In the morning, while committing ego death on his PC’s social feed, Kal fiddled with Komodo’s card and pecked across a paper plate of microwaved mush. He slid the card into his boot as his PC pinged with an incoming call, number unknown. It had to be Lang or… No, he hadn’t given Komodo his contact info.
Paranoid much? He flicked the call away from him and it went to his kitchen’s speaker. “Technician-11, unsecured line.” He put a hand to his mouth to stifle a yawn.
“It’s me.” Wolf. He was the last person Kal wanted to deal with sober, let alone hungover.
“I’m hanging up.”
“Jackal. I’m on a burner. We… I need your help.”
“I’m not paying your bail if—”
“I’m not booked, but I’m in fucking trouble.”
Kal froze. It was Wolf’s desperate tone that got him. Wolf always came across as cool in-person. Kal knew that was a mask for the most part. The big, bad Amunite had only confided in him that he was a submissive a handful of months ago. To Kal, that confession had happened half a lifetime ago, when he and the Amunite had been on better, steamier terms. Kal had never really bought it, even when they’d collided into one another the day everything went to shit between them. Kal was still bitter about what Wolf had done to him, but even then, Wolf hadn’t been desperate.
Wolf sounded almost panicked over their voice link now.
“Talk to me,” Kal bade grudgingly. To justify the weakness in his head, he told himself he was an officer of the law helping Coyote’s brother and not the only person he’d ever wanted to jettison out of an airlock, at-speed, without a life preserver.
“Don’t tell Coyote, but I need you to pull some electric frack from a compartmentalized system on-site. I tried getting to it, but I—”
Kal made a cutting gesture to interrupt his transmission. “You know I can’t do that. First—super fucking illegal. Second—I’m not doing shit behind your brother’s back. I’m hanging up now.” He flicked his PC off cold.
That unknown number called again.
Kal cursed under his breath. Who even memorizes comm links these days? he asked himself. He got up and chucked his half-eaten food into the wall incinerator. Then he went to the sink and drank directly from the tap. His PC pinged pleasantly at him four separate times.
In another moment of weakness, he braced himself on the edge of the sink and gestured with his left hand to open the link.
Wolf’s voice was plaintive. “Please, Jackal.”
Ugh. “What’s the info for? Lang hasn’t reached out.”
“I’m…” He sounded like he was gritting his teeth. The next words came out sounding strained. “I’m trying to do something good for once. It’s not pack business. You know I’d call literally anyone else if I knew I could trust them.”
“How do you even know you can trust me?”
“The videos…”
“Wolf,” Kal warned neutrally.
“... of you and that Reedfall girl.”
Kal squared his shoulders and closed his eyes. “You’re gonna get yourself killed if this is going against Lang.”
Wolf waited for a beat and then said softly, “I know. So, help me stay on this side of the airlock. I don’t… I don’t want to have to use anything against you. You’re right, I don’t trust you. But I trust you care about your job. And I bet you care about your record. So, don’t make me use it. I don’t want to, but I will because this is more important than how I feel about you. Please.”
How he feeeeels about me. Kal snorted derisively. “Only if you promise to cut me into why you’re under the Medji’s microscope. Lang’s solicitor should’ve made that assault go away, but he couldn’t. What else is going on? Tell me.”
“I can’t. Anything but that.”
“Anything?”
Wolf sighed, realizing he’d given away a piece of heftier leverage that could get Kal out from under him. “Fuck. Fine. Yes.”
“Stop stalking me.”
The link was silent for more than ten seconds.
“Wolf!” he barked.
Wolf said, “I worry about you.”
Kal lost whatever patience he’d been clinging to. He let the Dog have it. “I’m a fucking Medji Tech.” He slapped the edge of the sink. “I don’t need a keeper. Never have. And while we’re on the subject of not fucking stalking, you’re gonna fork over every fucking pixel you’ve gotten out of Silver Lynx over the last three months… That’s right, Asshole. You think I don’t know what you think you have on me? Do you think I’m stupid? Lang may have Reedfall, but I have you by the fucking balls.”
He knew he’d caught Wolf off-guard, because the Dog answered with a numb, “You knew?”
“I keep bugs where I shit and where I eat. If I can’t get the Saturnalia vid, then give me everything from Lynx.”
Again, the Dog was silent for too long.
“You said anything.”
Insurance. Blackmail. Favors.
They were the lifeblood of Duat Station.
Wolf was still coping with his incredulity. “You knew I had that in my back pocket, and you kept sharp around me? After the fight last month, I thought we’d come to some sort of—”
“You know I only keep up a front around you because of your brother. If he fucking knew you assaulted me—”
“Lightsake, Jackal, for the last time, I didn’t know you were that fucking high.”
“Don’t you dare put it on me! I’m not playing with you.” He tried to keep his voice from going reedy. He hated when it did that. It made him sound small, and he really didn’t need to remind the Amunite of their physical differences. “I was only keeping up appearances because Coyote has a damn nose on ‘im and he would’ve…” He took a deep breath. This wasn’t the conversation he wanted to have. He was angling for dominance. He wasn’t angling to burn whatever bridge still lingered between them. Not yet. Not until he’d burned the bridge between him and Lang anyway. He ground his teeth and said, “Give me Lynx. You want me to do this? I’ll do it. But then you and I are done… Unless you want me to cut Coyote in too.”
Wolf made another one of his tch sounds. “You’re such a control freak.” He might have sounded contrite to anyone else, but Kal could tell he’d impressed the Dog.
He hated impressing Wolf more than he hated Wolf.
The Amunite was resorting to personal attacks which told Kal he’d won. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
A chime announced the delivery of an unadorned file. Wolf mumbled sarcastically, “You’re welcome, My Lord.”
Kal seethed. “Next time you come to a blackmail fight, just don’t. I live and breathe this shit, On-worlder.”
Wolf tched like the little brat prince he was.
“Send me the details. I’ll head for the pin.”
“Jackal.”
“Apologize or don’t bother.”
“Thank you.”
Kal hung up on him.
A pin came a second later. He swiped at it and groaned.
Green Side: the heart of Duat’s criminal underworld.
Serpentine Syndicate’s territory was in that ritzy, clean part of the station, rife with so much security, it wrapped around to being ironic. It would be easier for someone to immigrate to Amun’s Utopiana than pass through Green Side unscathed.
Forget Wolf. If Kal did this and got caught, he was as good as reclaimed protein.
He seriously considered texting Coyote about all this espionage shit and Wolf’s fucked-up relationship with him, but then he cursed to himself. If Wolf was as cunning as Kal knew he could be when cornered, he would have stored copies of the Lynx recordings to ship out if Kal backstabbed him like that.
He weighed that against getting actually stabbed in the back himself and sighed.
I’m trying to do something good for once.
Kal raked his hands through his hair and shook out the tresses as he eyed his popcorn ceiling. He absently slid a pick-me-up into his mouth, cracked in between back teeth, and after swallowing, he whispered, “Something good… What’s that look like?”
Paranoia and self-preservation gave way to intrigue.
Fuck. Maybe he was a sucker, deep, deep, deep down.
He took another pick-me-up, drank from the tap, grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair and slipped on his boots.
He just needed to not get caught stealing from the most dangerous gang of corporate fuck-heads this side of the sector map and then his ex-whatever-they'd-been would leave him the fuck alone for good.
Right. Simple. Right…
In the lift, he ripped on the end of a disposable atomizer and swooned a little as the nicotine hit harder than he anticipated. He giggled to himself.
Why is simple never easy? he wondered.16Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡu9NpP0wKiD
He didn’t have to report to the precinct for his evening shift until around mid-cycle, so he figured he had enough time for a little recon. He wasn’t outfitted to walk about Green Side casually. Even the human help that worked for the Syndicate looked and dressed like they’d stepped off an advert. Kal at least had his looks going for him, so maybe he could play off his worn threads as some sort of chic power statement if he played his cards right.
Even if he ended up being memorable, it meant when he hit the place incognito, his previous casing job might go unnoticed.
Or, as it would happen, he’d get lucky.
He was waiting at a shuttle pool across the street from Bureau Tower Six, the building where Wolf and the data hound he'd hired had nearly gotten caught, when a wheeled transport manned by a human being pulled into the alleyway between it and Tower Five.
Kal took a drag on his atomizer and pretended to be enthralled with the social feed his Disso eye was running. If anyone ran any kind of threat analysis on him, he’d come across as a sight-seeing transient. And he did feel a couple cursory pings from some patrolling station drones, but as soon as they hit his Medji credentials, they moved on and flagged his behavior for their records just in case he was there as a plain-clothes official.
The delivery transport’s hauler door opened. Crates. Crates with boxes. Boxes full of…
Paper?
The human driving the transport got out of the pit and came around, holding a clipboard.
The human driver was odd enough. The lack of electronic inventory was even odder. The paper? That was weird.
But humans are unpredictable.
If there was anything more than raw code that Kal trusted in, it was his instincts. They’d yet to fail him. Whenever he’d ignored his gut feelings, things had blown up in his face in spectacular and damaging ways.
He was getting a gut feeling now.
The delivery kid, probably in a lazy effort to slip under the radar, was wearing street clothes instead of a uniform. Just like Kal. It felt like fate. He was probably just some guy that the delivery company had hired on temp or indenture at the last minute to fill a position that a bot would normally occupy. Or the Tower didn’t trust the delivery company. Or bots.
All three?
Gift horses or something, Kal thought to himself.
He approached the transport and, instead of explaining his presence, just started helping unload the truck. The kid dabbed him up after they’d gotten everything inside the building’s loading kiosk and Kal promised to get the goods into the Tower.
His credentials as another delivery person were taken at face value when Kal greeted the Tower’s street-side security bot with familiarity, telling it that he'd met the bot the week before on a previous delivery. The robot, of course, didn't remember shit, but didn't want to embarrass itself as it ran an internal matrix diagnostic, so it offered to help Kal out and that clinched it.
The delivery kid left, telling him he'd see him around, and so the robot was reassured that he was who he said he was too.
Kal knew the cheap, station-provided security on the outside, the kind that could be convinced to turn a blind sensor on him due to his credentials, would probably not extend to the inside where private, contracted security reigned supreme and didn't care if you were Medji or not.
Fortunately, he was already inside the building, being practically escorted by the street sentry, and when the robot keyed in its remote code to get inside, Kal cloned the signal without intercepting it.
After Kal opened a couple doors without the robot’s assistance, the bot was properly convinced it didn’t need to hold him under any kind of additional scrutiny, and so it returned to its post when they were about half-way through his delivery.
Not to be rude, Kal finished delivering all the boxes, making sociable eye-contact with some of the bound, white-collar workers. He even managed to get the cameras to disregard his facial makeup and his gait profile, adding the things he couldn’t hide, like his personal identity fob’s IFE signal, to their temporary employee roster. He told the system to put a timer on it and delete it as erroneous data after a single cycle. The system was all too happy to focus on more important taskers than keeping tabs on some literal paper pusher.
He cleaned up in an employee lounge, stole a spare uniform, and marveled at their fully stocked gel bar.
He could’ve stayed sober until he was scot-free, but the pick-me-ups were beginning to wear off, and what was a little congealed courage at the end of the cycle?
He was chatting with a couple uniforms by a water cooler, tipsy on three free vodka tonics, when his PC reminded him he was actually on a timeline.
He bid his new associates good-bye, then hit a lift to head to the floor Wolf had indicated in his notes. The lift didn’t call for any additional credentials, but to cover his bases, he’d palmed a Deck Twenty fob off one of his “coworkers” and snorted at the guy’s name: J. Batty. He’d certainly had the satellite dish ears to be a bat.
Kal absently wondered if Batty knew what a bat was.
Most Duati—starlight—Most Spacers didn’t know much about Cradle Fauna. Kal tried not to hold it against them, but it did cut down on the number of idioms he could use that wouldn’t get lost in translation.
While he waited for the pod to reach his true destination, he mused over whatever the fuck Tower Six was doing with all its analog conditions.
Flesh and blood workers in an office building that used paper? That screamed technophobia like nothing else.
And yet, he was here to steal data from an isolated terminal, agnostic from the station’s main intranet.
Whatever this good deed Wolf wanted to do… had flashing proprietary warning lights all over its face.
If Kal wasn’t already uncomfortable about being in Green Side, he especially wasn’t when it came to protected information.
Because if Wolf was doing something good, and something good was stealing from a crime syndicate's shell corp’…
Whatever information Kal was about to have stored in his wetware was likely a fucking bombshell.
Or it was bait.
Kal had enough time to freak himself out in the lift, but not enough time to talk himself back downstairs.
The lift doors opened, and he was relieved to see more glass cubicles and humans. There were no cameras on Deck Twenty either, which would have been weird if everything else about Tower Six hadn’t been.
He confidently wove through pedestrian thoroughfares and made it to the unmanned station he was supposed to access the isolated terminal through. It wasn’t physically protected, but there wasn’t a chair pulled up to it either.
The idle display had a company logo bouncing around as a screensaver. Kal didn’t recognize it. That should have scared him away, and his gut was telling him that was the last straw, and it was time to leave.
But he’d already come this far.
Looking around, he spotted an office drone, the bound kind, that looked like they'd rather be anywhere else.
“Hey, do you know where the service terminal for this floor is?” he asked. He knew where it was, practically hovering beside it, but feigning unfamiliarity would help keep his new-hire cover going if it turned out the drone was ‘netic or an enhanced security plant.
The man squinted at him for a second, took in his uniform, and then recognition hit his face. “Oh! You're with the paper company, right? Thanks for your hard work. Normally the truck guys make us do a whole fire-brigade thing.”
Why didn’t I think of that? Kal groused internally. He was going to be muscle-sore for the next couple cycles due to the three (unpaid, he reminded himself morosely) hours of manual labor he'd just completed. He could only half-convince himself that the effort had been worth it.
The guy then asked, “Why do you need a terminal? You’re welcome to use mine if you need it.”
They weren’t working on anything secret. Curiouser and curiouser. Kal made a can’t-be-helped sort of shrug and decided complaining was the best approach. “Nah, so the thing is, my boss just got these new VOIP things installed on our office phones, and they don't play well with the station's intranet. Gotta get to a bald, hardline to call out. If you don't have one, I totally get it. I just figured it would be easier than going across the street to tell him we're all buttoned up here.”
The drone knew all too well the call of convenience over protocol. The guy nodded understandingly and made a grunt of kindred frustration. “Dar’pro’, if I had a black dram for every time my super foisted some kind of hot, new tech on us to up our bound efficiency, I'd have enough fuel to blow this flotilla, y’know? The terminal's next to Lacy's desk. You can use her chair if you need it. She won't be in until after lunch. I dunno if it’s hardlined though. I’ve never tried. Can’t hurt. Lemme know if you need an alt.”
“Thanks, really. You're a star.” Kal went to shake, but the guy was clearly from outside Green, as he went for a casual fist-bump and a religious forehead gesture instead which Kal was all too enthusiastic to return.
Kindred lazy spirits indeed.
Kal rolled Lacy's chair over to the terminal and, after lining in with his wetware’s hardline, he was cracked into their system in less than a minute. He had to be fast. If they were already on alert due to Wolf’s previous attempt to hack them, they'd probably planted traps, or at least terminal activity switches that would be manually retrieved on a regular basis. Since they didn't have robots, they would at least be running at the speed of human judgement rather than algorithmic learning.
He disassociated and mentally jumped into the drip.
Inside the terminal, time would be quartered.
But he didn’t need a quarter of anything.
There were no traps.
Because the trap had already been sprung.
Inside the terminal was an aggregated package of images with geo-tagged meta data. Already compressed, he couldn’t look at the images without unpacking the file which a timestamp informed him would take almost an hour. It looked like Wolf’s wetware helper had indeed been interrupted from retrieving it. Whoever the Dog had hired to do the extraction had already done all the hard labor for Kal.
The only other artifacts in the terminal were extraneous lines of raw code that explained what had actually happened. A kill switch. The green string of data would have been embedded in the other green code, completely hidden unless you knew to look for it. It had apparently gone off and muder-ated the hacker through their hardline, inducing a brain bleed if they stayed in. They'd evidently stayed to finish compressing the file, but they should have eventually seen the malicious code and bailed out. The fact that they hadn't meant they'd either sacrificed themselves… or someone had prevented them from uncoupling.
Wolf hadn’t included that little, tiny detail in his notes. The only mention of how the hack might have gone sideways was in three short lines of text: Going at night was a mistake. There are no humans at night. You'll be fine.
Kal took the file and bailed. When he came back to his body, his palms were fucking sweating and all the pale hairs on his body were standing on end. He could feel his rapid heartbeat in his throat, and it was difficult to swallow passed it.
He quickly extracted himself from the terminal and gently uncoupled his hardline.
Clean. Unmessy. Beautifully executed.
His paranoia, his instincts, his guts, were all collectively screaming at him to hold out for The Prestige.
He got it as he stood up from Lacy's rolling chair. A piece of paper, that had likely slipped under the terminal's floor mount, had been displaced by a wheel as he'd gotten up. He eyed the corner of it for a moment before bending down to retrieve it.
It was a business card.
It was blank on both sides.
He extracted himself via service corridors and the fire escape, telling the Tower’s system, Have a good day, over a private text line. Inserted in the text was a white string of code, making any static imagery that matched his profile glitch out and artifact beyond recognition.
The private security system pinged him back instantly: Thank you for your consideration. Please have a good day as well, USER-ERROR. It’s expected to be an above-temperate day tomorrow.
His panic was galvanized into fury by the time he made it to the precinct. Fucking Wolf. Fucking favors. Kal felt like a past-addled sap for helping him.
Wolf had asked him in The Trenches if he knew Komodo. Komodo had given him a blank card. While Kal was getting ready for bed, Wolf had infiltrated a place on Green Side… that made Komodo's blank business cards? No. But the business card was a connection. Komodo… had been at Tower Six? Before or after Wolf's infiltration? But why the obvious, literal, paper trail? That wasn't normal Knife behavior.
Had Komodo been fucking with Wolf, Wolf with Kal, or Komodo with Kal? Did Wolf and Komodo know each other? Komodo obviously knew he at least ran in the same circles as Wolf…
His head was pounding.
He didn't have time to return to his apartment, so he hit the rail heading to Blue Side. He had a spare suit in his locker. It probably smelled like socks, but it was better than being late, smelling like vodka gel.
Waiting for a single-by transport at the junction between Green and Teal Side, he sighed to himself and sipped on a vended coffee. Even with a little hair of the dog, he didn't have enough data to make sense of anything now. The reality was, he was too hungover and sleep deprived to be much use to anyone, least of all himself.16Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡUkzQdXzmI7
Plugged into Dispatch, Scythe-Bravo didn’t ask why Kal was in a gray jumpsuit when he clocked in, but they did greet him when he entered the bullpen by saying stoically, “Technician-11, Officer-3 wants to see you in his office as soon as you’re outfitted.”
Kal saluted without a pithy comment for once and knew that was a mistake when S-B called after him, “Are you alright? Your biometrics are all over the place.”
He made a derisive hacking noise in the back of his throat. “I, uh, meant to grab breakfast this morning, but the rail got diverted to clear another jumper.”
Scythe-Bravo didn’t move as they responded a little too casually, “You woke up for breakfast after closing The Trenches last night? I’d say I’m impressed, but I’ve analyzed your metrics. I call balderdash.” Balderdash had to be worse than bullshit. At least Kal knew what bullshit was.
He froze in place, demanding, “Who’s the narc?”
“ME-0999.”
The fuck? Nines again? “Am I under internal review?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Then why did an unbound breathe on my taint during crew rest?” Oh shit, oh fuck, oh shit, oh fuck. “When was his last sync-up?”
“It’s been at the precinct since cycle-start.”
Nines hadn’t seen him go to Green Side.
Holy, shielding, Light-killing Darkness. I swear, if I can just get through this cycle and get Wolf his data without painting a big red X on top of my profile, I will go back to temple and get right with the Universe. I swear it.
Kal didn’t breathe a sigh of relief, but he was certain he’d have to change into the spare underwear he kept for emergencies like this.
If S-B was capable of remorse, they might have expressed it on their face. Instead, their tone came across as calculating as they said, “His debrief this morning said the two of you were tailing a Dog from Lang’s pack. I believe it was related to the BOLO pushed out yesterday. Wasn’t that why you were there?”
Wait. Nines had covered for him. Why? How? Robots couldn’t lie. It was a part of their programming. But if Nines assumed that’s why he’d gone to The Trenches in the first place, why hadn’t the bot confronted him or at least criticized his lack of authorization? How did he know he was personally connected to Wolf in the first place? Was that why he’d been following him?
Kal mentally pivoted. He huffed a humorless laugh. “He needs to cover his reports better. I was trying to keep my surveillance quiet. That why Mac wants to talk?”
“He verbally expressed as much in the lounge. You should have submitted a risk assessment before acting on your own. Blue Precinct’s insurance doesn’t cover unsanctioned surveillance. What if something had gone wrong? You’d be on a slab, paying Med out of pocket. Did you at least secure the arrest?”
He shook his head. “Too many Dogs. I thought it would turn ugly… and you know how I’m trying to turn over a new PR-centric leaf after what happened with the drone situation the other day.” He batted his eyelashes.
Scythe-Bravo said, “I’ll believe that when your delinquency package stops taking up enough space to be considered net-choking malware.”
“Mmm. Now you’re just talkin’ dirty.” He smirked.
“I will sic HR on you.”
“Have mercy! My package can only get so big!”
“If Officer-3 pings me over the network one more time in the next twenty seconds, I’m going to start docking the time from your lunch hour.”
“Pro-ceding, Us-er,” Kal said in a monotone and headed for the technician locker room before Scythe-Bravo could throw anything more than a middle finger at him.
He was surprisingly in a better mindset by the time he was suited up and headed for Macaw’s office. He wasn’t perfectly sanguine. Who would be in his position? But Wolf’s favor was getting happily backburnered in light of Nines’ recent doings.
Normally he chafed at being actively stalked—see personnel profile: Wolf—but for some reason, he wasn’t as bothered by Nines’ reconnaissance because the enforcer’s activity seemed almost… innocent? From a technical standpoint, Nines’ behavior execution was aberrant. And while Kal didn’t like that there existed an artificial entity whose model he couldn’t predict, Nines’ strange matrix offered an interesting sort of puzzle for him to exercise with.
If he wasn’t so stressed about the Wolf shit-uation, he could almost say he was looking forward to confronting the metal unbound about his activities. At present, however, Kal made a point to mentally backburner his professional interest to make way for admittedly vapid, personal annoyance.
Nines was going to complicate a complication as it was.
Fuck I’m hungry. I should’ve finished breakfast. Kal knocked on the open door’s frame and from within the office, Macaw spoke, “Enter.”
“Technician-11 reporting.”
Macaw was seated behind his desk, wearing their cloth uniform of black and red. “Jackal.” He gestured for the Tech to take a seat and then he tapped the comm bean in his ear unnecessarily—a carryover movement from the days when you had to physically key your radio bean to make an outgoing transmission. “ME-0999, present yourself.”
Kal tried not to lose his cool as they both waited for the ME to physically undock himself and walk to the office. He also refrained from asking Macaw what this meeting was for. Instead, he kept thinking that this conversation could either reveal that he was a piece of shit on the take, or that Nines was a piece of shit piece of hardware, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to experience either outcome before finding out for sure what the bot’s angle in all this was.
At the very least, he wanted to find out why the bot had asked Wolf about his relationship status. That was still a weird, outlying bit of data that needed addressing. For science, Kal told himself.
The bipedal robot entered the room, stopped next to Kal's chair, saluted, and remained at attention. “Unbound reporting as ordered,” he intoned flatly with none of the animation he'd displayed in front of Kal the day prior.
Macaw bridged his hands in front of his mouth and said to Kal, “At ease, Technician. Nobody's in trouble. Not yet.”
Kal tried to unknot the tension in his rigid spine, but only succeeded in unclenching the fists resting on his thighs. “What’re they saying I did this time? If this is about the maintenance requests to Stock last night, I was just—”
“Nope. Good guess though,” Macaw said with a snort. He flicked at the surface of his desk and Kal’s PC chimed with a work notification. “I heard from a little bird that you’ve been doing some recon off the books. Now, normally I get real pissy when a technician toes into enforcement lanes, but in this case, you got some good intelligence that we can pass along to OCU.”
Kal twitched a finger to bring up the info on his HUD and kept his breathing level as he soaked in the image of himself surrounded by enough of Lang’s Dogs to implicate him. Glitter smeared, pupils blown, he looked like another club-hopping Duati. Yet he wasn’t tagged as a compromised entity. Nines had tagged him as undercover.
He didn’t look at Nines out of the corner of his eye. Instead, he subtly twitched another finger to bring up the bot’s matrix. As he sorted through the Medji’s memories from the previous night, looking for anything else that might be more compromising, he said to Officer-3, “Let’s just say, I saw an opportunity. Sorry for not pushing for the surveillance package. In hindsight, I really should have.”
Macaw gave him a curious expression. “I’m just surprised. You’re not usually the type to take initiative. Reports of surveys, civil damage inquiries, workplace harassment… Those are usually the pieces of frack that end up in my inbox with your name on them. But then I assign you to babysit Inspector Refurb’ here once and suddenly you wanna put in unpaid overtime? Maybe I should’ve issued you a hotrod months ago.”
Kal didn’t like where this was going.
He also didn’t like that Nines was missing memories from the night before. Nines hadn’t recorded his interaction with Komodo at all, and there was a half-hour chunk of time that was encoded with a privacy act firewall. He couldn’t focus on cracking it and talking to his supervisor, so he slipped out of Nines’ head with a finger tap and said to Macaw, “ME-0999 may have inspired me with his work ethic.”
“His work ethic,” Macaw stated skeptically. Then he huffed a laugh and said under his breath, “Technicians.”
“Sir?”
“Nothing. The way you people treat our weapon platforms wigs me out sometimes.”
Kal chuckled. “Believe me, I’m not as bad as Onesie.”
“Ha! No, he’s clinical. Y’know, the other day he asked me if it would be possible to take PTO to go get married to some companion bot on Neon-1 and I swear he waited until I took a drink from my thermos before asking.”
Kal laughed along with him. “Isn’t he from Amun? Don’t they vet for genetic defects like that?”
Macaw slapped his desk as he chortled, then hurriedly closed out of an application he accidently opened. He cleared his throat then and said, “I told him he could do whatever he wanted in his free time, but reminded him he wasn’t getting dependent rates for his washing machine if he brought it back to the station.”
“He’d have better luck renegotiating his renter’s insurance to account for the new appliance,” Kal said.
That got Macaw belly laughing and Kal honestly thought he was in the clear.
After Officer-3 got himself under control and had wiped the tears from his eyes, he said, “Damn, that’s funny. I gotta hit him with that the next time he goes off on a tangent about unbound civil rights and shit… Anyway.” He gestured then and Kal’s PC chimed again. “I’m assigning ME-0999 to you from now on. Stock’s been dragging their feet with its periodic maintenance and none of the other technicians have any experience with unbound units—you know, beyond boinking the ones designed for it. Something about a bug in the workorder queue. I don’t care. It’s all geek to me.”
“I don’t have the man hours to support that!” Kal immediately protested.
“You do now. I took you off drone support, which coincidentally works out on the paper side too, since the Comissair’s been asking me to take you off drones since you blew one up to Med-ical those two Serpentine op—”
“Maintenance aside, wouldn’t it make more sense to issue him to another enforcer that—”
Macaw made a hand-chopping motion. “Button it up! The Unity platform makes the flesh-and-blood enforcers uncomfortable and it hasn’t bugged out when it's been assisting you. Whatever you did, I need you to keep doing it. Now… get out of my office before I start asking more questions about Wolf.”
Kal knew when to cut his losses. He stood up and saluted. “Understood, Sir.”
Macaw gave him an olive branch smile and said, “Take it easy the rest of the shift. Your intel got you an extra hour for lunch.”
Wonderful, Kal remarked internally before turning to leave. More time to enjoy my daily depression spiral. Yippee.
“Take the unbound with you!” Macaw called after him.
Kal gritted his teeth. Macaw could have ordered the bot back to his dock, but instead he was clearly punishing Kal for his “good deed”. “ME-0999, protocol.”
“Proceeding, Technician,” Nines said neutrally and fell into step as they headed back to the pen. Kal went straight for his cubicle. In all that time, the precinct had filled up with the rest of Swing Shift’s personnel, all readying themselves to hit their respective routes or preparing service bags for the various robots the precinct utilized.
Kal tried to keep his body language relaxed as he noticed he had several pairs of eyes on he and Nines’ approach. A couple messages hit his HUD. With a twitched wrist, he brought them up as he sat down at his desk. Nines hovered at the threshold of his cubicle, standing inert, clearly waiting for orders or permission to enter if he was needed.
Kal didn’t need him.
Technician-10 texted, “Oooooooo. Did a drone file a complaint with HR? Was it a harassment allegation again? Do you need to talk to someone?” He’d attached the station’s suicide hotline to the text.
Using his Disso eye, Kal tracked across a virtual keyboard to respond with, “Aww. Thanks for thinking about me, Kodiak. Tell your sister I’m still good for next cycle if she can get away from her wife.”
Across the room, Technician-10 cursed under his breath, but Kal didn’t look up to catch his expression.
Technician-5 had sent: “First, Onesie, and now you too? Let us know when the bachelor party is! We’ll pay extra for a Happy Ending unit!”
Kal told them, “We’re doing a joint celebration, so add some skin escorts to the wishlist too. Blondes. Big tits.”
Lioness was a good sport. They replied with several laughing emoticons and said, “You’re crazy, Jackal,” paired with a heart emoji.
He depressed the valve on his helmet and pulled it off so he could sync it with his terminal’s updated navigational data. He glanced once at Nines, then rolled his eyes. Fuck it. If the bot hadn’t sold him out over fraternizing with gangsters and snorting Dusk, he wasn’t going to do anything about Kal’s more forgivable habits.
He slid down in his chair, activated a macro on his PC to disable the camera pointing at his workstation, and slid a vial of ClearCo out of one of his suit’s hard pockets.
He used to snap them directly over his eyes when he was younger, but it only took one sliver of glass to teach him that a potential drop-loss wasn’t worth getting debris stuck behind his eyelid again. He popped the vial's top in a glove and carefully tipped his head back, smoothly administering the liquid script with practiced movements. He blinked a dozen times and pocketed the dry sharps of the cracked vial. He used a tissue to dab at the tears and pocketed the tissue too. ClearCo use was legal, but it was still script-only and Kal didn’t technically have one.
He was also supposed to be sober while on the clock. Something about working with heavy machinery… He cheated on his entry exam, so he wasn’t sure if that expectation was explicitly written in the handbook or just something Medji liked to write each other up for.
His helmet had finished syncing by the time he felt the script hit. Calm, focus, control. Let's fucking go. He re-bound his hair before putting the helmet back on. There was a private message from Nines waiting for him. He snorted after reading, “You don’t need that.”
He chanced a look back at the enforcer, but the Medji hadn’t moved. “I don’t,” he texted back. Internally he doubled down on the sentiment. He wanted ClearCo. It made things sharper, easier to understand and sort. It didn't give him the energy to do all that though. That's what pick-me-up pills were for. And neither combatted the gravitational nausea he got from time to time. That's what Dusk treated. And none of the above helped him fight the impulsive, self-destructive urge to tear his own skin off when being alive got to be too much. That's what good ol’ dopamine kept at bay.
But he wouldn't be getting a heavy dose of that until his next day off, which was, horrifically, still two cycles away at the moment, so he'd have to settle for the dopamine he got for doing a good job pushing buttons, and pushing buttons was always easier with ClearCo.
So, no, Kal didn't need ClearCo.
Addicts needed ClearCo.
He wanted ClearCo to keep from ripping his own face off.
“What’s on the docket today then?” Nines asked.
“The usual. Prepping to take over the station. I’m thinking of plastic explosives near the pylons in Red Side.”
Nines sent back, “{Amusement} Wouldn’t it be more effective to plant them near Yellow? Then at least you wouldn’t have to worry about damaging hull integrity, but you’d still be taking out the emergency beacon tower.”
Kal huffed a laugh through his nose, but he didn’t reply. He logged into his workstation remotely and leaned his head back to sort through his workorders with lazy flicks of his green irises and other half-hearted suit gestures. He preferred direct input usually. But after his recent run-in with that hardlined system in Tower Six, he was reluctant to even jump into Blue Precinct's secured lines.
Another message from Nines came through, but Kal ignored it until he’d downloaded the jobs for the day. Nines had texted, “Y’know… I can help.”
He forwarded the workorders to the bot and texted, “Grab a bag from Stock. I’ll see you at Site Seventeen in a couple hours.”
Nines replied silently, “Serving a slip for a parking violation will take five minutes.”
“Look at you, Mister Efficient. Then you’ll have a whole hour and some change to do whatever you want.”
“And what, pray tell, will you be doing all the while?”
Kal crossed his arms and rested his chin on his chest. “Take a wild fucking guess, Medji.”
“You’re… gonna hydrate before taking a siesta, right?”
The question caught Kal off-guard. He turned to look at the robot. Nines was like a Unity static display. “What?” he asked out loud.
Nines didn’t move as he sent another message: “Doctors recommend at least half a liter of water intake for every fifteen ML of ClearCo. Helps with absorption.” He attached a study conducted two cycle-cycles ago.
“Nines,” he said out loud.
“Present,” the bot answered.
“Mind your own business.”
“Yes, Technician-11.”
Kal issued another moveorder against the enforcer and said, “I thought I told you to go prepare a bag.”
“Stock will require your biometrics to assign the equipment to your issued platform.”
Kal cursed internally and took a deep breath to keep from throwing something. Fucking Macaw. The breath didn’t help. Fucking Nines. Neither did counting down. Stupid, fucking Wolf!
He got up and shoved his chair back under the desk, knowing the soft-close feature would prevent the seat from making any noise. It wasn’t as satisfying as flipping his desk, but he’d tried that before and nearly gave himself a hernia, so throwing the chair back into its spot was the next best thing given the circumstances.
“Come on then,” he growled.
“Itinerary?” Nines queried in a monotone.
“Blue Side, Medji,” he quipped. “Let’s see how helpful you can actually be.”
A new Tech, a transplant from Teal, Kal remembered, called after them for the benefits of all the Medji hovering near the vending machine, “Jackal, didn’t you get shit-canned? Oh, there’s the sanitizer now! Sowwy.”
Kal laughed along with them, then said seriously, “Careful droppin’ trow, Tadpole. My sanitizer’s got guns for arms and knives for legs. Unity. Temperamental.”
As everyone else guffawed and carried on, Tad shot back with, “You’re just pissed you got taken off drones. Who gets taken off fucking drones?”
“I wouldn't mention piss around my sanitizer either,” Kal warned dryly. Then he tilted his helmet in consideration, “And fucking drones is the reason you were moved from Teal to Blue wasn’t it? So…” He sent a picture of a glass pod to everyone’s intranet drop.
Tad blanched and crept away as the gaggle upended themselves with laughter, forwarding the verbal exchange to the other chat rooms between station precincts.
Kal saluted the group before marching on.
Nines texted him, “Cheers for that, Mate.”
Kal shook his head, annoyed. “Didn’t do it for you.”
“{Unquestioning Belief} ‘Course not.”
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