This was a fuckup. A major fuckup. Bigger than the time the Department of Transportation developed a bus surrounded by a tank tread only to realize it couldn’t turn. Bigger than the time The Montage downtown misspelled a sign for a Grape Festival and ended up having to truck out sex offenders by the shuttlefull. No, this was a fuckup on a level previously unknown to man. Some idiot had faked his passport and ID chip, bluffed his way past Vivant security, taken the space elevator, made it past customs, dodged the security cameras, found a wealthy neighborhood and stolen Venerant Testivali’s dog, Munchy.
There wasn’t even any footage. Somehow the idiot had implanted powered retroreflectors under his skin that blasted the IR cameras and blue-boxed the facial recognition system into such a clusterfuck that they didn’t realize anything was wrong until they arrested the Primarch on suspicion of breaking and entering his own home as he sat on his platinum toilet, fat and spongy, getting a blumpkin from a pricy whore.
How many areas did he hit? Rage, shame, sadness, indignation, loss of face. That poor idiot had just pissed off a skyhook city with an average net worth of $75 billion. Now here I was standing in the lobby of the Grand Hall in Vivant, meeting with the Special Counsel on Intercity Relations, also called the Ministry of Murder by anyone not talking to the MoM.
The penalty for falsely entering Vivant: death. The penalty for theft from a venerant: death. The penalty for inappropriately touching a dog: death. The penalty for causing undue distress or embarrassment to a member of society: 280 days public service. The penalty for tampering with security cameras: facial ID tattoos and 700 days public service. This guy was gonna die twice before he even reached the annoying part.
So now here I was standing in a receiving room in the MoM with a fixer, two wetworkers, and what looked like a pizza delivery guy that had bluffed his way in. A counselor with a parched, flaking scalp and chapped lips stood staring at a few blurry stereopics from the cameras, all of them shot through with white artifacts. It could have been Cassidy Pink, pornstar extraordinaire for all we knew. Looked vaguely male. Height normal. Not bulbously fat but not a runner either.
“You want us to go back down to the city and comb through four and a half billion people to find this one guy who won’t even show up on a cc cam?” The fixer, a big polynesian dude with a topknot and queequeg ink, crossed his hamlike arms.
“That is essentially what is being offered, yes. You all came highly recommended to the MoM and in exchange, we will be willing to offer our usual retainer as well as a hazard bonus and a substantial per diem, as well as a generous bounty for the safe, living return of this person of interest.
“What are we talking?” Pizzaboy asked.
“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss, but if you sign the requisite paperwork the accounting department will have your first installment in your accounts by business open tomorrow morning.”
Never tempt a desperate man with a hot breakfast. We were sold, damn the torpedoes. Like obedient wolves we signed the tablets on the first of 226 pages of stipulations, waived our right to read what we’d signed, accepted the temp-tag in our forearms and got inducted into the green room, all except one of the wetworkers. This guy was fat as hell with a missing arm he’d replaced with some janky bottom shelf rig he’d probably stolen off a mechanic. The servos juddered and whirred when he made a gesture, which was always, and nearly drowned out his voice, which never rose above a hoarse whisper, probably owing to the livid purple burn scars that shone on his throat. Must’ve worked as a rook, because other than rigging doors to blow there’s no way he chased a poi farther than five steps before he was puking his lungs up. Anyway, the rook declined and shot me a look as he left. Oh well. More per diem pour moi.
As they walked us through the standard acceptable force video with that same damn monotone woman in business casual discussing what “extrajudicial contract enforcers” are entitled to do wink wink they brought out a tray with three items on it. Pizzaboy looked nervous and hung back, but me and the others moved forward.
“Use of a taser is acceptable in life or death situations,” the video droned.
“We recovered these three items from the premises,” the counselor said. On a gaudy silver tray there was a button, a tuft of fabric, and a fragment of some sort of metal with a quarter of a logo on it. The fixer, dumb fuck, immediately reached for the metal. The guy was too used to fencing stolen metro pods or smuggling in hyperpowered aircars from New Seoul. He’d spend a week chasing down the rest of the logo and then hit a dead end when he found out it’s herring bait the poi fished out of a trash pile on the corner to throw us off the trail. What did he even think it was? The poi didn’t have any protos on in the cc vid.
I grabbed the button. Best chance of at least pinning down a section of the city, and the fabric is too generic. High prob that cloth was herringbait too, could be a washcloth or part of a towel from a hotel. The wetworker grabbed the fabric and examined it carefully, as if he expected to unlock its secrets with his naked eye under the violent fluorescents in this godforsaken receiving room. The guy’s obviously a blunt force instrument unused to working with others. Probably a former rook or hookman, striking out on his own away from an agency for the first time and trying to make a good impression with his scuffed black pants, grey tac-boots, tight fitting polo. The guy looked like an overpaid mall cop, to be blunt.
Pizzaboy hung back. Christ, the kid probably hadn’t had his first kiss, let alone kill. When you see how a person dies, watch a person turn into a rigid, unnatural thing in a bloody instant instead of a breathing person, you stop giving as much of a shit if people think you’re rude.
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