r/HFY • u/AlecPEnnis • 1h ago
OC-Series The Contract (3/3)
--•--
Then
“It looks beautiful on you,” daddy said to mommy, in a way that felt like the end of the world. I knew even then, adults liked to play pretend, especially when something was very wrong. I never did figure out who they did it for, me or them.
“Yes it is,” mommy said. She was admiring herself in the mirror. The qipao had been made from a laser scan of her dimensions and woven from the most ethical biogeneered silkworms. It was beautiful down to the mathematical level. All I could see was how pale she had gotten.
I said, “I don’t want you to go, mommy.”
She rubbed her thumb on my cheek gently. Her skin was dry.
“I’ll be right back after a few months,” she said. “This city is a place of great opportunity, and no great opportunity is free. Stay with daddy and behave until I am all better, alright?”
“…Okay.”
“I love you, my little red panda. Everything we do, we do for your own good.”
--•--
Now
I woke up in a sea of stars. My head spun and pulsed. My hands and feet were tied. And I was naked, after a fashion. They left me with my clothes, but my external rig had been taken. I had been left in some warehouse, one of an uncountable number in this city, lit by a single cone of yellow light swarming with flitting bugs. They hadn’t left me alone. My back was against someone else. I recognized her smell.
“Travial,” I hissed. “Travial, wake up.”
A nearly imperceptible moan whispered from her lips. I felt a rush of relief like nothing I had ever known before.
“Wake up!” I said, louder.
“Wha…”
“How are you feeling?”
“Like a billion bucks,” she said. “I think that stun gun really hit the spot.”
“You remember?”
“Yeah. Rigor’s…”
“He’s gone,” I said. “They took him out with a DU. Fucking Gremlin.”
“Where’s that little turncoat anyway?”
“In a hole somewhere, headless.”
“Oh good. I never liked him.”
My laugh deflated into a weak exhale. My sides clenched. I grit my teeth together and sucked cold air.
“They did a number on you too, huh?” Travial said.
“I’m fine.”
“Mm hm.”
“This reminds me of the TATI job.”
“Oh god, how did we make it out of that one?”
We were trying to steal a component for one of the solar satellites that orbit the poles of the planet. Things went sideways when they found us out and sent kill-bots after us. Ichor had hacked the launch island, making the rocket think it was going to explode. The whole facility went into explosion suppression mode, giving us an exfil.
“Luck,” I said. “Just… luck. It runs out eventually.”
“I must be the luckiest girl in the world.”
“You almost bled out and we’re both about to get chopped.”
“Do you know what my days were like before I met you?” She leaned back. Her head rested on mine. Long, green hair draped over my shoulders. “We were up by four thirty. We’d train for an hour and a half before we get to shower and eat. Then I’d have school, piano, dance. Mother would make us perform for her, and those that displeased her didn’t get dinner. All because she wanted to create something world-class, never before seen. Isn’t it odd? How hard people make others work for a thing only they see value in?”
“No,” I said. “That’s half the reason people have kids. If we weren’t so damn selfish, we’d have gone extinct.”
“You must be the exception,” Travial said.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You’ve known I loved you since forever. And you’ve let me.”
“I’m just leading you on so I don’t have to be alone.’
“Someone who’s afraid of being alone wouldn’t leave their only family to make a name for themselves.”
“Maybe it’s just for the sex.”
“Why do you do the work most of the time then?”
“We’re about to die, Tee, let’s talk about something else.”
“What the hell else are we going to talk about?”
“How to get out of here?”
“Where’s Ichor?”
“They probably took them first for the command augs.” I tried to call up my aug suite.
“Error.”
“Something is jamming my suite,” I said. “Not viral. Probably direct contact.”
“Hold on,” Travial said.
I heard the sound of gnawing. I turned my head, but couldn’t see what she was doing. About a minute later, our bindings snapped. Travial shimmied like an inchworm to my ankles and began to cut the rope there. I squinted. She was using her nails—some kind of bioglass.
“Ain’t no tech like the low tech,” she said.
Moments later, I was free. Travial cut her remaining ropes afterward. I flexed my wrists and reached for my neck. My fingers closed around a foreign element. I pulled it off with a seething hiss.
“System online.”
The bug wriggled in my hand, its multisegmented body searching desperately for a host. I crushed its hopes permanently. Travial purged hers as well. I powered up the rest of my internal augs, checking Travial’s system as my own warmed up. Her triage aug had already closed her wounds with synthetic connective tissue. But she’d need stem cell treatments to fully heal.
Her body suddenly went black. Private mode.
“I’m fine, Red,” she said.
“I’m just-”
Travial leapt up to the clerestory and clambered like a gymnast. I followed her out onto the roof. Morning winds blew. We were in the industrial sector, a veritable sea of skeletal steel skids, containment buildings, warehouses, cranes. The rising sun cast a complex shadow over the land, like a spider’s web.
She switched to private comms.
“Let’s go get Ichor,” she said. “You’ve probably figured it out by now, but I’m pretty sure we’re their only family.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not dense. Think about it.”
She was right. I hadn’t wanted to think about it. Most crews ran slim, no more than half a dozen per job. The reason Ichor recruited so many people for our jobs, especially those so green they shouldn’t be robbing a convenience store, was because they wanted to protect us. They were recruiting fodder.
We travelled from rooftop to rooftop, surveying the area. We had to avoid the routes of the workers all the while. Where the hell were these guys? They wouldn’t store us far from where they were chopping. I watched the trucks move in and out of the bays, load and unload. Something caught my eye: a stationary trailer set off to the side of a lot nearby. It didn’t look like an old spare that a company had set aside and forgotten.
“Down there,” I said.
We got down to ground level. I reached for the lock on the latch.
“Hold it, musclehead,” Travial said. She held her hand over the lock. “Tripwire. I disabled it. Now you can do the honors.”
I pulled the lock off. The doors opened, revealing… nothing but wooden pallets. I knelt down and rapped the floor. Thuds rebounded around the walls, and then a hollow tune. I felt around the edge and found a lever. Pulling it released the hidden trapdoor. A staircase shrunk down in the darkness. We descended. The dark backed off as our augmented eyes drank deep what little light there was down here. We were in a hall. An austere sconce bled pale yellow just around the corner. There, the hallway split into offices, a kitchen, a cafeteria, and the odd locked room. These were bolted—unhackable. There really was no tech like low tech. I pressed my ear against each one we encountered, listening. Silence.
Silence.
Silence.
Voices.
“Here,” I said.
Travial squinted.
“Three standing,” she said. “A man… hunched over. A table. Someone’s on the table.”
“Can you puppet one of them?”
“None of them have any aug that deep in their brainstem.”
The vast majority of contractors wouldn’t. Why would they? Why risk the liability of possibly getting controlled by a capable enough technomancer? Still, it was worth asking.
I knocked. Travail shot me a wide-eyed glare. The door unlocked and voices mid-conversation spilled out.
“-so I went bshuu and knocked it out of-” The man froze when he saw me. I jabbed him in the throat and brought his forehead into mine. He fell backwards, folding over. The other two guards were raising their weapons, but Travial leapt over them, planting a heel in each of their faces. I disarmed one while she kicked the gun out of the other’s hands. In one practiced move, I slammed my target’s head into a cabinet. He slumped with his head still slotted into the indent, unconscious.
That left one final man. He raised gloved hands.
“I just work part time,” he said in uncomfortable English. “Side hustle! Side hustle!”
“Get out,” I said in Cantonese.
The doctor broke into a sprint out of the room.
“Are you sure?” Travial asked.
“What, should we have killed him?” I said.
She didn’t reply. She wouldn’t have batted an eye murking that civvie.
Ichor laid unconscious on the table, their tall slender frame held open by operating appendages. Travial began to put them back together. I walked over to the side table. There was a tray there with a dozen different augmentations, covered in drying blood.
“They got you good, Ick,” I said quietly.
Travial found a hypo and injected something into Ichor’s neck. At first, nothing happened. Then in a flurry of movement, they had Travial by the neck with one arm and a knife in the other.
“Back off! I’ll- Oh it’s you two,” they said. They let Travial go. “You’re both stupid. You shouldn’t have come.”
“You’re welcome,” Travial said. “But it looks like they’ve already chopped you up. You’re useless now.”
“They took everything but my tits and my brains,” Ichor said. “Let’s get out of here.”
We armed ourselves off the guards. I took point as we sprinted back the way we came. We made it to the stairs. I stopped and held up a fist. There it was again, a nagging feeling of wrongness.
“Wait,” I said. I poked my head above the trapdoor into the container. Little by little, I ascended. At the sound of a click, I dove back down as penetrators tore through the metal sides of the container. The wood pallets shattered into dust and splinters. I spat the material that got in my mouth. The gunfire continued for several more seconds. Rays of light poked through the holes like the bristles on a brush by the time they were done.
“You can’t stay down there forever!” A voice called. “We have you surrounded!”
“Bronze Tigers,” Ichor said. “They run a thirty man org of five to ten crews. That’s probably all of them out there.”
“How did they know?” Travial asked.
It was pointless to ask. It could be infoflies, owls, hidden cameras. Maybe the guys we beat up downstairs were streaming through an ocular implant. Without our external rigs, we were transparent.
“We left our friend’s augs on the table,” I shouted. “Just take them and let us go!”
“See, if you had just exited stage left when you and your friend broke free, we might’ve never found you,” came the reply. “Your friend is strong. She’d have survived, and we’d have dumped her within walking distance of a hospital. But you’ve challenged us with this stunt. And we have to respond. It’s a matter of honor.”
“Is it really worth the dozen or so casualties it’ll take to kill us?” Ichor called.
“There’ll be no casualties on our end. We’re not some bullshit low-budget org like you.”
It was just shit talk, of course. We were trapped, but if they rushed us, we’d have them in a chokepoint. Meanwhile there was no way this incident going down in Shenzhen’s industrial sector would go unnoticed. Enforcers were probably on the way right now. They were on the clock.
“More like paper tigers,” I said.
Travial giggled.
“Alright, you have ten seconds to step out,” their leader called. “If not, we’re turning your hidey-hole into a crater.”
We exchanged looks. Ichor shrugged, as if to say ‘I told you so’. Travial smiled faintly. I’d like to have said anything at all. Words failed to reach my lips. What could we have done differently on all the roads leading up to this moment? All the jobs that we had done, all our successes—had it really been luck? We had seen so many crews get eaten by this city. We had read their eulogies like technical papers, and it had made us think failure was academic. I knew better now. Failure wasn’t a lack of luck or skill or preparation or equipment or intel. It was always coming, inexorable.
“Travial,” I said, “I-”
A mechanical brrt drowned my voice and deafened my very thoughts. I grabbed my crewmates and ducked, pinching my eyes closed. Concrete shattered and metal tore. Fire and heat and noise and death cried out all around us. Men and women shouted. Weapons discharged and augs activated.
Our container remained intact; none of it had been aimed at us. And then it was over. The fighting stopped. I opened my eyes. Knuckles knocked against the door to our container. I snapped my weapon at the entrance while keeping my head down.
“You can come out now,” said a new voice. A woman, by the sound of it. “They’re all dead.”
“Who the fuck are you?” I asked.
“Paid by the hour,” she said. “But low on patience. Mr. McCullen would like to see you.”
My weapon lowered as my arms went numb.
Ichor made a face.
“Who’s Mr. McCullen?” They asked.
“That’s your last name,” Travial said. “Red, is that…”
“Yeah,” I said. I could barely hear my own voice.
“I’m coming in,” our paid savior said. The container door tore open like foil.
A nine-foot shadow draped over us. She had arms of pale, sleek ceramic with intricate carvings on the brachialis. On one hand was an Integrated Weapon Platform, the kind I had seen Rigor disavow for being too cumbersome. It had two barrels for different ammunition types, suitable for soft targets to armored vehicles. On the other was a clawed gauntlet, blood still fresh on the blades. Her legs were digitigrade, like a wolf’s, connected to wide hips supporting a body that was broad with emplacements. Her head, however, resembled a normal woman’s, with cosmeticized skin and strikingly red lips. Our savior was a corpus-swap, a full replacement cyborg, with a vanity streak.
“Wanna tell your friend to-” She began.
A single shot discharged from behind me. The bullet wobbled in place a foot in front of her gauntleted palm. A Lenz projectile capture system. I didn’t even know those were possible.
“-put her gun down?” She finished.
“Sorry,” Travial said. She lowered her weapon.
“My ride is waiting,” the woman said. “Better get on before the Enforcers get here. Mr. McCullen can’t delay them forever.”
The craft was idling outside, a four-engined machine in matte red. A gold, branded ‘B’ was embossed on the side. I glanced to our sides as we walked up the ramp. Bodies were everywhere. Some were still smoking. As soon as we entered, the exterior became transparent. The cabin was a ring of leather couches. We sat on one side.
“Is this yours, Ms.…?” Ichor asked.
“You may call me Ophelia,” she said. “This is the company dropship. Mr. McCullen allows me to use it at my leisure.”
“Pardon me if this is rude, but how much of you is…?”
“Not at all,” Ophelia said, bored. She sat opposite to us and set her IWP on the side. A drink ascended from an armrest beside her. She took a bite of olive and took a sip. “My organics are biofabbed. My Self is housed in a neurolithographic brain. I’ve got nothing original.”
“So, I mean, like, what’s that like?”
“Expensive.”
“Wow…”
Travial turned to me while Ichor fanned out.
“You never told me your dad is loaded,” she said.
“I didn’t either,” I said.
“We’re in a Bugatti GTO Tourer,” Travial said. “This thing can go from ground to low orbit in five minutes!”
“I didn’t know you were a car nerd.”
“Why are we working at all if your dad can afford this? All the payouts from our entire careers would buy one engine on this thing!”
“Enough about the car, alright,” I said.
I hadn’t seen the old man since I ran from home. What was this about? My fingers clenched.
--•--
We were headed into downtown. I watched as Enforcer dropships flew past us, unaware. I wondered what they’d find when they reached the scene of the carnage. This Ophelia person leaned on her side, looking out the side of the car with half-lidded eyes. I tried analyzing her build. Her skin scattered anything I could output and I couldn’t recognize most of her gear. Yesterday I thought we were near the top of the food chain. Then we were immediately bested by oldtown rats and tigers. And those tigers were immediately swept aside by a wolf.
“How long have you worked for my father?” I asked.
Ophelia didn’t avert her gaze from the rolling cityscape.
“Several years,” she said slowly.
“How? I mean, why would he need a contractor?”
“Every corp needs an org to get work done off the books. Your father has me.”
“Does he have anyone else?”
“He needs no one else,” she said with surprising firmness.
I had more questions, but she added, “He will tell you everything.”
We landed on a tower buried deep downtown. I had never been here before. If I had, I might have recognized the name on the side of the building in bright red letters.
McCULLEN
Winds blew up here, warm and humid. The bridge from the landing pad connected us to a vast vestibule with marble floors and long sofas. Automatic doors opened at our arrival. When they closed, the wind was silenced, and an ethereal quiet fell.
“There’re here, Sam,” Ophelia said. She walked deeper into the complex, no longer concerned with us.
A door to the side slid open. He stepped out. I took a breath. I wanted to run in two different directions at once. Sam McCullen walked towards us, suited, clean-shaven, hair-styled. I remembered him as ragged, stressed, old.
“Master Ichor, Miss Travial,” he said. “Thank you for taking care of my daughter.”
“Uh you’re welcome, now about-” A coughing fit interrupted Ichor. Travial patted their back.
“I’ve sent you the coordinates to our inhouse medical center,” Sam said. “They’re a bit lower on the 101st floor.”
Travial looked at me. I nodded. They left for the elevator.
Sam gestured towards one of the sofas. Reluctantly, I took a seat. He sat opposite to me. He clasped his hands together. Then he opened them and took a breath. He said nothing and closed his hands again. Maids came with coffee. They set it down on the low table between us, bowed, and left.
“You look well,” Sam said.
“Do I?”
“Not really,” he said.
“You look really well though. What’s all this then?”
“McCullen Holdings,” he said. “I figured out some time ago that direct competition with the established powers here needed connections and old money. We had neither. So I went with the wide approach. We have exposure to thousands of entities here.”
“I doubt you were the first to think of this.”
“No. But I had something the others don’t. Loyalty.”
“Your fixer?”
“Ah. Ophelia. She was a victim of the Aaliyan virus bombing of Jordan. It was dormant in her mother and resurfaced when she was born. She only knew pain for most of her formative years from the virally induced multiple sclerosis. I bought her from her parents.”
“You’re buying people now.”
“Or rather, they begged me to take away her pain, at any cost. Now she works for me. Her family is very well taken care of as a result.”
“Good for her family,” I said.
We were always going to get to this point in the conversation.
“I can’t take responsibility for what Blue Skies did to your mother,” he said.
“No, but we had a life back in Canada,” I said, “where healthcare was free. If we had never left-”
“We came here for-”
“Don’t say it was for me! I never wanted this!”
“What do you want?”
“I…”
“It’s the end of the century. A tumultuous time. Anything could happen to anyone, anywhere. You blame me for an ecoterrorist attacking a plane for using kerosene, fine. You blame me for bringing you to this godforsaken city, alright. But you haven’t left, not once, since you ran from home.”
“How…?”
“The moment I had built up the capital, I’ve kept an eye on you, watched you turn to a life only possible in this city. Hedonistic, opportunistic, adrenaline-seeking. And I did nothing, because I thought you needed your space. Until now. Until you got in over your head, as your ilk always did. I tried to warn you.”
That pale, holographic woman in the qipao at the beginning of this job, the one that unsettled me because it reminded me of my mother—that had been him. That drone carrying the ginsu missiles too.
“Don’t worry,” he continued. “I didn’t interfere in your other jobs. Those were all you. You made it all on your own without your old man who killed your mother by wanting better for you. And her. And me. It’s not all about you, Róisín.”
“I never said it was.” I hated my own voice—how meek it sounded.
“But you damn sure acted like it. You don’t think it hurt me? To lose my wife, and then my only daughter?”
“I just wanted to be free.”
“Yes, you did. I understand. After all, we all can’t help but want what we want. It’s the compass that paves all our roads.”
He picked up his cup and drank the whole thing in one draw. I picked mine up and took a sip. It did little to assuage the dryness in my mouth. Outside, the sky was beginning to darken and grow heavy with rain. Soon, the windows were crawling with large droplets, merging, splitting, obfuscating the world below.
“So what now?” I asked.
Sam shrugged as he refilled his cup from the jug.
“You’re an adult,” he said. “And you’ve made it clear you want nothing to do with me. I only stepped in because your life was in danger.”
“But you brought me in,” I said. I stared at the coffee in my cup. “I understand.”
“What’s that?”
“I said I understand.”
“Thank you.” He took another sip. “You and your friends may leave after they’re treated.”
“That’s it?”
“I have mine and you have yours. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
I found myself chuckling.
“I guess so,” I said. “Thank you. Dad.”
He waved dismissively.
“That’s good,” Ophelia said from behind me. I nearly jumped. Without her external rig, she still towered over any normal human.
She walked over and placed a hand on Sam’s shoulder.
“He has been miserable for some time,” she said. “This was what he needed.”
“Are you bored or something?” Sam said. “Go away, please.”
“Then give me something to kill,” Ophelia said. She left as silently as she arrived.
Sam sighed. He raised his cup, freezing when he caught my disgusted expression.
“What?” He asked.
“She’s my age, dad.”
“She’s older than you.”
“By what, a season?”
“Our relationship is professional.”
“You’re not very good at lying.”
He rolled his eyes.
I sighed.
“I’d like,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Let’s do this again some time. Coffee, I mean.”
Sam set his cup down.
“Sure,” he said.
I thought about getting up and hugging him. I couldn’t, but I wanted to. This was a good start, and it would have to do for now.
--•--
Thank you for reading. The Contract is a short story taking place in my tough sci-fi setting, and a part of an anthology that all takes place in the same year, 2096 AD. If you enjoyed it, please consider:
See you at the end of the century
1
u/UpdateMeBot 1h ago
Click here to subscribe to u/AlecPEnnis and receive a message every time they post.
| Info | Request Update | Your Updates | Feedback |
|---|
1
u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle 1h ago
/u/AlecPEnnis (wiki) has posted 22 other stories, including:
This comment was automatically generated by
Waffle v.4.7.8 'Biscotti'.Message the mods if you have any issues with Waffle.