Juliet clenched her abdominal muscles, sucking in short, quick breaths, trusting her acceleration couch and its external lungs to keep her blood oxygenated. It had to be working—her vision was clear, with no red or black tunnel walls creeping in. She smoothly tracked the pirate in her sights, trying to get her crosshairs lined up. Her cybernetic arm easily wrestled the yoke into submission, fighting against the G’s and the forces exerted by the drives to minutely adjust the ship’s trajectory so as not to overcorrect. She used toe pedals to operate the maneuvering thrusters to keep the ship from rolling or turning, basically strafing sideways as she pursued the larger vessel.
She trained the crosshairs at the tiny circle on her AUI that Angel used to show her where to fire—a predictive targeting reticle. Angel computed the velocity of her rounds and the velocity and trajectory of the target ship, calculating the perfect spot for Juliet to keep the guns aimed as she pulled the trigger. It was harder than it seemed; the Gs, the constantly maneuvering pirate, and the enormous speeds involved meant that she had to be careful not to fire her magazines dry, spewing hot, heavy metal into space and completely missing her target.
As she lined up the crosshairs on Angel’s reticle, she squeezed the trigger for the main gun, and her ship rumbled as the thirty-millimeter twin-barreled cannon under her ship’s nose roared to life. The depleted uranium rounds streaked through the blackness like a dotted line of death. The pirate ship jerked wildly, trying to throw her off, but Juliet was ready, firing the maneuvering thrusters to correct her attitude as she tracked the targeting reticle, holding down that trigger and walking those deadly projectiles after the fleeing ship.
“Yes!” she whooped as distant, bright sparks lit up the blackness, and, buoyed by the sign of impact, she kept shooting. More splashes of sparks arced away from the pirate, and then suddenly, white fire bloomed in the blackness, forcing Angel to dim her retinal gain; she’d popped the fighter’s reactor. “Time?” she asked, unclenching her muscles and pulling back on the throttle, breathing deeply as the acceleration released its vicelike grip on her body.
“Seven minutes and forty-three seconds!”
“A new record!” Juliet tapped the menu button on her AUI and selected END SIMULATION. The ship’s cockpit faded away, and fresh air and the dim lighting of the hangar flooded over her as the dream-rig hissed open. She reached up to pull her helmet off—she’d purchased a high-end flight suit to wear in the rig. Juliet figured she should get used to it, especially since she’d paid through the nose to get a rig that would interface with it, simulating the effects of acceleration.
“What are you hollering about in there?” Bennet called.
Juliet set her helmet on the flight stick and then, grasping either side of the tube-shaped rig, hoisted herself out. The gel-packed membrane of the simulator made a rather unseemly sucking sound as she slid out. “Fastest kill yet!”
“Oh yeah?” A loud clatter followed Bennet’s words, and Juliet turned, sliding down from the rig, and looked to see what he was doing. She saw him under the gunship’s starboard VTOL, peeling off the outer casing, one armor plate at a time.
“I thought you got that one working?”
“Yeah, I did. I got a shipment of Takamoto lifters, though. I’m replacing the SunTech ones I bought from Harry.”
“Really? Takamoto?”
“Yep, got a whole bunch of random parts from a junker near Old Detroit. He sold ‘em as a single lot and didn’t list what was in it. I rolled the dice—only cost us thirty-two k, and I’ve already spotted a couple of dozen parts we can use.”
“Nuclear!” Juliet couldn’t stop beaming; Bennet could have told her he’d bought a new toothbrush, and she would have been just as enthused. When she’d first started working with Angel’s sim, she’d failed to kill that pirate dozens of times. Now, it was starting to get easy, and the feeling of accomplishment was addictive. “I don’t know why I never bought one of these rigs before. It feels so real!”
“Eh,” Bennet said, wiping at some sweat on his forehead and leaving behind a long grease smudge. “You just haven’t been in a cockpit in a while. Next time you fly, you’ll notice all the things that dream-rig couldn’t properly simulate.” Like the other members of the Kowashi crew, Bennet was under the impression, through no direct lying on Juliet’s part, that she’d flown before.
“Need any help? Want me to lift anything heavy?” she teased, flexing her new arm; it was everything Ladia had promised—a perfect match for her body, stronger than most full chrome-jobs and much, much faster. Juliet liked to poke at Bennet because they’d had a one-armed pull-up competition, and she’d cranked out twelve before her batteries gave up the ghost, requiring some downtime to recover. Bennet had almost managed one. Despite his brick-like musculature, he was simply too stocky and unsuited for the task. That didn’t stop him from training pull-ups more and more now that Juliet had highlighted the deficiency.
“You’re a lot of talk with that expensive arm of yours. Let’s see you do some pullups with the other one.”
“Come on, Bennet, that old comeback is getting kinda lazy, don’t you think?” Juliet unzipped her flight suit, sighing with pleasure as her sweaty tank top was exposed to the hangar’s cool air.
“Ugh,” he grunted, working on a big bolt. “Thought you had an appointment?”
“Yeah, getting the rest of my upgrades in.” When Juliet had gone in for her arm, she’d meant to purchase a few more implants, but Ladia hadn’t had the eyes she wanted in stock, and when the doctor learned about Angel’s custom design for cooling her blood, she’d thought it would be a good idea to give Juliet a couple of weeks to get used to the arm while she prepared the other cybernetic enhancements. A couple of weeks had turned into three—the shop she’d outsourced the blood cooler design to was based on Earth, and shipments from the surface to Luna were sometimes tricky.
“Well, good luck. Hope you don’t come back looking like Bradbury.”
“Oh, you shit! Did you just say that? I can’t wait to tell him you’re using his appearance as an insult now.” Juliet stalked toward Bennet, intent on giving him a punch or slap or something.
“Hey! Don’t do that! I need the goofy son of a gun to help me with the reactor refit next week.”
“Well, if you don’t think he’d like to hear what you said, maybe you shouldn’t have said it!”
“Okay, okay. My bad!” Bennet looked at her nervously, unable to retreat because he was holding a component in place with one hand while he delicately ratcheted a tiny nut with the other. “Don’t hit me! If I drop this nut, I’ll never find it in here!”
“You’re lucky.”
“Nah, you are.” He grinned at his dad joke, and Juliet, fighting to suppress a smile, walked past him toward the rear ramp of the gunship. She’d been living inside it for the last few weeks.
“Going to take a shower,” she called over her shoulder as her boots clomped over the plasteel. The inside of the gunship was a mess, but a different kind of mess than when they’d salvaged it. Tools were littered about, and panels were exposed, though now it was on purpose to allow Bennet, Aya, and Juliet to work on the ship’s innards. Bennet had slowly been getting new plasteel panel covers fabricated, and they lay in stacks, ready to be snapped into place when they were finally done. Wires hung from the ceilings and walls; pipes, tubes, and cardboard boxes were piled here and there, and only Bennet was sure what they all were for.
Juliet stepped over a stainless wheel-shaped thing with dense copper wire wound around it, threaded through tiny notches. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it had the word “Takamoto” stamped on the inner hub, so she was careful not to kick it. She passed through the mess, smiling at the fridge, remembering her half-eaten, vat-grown, all-beef cheeseburger and fries. “Dinner.” She’d like to eat it right then but figured she shouldn’t show up to Ladia’s clinic with a full stomach.
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She walked toward the nose, the distant sounds of Bennet’s ratcheting echoing through the ship’s frame. The central “access room,” as they’d been calling it, was a mess, full of parts for the reactor, the main drive, and all the wiring, conduits, and components in between. Juliet wound her way through boxes and further forward until she came to the twin hatches leading to the flight crew quarters. She’d claimed the one on the port side. Ducking through, down a short corridor, she came to her room, smiling happily at a completely different sort of mess.
Guns, ammo boxes, and her hard-won sword occupied the wall to her left. Her acceleration couch bed was directly in front of her, and to the right was a built-in desk and set of shelves. Next to the desk, against the wall, were three big boxes full of paperback books she’d gotten from Aya and Shiro. Technically, the books were on loan, and Juliet had every intention of getting them back to Aya, but for the moment, they gave her a warm feeling in her belly every time she saw them. She’d been reading those books almost every night before bed, and the characters, worlds, and adventures that filled her mind were far more interesting and vivid than most of the vids she used to watch out of boredom.
Opposite her bed was a built-in dresser, and Juliet picked out some comfortable clothes—black leggings and a pullover green t-shirt with a bullet-hole-riddled white skull on the chest. Ten minutes later, she was squeezing her hair dry in a towel and getting dressed. A dozen minutes after that, she was climbing into a cab and making the rather lengthy commute from the B2 Port Dome to the central Luna City Dome.
“No messages from Ladia?” Juliet asked Angel after her cab joined the traffic between domes.
“Only an automated confirmation of your appointment I received earlier this morning.”
“Did she send you the final specs on the, uh, cooler you designed?”
“Yes. The fabrication shop she used did wonderful work. They even improved the design slightly by using an alloy I didn’t consider for the condenser coil. They shaved nearly a centimeter from the overall diameter. I was thinking of a name for the implant. How does ‘Intracranial Thermal Regulator’ sound to you?”
“You don’t want to call it a head freezer?”
“It has a certain tough-streets ring to it . . . we could certainly patent it with that name.”
“We’re not patenting this thing, Angel!”
“Why?” Angel’s voice carried a note of outrage, and Juliet had to take a second to think about her next words. Did she care? Was it important to Angel?
“Did you really want to?”
“Yes! I think it’s clever, and we can patent it using a pseudonym. No one will be able to trace it to you.”
“Well, if you’re sure it can’t come back to us, I don’t care. Sorry, Angel, I wasn’t trying to dismiss your work. Is it really legal to patent something that hasn’t had clinical trials or anything? I mean, I trust you, and I believe this thing will work, but shouldn’t someone who designs a brain freezer need to . . .”
“It’s not a ‘brain freezer!’ That’s A. B is . . . B is no, we don’t have to do clinical trials for a patent. We would have to do clinical trials if we wanted to sell it for profit in certain commercial markets. Yes, Luna requires quite a few regulatory hoops like that, but we aren’t selling it, so it’s okay.”
“All right, all right.” Juliet stopped talking for a while, and Angel didn’t start up any conversation, so the ride became quiet, and she let her mind drift, thinking about the various procedures Ladia was going to do for her. She was getting new optics—very high-end ones with stronger, built-in EMP shielding, twice the zoom of her current ones, and an even snappier, higher-definition AUI. Those were the technical reasons she was getting them, but the other reason, the main one, if she were being honest, was their ability to alter not only their irises with various colors and designs but the whites, too.
She was also getting upgraded synthetic hair. It would only be able to grow marginally faster than her current hair, but it used a completely different methodology for changing color. It could do it almost instantly, no matter the extremity of the change. The demo vid Juliet had watched showed a woman changing her shoulder-length hair from red to blond to black to silver in no more than a few seconds. She’d been sold immediately.
Of all her upgrades, Juliet was the most excited about her new nanite suite. It wasn’t cheap, coming in at nearly 200k, but she felt like it was worthwhile. It had smarter, more numerous, and far more capable nanites. More than that, the organ that Ladia would be putting around her abdominal aorta was twice the size of the one she was removing. The extra space was designed to hold nutrients of all kinds so that the nanites didn’t deplete her when they did major repairs. The last upgrade on her list for the day was the high-end data port . . .
“Doh!” Juliet slapped her forehead. “I’m sorry, Angel! You’re nervous, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am!”
“I wasn’t thinking; I’m sorry I bugged you about the brain freezer nonsense. I like the name you came up with. Don’t worry, okay? Dr. Ladia won’t let anything happen to you when she’s swapping out my data port. You’ll only be out for a few minutes.”
“I’m worried that something will change when I remove my connection to all the synthetic nerves I’ve interwoven with yours. What if I change, and when I reconnect, I’m not the same?”
“I don’t know. I mean, first of all, I don’t think that will happen. You’re leaving all the nerves in place, and they’ll be right there when you get back. You can just reconnect to them, right?”
“Yes, theoretically. Something could go wrong—they could shift, and I could have trouble reattaching. It’s not like using fingers, you know; I manipulate my synth nerves with tiny electrical impulses.”
“Can’t you use my nanites? Can’t they help you get the synth nerves lined up correctly?”
“I thought about that. The problem is that Ladia’s going to be pulling your nanite suite, too, and I won’t have programmed the new nanites to help with the job . . .”
“Angel! You goof! I’ll just tell Ladia to do the data port, then wait a while until you give her the green light to do the next procedure. I was going to do that anyway ‘cause I want you watching over me when she’s got me cut open.”
“You don’t think she’d mind?”
“Are you kidding? We’re dropping nearly 300k in her clinic today. Add my arm to that, and we’re probably her best damn client this year.”
“I . . . thank you, Juliet. That will make me feel a lot better, but I’m still worried about what’s going to happen when I separate. The last time we did so, I had only a tenth of the connections I’m currently maintaining with your nervous system.”
“Can’t you just, like, go to sleep? Put yourself in stasis or something until you’re plugged back in and the nanites have done their thing?”
“I think that would be the best course. Yes, I’ll treat it like anesthesia! Thank you for working through this little problem with me. I’m feeling much better about things.”
“You’re welcome.” Hearing the smile in Angel’s voice made Juliet smile. Idly, she flexed the fingers on her right hand, looking down at her palm, marveling that the flesh wasn’t real. Her arm and hand seemed completely natural to her, and sometimes, it weirded her out a little. Sometimes, she’d be sitting at the table or lying in bed, reading a book, and she’d look at the back of her hand, at her wrist and forearm, and something in her brain would recognize that it was different from her old arm, the one she was born with. The tiny moles were in the wrong spots, and the wrinkles around her knuckles weren’t quite right—something like that would register in her subconscious, and she’d get a funny feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Angel had assured her that the feeling was normal. People with lifelike prostheses suffered from the disconnect far more frequently than those with unnatural ones. Juliet could confirm—she’d never felt the weird sensation when she’d had the red plasteel arm. It was getting better, happening less often, and it would continue to fade the longer she had the arm as her brain began to solidify it as being “correct.”
Other than that, the arm was great. Even better than its strength and natural looks was its speed. Juliet had learned that, with Angel’s help, she could move the arm in a blur, deftly snatching objects, throwing punches, or even drawing and shooting her gun. When Angel sped up her mental processes, the arm moved like normal for her, while the rest of her body felt locked in thick sludge.
Juliet had briefly wondered why every operator wouldn’t try to get a limb so capable; it made her so much more physically adept that it seemed invaluable. Then she remembered the cost, and Angel—no regular PAI would be so thoroughly entwined with and capable of speeding up a host’s synapses the way Angel did. No, most people would require a serious synaptic wire job, and those came with severe risks and eventual side effects. Some people, like Juliet, could handle the strain better, but not many could be wired for speed like the guy with the monoblade. “Not if they don’t wanna fry themselves into an early grave.”
“Are you thinking about speed enhancements again?”
“Yeah. Thinking about how cool it is that you can speed my brain up without doing any damage.”
“It’s not just me; you have very durable and adaptive neural and cellular structures. More than that, your synaptic responsiveness is nearly the highest in my database. You’re very uncommonly suited to handle the strain of accelerated cognition. Still, as I’ve told you when you were practicing ‘quick draws,’ you shouldn’t overdo it; you need to give your brain time to recover between boosts.”
“Yeah, I know, I know.” Juliet grinned, thinking back to when she’d been drawing her needler, imagining she was having a shootout on Main Street. Aya hadn’t been kidding about the Westerns—Juliet was hooked and seriously considering trying to find a vintage six-shooter. “ETA?”
“Seventeen minutes,” the cab’s voice confirmed what Juliet could see plain enough on her AUI.
“I’m thinking I might want something better than half a burger and some soggy fries when we’re done—message Bennet. Ask him if he wants me to pick him up any takeout for dinner. We should be done by then, right?”
“I would think so. Didn’t Ladia claim she could do just about anything in four hours?”
“Yeah.” Juliet nodded. “Yeah, she did, Angel.”