3.1
November 2085
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Isolde Crane promised her daughter they would go to the Luminara festival downtown and buy a stuffed bunny the size of a street vendor’s cart, but promises were easy to make when they were months away, and when there wasn’t a bloodstain smeared across your door with the words RENT IS DUE.
She had been sitting at her desktop computer for the past three hours, searching and searching for a job. One thousand applications, one thousand rejections, and zero phone calls. For someone of her educational background, a woman who’d graduated with a masters in pharmaceutical chemistry, she couldn’t believe that no one would hire her, that no one would give her a chance.
She wasn’t looking for anything special—even a waitress or food-serving position would do—but the economy wasn’t crying out for any of that. It seemed most places were already up to their eyeballs in employees, and that a lot of these job vacancies were fake or already filled.
The walls were fading to a dull grey, embellished with the purple gleam of an occasional flickering neon sign which shone through the window. The apartment was small, yet cramped with mismatched furniture—an old metal-framed bed with a threadbare comforter sagging under the weight of too many restless nights, a bedside desk buried beneath crumpled job applications and scrawled reminders that had gone nowhere, and a beanbag that had long since lost its shape. On it, a little girl with white hair nuzzled her octopus and bear plushies, sound asleep.
She had always been a quiet sleeper, like her father, but he’d vanished, taken off like a whisper in the wind, too scared, perhaps, to handle the reality of raising an autistic child.
Her name was Elysia. She was seven years old, though with her puffy cheeks she easily looked a couple years younger.
To Isolde she was the most beautiful person in the world, even if she didn’t speak or listen all that well; she was uniquely perfect.
A knock from the door snapped her attention away. She thought that it was the landlord at first, but after a couple seconds, a voice came from the other side, and she relaxed.
“I hope you’re not asleep.”
It was Silas. She knew by the raspy, ominous tone, one that she swore would get him killed someday.
She got up from her desk, feeling slightly light-headed, and made her way over to the door. She opened it, expecting to see him looming over her, but he was slightly hunched, carrying boxes that were stacked messily atop one another. He brushed past her, minding his step. He must have been walking for quite a while, because he didn’t look too hot. He dropped the boxes near the sagging bedframe, and Elysia’s eyes blinked open. She rubbed them sleepily.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said, turning towards her and settling his beanie over her head. It sank down so low it nearly swallowed her face. “Catch any animals today?”
“In the rain?” Isolde said. “Think a storm is gonna blow through. Things aren’t lookin’ too great, Silas.”
He took a seat on the bed and scratched his head. Much of his brown hair had receded, and what was left grew in listless, piebald patches. “Were some items on sale down in the market. I picked up some new blankets, couple books for yourself, and some cold-and-flu medication. It’s about that time of year. Got all kinds of stuff. Oh, and something for The Bunny Hunter.” He reached into the inside pocket of his dark slicker, knelt in front of Elysia like an old-fashioned suitor proposing marriage, and snapped his arm forward, as if drawing a gun. He even made a pew sound. In his hand was a brown cloth rabbit, stitched together from fabric scraps: faded corduroy, plaid flannel, and an old, soft knit. Its button eyes were uneven, giving it a lopsided, quirky charm, and a candy-red ribbon was tied into the bow of its neck, frayed, but tied with care all the same. The rabbit’s ears flopped to one side, no doubt weighed down by the years, and its chest, perhaps once a heart or star stitching, was obscured by a charred stain.
Elysia took it, and although she didn’t say a word, her adorable wild grin and rapid footsteps beating against the carpet told him all he needed to know. She gave him a hug, like she normally did when he came over. It wasn’t often he got to do stuff like this.
“I really appreciate you, Silas,” Isolde said. “I’ve been applying everywhere and the landlord is still up my—” She paused, taking a breath. “Elysia, sweetheart, go to your room.”
Silas broke the hug with Elysia. He took back the beanie and she hobbled into her little hut to play. “Why don’t you wash that paint off? Seems a little degrading.”
“I tried,” she said. “Bastard puts it up the next day. Just a waste of water and I’m already up the ass in bills as it is.”
He winced as if prodded, then reached into the top cardboard box, pulling out a newspaper. “Then you won’t like what The Neon Ledger said this morning.” He tossed her the paper but she didn’t catch it. It was the shake in her hands.
She picked it up. The expression of horror that dawned on her face was so naked that she had no choice but to sit down. This couldn’t be real. No way. “They’re thinking of ‘cutting welfare payments’? When did this become a thing?”
“Since that new company took over the tech industry,” he said. “Techstrum, once again, running people out of work and kicking them while they’re down. 2086 is about to be one hell of a year.”
She shook her head, got up, and walked restlessly around the room. “No, no this can’t happen, Silas. I’m already knee-deep in shit. Does it say how much they’re cutting?”
“It’s not listed in the paper, but I checked the source material. Stipend slashed by approximately 41%, under the pretext of quote-unquote ‘budgetary constraints’.” He did air quotes. “And supposedly they’re reallocating subsidies to Techstrum and military programmes.”
“Those fuckers.”
He nodded and hummed. “You’re not the only one. People are outraged. Wouldn’t be surprised if a riot breaks out.”
“Is this going to happen? Or is it just, you know, theorised? I really don’t need this.”
He sleeved a sheen of sweat from his brow, looking torn. “The chances are high it’ll take place. It pretty much always does. All really people can do is pray it won’t last very long, which, as you know, is wishful thinkin’. I truly am sorry to tell you.”
Isolde chuckled. She simply could not believe what she was hearing. Softly, she said, “I don’t know what I’m gonna do. This is.... Jesus Christ. Can’t they let us just have one thing? Can’t they?”
“Your only hope is applying for a job at Techstrum,” he said. “They have a lot of openings. Pharmaceutical roles, too. Sooner or later a lot of the other jobs are gonna either be wiped out or there’ll be massive layoffs.”
“Those assholes? The ones who are causing all this? Who invited them here anyway?”
He shrugged. “Ah, well, the state must have taken an interest in their tech, I suppose. Lot of eggheads. Developed some cybernetic stabilisers, the kind that keep soldiers or high-level execs from burning out their heavy augments. Guessing they contracted them to enhance law enforcement and probably streamline factory operations. Cheap labour. I knew they’d start outsourcing overseas eventually. N.A.’s been sinking for decades.”
Isolde was looking at Silas with a mixture of shock and wariness. She could understand that. With everything that was going on in the city, the chronic inflation, the market drop-offs and large corporate layoffs, it was only a matter of time before they’d hire outside help to keep the rich rich and the poor even poorer. Maybe if they’d work on civilising the two sides of society they wouldn’t have to do such things, thought Isolde, but of course, the government would seize any excuse to avoid digging that deep into their pockets—especially not for common folk. Perhaps it was fear that held them back, the idea that such lowly folk would be ungrateful, that they might even try betray the bureaucracy. She didn’t know. That was where her understanding ended and her hatred began. Silas hated them, too, but she believed he was more content with it all. He had a job selling books and tools made from scrap pieces he’d pick up at markets, shops, and sometimes even junkyards. He didn’t have to worry about missing bills or having a crazy landlord paint humiliating messages on his door. He was something of an engineer, although he’d told her on numerous occasions that he didn’t possess any formal training or education. She’d known him for some years now, met him at a kiosk. He sold a lot of books but didn’t read much, if at all, but Isolde loved to read, both fiction and non-fiction.
Stuff like this, however—stuff about welfare cuts, lay-offs, and rising costs—made her wish she was illiterate.
“I don’t feel so well,” she said, dropping the newspaper on the carpet. Softly, she asked, “What am I gonna do?” Her arms hung loosely at her sides, and she stared at the fluorescent light strip running across the ceiling. It flickered.
Silas stepped over and knelt before her, just as he had done with Elysia, but this time he didn’t have something to pull out of his pocket, something that would make the problem go away. Instead, he picked up the newspaper, folded it, and then stuffed it in his interior jacket pocket. He patted Isolde’s knee. “Whatever happens, I won’t just let you end up on the streets. I’ll think of something. I’ll ask around. Make some phone calls. See what I can find. Push comes to shove I can help out with payments.”
Isolde shook her head, staving off tears. She spun around on the swivel chair, pressing her face into her hands, her elbows propped on the desk. “No,” she said, her voice muffled. “This is my problem. I’m not going to drag you down with me. I’ll figure it out. I just need some time.”
Silas gave her a reassuring pat on the back, then gently massaged it in soothing circles. “If you ever need me, I’m a phone call away.”
She turned to face him. “Thanks, Silas.”
There was silence for a moment. The sound of the fluorescent light strip thrummed in it.
Silas stood up, put his beanie on, and said, “I’ll head out. It was nice talking, Isolde.”
She smiled ruefully. “Watch your step on the way out. Once again, I appreciate everything.”
He nodded, pressed the scannerlock, and the door hissed open, the metallic panels gliding apart with a soft hum. It was a little grindy, from decades of use and no renovations, but it held up just fine. “Enjoy your evening.” And he was on his way.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The door slid closed.
Isolde rubbed her eyes. She wasn’t crying; only tired. She grabbed the crumpled job applications and started piling them away into the wastebasket. She paused once she heard her daughter’s door hum open. When she looked over, Elysia was standing there, rabbit doll grasped firmly, her gaze unfocused and distant, as if staring through the room rather than at it. Her face was calm but unreadable, a blank slate except for the faint furrow of her brow, hinting at some quiet, inward thought. How Isolde sometimes wished to hear her thoughts, to know how her daughter felt about all of this, but she acknowledged that a girl like her wouldn’t understand such injustice.
Not that it mattered. What mattered was making things better.
Elysia walked unsteadily over to her mother and, out of the blue, wrapped her in a tight hug. It was so unexpected, and perhaps so unlike her, that a tear graced Isolde’s eye. She kissed the top of Elysia’s head, then turned back to the desktop computer. She still had the job-search website open, and she saw, near the top, a new job alert. The title of the job sparked intense curiosity. ‘Neurochemical Development Specialist’. But then her eyes landed on the company name listed alongside the job description: Techstrum. It was a longshot, and she felt uneasy about applying to a company who indirectly made things worse for society, for those on the lower end of the ladder, but she didn’t really have a choice in the matter. She had to apply everywhere, get something, fast, before everything went to hell.
She spent some time fixing up her resume and personalising it to match the job description. Even wrote up a cover letter, more detailed than ever, explaining her experience, her educational background, and, perhaps most importantly, her circumstances. She mentioned that she was on the brink of homelessness, and that she had an autistic daughter to take care of. It was emotional and might have even destroyed her chances, or, she thought hopefully, increased them. Perhaps whoever was hiring at this agency had a heart, and would at the very least invite her for an interview.
Her hand shook—not with shock or fear, but with nerves—as she guided the mouse pointer down towards the bottom-right corner and hit ‘Submit’.
“Please,” she murmured. She leaned back on the swivel and let out a sigh while her daughter played with her plushies on the beanbag. Isolde was partially relieved, having completed such a long resume, but she also felt weary. It was like a heavy fishhook had sunk into the back of her sweater and was slowly reeling her down a very long, very dark corridor, like she was being pulled into waters too deep for her to handle, and into hands too large and bulky for her to escape.
The next day, Isolde threw on a thin raincoat and ventured through the apartment complex towards the market down on Lower Elm Street, telling Elysia to stay put while she was out. She didn’t like bringing her daughter to the market, because it tended to get very busy in the early mornings to late afternoons, and she had a sinking feeling that one day she would lose track of her, or that some sicko would swoop in and snatch her from her grasp. It wasn’t difficult to see why someone would think that way. Lower Elm Street had a higher crime rate than most, because in the market most of the drug deals and illegal trades occurred, under the tarps, in the alleys. Some didn’t even try to hide it.
She was looking for two things: milk and eggs. That was all she could really afford right now; she had a budget to watch, and it wasn’t getting any larger.
Temperatures were in the low forties. Colder than she would have liked it to be, but it was the winter. Things were already on the brink of freezing, although weather control operatives were busy clearing streets of black ice.
The market sprawled beneath a web of buzzing signs and sagging palm-oil tarps. The ground was slick, patched with frost that weather control must have missed or not bothered to clear. She had to watch her feet. This wasn’t the time to add a hospital bill to her already growing list of problems. She cleared her throat, looking for the D&P sign, ‘Dairy and Poultry’, as it were. It wasn’t a difficult sign to miss, because it was shabbier than most, with a missing ‘A’ that made it look like Diary and Poultry, but it never seemed to stay in one place, and this was an enormous market. It spanned more than a block, was built into the side of an apartment complex, and dominated the entire street for the early half of every day.
Vendors called out in raspy voices, their breaths visible in the chill, haggling with needy passersby who clutched to their ragged winter wears and counted every eddie like it might be their last—and it very well might have been. The air was sharp and smelled oddly of damp cardboard, with the faint acrid tang of ozone, no doubt coming from those overbearing streetlamps.
Milk and eggs. Simple things. Yet Isolde wandered aimlessly between the stalls, nearly swallowed by the crowd on more than one occasion, noticing that even the basics were more out of reach than they had been a month ago. Fifty eddies for a small slab of butter. What on Earth was happening? People must have been preparing for what was to come.
The crowd started to thin out a little, near the upper steps of the apartment complex, leading into the entrance which was packed with vending machines, smokers, and, to her surprise, NACP units out on patrol. Their uniforms seemed to get upgrades quite often. Sleek, black exoskeletons snaked along their spines and branched out across their limbs, the matte material catching no light, absorbing, controlling, and moulding all warmth and life around it. Over their shoulders, armoured plates jutted out like mechanical wings. Dark, heavy visors masked their faces. Below them, angular helmets twisted into crisp, insectoid points, while their chest plates puffed out with lionlike pride, bearing the words NACP in cold, snow-white characters.
Even the way they stood was so... rigid and perfect. Inhumane. She wasn’t looking into the faces of people who swore to ‘protect and serve’ but rather the dark, foreboding, controlling, predatory glares of the devil’s henchmen themselves.
She figured it was best to stay out of their way, but poor luck would have it that the D&P was located past them. The cheapest vendor for milk and eggs, stuck right in front of these enforcers.
“Why the long face, Isolde?” a voice called out, slightly high-pitched though evidentially masculine in its resonance.
Isolde turned, and after a riptide of commoners cleared from her view, she saw, standing on the other side, a familiar face.
He was leaning on a barrel of some sort, his blonde hair spiked up into a miniature mohawk, arms folded, dressed lightly in a belt-bound leather pauldron, denim jacket, cargo jeans, and boots. His eyes were obscured by a thin red line, and he bore a grin that was nothing more than a yellowing line of receding gums and brown tartar.
It was Rhyce. Next to him stood a couple of tall, bulky cronies whose faces were so packed with cyberware it was impossible to tell where the flesh started and the electronics began.
She hadn’t seen this man in years, not since—
“Still hanging ’round this shitbox, ehhhhhh?” He widened his stance, and she could see, between his legs, the barrel. It was swirling with bottle-green liquid.
She was curious. That didn’t look like a drink. She looked over his shoulder and saw that he had vials of the same liquid neatly squared away in small boxes, with a sign that read: SYNTHETIC STRESS RELIEF. But that didn’t look like any stress reliever she’d ever seen. They normally came in the form of pills. But this... this looked peculiar.
Isolde approached him. “You realise there’s a couple of blues right around the corner, right?”
He and his cronies chuckled.
He splayed his arms, as if doing nothing wrong. “I’m selling stress relievers. Totally legal. Nothing they can do about it, and we sure as hell ain’t givin’ them a taste.”
“That’s liquid,” she said. “You’re just asking for trouble.”
He scowled. “Is that a way to say hello to an old friend?”
She furrowed her brow. Calling him an ‘old friend’ would be a gross misrepresentation. They dated briefly, over a decade ago, after a chance meeting in a rural bar. Just a temporary fling, at least for her. She’d been young, restless, and just out of university, broke as a bat, and used to chat up men to get free drinks. It was wrong of her to lead him on like that and not make her intentions clear. She understood that now. But even back then he wasn’t the most pleasant person to deal with.
Yet here he was. The same rotten smile on his face, the same reckless look in his eyes.
“What are you doing here?” asked Isolde. “I thought you were going to move out of N.A.”
“Ay,” Rhyce agreed, and he stood aside, slapping the top of the barrel. “Also told you I’d be back someday, with a completely new life.”
She eyed the keg more closely this time, squinting. The liquid sloshed, as if there was something swimming around, but it was too thick to make out. “What is that?”
Rhyce grinned. “Cool, right?” he said.
Isolde wouldn’t say cool. More creepy than anything.
He cleared his throat. “This is Ghostfire.”
She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Ghostfire?”
He grabbed one of the vials and held it inches from her face. She recoiled slightly, but he beckoned for her to grab it, so she did. The liquid was warm, and she could feel it moving around beneath her fingertips. She sniffed it, expecting it to have some strong drug smell, but it was odourless.
“What does it do?” she asked.
“Well, I fell in with a gang out in The Scrubs,” he said, referring to the desertlike scrublands along the border of the city. “Chemical geniuses, though not all that rich. This chemical is the answer to cyberpsychosis, sweetcheeks.”
She twisted the vial around, then chuckled. “This? This will stop people from going crazy? It looks like it would have the opposite effect.”
He shook his head. “Tested it out. People with intense cyberware upgrades showed reduced symptoms of cyberpsychosis once they injected this into their system. More clearheaded, easier to think.”
“Any scientific explanation for that? Because as far as I’m concerned, this is a cash-grab. The primary cause of cyberpsychosis is the neural overload caused by augmentations. Your brain’s natural pathways are flooded with information, and when those signals can’t be properly processed due to an overload or incompatibility with the cybernetics, it fractures the mind.” She sounded technical, like she had back in university. It was deliberate. “You’d need something that could not only stabilise the brain’s neurochemical balance but also enhance its plasticity—its ability to adapt to the new augmentations without rejecting them. The brain’s reward pathways need to be carefully regulated, or else the user will experience a feedback loop of aggression, mania, or apathy. This is probably just another dopamine spiker that provides temporary relief and nothing more.”
He snorted a laugh. The pig. “If you consider a whole month ‘temporary’. They tested it on their most decked-out people, had ’em locked away in case things went wrong, and for a month they were calm and clear-headed before starting to show signs of mania. You really are still stuck-up, aren’t you? Still talking like you have all the answers, ehhhhhh?”
She scoffed and thrust the vial into his chest. He caught it with a lightning-quick reaction. Augmented limbs, of course. The wires glowed beneath his skin like pumped-up, bodybuilder veins. He tightened his grip on her hand. She jerked to break free but couldn’t. She winced.
“Let go,” Isolde said calmly.
“Just relax a lil, al-rooooooight? Haven’t seen you in so long, and yet you’re still being a feisty diva. Little old for that, don’t you think?”
She laughed sarcastically. Up close, he smelt like he hadn’t showered in days. “I wish you never came back. All you do is cause trouble. And you still smell like shit.”
He took a moment to respond. “You know, you used to be a fun girl,” he said. “Till you fucked off with my money. And now you’re stuck with no one, raising a vege. Yeah, I heard about that. How your man left you once he saw what popped out of the oven.”
Her eyes flew open, and her skin, once cold and numb, rashed out with goosebumps, each strand of hair rising like a soldier preparing for war. Her fists balled, and all the sound around her dwindled to a continuous, high-pitched buzz. “What did you just fucking say?”
“You heard me, vegemom,” he said, and his cronies laughed. “You’re angry because you took the hard life that leads nowhere. You could have been someone, but you chose to be no one. You’ll never amount to anything so long as you’re taking care of that disgusting, useless, waste-of-space thing.”
Isolde drew her fist back and thrust it towards his face with all the power a five-foot-eight woman could muster, but it was caught, not by Rhyce or one of his friends, but by a thick, gloved hand. Rhyce let go of her and she turned around. Staring into her was the dark helmet and visor of an NACP officer.
“There a problem here?” the officer said, his voice muffled and staticky through the helmet. Although she could not see his expression, she could tell he was cold on the inside.
Rhyce sat back on the barrel and crossed his arms. “Just two friends catching up.”
The officer chuckled, still not letting go of her hand. “Typical. Two scrappers fighting over pittance. Any more out of you two and you’ll end up behind bars. Watch it. You understand me?” He spoke so menacingly, as if a murder had been committed.
Rhyce nodded. “All good, chief. You have a good day now.”
The officer let go. “On your way,” he told Isolde.
She stepped back, looked at Rhyce and his stupid dog grin, doing her best to fight off tears, and took a deep breath. She moved away and went over to the D&P to purchase milk and eggs. They were more expensive than last time, too, but she didn’t care about that. All she cared about was making that asshole suffer.