moments in a Mission par deux
Last night it happened. Why I’m staying here. i got invited to the big event.
We make our way to a door near the ‘freshers, hidden by the mats and crates during the day.
A keycode is punched in—i’m at an angle to see it, 287776726937—and we descent into darkness. Metres and metres we descend until a faint light appears.
We finally arrive at our destination, an abandoned SubLink Station. It’s dank, with dripping water and the smell of mold in the air. I hope my lung implants are properly filtering the filth out.
The room is filled with dozens if not hundreds of homeless. Standing in a corner are a handful of women, most with low-grade limb replacements but all gorgeous. Definitely not homeless but close. Then I recognize three of them and move away from them, ducking my head. They’re dancers at the Wintermint Warthog, a gentleman’s club. They dance on Mondays in the day. Not a day I usually go in but I have occasionally stopped in for their incredible buffet. I make sure Thea doesn’t see me since she knows I’m a journalist: she was a witness to a murder I covered.
The fighters are paraded out, all with only basic implants and explants. All with artificial arms.
I take stills. I’ll run them against every database I can later. For now, I pull out a cap and move in.
The betting is beginning. I drop five hundred thousand ₩an on each match, mostly randomly choosing.
Then she* steps out and for a long moment I forgot why I’m there. She’s wearing a faux distressed old vintage tee. DARE: Drug Abuse Resistance Education: a program that caused more people to do drugs than it stopped from doing them from what I read at university. It was chopped off and tied in such a way it showed her full back, her sheer bra, and her subdermals blinked and winked through the thin material. A pair of latex shorts with a zipper from front to back and thong straps visible above the waistband. Antigrav heels add 160 mm to her height, making her nearly walk en pointe. Her green hair and eyes are the exact opposite color of the top, vibrant, lively, full of mirth. Her smile is genuine. Why is she here? She’s got no visible explants except those subdermals. Only a few visible tattoos: two revolvers oriented like wings on her back and cupcakes on her abdomen above the waistline, each animated with cute death’s heads winking, a crescent sun is next to her navel, the animation beautifully done as it slowly occludes, reenacting an eclipse. She’s too beautiful to be a day time stripper, too beautiful, period. She has to be slumming. I take multiple stills of her. And a few long sequences of movement as she walks around the ring, holding a holo-emitter advertising the first matchup of Boxcar Bruce vs Mad Maxwell. The stills are to identify her. The long sequences are for my wank bank.
They enter the ring, freshly covered in oils, their hands wrapped in thick bandages. Bare fists of metal would end matches too quickly, I presume.
“New?”
I turn and nod at the spectator who spoke.
“They’ll have the tape put on in a moment then they’ll dip their hands in the glass. Then the fight begins.”
I blink. Glass?
Then they do it. A large clear bowl filled with shards of colored glass is lowered into the octagon. Their hands are wrapped again by the girls and they dip their hands in then more tape is put on.
A gong is hit and the two men begin moving, fists up, watching each other.
I expect a punch. The first strike is a kick. I realize this isn’t “bum boxing.” This is mixed martial arts. That strike was muay thai. Bruce responds with a snap kick. They dance again.
Finally a punch. I see blood. The glass has broken skin. Shocked they don’t have kevlar subdermal plating. It was one of the first implants I got from my employer. Most veterans kept it post service. And both these guys have service tattoos.
My eyes move back to the redhead. She’s watching avidly. Popcorn eaten a piece at a time as she watches. I’m definitely in love.
I turn to surveil the crowd, taking more stills.
The fight ends soon when Mad Maxwell backhands Boxcar Bruce and we hear—and see—his jaw shatter.
I realize I just won on the fight and look at the odds. Bruce was the favorite, I just won over three hundred million ₩an. Not gonna retire on that obviously but I can buy a quality used tracer or sprinter. Be nice not to use the TransTubes to get around the arc.
The tenth fight. I’ve won seven times so far. Six were favorites so I’m not up much more.
The eleventh fight is about to begin. She enters the ring again and moves around. I finished scanning ArcSecDB: her name is Niki Edison. She’s law enforcement, an analyst specifically. She can’t be undercover. They’d have wiped her info. She’s here for the fights. Which means there’re more SecFor in the crowd. Have to be. Too much money is changing hands.
~•~
I’ve left the mission, carefully making my way to another arc then using a friend’s truck to drive back to the arc and back to my work. I can’t run all the faces, it took almost an hour to identify Edison.
I’ve just finished inputting all the people I got stills on and have cued up the search engine when the VI on the machine turned red and said, “Attention: cost to search all faces in available databases one billion ₩an. Contacting editorial board.”
I scowled. Someone’s fucked with my allowances. I’m allowed for nearly four billion a month in resources. There was no way I was over 75%.
My editor busts into the room. “What the fuck?” I ask. “Why’m I budget locked? I told you I found out something.”
“Yeah and what you found triggered a SecFor probe on our systems. Firewalls kept ‘em out while we purged your query logs and zeroed the drives. What happened‽”
“Yeah, not gonna happen. My notes are in the DB, hard copy backups where you can find them, but I ain’t telling you shit, Jerry.”
Salem grinned at me. “You on to something?”
“At least one SecFor analyst was there. At an underground—literally underground—fight.”
“Run the scan!” he ordered my cyberdeck.
~•~
Five cops. Two analysts. And a major. Corruption. I have such a j!boner right now. I’m just a bit sad this will hit Edison too. Unless, I mused. Unless she’s willing to be my source?
*she’s based on a woman who walked past me wearing a dare shirt and I fell a bit in love for the two seconds she was in view. She wasn’t wearing the rest of the outfit nor did she have green hair, though. As well as her there’s a bit of an ex, N, who’s been on my mind a lot lately.
If this was a novel, she’d be the damsel in distress protag must save.
503856
We make our way to a door near the ‘freshers, hidden by the mats and crates during the day.
A keycode is punched in—i’m at an angle to see it, 287776726937—and we descent into darkness. Metres and metres we descend until a faint light appears.
We finally arrive at our destination, an abandoned SubLink Station. It’s dank, with dripping water and the smell of mold in the air. I hope my lung implants are properly filtering the filth out.
The room is filled with dozens if not hundreds of homeless. Standing in a corner are a handful of women, most with low-grade limb replacements but all gorgeous. Definitely not homeless but close. Then I recognize three of them and move away from them, ducking my head. They’re dancers at the Wintermint Warthog, a gentleman’s club. They dance on Mondays in the day. Not a day I usually go in but I have occasionally stopped in for their incredible buffet. I make sure Thea doesn’t see me since she knows I’m a journalist: she was a witness to a murder I covered.
The fighters are paraded out, all with only basic implants and explants. All with artificial arms.
I take stills. I’ll run them against every database I can later. For now, I pull out a cap and move in.
The betting is beginning. I drop five hundred thousand ₩an on each match, mostly randomly choosing.
Then she* steps out and for a long moment I forgot why I’m there. She’s wearing a faux distressed old vintage tee. DARE: Drug Abuse Resistance Education: a program that caused more people to do drugs than it stopped from doing them from what I read at university. It was chopped off and tied in such a way it showed her full back, her sheer bra, and her subdermals blinked and winked through the thin material. A pair of latex shorts with a zipper from front to back and thong straps visible above the waistband. Antigrav heels add 160 mm to her height, making her nearly walk en pointe. Her green hair and eyes are the exact opposite color of the top, vibrant, lively, full of mirth. Her smile is genuine. Why is she here? She’s got no visible explants except those subdermals. Only a few visible tattoos: two revolvers oriented like wings on her back and cupcakes on her abdomen above the waistline, each animated with cute death’s heads winking, a crescent sun is next to her navel, the animation beautifully done as it slowly occludes, reenacting an eclipse. She’s too beautiful to be a day time stripper, too beautiful, period. She has to be slumming. I take multiple stills of her. And a few long sequences of movement as she walks around the ring, holding a holo-emitter advertising the first matchup of Boxcar Bruce vs Mad Maxwell. The stills are to identify her. The long sequences are for my wank bank.
They enter the ring, freshly covered in oils, their hands wrapped in thick bandages. Bare fists of metal would end matches too quickly, I presume.
“New?”
I turn and nod at the spectator who spoke.
“They’ll have the tape put on in a moment then they’ll dip their hands in the glass. Then the fight begins.”
I blink. Glass?
Then they do it. A large clear bowl filled with shards of colored glass is lowered into the octagon. Their hands are wrapped again by the girls and they dip their hands in then more tape is put on.
A gong is hit and the two men begin moving, fists up, watching each other.
I expect a punch. The first strike is a kick. I realize this isn’t “bum boxing.” This is mixed martial arts. That strike was muay thai. Bruce responds with a snap kick. They dance again.
Finally a punch. I see blood. The glass has broken skin. Shocked they don’t have kevlar subdermal plating. It was one of the first implants I got from my employer. Most veterans kept it post service. And both these guys have service tattoos.
My eyes move back to the redhead. She’s watching avidly. Popcorn eaten a piece at a time as she watches. I’m definitely in love.
I turn to surveil the crowd, taking more stills.
The fight ends soon when Mad Maxwell backhands Boxcar Bruce and we hear—and see—his jaw shatter.
I realize I just won on the fight and look at the odds. Bruce was the favorite, I just won over three hundred million ₩an. Not gonna retire on that obviously but I can buy a quality used tracer or sprinter. Be nice not to use the TransTubes to get around the arc.
The tenth fight. I’ve won seven times so far. Six were favorites so I’m not up much more.
The eleventh fight is about to begin. She enters the ring again and moves around. I finished scanning ArcSecDB: her name is Niki Edison. She’s law enforcement, an analyst specifically. She can’t be undercover. They’d have wiped her info. She’s here for the fights. Which means there’re more SecFor in the crowd. Have to be. Too much money is changing hands.
~•~
I’ve left the mission, carefully making my way to another arc then using a friend’s truck to drive back to the arc and back to my work. I can’t run all the faces, it took almost an hour to identify Edison.
I’ve just finished inputting all the people I got stills on and have cued up the search engine when the VI on the machine turned red and said, “Attention: cost to search all faces in available databases one billion ₩an. Contacting editorial board.”
I scowled. Someone’s fucked with my allowances. I’m allowed for nearly four billion a month in resources. There was no way I was over 75%.
My editor busts into the room. “What the fuck?” I ask. “Why’m I budget locked? I told you I found out something.”
“Yeah and what you found triggered a SecFor probe on our systems. Firewalls kept ‘em out while we purged your query logs and zeroed the drives. What happened‽”
“Yeah, not gonna happen. My notes are in the DB, hard copy backups where you can find them, but I ain’t telling you shit, Jerry.”
Salem grinned at me. “You on to something?”
“At least one SecFor analyst was there. At an underground—literally underground—fight.”
“Run the scan!” he ordered my cyberdeck.
~•~
Five cops. Two analysts. And a major. Corruption. I have such a j!boner right now. I’m just a bit sad this will hit Edison too. Unless, I mused. Unless she’s willing to be my source?
*she’s based on a woman who walked past me wearing a dare shirt and I fell a bit in love for the two seconds she was in view. She wasn’t wearing the rest of the outfit nor did she have green hair, though. As well as her there’s a bit of an ex, N, who’s been on my mind a lot lately.
If this was a novel, she’d be the damsel in distress protag must save.
503856
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