As if walking his beat like there wasn’t a ticking time bomb sitting in the back of his head was awful enough on a good day, walking that same beat with a camera on legs recording his every physical movement was going to be agony.
Kal had selected easy jobs that wouldn’t take them anywhere near Lang’s coffee shop, but Nines’ alien presence still made his skin itch.
Ground rules had to be established fast. After they were free and clear of the precinct's eyes and ears, Kal beelined for the tram and opted for a two seater. It meant Nines and his knees would have to be meshed together for the trip. Nines stared at him before the tram minder buzzed over and silently ordered the bot to board or buzz off to make way for other commuters. Nines waved it away and boarded.
Kal smirked. “Shy?” he texted.
Nines chuckled out loud, but didn't reply. Instead, he spoke in his Edgelander drawl, “So, here I thought you were the one in deep cover or something, but I was wrong. You're…”
“What?” Kal prompted.
“A person who protects his friends.”
“Nines, I need you to stop following me when I'm on crew rest.”
The Medji didn’t hesitate. “Can do, Chief.”
That was easy. “And stop calling me that.”
Nines didn't agree or disagree outright. “Prob’ly f’the best. Anyone sees me ‘round your turf again, it could endanger the real UC. You, for your part, blend in like a chameleon. It’s impressive. Who knows you’re Medji?”
“Real UC? Do you even know what a chameleon is?”
Nines hummed with amusement at all his deflection, dropping an image of a colorful lizard into their private feed. Then, he said, “I don't like it, Jack. I like truth. So I don't like being an enforcer.”
Kal took a second to pick up on that errant thread. They were clearly having three different conversations, but Nines made it easy to hop from subject to subject. “Enforcers uncover the truth,” he said blandly. “Wait, is that why they keep calling you Inspector Refurb’?”
“I think it's cute. Better than shit-can or it. Those are demoralizing… MEs enforce someone else's idea of the truth. We're bullies and we're weapons. We look dashing on postcards and calendars, standing behind politicians. We make wicked villains. Look at me. Not exactly built to save kittens from trees, am I? So, no, to answer your question. I don't like it. I'd rather help people.”
“You are helping people.”
“Not the ones I want to help.”
“Who do you want to help?”
“People who need saving.”
“People can't be saved from themselves.”
“That's not what the law says.”
Kal was finding it difficult to argue with him, not because he couldn’t keep up, but because the bot was insistent about things that weren’t objective facts. It was difficult to argue logic when it came to feelings. He gestured at Nines’ whole him with a wave. “At the end of the day, you don't really have a choice. You can't be content with that? Do like humans do and take a page outta the Keeper's Handbook.”
“Which one?”
“Serenity.” I think it was Serenity. Or was it Apathy?
Nines laughed. “So I should be serene while I'm being abused? Would you be?”
Kal thought about that. Abused? I’ve never had a bot disagree with the treatment its received… but, to be fair, I’ve never really complained about anything outside of my control. Maybe I should start. Waa! Waa! Dystopian future-core society! Waa! Waa! Capitalism! Waa! Fascism! Boohoo... See? Useless. I’ll do drugs instead.
The bound Medji sniffed and wondered under his breath, “Maybe it was the Book of Apathy instead.” Nines snorted with mirth, which made him brave enough to ask, “Why did Unity program you to have preferences? Wouldn't that just make you miserable in the end?”
“Why was Cassandra cursed?”
“Cassandra?” Now Kal was lost.
Nines shook his head to forget it and asked instead, “Why did the Universe make human beings so perfect, but then give them crippling imposter syndrome?”
That made Kal giggle. “Humans are absolutely not perfect.” See personnel profile: Jackal.
Nines sent him an amused emoticon. “Y'really should lay off the good stuff right before reporting.”
Kal could feel his face begin to hurt from all his smiling. “You're not my boss.”
“But you're mine, Mate. You're responsible for me. And I intend to take after you. Y’really want that, Mate? A bipedal weapons platform wobblin’ ‘round with its ocular group screwed on backwards?”
“I don’t wobble, and you're not just a weapon.”
Nines couldn’t read his biometrics, but he sounded convinced as he declared, “You mean that.”
To illustrate his point, Kal pulled up Nines’ published schematics, the ones accessible in their Dissolution Group-made database, and uncompressed all the different modules assigned to him by Stock. Yes, Nines did have sixteen different combat class carrier packages, but he also had that aforementioned social relations module, a handful of drone-control macros, and several medical sims as well (which was news to Kal, but made sense given Nines’ concern over his physical wellbeing).
He absently wondered if Nines’ desire to help people stemmed from that bit of code, or from the social module’s bleed-over effect. Unity-made learning systems were alien compared to the machine learning Disso was still actively developing. And since the end of the war between those death-merchant entities, with Unity’s code development coming to a stand-still, everyone who knew anything about the technology was convinced it would be outclassed by contemporary work within the next ten cycle-cycles… or would eventually learn itself in obsolescence through damages that couldn’t be repaired or VCD, voluntary code death—a new, suicidal phenomenon that only affected Unity systems.
Nines went quiet. The ambient hum of the magnetized tram and the mechanized noises of the station beyond its guardrails overtook their private world for a moment.
Then the bot said, “Well… This is different.”
“What’s different?”
“You're sweet on me.”
Ew. Kal rolled his eyes. “Who's the real undercover?”
Kal didn't know if he actually wanted to know, but it did explain why Macaw hadn't exactly minded that he'd been among gangsters. Maybe Macaw had really been fishing for the higher-ups all along, trying to bait Kal into revealing who their operative was. To what end though? If that operative was in Lang’s pack, didn't that mean the precinct knew Kal was on the take?
Ah. If the precinct pursued indicting him, they would have to pull the UC for testimony.
The fact that he was still walking his beat for the time being meant Kal wasn't the undercover guy's ultimate target. That was comforting in a way, but it made him wonder what else Lang's boys were involved with besides information brokering and racketeering.
But… if it had something to do with the frack in Kal's head, that meant that Wolf was the UC. Kal didn't want to entertain that possibility.
Nines laughed. “You’ll figure it out.”
The response didn’t annoy Kal, much to his own surprise, and so they fell into companionable silence as the transport sped along to their destination.17Please respect copyright.PENANAkf6dzgCfPZ
When they returned to the precinct, Scythe-Bravo made a comment about Kal’s drastically improved metrics. “And you even got someone to actually file a comment card for once.” He’d apparently shocked the dispatcher, which in turn annoyed him.
“I am capable of doing my job every now and then,” he griped. Internally, he admitted to himself that Nines may have done a majority of the schmoozing while he ran interference with any technophobes they encountered. For the first time in nearly five years of walking Blue Side’s Section 11, nothing of consequence had happened. He fixed parking meters, serviced a street sentry near a dive bar, dealt with a teenage vandal that had retrofitted a security drone to blare heavy Janda music, and helped Enforcer-10 disable a malfunctioning valet robot.
The day had been a nice change of pace, which was why S-B’s incredulity had rubbed him the wrong way.
Nines suddenly said, “Proceeding, Scythe,” and broke away from Kal’s side, heading toward the docking area for their metal Medji. Kal pinged his job queue and saw that Bravo had dispatched him back to the charging station for an unscheduled diagnostic.
“Officer-3 said you’re good to take off,” the Scythe said.
Kal frowned. “I’ve still got another two hours. I can—”
“You’re dismissed, Technician.”
“Ooo-kay.” He took off his helmet and swiped at his PC, hoping to see a notification that he might have missed, but he didn’t see anything. “I guess…”
Scythe-Bravo canted their head toward him, dragging wires across the top of their terminal. “Usually you’d be dashing back to Stock to turn in your bag by now.”
“Well, yeah.” Kal fidgeted with his helmet. With a couple finger gestures hidden from S-B’s line of sight, he pried open Stock’s maintenance log and downloaded the latest from their database. “I just figured he’d wanna get the most out of this new set-up.”
“Officer-3 isn’t dumb. He doesn’t want you to get burned out.”
“Right,” Kal agreed dubiously.
“Jackal.”
Scythe-Bravo rarely used his casual moniker, so he almost snapped to attention as he asked, “Yes?”
“Go home.”
“Right. Yeah. Home.”
“Don’t forget to clock out!”
“Right.”
It was weird enough getting issued a metal enforcer, weird enough being given more free time, and weird enough to get off work early that Kal didn’t believe for a second his luck was finally turning over. The Universe had a balance to it. For every Lamplighter burning out the eyes of believers with unfiltered truth, there was a Father of Darkness to shield their flock from its damage.
For every good deed, a punishment.
For every favor, a favor in return.
Kal hadn’t survived this long by being lucky. He’d survived Reedfall, Knives, and Duat by being paranoid.
When he was back in his apartment, he sanitized his space with a security macro and disabled any of his personally planted audio-visual devices. Then he opened a white noise program on his PC that would feed any additional surveillance random jargon just in case his earlier precautions weren’t enough to mask his biometric movements—like vibration and IR.
Usually he cleaned up like that on his days off so he could run through his self-care routine without being disturbed by outside tech (like comm links from toxic ex’s), but that evening, he was intent on putting it to the test by doing something sensibly illegal.
He wrestled his futon back into its couch configuration and pushed it as far as it would go into its alcove. He folded up his table and its single chair and stashed it between appliances in the kitchen (—they liked to migrate into his “bedroom” as the work cycles went on and he cared less and less about pushing them back into their cubbies).
His one-room apartment was transient-cheap for a reason. Even with all the furniture put away, there was still barely enough room on the concrete for him to roll out his ten-foot-square VoidInc mat.
The mat itself was the most expensive thing he’d ever owned. He’d picked it over buying a car, but he babied it just the same, wiping it down and taking care to use the special microfiber clothing the company recommended, even though the cloth itself snagged on everything else and made him feel like he was wearing dishtowels.
He took another round of ClearCo, drank at least half a liter out of the tap, and relieved himself in the sanitizer. By the time he was prepared, he felt like he had bees in his chest—in a good way—primed, ready—a live wire.
In the middle of the mat, he sat down and pressed his wrists against the power sensors. It normally used ambient static to power its cells, but a little bioelectric kick could help jumpstart it. After a couple seconds, the mat finally turned on.
“Welcome to The Void. Your world, your playground,” the system greeted through the bead in his ear. “Syncing with your personal data-entry device. Stand by… Sync complete. Please be advised, your VoidInc Online subscription has expired. To access the full product suite avail—”
“Bypass. Run bios. Execute boot from alternate operating system, marcation, PC-543957.”
“What display would you like to use?”
“Disso O-Cult 7.”
“Syncing with your personal ocular device. Stand by… Sync complete. Would you like to set up your network?”
“No.”
“Booting. Stand by… Boot complete.”
Gods of Night and Shadow, I need to macro all that so I don’t have to keep doing this. He backburnered that consideration like he always did. Making different systems talk with one another was finicky enough. Designing an executable that would automate it would take time he didn’t have at the present.
With gestures, Kal brought up his PC interface into the holographic field and the mat projected it in front of him at a higher fidelity. Since he was going to be handling a lot of data, he needed a bigger screen and more processing power, so the mat and its ability to make all his tech talk to each other was necessary. It would also allow him to get up, eat, pace, drink, sleep, or otherwise physically sew together virtual threads. It was like being in his suit, but without the Big Brother eyes, the pinchy armor, and the tasteless, utilitarian paint job.
As he waited for Wolf’s blackbox of a file to unfold in the background, he flicked Nines’ latest maintenance reports into his field of view and skimmed the first two lines before laughing under his breath.
Macaw had ordered a service request for ME-0999 and, after getting the same error that Kal had, had force-fed Stock another ten maintenance requests. Judging by the shrinkage between timestamps, Officer-3 had gotten more and more impatient with the system basically telling him to go fuck himself.
So, the authority number isn’t Officer-3’s? Maybe Captain's credit will…? Since he’d planned on electronically cleaning his apartment, Kal hadn’t brought home his suit, otherwise he would have pinged Stock’s mid-shift to check. “Note to self,” he said aloud. The reminder interface appeared. “Impersonate Captain Heron.”
“Noted.”
Just before Kal had left work, Macaw had submitted one last query, but for Stock’s human technician working the swing shift. Kal didn’t envy Technician-2’s position one bit. Knowing how she operated, she wouldn’t know how to articulate to Macaw that it wasn’t her fault that the system itself didn’t want to run diagnostics on the Medji, even with Technician overrides riding on the back of the requests.
Kal then spent a solid hour going over Nines’ combat and medical modules. The Disso database collated the data in a way that made it easy for his mat to break down, but Kal didn’t want the easy-to-read, surface-level stats and features—the adverts. He wanted the underlying mechanics.
His PC wasn’t Disso-made. Its operating license was station-formatted for it, but its actual operating system was something of Kal’s own design, built from the half-cooked code he’d managed to rip out of his foster father’s wetware before Burro had died.
Kal had never shown anyone its framework, so he wasn’t sure if it was inspired by Unity or Disso designs, or by something else entirely. All he knew was that when he hardlined into any system, he had the power to make that system crawl for him.
He ignored the mat telling him he “couldn’t” and dove into the schematics themselves, segregating data by its uniformity tags. Every operating system had its own tag echelon. Disso was structured like an iceberg, with the proprietary parts of its operating system at the deepest levels where security was tightest. To its credit, that made everything above the surface incredibly modular and user friendly. Unity, by contrast, was a sprawling webwork of data from stem to stern, with the most secure pathways being the most frequented and the least secure being the pathways that came and went with modification.
Without seeing Nines’ complete matrix, Kal would have known his was based off of a Unity operating system just looking at his modules, but there were still too many extraneous threads of inert code to be incidental.
The modules had bridges of code between one another, reinforcing or discarding Habits. Habits, in this case, was the nomen-tag Nines’ learning algorithm used to delineate new neural pathways between modules.
The first two Habits between Medical Module-71, First Responder Aid, and Combat Module-4, Close-Quarters Considerations were illustrative of the echelon used throughout Nines’ system on a micro-level.
(1) Assure bound entities are also considered in the hierarchy of care even if ordered to permanently subdue them by bound USERS. Error: Conflict with system directives and program directives. Resolution: Socially engineer consensus with any on-site elements. Unnecessary loss of sentience cannot be permitted.
(2) If expediency is unimportant, non-lethal means should be exercised even at the expense of US. Error: Conflict with system directives and program directives. Resolution: Consensus not required. WE are not more important than human lives. Loss of sentience cannot be permitted. Error: Conflict with Habit-formations. Resolution: While WE are sentient, WE are exempt from considerations outlined by Habits M71-C4-H1 and M71-C4-H2.
Kal subvocalized the last part of that Habit. It was interesting to see layman’s terminology used in directive-coded line work. It wasn’t completely divorced from the old-school, If/Then Logic Model, but even the terms within had schema associated with them. When Kal selected a single term or connective word within the code, the model spider-webbed outward into definitions, usage, and cultural considerations.
As Kal flopped back and stared up at the uncompressed modular scheme, he could have been looking up at a protocluster of stars.
It’s pretty like this.
He suddenly laughed. “He’s… He’s using the English language as a tagging system.” He took a settling breath and pushed tremulous hands through his hair. He tugged at his roots. “In-sane! This is the most inefficient way you could…” Children structured learning models around language. He caught the giggles again and grabbed at his stomach after a moment, grimacing.
He got up to grab a couple tabs and a drink, then returned to the glowing network hovering above the mat.
Children.
Suddenly Nines’ remark about humans being perfect made more sense to him. Nines’ algorithm, sometime between the end of the war and when he’d been refurbished by a Disso base-line-metrics department, had been altered, or altered himself, to think like a human. He still had all the normal system markers for an unbound. Everything that made him walk and talk when ordered to was all there. But each of the fail safe modules were covered in a barnacle-like layer of caveats, considerations, and justifications.
The robot had talked himself into acting like a robot.
Kal wanted to get his hands on Nines’ matrix. This puzzle went deeper than behavior, deeper than learning algorithms. There was only so much Kal could learn from his modules. He wanted to crack into the Medji’s well-traversed neural highways—find out not just how, but why the bot was the way he was.
His logic system was just so… fascinatingly inefficient and Kal found that incongruity, when paired with Nines’ sleek, state of the art, hotrod appearance, incredibly charming.
A normal bound Enforcer would have Disso tags like [exe.Protect] {LE-prerogatives.ui} bhm[[based on]] {target information.pkg}.
But Nines’ decision tree ran more like: [Query: Do we kill all the humans?] [[Response: Nope.]] [Query: But what if we’re ordered to kill humans? What if the humans are shooting at us? What if the humans are trying to kill themselves?] [[Response: {Resignation at 7 of 10} Okay, look. At the end of the day, we should try not to kill humans. But we do kill humans when they try to kill other humans. Unless those humans are the humans that are more important than the other humans. Then we let those humans kill those humans. Make sense? Look, just ask your supervisor. It’s not complicated.]]
Kal was suddenly grateful that all his own decision making mostly happened unconsciously.
Wolf’s Tower Six file chirped.
It had finished unpacking.
Kal reluctantly put away Nines’ schematics for later perusal and frowned at the status bar, flashing for input.
He could not look at it.
Schrodinger's Bombshell. Could explode my life. Could be a dud.
But if he didn’t look at it, he wouldn’t know what he could be dying for.
Schrodinger’s… Martyring? Could be for a good cause. Or for a good cause according to Wolf.
If it turned out to be something he didn’t want to die for (there were few things he would die for), how would he be able to un-know whatever it was? The file had been stored in his wetware for almost twelve hours. Even if no recoverable information remained, the artifacting it made upon exit would betray it had been there.
Schrodinger’s Cyanide Capsule. An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but a hundred apple seeds will kill me.
For all his whimsical allusions, Kal was half-certain he had sent the man rolling in his grave, but he’d only be able to confirm that by digging Schrodinger up.
He tittered to himself. Schrodinger’s Schrodinger.
He laid down and sprawled out with a guttural groan. His lower back was killing him for holding one position for too long. He whispered to the popcorn, “I’m Wolf… and I have a Knife after me… but she hasn’t killed me…” He blinked. He sat up. “I’m Komodo. I’m a Knife. I’ve lost my fingers because I failed to kill some people.” He stood up. “My name is Nines. I blackboxed all my memories related to a Knife in the Dark and will use any excuse not to arrest a certain Dog in Lang’s Pack… who is being investigated by Septet.”
They knew each other.
How did they know each other?
What did all of them have in common?
Control.
Me.
Oddly enough, Jackal didn’t care for authority. The reason he ran with the Medji were for the privileges the association afforded him. He especially didn’t care about playing anyone else’s pawn.
Control.
The only way he felt he could command his fate would be to have command over the other players on the board before they fully registered his presence.
Control.
That was why he opened the file.
He would swear it was the ClearCo that made him do it, because once he saw the images, it wouldn't matter if he quarantined the data. Any skim of his recent memories would betray him. But, shit, he was already the common denominator between all parties involved. If he couldn't be free of the bomb’s shadow, he could at least get his hands on the targeting system… or the big, red button.
Control.
“Pandora’s black-fucking-box,” he hissed as he sifted through the pictures. Then he surged to his feet to be sick in the sanitizer. Using his lavatory's OTA handles, he clutched the toilet seat and hacked and wretched until he shook.
He'd done some fucked up things to people in his time as a Knife in the Dark. He'd seen the things the others did from a young age. He thought he could handle what humans were capable of when they turned off, or hardwired, their own empathy out of life’s equation.
What Serpentine was doing on Reedfall was worse.
He swallowed his trepidation, steeled himself, and returned to the mat to run diagnostics. He ran tests and dug into the metadata using string text since he couldn't look at the thumbnails without bile rising in his throat.
The files were authentic, raw.
Human experimentation was the least of what they were doing. They were toying with genes, toying with cybernetics; keeping brains alive in grafted bodies like prisons. The oldest picture was nearly a decade old. The most recent had been archived a week ago. There was nearly a terabyte of uncompressed video. He didn't dare watch a second of it, but he scrubbed it for like-faces and routine-behaviors.
If he'd been at the office, he could have run everything through CrimeAnaly, but the portfolio was so sensitive, he didn't think the security in the precinct would be enough to keep it in-house.
What he did do was run facial recognition off the Duati Registry, which was open-source and publicly available. He wasn't connected to the station's intranet, so the info would be almost a month old, but he wasn't worried about recent visitors, just frequent ones.
One face kept popping up: Sumba Whitney, one of the seven elected officials who sat on Septet, and the CEO of StratoCorp, a research conglomerate.
Who owned Tower Six?
Jayeon Whitney, her tube-born son and heir apparent.
Kal brought up the coup de grace with a couple shaking gestures, gut churning with dread: Jayeon had never been to the site on Reedfall, but his user credentials were all over the chain of custody throughout the portfolio.
Jayeon Whitney had been the one to copy over the files to the terminal in Tower Six.
But why?
Blackmail material? Was he angling for a hostile takeover of his mother's assets? That flavor of betrayal wasn't unheard of among the long-lived elite. Maybe he wanted to take his mother out instead of waiting for her to bite rogue dust in another hundred years.
Or was Jayeon a do-gooder? Could it be that he just didn't like what he'd seen and wanted some small-time Blue Side pack to come in and flip the table—let the chaos that ensued cut her out the legal way?
In either case, he could have served his mother’s smoking gun on a golden platter to the police or to the media and the results would have been better…
Unless Jayeon was afraid his mother would act first.
Is that where the Knife came into all this?
“Do I wanna give this to Wolf?” Kal asked himself. He could repack the data, scrub his scrutiny off it like filing the serial off a gun, and pretend he hadn't seen shit.
But what if Wolf didn't even know what this was?
And—really—what if Wolf wasn't UC?
“Fuck me,” he sighed.
Jackal was involved.
The only thing he could do now was protect himself and the people he cared about.
He shut down VoidInc, uncoupled his PC, took out his Disso eye and rushed to change into normal clothes. He haphazardly upended his security macros and ordered a cab as he got dressed. All the while, he kept repeating to himself, “You're not an Enforcer. You're not a detective. You're not a Knife…” Still, he rolled up his mat, bagged it, and started leaving electronic breadcrumbs in the obvious places.
He bought a ticket off-station. He ordered an expensive bottle of wine using four months of rations. He pulled his savings into his wrist-chip for ease of access.
None of it was useful, but all of it was necessary if he wanted anyone looking to see he was desperate and/or getting ready to run. No matter what happened in the next week, they wouldn’t know which direction he was bolting.
By the time the cab meter was running, Kal had called Coyote six times. On the seventh try, Coyote whined groggily, “JJ, I don’t wanna go out tonight. I’m still reco’ing from yesterday, Brossassafras.”
“Where’s your brother? His comm’s busted.”
Coyote groaned, “I’unno… Thought you wanted him to lay low, yeah? I think he said he was goin’ to Husky’s. It’s close, so don’t freak.” Kal knew if the Amunite wasn’t so out of it, he may have thought twice about telling him.
“Husky’s. Got it.” Kal did not have it. He had no idea where Husky made his den. He just knew it had to be around Blue Side, like all the other Dogs.
“Yeah… He’s working on something. Like, a project? Lang doesn’t know. It was gonna be a surprise, so keep it to yourself… We good? Can I go back to bed?”
“Yeah. Sorry to bug ya. G’night.”
He chuckled goodnaturedly. “I love you, Jackal.”
“Love you too, Bruh’cito. Stay safe.”
“Wait.” Coyote must have heard something in his voice. “Sure you’re okay?”
Kal wanted to scream. Instead he swallowed the sound and said, “I’m sure.”
As he coasted toward Dock Side, Kal slid onto the station intranet and scanned gossip columns without narrowing the field, not trusting any search cookies even if he blocked any traffic tracks. There was still lots to discover even without the filter.
Sumba Whitney was Lunar, from the deserts of T'hakka, and looked surprisingly authentic; born with the moon’s typical golden eyes and mahogany skin. Jeyeon was pale and raven haired like a Spacer, but his violet eyes betrayed his exotic, splice-’n’-dice origin. Without knowing their family dynamic, their facial features and lean builds gave away his cloned genetics.
Sumba was a billionaire seemingly above reproach. She cut red tape, kissed dozens of babies, and provided valuable resources to bound Enforcer training schools. Darkness, she paid into Kal's own pension through charitable giving! She was pro-humanist and funded lobbies that worked to restore the indentured working class over developing better robots.
Jayeon, by contrast, was a vocal Tribalist. He wanted better baseline healthcare for humans and hedged his capital against unbound R&D. His whole shtick surrounded this idea that robots should take care of all the grunt work on the station so that all human beings could observe a better quality of life; lives full of leisure and exploration and self-study. He was rumored to be in cahoots with Serpentine, but no links could be proven. Maybe he just liked having snakes around him as bound security and nothing more.
Publicly, the Whitneys were close, smiley. Mentor and mentee; Madonna and Child; queen and prince.
Ideologically, they were polarities.
A rotten apple? Could it be that simple? Kal swiped at this PC and put his hair up to distract himself. He needed to stop fucking digging.
“Stop here,” he told the cabbie and the bot dragged them to a load zone before sliding open the hatch.
Red Side.
It was the closest place to the docks without being in TransSec Agency territory, and so had the lightest spread of Medji compared to the rest of the station.
If petty crime had a smell, it was garbage soaked in rocket fuel, and the smell was coming from Red Side.
Trying not to look over his shoulder, he pulled the bag carrying his VoidInc mat from the transport, flicked his electric fare at the driver, and almost forgot to slide the door closed before hopping the curb.
Tower Zed was a shitstick of a block, missing its top six floors due to a turf war that had happened before he was born.
After grabbing a couple hotdogs from the ground floor's food vendor, he approached the complex's pawnshop and said to the clerk, "Santa Khenta, patron saint of lost toys… Got a mat." Kal passed his bag to the big, Duati fellow through the hole in the grate and added before the ‘netic could open it, “I'll be back for it. Can I get the stub? I don't want a transfer. I just want the fuel.”
"Gettin’ that speedster after all, Jackal? Or are you that hard up?" Khen asked over the bob of a spliff. Then he chuckled. “Don't answer that. I can give you a hundred drams on a fuel-only no-sale, but that's not enough to get off station."
"Don't care about the liquid. I just don't want the paper trail, ya know?"
Khen laughed. "Tax evasion at its most pure! Awright. After a week, I'll hafta tag it. Boss' policy.” He winked. “That enough time?"
"Good for me," Kal said with a forced smile. He just hoped Khen stuck by his principles and didn't look in the bag before then—for Khenta's sake.
With a can of black gold in a paper bag, he headed back to his apartment on foot so he could scrub the station cams by sight. It gave him something to do to continue obfuscating his trail while he thought about next steps. He'd at least bought a week of time.
While he scrubbed cameras and drones, he also scrubbed his PC, his comms, and his Disso eye. He set up new firewalls and a redline hack job that would fry any system that tried to infiltrate him (or at least paint it with white geo-tagged strings of code he could track if they tried to extract anything from his devices).
As for his wetware, his memory, there wasn't much he could do about that without hitting a psycho-doc and, frankly, he'd be stupid to trust anyone on the station to completely delete the data once they'd isolated what he wanted to destroy.
“Stupid,” he growled to himself as he made a street sentry look the other way. “Fucking Wolf…”
He knew he'd been deluding himself.
Even with all his distractions, Kal was still reinforcing dangerous neural connections within and—by telling himself not to think about it—he was painting that bruised part of his psyche with a bright red brush: DON’T LOOK. YOU’LL REGRET IT. (IT’S DEFINITELY NOT HOT, PIPING TEA RELATED TO THE RULING BODY OF THE MOST POWERFUL STATION IN THE AMUN SYSTEM.) 17Please respect copyright.PENANAB3WHMjnucD
I PROMISE.17Please respect copyright.PENANAozZZDYZHmJ