I tugged at the sleeve of the jumpsuit, wondering how Lisa had managed to first guess my exact measurements and then find an outfit that fit actually fit those measurements in a matter of hours. Not that it fit too well, of course, but that was just more proof of how right she’d got it. Corporate uniforms come in standard and often unisex sizes of small, medium and large, plus the occasional extra-small or extra-extra-large for dwarves and trolls.
Only the suits have clothes that fit them, and even then it’s only those who can afford to get it tailored.
“It doesn’t fit right,” Regent complained, pulling at the waist of his own jumpsuit. He was a skinny guy, which meant there was a lot of jumpsuit to pull out. It’d look worse on a woman, though. It looked worse on me.
“Of course it doesn’t,” Tattletale answered, leaning against Bitch’s van with a smug expression on her face. “Have you ever seen a janitor in tailored clothes?”
She was dressed in her usual work outfit – what I’d call magical private eye chic – and was clearly relishing seeing her fellow mall-rat teammate slumming it with the rest of us fashion-blind luddites.
“There was a fad in Montreal for that,” Regent replied, seeming almost lost in thought as he popped the collar of his overalls.
“Really?” I asked, trying and failing to picture it. He nodded.
“For a whole month, all the society kids went out buying up authentic blue collar corp unforms and having them re-tailored into suit jackets, mini-dresses, whatever. I remember this one girl who turned up to a club wearing nothing above the waist except for a high-vis jacket and a hard hat. But the fad had passed, and she just looked like an idiot in construction gear.”
There was something close to a genuine smile on his face, before it slipped back into his usual expression – a self-satisfied grin that seemed just a little too real. Like a perfect copy of the genuine emotion.
At that point, Grue finished buttoning up his own jumpsuit. If anything, he had the opposite problem to regent. He and his muscles fit the outfit a little too well, and I could see his biceps pressing against the seams of his sleeves. Cyberlimbs they may be, but it was clear his organic body was in much the same shape. Frankly, he looked like an action hero, and that image only became more accurate as he picked up his new rifle and slid it into a black duffle bag.
He looked up, and our eyes locked for a moment before I looked away.
“Bug, your gun?” he asked, and I almost jerked forward, snatching my gun and holster from where it had been sitting on a table and depositing them in the bag. It had a logo on the side of it; the same one that was embroidered on our jumpsuits. One on each sleeve – on the upper arm, just below the shoulder – and another, smaller, logo over our hearts, next to three random surnames. That particular logo had a small, blank, RFID tag inside it that on a real employee would be loaded with their employee number and, if they were important enough, Corporate SIN.
Once my gun was in, Bitch – seated in the front of her van and watching us all with a dispassionate expression – had her Crawler scuttle on over, leaping up onto the table and secreting itself in the duffle bag. Grue nodded, zipping the bag up and picking it up with one hand, never mind the weight of all the metal inside.
“Let’s go,” he said, bluntly, before stepping up into the van as the rest of us followed.
A storm had rolled in from the Atlantic, and our journey was accompanied by the constant clatter of raindrops hitting the Bulldog’s metal roof. Looking over the seats, past Bitch and Tattletale, I could just about make out the road beyond the water streaming down the windshield, only barely held at bay by the wipers – even on full tilt. It was only half nine in the evening, but all the traffic on the road had their headlights on full beam to cut through the downpour.
Bitch had gone one further, and wasn’t actually looking at the road at all. At least, not with her optics. Instead, I could see the thin stream of data linking her to the souped-up parking sensors that she’d installed around the van, giving her a three hundred and sixty degree view of her surroundings – within a certain amount of distance.
It meant she could move a little faster than the cars around us, could weave between traffic with complete confidence in her ability to fit the lumbering van through the gap. With each turn, the steering wheel spun on its own accord, her arms resting on her legs in a way that reminded me of the drones stowed neatly in the back, waiting until they’re needed.
The drive was a lot shorter than the trip to Palanquin, but I spent it in a state of anxious near-panic, feeling like I was ready to spring out of my seat at a moment’s notice. Strangely, I didn’t feel like running. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t run, either; even if I pictured myself leaping out of the van, it was almost always followed by me drawing a gun. I was terrified, but it felt like all that fearful energy was focused forward. Backing down didn’t even cross my mind, now that I’d passed the point of no return.
The van lurched forward for a moment as Bitch cut off another Bulldog to snag a rare open street-side parking spot, then lurched even more violently to a halt. I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt – the over-the-shoulder belt was too low for me – and I found myself gripping onto the seat so tightly my knuckles turned white, as nightmares I hadn’t suffered in years suddenly resurfaced.
I leapt up the moment we were stationary, brushing past Grue and almost throwing the panel door open before staggering out into the pouring rain, the sudden shock of cool water on my skin helping to ground me. Grue and Regent followed me, and I silently hoped they’d mistaken my panic attack for professional eagerness.
“We’ll wait for your signal!” Bitch shouted through the rain, and I looked back to see her staring straight at me, one arm slung over the back of her seat. “Send me an exact pickup point, I’ll be there!”
“Got it!” I shouted back, my voice still a little shaky. Bitch didn’t acknowledge me, sinking back into a fugue as she remotely closed the van’s door and drove off into traffic accompanied by screeching horns.
“You okay?” Grue asked, suddenly hovering by my shoulder. I flinched a little. “Nervous about the job?”
I could have taken the way out, but instead I shook my head. I didn’t want to seem unprofessional.
“No, it’s just… You think Bitch would mind if I asked her to install some bigger seats back there? Or just swap out the belt for one that just goes over the waist?”
“I don’t see why not,” he said, shrugging. “The belt at least. Maybe it rubs her the wrong way as well; she likes everything to be neat. Especially when it comes to her gear.”
“C’mon already,” Regent interrupted, “I’m soaked through!”
The three of us moved down the street at a brisk walk, ducking under hanging awnings, scaffolding and street-coverings wherever we could to keep us out of the downpour. On our left rose the immense flank of one of the sprawling residential blocks that made up Charter Hill, while to our right – past four lanes of traffic – lower-rise office blocks shared space with clean yet uninspired corporate residential blocks. Each door had the Medhall logo on it, and there were regular tunnels and footbridges that crossed over the traffic onto this side of the road.
At this hour, the streets were largely empty – most people were either at home or hitting the clubs – but we shared the pavement with a few dozen other people in similar corporate uniforms to ours. They hurried along just like we did – eager to get out of the rain, and afraid of clocking in late – but most of them hurried on their own. It wasn’t like the Dockworker’s association; these people didn’t actually know or care about each other outside of work.
What’s more, Medhall’s custodial staff had a high turnover rate, and rather than having set staff members assigned to single buildings they were rotated between sites, spending a few hours at one building before being sent on to the next one. The people who were walking were those who were just coming on-shift and had to make their own way to the first site, but the long grey bus that drove past us – a company logo clear to see on its side – was carrying employees who were already on-shift.
The RFID tags in their uniform all followed a pattern, one I was able to duplicate in our own tags to create the impression of legitimate tags. They weren’t complex; their main purpose was to make sure the bearer was authorised to enter a corporate site, and the ability to actually identify individual employees was an afterthought.
We were all heading to the same place; at the end of the road, what would otherwise be a serviceable view of the Bay was instead blocked off by a slab-sided grey building that rose up perhaps five stories high. It had few windows, and was surrounded by an equally grey concrete wall topped by razor wire. In fact, the only decoration on the whole structure was the company’s logo and the words Medhall Pharmaceuticals written in great black letters as tall as I was along the face of the building.
Whenever Medhall ran an advert, or they featured in the local news, they tended to run with pictures of their factories on the south-east side of the city. Those were modernist-looking sites, with grass in-between the buildings and floor-to-ceiling glass in the lobbies. The people who worked there were graduates, or highly-skilled technicians tasked with maintaining automated factory-floor robots. With the suburbs on one side and the university on another, they worked hard to present the company as the forward-thinking New Hampshire behemoth everyone knew it was. But this factory was in the North End, so why would anyone care how it looked?
As we waited at the road crossing, shoulder to shoulder with half a dozen other similarly-dressed workers, an ambulance sped past with its lights and sirens on full blast. It was white with green trim – a CrashCart vehicle, rather than Valkyrie – and from its Matrix signal I could tell it was crewed by the standard complement of two guards up front – one of which was the driver – and two paramedics in the back.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I could see a stream of data leaving the vehicle, relaying accurate data on the patient back to CrashCart’s central hub. A heart attack, apparently, and he owned a standard healthcare package. CrashCart was cheaper, but their coverage was a lot worse than Valkyrie. I had neither; I used to be on my parents’ package, but when dad died it was just one of a number of costs I dropped to be able to make the rent.
The crossing light turned green the moment the ambulance had passed, as the city’s matrix-linked metropolitan traffic grid switched back over to normal procedures. We hurried across the road, anonymous among the crowd of jumpsuits, and joined the line of other workers queueing up outside the factory’s main gate.
Three minutes later, I stepped over the white painted line and out of New Hampshire, crossing over into Medhall’s sovereign territory. In front of me, the rest of the custodial shift were stepping through angular metal detectors with the unconscious ease of people who’ve done this a thousand times before. They were watched by hired security guards shielded from the rain by ponchos and three-pointed hats, the RFID tags in their simplistic body armour identifying them as contractors from Minutemen Security Services.
It was further proof that this wasn’t one of Medhall’s most valuable factories; if the work here was truly important, or if the products were trade secrets, then Medhall would use in-house security personnel. Instead, they’d shaved a few numbers off their bottom line by outsourcing.
As the line edged closer to the bag scanner and metal detector, I twisted my fingers together as I tugged at the ambient resonance, drawing it together and compiling it into a pair of woodlouses – woodlice?
With a wordless gesture, I watched as the two sprites darted through the air, settling on top of the scanners as they started to work their way into the system. They’d only just made it through when it was Grue’s turn at the scanner, and I let out a faint sigh of relief as I received their signal right as he set the bag down on the conveyor belt.
He stepped up to the metal detector, and my sprite made sure it picked up the metal in his cybernetics, but not that they were combat grade. Their syn-skin coating and decorative false eye coverings were good, but not so good that a close inspection wouldn’t reveal the metal beneath. So best not to risk it.
It meant that the metal detector went off with a yellow light, rather than a red, and one of the guards waved Grue aside with the same dispassionate gesture he’d given to the three other people who’d set the device off this way thanks to their own cyberware. As he waved an electronic wand over Grue’s body – fortunately tied into the same system as the detector, so I already had enough control to spoof it – the bag passed into the scanner.
Fooling the scanner took a lot more effort. It wasn’t just a case of downgrading an alert from red to yellow; I had to feed a false image into the system so that it would show up on the guard’s screen just as it would if the bag were passing through naturally. Since we didn’t know how fast the scan would be moving, that meant I had to do it all in real-time.
So I swayed a little, as I stopped focusing so much on meatspace and lost myself in the thin strand of data connecting me to the woodlouse, and the invasive spikes anchoring the woodlouse to the scanner. I didn’t even watch the guard to see how she was reacting, instead focusing solely on trying to match the false image to the real one.
When nothing happened, I knew I’d done it. All she’d seen was a bag full of tools, and I’d just smuggled two guns, a couple hundred rounds of ammunition and a military-grade reconnaissance drone through security.
I’m sure my parents would be very proud…
Regent was the next to step up to the scanner, and after the stress of getting Grue through it almost seemed anticlimactic when he stepped through the scanner without fanfare, the guard not even sparing him a glance as he waved him forward. But then, it wasn’t like he had any metal on him in the first place.
Since I didn’t have any metal on me either, I felt pretty confident when it was my turn to step through the metal detector, only to find my way blocked by an outstretched palm on the other side.
I stopped, and froze when I looked down to see the top of the three-pointed hat of the guard who’d moved in front of me. He was holding out his left hand, because the right was resting on the trigger of a submachine gun.
“Out of the line,” he said, gesturing with a thumb.
“W-why me?” I asked, dumbstruck.
“Random pat down” was all the explanation I got, as the guard finally looked up enough that I could see his face beneath the brim of his hat. He was in his mid-fifties, human, with a salt and pepper beard and an expression on his face that was more disinterest than anger.
I was relieved, but I tried not to show it. I thought he’d made me, somehow.
Instead, as I stepped off to one side he turned back to the scanner as the rest of the shift made their way through, none of them sparing me so much as a glance as a female officer approached me.
She was younger, maybe in her thirties, and only armed with a pistol in a thigh holster. From the look of it, she was just as engaged as the other guy was, but it seemed like she’d tried to put on a stern expression just for me.
“Arms out, palms facing up,” she said, bluntly, before she began running her hands over me with practiced dispassion. I was made to tilt my head back, so that she could reach up to pat down my hair, but otherwise I was simply expected to stand stock still as she went through her checks from top to toe; running a finger around the inside of my collar, her arms down the length of my sleeves, the flat of her palms down my back, and on and on.
About halfway through, I was stuck by the bizarre realisation that this might be the most intimate anyone outside my immediate family had ever got with me, at least physically, and that it had been years since anyone had touched me for any reason.
And then, after about a minute and a half, it was over, and I was let through to rejoin Grue and Regent, now at the tail end of the two dozen shift workers streaming into the factory.
Once we were inside, we were greeted by the sight of the shift workers being assigned to various tasks by a human middle-manager in a crisp white shirt, with a tablet in his hand that was collecting the data from the workers’ RFID tags and telling him who exactly he had to work with.
“Is that our guy?” Grue asked me.
“No,” I answered, with a faint shake of my head. “ID badge reads Michael Simmons.”
I fed false data into his tablet the moment it latched onto our tags. From his perspective, a last minute work order had only just managed to make its way through the system. It was still three more people than he was expecting this shift, so he looked at us with mild confusion.
“We’re here to fix the lights,” I said, and he nodded, immediately turning back to the others as he monitored them clocking-in. Behind him, bracketed to the wall, was a flatscreen that bore the day’s work rota, but most of the custodial staff didn’t even look at it. They knew what they were here to do, because they’d done it hundreds of times before.
I moved purposely past them, ducking beneath a low doorframe – low for me, at least – and into the featureless corridors of the facility, with whitewashed walls and fluorescent lights embedded in the ceiling.
“Did you get the lights from their maintenance schedule?” Grue asked.
“Nope,” I replied, popping the ‘p’. “A building this size? There are always lights that need fixing. That and toilets.”
“You sure know your way around grunt work, Bug,” Regent observed.
“I grew up around the docks,” I answered. “I’m guessing you didn’t.”
Regent simply smirked, ignoring me in favour of keeping an eye out for trouble.
It’s good to know he can at least act professional, even when talking shit.
“Down here,” Grue said, gesturing down a side corridor that looked like it didn’t get much foot traffic. I moved to follow, while Regent took up a lookout position at the end of the corridor. At the same time, I was contacting Bitch.
“We’re about to deploy the Crawler,” I said through the Matrix.
“Got it,” she replied. “I have control.”
Grue set the bag down on the floor and unzipped it, allowing the Aztechnology Crawler to… well, crawl on out. It was a boxy grey thing with four articulated legs, with its main body small enough to fit the palm of my hand. Bitch was looking through its eyes, and after a moment I pulled up the feed in an AR window in front of me, letting me see what she could see.
I knelt down, holding out my hand palm up and letting the drone crawl up my arm. It perched on my shoulder, and I stood up to my full height before reaching up and pushing one of the ceiling tiles out of its bracket.
Bitch used my arm like a ramp, bringing the Crawler up into the gap between the ceiling tiles and the actual ceiling. I let the tile drop down as Grue zipped the bag back up, and we left the side-corridor without any indications of what we’d just done.
“Now what?” Regent asked.
“Now we look busy,” I responded.
So we did, wandering the halls with the purposeful stride of people who know where they’re going and want to get there, even though we didn’t on both counts. It was all about putting on appearances for the people who passed us in the halls. Some were other custodians in grey jumpsuits, others were factory workers who wore the same outfit, but in white and with hair nets, face masks and gloves.
A couple of them were obviously much more than that; a woman in slacks and a business blouse talking to a man in an expensive suit. We moved to one side to let them pass us – Regent moving a few moments later than Grue and I – but they didn’t even seem to notice we existed. As they passed, I was able to catch a brief snapshot of their conversation.
“-I’ll pass your concerns on,” the man was saying, “but the increase in production is non-negotiable. New markets have opened up, and supply must increase to match demand before someone else moves in.”
And then they were gone, stepping into a side office.
Bitch contacted us again right as we were passing a long window that looked over the factory floor, where about a dozen employees were collecting wheeled troughs of carefully-measured powder and moving them over to other machines that mixed and pressed that powder into dopadrine pills, ready for bottling.
“I’m in position,” she said. “You should have access now.”
I relayed her words to Brian, then leant against the wall while I focused on the matrix. Bitch had just moved her crawler to the building’s server room, and more specifically the server that held employee data.
We knew Garcia had a Medhall System Identification Number, but the details of corporate citizens were protected with the same delicate care as any other matter of national security, because that’s what they were. The whole reason Garcia’s UCAS SIN had disappeared for seven years was that he’d been living in a company pad, shopping in company stores and working in a company building, all while that company had kept his identity secret.
But the company needed to keep track of its employees, and there were all sorts of reasons why a workplace might need the biometric data of the people who work there. So it would have a stored list of all limited and full corporate numbers who worked here, including our target’s. For added security, they were often kept on offline servers, to prevent rival companies from sending in deckers to scout out just who works where.
And Bitch had just driven her drone’s datajack into that server, giving me full access.
It was simplicity itself to find the right SIN; all I had to do was look for the exact same biometric data as his UCAS one. Once I had it, I spun a courier sprite into existence and sent the dragonfly off in search of the connected ID badge. About a minute later, it pinged me with his exact location – in a small office overlooking the factory floor in a different part of a building.
“I’ve got him,” I said, triumphantly, in both the Matrix and meatspace. Bitch immediately pulled back her drone, moving it out of sight of any data techs who might wander in, while Grue immediately took note of the positioning data I layered over his optics.
“You’ve found him,” Grue said, obviously pleased. “Now let’s get the bastard.”