Chapter Twenty-Six: Mister Karadengo
The distant yet frantic call of klaxons was the first thing that came to her senses, followed by the smell of dust and then the utter oppression of the darkness all around her.As she blinked awake, Kuu’s memory modules–a bit jarred from the fall–cycled back into full gear and she remembered where she was. Or, relatively where she was, since she hadn’t exactly had time to take in a lot on her fall from the heavens. She knew she was in some kind of abandoned building, one without any power by the look of it, and something soft-ish had broken her fall. She looked up through the shattered wood slats in the ceiling, the hole through which she had fallen and the only real source of light. Outside, she could make out the looming walls of the tenement buildings and beyond that the amber sky of a Tansis dusk, the endless air traffic flitting in and out of view like busy insects. From her vantage point, Kuu could make out the faint ebbing of a light reflecting against the biodome firmament, signifying that the city had gone on alert. She wasn’t sure what had tripped off the emergency system but she knew she had to get back home to safety; if they enacted curfew before she could get back to the Blok Kubiform, well, it was an understatement to say that the stratzenmuskl patrols weren’t especially kind to cybernetics at the best of times…
Kuu pushed herself off of the pile of soggy flour sacs which she apparently owed her life to. That and, perhaps more so, her body’s ability to repair itself in short order. She adjusted the rod receptors in her eyes and was able to take in more of the room, discovering an old pass bar and various industrial kitchen supplies, now forlorn and covered in dust. Perhaps, it had once been a popular bakery or a little boutique cafe; now it was just another of the many faceless and forgotten businesses that had closed when the wave of economic collapse from a decade prior had billowed out into the Shenzen district, leaving a veritable ghetto in its wake. Kuu sighed and continued to scan the room for a way out. A speck of light shining through a boarded-up window peaked in her dialed-up optics and she approached the window, gasping as a creature zipped by underfoot, brushing against her leg. She stopped, lifting a leg in horror as her optics watched a cat-sized rat scurry along the cement floor and disappear into the darkness. Kuu stepped gingerly from then on, reaching the window which she examined thoroughly for any further creepy crawlies. She pried at the boards which came off with surprising ease, telling her they had likely been there long enough to rot away. She cleared the window and, once all the boards were removed, she managed to unlatch the lock and slide the frame upwards, kicking up a sheet of dust in her face. Coughing and batting smut out of the air, Kuu stepped out onto the streets—and into chaos.
The sky–biodome–was alight with ebbing amber flashes, a feature programmed right into the panes of the dome itself, giving the impression that the whole sky was intermittently on fire. Kuu knew better, knew that the beacons meant a citywide alert and, as she had suspected and feared, impending lockdown. Something had happened when she was out; something big. Tansis didn’t go full alert very often; the closest thing she could remember was fifteen years prior when a massive asteroid threatened to veer onto a collision course with Lema. In the end, the trajectories didn’t match up and it passed by, the moon and its inhabitants unharmed. But even then Tansis only went to Stage 1. This was serious business to have gone to Stage 4. Stage 4 was reserved for nuclear meltdowns, mass biohazard contamination and other apocalyptic events.
This made Kuu all the more confused to see so many people dressed up in costume, partying in the streets. Was it some kind of doomsday cult she had walked into? Then it hit her: her HUD reminded her that it was Jandrem of Sarelo, the ninth of thirteen days that made up Valletat–the festival of the dead. Valletat was an age-old tradition, believed to have begun in druidic times, honoring the memories of the dead. While there were no druids on Tansis, of course, the traditions were brought by the earliest settlers on the nascent moon colonies, many of which were fey that were escaping persecution of some sort from the many wars raging on Rynn at the time. Valletat–literally “living death”–had evolved in the city to become less a ritual of mourning but an excuse to party in the name of past names, and even less so any kind of honorable tribute to ancestors. Indeed, one (very informal) ritualistic drinking game involved literally urinating on the gravestones of the loser’s deceased. Suffice to say, Valletat was very popular; nearly everyone under the age of one hundred and fifty and with two working legs was out on the streets celebrating that day. There were costumes of every shape and color, most bright but some daringly dark; streamers and banners, floats both real and holographic; dancers, fire spinners, musicians and every other performer one could imagine. All this, juxtaposed against the muted dread of the citywide alert, made for a most absurd experience. Kuu couldn’t quite tell whether she was supposed to panic or join in the fun.
As if making the decision for her, a group of young passersby wearing colorful masks but little else grabbed Kuu by the hand, reefing her into the fray. Kuu had no time to protest and even if she could, no one would hear it over the din of sound around them. She was dragged into the masses, people of every walk and shape surrounding her, hemming her in. She had become absorbed by the organism that was Valletat and she didn’t know how to escape. Perhaps there was no escape from this sort of thing. Kuu had never participated in past festivals of any kind–or any social event, for that matter. She much preferred to be cuddled up with her meowmod in her unit, a cup of tea in one hand and a good book in the other. This was the opposite of that. She could feel her sensors about to overload. She wasn’t built for this kind of…extraversion. She watched in awe and slight terror as people danced and celebrated around her. Many were drinking fermented beverages and she was sure there were enough drugs circulating to make the local pharmacies blush. She wondered how so many people could be oblivious to the alert. Did they not care? Or were they just too high and drunk to notice? Either way, Kuu had to find a way out before the lockdown began. But if she were to chart a path back home, first she needed to know what was going on. Doing her best to pantomime some fake dance moves, Kuu stumbled and swayed over towards a young girl who appeared to not be inundated with other people, like most of the others. She sidled up next to the girl and leaned in close to her, the girl so into the sights around her that she didn’t seem to notice Kuu’s presence.
“Excuse me. Could you tell me what has happened?” Kuu yelled over the pandemonium.
The girl turned and glanced at Kuu, her smile growing larger. “Heeey! Isn’t this awesome? They really went all out this year with the fireworks, huh? Did you see the thing with the bears? Wasn’t that cuh-raaaazy?”
“Um… Yes, that was very…neat. But, um, if you don’t mind… could you please tell me what is going on?”
“Going on? YOU are going on, sister!” The girl laughed and grabbed Kuu by the hand, twirling her around in a circle, encouraging her to dance.
Kuu went along with it for a few twirls until the girl’s attention was stolen away once more. Kuu moved away, bouncing between bodies until, eventually, she stumbled out of the crowd and into the periphery near an adjacent building. She wavered backwards until her back was resting against the cold stone of the wall and she slid halfway down, catching her breath.
“Not your tune, I take it?” Said a male voice from beside her.
She turned to see a middle-aged gentleman in a trench coat leaning against the same building smoking a cigarette. Kuu didn’t usually talk to strangers but the man seemed harmless enough.
“Two left feet, I’m afraid.”
The man nodded, flicking the butt onto the already trash-laden street. “I used to dance but I blew out my knee in the war. Mind you, there weren’t many people left to dance with after that anyhow. None that I knew well enough, anyhow.”
Kuu didn’t know how to respond to the man. She knew nothing about war and didn’t get the impression the man was fishing for sympathy.
“Well, you have yourself a good night miss.”
“Wait.”
The man stopped, frowning. “Yep?”
“Do you…do you know why the city is on alert?”
He looked perplexed. “Where have you been the last six hours?”
“I was… offline for a time. An accident.”
The man held up a hand. “Hey, none of my business. But I don’t recommend going anywhere near the Kado district anytime soon. The street meat have that place locked up tighter than Seeling Street.”
“Why? What happened there?”
The man looked past Kuu, nodding behind her. “See for yourself.”
Kuu turned around and followed the man’s gaze, gasping as her eyes traveled up the length of a strange metallic spire, jutting out of the city where it nearly graced the biodome, hundreds of stories above. Out of its apex a bright red beam of light shot straight up, somehow piercing the biodome without damaging it. The object, though Kuu’s sensors told her it was over one hundred blocks away, loomed over them as if it had sprouted out of the earth at their feet. It appeared to be made of some kind luminous, glassy metal with an anisotropic surface not unlike obsidian. A faint green light ebbed out of strange grooves etched across its surface as if some kind of energy source lay within, straining to get out. Its design seemed purposeful but Kuu’s databases could not place any known architects that matched its style.
“What…what is it?” Kuu stammered.
“No one knows. They popped up about midday, came right of the rock. There’s more of them, they say, all over Lema. They’re callin’ them Spurs, ’cause some of the more superstitious folk think it’s some kind of… spiny fish god or something slowly rising out of the ground. Spurs on the back, you know?”
Kuu nodded, transfixed. “Lighenfighen. The Unfinished One. A Poio legend from the first era. But the timeline isn’t right, and there is no mention of the moons in their culture.”
The man shrugged. “Hey, I don’t make these things up. Either way, that one there took out about twenty city blocks when it popped up, causing a lot of damage. That in itself might not have been enough to tip Overwatch to flip the switch, but see that light coming out the top there? Apparently, they all do that. And its forming some kind of…force-field around the whole moon. All air traffic has been grounded and no comms can get through that thing. So I think you can see why Big Brother is a bit antsy, huh?”
Kuu stared in awe at the Spur, unsure of what to make of it. There was an air of danger about it despite its majestic construction, but not so much a danger that it itself posed but more like…a warning, somehow. Kuu couldn’t put it into words.
The man reached into his pocket and pulled out another cigarette, lighting it with a match. “It’s a shame, really. There was a really great doughnut place down on five-eighty-fifth there. Don’t imagine it made it out of that alive.”
Kuu turned to the man. “Doughnut!”
The man chuckled as he blew smoke out of his nostrils. “I can see you like doughnuts too.”
“No, my cat Doughnut! He could be in trouble. I have to get back to him.”
Kuu ran off down the nearest alleyway, scripts in her syncrospatial cortex already relaying the fastest calculated route to a holomap in her HUD. As she emerged on the other side she nearly walked right into a passerby on stilts, part of a wash of people in a parade marching down the boulevard. She backed away from the crowd and a voice from behind her startled her again.
“Get yer Stick Fix! We’ve got every kind of meat from Metriak to Candos: bat on a stick, rat on a stick. Don’t like the creepy crawlies? Try the goat kebab. It’s my grandma-ma’s secret recipe!”
Kuu bowed politely at the street vendor, one of countless others lining the walk, deftly set up to cater to hungry paraders. The street was crowded and there didn’t appear to be any easy way through. As she recalculated her trajectory, she accidentally placed a hand on a railing she hadn’t noticed and looked over to see a staircase leading up to a skywalk which led up and over the boulevard. She raced up the stairs, continuing on a path which her visuals told her was only a 99.7% deviation from her course. As she ran along the bridge over the road, dodging carefully around the many bodies coming and going, Kuu glanced to her side, looking past the hubbub of the city, the skyscraper and all the AVs and holo ads on and around them, to the Spur, that foreign sentinel standing vigil over the cityscape. It felt like it was watching her as she ran, calculating her every move. Of course that was silly: buildings didn’t think. But did anyone really know if it was a building? If Kuu knew anything it was that looks could be deceiving at the best of times.
Kuu’s momentary distraction to the side caught her unawares as a child in the oncoming pedestrian traffic accidentally dropped a toy it was holding as its mother handed it a candystick from a kiosk on the skywalk. Kuu yelped but it was more a response than a warning as she was already tripping over the toy, heading for the banister as she stumbled backwards into a stairwell. She tried to grab at the railing but the momentum threw her off course and she found herself stumbling down three flights of stairs, covering her head with her hands for protection. Luckily, no one was using the stairs and she avoided instigating a set of cren dominoes. She rolled to a stop on the sidewalk of the street, face down on the concrete. Her systems indicated minor damage to her extremities but nothing functional, though her heart was still racing from the adrenaline pumping through her veins. She slowly looked up, people walking past but no one seeming to care. A cybrid on the ground was probably nothing new to these people, and hardly worth the extra thought. Kuu stood up, fixing her dress and looking herself over. One of her elbows was badly bruised but aside from that she felt okay. She looked around and saw that she was on a different street, one with less festival traffic, though she wasn’t familiar with the area. She dialed up her localizer but the scripts came in fuzzy, unable to relay coordinates. She tapped the side of her head with her forefinger but only static got through. She guessed that her synchronizer must have been damaged in the fall. She sighed.
So much for avoiding functional damage.
Kuu looked around, a chick lost in the woods. Without her localizer Kuu would have to rely on her senses to get her bearings. The problem was Tansis was a large city by system standards and she had only been to perhaps 2% of its total area, which essentially amounted to her neighborhood and Mass Transit. Outside of that, Kuu had a handful of favorite haunts that she would visit from time to time but her bubble wasn’t large by anyone’s standards, introverts included. As a sense of panic began to set in, Kuu heard a small, familiar noise from behind her. She turned around, looking for the location of the chime but she couldn’t hone in on the source. A blinking light caught her eye from a few blades off, down on the walk by the base of the stairwell from which she had so unceremoniously descended.
The pod chit.
Kuu patted her pockets, confirming that she had dropped it in the fall. She walked over and picked it up, wondering how it had reactivated itself. Had it malfunctioned during the fall, just like her? Or was it possible…
The bounty hunter was nearby, once more.
No. That was a stretch. Kuu’s luck had already run its course on that front. She had blown all of her chances and, if statistics had anything to say about, her chances of running into the bounty hunter again were about as likely as Rynn and her moons colliding without any outside influence. Her stochastic interferometer confirmed as much and Kuu moved to pocket the chit.
As her hand rubbed against the fabric of the inside of her dress pocket, Kuu stopped. A small voice inside her told her she could–should–test it. Test the pod chit before she write it off as broken. But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? She was no technician. Turning the thing on and off was one thing but troubleshooting such a device for any or all glitches was another. And then Kuu realized something:
There was another way.
Kuu pulled the chit out and began to walk down the sidewalk, away from the stairwell. After about thirty paces the beeping began to slow. At fifty paces it stopped. A flutter in her chest as excitement began to build.
“Okay, not that way.”
Kuu turned around and went back to the staircase. At the staircase she turned and crossed the road once it was safe to do so. On the other side, she stopped at the street corner and reassessed. The beeping hadn’t changed noticeably, which meant she hadn’t significantly altered her position in relation to her quarry, so she had likely traveled perpendicular to his location. That, or the chit was truly broken and the previous change was an anomaly. To put the theory to rest, Kuu turned ninety degrees and began walking down the street, in the opposite direction as previously attempted. As she had suspected–and hoped–the beeping began to increase in frequency. Now elated, Kuu began to walk briskly down the walk, artfully dodging around people so as to not disturb them or draw any undue attention to herself.
Several minutes later, when the frequency of the chit’s pulses had reached a near-frantic period, Kuu came to a busy intersection. She was in some kind of commercial district with all kinds of shops selling various wares, beaten-down and time-weathered facades, glowing signs running on ancient fumes of noble gases. Even the holos flitting in and out of existence beckoning passersby into the shops–the walkhawks as they were derisively known as–seemed to be tired and not really giving any real effort to execute their programming. She stopped on one corner and scanned the area, watching people come and go, hovercraft of various types zipping by here and there, leaving glowing blue contrails in their wake which dissipated in seconds. As time passed and the chit continued insisting she had made her mark, she was beginning to think the device broken. Then, out of the corner of her eye she saw a glint–the familiar shining of glass–and she saw the magnigraft reflecting the multicolored lights around them. The bounty hunter emerged out of a crowd, his leather duster trailing out behind him as he made his way down the other side of the street. He moved with purpose, as if he had somewhere to be at a specific time. As Kuu watched him, he stopped suddenly, putting a hand up to his temple and looking around. Kuu gasped, recalling the same very reaction in Sho Menii complex when the chit had almost exposed her. Somehow, the device pinged his systems when it was close enough, and Kuu had forgotten this small detail. She dashed into a nearby booth, seeking refuge from her prey-turned-predator. She fumbled with the chit, turning it over in her hand as she looked for any kind of switch. Nothing was apparent and she feared she would have to take the device apart as she did before. She leaned her head out of the booth and saw the bounty hunter scanning the area, stepping out onto the street as he slowly made his way in her direction. She yanked her head back in and fumbled with the pod chit, realizing there was no time to disassemble it. There was only one option left if there was any hope in staying hidden.
“Please, let me be able to fix this.” She whispered to herself.
Kuu pointed a finger at the pod chit, beeping wildly in her lap, and discharged a bolt of electricity into it. The beeping died and the pod chit lay silent. Slowly, Kuu poked a head out and saw the bounty hunter lower his hand, looking around in confusion as if he had heard it too–or rather, not heard. He did a one-eighty check several more times then his gaze meandered on an adjacent building, seeming to catch his attention. He turned to it and descended down a staircase out of sight. Kuu took note of the sign and leaned back into the booth, letting out a long sigh. She glanced down at the dead device and realized the irony in her situation: out to retrieve secondary access data for primary access data that no longer worked. She only hoped that she hadn’t fried the circuitry beyond repair. If she had, well… She would have to deal with that if and when the time came.
“Are you just gonna sit there honey, or are you gonna play?”
Kuu jumped at the voice, realizing for the first time that a holo of a scantily dressed woman in high heels was waiting on her on a stool, legs crossed and smoking a cigarette from a quellazaire.
“This ain’t a peep show. You gotta pay to play, sweetie.”
Kuu flushed red, jumping to her feet and bowing awkwardly as she backed out of the booth, the satin drapes shielding the booth from the outside sliding over her back like limp tentacles. Kuu hadn’t realized that the specific booth she had entered was adults only, despite the countless signs and flashing holos emblazoned all over and around it indicating as much. Back on the street, Kuu cleared her throat and attempted to regain her composure. She looked over at the building in which the bounty hunter had disappeared and dialed in her optics to read the sign. Kuu’s were no magnigraft but her optics could magnify her visual feed about three times from standard view, which was enough to make out the words MERCKY WATER. It wasn’t at all apparent to her what the establishment was meant to be but clearly a grammar school it was not. A quick scan of the streets showed her no untoward security measures and the coast looked clear. She watched as a young couple clad in festival regalia stumbled drunkenly down the stairs of the very same building and Kuu took that as a cue to follow. When the road was clear, Kuu dashed to the other side, shrinking down to remain as inconspicuous as ever. She stopped at the staircase as a thought came to her. She turned to the side and walked over to a sleepy looking vendor behind a stall with various festival paraphernalia. A white cat mask with a brown ring on its face caught her eye, reminding her of her friend waiting back at home for her. She handed the vendor her wrist and he transacted three times its list price from the bar code etched onto her skin, which was a fairly standard grifting as far as cybrids went. Kuu had neither the time nor inclination to argue so she thanked the man and put on her mask, heading down the steps into the Mercky Water.
***
As Kuu stepped off the last stair and into the dimly lit corridor, there was a moment where she thought she must have taken the wrong staircase. She was in a dark, narrow alley, smelling of urine and old cigarettes, time-caked articles of clothing littered in the corners and crevices of the neglected walls. There were a few homeless about, but they showed no interest in Kuu, either lost in spaze gaze or the standard meat mode mind drift of depression. As Kuu rounded a corner, a neon sign above a single reinforced steel door read MERCKY WATER with a flickering K, almost as if it were ominously intentional. Kuu’s best guess was that it was some kind of speakeasy; many such existed in Tansis–off-sales spirits and such– which was usually why they had to pretend to hide in places like these. She opened the door, no lock or passphrase needed, and entered what appeared to be an attempt at a lobby, though the bench that was set there was so dirty that a muckgucker would not dare sit on it. The room was more of a vestibule than anything, probably four square blades at best, with naught but the bench, some kind of exotic potted plant near death, and the reception desk, which was essentially a box with reinforced glass. The drunken couple was busy checking in, although judging by their constant fumbling through their pockets and dropping of items, unsuccessfully. The concierge–which was a very kind word for the creature that tended the desk–was the largest gamza Kuu had ever seen. Though the majority portion of its three-cask weight was in its ample midsection, the lizard-man had biceps larger than Kuu’s hips which had the effect of undoing any humorous effect which its massive gut may have imposed. Clearly, the “concierge” could handle itself if any guests got too rowdy. In the case of the drunken couple, it either afforded them the patience of a saint or was so used to that kind of behavior that it no longer phased it. After another thirty seconds or so of bumbling and stumbling, one of the figures handed the gamza an item from his pocket.
“Foundz you! Here you are, fine sir.”
The gamza took the item with a half sneer, inspecting it briefly. It handed the item–card, by the look of it–back to the costumed man.
“Code?” The gamza said in a menacing profundo.
“Open sesame?” The man said.
His partner elbowed him in the ribs through a chuckle. “Don’t be an idiot, idiot. You know who…who owns this place. These kind folks they don’t mess…around.” She spoke as if she clung to consciousness.
“Right, sorry. It’s um…let me see..”
The gamza rolled his eyes.
“…just gimme…gimme a sec. I’m looking through yesterday’s mail. I know it’s in here…Oh! There it is. PRETTY RIBBONS.”
The man leaned in to the woman. “Seriously, who makes this stuff up?”
“Will you shut up already? It’s supposed to be a secret code for a reason, dummy. She motioned her head at Kuu. With the shakiness imparted by one too many festival cocktails, the man turned his gaze towards Kuu, his eyes widening as he acknowledged her for the first time.
“Oh right! Shhh! Shhh!” He held a finger up to his mouth, chuckling.
The gamza sighed and leaned back and grabbed a key from a hook on a pegboard where many others hung. He placed the bronze key on the table and pointed to a ledger on the table in front of them.
“Ssssign in here.”
The woman picked up the key and cooed. “Whoa! This is old-school. Which museum did you get this from? And a pen–and paper? How much did that cost?”
The gamza crossed his arms, not looking impressed. “Untraceable that way.”
The man finished signing and the woman stared at the key as if it were the forbidden fruit. “Uh-huh. Well, you have a good night fine ssssssssir.”
The two laughed and wandered off down a hall, arms around each others shoulders as they hummed a silly tune, eventually fading out of earshot.
“Amateurs.” The gamza sniped once they were gone. He turned to Kuu.
“Checking in?”
Kuu clasped her hands in front of her and stepped forward. “Um, yes. Please.”
The gamza raised an eyebrow. “Code?”
“Um…Pretty Ribbons…?”
There was a beeping from behind the desk and gamza looked down to his side. “Code’ssssss changed. Check your account.”
Kuu’s shoulders slumped as her pulse nearly froze. Just when she thought she had a break… What was she to do next? One could not lie about a pass code; either you knew it or you didn’t. And if she didn’t act fast she could risk exposing herself. No, she hadn’t come that far to be beaten by a front desk agent.
“Of course. I apologize. I wouldn’t have known because, you see… I took a fall on the way here and damaged my synchronizer. I haven’t been able to access any feeds for the last hour.”
The gamza crossed his massive arms. “And thisssss is my problem, because…?”
“Well, of course it isn’t. But I was hoping that, perhaps, I could get a room on credit, and I could bring you the code once I have the time to sort out the networking issue. With a…safe room to do so, it shouldn’t take me long.”
The gamza stared at Kuu for a long while, Kuu withering under his gaze.
“No code, no room.” He said at last.
Defeated, Kuu nodded and left the Mercky Water.
***
Back at the street level, Kuu stared out at an unforgiving Tansis. Whoever–or whatever–had brought her that far had toyed with her, made her believe she was meant to do something special, only to cut her down. It was the cruelest of tricks and Kuu chastised herself for falling for it. She watched as people and the world they were in moved past her, not a care for her or anything outside of their own small lives, and the insignificance she felt was only amplified. Suddenly, she felt a pang of anger rise up in her. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the pod chit, her gaze moving out to the busy street. Terrain vehicles were not all that common on Tansis but one or two did pass by every couple of minutes or so. After waiting about forty five seconds or so she heard the familiar grip of rubber against turf and saw a modded-up retro rod cruising down the lane towards her. She reared back her arm getting ready to throw the chit into its path, streams of data in her HUD verifying the scripts needed to do so with precision, and as her muscles tensed to fling the thing, a chime sounded from the device. And this was a different kind of chime, one she hadn’t heard from it before. She looked down at the pod chit, turning it over in her hand and her eyes went wide as a small display with scrolling text appeared. How she hadn’t noticed the display previously was beyond her, but there it was. And the display read:
NEW MESSAGE FROM 098.5.6334.07: YOUR NEW PASSCODE IS: GILDED…
And the scrolling display preview cut off.
“No no no! I need to see the rest.”
Kuu pushed the one button below the display but the display text changed to ACCESS DENIED. She shook the chit, smacked it with the palm of her hand but nothing could get the display to show her the rest of the message. As Kuu attempted to push, pull and prod the thing, the display went dead.
“Oh no! Please, come back. Please tell me the rest of the code.”
But, of course, the device did not respond. It was, after all, only a pod chit. Kuu slumped down on the edge of the sidewalk, burying her head in her lap. If ever there was any doubt about her evil genius manipulating her life theory, there was now none. This was just cruel. Why else would anyone, god or otherwise, feed her this much information, only to have her ultimately fail? Whichever of the Thirteen it was that was playing with her life, she silently cursed them. Was it because she was a cybrid? Did gods hate cybrids as much as most cren? Kuu had no idea. Just thinking about it made her misery miserable.
With her head between her legs like an embarrassed ostrich, Kuu moved the pod chit into view and she studied it while she commiserated. Gilded. The pod chit had said the first part of the code was ‘Gilded’ but there could be many words that followed that. Her hope was that it was only one word, as in ‘Pretty Ribbons’, but she had no idea how the cipher system worked and what kind of algorithms were employed to generate the codes, nor how often they changed. Of course, she could wait for it to change again but then there were multiple risks with that: the pod chit could run out of batteries (did they even run on batteries?), the subsequent codes could also be too long to eke out of the display preview, not to mention that any partial report of a code would mean she would be left guessing the other part, which she was more than certain the gamza at the reception desk of the Mercky Water wouldn’t be sympathetic towards. No, there was no other way to do this than figure out the entire code. But how could she do that? Her stochastic interferometer fed her some numbers and it turned out the likelihood of her guessing the correct phrase was approximately one in three hundred thousand. Those weren’t good odds.
And then it hit her.
Odds.
That was the key! She needed good odds to guess correctly. And as it so happened, she had the best odds around:
Oddsworth.
***
“Indeed, it does pose a problem of numbers.” Oddsworth noted as they moved their gloved finger across the row of books.
“Luckily, numbers are something of a speci-ality of mine. A function even, if you will. The problem then, isn’t the numbers but the sequence.”
“Sequence?” Kuu asked as she watched Oddsworth searching through the seemingly endless shelf of books from on a sliding ladder.
“Indeed. While the word we are looking for could be representative of any given field of inquiry, it is easy enough to distill it down to its meaning with enough time. Rather, what is challenging here is how it is intended–its presentation. Ah, here it is.”
Oddsworth selected an antique looking leather bound, though all the books looked ancient to Kuu. Oddsworth scaled down the ladder with practiced precision and it disappeared as their feet touched the floor, lost to the roughly forty septillion connections that made up the neural net, to be reused as needed. They opened it up and began flipping through the pages rapidly, faster than even the most honed speed reader could ever attest to.
“In case you were wondering,” Oddsworth spoke as they continued to fan through the pages, their eyes flitting rapidly across the pages, “this specific volume is one of our non-collated collections, hence the handiwork. Interesting fact: recent estimates from the Department of the Archival Oversight place upwards of 85.2% of all entries in the Lexinorium as being engrammed, which is top of the class as far as repositories go. In fact, in all of the Link, only two such repositories can boast better numbers and only slightly. It’s something of a…political game between them; it’s all about ratings, you see. So when we come across these first gens, ‘dusters’, my colleagues call them–because physical copies collect dust–it’s something of a delight to behold them, since they are so rare within the Lexinorium.”
“I see. That is very interesting.”
“Ah, but I apologize. Please forgive an old bibliophile their indulgences. There! All done.”
Oddsworth closed the book and for a brief moment it became illuminated by pure white light, only the silhouette of the book visible. The glow receded and Oddsworth handed the book to Kuu who opened it to find two solid chunks dividing the book in half and a single, shining engram in the center of one side, just like the last book she had uploaded.
“Truly amazing, Oddsworth.”
“Miss Kuu, you are too kind. For us, it is every other Tuesday. But go on, see if this may help us along.”
Kuu placed her hand on the engram and her head tilted back as her eyes went into REM, downloading the information. After several seconds she returned from that world within worlds within worlds and frowned down at the book.
“I am unsure if this will help. As I feared, there are too many phrases and ways to combine the word for it to help us narrow it down.”
Oddsworth stroked their chin. “Well, this book contains the widest span of antiquities that I could muster, which seemed appropriate given that gilding was an historic craft. If it’s not gilded as in art or metalwork, have you entertained speechcraft, perhaps?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for example, the phrase “gilding the lily”, which refers to superfluous adornment.”
“Something tells me that these are not the kind of… folks that appreciate word play.”
“How so?”
“Well, remember how I mentioned the name of the hotel was Murky Water? The sign was misspelled, M-E-R-C-K-Y, so I am unsure if one who has not mastered basic grammar could skip a level and jump to metaphors.”
“Hmm, this is very interesting.” Oddsworth thought for a moment and then waggled their finger. “What did you say the first passphrase was? The one that had expired?”
“Oh, um… Something Ribbons. Beautiful ribbons. No, that wasn’t it…”
“Pretty Ribbons?”
“Yes! But wait, I don’t think I mentioned the passphrase though. How did you know that?”
Oddsworth smiled, looking like they were holding back laughter. “Why, it’s exactly as we suspected. Well, not exactly, but inline with it, to be certain. But you are right, Miss Kuu, this is not wordplay. It is argot.”
“Argot?”
“Yes, a language shared among thieves. Or in this case: mercenaries. Mercs.”
“Mercs…”
And then it donned on Kuu. The sign was not misspelled. Mercky Water was a hotel…for mercenaries.”
“And as it so happens, mercenaries have a very particular way of communicating with one another. A lingo of sorts. ‘Pretty ribbons’ actually has nothing to do with wrapping gifts or adoring a little one’s pigtails, as the name suggests. The truth is more gruesome, I’m afraid. When one is garroted, as with a wire or the sort, it is common to leave a nasty abrasion across the throat. Similar in effect, I suppose, to a red ribbon one would see tied around the collar at, say, feast day.”
Kuu looked terrified.
“Alas, irony aside, you have to admit it is creative.”
Kuu swallowed. “Creative. That may be…more generous than I. Now I am afraid to ask. Gilded…?”
“Ah yes. Gilded. Not lilies, no. Glasses. Gilded glasses.”
Kuu cringed. “Do I want to know?”
“This one is not so grim, I promise. In fact, the murder has already taken place. The ‘gilded’ refers to the golden coins placed on the eyes of the deceased and the ‘glasses’ are a double-entendre, referring both to spectacles, as one would wear on their eyes, and to the eyes themselves. The eyes, as the poet says, are a mirror into the soul. Mirrors are usually made of glass. Glasses. More interesting than the wordplay is the ritual of doing such a thing to begin with. Traditionally, placing coins on the eyes of the dead was an honorary act to aid the loved one passed, in the afterlife. However, mercenaries–who don’t tend to be the type to pull on heartstrings– place coins on their mark as a kind of ‘tip’, a share of the payment in thanks to the deceased for the opportunity. While it may seem both pointless and defiling to do such a thing to a corpse, trust me when I say that superstition is a kind word for how serious mercenaries take gilding their marks. Oh, but look at me, I did it again, didn’t I?”
Kuu smiled. “It’s okay, Oddsworth. I always learn so much from you.”
Oddsworth clasped Kuu’s hand in theirs. “I do enjoy our little meetings miss Kuu. Please, if ever a question knocks, please do not afraid to open my door.”
Kuu bowed. “Thank you Oddsworth. I won’t forget your kindness.”
***
The door closed quietly behind Kuu as she let herself into the foyer of the Mercky Water–a name which she had found a new appreciation for. The room was dead silent, save for some old recording of a Scorssian symphony playing on a tinny sounding PA which filtered out into the area. The huge gamza at the desk looked over the top of the Swamp Mistresses magazine that he was reading, which depicted several female gamza posing near nude in provocative positions. Kuu sidled humbly up to the desk, looking up at the massive scaly creature who cast her a look that told her he wasn’t happy to be interrupted from the piece of classic literature in his claws.
“Um…pardon me, sir… But, it appears that my synchronizer has come back on line and I’ve access to my account. I would like to check in, please.”
The gamza stared at her for a hard moment then it sighed, like a snake with pneumothorax, putting the magazine aside.
“Password?”
“Gilded glasses.”
Kuu held her breath, praying silently to the Thirteen that Oddsworth had been right. As if to help along her anxiety, the gamza was unresponsive, giving her another long hard stare, this one threatening to stretch out to the ends of a conspiracy theorist’s flat Rynn. Finally, just before Kuu thought she would shatter like a glass to a prima donna’s high note, the gamza shifted his weight and pulled out another book from beneath the counter, this one looking far less pornographic. He opened up the leather bound and revealed a ledger with names.
“Sign here.” He handed Kuu a pen, Kuu’s hand dwarfed by his huge green claw.
Kuu signed on the next open line, quickly taking note of the names above her. The scrawl above–the one from the drunken couple–was too illegible to read, but the name above she committed to memory:
Mister Karadengo.
So, her bounty hunter had a name after all. Or, at least, a handle. Kuu’s pen hovered on the line as she ran a quick sublink thread to search for the name. The gamza’s grunt cut her short and she terminated the query, glancing up at the lizard man who looked unimpressed.
“Forgot your name too? Might want to check your account.”
Kuu swallowed. Right: she would need a handle too. She hadn’t thought that far. And the problem there was creativity was not something you could quickly search on the Link. That kind of thing was just in your bones, and Kuu didn’t even really have bones, so to speak. She looked over at the foyer, searching desperately for anything that could prompt an inspiration but the sparsely furnished room and the near-dead plant hardly constituted the poet’s wish. And then, as if irony crawled on six legs, a dreckroach scurried out from some ungodly crevice, disappearing behind the chesterfield.
A line from Lian-Guh sung in her mind:
Oh splendid chariot, my stallion of fire; how you dance in the air, though no legs to ground you and soaring through space despite your wings clipped. And in your trail, all living things, as you gallop ever onward unto the day you bring.
Kuu smiled and jotted down
ROACH
She placed the pen down and the gamza’s eyes briefly flitted down to the page, perhaps acknowledging her entry, perhaps not. He closed the book, putting it back under the counter and reached back to the pegboard behind him, massive bicep extending out as his monstrous claw, albeit delicately, retrieved a key from a hook. He handed Kuu the key.
“Three oh one. Up the stairs, take a right, three doors down on the left.”
It was the most Kuu had heard the gamza say. She nodded and bowed awkwardly, unsure if this was customary of a mercenary, despite herself. As she walked out of the room, the gamza, eyeing Kuu’s back, reached down and pressed a button underneath the counter. Kuu’s extra-aural sensors heard a faint click and she glanced over her shoulder, watching the gamza pull out his magazine as he delved back into some choice nonfiction.
Upstairs, Kuu found her room easily enough, double-checking the number on the key tag matched the number on the door. She took note of the locking mechanism, which appeared to be a standard tumbler lock. Ancient, by all standards, but efficient if one wanted to avoid cyber-terrorists intruding on their holiday. Or other mercs. Kuu’s best guess was that the key offered mercenaries the best form of insurance in that it bought them time. Though a lock was easily enough picked, to the trained ear, one could hear a lockpick, but not even the many, many neurons that made up the link would be able to help one predict when a script was about to be used to hack their security. And though electronic security systems were by far superior, in a way, the key was ironic.
Kuu entered the room, the first thing she noticed was the musty smell of stale cigarettes. Clearly, the Mercky Water didn’t have a no smoking policy. Either that, or they didn’t enforce it. The room was tidy enough. Surprisingly, no blood stains on the wall and the carpet looked clean. Kuu wasn’t sure what she had expected; it wasn’t a Zenn Grandia but it also wasn’t a complete dive. More than anything, it was circumspect; one twin bed, a writing desk with one electric lamp and what looked to be a reloading station, though casings didn’t seem to be supplied (that was on the mercs). Kuu opened the drawers and, instead of finding the Word of God in written form, the desk was full of emergency first aid supplies. Made sense, considering. She closed the drawers and made her way over to a strange looking machine in the corner of the room near the bed. Upon closer inspection, Kuu could see a lever holding rows and rows of cigarettes displayed behind glass. It appeared to be coin operated. Very vintage. Clarified the smoking policy.
She looked around, assessing her situation. Her eyes landed upon a ventilation grating above the bed, just large enough for a small person to fit through. She turned to the one window, parting the blinds—actual blinds—to look out upon a portion of the city she would otherwise never had reason to see in her life. Tansis was funny that way: it was big enough that you could never know all of it but it was much the same in most places that you didn’t really need to, anyhow. Kind of like a large family where everyone was the drunken uncle; once you met one…
Kuu watched the AVs zip by above her level and the people walking on the streets below. It had begun to rain, water droplets collecting on the pane and the sill, though of course Kuu knew it wasn’t really rain, but part of the complex network of weather simulations manufactured and controlled by CitSys, Tansis’s operating system, essentially. Supposedly modeled after discarded technology donated by the “Others”–CASARI immigrants that brought some of their city’s lesser secrets with them–CitSys performed a wide variety of tasks that helped maintain citywide functions and processes. Weather was a bit of an oddity on Tansis, given that it wasn’t entirely necessary; most of the agriculture and farming was tightly controlled and processed in agridomes throughout the city and the public flora was sustained by under-road aquifers which networked around the city like the mycelia of mushrooms. Rather, weather was more of a mental boon for those who had come from planetside to help them adjust. As it turned out, there was actually a legitimate medical condition called Meteorological Estrangement Disorder, which was a kind of Seasonal Affective Disorder where one became dysfunctional due to lack of exposure to weather-like conditions. Hence the rain. But Kuu liked the rain; she liked to imagine she was somewhere on Rynn, walking through a forest or on a boat out to sea, rivulets of water streaming down on her as the moist air caked to her skin. The thought of being there made her feel so much more alive, so much more meaningful. All this in just a few raindrops.
Kuu sighed and closed the blinds, blocking out the view of the city. She looked back over her shoulder at the ventilation grating and nodded to herself.
“You can do this.”
She climbed on top of the bed and removed the grating with a few twists of a loose screw. Before she went in a thought struck her. She looked over at the door to her room and had a vision of the future, one that did not bode well in her favor. If she had been followed or made, she would need another set of eyes to help her along. Kuu reached into her pocket and pulled out a small object, placing it on the bed stand. She pushed a small button on its back and the small metallic beetle whirred to life, its tiny eyes glowing a faint blue. A new script flashed alive in Kuu’s HUD and she selected it, accessing the program. A small window appeared in the corner of her vision, showing her what the beetle saw. She synapsed with its operating system and she tested out its movements, getting the beetle to scuttle in a small circle on the tabletop. She patted the beetle on the head with one small finger.
“Watch my back, will you Winston?”
She relinquished control of Winston and the beetle fluttered up to the lamp on silent wings, climbing up over the top and into the shade out of sight. Kuu gave the room one last look and climbed into the ventilation shaft.
***
Kuu passed by many grates peering into others’ rooms before she found the one she was looking for. To her surprise, the Mercky Water accommodated quite the eclectic menagerie of clientele, everything from a female (presumably) merc in the middle of body-bagging a (presumably) contract on her hotel floor, an orc flossing its teeth with a fourteen pinch blade, an elderly not-so-gentleman standing irreverently nude at his wide open window, and an assortment of other would-be mercenaries up to no good under that very roof. She even came across the room of the drunken couple from the foyer who appeared to have attempted coitus, rather unsuccessfully from the look of it, given by their unconscious dispositions across the room from one another. Kuu had never seen anyone black out under a bed before. There were more questions than answers there…
And then she came to a grate looking into an empty room. She almost moved on, presuming it vacant, and then she caught the blinking light on the desk–a laptop in low power mode. Laptop. Who were these people? Coin-operated machines; hand-written ledgers; physical CPUs… It was like she had stepped back in time four hundred years. Mercenaries, it seemed, either really didn’t like technology or they really didn’t want to be tracked on the Link. Kuu leaned towards the latter, though there were several Luddite cults on Tansis that came to mind…
She watched the room for a long while, nothing-ado about much, or so some such. And then she saw her mark, coming out of the periphery into view, his duster replaced with a posh white robe, the insignia MW on the breast. It was both comical and surprising to see Mr. Karadengo in such a state; comical for obvious reasons and surprising because not in one million years would Kuu have ever expected an establishment like the Mercky Water to supply fine bathwear to their “guests”. M. Karadengo didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he was humming a tune, one Kuu didn’t recognize, as he made his way into the bathroom, toothbrush in mouth. The door to the washroom closed and after several minutes, Kuu’s amped-up aural sensors picked up the familiar signature of water trickling onto porcelain: M. Karadengo was taking a shower.
Now was her chance.
Kuu removed the single screw fastening the grating on, placed so loosely that Kuu wondered if the proprietor wanted guests infiltrating each other’s rooms. Silently, she slipped into the room, stepping down on to the headboard of the bed, replacing the grate before she hopped gently to the floor. She double-checked that she had not disturbed the bed, taking note of how it had not been disturbed by the bounty hunter as of yet. Either that or it had been made immaculately. Did she have a clean freak on her hands? The last thing she needed was an O.C.D. bounty hunter who took note of the angle of their pillow case and the crease of the sheets. In any case, Kuu decided she would assume as much and be as close to a ghost as possible while in the suite. She tiptoed up to the computer and, serendipitous, Mr. Karadengo’s gloves lay neatly folded beside the laptop. Kuu swallowed, hoping against hope that he didn’t wear them when he used the device. Luckily, the device was open, the screen black, but there was a touch-sensitive pad in the center of the keyboard, which looked to have been used recently, judging by several finger marks. Not O.C.D. Good, that was good news. Now, could she lift a print? That was the metin credit question. Kuu didn’t have a lift kit with her, as she was no private sleuth, but she did have another set of tools she could use that would likely do the same trick. She ran a script which filtered her visual intake feed so that it singled out the specific pattern which made up the whorls of the fingerprint. She dialed up the contrast and overlaid an infrared filter and the laptop’s touch-pad came alive with a veritable toddler-esque art quality, threatening to yield no single quality sample that she could extract. Kuu grimaced, looking back over her shoulder at the bathroom, the shower still going, though for how long her quarry bathed she could only guess. She took a snapshot of the image and ran it through an extraction protocol, the percentage bar in the top of her HUD not exactly moving at a promising pace. As she watched the percentage points tick slowly up, a small window suddenly popped up in the bottom left corner of her vision. It was Winston and he had something to show her:
Men, in her room. And they did not look like the room service type. They were clad in full body armor, helmets with visors and a strange insect-looking quality to them. They sported tactical shotguns with laser sights which they panned around the room as they dressed it down. Kuu didn’t recognize the group but her best guess was they were connected to the hotel somehow. The gamza–he had tipped them off. She knew it even when she didn’t know it. Oh, she had been such a fool to think she could get away with this easily! As she split her attention between Winston’s feed and the status bar, she watched as several of her pursuants broke off from her view, leaving her room. And then the knocks began. The soldiers had begun to canvas the other rooms, one by one, looking for their special someone. Looking for her. Kuu looked between the ventilation grating and the door to the room, but realized both options likely led to the same outcome and decided against it. The status bar pinged completed and Kuu sighed in semi-relief though her predicament had only begun. At least the bounty hunter was still in the shower. That was something, pessimism-be-damned. Kuu looked around the room for any kind of Hail Mary and her eyes settled on the window.
She ran over to the window, quickly examining it and its immediate outside situation. The window was single pane with a physical lock, no problem there. The street, however, was three stories down. While Kuu’s systems could easily repair the damage from such a fall (as was evident from her much, much higher fall into the abandoned building), the risks were too great to take a chance; if she damaged her legs too much, she would be too slow to get away in time. And by the look of the lot from Winston’s feed, these were not the sort to balk at a chase. No, Kuu would need another way down–an intentional one.
Like the fire escape immediately to the left of the exterior.
Kuu wasted no time, opening the window and throwing herself out the window to the metal cage half a story down. She landed on the rusty platform with a clang and grabbed the ladder, attempting to release it from the latch. It wouldn’t budge. The mechanism holding it in place had rusted shut. Kuu was not one to curse but she definitely felt like doing so at that moment. Dialing up as much adrenaline as she could, she kicked the top rung with her small shoe, once, twice, thrice, and finally the mechanism released with an irritated groan, the ladder sliding downwards where it slammed unapologetically into the pavement of the sidewalk below. She pulled out a small metal case, pressing a button on its surface. Winston came buzzing out the window of her room with the expediency fitting of the situation, landing in the center of the case with the grace of an insect athlete, powering down as she closed the lid and pocketed the container. Kuu clambered down the rungs, landing on the sidewalk in a full sprint as she made her way down the boulevard, off into a Tansis unknown.
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