Bitstream

  By Rowdha Al Sol

  1.1

  “Cardiac system restored.”

  A voice. Female. Digital. Cold.

  But who is it? What is it?

  Maybe I’d know if I could open my eyes. But I can’t. All I feel are the hollow craters where they used to be. And beyond that: nothing. Darkness. Cold, meaningless darkness. No up, no down. No body, no breath. Just remnants of a consciousness that once was and no longer seems to be. Data. Echoes. A mind without a home.

  “Vitals low. Activating emergency protocols.”

  There it is again. Robotic, without presence, without soul. And something else, something sharp. I feel it in my bones, a bolt, a pulse, a... a...

  OUTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!

  My voice. A distorted scream that whirs and whirs, and it hurts. Everything hurts. Where am I? Who am I?

  “Optics online.”

  Those numbers, those ghostly red ones and zeroes, warping, whipping up and down, back and around, shifting, shifting, steady now, along the edges, carving parallel lines that face off and connect. They surge, throb, reel again and again. Back now, up to the corners. Holding. Stable. Squared off, flat. It’s... it’s... a dumpster, sketched out of nothing but code, and I’m covered in something thick and heavy. Not sure what. Too hazy, too empty. But I need to move. I need to get up. I need to push. Come on. Push, damn it. Push. Push!

  The lid: it smashes open, and a swirl of numbers comes swooping down, pressing against me, trying to force me back, but I won’t have it. I’ll keep pushing, I’ll keep clawing, I’ll dig myself out of this nightmare one way or another. I try to bring my right arm up and clear the stream, but it hangs loose, unresponsive, nothing but dead weight. Still, I push on, cleaving my way through the numbers, the clumps, the masses. Out of my way. Pull, come on. Get over it.

  But my foot: it’s stuck, and before I have time to readjust it slips and I go helplessly tumbling down a mountain of code.

  I hit the bottom. Hard.

  And I stay there for a moment, trying to draw air, trying to think, trying to make sense of this digital realm. My pulse whams in my ears, too loud, too fast, as if my body still believes it's flesh and bone rather than numbers. The world is a shifting thing. Data streams, coiling, unraveling.

  Then something. Subtle.

  Rah… Roh…

  A whisper. No, not a voice exactly, but the shape of one. A breath of static curling at the edge of my perception, teasing at my consciousness like the ghost of a memory I can't quite grasp. It slithers through the nerve endings, slipping past firewalls, threading through the fractures in my thoughts. It’s not her voice. It’s different this time. A name. I don’t know how I know, but I do. It’s lodged somewhere deep, in that part of the brain where language goes soft around the edges, where half-buried memories play hopscotch on broken pavement. I can hear them: kids long gone, their laughter fading out, then rising and falling with the unsteady groan of a swingset missing a chain. The name is there, teetering, right at the tipping point, but it won’t fall. Not yet.

  And is it mine? I don’t know that either. I don’t know anything. Not one, damn thing. But I have to find a way out. I can’t stay here.

  I force myself to my knees, feeling the landscape dig into my palm. The surface is uneven, strange. I drag myself through the digital murk, crawling, tugging. I look ahead, hoping to see something different, something other than these damn numbers. Eventually, in the distance: a splotch of green. A blinking track. I move quickly, not stopping. I reach down to the green numbers, grab a round yet jagged object, and hoist it up. The code takes form, revealing a head with optics plugged into the sockets, and I get an idea.

  Please, let this work.

  I set the head down and pry the optics out, slotting them into my sockets one by one, careful not to nick the circuitry. At first, nothing. Not even a shudder. Then a jolt, a glitch in the neural interface. Static. Distortion. Red digits scrolling. I blink, and the world stutters like an old slide projector: first a blur, then the image snaps into place, sharp, vivid. Is that... water? It is. A canal, in fact, snaking through the wasteland, rippling, sloshing, wobbling with rain. A massive bridge looms over it, stitching two halves of a city: sleek towers, chromatic spires, a place still breathing, every micron beating.

  I feel it thrumming through my bones. Bump. Bump. Bump. No—not the city. My heart. Slamming. Hammering. Threatening to tear loose from its cage. I look down at myself: cyberware, tracer markings glowing faintly along my shoulders, chest, stomach. Dried blood on old wounds. Some from bullets. Some from blades.

  And yet, somehow, I’m still here.

  How?

  All around me are bodies. Not humans, but androids, mixed in with garbage, oil, and rust. It’s a graveyard, a dump leading out into the water.

  Was I... dead?

  I glance back at the severed head and see that the neural jack glows softly, which gives me another idea. I drive my fingers into the port, detach the chip, and swap it with my own, the fractured, sparking mess inside my skull.

  A jolt. Then, finally, sound. Muffled at first, sharpening: the distant scream of a siren, the rush of city traffic, the cry of seagulls, and rain. It feels... familiar.

  How long have I been here? And more importantly, how long do I have left?

  I blink, checking my neural HUD. Nothing. The vitals display has melted into unreadable digital smear. My OS is failing, held together by sheer luck and broken code. I need a new system. But here, in this graveyard of obsolete machines, that kind of luck is in short supply.

  Some voices from behind. Laughter. In the distance. Not sure how far exactly. I turn to see two men and a woman picking their way down one of the towering android heaps. The pile slopes up to an opening, one I can only assume conceals a ladder or stairway, a passage that must lead to the city.

  They have no eyes, only blue visors that glow with unnatural, animated screens: cubes that rise and fall and travel, as if bumping to the sound of music. Those cheap leather jackets, kuttes, are marred together with all sorts of symbols, everything from clowns to spiders to snakes to rabbits. And their necks are engraved with sharp inclines, containing circuit boards and external ports. It all looks so advanced, so bizarre, yet, at the same time, they don’t seem very rich. They’re... poor.

  What do they want? Are they here to help me? I don’t know. The way they walk, the way they talk with those weird, countrified accents.... They’re not here to help. They’re here to—

  “There’s a live one. Over there, look,” the woman shouts, pointing a thickly gloved finger at me.

  My heart races and electricity surges through my body. I try to step back, run, but my legs buckle. Before I can react, I’m seized by uncontrollable trembling and collapse onto the ground.

  The people laugh.

  First the woman comes over, then the two men. She bends down and pulls my head towards her. “Ah.... It’s old. Look, an XV-2054 Model.”

  “About fifty years past your prime, dustbucket,” says the taller of the two men. He pulls a cigarette from a menthol package, pops it in his mouth, and lights it with a flame embedded in his index finger.

  “Might be worth somethin’ still, if it’s still runnin’,” says the shorter man, flicking a switchblade up and down.

  The woman presses the side of her neural port, which sits above her left ear, and suddenly her visor turns green. Some seconds later, she says, “Part-human, part-’borg. I’d imagine back in her time she was a fan of implants. Probably spent more time on a tech surgeon's chair than your average cyberjunkie, that’s for sure.”

  A tech surgeon.

  The taller man gets down on one knee and blows a puff of smoke in my face. “Anything valuable? What’s that pretty eye of yours see?”

  “Hard to tell,” she says. “It’s beat up pretty bad and some parts of the body are unscannable.”

  “Cheap fuckin’ optics, that’s why,” says the shorter man.

  “I suppose you could strap it ’round your back and carry it to the truck, look at it later,” the woman says. “It’d be much easier than trying to rip it apart here with all these bodies.”

  The taller man reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a stout and bulky object. It takes me a second to realise that it’s a pistol, one embedded with a carbon skin, a ring-shaped trigger, and an orange bore. It glows when he thumbs the safety off. “Want me to ice it here?”

  The woman pulls away. “Just be sure to hit it between the eyes. Anywhere lower and you might fry all the circuits and we’ll get nothin’ out of it.”

  This can’t happen. I can’t die, not like this, not after I’ve been given a second chance.

  He kneels closer to my face and presses the barrel of the pistol against my skull. “Adios, dustbucket.”

  The air grows heavy and it’s as if a million hot needles are piercing my skin. Within seconds, the bullet will pass through my cranium and knock my lights out for good; brains will splatter and for the first time I’ll get to witness what it’s like having my existence ripped from my being, what it’s like to die in cold blood. Then what? Is it just an empty meaningless void? Is there a hell? A heaven?

  I’m too young to find out. Now is not my time.

  “No,” a voice says, weak and strained.

  “The fuck?” the man snarls.

  “Not now,” the same voice says, only I realise something that I hadn’t before: the voice, soft, feminine, belongs to me.

  “You can talk, even after all these years?” the woman says, laughing. “Well, isn’t that crazy? Fifty years old, probably dumped here at least a decade ago, and she speaks. There’s some human left in you after all.”

  “Poor bitch,” the shorter man says. “Ought to put her out of her misery. It’s a win for both sides, I reckon.”

  The electricity coursing through my body begins to accelerate as my heart pounds harshly against my chest, giving vigour to my being once more. “No,” I say—shout, actually. “I can’t die!”

  “The fuck you can’t.” The tall man rams his thick palm into my forehead with the hope of slamming me back into the ground, but to his shock, and to my own, my neck doesn’t give.

  Before he has time to prop the barrel against my skull, I grab his wrist with my cybernetic arm and squeeze as hard as I can. His ulna and radius crunch beneath my grasp. He screams. The gun fires and a flash illuminates the blood staining my body.

  “Kill her!” the man squeaks.

  The woman stumbles backwards, reaching for her pistol. My arm, with strength even I don’t expect, jolts forward and becomes a ball-bearing as the body of the tall man goes helplessly sprawling across it. The woman takes aim. Before she can fire, an object springs from my forearm: a long, raptorial blade. It pierces through the man’s chest and slices through the woman’s neck. She stands there shaking, just as I had moments ago, while the life drains from her face. The shorter man steps away, slackjawed. He doesn’t say a word, only watches.

  The woman’s body hits the ground and the man on my raptorial blade drops his gun. They’re dead. That much is for certain.

  I move the man’s body to the side and watch as he slides off my blade. His guts droop and pull along the jagged splits.

  The remaining man gasps, drops his switchblade, and makes a beeline for the climbing android pile, nearly tripping along the way.

  I don’t bother chasing after him. He’s not on my list of priorities right now. Instead, I crawl over the dead woman and slice her chest open with my blade. I make a fist and the blade retracts back into my forearm, secured by a pair of plates in hard muscle. Inside the woman’s chest, I see the rectangular operating chip attached to her internal life system, beneath the heart. I detach it carefully, making sure not to damage it. I know this procedure is going to be difficult. If I don’t replace my operating system quick enough after taking it out, my heart will stop. Terrifying, but I have no choice. I take a deep breath, staving off as much fear as possible, before pressing my neural port and opening the life system on my chest. The steel plates securing my racing heart remain intact, but the operating system looks fried, pulsing dimly with a blue glow. Despite this, I grab the switchblade left over from the short man and, using the tip, pry the chip free. It isn’t long before my vision blurs and all the air empties from my lungs. For a second I feel as though I’ve been launched into outer space.

  I quickly but carefully secure the woman’s operating system beneath my heart. To my shock, I’m still unable to breathe, I still can’t see my vitals, and slowly the world around me begins to blur before going dark.

  The darkness is different. I don’t see any red ones and zeroes. It's... nothing.

  Rah... Roh...

  Again, that name, and the laughter; the children's laughter. Come on. What is it? Tell me... Tell....

  “Operating system online.”

  I gasp, eyes flying open. I’m lying flat on the ground, but there's a difference: I’m able to move smoothly. No shakes, no pounding heart, and my vitals pop up on my neural display. Everything is green. Everything is okay. I look down at my naked torso and see nanobots sewing my wounds shut.

  “Vitals stabilised,” the robotic voice in my head says. “Have a nice day, Rhea Steele.”

  So that’s my name.

  Rhea Steele.

  Familiar, yet distant. But so are many things. Many, many things.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  I pick myself up, slowly, and stretch my limbs. The mantisblade embedded in my forearm is a surprise, a shock actually. It's so large, heavy, yet I can hold it up with ease. My level of strength must be extreme, especially for someone my size. I must have been like these people, these... scavengers. Or maybe I was the opposite. Maybe I had to protect myself, and this mantisblade was what kept me safe. Either way, it's a scary amount of technology to have contained in a single arm. I ought to be careful and use it wisely, less I want to accidentally slice my head in two.

  I look at the scavengers' bodies, focusing on the woman, her clothes in particular. Her cut-off leather jacket coats a white button-up shirt; the sleeves are rolled up to her elbows, revealing ugly tattoos: werewolves, snakes, and an eerie-looking clown.

  I unbutton the woman’s leather kutte and peel it off, followed by her white shirt, cargo jeans, and combat boots. I leave her panties untouched—wearing someone else’s underwear is too disgusting to consider. I wrestle my way into her shirt, the fabric sliding over my head. The jeans cling stubbornly as I shimmy them up with one hand, and the kutte dangles until I manage to shrug it into place. The boots put up a fight, the right one requiring a clumsy kick and shuffle before it finally settles. Every movement feels like a dance, my lifeless right arm hanging uselessly at my side.

  It must have been fried pretty bad to be completely dead. If I want to get it replaced or removed, I’ll probably need to visit a tech surgeon, like that woman said, but it’ll come at a cost. I’m sure.

  That and, well, maybe they can figure out what happened to me, what's happening to me.

  I run my hand through the man’s corpse, seeing if he has anything valuable. Other than the pistol, there isn’t much. I take it anyway. I take the woman’s pistol, too. Maybe I can sell it and make a bit of cash on the side, if it’s worth anything.

  I pop the man’s pistol into my back holster and keep the other in my inside jacket pocket, then spot the switchblade that coward of a man left behind. I grab that, too, keeping it safe in my pocket. After that, I walk over to the climbing android pile from which these scavengers came, expecting to see a ladder or walkway. To my surprise there’s neither. From the bottom of the wall to the top there’s a mesh of rusty pipes, worn and leaking from the chambers. Part of it is held together only by carbon-fibre tape. That’s funny to me. Nevertheless, I clamber up the android pile, knocking bits aside. It's taxing but not impossible. It doesn’t take long before I reach the top. This is where the real challenge begins. Getting up this damn pipe system. I can try hook my arm around some of the looser areas but from the looks of it they’re farther up. I’ll have to use my legs to do most of the work, and I do—well, try—but inevitably fail as I find no way to hoist myself up onto the next available grip. I slip but don’t fall off. I manage to anchor myself by sticking my mantisblade into one of the bodies, which gives me an idea.

  I try the same thing, but instead of grabbing onto the first available pipe, I spring my blade as high as the rig will allow and wedge it between a suitable gap. I pull. There’s a strong hold. This should work. I take a deep breath and, after a moment, retract my blade, just as I had done before, only this time I’m launched upward towards the point of contact. I stop when I hit my head off the wall. Not hard, but with enough force to send a shockwave through my body. Before the blade fully retracts, I wrap my legs around a thick pipe and grab onto another. I repeat the process until I reach the top and pull myself over the ledge.

  It really takes the air out of me. My optic display tells me my oxygen levels are falling. I really ought to take it easy until I can see a tech surgeon.

  Once I catch my breath, I look up and see the sprawling city in all its glory. I expected as much. All around the place, people bustle from sidewalk to sidewalk, across flashing yellow crosswalks and below quickly changing traffic lights. They wear all sorts of punkish clothes, everything from leather jackets to brightly coloured cardigans, sleeveless denim shirts, and haircuts of blue, red, green, and even some neon fibres.

  The block spans just as much in height as it does in distance. Above, where a large highway curves around buildings, people lean over balconies from shabby apartments, dumping cigarettes and wrappers. They don’t reach the bottom; they’re quickly carried away by a gust tunnelling through the intersection preceding the bridge. It’s cool, icy even. But that’s okay. I prefer the cold.

  But how do I navigate this place? How do I find out where the nearest tech surgeon is? It’s not like there’s a map flashing on every available corner of this place. I start walking, seeing if there are any signs indicating a repair unit or medical centre or whatever field tech surgeries would fall under in this era. It’s hard to tell, and I can’t exactly remember what such buildings look like. Even if I could, they may very well look entirely different now.

  People hurry past me in sweeping riptides. I find it difficult to keep a steady foot. One man tells me to watch my step, and another calls me a walking corpse. I decide to cross the street in search of a billboard, an advert, something to indicate the location of a tech surgeon, but despite the hundreds of LED screens promising penis-enlargement pills, powerful weapons, and careers working for a company called ‘Techstrum’, there’s nothing. Nada. Zilch.

  So I walk on. After ten minutes of struggling and nearly tripping over the boundless pedestrians, I step into a seemingly quiet alleyway leaking at the pipes and comprised of overflowing trashcans, rats that scurry from one hole to the other, and... a man, sitting on a doorstep built into a red-brick building. He’s enclosed in shadow, to the right of the alley, smoking a cigarette. He glances up at me. It’s too dark to make out his face.

  “Lost?” he says, his voice raspy and orotund.

  I blink a couple times before responding. “I guess you could say that.”

  He puffs out a ring of smoke. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  I furrow my brow. “I.... Well, I’m not entirely sure where I’m supposed to be, or where I’m—”

  “No.” The man shakes his head. “You’re not supposed to be here. Here.” He gestures to the ground with open hands. “In this alleyway. It’s private, for clients and staff only. Did you not read the sign?” He points over my shoulder, at a poorly lit sign that reads, in large red characters, “STAFF AND CLIENTS ONLY.”

  Shrugging, I say, “You really expect me to see that?”

  He chuckles. “Outdated optics, eh? In 2100?”

  “2100? As in, the year 2100?”

  He takes another puff from his cigarette, blows the smoke out, tosses it to the ground, and crushes it with his boot. He stands, and I can see his face more clearly. He has a grey beard surrounded by tens of little wrinkles, so little that he may have gotten some sort of anti-aging surgery done to his skin, along with a well-trimmed fauxhawk. His large head sits on a bullish neck between a pair of roofbeam shoulders. Clearing his throat, he says, “What’s your name, lady?”

  “Rhea Steele,” I say.

  He presses the side of his neural link. His eyes glow silver and twist. “Born 2035. Deceased 2056. What’s it like in the afterlife?”

  “I... I’m sorry?”

  He chuckles again. “So, what is this? You install someone else’s neural chip? I just can’t figure out why someone would do that, unless of course, they’re looking to commit identity fraud, but you have different motives, don’t you? Hard to commit fraud when any actuary can see you’re supposed to be dead.”

  “I’m not trying to commit fraud,” I say.

  “Then why does it say you’re dead?” he asks, his shrewd eyes flickering from my damaged arm to my bloody jacket.

  I look him in the eye. “I don’t know. All I know is that I woke up by the canal.”

  “The circuitery?” he says sharply. He takes a step towards me and scratches his beard. “With all those dead bots?”

  “That’s a hell of a name for what actually goes on down there, you know that?”

  The man looks at me for a moment, as if trying to read my mind, then reaches into his pocket. He pulls out a package of cigarettes, slides one out, and says, “You smoke?”

  I shake my head. “I’m just looking for a tech surgeon. Someone to tell me what happened. Someone who can figure out why I came back to life, and for God’s sake fix this broken arm.”

  “Your non-functional arm is entirely mechanical,” the man says, sliding his cigarette package into his chest pouch. “Your left arm though.... That’s cybernetic. Nice implant, by the way. Though it’s an older model.”

  I make a fist and watch as my mantisblade slowly creeps out of my forearm, like a turtle peeping from its shell. I let it slide back into hibernation. “Listen,” I say, “do you know where I can find a tech surgeon? This city isn’t exactly clear with directions, and all the adverts.... Are people really that concerned with getting it up?”

  The man laughs this time—a nice sound straight from the belly. “Well, I can take a look at you, even though I am technically on my fifteen.”

  “You’re a tech surgeon?”

  He nods. “Didn’t see that sign either, I take it?” He points behind his shoulder with his thumb, at a sign placed above the stepped doorway. It reads, on a silver plaque and in gold letters, “DR. MAELSTROM’S NEUROTECH SURGERY.”

  Yeah, because that’s so obvious, I want to say. Customers must have to book an appointment, and after that a set of directions must get emailed to them, because there’s no chance in hell anyone is finding this place just by looking at any website or brochure.

  “Oh,” I say. “Well, how much is a consultation? I don’t have much.... Don’t have any creds, actually....”

  He waves a dismissive hand and opens the alleyway door. “Because I’m so curious as to why a living corpse showed up at my doorstep, I’ll do this one for free, but I can’t guarantee I can fix that arm. It looks like it needs to be replaced entirely, or, you know—” He makes a buzzsaw sound and motion. “—cut off.”

  I guess that wouldn’t be so bad. It’s not like this arm is doing me any favours. Before I follow him in through the door, I pause and ask, “So you’re Dr. Maelstrom? Just to clarify?”

  “I’m Vance. But yeah, that’s me. Technically you’re older than I am. I’ll have to get used to that one.”

  “Thanks for your help,” I say.

  “I haven’t helped you yet,” Vance says.

  I follow him in the door, brushing beads aside. The interior isn’t so bad. I was expecting something a little more white and intrusive, like a dentist’s, but instead this place has delicate lightstrips cruising through different shades: pinks, blues, greens. It’s a foyer, and there’s a lady dressed in a sleeveless, red qipao behind a reception desk. She smiles at me with her hands crossed behind her back.

  Someone ought to give her a chair.

  “Hi there,” she says sweetly.

  “Set the building to closed, Jin,” says Vance. “This’ll take a minute.”

  “But what about your two-o’-clock?”

  “Delay it by another half hour,” he says. “They can wait. Always do.”

  Her fingers warp at lightning-quick speed as she begins typing at her computer. Soon the door behind me locks and a timer for thirty minutes pops up on a large LED screen which moments ago had been blank, ready to tick off at two in the afternoon.

  Wasting no time, I walk on, beyond the reception desk and through another doorway decorated with low-hanging purple beads. Brushing them aside and turning the first and only right corner, I see Vance descending a couple steps, into a dark open room, illuminated by a red, cross-shaped fluorescent bulb. All around the place are medical carts packed with gleaming cybernetic implants, biohacking tools, and holograms touting the latest upgrades, everything from operating systems to circulatory, ocular, and nervous systems. They’re indicated by a holographic body, and the position of each implant is labelled accordingly. Thick power cables run along the floor dangerously, plugging into the side compartments of a makeshift surgical bed. All around it are monitors, biometric sensors, and an overhanging screen on which a neural interface remains dormant.

  The entire place is like a meth lab, but nicer, cleaner, although still quite a bit messy.

  Vance pulls out a swivel chair and takes a seat at his corner desk. The desk is littered with alcohol bottles, blood vials, motherboards, and various surgical tools I can’t even begin to name. There are two monitors: one for his computer and one showing security footage of the foyer.

  Seems he’s had some problems in the past. Unsurprising.

  He starts typing. “Relax. You don’t need to stand. Not yet.”

  I take a seat on the surgical bed.

  “You must have done some fighting to have that much fresh blood on you,” Vance says.

  “Reckon so?” I say.

  “How many scavengers?” he asks.

  “Three,” I say. “That’s when I—”

  “Used the mantisblade.” He wheels away from the desk and approaches me slowly. He looks at my face long and hard, then reaches out and takes my chin in his hand. “You changed your optics recently, too. Did you wake up—or well, did you come back blind? Optics picked out of your sockets?”

  I nod dumbly. Vance reaches up and grabs the overhanging neural interface. He starts tapping the screen. Then he tells me to unlink my neural wire from the side of my head. I comply, and he plugs it into the bed computer.

  “How much of your life do you remember?” he asks.

  It takes me a second to respond. “Not much. I mean, I remember some things, kind of. The name Rhea Steele was in my head, but I didn’t know it was mine until that voice—”

  He nods. “The neural AI.”

  “—spoke to me. I also remember this city. It looks familiar. Feels familiar. Although I can’t remember the name....”

  “Neo Arcadia.” He rubs a hand slowly over his face, then looks at me sternly. “The name of the city is Neo Arcadia. That ring a bell to you?”

  I shake my head. “Not at all,” I say in a low voice. “Some memories came back to me after a while. Details about this city. Like tech surgeries, but that’s probably because the scavengers brought them up first. I also remember these streets, the cars, hell even the people. It’s an awful feeling. Time doesn’t feel right. I don’t feel right.”

  “Old. Outdated. Is that what you feel?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “Outdated, definitely. Like I’m in the wrong era. And if you don’t mind me asking, how do I look? Do I look... old?”

  He chuckles, then presses a few buttons on the monitor before turning it around. “You tell me.”

  Instead of displaying a neural interface, the monitor shows a mirror. In it I see the face of a young, green-haired woman with freckles and slightly tan skin. The hair is cut short, falling no further than the ears. The jaw is soft, and the nose is long. This is a face I most certainly remember.

  I bare my teeth, expecting to see rotten brown pearls left over from a decade of neglect. To my surprise they’re only slightly yellow, well-shaped, though my gums are certainly more red than they should be.

  I look as though I’m still in my early twenties, with a full life ahead of me.

  “Seems your body’s been kept perfectly preserved all these years,” Vance says with a glint of amusement in his eye. “Nanobots, I’d say. Looks like they’re the reason you haven’t died. You must have been in some sort of comalike state. There is a problem, though.”

  “Problem?” I say. “Which one? The fact I can’t remember a thing or the fact I’m hanging on by a thread?”

  “Well,” he says, “you’re not hanging on by a thread. Actually, you’re doing quite well for yourself for someone who supposedly died forty-odd years ago. But your internal processors are damaged, particularly around your mid to lower abdomen. You’ve been shot quite a few times, and stabbed, you know?”

  “But the nanobots.... Do they not repair the damages? I mean, I don’t feel any pain.”

  “That’s the problem.” Vance turns the monitor towards himself and starts tapping it again. “You don’t feel any pain because your sensory nerve processor is damaged. Your dorsal posterior insula’s disconnected from your primary operating system.”

  I cock an eyebrow. “You gotta remember not everyone’s a doctor.”

  He pushes the monitor up and sits closer to me, clasping his hands together. “Look,” he says, “the part of your brain responsible for indicating the intensity of pain has been disconnected from your central nerve operating system.” He taps his chest. “Meaning if you get shot, or if there’s some internal damage done to you, you won’t know, but you’ll see the effects pop up on your neural display. Faster heart rate, high blood pressure, low saturation. Suddenly you might flatline.”

  “But how am I now?” I ask, dreading the answer. “Is there anything to worry about?”

  “If there was, I would have told you already,” Vance says. His voice is stern, but I can see a twinkle in his eye that betrays it.

  I stare at him. “So, I’m okay? I’ll live?”

  “I didn’t say that.” He disconnects my neural cord from the bed computer and lets it zip back into my temple port. “You know,” he begins, wheeling back over to his desk computer, “it’s not every day you meet someone with a mantisblade. Especially not one from your era, but that’s beside the point. They tend to be very expensive, and in the 2040s they were relatively new implants. A lot of the NACP deployed units with those upgrades.”

  “NACP?” I scratch my head.

  “Neo Arcadia City Patrol,” he says. “Other words: the blues. Police. Whatever you wanna call ’em.”

  “Your point being?”

  Vance hesitates. “My point being that you must have either been a high-tier NACP unit, a criminal, or one rich son of a bitch. To afford implants like that? Possibly in your other arm, too? I wouldn’t be surprised if someone shot you and stole the blade off you.”

  “So, you’re saying I was....”

  “Any one of those things,” he says, typing at the computer. “I’m running your name through the city database here.... Can’t find a single thing on you, so I’m willing to bet you were neither a rich bitch nor a unit. Logic dictates you worked for a gang of some sort.”

  I get up from the surgical bed, look at my fist, and clench, watching the blade peep out again. “A gang? What sort of gang?”

  “With those blades?” he says. “Could be any damn one in the city. Maybe even a bit beyond in the scrubland. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  I step towards him and let my blade retract into my forearm. “That’s not what I mean,” I begin. “A gang. The sort who kills, steals, wreaks havoc?”

  He glares at me, then turns, facing away from the computer. He steeples his fingers and dips his head while maintaining eye contact. “I have absolutely no idea,” he says flatly. “All I know is there are a lot of gangs, with a lot of different motives, with a lot of different ideas of havoc. Some only seek to survive. Some have much darker plans. I’m afraid that’s where my knowledge stops.”

  I sigh. The information has been more than helpful regardless. The rest I’ll have to figure out on my own, and that’s okay. “Thanks. At least now I know. Any ideas where I go from here? I'm sort of lost.”

  “Your first step is getting your senses in order,” he says. “Not being able to feel pain isn’t everything it’s chalked up to be. Trust me. I’m a doctor. I’d know. One day you’re cruisin’ the streets of Neo Arcadia, lookin’ for an easy target, or whatever the hell you’ll decide to do, and then the next day you drop dead. Might have been a pulmonary embolism. Might have been a really bad infection. Somethin’ your neural display won’t pick up on, because one as old as yours is likely to screw up and read data incorrectly.”

  “So how do I fix it?” I stare. “Can you help me?”

  “This,” Vance says, placing a comforting hand on my arm, “is where my altruism ends. End of the day, I got a business to run. Can’t help anyone out with expensive procedures like this without expecting something in return. But I’m willin’ to cut you some slack, give you a percentage discount just because I like you so much, but I’ll be damned if I do it for free.”

  I stare at him some more. He has a point. Most doctors in this city would have turned me away before even getting to learn my story, but Dr. Maelstrom at least listened. The questions remain: how much is the procedure, and how on Earth do I secure enough creds to pay for it?

  I ask him, rubbing my neck.

  “You know,” he begins, “as a tech surgeon you meet a lot of people, all getting implants for different reasons. How’d you think I knew exactly what mantisblades are used for?” He grabs a piece of paper and what looks like an electronic map from one of his desk drawers. Then he grabs a pen and starts writing. “I’m gonna give you the name of a relatively new gang in the city not far from here, just on the other side of the bridge. Maybe a few blocks farther down. They’re always lookin’ for new talent, ’specially if you already have relatively strong upgrades under your belt. Or sleeve, I should say.”

  I walk over to him, and he hands me the paper with the map folded underneath. I look at the piece of paper. It has a single name written at the centre, along with an address scrawled overhead. “‘Fingers?’” I read aloud. “That supposed to be code for something?”

  He gets up from his seat, pulls a cigarette from the package in his chest pouch, and lights it up. Blowing smoke in my face, he says, “That’s the boss' name. Press the buzzer at the door. Say Maelstrom sent you.”

  “And you expect this person to just help me out like that? Give me a job? A member of a gang?”

  Vance grins broadly. He flicks his lighter shut and tosses it on the desk. “You’ll have to prove yourself, of course,” he says. “But at the end of the day, Fingers owes me one. I’ll let the gang know you’re comin’.” Then, as if suddenly remembering, he adds, “Oh, and the procedure’s gonna cost you five bags. Normally I’d charge eight, but like I said, I got a good feelin’ about you.” He pats my shoulder and points to the exit, back the way I came. “Watch your step on the way out. Follow the map. It’s embedded with a tracking device so it’s easier to figure out where you are, and more importantly, where you’re goin’.”