Busted and Blue

I was asked by a computer, a shadow on the wall
An image made by Virgil to rule over us all
To amplify the sirens and to find real amends
I'm through the echo-chambers to other worlds away
- Gorillaz, Busted and Blue

It had been over a month since the incident at Burger Factory. And it had not ended well for Kaydence.

Crime was, by the very design of the city, difficult to do in Neo Manhattan. Oh, people tried all the time, but between the digital and physical surveillance, the AutoCops, financial incentives and citizens more than willing to snitch on each other, criminals tended to last as long in this city as spiders in a bath. The most criminal one could be here was in cybercrime - picksocketing, theft of data, creation of illegal braindances, virus-based vandalism. And even that carried the risk of having armed AutoCops kicking your door down at three in the morning.

But it happened enough that a legal system existed, even on this planet. One that, much to her own surprise, Kaydence had ended up being dragged through.

--------

"Kaydence Roberts, has it ever occurred to you that, out of all the five-hundred and thousand citizens in Neo Manhattan, only you seem to have a problem?"

Kaydence said nothing, but merely glared at the judge. Justice Andrew Hardy, from the moment he'd sat in the chair, had proven himself a real piece of work. He didn't even try to hide the fact that Burger Factory had hired him specifically because they knew he'd rule in their favour. It was written all over him like stink lines on a child's drawing. Not to mention his obvious disdain for someone whom he clearly saw as just an errant cog in a machine that needed to be smacked back into place.

Stupid, smooth-brained, malicious piece of corpo shit.

"You paint yourself as a subversive, as somebody who fights back against an oppressive system. And yet the vast majority are able to live in that system without destroying public property. Because they understand that, like it or not, the system works. You are not some cyberpunk revolutionary - far from it. You are no more than a jumped-up, selfish attention-seeker with a persecution complex."

The trial had been a fairly quick one. Even if the evidence had been overwhelming, the justice system of Neo Manhattan prided itself on efficiency and speed. But what really got Kaydence's bile rising in her throat like magma in a volcano was how the prosecution trotted out everything they could to prove their point. Her interest in cyberpunk fiction. Her browser history. Her streams - and the sight of herself reciting her catchphrases and the occasional flash of cleavage, right in front of the jury, made her own skin crawl. And the jury, indeed, ate it up. 

Dead-eyed, mindless, shuffling puppets dancing to invisible strings.

"In most cases, a mere fine to cover the damage would suffice. But your general attitude, in my eyes, is a clear indicator of future delinquency - something I will not permit in my quarter. I hereby additionally sentence you to six months of Overwatch, non-negotiable. All activity, offline or online, will be monitored heavily, and you will be required to report every week to an appointed psychiatrist concerning your behaviour. Failure to do so will result in six months of jail time without bail."

Overwatch. Yeuch. Of all the punishments to dole out, it had to be the least fun one. She could have even taken a stint in the pen - at least she’d only have to worry about prison wardens and suspicious meat in the food. Granted, breaking a Serv-A-Bot wasn’t kosher, but it wasn’t worth a stint of Overwatch, of all things. Those things were so cheap, it was a wonder anyone made a fuss.

“It is hoped that this punishment will dispel any notions you have of being some kind of rebellious warrior and to control your temper in future. But, given the clear contempt for the court and those your actions have affected, I sincerely doubt it.”

And bang went the gavel. Somehow, despite having every kind of technological innovation in this city, those still existed. Perhaps it was just the look of the thing.

“Court adjourned.”

--------

And so here Kaydence was, on her laptop, some weeks later. And if the incident at Burger Factory hadn’t been the tipping point, this was.

Overwatch. It was a punishment unique to Neo Manhattan - even the coast towns would normally just throw you in jail. It was just another way of saying "we know we're monitoring you already in a thousand different ways, but now we're just gonna say it". It was the closest one could come to house arrest without actually being locked indoors, but you might as well be for all the actual freedom you had. Between the ankle monitor, the spyware installed onto all your devices and the weekly therapy, you felt like a dog on a leash that everyone was afraid might turn rabid at any moment.

And what they didn’t understand was that you didn’t lock a dog up because of that. It only made that dog want to bite more. But of course they didn’t understand. After all, Overwatch wasn’t even a real punishment. It was what was doled out when the assholes up top wanted to look like they were doing something about you but didn’t want to pay out of pocket. Cheap, easy and quick.

Goddamn piece of shit fucking stuffed shirt parasites.

She’d talked about it with her co-workers. They’d been sympathetic, to a point. They always were - even Jake, the guy who smelled faintly of cheese. But none of them understood, not really. She’d tried to make them understand. She’d ranted, nearly screamed, about how unfair it was that one company ran the show, that your choices didn’t really matter, that this city wasn’t really for the people who lived in it but for the pugoloj in their silver towers. And they’d either stared blankly at her or…

She gritted her teeth as her fingers flew over the keys.

Her boss had been reasonable.

That hurt. Hurt more than the judge who’d basically called her a delinquent, or the people on the street who called her crazy. Because he’d sat her down, looked her in the eye and said:

-------

“Look, Kay, I know it isn’t great here. Not much happens out of the ordinary and all the convenience is… well, a bit overwhelming. And I don’t much care for UES and that stick-up-their-ass Osmond family, either. But what else is there? At least here we don’t have to worry about getting mugged in the street, or our houses falling into the ocean. A gilded cage is several steps up than rusty freedom, Kay. And you’re not going to find anywhere on Spero better than this.”

-------

Except there was something else. Kaydence had been there. And, thanks to that bastardo judge, she had all the incentive to go back. UES had made it clear to her with that sentence: Either you toe the line and swallow the lie, Kaydence Roberts, or we drop the hammer on you. You live how we want you to live and tough shit if you can’t fit in, because good fucking luck trying to live anywhere else when we have all the infrastructure that none of the shitty coastal towns do. Once again, fake choice.

Well. Fuck that noise all the way to the Blackwall.

The sound of keys being struck was like the tapping of a woodpecker on a sugar rush. Lights of different shades flickered over Kaydence’s face.

UES’s court-issued spyware had been designed to be uncrackable. It was there to watch you, and it screamed like a barn owl if you went anywhere the corpo gonks didn’t want you to be. It was constantly updated, every day, with new revisions to fix bugs and close off gaps that could be exploited. Even the most cunning hackers who somehow got into Neo Manhattan would have struggled to break it.

But then again, most hackers couldn’t hear coding like Kaydence Roberts could. And Kaydence Roberts, to whom the running of government-issue software was a monotonous drone muffling the symphony of pure unfiltered data, had found the one bypass that hadn’t been patched out in six years and cracked it open in a matter of minutes. She could have laughed, but she hadn’t been in much of a laughing mood recently.

And now, as far as the corpos were concerned, she was either watching a playlist of stupid cat videos or catching up on the highlights of the Strike tournament. But those weren’t the things flashing up on her screen as she typed, filtered and scanned through layer upon layer of content. Websites, server lists, back channels… things that most people couldn’t access, shouldn’t access. Either because they were insanely private and owned by rich pricks or because they were the few places illicit data could be traded.

She wanted a way out. A way out of the city. A way that skipped the awkward step of acknowledging she had a criminal record, or having to pay with money - anything that UES could possibly track. And to do that, she had to search beyond the networks and servers that the average joe was allowed to browse. Which, as she was demonstrating, was easy enough if one was either a technopath or just really good at hacking and web surfing. She had to find outside sources that would be willing to work past all of those problems - not illegal, per se, but definitely skirting legality.

Because now was the time to cut her losses. It was time to…

She paused. What was the title of that book again? The one where it turned out the wonderful fantasy dream world was based on something awful, and a bunch of people left because they couldn’t stomach it? It wasn’t an exact match for her scenario, but…

Ah, yes. It was time to Walk Away from Omelas.

She sighed, restraining a laugh. God, that was fucking awful. She hoped there wasn’t any mind-reading tech in that ankle monitor.

Then she carried on typing.

She must have slipped into some form of autopilot at one point. It happened a lot, especially when she was repairing things or scrolling through Flutter. Her fingers moved by themselves and her eyes glazed over, not really reading the text scrolling past her face.

So when her screen abruptly blacked out, she nearly fell out of her chair.

“La fiko?!” she cried aloud. Curse words, she knew, weren’t covered by the terms of her Overwatch - and even if they were, she wouldn’t have cared less.

She stared at the screen. Her eyes strained, trying to see… something. Anything, past what the screen was telling her. But nothing. Just a black screen, with no other details on it. For a moment, she wondered if she’d done a proper job in blocking out the spyware, or if the automated watchdog had scented her efforts and was barking to its masters up in their towers. Would she be hearing the AutoCops swooping in at any moment now?

No.

She peered again.

There was a detail. A green arrow. And, next to it, a flashing green line.

“...a command prompt?”

She was typing even as she spoke. Her usual test sentence came first:

>GET YE FLASK

She hit Enter.

PROGRAM NOT FOUND.

At first, she was inclined to sigh with relief. Then her forebrain turned around, kicked her hindbrain and hissed ‘Hey, idioto, drop the fourteen-year old internet memes and think about what the fuck we’re doing here’. So instead she hesitated a moment, closing her eyes and straining not her vision this time, but her hearing.

Technopathy was a constant fact in her life. Its presence had stumped the doctors as much as her digimancy had, if not more so - and there was a good case for the two being connected. She’d never been able to ‘turn it off’ in any way, as hard as she’d tried, and thus she’d had to live with the constant, ever-shifting soundscape of digital noise in the back of her hearing every day. But it also made her ‘preem’, as she herself would put it, at understanding hardware and software, which was why she was so good at her job.

She listened now, and tried to understand.

She’d ended up… no, it wasn’t a corpo server. It didn’t sound like any of the servers or networks used on Spero at all, never mind Neo Manhattan. It was… quiet. A quiet hum, low and far-off sounding. It felt like… she’d broken through something. Some kind of wall, or barrier, separating one network from another. Like she’d stumbled into…

…another internet?

A chill ran down her spine. She shuddered. Had she just…?

No. Bottle that thought, Kaydence. You’d know if you’d gotten into… that place. Every instinct of yours would be screaming right now. And anyway, you’re not even stupid enough to try doing that. You know why that was built, and you know exactly what would happen if you went anywhere near it. And that would be the last thing you’d want adding to your rap sheet. Kaydence Roberts, twenty-five, cracker of the Blackwall, destroyer of civilization.

But she could tell one thing. She could definitely type commands into it. Even ones as stupid as “get ye flask”. So…

Trial and error happened for a while as Kaydence combined what she could hear with what seemed logical at the time. She typed in as many variations of ‘run’, ‘print’ and ‘execute’ that she could think of. It only got the expected results of barfing back whatever she put in, like a looped video of a parrot. She experimented with trying to change the font, the text size and even alignment - no dice. She did manage to get it to accurately calculate the cooking time of her favourite brand of pizza if it was scaled up by ten times, but that was mostly idle thought and curiosity.

Finally, she did something daft, because logic and listening had only gotten her so far. She decided to type in utter nonsense, as she’d done once before.

>C6H12O6 + 6O2 —> 6CO2 + 6H2O?

PROGRAM NOT FOUND.

A brief flicker.

AN EXPLOSION IN A CUSTARD FACTORY.

Kaydence blinked. Did that just…?

She typed again.

>Can a match box?

NO, BUT A TIN CAN.

>You fight like a dairy farmer.

HOW APPROPRIATE. YOU FIGHT LIKE A COW.

>So I fired again. And I missed. And then I missed again.

AND THEN I FIRED AGAIN. AND THEN I MISSED. AND THEN I FIRED, AND THEN I FIRED, AND I MISSED. I MISSED BOTH TIMES. AND THEN I FIRED. AND I MISSED. THIS WENT ON FOR SEVERAL HOURS. AND THEN I FIRED. AND THEN I MISSED. AND THEN I WAS OUT OF BULLETS. AND THEN I GOT SAD. I HAD A POPSICLE. AND THEN I PASSED OUT IN THE SNOW. AND THEN I WOKE UP. AND THEN I RELOADED. AND THEN I FIRED. AND THEN I MISSED. I MISSED AGAIN. I FIRED. I HIT SOMETHING. BUT IT WASN'T WHAT I WAS GOING FOR, SO I GUESS I MISSED. I PASSED OUT AGAIN. I HAD ANOTHER POPSICLE. I HAD A DREAM THAT I WAS FIRING AT SOMETHING—I MISSED.

“You gotta be shitting me, choom,” muttered Kaydence, rubbing her eyes.

This was… she didn’t know what this was. She knew what she wanted it to be - something simple, one of those “AI” toys people played with in school classrooms. But the knowledge that she wasn’t on a Neo Manhattan server anymore - and she knew that for a fact, her ears didn’t lie - quashed that hope completely. Not to mention how oddly specific the replies were. And even then, the lingering idea that she’d gone somewhere really dangerous kept itching the back of her mind.

If she didn’t know better… and she was fairly sure she did… she might have sworn there was somebody else on the other end of the line. Somebody feeding back responses. But that was insane - she knew it was all a program. Just more code, just automated responses to lucky guesses.

Right?

She sighed, got up and went to get a drink. She needed to relax, and nothing helped her relax like booze.

She reached her fridge, yanked the door open and grabbed the first drink she laid eyes on. In yet another testament to how ineffectual the justice system in Neo Manhattan really was, it was a carton of Nebula -  the booziest she had. They could take her computer and take her heartbeat, but they would never take her right to get crunk. Especially on the only brand manufactured outside the reach of the all-consuming monster that was United Everything Services.

She cracked the top open and swigged back half the contents. The taste of cherry - real cherry, not the artificial lab-grown shit - filled her mouth, barely masking the strength of the alcohol as it sloshed down her throat. She shuddered as the pleasant, fuzzy detachment she loved about drinking washed over her and made her skin tingle with warmth.

That done, she turned back to the computer.

TENSION, APPREHENSION, AND DISSENSION HAVE BEGUN.

…that hadn’t been there before.

She sat down, setting the carton aside on her desk. The fuck was this about? Was this a quote or something? It seemed like one - at least, it rang a bell. But what was it really? A secret message? Was there some weird anarchist group going around recruiting that she didn’t know about? She was pretty sure the AutoCops, the monitors and various corporate-backed bills had stifled out any room for something like that to develop. So who would even be sending this out, never mind from an entirely different network?

It had to be somebody, right?

Her fingers drummed on the table. What the hell was she even supposed to say here? What would someone sending out a message like this even want to hear…?

She typed.

>Remember, remember, the fifth of November.

COMMAND NOT RECOGNIZED

Huh. That one seemed like a dead cert. Classic Guy Fawkes imagery and all. What else?

>What is the Matrix?

COMMAND NOT RECOGNIZED

Fuck, that seemed pretty obvious, too. Anyone would have quoted that if they wanted to stir up a little dissention. At least, she would.

>Some animals are more equal than others.

COMMAND NOT RECOGNIZED

Damn it.

>Power is not a means, it is an end.

COMMAND NOT RECOGNIZED

FUCK.

>Hey, paisanos!

COMMAND NOT RECOGNIZED

Okay, that one was a goof. She wasn’t expecting a real response, anyway.

Kaydence groaned and put her head in her hands, trying to fight the swirl of alcohol, tiredness and frustration in her head. Where, where, where?! Where the fuck had she read that quote before?! She wished she hadn’t had that swig of Nebula now, it was making it hard to focus. Why wasn’t shit like this ever easy?! Why did these people always want to make you figure out some bullshit code before they let you into their secrets?!

She looked at the screen from between her fingers. The screen, now full of her disjointed typing and guesses, offered no answers. Her hearing picked up the same droning as before. She was fairly certain her eyes were aching now from staring at the screen all afternoon, but she didn’t care.

Those words together. Tension. Apprehension. Dissension. They all rhymed, obviously. And the way they were put together… it seemed like it had come off of a poem. A poem used to make some kind of philosophical point. But why use that specifically? It seemed to be directly targeted at her. At the very feelings she was experiencing. Tension at her living situation. Apprehension that nobody else seemed to realise what was wrong. Dissension with the way the people who ran the show paraded themselves with fake smiles and hollow hospitality as they sucked the money right out of your-

…wait.

Rich people. Hiding their intentions. Using… poems - no, jingles… to disguise their…

A memory came flickering to her head. A memory of the one time she’d ever been in a public library, because books were about as engaging to her as a dead mouse in a gutter. The one time she’d ever held a proper ink-and-paper book before it was all replaced by glass tablets. Sitting with her feet up at the back, flicking through the first thing she’d found in the sci-fi section. A story of wanting to commit the perfect crime, but hiding the intent to do the crime. Much like UES hid their true faces behind-

The grin that split her face would have sent even the most hardened tiger into a nervous sweat.

“Gotcha, bitch,” she hissed, and typed.

>Tenser, said the Tensor

“The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester,” she cackled as she hit enter. “Not so fucking clever now, are we, choom? Better get that little routine of yours sweeped, because-”

The hum of the strange network grew louder, encompassing not just her ears, but the world around her. She blinked, and realised that the screen had turned into a white sea with ripples of green, swirling, flowing. She tried to take a breath, but it seemed distant, far away, as if she was being pulled out of her own body. She tried to move, but her muscles wouldn’t respond, and yet somehow there wasn’t any panic or fear in her mind, there was only the ripples and the hum-

Her body went still.

But her mind...

-------

Kaydence blinked.

She felt as though she was standing… or floating? She couldn’t tell. It seemed as if she were suspended in midair, as if underwater or by a hook, yet the idea of down was a mere suggestion. 

She blinked again, and this time she saw.

All around her, everything was white, as if she was caught in some sort of pea soup fog. And yet trails of green, cyan, yellow and magenta flashed, hints of light and colour zipping past her face with the silent speed of fireflies on their nightly vigil. She glanced around and realised she was suspended in the middle of a long tunnel, its walls and floor and ceiling formed by these coloured trails. Sudden jinks to the right or turns at bizarre angles indicated other routes, other tunnels to go down. More of them zipped past her, barely grazing her skin but never quite touching.

She looked down at her hands. They seemed… real enough. But they were the only things there - they floated in midair, detached, terminating in flat planes as if cut from a mannequin. She couldn’t see her feet, or her body. Everything felt… detached. Like she wasn’t actually there. She could see things, definitely, but there wasn’t exactly a sense of touch. She just felt numb, all over.

For once, she was completely stumped. No possible ideas of what this was or why this was even happening could present themselves.

At least she didn’t feel drunk anymore.

Without thinking, she reached out and caught a flash of green that sped past her head. She looked down and saw what looked like binary code in a vaguely butterfly-shaped lump wiggling in her grasp. But her ears picked up the bips and bleeps it let off, and the back of her brain told her that this was a very strongly-worded email about safety standards concerning an amusement park somewhere. So she let it go and watched it buzz away, flashing like a sentient strobelight, until it faded into the marble-white fog.

She wondered if that tiny delay would be noticed.

Then she looked around.

There didn’t seem to be much to see, at least at first. Nothing but the same binary meteors against the white nebula. It told her things, of course - deliveries, emails, music streams. The daily workings of a network carrying traffic all around, from A to B and sometimes to Z. But she recognized no names, found nothing familiar. No UES tags, no domain names or server lists she’d seen earlier. Everything was strange and foreign.

But then something caught her ears and eyes together.

She strained to hear and squinted to see. Had she imagined it? No… yes… no… It was faint and kept slipping in and out of focus, but…

Up ahead, beyond the fog and the constant hum and zip. She hadn’t the words for it, but it felt like… a beacon. Like the light of a lighthouse, barely visible to the wandering captain of some ancient ship from long ago. A sort of soft, choral sound, laid underneath the drone of her surroundings.

It seemed to be… beckoning her. Somewhere, in the heart of this maze, was where… whoever this was, wanted her to go.

But…

Kaydence had spent a lot of time traversing networks in VR, even though Neo Manhattan hadn’t really given her reason to. She’d prided herself on mapping out every inch of the digital corridors that formed the private intranets of every business in her quarter. It was something she could use to silence arguments about who the most hardcore webbie was. And this was, in part, because she always knew how to get back to where she started. A network was like a maze, and if you were smart you trusted your instinct on where you were and didn’t leave any clues for firewalls to pick up on. Theseus and his ball of yarn could eat shit.

There was no such reassurance here, though. A strange network, unknown territory, poor visibility and no clue as to which was up or down or left or right. Every possibility of taking a wrong turn here. If she didn’t get it right the first time, didn’t pin down the exact route to get to wherever she wanted to go… 

That would be it. She’d never find her way back here.

She’d be lost.

For a moment, the very idea was like ice in her stomach. She hung, suspended in digital existence, not moving. Light and colour and raw data flickered and surged about her like shooting stars through winter clouds.

Then she realised the absurdity of her own thoughts, and voiced them aloud.

“Lost? Bitch, I’m Kaydence Roberts.”

She lifted her hands. A keypad materialised in the virtual ether beneath her left hand a sphere of binary coalesced beneath her right. In front of her face, a map - shrouded in the fog and incomplete, yet ready to be filled - blinked into being.

She grinned.

“I never get lost.”

She typed. She twisted.

And off she sped down cyberspace.

--------

Kaydence loved the thrill of Touring, as it was called. When she’d been in college, she’d been taught by a couple of rowdy webbies how to do it. How to jack in on a modified VR headset originally meant for shitty science presentations. How to navigate the maze of networks and servers, and to do it quickly. How to find the hidden doorways of file paths and pry them open as easily as one would open up a can of cat food. How to find the nodes and twiddle them in just the right way to override securities. How to get past firewalls by rotating the rubix cubes of information to shut off triggers and redirect subroutines. 

Once you learned to do it, you never forgot. It was like slipping back into a comfortable pair of sweatpants after a long day at work. 

And, one sharp turn down one virtual corridor later, Kaydence got her chance to do it all again.

What she assumed was a solid wall of red was blocking her path, looming over her in every direction. Except it wasn’t solid - not entirely. Peering closely revealed it to be formed of strands of binary, interwoven like the threads of a blanket, that rippled and pulsed as the lines of code passed through and around each other. Flashes of light here and there, like glitter on a cocktail dress, flickered along the shifting surface as it loomed large in front of the wayward webbie..

“Hello there, choom,” she muttered as she stared at it. She could tell what this was immediately - a particularly tough, multi-layered sequence of self-aware security routines, bordering almost on artificial intelligence. Far from proper ICE, but a cut above what she’d seen before, and certainly above what she’d found here up until now. Most likely a custom fit? Somebody paid through the nose for it, she could tell.

And it was between her and the siren call of the strange signal.

Well, she hoped they got their money’s worth. 

She cracked her knuckles as various keypads, dials and nodes flashed into existence in front of her. She could visualise every inch of the system before her, the itch in the back other mind reading her opponent as a deep, ominous droning akin to a distant swarm of hornets. Screens popped up in front of her, each one filled with loading bars or scrolling text as her hands typed and twisted and pulled. A node here, a routine there… connect that to this… she could see every layer of the offending program - and, what was more, change it in subtle ways that nobody would sense until it was too late.

No point in being subtle here. Doing it one layer at a time would only attract attention. She needed to take them all down at once, shut it down entirely and-

The droning turned into an angry, snake-like hiss. Kaydence looked up just in time to see threads of the wall snap off, untangling and fraying away from the main body. The thin tendrils thrashed for a moment, then whipped outwards at speeds impossible outside of dreams and wound themselves about her limbs and body. They drew taut in an instant, tightening hard, and a burning, stinging sensation, like hot peppers pressed against an open cut, flared where the red lines pressed and dug into her skin.

Neon yellow text popped into her field of vision, counting downwards. Thirty seconds.

“Trying to choke me out?” she croaked. “Clever.” She meant it both literally - a thread had gotten itself around her neck - and figuratively. It was street slang for a common ICE tactic, foiling intruders by throttling the attacker’s processing speeds to a crawl, whereupon the disparity between their speed and that of the server would forcefully kick them out. And this was what it felt like when Touring. Not fun, unless you were into that sort of thing.

She could already feel her movements becoming sluggish as more and more wires shot out and ensnared her. The loading bars were slowing and alarm notifications were flashing on her screens. But she fought against it, pulling hard against the tightening bonds and keeping up her typing speed as best as she could. 

Twenty seconds.

Now she was fighting on two fronts - the race to connect all the nodes with one hand and to beat back the ICE trying to restrain her with the other. Over and over again, she typed out her countermeasures against the ICE’s attack. Threads turned black and fell away, crumbling like dust made of ones and zeroes. But more threads came just as quickly, coiling like nooses around her, depriving her of movement, and the stinging heat was growing into a fiery pain like hot needles being driven into her flesh. 

Fifteen seconds.

She gritted her teeth, biting back the pain, and focused as much as she could on trying to finish her work. This was the problem with Touring, and why most people just stuck to monitors and keyboards after a while. As much of a novelty as it was to actually manipulate the world wide web with your hands, it often meant spending a day with a limp because a virtual dinosaur bit your virtual leg off. 

Kaydence was rapidly running out of excuses for that one.

Ten seconds.

Reams of code blossomed like flowers before her as her hands, straining against the ICE, worked like agitated spiders. She could see that she was only a few more lines away from her goal. But the ICE was starting to win out. The tendrils were coming faster than she could delete them, and they were morphing into thicker ribbons that spiralled up and down her limbs. Her movements were getting sluggish, as though the air around her was turning into hardening gelatin, and nearly every inch of bare skin prickled with fiery pain.

Her progress bars were flickering, struggling to keep up with the disparity in server times. Not good.

Five seconds.

A tendril of code squeezed itself around her chest and stomach, forcing out a grunt that was muffled by another that covered her mouth. Her hands were barely able to move now, fingers twitching frantically. 

Come on, come on…

Three seconds.

Her heart hammered in her ears. Lights danced in her vision. She thought she might have started sweating, but she couldn’t really tell anymore.

One sec-

Ding, went the prompt.

She hit enter.

It was like flicking a light switch. One minute, there was a wall. The next, it had simply vanished. As had the threads constraining and slowing her - the heat vanished, and she gasped as the tightness and burning left her. Damn. That had been rough - she was very out of practice when dealing with that kind of ICE. Perhaps a few nights of practice instead of the camgirl work might have helped.

She didn’t dwell on that for long, for as the wall faded away she saw the tunnel stretching out before her and the light at the end of it. And she knew, instinctively, that she’d won, and without thinking she speed towards it, feeling invisible wind whip at her hair and her clothes as-

—

-she stepped out.

…for a mystery Narnia Neverneverland off the edge of all maps place, this sure as heck looked like an isolated country diner.

Heck, it had it all. Red round vinyl seats at a counter. Booths. A jukebox (though Kaydence’s senses could tell it was digital and hence somewhat modern), baked goods under glass, even a pair of arcade games in the corner. But what sold the place was that it looked…used. Like it had seen many, many customers, possibly over the course of decades. It was clean, but it bore the marks of a longtime business.

It also had a man serving at the counter instead of a woman, so there was that. He had given her a wary glance, as had the few customers. No wonder; she’d come in from the bathroom. And hadn’t actually entered the diner beforehand…

The sound was a series of low clicks to her unique senses. A sort of low grade dog whistle, so she’d know which of the customers was not just a random soul stopping for a rest and food. Once her attention was drawn though, she stood out in other ways.

Namely that when she moved, Kaydence got readings from her technomancy. Normal people didn’t cause that. Even if they had artificial limbs or items like pacemakers, she got nothing. Which meant…

The woman looked at her, before nodding at the empty seat at her table. Kaydence sat down.

“Hello.” Dawn said. “Name’s Dawn Cosineau. You are Kaydence Roberts, and you have travelled a long way from home. You’re likely hungry, so order something. I have a tab. Also, drink some glasses of water. Between the alcohol and your trip, you’re likely somewhat dehydrated.”

Kaydence opened her mouth, and then blinked as the fuzziness of the Nebula she drank returned with a vengeance. It took a moment of blinking to come up with something to say that wasn’t a statement of the obvious, like “you’re a Barbie”. Which, the sober part of her head was quick to remember, wasn’t a thing you said to androids if you wanted to keep an intact jawbone.

“...okay,” she said. “I’ll admit it, right now. You’ve done something no jumped-up corpo or chrome jockey has done for ages yet..”

“And what would that be?” asked Dawn.

“Genuinely surprised me.”

And it was true. Kaydence, for what felt like the first time in a long while, was feeling… awake. It was like somebody had dragged her, physically, out of the fog of detached boredom that was her default state and put her into the light of an actual sun. And it was… different. Whether in a good way or a bad way, she hadn’t decided, but she had to give the Bar- Dawn, her name was Dawn, she had to give her credit for pulling it off.

It felt a lot like when she’d tried fighting that guy in the KISS makeup, actually. She didn’t think she’d ever get something like that again.

She looked at her hands. At the table beneath them. She looked under the table, and saw she still had her ankle monitor on. Then she looked back at Dawn.

“So,” she said, slowly. “I’m, like… here, right? Actually, physically here?”

“Yes. No trickery here. You’re at Winstead’s. Kansas City, Missouri, the United States. Earth. Universe…”

Kaydence must have made a face at that point.

“Okay, okay, yeah, fine, it’s real.”

Kaydence nodded. “Yeah, okay. I get it.” She licked her lips and drummed her fingers on the table as she tried to think of what else to say. There was a lot to unpack at this moment - the idea that she had somehow whisked through dimensions being just one of those. There was the mechanics of it, for a start, and then there was the reasons why, and she hated that part of her was already screaming that this was some kind of corpo trick, what if the UES goons had found her out…

And then it occurred to her that, yes, she was indeed hungry. And still slightly drunk.

“...I’d like to eat something,” she said at last.

---

In the end, Kaydence got something called a Double Winstead, along with fries and a cherry ice cream soda. And, as Dawn was quick to remind her, a few glasses of water.

She’d made some rather uncouth noises when she first bit into the burger. But in her defence, it was a damn good burger. Good enough to make her wonder what the hell she’d been doing, settling for the flat-pack, follow-the-numbers crap from Burger Factory. It really made a difference to have something made for you by hand, by a human with flaws and hopes and dreams, instead of a robot arm unable to deviate from the instructions fed into its brain by a computer.

It took a few more bites - and some drink - until Kaydence could feel the haze of Nebula leave her brain. And that was when she felt confident enough to talk her usual talk.

“Alright,” she said as she nibbled on some fries. “So you hopped me, all the way from my house - possibly through my rig - to your planet. That’s a lot of effort just to get one webbie sitting next to you chunking down a burger and fries, y’know? I mean, that’s some preem tech - the kind of War-era shit they keep locked up in a vault somewhere.”

“Ironically, the process is actually somewhat simple…it’s the power requirements that are the issue. And ensuring safety. A lot can go wrong. A lot…lot lot. Making sure every T is dotted and I is crossed, sometimes even I feel stressed. I still don’t like the fact that every time I activate transport, there’s a possibility the whole omniverse will break.”

Kaydence paused in the middle of taking a sip of her ice cream soda.

“...how big a possibility we talking?”

“The odds are about one in 40 sextillion. Like I said. A possibility. The math is on our side.”

“Then don’t stress about it, choom. If it ain’t broke yet, y’know?” The sip was taken, and Kaydence shuddered. Fiko, she loved cherry.

“Still,” she went on, “can’t help but wonder why. I mean, you got a whole riddle game goin’ with classic sci-fi references. Average gonk ain’t gonna pick up on half of that. And then there was that bit with the ICE giving me the Tutankhamun treatment. All very direct, you catch what I’m throwin’?”

“Well, you’re the one who somehow tripped over my thread. Which you really shouldn’t have been able to do. I put it outside your planet’s systems for a reason.”

“Best laid plans, am I right?” Kaydence shrugged, then took another bite of her burger.

“...and hold up,” she said with her mouth full. “I just twigged what the fuck was wrong with what you just said. The flying fuck’s a ‘thread’ and why do you have one of those?”

“You familiar with the concept of two soup cans connected by a string? Basically, that.”

“Again, why?”

“Because as we were dealing with the last of the giant dangers our yearly grouping collected, a random girl showed up and tried to pick a fight with a literal planet cracker. And didn’t die. That’s worth keeping an eye on. Seriously, Miss Roberts. Do you want to know what the odds are of what happened actually happening? I hope you don’t plan on purchasing any lottery tickets for the next….1300 or so years.”

“Yeah, well, here’s me, trying to enjoy a shitty vacation I won in a raffle, and some fuckin’ chrome jockey in bad makeup turns up lookin’ for a scrap. You think I’m gonna lie down and-”

Kaydence stopped mid sentence and stared at Dawn as if she was only really seeing her for the first time. Long enough that a pickle slid from her burger and landed on her plate with a wet plop.

“...holy shit, you’re with the Kobbers.”

“One of their overseers, in a sense, yes. Semi retired, but not out of the game yet. Part of being an overseer is keeping an eye on anyone who enters our circle. But even I was surprised when you somehow found the thread. Even WITH your powers, it was well hidden. HMCS Bitter Hidden. So I assessed your current recent situation, and then decided to see what would happen if you realized there was some sort of road to follow.”

“Well, guess you know now. Also,” and Kaydence couldn’t hold back the smirk, “you basically just admitted to observing me for like, what, three months? Hope you weren’t watching too closely, I usually charge for that.”

“Moreso the data in regards to your troubles. Nevertheless. You found your way here. You slipped off into the unknown and had enough of a brain and a talent to follow the breadcrumbs. That is beyond ‘I am so bored, here is a solution’: you more or less did stick your neck out, not knowing what was going to bite down on it. Beyond all the prying eyes of your world, at that. Don’t worry about them, they’re thoroughly baffled. Whatever the danger was, you dared it. Sort of. There was never any actual danger: I was keeping close watch and just laying down the illusion of it. But you didn’t know said danger was false. And here you are. So, Miss Roberts. What do you want?”

Kaydence stopped with the burger halfway to her mouth. She looked up at Dawn.

“...run that by me again.”

“You came here. You followed the thread to the other end. You clearly want SOMETHING. So what do you want?”

“...what’s off the table?”

“Anything outside the realm of basic reason, of course. I won’t blow up a city for you. Or give you a dangerous enhancement to that unique arrangement of brain tissue you’ve got spread over your frontal lobes. Otherwise, the field is quite wide.”

“...why?”

“Mmmm. Fair question. What’s in it for me? Nothing, really.” Dawn said. “The people running your society, who built your little snowglobe…well, they’re not much different to people ruling over places of rot and horror. Most are one dimensional. Want more. Get more. Yours at least have SOME benevolence mixed in, though I’ve seen better. And worse. But ultimately, far too many of those who gain immense resources are not the types who’d want them for something other than themselves. And the very thing that makes them always wanting more and being unwilling to share is also what often lets them get such resources. The way to get the most shit is to be the biggest asshole, too often.

“I am not like that. I’m an exceptional anomaly, if I may be a bit of a braggart. So that’s why. I try to be one of the good guys. Because there’s far too many of the bad.

“Not to mention, I didn’t exactly EARN this benevolence. My mother had the benefit of living actual multiple lives, which let her form a more coherent whole than the average ambitious person. And I didn’t exactly have to go through all the development organic brains do. Skipped a lot many pitfalls by virtue of what I am. It had its downsides, but I’m learning. I think I’ve figured out empathy to some degree. You’re suffering. I saw you. I can help. So I will.”

Kaydence took a much larger swig of her ice cream soda than was necessary, then put the glass down nearly empty and with a heavy clunk. Her eyes were half-closed and her lips drawn into a tight line for a moment.

Then she looked up at Dawn.

“Look, choom. If you’re asking if I want something deep and profound, then… fiko, I don’t know what to tell you that ain’t gonna disappoint. I’ve spent about twenty of my twenty-six years of life in Neo Manhattan. A fucking model city run by rich gomi's in pressed suits who treat us like shouting Sea-Monkeys in a science lab. Yeah, it’s not the worst place ever, but it’s… dull. Safe. A padded box where you don’t have to do shit, and in return they get to watch you swim about and take notes. Just because they ain’t got jackboots marching down the street, neh?

“And I didn’t think there was anything else until I ended up winning that raffle to your planet. And yeah, Earth’s a little dirty - doesn’t have half the tech I got back home. But, like… you can do things! You can go wherever, do whatever, you can be a person! And you get to eat burgers made by human beings, and live in places that weren’t measured with a set square, and there isn’t just the one bloated whale carcass of a corporation keeping things sterile and… you have Kobbers! We wouldn’t ever get to have Kobbers unless UES designed them by committee first!”

She drew in a breath. Her chest felt oddly tight - or maybe that was the end result of drinking an ice cold drink too fast.

“Look, I know what I am. I’m an overstimulated vidiot bitch who’s dead on the inside because she’s had chrome buzzing in her ears since she was four. All I want is to feel something, anything, that isn’t a constant stream of white noise from the world around me. And I guess I wanted the Kobbers to be like how the old stories were because it wasn’t Neo Manhattan. It was exciting, and different. But even that didn’t do it, and I don’t know if maybe that’s my fault for expecting too much? But now that I've seen all that, I can’t go back, because the alternatives are either a crumbling cliffside town on the ass-end of nowhere or actual fucking EPCOT for rich white assholes.”

She sighed.

“Yeah, so… pardonu. Nothing deep or profound there. I just want out before I go cyberpsycho.”

“Well, not everyone can be Descartes. And even he was dumb in his own ways. Like how he died. In any case…yes, the Kobbers aren’t what they used to be. They’ve evolved. Or matured. Or gone soft and sucky, however you want to say it. I’m afraid the days of casually killing homeless people and eating our enemies are done.”

Kaydence, for the first time, looked horrified.

“It was a fish. In both cases. Well, technically the second was a crustacean…but close enough. I partook of neither. Beyond the obvious reasons. Unfortunately, I can’t help much with the white noise. Your talent’s buried deep in your brain. I’d have to lobotomize you to get any solid results. But I might be able to pull together SOMETHING…I think I could make an earpiece that would silence it…but…considering what I have seen, it would have severe downsides. Namely I think using it would innately make you so tired you’d basically be subjected to narcolepsy. Great if you just want to sleep, but you strike me as someone who resents the concept of sleep.”

Kaydence grinned. “Yep. Sleep is for cowards and gonks.”

“You still need it. Unless you want me to call up a doctor I know and see if she can replace your brain with one that doesn’t need sleep and is probably somehow made out of scorpion tails. But, besides THAT fact…well, I think I have a solution.”

Dawn had some tricks of her own. Like subtle access to a 3-D printer that had allowed her to make up the paper and easel holding it, as well as the pen attached that she produced, putting it on the table.

“Come work for me.”

Kaydence stared once more.

“...for real?”

“Yes, I suppose that degree of disbelief is understandable. Let me put it this way. Your overlords are sterile and lazy. They wouldn’t bother playing games like this. They’d just have kicked down your door and stomped a boot on your neck. So we can assume they’re not involved in this. So if it’s not them, then the only other option is that this is a legitimate offer from an outside source. Decartian logic. Unless you want to go down the rabbit holes of delusion, brain damage from one thing or another, and so on and some such. I assure you, it ends right back at this table.”

Kaydence licked her lips again. Every instinct was screaming at her. Take it, howled her hind brain. Take this fucking meal ticket out and never look back. And she wanted to, oh, how she wanted to just snatch that paper and sign herself out of turning into a mindless drone in Neo Manhattan right away.

But the rarely used common sense she possessed, tucked away in her forebrain, was smart enough to reign her in for that crucial moment longer.

"What kind of work we talking?" she asked.

"The kind of work where your talents won't go to waste," replied Dawn.

"How much?"

"Enough that you'll never want for anything."

"And can you-?"

"Absolutely."

There was a pregnant pause.

And then common sense, satisfied, finally let go of the reins, and Kaydence snatched the pen up, pulled the paper closer and scrawled her name down with the fervour of someone in the desert chasing an ice cream van. When she’d finished and shoved the paper back, her eyes were wide and she seemed to be repressing a manic grin.

“Sorry if this is out of line or anything,” she gasped out. “But if you hadn’t just become my boss, I would kiss you so hard right now.”

“I’ve heard far worse from people I’ve worked with before.” Dawn’s face was completely neutral as she took the pen and paper back. “And don’t worry, I appreciate the sentiment. But I think you can already tell, even if that was a genuine offer, why I’d have to politely decline. Aside from skewing the whole employer-employee relationship, I mean.”

Kaydence nodded. “You ain’t wired for that sort of thing. I get it. Hear it, in fact.”

Dawn pocketed the items. “Anyway, that should cover everything. Don’t worry about staying in contact, I’ll call you when the time comes. Your legal troubles are already being worked on as we speak and I’ll make the arrangements to bring you over again once things are sorted out. We can go over your contract later, but I’m confident that there won’t be anything you’ll disagree with on it. And, given how eagerly you signed it, I suspect you might not entirely care.”

“Choom, you just gave me a chance to leave Neo Manhattan for good. I wouldn’t care if that thing asked me to kindle myself. Set myself on fire,” Kaydence clarified, after a peculiar look.

“Well, let’s try to avoid that, shall we? I wouldn’t be a very good employer if immolating my employees was a requirement. Oh yes. One last thing.”

The flask was placed down in front of Kaydence.

“There.”

With that, Dawn headed out the front door. The diner employees and customers were put off enough by the strange woman. No sense really driving home how strange she was by literally vanishing into thin air.

Kaydence stared after her. Her head was spinning by a considerable amount. In a short space of time, she’d been challenged to a weird guessing game, shot through cyberspace, fought a piece of ICE, ended up here, eaten a burger, then been offered - and taken, without much thought - a job by a red-haired synth who was Kobber adjacent. And all so fast, she wasn’t even sure it had happened at all, and only her sitting here clutching what was left of her burger was proof of it.

She let out a breath that she didn’t know she’d been holding. And it dawned on her that, all of a sudden, she was feeling something. Something other than either dissociated apathy or self-righteous frustration. A sensation as though the sun was about to burst out of her chest, that wings might sprout on her feet and lift her away. The world suddenly seemed brighter, more vibrant, more… interesting.

Then she finished her meal. Actually, she ordered ice cream afterwards to make sure she was good and filled up. Then she picked up the flask and, remembering how she’d gotten here, walked back into the toilets.

Her suspicions were proved correct when-

--------

-she emerged from her own bathroom and in her apartment. At this point, she wouldn’t have been surprised even if she’d walked into a pit of kittens. She was about ready to start dancing, maybe put on her speakers at full blast and belt out some Solid Base just to piss the neighbours off. And she would, indeed, have done it - she would have turned her entire apartment into a rave if it meant celebrating her newfound freedom.

But she was stopped when she remembered something that Dawn had said. And it ended up bothering her all day until she went to bed.

“...the fiko is the HMCS Bitter?!”

--------

Justice Andrew Hardy, the judge who worked the South-West Quarter of Neo Manhattan, was very surprised one morning when he was approached by a woman with red hair and a team of people in suits.

He ended up learning a lot of new ideas in a short span of time. Mostly about his own profession, but also about a group called the Kobbers, who would be very interested in both him and Neo Manhattan as a whole if he didn’t agree to one or two things. Not to mention the trouble that could be made not just for himself, but for the Osmond family, with whom he was very connected. Even out here, everybody knew what had happened to ZAIA Japan.

To make a long story short, Dawn Cosineau and her lawyers convinced him to overturn the charges against Kaydence Roberts and clear her record. She then also went to John Filgree, political representative of the quarter, and behind closed doors she convinced him to not interfere in the matter. Wherever she went higher than that, well… that would become rumour in the city for years to come. Not even the Osmonds would dare remark on it.

Not long after that, Kaydence Roberts resigned from her job and renounced her citizenship of Neo Manhattan and Spero. And then, quite soon after that, she left the planet altogether.

The funny thing was, she never booked a flight.