TR: 23

Chapter Twenty-Three: Minds Within Minds

Kuu stood crammed between bodies at the back of the magline tram, listening to the steady clickety-clack of the trolley rotors as they whirred along the magnetic lines above. The smells around her–body odour mixed with cheap perfumes and the defeated aroma of cigarette residue–would have been unbearable if not for her insatiable desire to breach the terminex, the soul gatekeeper of which sat not ten seats away, feigning interest in a daily holo-press that he had procured prior to entering the line.

To avoid further detection by the bounty hunter, Kuu had figured out how to switch off the pod chit, which had required nothing more than a nail file and a five milli-kors surge, both of which she had easily provided. As it turned out, modern technology was not as advanced as it seemed. Through the crook of an arm, she watched her quarry as he seemingly conspired over Tansis’s national mouthpiece, The Orbital. Now and then, small holograms flitted in and out of existence, hovering over the pages as they boasted of their importance and vied for the reader’s attention. But this was nothing special; all around them the interior of the tram was filled with colorful, dancing images playing on banners lining the cabin, advertising the most exciting new products or the most anticipated new holo series etc. Every so often, one of the ubiquitous ceiling-mounted projectors would flash to life and full-D hologram of some such person or other would prance down the middle of the aisle as if en vogue down a catwalk, displaying the most trendy new fashion articles from one of the countless outlets on Tansis. Or perhaps it was a celebrity or an athlete–some household name to be sure–flourishing their moves for any that cared to pay attention to them (which wasn’t many those days)–and then, like the insipid program that they were, they were gone as soon as they had come. But no one paid them much attention; they were as regular an occurrence in Tansis as was the artificially-generated air that they all breathed. Well, that everyone but cybrids and the like breathed, that was. Kuu took some solace in the company of all the distraction that day, for anything that drew attention away from her was a blessing in disguise, in her eyes. She didn’t know how she was going to obtain a sample from the bounty hunter, but she wouldn’t let a miraculous second chance like this pass her by. She would follow him as far as was safe to try and procure a sample. Her only hope was that he made a mistake somewhere–an unadorned hand here, or an inattentive expectoration in an alley there. She just needed DNA–raw, unprocessed DNA. She would never pass through the two-pass identification system of the nexus portal without it. The problem was, from what she had gathered from this man so far, he took extra precautions to leave no trace. Whatever the reason was, from his seemingly hairless form (he even shaved his eyebrows off!), to the cumbersome leather duster and gloves, the man did not want to be tracked. Which was a frightening prospect for Kuu, given she had, essentially, trespassed on this man’s very nature. Luckily, Kuu was small and circumspect, and cybrids weren’t exactly on most peoples’ radar; they were more like insects–neither here nor there, but everywhere just the same. Not worth the thought until they were pestering you or there were enough of them to raise a concern. Of course, this was the very premise which had driven Kuu to her current position; if Overwatch hadn’t restricted Pod access to non-cybrid travelers, Kuu would have had her own pod chit and she wouldn’t need to be on a wild DNA hunt. But Kuu didn’t ruminate too much on the politics against her kind. After all, Lian-Guh reminded:

The spirit is only as heavy as the burdens it bears; physics is as much a matter of the self as it is the other. If you choose not to pick up the weight, then everything around you is merely endless potential. 

As Kuu meditated on her condition for the umpteenth time, she almost missed the bounty-hunter’s eyes flit from her direction back to his lackluster newspaper.

Oh no! Had she been noticed? Would he have even remembered her? If he had registered her during their first encounter–which was probable given his magnigraft and multitude of other likely mods–then he may have already pinged her piD on the Link, which was no challenging task for even an amateur Linklancer. Or worse, perhaps, he had sensed the chit again and knew it was her who had been following him.

Self-consciously, Kuu reached into her pocket and ran her fingers over the smooth poly surface of the device. The receptors in her flesh sensed no undue activity from it and she sighed inwardly, silently chastising herself for being so paranoid. She hung her head, staring at the grungy floor of the tram as she attempted to slow her racing heart and gather her thoughts. As she ran through the scripts that aided in downregulating her blood pressure and sympathetic nervous activity, she focused on her immediate situation, taking in the breadth of her emotions and the many, many scripts which ran all of her sensory processes. As she became present, she began to slowly notice the soft pitch and shove of the tram as her body gently jostled back and forth with the movements of the line. She focused her attention on her hand grasping the bar for support against the line’s movements, and then on the warmth and smells of all of the bodies around her. Kuu slowly brought her attention away from the floor, back up to the seat where the bounty hunter was sitting. Or had been sitting. There was now an empty spot between two bodies where one had not  been moments before.

The bounty hunter was gone.

Kuu’s adrenaline surged and she lost all the grounding that she had just attained from meditation. She leaned past the body partially blocking her view, frantically scanning the aisle for the missing P.O.I. He was nowhere to be seen. Kuu moved away from the bar, slowly winding her way past the maze of bodies otherwise occupied, either lost to spaze daze in the Link or their attention consumed by their personal devices. Expectedly, no one really moved out of her way, more molded around her to adjust for the pressure of her body against theirs. Despite her profuse apologies and gingerly manner, one woman even proceeded to hiss at the poor cybrid as she slid past her. With a simpering bow, Kuu scuttled away posthaste to the connecting bay, an automatic door sliding open with a sound approximating a sigh, and she made her way into the adjacent tram.

As the door opened into the next cabin, the situation was hardly any different–bodies packed cheek-to-jowl as before, everyone’s attention in another realm. Then a distinct movement caught her eye; at the back of the aisle, Kuu could make out a large figure making its way through the crowd, unceremoniously shoving those out of their way who did not heed. Kuu caught a glimpse of one of the weathered leather tails of a duster and she knew it was her mark. A glinting eye turned and look back at her over the island of shoulders between them and, though she could not see the face under the apparatus, she knew he was staring her down. The figure paused as the tension grew between them and then, as if cued, the bounty hunter turned and began steamrolling through people with renewed force. Without a thought to the contrary, Kuu pursued, crouching down to give her more leeway around the hips and legs which took up less surface area than having to navigate a full, otherwise ignorantly immovable body.

Kuu came to the next connecting bay and ran through, the bounty hunter already moved on. In the next cabin, Kuu stopped cold. Here, the interior lighting had malfunctioned and the cabin was perhaps a quarter of the light exposure, save from the flickering of a ballast that spluttered its last, dying breaths, the atmospheric light wafting in from the cityscape far below. But this is not what gave Kuu pause; it appeared the cabin had been, intentionally or otherwise, relegated to a kind of layover area, due to the low lighting. This meant that virtually everyone was either seated or asleep; among those in the thrall of REM, a good handful were, presumably homeless from the look of them, likely to be kicked off once the next TransCorp patrol did their rounds. And since the aisle was more or less clear, that meant the bounty hunter had evaded her somehow.

She slowly paced down the aisle, dialing up scripts which relayed energy from extraneous systems to the rod analogs in her retinas, which helped her gather more light. Scanning the sleeping bodies, which glowed with programmed photoluminescence thanks to the algorithms whizzing through her brain, Kuu could discern nothing out of the ordinary. Halfway down the aisle Kuu stopped, looking around at the sullen, sleeping faces of boring, ordinary people–not a bounty hunter or rogue among them.

Somehow, the bounty hunter had evaded her.

She sighed and dialed down the scripts, slumping down in an empty seat, burying her face in her hands. Against all odds, Kuu had run into the very same person whose chit she had procured–through the utmost chance–and that very grace that the Gods had bestowed upon her, that one last, fleeting chance she had to fulfill her vision, she had completely squandered. But it didn’t make any sense. How had the bounty hunter escaped from the tram? She leaned over the empty seat beside her and glanced out of the window at the darkened cityscape far below. At that moment, they appeared to be over the Ther Nadarv district, somewhere between Tansis proper and the Sratchlands–the ever-expanding belt of construction circumscribing the core cities. By Kuu’s best estimate, they were anywhere from point-seven to point-eight kaldar in the air, which would be suicide even for a rock, let alone an organism. So how, then, had he escaped?

Had he escaped?

Well, if he was hiding, there was no way Kuu would find him now; he could have just as easily switched his clothes, looking like any other passenger. Kuu groaned and leaned against the back of the adjacent seat, burying her head in her arms. There would be no way she could differentiate him now.

Kuu’s breath paused as a flashback came to her.

Or was there?

The magnigraft. 

No matter what wardrobe adjustment the bounty hunter made, there was no taking that device off–it was fused right into his optic nerve. That meant if she could track the magnigraft, and assuming no one else aboard had a similar mod, she would find her man. The immediate problem was–Kuu knew absolutely nothing about the device.

But the Link would.

Kuu steadied her breathing and with the subtlest motion of her left eye, focused on the top left corner of her field of vision. After a moment of focus, a small icon appeared—the same ubiquitous icon available to anyone hardwired in through endogenous chipsets or wearing SoftLink hardware—that of a blue brain with a curly arrow at its center. Kuu blinked three times, confirming her intention to access, and the world-as-she-knew-it disappeared around her.

From somewhere kaldars away, through innumerous relay stations and pinging off of any transient nueramech that happened to be along the axis of interfacing, the tiny chip inbuilt into Kuu’s brain called up a LinkNode which itself, in turn, interfaced with all other surrounding nodes in a similar fashion, thus calling up any and all minds theretofore connected in style. The first step—which was always the most daunting for those unfamiliar with it—brought the “minder” into what was colloquially known as “The Blue”, which was the default GUI that everyone was programmed with. Of course The Blue didn’t have to blue, it was heavily customizable in virtually every regard; it was merely named so because of the apparent mistake that one of the architects had made several hundred years prior during the development of the first GUIs, where they couldn’t get the lighting right and the launch site—usually an empty room of some kind—was tinged ever so slightly by a blue hue. Cerulean 364, as it turned out. Yet, as serendipity would have it, the blue tinge proved to boost user moods and thus drew in more subscribers (back when the neuralnet wasn’t free) which, user experience notwithstanding, happened to be a business boon as well. So The Blue name stuck, in spirit if not in actual colour.

Kuu watched as colours bled away into a wash of paint runoffs, fading away first to black nothingness, and then, as if to parallel the parable of the beginning of the universe and much later, that of consciousness itself, a light exploded out of the center of the field of view and all senses returned renewed yet somehow different. Different, in that the minder, while fully conscious and aware of their body and surroundings in realspace, was now attuned to a different set of rules, feelings and experiences beyond those of their everyday life. It was like another layer in which a string was set to vibrate against itself, creating a new frequency—a chord of sorts—against which the consciousness could be sounded. The self was thus both removed and amplified in the process, resulting in the inexplicable metaphysical paradox that was known as being “phased.”

Kuu blinked and the blue had receded, revealing that she now stood in her apartment—the very same claustrophobic yet cozy corner of the Blok Cubiform where she spent all of her evenings alone. (Except for Donut of course). In essence, the scene was merely a construct; any minder could fashion their own Linkbase, down to the molecule if they so wished. While Kuu knew she could have certainly exercised her imagination more when designing hers, her home was one of the only meaningful things that she owned, and so the thought of it—or the construction of it, in this case—brought her calm. And the Link could be easily overwhelming, so any mental aid that she could pay forward to herself was also functional. In fact, there were many folktales floating around Tansis of those who decided to “freeform” their constructs and BaseLinked into the Blue—that all permeating platform underlying the ten-to-the-twenty-four synaptic signal connectome which made up the Link itself. Of course, it only took a fraction of a fraction of that number to cause sensory overload, and thus many safeguards had been put in place to avoid such a “basejump”, as it was colloquially known. But that didn’t stop the savvy (and foolhardy) hacker from trying, even if it cost him or her their sanity. As such, the Link was rightfully terrifying in its own rite. Like a dangerous yet beautiful creature, better left to marvel at than to try and capture.

Kuu steadied herself as she always did when she did this kind of thing. Taking a breath of air that was not really air, she cued herself out of her home that was not really her home.  A cue was not the same thing as a thought; this was an important distinction to make in the Link, as a minder was literally a thinker within a world of everyone else’s thoughts. More, one was free to conjure thoughts and feeling just the same as in realspace, so a unique term was necessary to describe the executive function of moving oneself from place to place (or module to module, if you really wanted to be picky) within the Link. Enter the cue. Cuing involved thinking but it was more than just a fleeting synaptic fancy. In the same way that all whales were mammals but not all mammals were whales, thinking was necessary but not sufficient to describe the process. One had to also commit to the thought; that is, they had to also embody it. While there was no way to explain the process other than experiencing it directly, the analogy could be drawn between the disconnect involved in understanding a new sense that one did not possess, such as the echolocation of a bat or the visualizing of infrared thermals of a hawk, and actually having those senses. Indeed, the first time one cued themselves in the Link, the experience was often recounted as being supernatural.

And so it was that Kuu cued herself into The Kostinov Lexinorium, one of countless Thought Repositories in the Link—libraries of a sort, though the information contained within the pages relayed more than just words, but rather the thoughts of the minders tethered to them. While Kuu could have chosen any old repository, there was something about the Kostinov that filled her with a grand sense of pique and mystery, like she had stepped back into a time from a world long past. The Kostinov Lexinorium, named after the architect who constructed it two hundred years prior, was a living anachronism: designed in the fashion of a second Era Scorssian Teatra—a theatre—everything from the gilded trim on the balconies and railings, the faded frescos on the ceiling, the fluted marble pillars and the burnished wood decor, spoke of a time long past, yet resurrected for user enjoyment. The ultimate flourish, in Kuu’s mind, was the massive chandelier which hung down from a thick chain of cubic zirconia fastened to the dome ceiling, suspended over the center of the main mezzanine. The chandelier glittered like a million shining eyes, reflecting and refracting light as it redirected it around the room with a poet’s touch. That was not the most impressive bit of it to Kuu though; the multitude of lights set at the ends of its layers of tentacle-like arms were all incandescent. Incandescent. In a world filled with Glo, that soft yellow wash seemed eerily eldritch, as if the souls of the ghosts of the forebears of the technology were entrapped in those little bulbs, shining through onto a world where they were long forgotten. Staring up at the chandelier, then and every other time before, there was something regal about just even being there that made Kuu feel special. Standing there in the massive open foyer, hemmed in by the sentinels of looming bookshelves with mouths brimming full of fiction and nonfiction alike, Kuu could swear she had been transported to the ancient Rynn continent two thousand years past. Despite its glaring grandeur, hundreds of individuals cued in and out of the Lexinorium, coming and going as they did their business or whatever it was, seemingly unaware of anything extraordinary in their midst. And although Kuu had come there many, many times herself, she remained in awe with every subsequent visit.

A figure suddenly manifested in front of her, cuing out of thin air. They wore a perfectly-tailored jacket and hard dark hair immaculately shellacked to the shape of their head. The smile was knowing yet friendly, and it was a familiar one.

Oddsworth, one of the many attendants at the Lexinorium. Likely sensing her UID and pulling up her default user preferences, the Lexinorium would know by now that she preferred the attendant above all others and had summoned the necessary protocols.

”Greetings miss Kuu. Welcome back to Kostinov Lexinorium. I trust you have been well?”

Kuu bowed her head humbly. “Hello Oddsworth.”

Oddsworth’s gender wasn’t at all apparent from their appearance or presentation. Of course, that was no uncommon thing on Tansis, or anywhere for that matter, as gender was more fluid than water in most cultures. What was intriguing, however, was that the Lexinorium had chosen to give one of its attendants such an ambiguous presentation. They were, all of them, artificial constructs, just like the Lexinorium itself. So how did one address an AI: he? She? Zhe? With zeroes and ones? Kuu was at a loss, so she interacted with the attendant on a name-only basis. The thought of asking Oddsworth such a personal question mortified Kuu. Best to play it safe and stick with the facts presented.
“And how may I be of assistance today?”

”Well, this is a strange request, I must admit, but could you direct me to your engineering section?”

Before the ink of Kuu’s question mark had dried, the Lexinorium shifted around them, like bending light, shifting by like sand blown in the wind. The images settled into place and they stood somewhere different, a long, narrow aisle, formed by vaulting shelves full of books which ran the length of it, which seemed indeterminately long.

Oddsworth leaned in, hand behind back and a glitter in their eye.

”And what will we be building today, Miss Kuu?”

Kuu looked around at the near limitless tomes surrounding them. So many minds, so much information to sort through. Thank the architects for programming attendants: one could literally search their whole natural life through those books and never find what they were looking for without proper guidance!

”Not building. I need to understand how something works, actually.”

”Aha! Research then. What kind of device is  it that you seek?”

Oddsworth held out a delicately-gloved hand as holograms of various images appeared above it as they listed off objects.

”I have the schematics for virtually any kind of machine a mind has thought of in the last five millennium. Power supplies, batteries, couplers and uncouplers; for military applications, ballistic weaponry, long arms, energy dispersal systems and over three thousand kinds of incendiary and vacuum-expulsion devices; if mass destruction is not you premise, in Classics you’ll find such gems as the combustion engine, windows made of glass, chairs made of wood, over three hundred different printing presses, an assortment of sanitation devices…”

Kuu stared in awe as each arcane image flashed by in sequence.

”…forks, knives, spoons, forks that are also spoons; or perhaps you are looking for something with more…character. In that regard, I would suggest perusing Exotics, where you’ll find a variety of endearing curios, including but not limited to: smoking pipes, hairpieces, rabbit’s feet, and a wide array of personal stimulation devices…”

Kuu’s eyes went wide at the sight of the large phallic image and she quickly put her hands over it, extinguishing the feed and gently lowering Oddsworth’s hand with her own.

”Magnigraft!”  Kuu chirped, her cheeks rosy with embarrassment.

“I beg you pardon, Miss Kuu?”

”I’m looking for…” Kuu cleared her throat as she regained her composure.
“I’m looking for a magnigraft. Do you have anything to do with one of those, perhaps?”

Oddsworth stared at Kuu inquisitively for a moment then the familiar, confident smile returned.

”Why of course! Why didn’t you mention it sooner?”

Before Kuu could respond, they were transported to another section of the Lexinorium, cuing into a different wing, though much alike the one they had just come from. Oddsworth bent over, thumbing through a row of books amongst a seemingly endless collection of them on towering, adjacent shelves.

”Now let’s see. Where did I put that volume? I know it’s around here somewhere. Funny, I was just sourcing this same book for another client not too long ago. Forty three years, fifty two days and ten hours to be exact, but who’s counting? Aha! Here we are.”

Oddsworth pulled out a dusty leather-bound book and placed it almost reverently in Kuu’s hands, who received it in kind.
“Theory and Structure of Optical Enhancement Modifications: A History And Reference Guide For The Modern Enthusiast. Irving Peace. This should have everything you need.”

Kuu opened the book and a blank page with a square, glowing engram stared her back in the face. She placed her small hand against the engram and her head tilted back into the air as her eyelids fluttered rapidly. After a brief moment, she lowered her gaze back to the book and closed it, handing it back to Oddsworth.

”Did it have what you were looking for? Peace was a brilliant man in his time. We are fortunate that such a mind was around for us to inscribe it.”

Kuu looked at the floor between them as she examined the new information that she had uploaded. After several seconds her shoulders slumped and she sighed, meeting Oddsworth’s questioning gaze with dejection.
“I’m afraid that all of this doesn’t help me. I know everything I possibly could about this device, but I don’t see how any of it can help me.”

Suddenly, two high-backed armchairs appeared behind each of them and Oddsworth sat down, crossing a leg as they cradled a steaming mug of tea between gloved hands. Kuu looked down and found an identical mug in her own. It was her favourite blend too, from the pleasant aroma. Oddsworth took a sip from their mug and motioned for Kuu to sit down.

”Perhaps a little context will provide some insight.”

Kuu sat on the edge of the chair and sipped from her tea, a small smile playing at the corners of her mouth as she delighted in the drink that was not really even there.
“Well, it’s a long story, but the short version is that I have been following this man—a bounty hunter as it turns out—who has something that I need. I pursued him onto a Skyline but he managed to get away before I could find out where he went. And that brings me to where I am at now.”

Oddsworth sipped from their tea.

”And is it too bold of me to assume you are still aboard this Skyline as we speak?”

Kuu nodded, frowning down at her reflection in the teacup.

”Then the most natural question to follow is how does one evade another in such a predicament, when said other and other are both bound to their locations in such a limiting manner?”

Kuu sighed. “I considered the very same, but it turns out that many, many people can fit onto the line and that they present many location in which one could easily hide. If he decided to pose as another, I would not recognize him and he could slip and off unnoticed at the next station.”

”So then this magnigraft—you figure you would be able to use that to pinpoint him, as it were?”

”Perhaps, but it does not take too much imagination or innovation to disguise one’s face. There is nothing stopping him from donning a mask, refitting his mod or even keeping low enough to conceal his features. The variables are too many and too soon. The odds are against me, I’m afraid.”

”Fear not miss Kuu. Odds are my game; after all, is it not what they call me?”

Kuu smiled wanly. “I appreciate your support, I really do, but I just don’t see how all of this data is going to help us.”

Oddsworth drummed their fingers on the arm of their chair as they stared off into space, thinking.
“You said you—and presumably this bounty hunter of repute—are still aboard the Aerial Transit Pods, yes? Why not perform a differential integral component analysis?”

Kuu looked at Oddsworth as if they had grown another head.

”I apologize. I spend much of my day interfacing with core AIs and shadow protocols; the technobabblex becomes more a matter of habit than course, I’m afraid.”

Oddsworth leaned in and placed a hand against the side of their face, lowering their voice. “A horribly boring lot, that. But don’t tell them I told you that.”

They sat back, taking a sip and continued.

“Rather, what was meant to be articulated was that it may behoove one in your situation to compare their surroundings to that of the object of their desire.”

”I am sorry Oddsworth, I still do not understand…”

”Why miss Kuu, it is simple: compare the components of the tram with those of the device—the magnigraft—and the answer may be in the difference between them.”

”You mean compare every single component of the Skyline to the magnigraft? But there must be over ten thousand different materials used in the machine! I know next to nothing of intermittent thrust systems but I do know they use Glo technology, which means they must be complex. That is not to mention that I know nothing of this specific line; there are hundreds of them over Tansis, many different from another. Who is to say what contains what? I feel it is a dead end, I’m afraid.”

”Ah, ever the pessimist, miss Kuu! It is not befitting of you, I have to be honest. But you are slightly mistaken on several fronts: there are actually only eight thousand, three hundred and fifty seven separate components among a given subset of aerial lines, if you aren’t counting passengers. More, there are actually just over one thousand active lines transiting the city, as of the last census.”

”But Oddsworth, that makes our case worse!”

”It would indeed, if those thousand lines weren’t manufactured by only four companies. And at an average of eight different models each, our pile of sand sifts down from thirty million factors to just over thirty, which is a considerably more manageable number.”

“But I don’t have access to that information. That is proprietary—found only on intramind channels and private networks. There is no way Big Transit would ever release that information to the public.”

Oddsworth smiled, that ever-knowing, borderline cheeky grin. “When you’ve been around the Link as long as I have, miss Kuu, you find doors that others have forgotten even exist. You would be surprised how many doors get left unlocked when people don’t know they are there.”
Oddsworth waved a hand between them and Kuu’s HUD flashed a prompt signifying incoming data, which she received. She unpacked it and the blueprints for over thirty different models of Aerial Transports, some dating back as far as eighty years, were uploaded to her consciousness.
“Now, run an overlay against the magnigraft schematics. Specifically, we want to look for Omni Parametric Anomalies.”

“I am sorry, Oddsworth. Omni…”

“Omni Parametric Anomalies. OPA. Things that are rare enough to be in stark contrast to their surroundings.”

“OPA? Okay, I will see what I can do.”

Kuu began running the overlay, scanning through the documents in her HUD.

”What do you see?”

Kuu’s eyes flickered back and forth as her brain attempted to make sense of the streaming words and numbers flitting past.

”Nothing significant so far. Only thirteen percent likeness on a functional scale. About as similar as a bee and a bat.”

”Good! Now, let’s zoom in further, shall we? Run a molecular bypass, with a boolean emphasizing rare materials.”

”You want me to go elemental? That could take hours! Why so specific?”

”Because even though bees and bats may only be connected by structure, they are both made of carbon. It is thus the very essence of their being that connects them to all other things, big and small.”

Kuu continued working, calling up the scripts that Oddsworth had suggested. “You are not going spiritual on me now, are you Oddsworth? After all of these years, I wouldn’t have thought…”

Kuu paused, staring in silence.

”What is it miss Kuu?”

”There’s…there’s a match. I don’t believe it. The primary mirror in the objective…it has a micro layer of aluminum.”

“Aluminium?” Oddsworth scoffed. “Hardly a differentiating metal between the two! You might as well have found electrons for all the good that will do you.”

”Not just aluminum, Oddsworth: Aluminum oxide.”

”Aluminum oxide, miss Kuu?”

”Oddsworth, the magnigraft…has a coating made of sapphire.”

Oddsworth sat up erect, looking solemn as they sipped their tea. They placed the cup on the saucer and the familiar smile returned.

”It appears then, miss Kuu, you have found your blue diamond in the rough. OPA.”

Kuu stared at the image a moment longer, before she summoned it away. She nodded, dumbfounded.

“OPA.”

They stood up and the chairs vanished, dissipating back into the code from whence they came. Oddsworth adjusted the cuffs of their sleeves, dusting off an arm with the back of their glove.

”Thank you Oddsworth. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

”Are there any other services that I can provide today, miss Kuu?”

”No, thank you again. This is amazing!”

”Oh miss Kuu, you are too kind. But there is nothing amazing about it, I’m afraid. It just helped you pick up the scent of the trail already laid, as it were. In that regard, what once was amazing is now…merely natural.”

***
Oddsworth’s words faded into the background, filtering out until they were electronic noise, then nothing. Kuu raised her head, staring at the time-tarnished faux-leather of the back of the seat in front of her. Looking around, it was still dark in the cabin and most people were either asleep or adrift in spaze-gaze, doing who-knew-what. Excitedly, Kuu dialed up a mass-spec protocol, overlaying it onto her optic sensor. The world flickered and objects began to resonate at varying vibrations, tiny near-microscopic data feeds dancing around them like gnats over a pond. She panned her head slowly from side to side, examining the components of the people and objects around her, filtering through the barrage of near-endless data that the algorithm generated.

Various steel alloys. Copper, nickel, cadmium, lithium. Silicon, sodium, oxygen and nitrogen. Other trace elements that most people had never heard of. Lots and lots of carbon. She narrowed the trace band down to metal-oxides, hoping the filter would be more helpful. She increased the range of the scan, notching the field radius up to two bouts. In the infrared HUD that was part of the program, Kuu could see the other trams come into view. Suddenly, the algorithm chimed several times as it pinged results. Examining the HUD viewfinder, Kuu could see that the results were a match but by their size and location, they were most likely jewellery on the bodies of other passengers or some small component on a pocket device of some sort. After a minute of silence, Kuu was about to give up, but then the program returned a last result: eighty nine percent probability of aluminum oxide. And it was outside of the tram. And it was moving.
Kuu looked up at the ceiling of the cabin, listening to the trolly as it zipped along its magnetic line. Suddenly, it donned on Kuu: of course! That was where he must have gone—why she couldn’t find him. He wasn’t in the tram anymore: he was on it.
Kuu got out of her seat and began carefully making her way down the aisle, squeezing past a leaning, sleeping body hanging out into the aisle here and gingerly stepping over an extended leg there. She came to the cabin doors and the sensor, detecting movement, opened the doors and let Kuu into the adjoining section. Kuu stepped through and stopped in the connecting bay, looking around. Sure enough, one one side of the bay there was a nondescript arrow pointing up, and near the corner where the wall met the ceiling, the words FIRE ESCAPE were printed in fading red letters.
***
The hatch opened and a small, black-haired head slowly poked itself out. The air whipped past Kuu’s face, the sudden glare of Karyus shooting through the geodesic plates of the Agridome, assaulting her eyes. Blinking away the sunspots in her vision, Kuu pulled herself up to the roof, swinging her little legs onto the cold metal of the tram’s surface. The tram moved along at such a clip that the air friction boasted a considerable force, and while there appeared to be a lip along the edge of each trolley, likely to keep the service workers safe during repairs, while moving, they were little more than something to trip over before one fell from the heavens to certain doom. And certain it would be; Kuu leaned out, holding on to the blade-thick connecting rod which anchored the trolley to the tram, gazing down at the gaping maw of space beneath them. Far, far below, lights dazzled and distant holos flickered as the city writhed in its daily goings-on, unaware of anything other than its own self-importance. Layers of aerial traffic crisscrossed back and forth above that, though a few corporate buildings and commercial centers jutted nearly high enough to intrude on that boundary. Kuu could see a massive dirigible plodding along, a holo ad featuring a female pop star singing playing along its length. Something about an upcoming concert. A skysled suddenly dashed past her, not four blades away. Kuu gasped and pulled herself back in.

Panting, she considered abandoning the venture altogether. Was it really worth risking falling to one’s death all for what, a dream? But it had been more than that. Hadn’t it? The dream was so vivid, Kuu couldn’t help but feel that she was being transported to another place. Another time, even. And it recurred so frequently, that either something had seriously gone wrong with her core programming or else…there was some kind of phenomenon that she was now a part of. Of course, the proper thing to do was to submit her memory logs to the local Mender, but Kuu knew that in doing so that they’d wipe any trace even tangentially associated with the anomaly and that would mean she wouldn’t even remember she had the mission to begin with. And that would mean that her faraway friend—that nearly intangible, untouchable figure—the only one that she had in her life (except for Donut of course), would be doomed to fail. Kuu had foreseen what would happen to him if she were not to act. And while she didn’t know the full sequence of events and all the people involved, she knew what the first step had to be, and that was catching the…

SCHHHBO!

Kuu gasped and fell to her face as the blast echoed into the metal of the trolley arm beside her, the echo dissipating away in the wake of the speeding tram. Kuu’s sensors blared alarm, signifying the sound had been a high velocity projectile, targeted to kill.

Someone had just fired a gun at her!

Kuu panted as her heart raced, her fingers nearly digging grooves into the aluminum alloy of the tram roof. Kuu had never had an attempt on her life, and in that moment her world had become upended. What had once been a quiet, introspective and borderline boring life had just been overturned, doused in merconium ketafluid and thrown into a furnace. Kuu knew she was no vigilante and that reflection had just become all the more real now that it had been punctuated with a bullet.

Yet, behind the wall of abject fear, childish dreams and innocence, a fire still burned. In fact, laying there helpless and defeated, thousands of blades above the city line as she soared through space at rip roaring speeds, Kuu also felt angry. Angry at the world for putting her in this position, but also angry at the man who stood between her and her goal, however abstract, and thinking he could shut her down.
Well, Kuu would not be shut down so easily. If she was good at anything, it was existing, however subtly, and she intended to continue doing just that.
Kuu peaked her head slowly around the side of the connecting arm and, to her surprise, saw a figure fleeing the other way. Zooming in with her optic sensor, she could see a man in a long coat hopping from one tram to the next as he made his way down the line towards the conducting booth. Immediately, Kuu knew he was planning on hijacking the train. There was no other reason for him to run from her. If he could infiltrate the control hub, he could easily override the propulsion regulator and speed up the line to the point where Kuu would be thrown off like a drunk on a mechanical bull. But if she could close the distance between them, he may be forced to reconsider his options. And then, perhaps, she could find an opportunity to distract him and get that sample.

Kuu launched to her feet and began running along the line. Despite its rapid speed, the train moved smoothly over the lines above, save from the occasional hiccup or sway from a knick in the line. As she pursued the man, her HUD fed her veritable newsfeeds of data, everything from her prey’s coordinates, his body temperature and his current velocity which, to Kuu’s chagrin, outpaced her own considerably. Kuu dialled up the nervous system in her legs and she managed to boost her movement efficiency by nearly twenty percent.
She began to gain on him.

Kuu hopped over the gap between trams and, as she landed, he sensors went crazy. A red beacon flashed in her field of vision, warning or her a probable incoming foreign object. She dodged slightly to the side, following the adjustments recommended to her by her sensory system, and another boom-crack as another round from the Atria sailed past her left shoulder. Shots continued to fire and Kuu’s systems continued to direct her away from them with precision statistics and a touch of guardian angel dust. She closed the gap between them and landed on the same cart as the bounty hunter. In one deft movement, the man swivelled on his heel, getting down on to one knee as the tails of his duster fanned our behind him. Kuu stopped dead in her tracks as a laser sight aimed straight at her chest convinced her that was the best plan of action. That, and the 0.00001% chance of evading such a close targeted attack that her system assured her was the case.

“What’s a child doing following me?”

“I am not a child.” Kuu said defiantly, despite her internal terror at having a precision weapon aimed at her vital organs.

The bounty hunter’s magnigraft swivelled and telescoped, taking Kuu in in more detail. He stood up, cocking his head curiously to the side.

“A mixup? What’s a bloody Halfie want with me? Wait, you’re not one of Choga’s pets, are you? You tell that guttersnipe that a deal’s a deal: there ain’t no head when the job goes dark. That’s creed. Even that slug of a boss of yours knows that.”

Kuu was taken aback. “I have no idea…”

“Enough talk. How about I send a little message to your organization, one that reminds them them what happens to those who break oath. You see this here?”

With his free hand, the bounty hunter reached into his duster and pulled a device from a concealed utility belt covered in various contraptions and dangerous-looking gadgets. He procured a round metallic disc with glowing red facets along its edges.

“This is an ECD–an electro-concussive destabilizer. Basically, it blows magnetic shit up. Those in the business call ’em sizzlers, ‘cause there’s a lot of electrical discharge after the knockout punch. But you know the best part about it? It’s not the sheer power or the fireworks; no, it’s the uniqueness.”

The bounty hunter hefted the ECD in his hand, smiling like a shark.

“As it turns out, this is a class five controlled explosive, meaning only those with Sectech clearance have access to it. Or so that’s the story. And of all the guilds, there’s only three that have that kind of clearance, one of which happens to be your pig of a leader and his little posse. So you can bet that once Overwatch figures out the source of the damage, Vertex will be swarming your little hideaway like wasps with a kicked-over nest. Too bad neither of us will be there to see the look on old Choga’s face when it happens. Gods, what I would pay for that!”

Kuu opened her mouth to respond but, before she could, the bounty hunter fastened the disc to the end of his cobra, the barrel changing shape to accommodate a fitting for it, and he aimed it above Kuu’s head, firing it past her. Kuu ducked into a squat, cowering as she covered her head and closed her eyes as the sound of the gunshot echoed around her. Several seconds passed and nothing else seemed to transpire. She raised her head and watched as the bounty hunter jumped off the racing tram into thin air. Except he did not fall. Instead, he somehow glided across the air as if descending down an invisible staircase. Kuu could see a blue glow emanating from his boots, leaving an ephemeral trail in their wake. Her sensors told her it was some kind of propulsion system. She watched him go, AVs gliding past him as he maneuvered his way down to the city line where he landed on top of a skyscraper, rolling across the roof to distribute the force of impact. The train banked and the building was out of view. A small beeping sound stole her attention away and Kuu’s eyes followed the sound up to the nearest trolley arm, about three blades away. There, near the line connector, was the blinking disc. Kuu stood up, scanning the device with her sensors. As her systems gathered data on the strange object, the blinking began to increase in frequency and pitch and a sense of unease quickly became dread. Preliminary data began to filter in and Kuu didn’t need to see the rest to know that she was staring at a bomb.

Kuu ran as fast as she ever had in her life. Funnelling her biochemical scripts to funnel all surplus ATP to her leg muscles, Kuu sped across the tram roofs, hopping one after the next as she attempted to put distance between her and the disc. As she ran, she could hear the beeping increasing in frequency, matching the ever-increasing speed of her heart as it struggled to pump to the demands she had set for it.

What was I thinking? Kuu kept asking herself, over and over in her head.

She may have been a Cybrid but she was still just a little girl beneath it all, and now she was terrified for her life.

Wait.

Child. Kuu was a child. Children. There may be children on the tram!

Kuu had to warn them. But what could she do? There was no way to get them off the line safely; currently, they were over scratchland, somewhere just off the perimeter of the city boundary, hundreds of blades above land. There was nowhere to go but down. And down meant death. But staying on the tram also surely meant death, so Kuu knew she had to try something. Maybe there was an emergency brake that she could activate. That would warn the authorities, and then maybe she’d have time to…

BAABOOOOOOOOOSH!!!!

The explosion sent Kuu flying onto her face as the shockwave rippled out across the surface of the tram. Red and white flames followed by snaking electrical lines danced past her like hungry fireworks. There was a metallic groan and the hiss-crack of a whip as the tram line snapped.

And then the screams began.

Kuu looked back over her shoulder and saw three severed cabins dangling beneath the line like lame appendages ready to be excised. Kuu could see people in the adjacent cabins—the ones still attached to the line—panicking and scrambling for their lives as they pushed and shoved down the aisles, racing to get to the other end of the line. Kuu saw a little girl, not much younger than her, tugging at the unmoving body of a woman beside her, slumped over with what looked to be blood caked in her hair. The little girl turned to look out the window and tear-stained eyes met with Kuu’s.

Kuu held out a hand, reaching across an impossible space, and the little girl put her hand against the window, her mouth moving but the words inaudible.

A series of deafening snaps and twangs and the remaining carts began to dislodge from their trolleys as the weight of the derailed trams dragged them down. The little girl turned her head and then she was gone, falling through space among thousands of tonnes of metal and bodies, to become nothing more or nothing less than a memory.

“No!” Kuu shouted, still reaching out for an little hand that would never take it.

Another snap, this time closer—too close—and Kuu felt herself grow weightless.

***
”I dunno, man, are you sure that’s such a good idea?”

He watched anxiously as his friend pried off the wheel cover of the steering wheel with a small electrical driver, wires spilling out like intestines.

”Relax, there’s no one watching out here.”

”Uh, not true. There’s relays all over the place. We just passed like three Pingwings the last couple of minutes. They don’t need to see you to see you, man. It just takes one of them to grab your metrics and they’ll see you’ve overridden the autopilot. And that’s a serious offence. Transcorp patrols don’t mess around!”

”That’s…a fun story, but I don’t read Fantasy, I’m afraid.”

He played with a small metal sensor connected by crisscrossing wires interlinked to various circuit elements.

“I’m not making this shit up! My cousin knows a guy who decided to fly commando, just over Industrial way there by the dockyards. The place usually never has a soul, but a passing flyby happened to doxx him and border patrol was on him in minutes. He’s still doing time over in Requiem, and that was five years ago!”

His friend shrugged. “Not much into horrors either.”

His friend shook his head and crossed his arms, putting his feet up on the dash as he stared sourly out the windshield at the passing cityscape, other AVs whizzing by them like busy bees.

“Hey, get your dirty-ass feet off my car. I just had this cleaned. Show some respect.”

He took his feet down. “Doesn’t seem like you are too worried about the state of your ride.” He motioned to the jumble of wires on his friends lap, piling out of the partially dismantled wheel.

He leaned over towards his friend. “That looks complicated. Are you sure you know what you are doing?”

His friend twisted the driver and a small beep sounded and the wheel shifted downwards, settling into his hands. The lighting around the dash changed colour to a soft blue, indicating something had changed. He turned to his friend and smiled.

”I guess we’re gonna find out aren’t we?”

Before his friend could respond, he jerked the steering wheel to the left, banking downward into a hard nosedive. His friend tumbled in his seat, bracing himself against the dash to avoid slamming into the ceiling.

“Hey! A warning next time would be nice.”

He shuffled back into the passenger seat and pressed a button near his shoulder, a safety belt extending across his lap and chest.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you you should always fasten your seatbelt?” He grinned sheepishly at his friend.

”No, no they didn’t. But they also didn’t tell me I’d be driving with a crazy…whoa! Watch it, you almost ran into that guy!”

”You know, I think you ought to chill out a bit. I mean, look at us: young, dumb, living the dream, free-riding… You gotta enjoy the moments when they come up, man. If you’re always afraid and looking over your shoulder, you’re gonna miss the opportunities when they show up.”

”Oh yeah? Please enlighten me, old wise one.”

He dodged around several cars, lane splitting between them as he maneuvered the AV through the air.
“It’s simple, really: don’t try and force it.”

”Wait. Did you hear that? Was that an explosion?” He leaned over, squinting up through his window.

His friend continued, unconcerned. “It’s kind of like love, if you think about it. If you try too hard, it doesn’t happen. But if you let it happen—it just might fall right into your lap.”

A large object slammed into the windshield, a stress fracture radiating out around it as it partially embedded itself into the glass. The two friends began screaming.

”Holy mother of shit, is that a girl? Dude, you hit someone!”

”What?! She hit me! I can’t see anything!”

”Dude, I think she’s dead! You killed a little girl, man! Oh my god, we’re so dead!”

The AV weaved back and forth as he struggled to maintain control, his windshield cracked and too obscured by the body to make out anything.

”We’re gonna crash, we’re gonna crash!”

”Think of something!”

”I dunno, I dunno! I’m freaking out!”

”Quit freaking out!”

”I’m freaking out!”

”Wait! The autopilot!”

”What about it? Oh my god oh my god, oh my god, I’m freaking out!”

”Put the…Ahhh! Never mind, give it to me!”

”Wait, what are you…”

The friends wrestled the steering wheel between them as the roof of a large building came into view.”

”There! Land there!”

”What? We’re not gonna make it. We…”

They screamed as they pulled up on the steering wheel, skidding across the gravel of the rooftop, the chassis grinding against concrete and stone as rocks shot up around them like sparklers. A wing buckled against the force, snapping off and sending them into a turn. They smashed into the railing, half the battered vehicle hanging precariously over the edge, held on only by the remaining rails that helped buffer them. The body of the girl rolled out of the indent, sliding down the crippled hood of the car and down the side off the building. She fell through several canopies, bouncing off the third and landing on an adjacent roof, crashing through a layer of old plywood covering a hole where the old facade had crumbled in, and disappeared from sight.

***

Not far off another explosion—this one much larger—echoed throughout the scratchlands as the derailed trams collided into the craggy face of the rough hewn hills. As the smoke settled, a strange glow began to emanate from within the rubble, the humming of a beacon, an ancient song, coming to life. All around the moon, tremors began to emerge, as if the heavenly body had begun to shiver. And then, one after another, massive metallic spires rose out the ground, impossibly huge pyramidal forms, each preceded by a guttural, elephantine call, as if announcing their arrival. When the last of them had been exhumed, structures near their apex began to alight with brilliant red surges, as if they collected the very light of the stars themselves. And then, in one coordinated effort, brilliant rays of red light shot out from each until they reached the moon’s upper atmosphere. Once there, the pyramids shifted in the soil and the beams split off, diffusing outwards as if tracing the ecliptic. As the light spread out, eventually, they conjoined, and not five minutes later the entire moon was encased in a shell of red light.

The last of the lasers dissipated and the pyramid structures stood stark still, silent and unmoving against the backdrop of a starry expanse, sentinels of the night watching quietly as fate churned in the very air just above.