“Kindly get out of my son.” That usually worked. No one ever really got over the fear of someone’s mother walking in on them.
Not this time, though. Skinny ass-dimples stared obstinately, twitching unevenly.
“I got eight minutes left.” He only glanced at me in the mirrored headboard, the focus in his voice repeating through furrowed brows. I could almost hear his anxious self-coaching, “Aww, don’t lose it.”
Beyond those scrawny shoulders, Keilani’s painstakingly shaped brows skewed. He was as still as a board of koa wood, and beneath his pale—practically transparent—client his skin had nearly the same shade.
One flick and my pistol silently powered off. Another and the warm-up hum whirred—I’d replaced the Ridley 4C’s friendly starting noise with the growl of the larger 8A, recognizable from nearly every gangster XP released in the last five years.
The gyrating froze. Now I had those dimples’ full attention. My soles slapped against the motel room’s fake marble floor.
“Time’s up.” I jammed the 4C’s muzzle into his tailbone. “Get up and get dressed, your father’s waiting.”
“The fuck you talking about, crazy—” I ground the gun against bone. “Shit! Damn lady!”
“Move!” Using the gun grip like a handle, I steered him sidelong. He flopped across a bed too small to comfortably sleep a full night in.
Keilani’s knees fell and folded with practiced modesty. With a fluid move a laminated sheet corner covered him, doing little to hide cat-like curves. “Trouble finding us?”
I kept eyes and pistol trained as Slim fished to find his clothes in the right order. “Just that you went to the wrong floor. I had to threaten that junkie at the desk to get the number.”
“It’s the same room—I always use 303.”
“It was on the second last time.”
“I always use—”
Antheun MacSijs the Younger looked up from his laundry. Realization turned his expression mean. “You know this shitlord?! What is this?”
“One more word and see if I don’t march you out of here like that—let the whole aerostat see why Skinthetic morphs are so cheap.” I kicked the bed frame for good measure.
Losing his balance, MacSijs toppled back, legs flailing. He landed in a heap of clothes better than he deserved. A series of fumbles later he was on his knees, shoving some street-bought handgun toward me. “There’s exactly no way some skytrash cop is dragging me back to Octavia.”
The pistol wasn’t a good enough knock-off to pass for an authentic nSIG, but I bet it could still punch a hole. It wasn’t a matter of who could shoot first, though. I only got paid for dragging Cheeks here back unharmed. From the nervous look of the barrel, he was bound to twitch the trigger. Even worse, this was taking far too long.
I sighed, my eye-roll ending on Keilani. He mimicked the look—whether mocking me or because he’d honestly picked up the habit, I was never sure. A tawny leg shot from beneath the sheet. Reinforced keratin nails extended like claws, sheering across the stray heir’s jaw. More than the slash, MacSijs’s shocked shriek sent him sprawling across the scuffed laminate.
I brought my heel down on rich boy’s hand. He squealed and something in the cheap pistol snapped.
“Nice.” I shot Keilani a wink.
Thin brows bobbed. “You laughed when I got the Sex Kitten implants, but dishing out scars does wonders for more than just my tips.”
A headshake and raised palm fended off the need for details. “Your business is your business. I’m just glad you know how to use protection.”
—
Keilani met me in the plaza beneath the office, sauntering out of the fog of flashing neon and holographic paper lanterns.
I’d dropped off Mister the Younger with one of his too-important father’s flunkies. Disappearing into a sea of buzz and freelance sex workers seemed to be a common occurrence with Skinny—so much so that his baggy-eyed handler hadn’t even asked what happened to his clothes. I left the babysitter my card and told him repeat customers got discounts.
I waited on steps leading up to a battered portal—the word “Ambassador” slashed the door in ever-lurid pulse-paint. My distant hope of finding warm rice at the top of those steps evaporated. “And where have you been?”
“Just ran into a few friends—had to show off my new Aldrins.” Keilani bounded up the stairs, making a show of bouncing in shoes MacSijs had owned this morning.
I hadn’t meant for my hand to settle on my hip. Maybe it was a mom-thing. Maybe it was just closer to my gun. Keilani purposefully didn’t notice. The door hummed open and he swaggered through. I sighed and followed.
Three floors up, on the side of the hall where the quarters didn’t have plaza-view balconies, stark sans serif marked my door: “Valerie,” then below, in smaller lettering, “Discretion Bought and Sold.”
Once a client pointed out that the quotation marks around the lower line were uneven. I’d never noticed before that. Now I saw it every time I came home. Keilani held the door and I pushed past, trying to ignore the skewed slashes. Fuck that guy.
“Motashaker, shab bekhair.” Ruid said, and with two descending tones his terminal ended the call. Behind his podium, perpetually bored-looking eyes raised. “You’re late.”
“Can’t be late when I never said when I’d be back.” I returned my coat to the empty, faux-antique hat rack. Like all modern Venusian aerostats, Parvarti was never far from a comfortable 22 degrees. So no one ever actually needed a coat, unless they were hiding something. Hence, the local prevalence of coats.
Keilani dropped onto the hard waiting room couch. He didn’t wear a coat—hell, his hooded, button-down tank top and knee-cut pants barely qualified as clothes. That was his uniform, though, especially when he was working for me.
His only slightly scuffed Luna-made shoes hit the couch arm, one over the other. “Mom threw in a bonus this time.”
“Nope. I’m just taking those out of your cut.”
Ruid’s diplomatic nod passed from Keilani to me, in favor of both our windfalls.
“Any messages?” I crossed to the podium, a terminal that served as my operation’s hub. Rather than accepting contacts, payments, and other info directly via my personal hardware, I routed everything through there. It didn’t look like much, a plasticy standing desk with a concave screen, but it was a fortress of the best firewalls and sentinel AIs I could cobble together. Behind it, Ruid also didn’t look like much—a slight splicer with a checkered scarf arranged as professionally as a necktie—but he was the guard on my fortress walls. The terminal light brought out the coppery sheen of his skin, as though he were part of the machine.
“You’ve got clients waiting.” Eyes so dark they almost appeared to be all pupil gestured to the door.
This late? So much for dinner. “Clients?” I stressed the “s.”
“Well …” Ruid’s brow creased. He didn’t continue.
That didn’t make me more enthusiastic for late-callers.
I glanced at Keilani, sprawled across horrible, over-inflated cushions. The boy could doze anywhere. “Get started on dinner and maybe those shoes are an early birthday present.”
The little shit smiled without even opening his eyes.
“And nothing that takes all night to make. I won’t be long.”
I turned back to Ruid, adjusting my bare hip holster. Honest clients liked to know I worked with a real gun. Dishonest clients worried I might use it on them. Win-win. “What’s the name?”
Ruid’s lips knotted, as though they didn’t know how to start. “I asked. All she said was ‘the Octavian Neo-Synergists.’”
What the hell was that supposed to mean? I gave a nod like I knew and walked into my office to find out.
It was empty, but that wasn’t a surprise. With less than an eye twitch, familiar entopics cascaded through my vision. I joined the private VR simulspace and the room barely changed—same uncomfortable looking furniture, same wall of licenses. The crooked picture of a tropical coast was the only significant change. Adrift on a blank wall in reality, here the animated photo expanded into a bay of plantation shutters, the turquoise surf crashing only a short walk beyond.
A woman, desperately in need of some sun, took in the view.
“Kauai.” Thin veins budged beneath a colorless scalp, as if the faint channels themselves were reporting.
“What’s that?”
This was getting better by the second. She hadn’t turned, but I’d dealt with the sort who sleeved mentons before. Brain-hacked morphs with more head-tech than gray matter, most mentons talked like they had all the answers, but usually couldn’t tell the difference between people and lab recorders. A rainbow of smears on her pill-blue lab coat suggested this one wasn’t any more self-aware. Regardless, I’d never had a menton come to the office. Why would a braincase need an investigator? Unless she was mistaking me for just some hired gun.
Half-mistaking me.
She started to repeat herself, but I cut her off. “No, Niihau. The north shore—before Barb Robinson turned it into Casino Island.”
Turning, she cast a double pair of beady optics over me. Tiny lens shifted. She should have nodded politely and introduced herself, but didn’t.
I gestured to a cushionless chair and slipped around my blank desk. I preferred to talk across it. Not only did it keep things professional, but the wall of licenses, subtly blast-scorched trophies, and a frowning portrait of my father added a productive touch of gravitas. They weren’t just simulspace effects, either, the reality of each hung in my actual office.
Although my chair was plenty comfortable I didn’t sit. “I’ll save us some time. I don’t work for corps.”
Lenses adjusted, widening quizzically. Her bald head—like a subterranean thing’s—shifted a degree, almost making a nod. She didn’t answer, though.
“We have anything else to discuss here?”
She took a seat. “You think we work for a corporation.” Her airy voice made her sound like a stage hypnotist’s assistant repeating facts. “We do not.”
“Octavian Neo-Synergists. Sounds like some high-minded start-up to me.”
“High-minded.” The words floated from lips tinged the color of lab gloves. “Yes. But not a hypercorp.”
She rested her hands on her thighs, a distinctly awkward looking posture. I was starting to wonder if I’d misidentified her morph. Even for a menton, she seemed weirdly detached—synthetic.
“I represent the Neo-Synergists, a collective-intelligence community currently dwelling on Octavia. We are a community of individuals who elect to share our minds with one another, facilitating mutual understanding and development.”
Still sounded like a corp—or worse, corp advertising. “So, some commune.”
Her head twitched another degree. “A not uncommon perspective, but no. Our members share a more intimate connection. Our mesh implants unite us as a single shared intelligence. We are still ourselves, but we are also more.”
More wasn’t looking too impressive to me. “Sounds crowded.”
“Not at all, in fact—”
I swatted what was sure to be a lengthy explanation out of the air. “What can I help you with, Miss Synergist?”
“One of our number, a farcasting researcher named Harliss Vine, came to this aerostat.” She didn’t seem rankled by my directness. “We don’t know why.”
I’d never heard anyone in a menton say that before.
“We have lost our connection to Vine and wish to know why. To learn that, we must find him—a task I have thus far been unsuccessful in.” Her reporting remained even, it didn’t sound like she had any personal stake in this. “As such, I have been authorized to retain the service of a local. Your record of accomplishments compared to your low number of criminal convictions makes you a favorable choice.”
“Flattered. Let me save you some credits, though,” I nodded toward a wall-mounted screen shifting through scenes from Parvarti security cams. “Go find a cozy spot, catch up on your XPs, and keep your mesh feed on. No one like your lost tech comes to Parvarti to stay. He’s probably just shacked up with a bottle of Old Sky and some pretty mimi. Give him another night, maybe two, and one more to dry out, then he’ll come home. You can try dragging him off early, but I guarantee, the waiting game’s far less messy.”
“You misunderstand. Our neural implants aren’t simple mesh inserts.” She turned and touched a porcelain nodule at the base of her neck. Her vein-network seemed somehow deepest there. “Once installed, they cannot merely be shut down or removed without risking significant psychological damage. This has happened to Vine. We fear for his well-being.”
“Awful sisterly of you, but we both know how much I charge,” I took a seat on the desk corner. It was hard to read in those lenses whether or not she actually thought I was born yesterday. “What else did he take? Empty out the group account? Run off with some patent? Find a hotter bunch of brains to join up with?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Have you ever lost one of your morph’s limbs and had to live without for any period of time?”
“No.”
“You can likely imagine the inconvenience. Studies show that most never truly acclimate to missing an appendage being gone. It is unpleasant.”
I shrugged.
“Imagine if that missing limb was part of your mind—your memory of a place perhaps.” Without looking, she gestured to the lapping waves over her shoulder. The pointed fingers then aimed at my holster, “Or your familiarity with a weapon. That’s what Vine’s absence is to us.”
My brows climbed. That was a new one on me. “You’re really in a rush over this, huh?”
“Repairing our collective mind is of the utmost urgency for our community.”
She sat straight backed, hands settling back on her thighs. There wasn’t anything there to read. I supposed I could understand her interest in finding this Vine guy, though. Whatever she wasn’t sharing and whether or not he wanted to be found didn’t really bother me that much.
“I can find him. Dragging him back costs more—a lot more if he needs to go all the way to Octavia.”
“Our airship is docked on the lower ring. I can beam you directions along with Vine’s records and other details.”
“Good. My secretary will set you up with my schedule of fees and contracting costs—rates for non-disclosure, indemnity, the usual. You two figure out the paperwork and we’ll take things from there.”
I stood and she—finally acknowledging a cue—did the same.
“Thank you for your time, Miss Valerie.”
She disconnected from the simulspace before I even nodded.
—
I hadn’t been aware of Keilani’s purr-like snoring until it stopped. A mosaic of aerostat security feeds crumbled from my augmented reality display. Some people relaxed with predictable XPs. I found the flow of stock characters through Parvarti’s neon-drowned plazas not just calming but, often, surprisingly useful.
My office-adjoined apartment wavered back into view—freshly cluttered with rice and pork-smeared dinner plates.
On the floor, Ruid looked uncomfortable, sitting straight-backed against my tabby colored couch. The arm lock my son had on his thigh didn’t seem to be helping. Keilani would have charged anyone else a small fortune for that kind of casual intimacy. My secretary doubtlessly knew that, but still had the look of a houseguest suffering his host’s untrainable pet. I wasn’t sure when Keilani got so clingy with him—must have been a gradual thing.
Ruid noticed my eyes shift back to the real. “That synergist woman just returned the contracts. Looks like she’s buying …” he nodded appreciatively at files scrolling invisibly though his entopics, “… everything.”
“Even the extended privacy insurance?” I failed at keeping the smirk out of my voice.
He nodded. “Even the extended privacy insurance.”
Keilani gave a sleepy growl at the noise. We both ignored him.
“Guess she really does want this guy bad.” And certainly not just out of sororal concern if she was buying up this much confidentiality.
“Who’s she after?”
“Some scientist type from Octavia—probably here on a binge. He’s another one of those Neo-Synergists.”
“Looked into them yet?”
“A little. All the reports talk about some special mesh inserts they use to share thoughts—like some constant group feed. I thought they sounded like a corp, but the hypermesh buzz makes them sound more like a cult. A bunch of them just put down stakes on Octavia and not everyone there’s excited.”
“Yeah. It took some digging to get past the tabloid stuff, but if you do it gets pretty interesting.” His gaze remained on the middle distance, hypnotized by whatever info swirled through his AR. “They’ve essentially hacked their consciousness, networking their minds to share lifetimes worth of thoughts. Some people are calling it an obvious next step for t-human intelligence. Instead of the muses we’re using now, you’ve got everyone you know right in your head.”
“I’ve got enough clutter up there already. The last thing I need is a whole crowd’s chatter.”
“Sure.” Obviously he disagreed.
Keilani gave up on trying to sleep. Extricating himself from Ruid’s lap, his annoyed sigh didn’t end until the door to his room slid shut—just shy of a slam.
I had something like an apology loaded when I turned back to Ruid, but he hadn’t moved. His gaze remained distant. Again he played the perfect houseguest, pretending not to notice his hosts’ bad behavior.
“You know, you can tell him no.” I tried to sound casual.
His reply came faster and certainly sharper than I’d expected. “I have. Probably ten times now.”
A few minutes passed with both of us pretending to focus on our entopics.
“He’s got the hardware for it, he’d probably switch genders if that’s—”
“I’d never—” Ruid’s mouth snapped shut just as quickly as it had fallen open.
At least I had his full attention now.
He tried again, his tone a shade closer to his usual calm. “I’m just not interested in that. Not just not from him, not from anyone. I told him that.”
I nodded. “Kay can be stubborn. He’s used to getting his way when it comes to that sort of stuff.”
“Yeah.” He shifted to stare at the floor—and probably just the floor this time. “He still hangs on me, though. I like Keilani just fine, but … not like that.”
“I’ll talk to him.” I used my Mom voice, the one that promised I’d make everything alright.
Obviously it didn’t work.
“Please don’t.” Doe-brown eyes pleaded.
I tried another tactic. “Are you planning on leaving next week?”
The worry in his face intensified.
I didn’t drag it out. “Of course not. That means you’ll have been staying with us for over a year.”
He opened his mouth—something about looking for his own quarters—but I cut him off. “And we wouldn’t have it any other way. You’re the only secretary I’ve ever endured for more than a week and the only one who can figure out my network. Like it or not, you’re family, kid.”
He looked dubious. I went on. “Which means I’m not handing you back to the Night Cartel or any other skin-smugglers. When we took you in, I told you you’re welcome for as long as you like. That deal’s the same regardless of who you are or aren’t sleeping with.” I leveled my no-bullshit look. “Are we on the same page about that?”
His head bobbed.
I matched him, sealing the deal. “If Keilani needs to be brought on board, either one of us can give him that talk—or five across the lips if that’s what it takes. Whatever you’re most comfortable with, okay?”
“Yes, mam.”
“What’s that ‘mam’ shit?”
He half grinned. “I’ll talk to him.”
“And I’ll pick up the pieces.” I leaned back in my chair. “Anything else on your mind?”
“Well, while we were talking …” Had the little bastard been sifting through the mesh this whole time? “I found this.”
—
[Still awake, Pops?]
My muse’s soulful voice hummed from the back of my skull. [We’re both in trouble the night I bunk down before you.]
Pop’s voice was always a comfort. Since he started virtually haunting me our relationship had never been better.
Ruid had only turned in a few minutes ago and I was planning on doing the same, but I hated the idea of letting a job sit cold over night.
[What can you make of this?]
I pulled the virtual flyer onto the fore of my AR. It had all the style of a brothel signboard advertising Morningstar Day discounts—read like one too.
“Adrift? Alone? Afraid?” a breathy voice interlaced with the ad read aloud. “Seeking meaning, finding mirages? Assaulted by info but starved for intimacy? Join the Heartsync. Never be alone again.”
I cut off the last syllable as it echoed into infinity. [It might be nothing, but it sounds like a synergist thing. Maybe this Vine guy’s into it.]
[Ruid found this?] Pops asked.
I couldn’t help but nod. Maybe the kid had the makings of more than a secretary. [See what you can find on this Heartsync group—limited to the station.]
[I’ll do what I can, but if you want local, the mesh might not be the way to go.] Pops had never been into tech. Somehow, virtual resurrection hadn’t changed that.
[You’re thinking Keilani? Street buzz.]
[Sure am.]
[Good call. I’ll see if I can get him on it in the morning.]
He made an approving noise that used to go along with a nod. [What else ya need?]
[Anything you can find on these Neo-Synergists—real stuff, not just hypercorp news.]
[Alright. Night, hun.]
[Night.]
—
“Get jacked, blimpsteak!” Keilani fearlessly threw a finger in the face of the bruiser morph leaning over him. The woman was easily twice his size, but still she tripped back from the growling street cat. Seeing she wasn’t getting what she wanted, she tromped off into the bustle of untraceable market stands.
That was my boy.
The street café’s heavy chair whined as I pulled it back and took a seat. I caught a glimpse of sharp teeth. The snarl vanished as Keilani realized it was me. “Sorry, I think we missed brunch. It took longer than I expected.”
Pops hadn’t found much overnight. This Heartsync group was new to Parvarti, with the first mention on the local mesh only cropping up about a month ago. There was some chatter about meetings in the warehouse wards, invitations, and skepticism about it being some religious bunk or self-help scheme. The number of testimonials was growing, mostly among aerostat residents, not visiting dupes.
I woke Keilani up early and told him what I wanted to know—if anyone knew where to find real-chat, it was him. Of course, he wanted to know what it was worth. I agreed to call it even on the shoes. He talked me up to blintzes.
“What did you hear?”
“A lot of garbage. ‘Find what you’ve been missing,’ that sort of stuff.” He ordered an orange juice when the waiter stopped by—me, just water.
“Sounds like them. Where are they?”
“I expected them to be mesh-based, but that’s the weird part. A friend of a friend said they’re into physical meet-ups—send invitations and everything. She dropped in on one. Anyway, she says a couple of weeks ago she had a few drinks with this guy at that uplift bar, Chainlynx. The next thing she knows she’s got an invite to this Heartsync meet-up with her mesh ID coded in, like it was custom just for her.”
“Did she say what an invitation looks like?”
“Nope.”
Damn. “So, what’d she see?”
“That’s the crap-part. She went, but chickened out when she got the eye from some twitchy jenkin bouncer.”
“Well, where was it?”
“The warrens. Around the ring C warehouses—C-1580.”
“That’s a start.”
“Not much of one. I peeked in on stat-security. Fifteen-eighty’s been a tomb for the last couple weeks. A tomb where rubes do kick and get what they deserve trying to buy black market XPs, but still a tomb.”
The boy had earned his blintzes—even if it did sound like a dead end. Except …
“Jenkin bouncer? Don’t see those very often, huh?”
“No, but they’re not exactly sun-whales. We’ve got enough on the station that tracking down one isn’t going to be easy.”
“Maybe. But tracking down one who spends his time squatting outside a ring C warehouse might be easier.”
“If they keep to the warehouses at all.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Sounds weak.”
“Even a weak start’s a start.” He was right, but it wasn’t like I had any better options. I wasn’t in the mood to argue tactics, though. I changed the topic to the first thing that came to mind. “What’s the story with you and Ruid?”
He gave a big blink, as if I’d fired a camera flash in his face.
“Mom.” He stretched it into a one-syllable way of saying “mind your damn business.”
I wasn’t having it, though, not after the talk I had last night. I had tones that trumped his. “Seriously.”
He frowned. “I don’t know.”
We silently retreated to our corners as a sari-clad waitress delivered our drinks.
As savvy as he could be, and as adult as his body made him look, it was easy to forget Keilani wasn’t even twenty years old. It made it all the more unsettling when he pulled whiny teen tricks. I considered letting Ruid take first crack at him, like we’d discussed. But then figured, why not sort it out right now.
“I know it’s not the message you get out in the clubs, but not everyone wants to sleep with you, ya know.” I took a slow swig from my spotty glass.
“Mom. Really?” I could hear just a touch of his feline vocal implant kick in, a subtle growl undertone.
“Ruid works for me, he’s a guest, and he’s still touchy about the whole Night Cartel thing. Poor kid still doesn’t know where he’s from or who his people are. I know you like him, but I don’t want to make him uncomfortable. Okay?”
Keilani’s face went cold. His features were designed to be expressive, but, when necessary, could lock away his thoughts completely—a useful trick for a street bokkie. It made it easy to tell when he was locking it down, though.
“Are you telling me not to see Ruid?”
“I think that’d be a trick since we live with him, but no. Just think about his situation. He might feel like he can’t be up front with you.”
“You think I’d try to make him uncomfortable?”
“I think sometimes you don’t see the things you don’t want to see.”
Shit, that sounded worse than I’d meant.
His chair squealed back.
I scrambled for anything. “Your food should be here any minute.”
Obviously he didn’t care. Wherever he was headed, he chose the route that put his back to me and turned the first corner he found.
—
The waitress’s presence made me realize I’d been staring dumbly. I assumed I’d missed her question. “Just the bill.”
Keilani’s still likely warm chair screeched. The waitress smoothed her burgundy sari as she took a seat, ignoring the threat on my face. “Wehilani Lonoehu?”
“That name’s for family.” I made sure the threat was more than implied. One of the benefits of hiding your name: whenever you hear it, you know some asshole wants your attention.
“Of course.” She gave a patronizing little grin and inclined a palm toward herself. “Harliss Vine—though I believe my former associates spoiled our introduction.”
“Yeah. They got your picture all wrong.” She didn’t look at all like the image of the thick-faced menton the Neo-Synergists had forwarded. It would have been a simple matter for Vine to resleeve, though—standard procedure, even, if she was looking to disappear.
Sitting down for lunch with the woman hired to track you down, however, that was hardly standard. How’d she even know who I was?
“I’ve come to ask you to cancel your arrangement.” She sounded professional, clearly thinking bargaining was an option.
“Come on, you’ve got to know that’s not how this business works.” It was so obvious I barely shook my head. “So what is it? What’s so special that you’d come right out like this?”
“I’m not asking for myself. I’m asking for the entire Heartsync.” Her tone stayed formal. She wasn’t pleading—yet.
“Am I supposed to know what that means?” Sounded like Ruid’s hunch about that ad was panning out. Smart kid.
“I wouldn’t expect the Octavian community to explain my intentions here. They don’t understand. Their group is built too much on the mind. My new commune is built on the heart.”
That name was coming in to dock.
“That’s what the Heartsync is? Another collective intelligence community.”
“A perfected community. Transhumans are not machines. Our shared network cannot be entirely about memory and experience—it’s more than data. It must be about intimacy of both the mind and the soul.”
What a load. I think my head tilt got that across.
“Most are skeptical, more are afraid—it takes a great deal of courage to reveal everything to the world,” she went on applauding herself. “Once you lay yourself bare, though, you can be whatever you care to be. And where better to find daring, liberated souls than here on Parvarti? My group tempts them with something familiar, but shows them something very new.” Her open palm crossed to my side of the table. “The transhuman experience is not meant to be suffered alone, Miss Lonoehu.”
It all sounded like vintage New Age crap.
“Yeah,” I stretched the word out. “Well. Damn good of you to turn yourself over.”
Even her frown looked proud. “Since I haven’t done anything illegal, I don’t feel I have much to fear from you Miss Lonoehu.”
My little scoff wasn’t meant to reassure her. “That’s where a lot of off-station folk slip up. I’m not security. I don’t work for the Morningstar. So I don’t care much about ‘legal.’ And so long as things stay quiet, neither does anyone else around here.”
Vine nodded shallowly. “I see. Well then, by all means, take me in.” Her other palm crossed the table, offering both wrists.
I tugged the diamond-wire cuffs from the pocket on my holster, proving that I was more than willing to take her up on her suggestion. “If you want, but we don’t have far to go.”
“Oh, I insist. This is your job, after all.”
Both chairs screeched. She politely put her wrists behind her back and let me slip on the restraints. At the base of her neck, magenta flecks winked from a porcelain node. Gazes from a nearby table distracted me. Dodging my look, they found new interest in their flatware.
“This really is a shame. The Heartsync could help someone close to you someday.”
“Not likely.” I tightened the wire.
“Or maybe we already are,” she said, almost under her breath.
I spun her around. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Something in her expression changed, something subtle. The look of confidence flushed.
“What the—” Vine tried to bring her arms up, but the cuffs tugged her back. Shocked eyes shot to me. The cocky calm was gone, as was any hint of recognition. “Get these off of me!”
“What? You’re the one who wanted them on!” I hadn’t meant to raise my voice quite that much. More than just the nearest table noticed.
Then the screaming began.
—
I leaned over my desk, massaging the bridge of my nose.
Security hadn’t bothered with me for long. Two street officers I didn’t know showed up not long after Vine started shrieking her head off. I tried to explain, but I didn’t seriously have a clue. It took them no time to pull the waitress’s records—something I should have done. Nakshatra Klein, they said, a Parvarti local who’d been working at that café for the better part of the past year. I started to argue, to tell them who she really was, but it started sounding crazy even to me. I called it a mistake and took back my cuffs. The cops confiscated them. I dropped the names of a few friends I had in station security and things didn’t get worse. Miss Klein wasn’t so forgiving, but I got out of there before she was done cursing.
I’d need to find a new place for blintzes.
Back in the office—the one with just the picture of the beach—I tried to figure it out. Vine hadn’t offered anything new so I was back to Keilani’s lead. Security feeds from the past week, all from ring C, flickered through my entopics at an accelerated rate. I couldn’t say I was paying attention, but I knew Pops was. Despite the strangeness afterward, my thoughts kept coming back to Keilani.
[Was I ever that much of a pain growing up, Pops?]
He gave a gravelly scoff. [I assume you don’t want the real answer.]
The real answer was that Pops was only a facsimile of my father, derived from what we could salvage from the shot-up remains of his cortical stack. It wasn’t enough to bring him back, but in the three years I’d been working with the personality remnants, it had started to actually feel like him. He didn’t have all the memories—Kauai, for example—but sometimes that was easy to forget. Or to simply ignore.
[Of course not, all those times I called you kolohe, I never meant it.]
Death hadn’t impeded his sarcasm. [Thanks, Pops.]
What was I worried about? Keilani knew Parvarti better than I did these days. Seeing the way he prowled off, there was even a good chance he’d make more than a little extra tonight. Supposedly there was a good market for angry sex.
I shoved all that out of my head. [You find anything?]
[Yeah. Here’s your jenkin.] A still from a surveillance feed sprung up. I noticed his muttonchops first. How or why they were bleach blond, while the thin strands trying to cover his scalp were muddy brown, I didn’t even try to understand. He was trying to look tough, leaning on a length of steel pipe while picking protruding teeth with a too-long pinky nail. Jenkins, by design, looked like rats, but this one seemed to be embracing the look.
I minimized the image, having gotten enough for the moment. [Great. Where was this taken?]
[Over a week ago. He spent two nights playing doorman at C-1580. I’m sifting through security records to see where else he might show up.]
[You’ve got an image of Vine too. See if you see him around.]
Pops gave an agreeable hum.
Keilani had mentioned a friend had actually stopped by the warehouse. If Pops had found vids from the night, maybe we could find her … or someone else who had actually shown up looking for this Heartsync group. Someone with an invite. Or there might be a simpler …
[Still got room on your plate, Pops?]
[Always hungry. What ya got?]
I fished up the gaudy Heartsync advertisement. [Can you see if there’s anything weird in the code for this?]
[Weird.] He said it as if he’d never heard the word.
[Yeah. Anything extra.]
[I feel like we’re going to get a virus just looking at it.]
[I know you’ll be careful.]
He gave a little grunt.
A note from a strummed harp sounded in my mind.
[Val?] Ruid beamed the message from the waiting room, only yards away.
[Yeah?] I shot back. I always sounded sharper in my mind than in person. Ruid never complained, though.
[I’ve got a few errands to run, including the weekend payments to drop off. Would now be a good time?]
[Sure, kid. I’ll be here forever.]
Another harp strum, this time in a lower key. A moment later, I heard the office door slap shut.
Keilani could learn something from that boy. I didn’t know if they’d be a good fit romantically—doubted it, in fact—but I never had to worry about Ruid storming off. Nothing seemed to stick to him. Of course, anyone who’d been sold into a modern equivalent of slavery and survived probably came away with a different perspective on what really mattered.
[You saved us some time,] Pops interrupted things I didn’t really want to be thinking about. His tone said he didn’t have good news.
[What?]
[Here’s your address.] He flashed a map of the Parvarti aerostat with a path leading from my office door to some docking bay supposedly closed for repair. It wasn’t anywhere near ring C.
[That was on the ad?]
[Yeah. It’s custom—and relatively new.]
[How new?]
[Five days. Invite’s for a meeting tomorrow.]
[Well we’re not waiting around for that. Lets see who’s setting up.]
His grumble said it got worse.
[What?]
[The invitation’s for Keilani.]
—
“You’re the rent-a-sec?” The jenkin tried to sound tough, but jutting incisors gave him a ridiculous lisp. “They say you’re on the list.”
“Yeah? Who says?”
He hissed the first word, “Mister Vine.”
“Sure.”
It took two tugs for the bouncer to wrestle open the graffiti-smeared corridor’s only grimy door. It was a back entrance for staff working the station’s for-lease cargo holds. Even so, the thin violet curtains and warm breath of nag champa that drifted through were completely out of place. Purposefully not glancing back into the mystery of the jenkin’s muttonchops, my hand settled inside my coat and I pushed through.
The shimmering curtains didn’t block just the door. Inside miles of fabric turned what should have been an airy space into a maze of twilight gauze. The hold’s overhead lighting had been disabled in favor of intimate tapers and the cinders of incense holders. Figures drifted between floor cushion enclaves and discreet alcoves, trailing murmurs of close conversation or the occasional exclamatory gasp. The space didn’t smell like sweat, though. It felt more like a particularly quiet club, or a drug den where no one had brought any junk.
Trying not to seem out of place, I slipped casually through the first makeshift room into its slightly smaller, sapphire twin. At the center of the space, a group sat cross-legged, their arms around the shoulders of their neighbors as they swayed and whispered dreamily. A couple of rainbow-haired kick junkies, a woman in a new lunar suit, some custom morph that looked creepily like mesh celeb Lupin T., and a fury with a nanotattoo of endlessly rolling dice—they didn’t seem to have anything in common. Only pantsuit and custom job looked like they had any money. The others could have stumbled in off the street.
This Heartsync stuff had to be a drug thing. That’s the only thing I could figure.
“Mom!” If whoever grabbed my shoulder had whisper-yelled any other word, they’d have had my gun in their face.
And I would have preferred that.
“Keilani, what the hell!” I shook his arm off, spinning him into the corner.
“What are you doing here?” He kept up the harsh whisper.
Flaring eyes backed up my beamed message. [Don’t even. Now talk. Why are you here and how’d you find this place?]
Teeth locked down behind his grimace.
I didn’t have time for that here, though. [I find an invite to whatever the hell this is—custom created for you—then find you here. Boy, I don’t know what you’re caught up in, but this …]
[I’m not caught up in anything! I’m here to find Ruid!] His beam was almost too fast to follow.
[Ruid? What’s he got to do with this?]
It came out in a rush. [We came to one of these Heartsync things last week—before you got the job. We didn’t know what it was. I’d just heard it was, like, some way to help people let go of bad thoughts, to get it all out there, to be happier and connect with people around them. I talked Ruid into coming with me. I thought it could help him.] Black curls dropped. [He’s so … inside himself.]
Sweet, stupid kid. I wasn’t sure if I beamed that or not.
[We listened to that Vine guy you’re after. He started off with a bunch of basic Neo-Buddhist stuff, then started into this whole group-living, self-sharing, transhuman family thing. It all sounded real schemey. When he started talking about getting implants, I wanted to go.]
[Implants? What did he say about implants?]
[I don’t know. Just that he worked with a group that had created some sort of new hypermesh insert.]
[Sounds like the Neo-Synergists. They use their implants to form their collected-intelligence.]
[No, that’s not what he called it. He mentioned that, called it ‘thinking like AIs.’ He said he created better ones, inserts that could help him lead those who got them toward a higher state—or something. Curated-intelligence, he called it.]
Curated? The porcelain nodule on Miss Klein’s neck came to mind. Then her screaming face.
I squeezed Keilani’s shoulder. [I’ll take care of this. I want you to get out of here.]
“No,” he said aloud, something uncommonly hard in his tone. He switched back to beaming. [Ruid’s here somewhere. When I wanted to leave that first time, he didn’t. I couldn’t convince him to go. We argued, and I … ditched him here.]
I didn’t need to say anything. He looked away. [When I tried to apologize, it was like nothing happened. He just went on a screed about Vine and the next step in transhumanity.] Worried eyes found mine. [Mom, it really creeped me out.]
[Okay. We’ll find him. He’s got to be around here somewhere.]
[I’ve looked! He’s not in the common area. These are all just hopefuls, meditating and trying to prove themselves worthy. Only those up to get Vine’s insert are allowed in back.]
[In back?] I gave him something between a pat and a push. [Show me.]
We slipped through a line of curtained dens in shades of saffron, vermillion, and olive. In that last one, like a muddy forest grove, a neotenic pod gave a slow wave.
“Welcome again, Miss Lonoehu.” The boyish morph gave a faux-innocent smile.
“I’m getting real sick of hearing strangers use my name.”
“If it’s any consolation, I haven’t told it to a single person.”
I’d seen this trick already. I didn’t know how it worked, but I didn’t need to to understand it was a trick.
I considered kicking this tiny Vine. I made sure my expression made that clear. “Thanks for the scene in the plaza earlier. I really liked that place’s shakshuka.”
The small morph bowed, a motion that seemed somehow appropriate in his curtain-matching olive get-up, something between robe and gi. “I’m sorry it had to come to that. I admit to having mixed feelings. I’m either disappointed with Parvarti security’s lack of efficacy or impressed with your ability to extricate yourself from criminal charges.”
“You showed your hand too soon after bluffing. I know what you’re playing with now. If you had let me take your puppet in, there’s a chance I would have gotten paid and no one would be any the wiser.”
“Perhaps, but my former associates aren’t so easily duped. They know which me is me.”
“You’ve got quite the scene here. A bit dry for my tastes, but it’s a chill crowd.” I nodded around, checking to make sure no one had shown any special interest in our conversation. “What do we need to do to get into the VIP room?”
The kid’s smirk showed a single dimple. “It’s rather exclusive, I’m afraid. Only those open enough to truly accept the Heartsync are admitted. Feel free to enjoy yourself and broaden your mind communing with the others here, though. I will come lead them in the evening’s meditations shortly.”
“You’ve got Ruid back there,” Keilani blurted, obviously getting anxious.
Rust-colored eyes turned up to him. “Your friend has proven his dedication to the Heartsync. We will treat him well.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Keilani’s look snapped to me. “We’ve got to get back there.”
“Just calm—”
Obviously Keilani didn’t hear the action he wanted in my tone. His hand came up to push the neotenic away from the curtain slit.
Keilani’s hand didn’t connect. Vine’s small frame shifted, dropping his weight onto one bent knee. He turned just enough to show a familiar porcelain node, rapidly blinking with magenta eyes. Before I could get a better look, though, his small fist shot out, slamming into my son’s stomach.
Before Keilani could groan my pistol was against Vine’s temple. Then there was no temple at all.
The screaming started before all of the neotenic hit the floor. A glance assured the panic was all flowing the right way—away from us.
Frozen, halfway to doubling over, Keilani gripped his gut and stared. He’d seen me use my gun plenty of times. Probably not at such close range, though—and probably not on anyone who looked like a twelve-year-old. Some folks had trouble putting down neotenics, others counted on it, but a sleeve’s a sleeve.
“Come on,” I pushed through the freshly painted curtains. I didn’t say it, but we didn’t have much time. Vine’s redecorations likely covered most of the hold’s security cams, but a half dozen different security sensors would have detected a gun shot. Fifteen minutes—twenty at the outside—before security got here.
The back room was more of the same, this time hung in shades of wine. Maybe a dozen wide-eyed, would-be worthies stared, their lounging interrupted. Only two moved, both digging into alcoves toward the back. When they turned, the steady thrum of those weird implants blinked from the base of their necks.
“You got a gun?” I asked over my shoulder.
“No. Of course not,” Keilani snapped—as if I’d chosen this moment to test him on my strict rules. For the first time ever I wished hadn’t raised such a savvy kid.
The two in the back, however, did. Pistols small enough to hide amid pillows came up.
I beamed Keilani some garbled warning and threw myself sidelong. The curtains behind me seared, Vine’s guards making up for bad aim with elastic trigger fingers. Cushions offered a soft landing, but made poor cover. My own weapon came up. I pulled off three rapid shots and fresh panic sounds swelled in the nearest lounge alcoves. One of the guards toppled back, tangling in a curtained wall as she fell. The other didn’t appear to notice, firing faster.
I leapfrogged a heap of tiger-striped pillows. The blasts followed close, one near enough to singe my outstretched calf. I winced, reflexively shut off my pain receptors, and told myself it was just a graze.
A graze that pissed me off enough to send two shots into the second guard’s throat. Hope he’d backed up recently, there was no way his cortical stack was getting out of that unscathed.
“Come on, get out of here!” Keilani shouted behind me. Lollygaggers funneled past him, cussing and whispering, but giving me a wide berth as I picked myself up.
A glance was enough to convince me it actually was only a graze.
[You alright?] I beamed over to Keilani. He nodded, first to me, then to the opening at the room’s rear.
“Stay a step back this time.” I kept to the edge of the lounge and looked through, ignoring the chest-shot guard on the ground.
“You can’t understand what you’re doing.” The voice from the other room sounded just as frayed as the shot-up drapes. “The work you’re impeding.”
“Probably not,” I yelled back.
A wild shot tore through the opening. I ducked low and waved for Keilani to do the same as he came up on the opposite side of the tear.
“Valerie, please don’t do this.”
Ruid’s voice was a slap. I dared a glance inside.
It wasn’t a lounge. Vine’s portable office was little more than a folding desk, small terminal, and a collapsible bed. No, not a bed, an ego bridge like you’d find at any body bank, pillowed but uncomfortable, placed at the perfect height for techs to tinker, resleeve … or upgrade.
Ruid sat up on the slab. Behind him, a shaky pistol in hand, hid the man from the Neo-Synergist’s file, the real Vine.
“You okay in there, Ru? He do anything to you?”
“I’m fine. I came on my own. You’ve got Harliss all wrong.”
“He put anything in you?”
“I’ve learned about his work, Valerie,” he went on like he hadn’t heard me. “His inserts are the next step in what the Neo-Synergists are trying to achieve. It’s a true transhuman network. The potential’s incredible.”
Was it that Ruid was sounding like Vine, or had Vine pulled his puppet trick on him? I tried again, harder. “Did he put anything in you?”
My voice almost broke.
“Ruid?” Keilani sounded more composed. “You don’t need these strangers and their weird tech. I don’t know what they’ve told you, but no hopeful future starts in a greasy rent-a-dock. Please come home.”
“I’m sorry, Kay, but I don’t have a home. You and Val have been beyond good to me, but I know I don’t really belong. That’s not because of anything wrong with you, it’s something wrong in me. The Heartsync can help me fix that.”
“There’s nothing that needs fixing.” It sounded hackneyed, but it was true. I didn’t have the first clue about how to make him believe it, though.
“There is Valerie. I know it, I feel it everyday. It’s not just because my family sold me off. It’s something deeper, something broken that new tech can’t fix. But maybe a new perspective can.”
“I’m going to help him, Miss Lonoehu.” Vine sounded like he was sharpening his scalpel. “You’ve tried your way, now let me try mine.”
“Don’t you lay another fucking hand on him!”
“Mom.” Keilani turned wounded eyes. He stood and stepped between the curtains, ignoring my complaint. “Ru, is this what you really want?”
Vine’s pistol shook around the outline of Ruid’s body.
“I’m sorry if I hurt you, Kay.” The words welled up from those dark eyes.
My son shook his head. “Mister Vine. What’s someone got to do to get your implant?”
“Keilani!”
He ignored me.
Vine perked up, his twitches slowing. “Not just anyone can join the Heartsync. They have to be compatible and offer something worthwhile. Based on your display here, though, you could make an interesting candidate.”
“Getting the insert. What’s it take?” His thoughts were obvious in his curiously cautious steps.
A showman’s grin split Vine’s face. “It’s as much about a state of willingness as the hardware. It’s a modest upgrade, though, and one that’s compatible with most biomorphs. Yours would be a simple matter.”
Keilani turned his back to the table, indicating the port at the base of his neck. His eyes met mine, there wasn’t any hesitation. He took another step back, blocking my view of Vine. “Just here?”
Vine shuffled, his pistol coming to rest on Keilani’s shoulder. Sausagey fingers smeared the back of his neck. I could just barely hear him, “Right here. Yes. You even have open space. It would be a simple matter.”
“Kay, I’m not asking you to do this.” New doubt tinged Ruid’s voice.
Keilani looked over his shoulder. “I know. I’m just trying to help the only way you’ll let me.”
That was his only warning.
Keilani grabbed the menton’s hand, trapping the pistol on his shoulder, and extended his keratin claws. Blood coated the gun’s barrel as Vine, yowling, tried to struggle free. Keilani only forced his nails deeper.
The gun went off.
Broken digits blew through the curtain gap. Ruid screamed something I couldn’t make out.
Keilani didn’t miss a beat, though. Obviously he’d shut off his own pain receptors. While Vine cursed, he threw out a foot and yanked the menton’s shredded wrist. The pistol clattered to the ground, followed by a scientist avalanche.
A whirl of lotus-colored lights panicked at the base of the Heartsync leader’s skull. Vine’s implant was familiar, but more elaborate than the others we’d seen. Keilani didn’t waste time with the implications. He dropped his knees across Vine’s spine. Ignoring the grunting below, my son drove his remaining claws into the knot of lights. Veiny flesh split almost eagerly. Vine quivered, then went still.
A beat passed before Keilani and I both released a breath. I think we both expected to hear the menton’s cocky voice coming from behind the next curtain.
Ruid’s foot cracked across Keilani’s face, knocking him from the corpse.
Dropping off the table, he snatched up Vine’s pistol. “You bastard! You worthless, stupid trick!”
The gun trembled, so did his voice, but Ruid was too close to miss.
“Don’t you get it! He was my chance to find out what I really am! I need to know if I’m more than just a shell to get passed around.” He stabbed the barrel toward Keilani, “You ruined it!”
A sick feeling welled up in my gut. It felt like free falling. But I didn’t regret squeezing the trigger.
The pistol dropped from Ruid’s scorched, shattered arm. Through the pain, Ruid’s eyes found mine. Maybe he beamed me something, maybe his look said it all, but I knew he’d never come home. It didn’t change the steel on my face, though. It was a fair price for getting a gun off my son.
Ruid crouched and grabbed something from the mess at the base of Vine’s skull. Then he was up. I got a decent look, nothing marred the back of his neck. The rear curtained wall wavered and he was gone.
Keilani stared after him, bleeding across the floor.
—
The Neo-Synergists weren’t happy. They had said they needed Vine, but what they really wanted was his hypermesh insert. Apparently his was different from the others he’d been sticking his Heartsync members with—the master implant. I didn’t care. They got what they asked for. They were lucky I didn’t charge them extra for me and Keilani getting shot up. I could have forced the matter—I knew the option was hidden away in the contracts they’d signed—but I just wanted it to be over with. They left unhappy.
That made two of us.
I hardly saw Keilani for the next week. He kept to his room. I tried to talk to him once or twice, but his vocabulary had been wounded in the fray—the best he could muster were one-syllable words. His hand wasn’t fixed either. It would be a few more days before my tech could get a matching replacement with Keilani’s customizations. I’d already paid extra to put a hurry on the order. There wasn’t any chance of dealing with the emotional phantom pains while the physical ones were so obvious.
I leaned back in my office chair, watching the usual security channels. [You have any luck, Pops?]
[Not a glimpse.] Pops had been speaking softer than usual these last few days. [He could have left the station. Gotten out with some new face and name. He’d probably know how to after working with you for a year.]
[Maybe.] I doubted it, though. Ruid was still here somewhere, laying low, maybe trying to figure out the implant he’d stolen, maybe trying to get it installed. Who knew what that might mean.
Keilani’s door clicked. I pushed the video feeds aside.
Her look was just over the feminine border of androgyny, her makeup and curves straddling subtle and seductive. Messy black curls fell to her shoulders—that had hardly changed. Her wardrobe had always run the unisex line, being just part of her appeal. The smooth, koa-tinged skin was exactly the same, though. So was the stub arm sling.
“It’s a good look for you.” I nodded, meaning it. “I’m surprised you haven’t used those sex switch implants sooner.”
“I did that time you were on Aphrodite Prime for a month. I was going to surprise you, but reintroducing myself to everyone turned into a hassle.” Her voice had only slightly changed. It would take some getting use to, but at least it had come back.
“And now?”
“Part of me just needs to go away for a while.” She dropped into the lesser of the two uncomfortable clients’ chairs.
I tried to sound casual, before the silence got uncomfortable. “You okay?”
“No.”
I nodded, knowing. “Yeah.”
“You find him out there?”
“No.”
She took her try at a sad little nod.
The silence crept in. The air vent’s hum sounded self-conscious.
“You going to get a new secretary?” she asked the blank desk.
“I don’t think so. I never really needed one to begin with.”
When her eyes came up, I expected to see tears. They’d already been spent, though, and that was worse. “Do you think he knew that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think if we told him, that maybe …”
“Kay …” I got up and wrapped my arms around her. “If they’re worth it, never stop trying to save them.”
She snuggled into me like she hadn’t since she got her first morph. We spent a long moment trying not to think.
Finally she sniffled and gave enough of a wriggle that I let her go.
I didn’t go far, though. I leaned back on the desk. “You going to be okay?”
Fingers brushed the corner of her eye. “I think so.”
“Good.” I bent and kissed her forehead. “’Cause while I might not need a secretary, this week proved things are way more interesting with a little back-up.”
Her smirk looked suspicious, but it was close enough to a smile. I took it as a good sign.
“What do you think? Looking for more work?”
A familiar cockiness crept into her voice. “My rates have shot way up since last week. I’m not sure you can afford me.”
Pops snorted. [Smart kid.]
“Shut up.” I told them both.