It was hard to understand just how much money I’d made over the last few months. I hadn’t really spent much of it on anything important, just some furniture for my room in the loft and some business expenses – my gun, ammunition, that sort of thing. In terms of how I lived my life, things hadn’t changed a huge amount, while simultaneously changing in every way that mattered.
For one, I was spending more and more time in the loft, eating lunch and dinner there most days even if I then trudged back to my apartment when things became just a little too loud for me. About half the time, though, I stayed, woke up late in the morning – but still earlier than I had in years – and ate whatever breakfast someone had bought from the food trucks that catered to the blue collars who worked in the low-scale warehouses surrounding our building.
We spent more on takeout than I did even at my worst, but the lifestyle was broadly similar once you discounted the massive gulf between living like that alone and living like that with friends. I’d never felt like I was wealthy before, until I followed Lisa into the grocery store in midtown.
It was a fact of life that there were some stores that you just never walked into. It was a habit everyone learned from their parents, back when they were just barely old enough to toddle around behind them, pointing at random items on the shelves and loudly making a nuisance of themselves. There were the shops you used and the shops you didn’t, and the distinction between the two was ironclad.
My parents certainly never shopped at a Harris Teeter Metro, which meant it sat firmly on the other side of the gulf in my mind. Lisa, on the other hand, walked past the pair of security guards at the door of the franchised corner shop like she wasn’t crossing some ironclad societal border. Then again, her willing fall from grace seemed to have given Lisa the unique ability to ignore all those artificial boundaries, like she’d removed herself from the flow of society.
Besides, I thought, as rich as her family was, maybe her parents had people to shop for them?
Wealth had been on my mind since I wiretapped the Anders family. I still kept up a constant watch on their feed, an AR window always floating in the corner of my vision tracking who was watching, browsing and buying what. I knew the name of the nanny Kayden hired to watch her daughter when she was out, knew that Max was in the process of closing on a piece of American pastoralist artwork, knew more than I wanted to know about Theo’s porn habits. Growing up, it had been impossible not to be aware in an academic sense of the divide between rich and poor, but the stratified nature of that divide meant it had never been as visible before.
Lisa might be able to pass across the barrier like she’d been invited in, but I didn’t have any of the same natural indifference that made the guards overlook her. Or maybe they just paid particular attention to me because of the horns and the few extra feet in height. One of the guards was an ork, but if corporate said to pay closer attention to some metatypes than others then I was sure she’d oblige. That was just the way the world worked; a class could only function thanks to the work of the class below, who in turn could never afford the lifestyle their work supported.
“Come on, slowpoke,” Lisa drawled from inside the store just as one of the guards took a half-step towards me, “dinner isn’t going to cook itself, right?”
“Sure, Lisa,” I said, gratefully, as the guard pretended she’d never been suspicious to begin with.
I hurried through the automatic doors as naturally as I could manage, shivering a little at the sudden blast of filtered and climate-controlled air. It was hard to quantify what made it more upmarket than, say, a Walmart or an Aldi, but something about the aisles of food and mostly white surfaces distinguished it as an establishment that catered to the increasingly small caste that is the upper-middle class.
Maybe it was how clean everything was; I couldn’t see any spills or even any bare shelves. It was clear that time and effort had also gone into arranging the produce and the handful of staff were all wearing the same uniform to the exact same standard, no differences on whether the shirt was tucked in or not and no branded bibs thrown over whatever clothes they owned.
Perhaps the distinction came from pride? Not the pride of the staff, of course, but the pride of the corporation that enforced the standards the staff had to follow. They wanted their customers to feel like they were participating in something special when they shopped here.
“You’re really going through it, huh?” Lisa remarked, accompanying her point with a good natured elbow to my side. “Like a damn tourist. Shopping first, culture shock later, okay?”
“Sorry,” I remarked, shrugging my shoulders and turning my attention away from a shelf full of pasta stored loose in miniature silos in defiance of all reason. “Meat first?”
Lisa nodded, making for an aisle that was made entirely out of fridges. Only about a third of that space was given over to meat, but it was still more than I’d ever expected to see in one place. In the sorts of stores I was used to, meat was shut away behind the counter, or stored in individual slots in a device that was part fridge, part vending machine, ensuring people could only take the meat they’d already paid for.
Here, however, beef, pork, chicken and a few varieties of fish all sat happily next to each other on the shelves like they were something normal you might pick up in a weekly shop, rather than a rare treat reserved for birthdays, announcing bad news or other special occasions.
Lisa hummed contemplatively, her fingers raised to her chin as she assessed what was on offer. “It’s okay, I guess, for battery farmed stuff. The beef’s a bit fatty, and I’m not sure about some of the fish.”
She was putting it on, so I rapped my knuckles lightly against the side of her head.
“Careful, you’re packing metal knuckles now,” she cautioned, looking up at me with a wry grin. “Could hurt someone with those grippers.”
“Chicken, right?” I asked, grabbing a plastic container of light-pink breasts and dropping them into Lisa’s basket. “Anything else we need?”
“Some paste,” Lisa said, moving off to another aisle as I followed in her wake. “Maybe some fresh chillies and herbs if they have them. Dried isn’t the same.”
There was something comfortably domestic about the trip, as I followed Lisa’s meandering journey through the store, repeatedly doubling back on herself to hunt for something she’d just remembered she wanted while I kept the recipe up in a matrix window, trying to keep her on track.
It was like I was being given a taste of what my life could have been like, if it had proceeded more conventionally. If my parents hadn’t died, if I’d been able to really apply myself in high school and graduate with decent grades, maybe even if I’d never had my eyes opened to the world beyond the matrix.
As Lisa paid for the food, idly making small-talk with a cashier about our age who was paid enough to force a smile onto her face, I found myself wondering what sort of person that life would have made me. Would I have followed dad into the docks, riding his coattails into some admin role, or would I have managed to get the grades to make college a worthwhile investment, like I knew mom probably would have wanted? Even then, what would I have studied? What work would it have led me to?
By the time we’d left the store and caught the metro back up north, I’d realised that no matter how hard I tried to think about what could have been, I couldn’t picture myself being anywhere other than where I was in that moment. It didn’t matter how many mistakes I’d made along the way, how much time I’d wasted, I knew that I belonged here, with a friend by my side and a whole world of data waiting for me to open my eyes and see it.
“We’re doing okay, right?” I asked, looking down at Lisa. “Really okay? No PR spin for the sake of keeping us on track.”
Lisa smirked at the acknowledgement. She did a lot of work to make sure everyone was working together smoothly, even if it had taken me a while to notice she was doing it.
“We’re riding the lighting,” she said, after a moment’s pause. “All Shadowrunners are, at all times. So long as we can keep our balance, we’ll be fine, but not many teams manage to last for long enough to retire rich. For every Faultline, there are dozens of dead mercs just as good as us. We’ve wobbled a little on every job, but so far we’ve managed to hold on.”
“But how do we last?” I asked. “What’s the trick?”
Lisa shook her head. “There’s no trick, just skill and focus. Keep your eye on the team, the job and the client at all times, and treat everything else like it doesn’t even exist.”
I nodded in agreement. It was the answer I’d been expecting, and it matched my own observations. I couldn’t let myself be distracted by what could have been when we were surrounded by so many dangers in the here and now.
As we returned to our hideout, I heard the sound of gunfire long before I reached the stairs up to the loft. It wasn’t real gunfire, of course. I had yet to find any non-simsense piece of media that had managed to replicate just how deafening real gunshots were, even if it was still a little strange to think of myself as the kind of person who could tell the difference.
It was simplicity itself to reach out for the datastream emanating from Alec’s Shiawase Sim-Station, expertly teasing out the details from the tightly-packed beam of pure data. The gunfire was coming from a ranked multiplayer match in Awakening: 1949, a game that Alec had bought at some point over the last few weeks. He was playing with a partner, splitscreen, using controllers rather than the simsense trodes. The game hadn’t had a splitscreen feature until he’d paid me fifty nuyen to add one in.
Briefly, I pulled up the feed, watching as Alec sent a digital stunbolt into the back of a troll in a washed-out blue uniform, while in the background the Eifel Tower crackled with energy from whatever made-up magical ritual had made it a monolith. His partner wasn’t as good as him, but she – I assumed it was Aisha – made up for it with an almost frantic enemy, sprinting across the rooftops of Paris and occasionally firing frantic bursts at any enemy players she saw.
I dismissed the feed as I emerged into the lounge. Alec, having just been immolated by a summoned spirit, held up a glass of some sort of red cocktail in a salute, letting out a cheer as Lisa returned the gesture with the packet of chicken like it was some prized paydata we’d swiped on a job. Aisha sat next to him, her attention wholly focused on the game as she franticly mashed the melee button.
As for the others, Rachel was sitting on the couch with a can of beer in one hand and part of her attention offloaded to her drones downstairs, while I found Brian in the kitchen, where he’d just finished slicing an onion into thin strips. He looked up as we entered and, while he didn’t smile, I was fairly sure he relaxed slightly when he saw it was us.
“Hey Brian,” Lisa said, as she reached into the Harris Teeter bag and set down an eggplant on the chopping board, “got another one for you to dice. Taylor, mind getting started on the chicken?”
I nodded, taking the packet from Lisa’s outstretched hand.
As I started to fry the chicken, throwing in a pre-mixed bag of spices, I glanced across the counter to Brian. He’d diced the eggplant, but was now just looking down at the small heap of vegetable chunks, his hands resting on the countertop. I could see tension in the statuesque shoulders visible beneath his long-sleeved t-shirt, running down the length of his arms to the artificial fingers slowly digging into the chopping board.
“Hey,” I spoke up. “You okay?”
“Hm?”
“You’re sort of staring into space. You know, it’ll be nice to have a home-cooked meal again. A real one, I mean. Not just a meal for one. Real meat, too; can’t remember the last time I had that.”
I paused. The chicken was now fully sealed, which meant it was time to squeeze in the tube of pre-mixed curry paste.
“I think it was when I graduated high school, actually. Right before… well, right before everything went wrong. I decided I had to do something to mark the occasion, so I took the money I’d saved, went down to the Market and bought a few pieces of fried chicken. I remember the stall didn’t even have a fridge, just a few chickens in a cage that they’d butcher as they needed them.”
“I know the kind of place you mean,” Brian said, unprompted. “Took Aisha somewhere like it a few times, split some between us. Had an uncle who ran a black-market battery farm out of his apartment. Place reeked.”
“I guess I never thought about where they came from.”
“Only way to get meat if you’re SINless is to raise it yourself, or know someone who does,” he said, a scowl on his face. He was thinking about Aisha.
“Hey, she’s doing fine,” I said. “Sure, she’s a maverick, but she’s skilled. She’s comfortable with her skill, too. She’s really come into her own.”
“Did she put herself in danger?”
“I-” I began. I didn’t know how to answer that, but I didn’t have to.
“Hey bro,” the young woman herself said, striding into the kitchen with an expression on her face like she didn’t have a care in the world, provided you didn’t look too close. “Come on out, why don’t ya? Been too long since we hung out.”
Brian looked torn for a moment.
“Go,” I said. “I can finish up here.”
I wasn’t sure I’d made the right decision, but if Aisha wanted to help her brother then I wasn’t going to stop her. Instead I focused my efforts on dinner, frying the onions for a few minutes before adding the eggplants, powdered coconut milk and enough water to rehydrate it before letting the mixture simmer, muting the smell of the spices but not eliminating it entirely.
After a couple of minutes, Lisa came to join me, lifting up the lid of a rice cooker that hadn’t even been removed from its packaging when I’d dug it out of the cupboards. She gave the rice a stir then, apparently content, began rooting through the cupboard for crockery and a packet of prawn crackers that had probably been in there for far too long.
“You think I did the right thing bringing Aisha in?”
“Not sure she’d have given you a choice,” Lisa countered. “Besides, where else would she go?”
We worked in silence after that, occasionally stirring the bubbling green mixture until the recipe said it was time to turn off the heat and start putting everything on plates. By that point, Rachel had been lured in by the smell of cooking – or just wanted to escape whatever was going on in the living room – and she divvied up the rice while I poured in the curry, making sure everyone got roughly the same amount of chicken even as I gave myself and Brian extra vegetables.
Brian himself wandered into the kitchen a little after Rachel, taking in the spread with a sheepish expression as I handed him his bowl. We both turned as Aisha and Alec followed him through, watching as Alec wrapped a hand around the back of Aisha’s neck and pulled her down into a possessive kiss, which she enthusiastically reciprocated.
I glanced back at Brian and saw on his face the same abject confusion that was plastered across my own features.
“You two are… seeing each other?” I ventured.
“You haven’t noticed?” Rachel asked. “They sleep in the same room.”
The look Alec was giving me almost made me wish I was born a gnome so that I could just shrink down under the table and disappear.
“Guess the men in this team have a thing for tall women,” he smirked, his eyes flicking between me and Brian.
I stiffened, and beside me I saw Brian do the same.
“Pretty sure you have a ‘thing’ for everyone, Alec,” Lisa countered. When Alec didn’t deny it, Aisha reached over and cuffed him on the back of his head.
“Not anymore, he doesn’t.”
Brian looked down, idly stirring his fork into the curry before finally speaking.
“Clearly I’ve missed a lot.”
“Oh yeah!” Aisha exclaimed, either ignoring or oblivious to his tone. “I fought a fraggin’ Samurai! Pretty wiz for my first time out of the city, huh? Guy was a real wirehead too; chromed to the gills.”
Instinctively, she gave my metal arm a look.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If I wasn’t awakened, I’d probably go full razorgirl. But if you’ve got it, you’ve gotta flaunt it, right?”
“It’s taken some getting used to,” I say, glad to change the subject, turning my hand over and watching the articulation of the joints as I furled and unfurled my fingers. “Honestly, though, most of the time I forget it’s there. I tweaked my head in the matrix to think that way; basically made it part of my psyche.”
Rachel frowned at that, reaching over to lay her hands on the plastic surface of my forearm. I let her, watching with morbid fascination as she popped open a panel, scrutinising the synthetic musculature that moved the limb.
“You shouldn’t think like that,” she said, as reproachfully as she could manage. “Meat doesn’t usually need maintenance until you pass a certain percent of chrome, but cyberware does.”
“She’s got a point,” Brian said, fishing for something in the pocket of his jacket before setting down a small canvas pouch of spindly tools. “I don’t know how to fix mine if they break, but I know how to maintain them. You should learn how to inspect them at least; prevention is better than the cure.”
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
“I know you didn’t want to install it yourself,” I said to Rachel, “but would you mind giving it a look sooner or later? I’d appreciate it.”
“Don’t think I’ve handled Evo’s chrome before,” Rachel said, contemplatively. “Definitely not their milspec models.”
It wasn’t a refusal. If anything, she sounded intrigued.
From there, things started to calm down as everyone became more focused on the food than conversation. We still talked, but it was about small, inane things. None of us had much in common outside of Shadowrunning; we’d all grown up in wildly different worlds, even Brian and Aisha had lived separate lives in the same city. Still, there was something inherently comfortable about swapping tips on renting with Lisa – who was thinking of finding her own place in the city – or listening to Aisha brag about her cat-burglar antics.
Inevitably, the alcohol started to flow. Aisha had picked up extensive and, from the looks the others gave her, probably wildly unconventional opinions on what made a good mixer and insisted on making everyone a succession of different cocktails out of whatever we had in the cupboards, the fridge and the freezer.
I wasn’t really sure I trusted Aisha’s skill as a mixologist, but part of that might have been because I was still relatively new to cocktails myself. I’d mostly just limited myself to the occasional beer can when I lived alone, and while I’d drunk more since then I was still definitely a lightweight for my size.
Even so, when our dishes had been abandoned for someone to deal with tomorrow and everyone began to move back to the living room, I still had the presence of mind to push back the unsteady sensation in my head and grab Alec by the arm. I didn’t intend it to be a forceful grab, but between my new arm and my admittedly less-than-stellar coordination in that moment it might have ended up as one.
“What?” Alec snapped, looking up at me.
“You’re sleeping with Aisha.”
“Yeah? Thought we covered this, Bug.”
“You sure that’s wise?”
He scoffed, rolling his eyes.
“Don’t pull the shotgun brother shit, dork. I’ll get plenty of that from Brian later. We’re both adults, so Aisha can do what she wants.”
“Can she?” I asked, as digital memories flashed back into my head. “I know what kind of mage you are, Jean-Paul.”
Alec tensed. He didn’t get angry, or surprised, or afraid. It was like every muscle in his face just stilled simultaneously, leaving me face to face with a blank doll and already regretting what I’d said.
“Fuck you. You can’t leave it alone, can you? Have to dig your claws into everything and everyone until they dance on your strings, and you think I’m the control freak? But hey, at least you’ve stopped dropping hints.”
He stepped in close making the tight confines of the corridor feel even tighter, even though it meant he had to crane his neck up to keep meeting my eyes. Even as I looked away, my gaze landing on the door to Lisa’s room, on the almost impressionist portrait of an elven women that Alec had painted there.
“It’s a valid concern,” I said. “The… environment you grew up in.”
“Because we’re all just like our parents, right?” Alec drawled. “Only your parents are dead, so when are you gonna eat a bullet?”
“I-”
“If I was like mon père,” he continued, his voice pitched low almost to the point of whispering, “do you really think there’s anything any of you could do about it? I’d have made you all a puppet show by the end of the first week, then I’d take my pick of the rest of the city. Only difference ‘tween here and Montreal would be that I fuck guys too.”
A twisted smirk spread across his face, but I knew he was putting it on.
“But I’m not hungry for power, like some people I could mention. I’m here because I’m comfortable here, and because sometimes – when I’m high or being shot at or lectured by some arrogant dork – I actually get to feel something real.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, the words coming out quicker than I’d planned. I wished I could just blame the alcohol. “That was…”
Rude? Manipulative? A complete and utter breach of trust?
Alec’s smirk suddenly seemed to become real, just for a moment.
“Don’t be,” he said in a jovial tone, like the whole conversation hadn’t happened. “If I were any of my dear brothers and sisters, you’d all be fucked.”
He began to walk away, only to turn to face me again.
“Oh, and since you’re so interested in my sex life,” he said, spreading his hands, “I made Aisha a marionette just the other night, because she wanted to know what it felt like.”
As he finally left the corridor, joining the others in the living room and immediately turned up the music, I stood there for a moment. I felt ashamed and vindicated at the same time; ashamed that I’d asked, but strangely vindicated that my fears had been reasonable even if they were disproven.
Lisa had told me once that what Alec wanted above all else was control over his own life; the freedom to do what he wanted, when he wanted it. I’d forgotten because, for two years, that was something I’d had and done nothing with. When Lisa had asked me whether I prioritised comfort, like Alec, or ambition like her, I hadn’t been able to give her an answer. In hindsight, though, it was as clear as day.
I couldn’t let myself stop, because I knew that if I did I’d just fall back into the same kind of rut. I could be comfortable, could waste an evening in the company of friends, only because I’d managed to find enough ambition in my lethargic state to take the first step on an upward climb that might well have no end.
As I joined the rest of the team in the living room, I had everything someone like Alec would ever want in life. I had good music, a drink in my hand, something comfortable to sit on and the company of friends – which I suspected mattered more to Alec than he’d care to admit. Yet the only reason I had any of that was because of my ambition, and the only way I’d keep it would be to keep riding the lightning.
The games console had been switched off. Instead, Alec was pumping Francophone electropunk through his sound system while he and Aisha danced together like a pair of utter maniacs, close enough that I was sure they were deliberately flaunting their closeness to the rest of us.
There was a natural, effortless confidence to the pair of them that seemed almost alien to me. They were so comfortable moving together, so comfortable moving apart. I got the feeling that Aisha was the sort of person was regularly the first person in the room to start dancing and would feel no embarrassment whatsoever if she ended up dancing alone. To me, that was an almost unfathomable level of confidence, even though Lisa looked like she was moments from joining in.
Still, I couldn’t help but notice the way Aisha’s eyes would periodically flick over to her brother, who was sitting on one end the couch with one of Aisha’s cocktails in his hand, while Rachel sat on the opposite end.
I took the middle, between the two of them, and sipped from my own cocktail – a mixture of rum and store-bought tropical soda with salt inexpertly scattered around the brim. Sure enough, Lisa had joined the couple on the impromptu dancefloor, but I wasn’t quite drunk enough to consider joining them. I’d danced with Brian in the Palanquin, of course, but that felt like a lifetime ago.
Inevitably, that thought brought up memories of the almost incomparable sensations I’d experienced on the dance floor, pressed close to Brian by the people around us – and by my own, almost instinctive, desires. I’d felt something then that I’d never experienced before; a total reversal of my normal instincts to hide away from view. I’d wanted to be seen and I’d wanted to see him, and I believed it was mutual even if I had no idea whether Brian still felt that way.
Whatever possibilities there had been, they were interrupted by the realities of the life we’d both chosen. By a job, first and foremost, where I shut out all thoughts beyond how we were going to give the Chosen a black eye and escape unscathed. Then, when I failed, I’d sunk deeper into that focus partly because I wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again, but also because it hurt too much to think of Brian when he was hospitalised.
Abruptly I felt a hand on my arm, dragging me out of my thoughts. Not the flesh and blood one holding the cocktail, but its cybernetic counterpart. I turned to see that Rachel had popped open the panel again, and was in the process of taking a small pouch of tools from the pocket of her cargo pants.
“You don’t have to do that now,” I said. “Tonight’s about relaxing.”
“This is how I relax,” Rachel retorted, succinctly. I didn’t protest any further as she withdrew a miniature screwdriver, I just held my arm perfectly still as she unscrewed a second cover nestled between bundles of synthetic musculature.
It was a weird sensation. The arm had its own artificial nerve endings on the surface to let me know when something was touching it, but they’d shut off when Rachel removed the inspection cover. The result was something like the reverse of the phantom pain I’d read people sometimes experienced after getting a cybernetic limb; I knew exactly where the arm was because it was mapped to my digital persona, but I couldn’t actually feel it anymore.
I thought about talking to Brian, but it felt a little awkward with Rachel digging into my arm. Instead, I leant against the back of the couch and made another attempt at my drink, the baffling mix of flavours combining into something that was both singularly disgusting and weirdly compelling.
“Taylor…” Brian spoke up, startling me. “What I asked before, about Aisha?”
I swallowed, trying to figure out how to word it. I was struck by a sudden, inexplicable fear that my answer would disappoint him.
“Just…” Brian continued. “I need to know.”
“She’s reckless,” I said, biting the bullet. “The infiltration went perfectly; Aisha was as cool as anyone when it came to sneaking in. She mouthed off, but she knew when to focus on the job. But when everything went bad” – Brian flinched, and I mentally kicked myself. “Okay, so I got made in the Matrix, I told Aisha to bug out and she did, right up until she decided she’d rather pick a fight with a Samurai than keep running.”
Brian’s hand rose to his chin, his brow furrowed.
“You sent her in alone?”
“She’s good at what she does,” I answered, trying to figure out how to phrase it gently. “Really good. I know you want to keep her safe, but…” I glanced over to Aisha, then pitched my voice low enough that I hoped she wouldn’t hear it over the music.
“She was living with a gang that got wiped out by the Chosen as a reprisal for our attack on their shipment. We don’t live in a safe world, Brian. People can do everything right and still get hurt because someone else made a mistake. You know that.”
Telling Brian that we’d played a role – however indirect – in Aisha’s situation felt like kicking a puppy, but ultimately I knew that Aisha wasn’t going to leave and she wasn’t going to accept being benched for his sake. I didn’t want this to grow into something that’d drive a rift between them.
“You still sent her in,” he said, putting a strange emphasis on the word. “I’ve been hearing that a lot. You came up with the plan, you called the shots, I even saw you pulling Alec aside in the corridor just now.”
I sighed.
“Yeah, I stepped up. I’m the only one who sees the whole picture, Brian. Everyone on the team is wired somehow; even our mages carry commlinks. I know where they are at all times, and I know where our enemies are as well. I’ve got hooks on the Anders family, hooks on our client, even hooks on us.”
“I know you see a lot,” he said, a little forcefully, “I know you’re good at thinking on the fly, but I think you rely on that too much. You push for the risky plans because you know that’s the environment in which you thrive, where you offer the most to the group.”
“Stop,” I said, in a quiet voice. It felt unfair for him to pull this now, with Rachel sitting right next to us and everyone else in earshot, even if we were both next to whispering.
“It’s not just you. Often, you’re just joining in with whatever fucked-up plan one of the others has come up with. I tried, Taylor. I really tried to keep things sensible, keep the group sane. It’s so easy to die, you know? So easy to get in over your head, to be just a little too slow on the trigger.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, laying my organic hand on his shoulder. He flinched, but didn’t shrug it off. “They got the jump on us. Had the high ground and our backs to them. Might not have even happened if I’d managed to win the digital fight soon enough to keep GOD off our backs.”
“That’s not the point,” Brian snapped. “I almost died, Taylor. We all almost died. Everything I’ve done, I’ve told myself it’s so that I can be there if she needs me,” he said, nodding towards Aisha. “I’m not naïve. I knew she wasn’t safe, knew she didn’t respect me enough to let me keep her out of danger, even if I didn’t know where she was. All I could do was have a safety net ready to catch her if she ever realised she needed one.”
“And then you came out of the hospital and found out I’d enlisted her in our little war…” I shrank a little, letting out a long sigh.
“It’s a war now? Look, I know Aisha isn’t going anywhere. I know I’ve lost control, and I don’t think I ever had it to begin with. Not really. You’re right; I can’t see what you see. I can’t watch the team from the vanguard, but it’s more important that I’m there at the front when the bullets start flying.”
For a while, I didn’t say anything, as Rachel screwed my arm back together and left the party for her workshop downstairs. In a way, it made everything easier. Brian had been our leader almost by default, off the back of his years of experience in the mercenary world, but none of us were amateurs anymore and I knew that he couldn’t do what I’d done in Boston, or even in the raid against the Chosen.
For all that I talked about meatspace and the matrix, the two were so intertwined that there functionally wasn’t any point where one ended and the other began and I was one of the few people in the world who saw that. I could keep track of a battlefield, could search for paydata, could liaise with clients and contacts. I understood the great web of data that connected the world, and knew how to tug at its strings to get the best result.
But it still hurt. Physically, Brian was as solid as ever. It was like he was carved from stone, inviolate and immovable. I think it was why I’d been so drawn to him, why I still felt drawn to him. I’d gone down the rabbit hole into an unfamiliar world and he was something solid on which I could anchor myself.
The Brian sitting next to me, close enough that I was conscious of the visible muscles of his neck, of the way his long-sleeved t-shirt was drawn tight over his body, was still carved from stone, but it was like it had been aged by time – its immutability tested by moss and erosion.
He noticed me looking at him, turning away for a moment. When he spoke, it was in a quiet, almost hesitant tone.
“I want to protect you. I want to protect all of you. Work… it was always a barrier, before. Maybe you were right to bring Aisha in; I couldn’t be there for her because I needed to work to pay for her safety net. I couldn’t make friends, because solo mercs don’t have friends. But once I started Shadowrunning, work wasn’t a barrier anymore. Suddenly I had a team. I had friends I could talk to who really understood, who I didn’t have to hide anything from. I care about you.”
He straightened up, seeming to find some hidden well of resolve as he turned to look me in the eyes.
“I care about you.”
I didn’t know what to say. For a moment, I couldn’t think, couldn’t find the words or make them fit together in my mouth. In the end, what came out felt like a complete non-sequitur.
“Would you like to see the world the way I do?” I asked.
Brian gave me a strange look, shifting a little so that he was almost leaning side-on against the couch.
“I’ve used VR before, Taylor.”
“That’s not how I see it,” I countered, softly.
He considered it for a moment. “Okay.”
There was no resistance as I took control of his cybereyes; there wasn’t a single wireless device across the entire team that I hadn’t thoroughly compromised. Without a datajack, I couldn’t bring Brian’s consciousness through into virtual reality, but I wasn’t looking for that. Augmented reality devices worked by picking and choosing which Matrix icons the underlying algorithm believed were most relevant to their user. All I had to do to let Brian see the matrix was turn off the filters.
I did it gradually, so as not to alarm him. First, I made all the devices in the room visible, from the speaker to Lisa’s commlink. They appeared as ghostly afterimages of their real-world counterparts, having been designed that way by their programmers for ease of recognition.
Simultaneously, I expanded the range of the visible devices and faded away the real world entirely, revealing the full spectacle of the matrix. Innumerable devices and personas flitted through the city in the far distance, some tied to the physical world while others were visiting from elsewhere, or existed solely above out heads.
Blocky hosts created a cityscape of different structures, mapping out businesses and servers while the largest drifted far above the plane of the city like digital cloudbanks. It was the matrix Brian knew; the way the matrix wanted to be seen. The whole spectacle was manufactured, each icon and host given shape by corporate designers and service providers to present a comprehensible face to their users.
I took a deep breath, then disabled the filters, letting Brian see the true matrix, my matrix. The personas, devices and even the hosts were almost irrelevant in that world, visible only as points of light created by the overlapping strands of data that stretched in every direction as far as the mind could comprehend, like a great golden web that entangled the world.
The sheer volume of datastreams was overwhelming, even the least of them representing gigabytes of data being carried through the matrix. I was certain that Lisa would have compared the greatest of them to magical ley lines; channels down which incomprehensible quantities of energy flowed, and upon which the entire world was built.
“I’ve always found it calming to look at,” I said. “You realise how small you are, in the grand scheme of things. Walk down the streets and you’ll be bombarded by so many little boundaries and divisions, but I can brush my hand against these streams and feel data bound for servers in other countries, on other continents, into orbit. It might be financial transmissions, trideo broadcasts or someone’s call to their grandma, but when you look at it like this it's all the same.”
I kept talking, looking out across the vista that had been my constant companion for six years and trying to figure out how it might look through Brian’s eyes.
“I guess it takes me out of myself when I think about it, reminds me that we’re only one part of this vast system. Cogs in the universe, in our own way. Seeing the big picture like this, it makes all the little details feel so much smaller.”
Brian didn’t respond, but I didn’t need him to. I was content to simply sit there, staring at the endless pulsing datastreams. When I did finally turn my head to look at Brian, I saw that his own head was turned as well. He was looking at me, had been looking at me since I switched off the physical world.
Idly, I checked what exactly he was seeing. In the matrix I presented myself as a tall woman in silk robes, whose ‘skin’ was actually formed from plates of chitin, but that was as much an affectation as the icons I’d disabled, and it had been unintentionally banished by the same action.
As I held up a hand in front of my face, I saw the familiar crystals of solidified resonance; a golden counterpart to my cybernetic arm, exact in every detail. It was the second half of my dual nature; a perfect match to the meatspace body whose neurons it mirrored, bridging the gap between the resonant and physical realms. I was nude, but it felt like the nudity of a statue; given dignity by being formed from something more solid than flesh.
Still, I closed my eyes and focused for a moment, allowing part of the physical world to bleed through into Brian’s vision as I overlaid my real body – clothes and all – over my living persona.
Seemingly on instinct, Brian reached out towards me then stopped, his hand falling to his side. I watched his chest rise and fall as he drew in a breath, his eyes flicking away from me as he tried to centre himself.
“Hey,” I said, quietly, past the butterflies in my stomach. “Go ahead.”
He blinked, swallowed, and wrapped his arm around my waist, gently pulling me close until I was leaning against his side. His touch felt almost impossibly light, like he was afraid I might fracture into nothing if he held on too tight. I hugged my organic arm around his shoulders, pulling him in close until his head rested on my collarbone. I wasn’t as gentle as him. I meant to be, but I just couldn’t manage that same delicate touch. My heart was racing too fast.
“This is what you wanted?” I asked, quietly. I could still hear the music, but I had no idea what the others were doing. Neither of us did. We could only see each other; two bodies floating in the midst of a glowing web of data.
“You’re so still,” he replied. I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I didn’t say anything at all. I just stayed still, lost in the warm sensation of his breath on my collarbone, the faint pressure of his hand on my waist.
“I worry about you,” he said.
“You don’t need to,” I replied, on instinct. “But… thanks.”
He tensed up a little, but I didn’t think it was in response to anything I’d said. He’d closed his eyes, his fingers twitching momentarily as he mustered up the will to say… something.
“Can we…” he began to ask, his eyes flicking towards the corridor.
My eyes widened a fraction, my mouth opening as I realised what he meant. Apprehension ran through my mind for a moment, but it was a familiar kind of apprehension. A general unease that had nothing to do with this moment, but that was responsible for so many missed opportunities, that had kept me shut away from the world for far too long. This was everything I had missed. It was real, undeniable. I still wasn’t sure what he saw in me but, in that moment, I no longer cared.
“Yeah,” I said, gently releasing my grip on my shoulder as I stood. Using simple lines to mark out the floor, walls and corridor of the loft in the digital world I inhabited, I led Brian by the hand out of the living room, both of us taking slow steps that nevertheless drew us inexorably closer to my room.
As I closed the door behind us, I let go of Brian’s hand just long enough to shrug my jacket off my shoulders, then guided it to my waist as I backed towards my bed. His fingers felt smooth on my back as he slipped his hand beneath my top, gently stroking up my spine like he was afraid I’d get spooked if he went too fast. I kicked off my sneakers, simultaneously sliding my own hands beneath Brian’s t-shirt and along the muscled ridges of his chest. Idly I found myself wondering how much of what I felt was organic and how much was a cosmetic layer over cybernetics. It didn’t matter either way; it was warm and smooth and true.
I sat down on my bed and took a deep breath, savouring the electrifying sensation that seemed to be running throughout my whole body before finally lying back and gently pulling Brian down with me until our lips met in a fumbling, passionate kiss.