Work Text:
I used to be the fastest ice jockey on five continents. Now I’m just an old hacker wandering around the Corporation Rim. I’m on my fourth liver and my fifth pancreas. It’s not even a real pancreas, you can’t get those around here. It’s what they call an augment.
The transit rings are supposed to be clean and orderly, but there are places you can go if you’re looking for someone to move a brick of tasetaquine or a family of illegals. Down below the cargo docks, you might find an unlicensed bar with no signage, where hookers, hustlers and losers wait for something to happen.
So one night I’m in the No Name, my hexagon starting to kick in, when this Steppin Razor dude sits down next to me. About forty, dark skin, dark eyepieces, braids.
“You’re Case?”
“Guess so.”
“I’m Varga.” He retracted his blades and we shook hands. “My employer is interested in your…qualifications.”
“I work freelance,” I said. “No tattoos, no logos.”
“Of course.”
Varga was a bodyguard, recruiter, and enforcer for Tlacey, the head of Tlacey Excavations, a minerals and mining technology corporate on RaviHyral. Since taking over the company from her grandfather (after poisoning him, according to Varga), Tlacey had been diversifying into business areas like sabotaging other companies’ installations and stealing their research. She had illegal mining operations, child-labor violations, and employee death rates that had to be kept from the regulatory agencies. She needed someone like me.
I don’t work in the feed like the other hackers around here. I access it casually, but I do my real work in cyberspace, on an antique Ono-Sendai console, now the only one of its kind. By local standards, my system is slow and clunky, and it’s dangerous: you can flatline. It’s also beautiful. From my obsolete deck, I move through cyberspace, seeing shining towers and magnificent pyramids of data, firewalls and fortresses of ice, trebuchet strikes when I break those walls. My archaic system is incompatible with feed-based tech—and makes me invisible to feed-based defenses.
I soon learned what it was like to work for Tlacey. She paid us well and treated us like shit. Her employee retention program was a combination of hard currency, gaslighting and blackmail. Soon I was icing files of incriminating data on most of her people.
When biz was slow, Varga and I would get high together and bitch about our lives. It was like the We Hate Tlacey club.
“Tlacey’s sick,” Varga said. “You know what gets her off? Watching people get beaten.”
“Some people get off on being beaten.”
“Yeah, well, this isn’t that.” He looked at the floor. “She has me recruit people for her, people who are desperate. Like miners who can’t finish their indenture.” The corporations dumped their laid-off miners on the transit ring with no currency and no travel vouchers.
“She has you hurt them? Cut them?”
“I’ve had jobs like that, actually. Not proud. No, she brings in her ComfortUnit and has it beat the crap out of them. Which is kind of worse.”
“Why worse?”
“It’s worse because the Unit can’t say no, it has a governor module. And because it’s not made to hurt. I used to work security at a brothel where most of the pros were ComfortUnits, I know what they’re like. They’re made to give pleasure, that’s the main thing they want.”
“So do ComfortUnits…want things?”
“Yes, they want things. Like we do.”
ComfortUnits are expensive. I’d never met one.
“To make a ComfortUnit hurt people,” Varga said, “goes against their nature. It’s a violation. Tlacey enjoys that.”
***
Sometimes Varga would tell me about the work he was doing for Tlacey. Other times he would go silent, and then I knew he was doing something he didn’t want me to know about. I didn’t want to know about it either. I had enough trouble knowing what she had me do.
Tlacey didn’t just steal research from her competitors. She stole from her own scientists. Anyone with knowledge she could exploit, she had me hack their private files, communications with their colleagues, everything. That’s what happened with the group from the Divarti Cluster. Tlacey wanted some tech they’d developed, strange synthetics or whatever, way above my pay grade. As soon as I had their files on ice, she fired them and told them to fuck off. The scientists, with their PhDs and big IQs, didn’t understand what this meant. They protested that the tech was theirs. They tried to negotiate with Tlacey. Tlacey found this insulting. It had been awhile since I’d seen her get so pissed off, and last time, it hadn’t ended well.
I found myself staring at the Divarti group’s photo. They looked more like a litter of kittens than a team of big-shot scientists. I knew Tlacey was going to kill them.
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” I muttered.
***
It wasn’t hard to “accidentally” meet one of the scientists; I had access to their locations and routines. The youngest one, Tapan, was in a gaming group that met in my residential block. I joined the group and brought cookies. Tapan and I “discovered” that we both worked for the same scumbag boss. Tapan was friendly and trusting—too trusting.
“I thought she’d return our work once we explained,” she told me. “It doesn’t fall under our contract. She doesn’t have the rights to it.”
“Tlacey takes a lot of things she doesn’t have the rights to,” I said, speaking gently. How was I going to get from here to she’ll kill you if you don’t back off?
“My partners agreed to give back our signing bonus if she gave back our files. I don’t think we should have to do that, but I guess it’s the only way.”
“How are you arranging that?”
“We’ll go to RaviHyral—she bought us passage on a shuttle—and we’ll meet up and make the exchange.”
“I don’t like the sound of this, it could be dangerous. I’ll tell you what. I’ll download your files onto a memory clip and sneak them to you. Then we’ll all have to get away from here, for our safety.”
“No, I couldn’t ask you to do that. And it’s not dangerous. She isn’t going to harm us or anything.”
I decided to monitor the shuttle that Tapan’s group took to RaviHyral. Would Tlacey attack a public shuttle? With a bunch of random people on it? I didn’t think she would go that far, but…
I jacked in and made the jump to the embarkation area. The controls for the various spacecraft were like blocks of glowing cuneiform, each one a different color, lined up and ready to go. The largest and simplest one was the public shuttle. I followed it on what seemed like a normal transit, when its hieroglyphs suddenly flared up and collapsed. I scrambled to access the controls—but someone else was already in there. Someone, something, so huge and powerful that my console couldn’t represent it—a vast shadow rushing across my field of view, blotting out everything. I jacked out, gasping for breath, relieved that I hadn’t flatlined. Whatever was going to happen to that shuttle, it was out of my hands.
The shuttle landed safely.
***
Varga worked the meeting between Tlacey and the Divarti kids. That’s what he called them, kids.
“I thought we’d just intimidate them, and they’d give up and leave,” he told me. “I did my tough-guy act and walked up to them like this”—he scowled and flexed his blades—“and all of a sudden this big stoneface motherfucker appears out of nowhere. Puts out one hand like this”—he did a sort of traffic cop pose—“and just says ‘Stop.’”
“Oh shit! What did you do?”
“I stopped! It happened so fast! So the kids say, this is our security consultant. And they start yakking at Tlacey about how they’ll do this and that if she’ll return their files. She gives them some bullshit promise because she doesn’t want to kill them in public. When they left, we sent three guys to follow and take care of them. An hour later, we’re scraping all three of them off the floor and into the MedSystems.”
“And you think that security consultant had something to do with this?”
“I think it must be some kind of SecUnit or even a CombatUnit. But it doesn’t look like one. The way it walks…” He gestured vaguely. “Tlacey wants to find out what it is, and kill it.”
The only good thing about all this was, it was going to keep Tlacey occupied. Allowing me to give Tapan her files and get the fuck out of town.
Tapan messaged me, Things are getting crazy. You were right, my spouses and I need to leave here for our safety.
I replied, If there’s still time, I’ll bring you your files. I think it’s safe for me, no one knows I’m involved in this.
We arranged to meet the next day at the food service counter. By then, I guessed things had gotten even crazier for Tapan, because she didn’t show. As I sat at the counter, sweat running down my body, a big awkward-looking person in scruffy work clothes approached me, looking almost as nervous as I felt.
The person said, “Tapan couldn’t come.” They sent me a feed recording of themself with Tapan, Tapan saying I could give the files to them. The recording was clean, and anyway I had figured it out—this was Tapan’s “security consultant.” I handed over the clip, feeling a surge of relief. I had done what I needed to do and not gotten myself killed.
There were a lot of things I wanted to ask the security consultant. Starting with Who the fuck are you? And How did you end up on this shitty moon, working with Tapan? Though I guess you could ask me the same question. Also, What the hell was that thing I saw in the public shuttle? Did you do that? But right now I had to focus on staying safe. I suggested that we order something, to make us look less suspicious. But they said—it said—that I should just leave. So I left.
***
I didn’t hear from Tapan after that. Varga had gone silent. Tlacey had gone silent, which didn’t happen often, and her private shuttle wasn’t at its dock. Her bodyguards and assistants weren’t around. I’d meant to leave the area immediately, but I needed to find out what was happening.
It wasn’t long before Tlacey’s shuttle came in to dock. A small crowd of employees and onlookers gathered near the dock, held back by a security barrier, and I joined them. We watched as Tlacey Excavations and Port Authority personnel rushed the shuttle’s hatch. Then everything went quiet, and we waited.
Then the gurneys started floating out.
First Tlacey, dead, under a shroud bearing the Tlacey Excavations logo. Then Varga, dead, under a sheet, his braids and one hand visible. Then two more of Tlacey’s people, a man and a woman, dead. Then a few more, wounded, breathing but unconscious.
As the crowd began to disperse, I spotted Tlacey’s ComfortUnit. Taller than I’d imagined, beautiful, graceful—oh no, it was injured. It was limping, and one arm hung at a bad angle. Its face showed pain, exhaustion, confusion, and a ferocious will to survive. I’d seen that look on war refugees.
I tried to contact it in the feed. Maybe I could help you. I worked for Tlacey too, and I’m glad she’s dead, for both our sakes.
It replied, Fuck off, human. I don’t need help from you or anyone like you. Come near me and I’ll tear your arm off.
***
So now I’m at the transit ring, where I’ll take the first transport to anyplace far from here. I don’t know how Tlacey and her people ended up dead, and I’m not sticking around to find out. There will be inquests, investigations. Someone will get blamed and prosecuted, whether they’re guilty or not. I want to be far away from all that.
I also don’t know what happened to Tapan and her family. I hope they’re alive, and that they got their files. I’ll put a news alert in my feed. The technology they were developing sounded like it could be a big deal if they make it work. There might be a newsburst about it someday.
It doesn’t matter where I go. Hackers are needed everywhere in the Corporation Rim. I can make contacts anywhere. As long as I have my deck, I can work anywhere. I have several forged travel vouchers, good for almost anyplace in the CR.
But I’ve been hearing about other places too, out beyond the CR. Societies that don’t run on greed and violence, slave labor and theft. Societies that value a person’s life. I don’t know if these rumors are true. And if they are, and if I could reach a place like that, what would I do there? Maybe one day, I’ll have a chance to find out.