“No, it’s not that. I wanted to talk to you about chrome actually. I’m thinking of chipping in heavily over the next while. I figured you’d be a good person to talk about it with.” I said, putting my hands in my pocket as I stood near where she was sitting.
“Little old me knowing about all those gang gonk cyber stuff? Your asking the wrong person here boy, come by when you want to know what life was like before you were born or if you eventually want to find out where babies actually come from.”
“I’ve moved into Marchand’s street actually Allie, even had a good talk with her you know.” I said in a neutral tone.
“Ah. The spider steals another youth. Fine then, come in to my place. Not be talking out here for all to hear.” She said as she got up from the chair and moved it lightly aside to get into her apartment door.
I stepped in after her and found an apartment that was a little similar to Marchand’s place apart from being much smaller and with less little miniature models. Mostly Allie had decorated her little apartment with rugs and small mechanical things that might be parts from larger machinery but they were too small and specific for my knowledge to pick them out as anything particular without context.
“Take a seat over on the sofa there, I’m going to make some coffee. You drink coffee? I mean you’re still a toddler as far as I know but then I’ve been told I call middle aged folk youngsters too much so whatever.” She said as she bustled about a little kitchen counter that was mostly piled up with coffee containers of different types.
“I’ll just have an americano if you have it. No milk and just one sugar. Thanks.” I said as I sat down. Some people liked their rituals and I wasn’t going to pour cold water on Allie’s.
“I’ve got a nice americano from up north actually, they make it on these big farm complexes up at Saintess City on Anticosti Island. The city itself is is mostly filled with seawater, lots of aqueducts and canals everywhere all full at high tide that let enough water to flow through to keep the city nearer the coastline dry. Very pretty even though it usually smells awful. Especially at low tide.”
“You’ve been up there yourself? And yeah that sounds great, I’ll take that.”
“I spent almost twelve years living in the high end district there. Very expensive, very fun. Too fast and busy though and full of corpo types that loved to chip away at anyone from outside the city that they ran into. Just out of idle spite and paranoia. I moved from there to a nomad camp out in the northern craters to do a job and just stayed there in the end. Never even picked up my paycheck.”
“Wow, that’s pretty amazing. I’m looking forward to getting out of the city and explore the world a bit. Even if it’s just as far as the rocket yards past the outskirts I want to see some of world soon.”
“You’d be eaten alive out there. Literally in some cases. Little kids should stick around other people where things have a bit more normalcy and less cannibal tribes, scavenger convoys and bandit gangs driving cobbled together tanks. Plus, kids can’t travel as easily as adults, less stamina and less speed. Bad combination.” Allie said as she finished preparing the coffee and put mine on the coffee table in front of the sofa. She took her own with her and held it as she sat in the tall single seater sofa thing she had opposite the coffee table.
It felt a bit like I was at Marchand’s place but I figured saying that would likely get my head turned into a red mist, given their history, so I held that particular thought inside.
“Maybe when I’ve grown up a bit then. Anyway I was wondering if you had some ideas on what kind of cyberware would be good to aim for early on that would build up well as I added more over time.” I said, taking a sip of coffee, it was pretty good. I’d likely be pretty hyper after this, all the beaten down jadedness in the world wouldn’t keep a kids metabolism from making total use of caffeine.
“You looking to avoid growth problems or not? You’re still a sprout. Anything structural, exterior or shaped is going to run into issues as you get through your teenage years. Even that cerebral implant is going to need a new casing likely towards your fifteenth birthday unless you’re older than you look.” She said, taking her own sip. It looked black from what I could tell, I hadn’t seen her add sugar.
Milk wasn’t as rare as you’d think with less animals around but only because most milk was made from mammary farms where cloned human mammary gland cancer cells were grown in vats and pumped with nutrient solution, hormones and blood, with the milk it produced being collected. It was pretty nightmarish to think about but from the outside it just look like any other manufacturing plant full of stainless steel vats and pipes. I’d been told human milk was healthier for humans to drink but I didn’t know the science behind it.
“I’m not worried about growth problems, it’s nothing more chrome won’t just fix later.”
“That’s great then, really opens your options up. I myself have quite a lot of chrome on me, if that witch opened up to you enough for my name to come up then you’ve likely worked out her nature before you’ve come here. I’ve been a brain in a jar for most of my life, a while before she was fully borged, so I’ve seen a lot of the industry and development.”
“Yeah, I figured you would have seen a fair bit of it. I was hoping you’d have kept up with the goings on, maybe have some tips for a kid to get on that train so to speak.”
“What have you got so far? You don’t have to tell me everything if you don’t want to. I’m not your doctor here. I just don’t want to recommend something you either already have or have covered with something else.”
“It’s fine, so far I have a cheap cerebral interface, a low-middle grade medical suite, a wide-band IR connector, an MIC, an MPD and a recently repaired chem-brace.”
“So a barely out of the bargain bin medical suite and some netrunning gear. Not a bad spread for a kid to have. I didn’t have a single piece by the time I was a teenager. You said repaired? How’d the chem-brace get banged up? Those things sit pretty deep in the throat, you’d have more scarring than you do now if it got knocked.”
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“It’s kind of funny actually, me and Marchand got in a bit of a mix up and she ran my through with her knee spikes. We’ve worked… it… out… since…” I said jokingly but as soon as the words left my mouth I realized joking about Marchand wasn’t a safe topic for Allie. The instant I’d said knee spike Allie’s expression went from soft smile to full on furious.
At the same time the skinny coffee cup in her hand shattered and steaming coffee ran from her hand onto the floor. This was secondary to the long stabbing blades that extended from her wrists above her hands and the other from her wrists past her elbows. There were several other smaller spikes that extended from previously invisible pockets on the old woman’s skin at her different joints along with two at the outsides of her eyebrows that pointed straight forward.
Even as I froze in fear of sudden attack Allie flinched and quickly all the blades retracted back into her skin with a quiet noise as her expression turned to embarrassment. We both just sat there quietly in the same positions with Allie’s limp hand dripping scalding coffee without concern. I took a small sip of mine.
“Sorry about that boy. It’s been a while since I’ve had an actual visceral reaction like that, my combat threshold must have slipped down with me being so calm for such a long time. I’ve just set it to what I used to have it at before so we should be good now, I can hear that woman’s antics without slipping out my blades on accident.” She said, quietly. “You say she attacked you? She must have done quite the number to you if she cut that deep into your throat.”
“Uh yeah. She basically ran my through from stomach to shoulder. Lost basically everything in between on one side. Managed to get patched up with the medical suite and some spacer medicine though, was quick enough to repair the damaged organs. It was Marchand who saved me actually, she said she acted in haste and apologized. I’m still doing jobs for her.” I said, trying to put some lightness back into the conversation. “It’s part of how I guessed you were quite chromed, a lot of stuff made a lot more sense once I saw how Marchand took several fatal stab wounds and still near killed me. I managed to hack her off me before I bled out and burned the chem-brace keeping me conscious enough to get to the doctors downstairs.”
“You took Marchand down with a hack? After stabbing her several times. You did? Not a friend or something in the room.” She said, leaning forward.
“Yeah, it was a total mess. She sprung for me during a tricky conversation. I reacted as quickly as I could but my little attacks didn’t do anything, got her chest, her neck and took an eye. Did nothing to stop her basically nailing me to the door behind me though. As I was fading out I fired off a hack I had, we were still connected via IR from me sending some documents to her during the conversation. She went down paralyzed and I dragged myself out.”
“Boy, you’re ten years old and you managed to get Marchand the spider, Marchand the fixer of the underworld, Marchand the Anathema to lower her guard so much that she straight up forgot to disconnect her IR during an ambush? And you managed to stab her a few times. And you lived. A ten year old.” Allie asked a bit incredulously.
“That’s… Well yeah. That’s what happened. Ask her yourself if you need to. I didn’t really expect to wake up. But I did and I here I am looking to get chipped in.” I said a little grumpily.
But then Allie just started laughing like I’d told the best joke ever, she really broke down full on belly laughing in her chair. She had tears running from her eyes and everything.
“Boy… Mal. I’ll do you better than some catalog recommendations. I’ll give you some hand-me-downs of mine from a few years ago free of charge, and I’ll take you to a night market I was going to go to soon up on the surface. They’ll have some ware that you’re definitely going to be interested in. I’ll be checking in with Marchand later as well, I want to hear about this ten year old that got one over on the “Anathema the Tower Breaker, Inheritor of the Lightless Lines” straight from the source. Oh she’ll love those old names too, I can see it right now. You should definitely throw those around when you meet her next.” Allie said as she came out of her giggle fit. She was quite animated now and seemed excited.
I got the sense that I’d be nailed back on the door if I used any of those words around Marchand in the future. I would try to remember not to use anything related to any of them from now on, now I wished I had that perfect memory ability.
“That’s… incredibly generous Allie. I don’t think I can do anything for you to make that kind of effort worth it to you. I mostly do low risk deliveries and guiding jobs, I’ve just started doing some low risk netrunning. Is there anything you think I’ll be able to do to help you? Make up some of the debt?” I asked, a little awkwardly.
“You’ve already earned it if what you say is totally true. And then some. If it isn’t then I’ll be disappointed and we’ll be having a different conversation later and I’ll wash your mouth out for lying. But if you really feel like you need to give me a hand with something I’d like someone to run a message to a dead drop on the outskirts of the city, not far from the minimum range. There’s a little drone depot I’d like some messages left in for an old nomad friend who passing by soon, I was going to head over there myself but I like to stay put as much as I can. Too many eyes in this city and when old players start walking around it causes unneeded attention and worry and the knock on effects are bothersome. You’ll notice Marchand doesn’t get out much. And we’re just small factors in the bigger equation as it goes, the big names are rarely even heard of, never mind seen doing stuff.” She said, rolling her hand around at the end.
“Sounds really annoying. Like you can’t just go shopping without people following?” I asked.
“Oh, never mind shopping, I guarantee there’s a few interested parties watching my closed door right now because it’s breaking my norm. You’ll likely have a couple of eyes watching you all the way home until they lose interest. If I actually walked to the edge of the city I’d likely have to put down two response teams and a dozen corpo spies just to leave the messages without them being tampered with.”
“That’s… Really extreme. What did you do in the past Allie? Actually you don’t have to answer. That wasn’t a very fair question. Just keep yourself covered, yeah? I know I’m not much but if you threw me a call, I’d run interference if you needed me to.”
“That’s sweet Mal. Maybe I’ll give you an actual job to do some day. Unlike Mrs. Marchand I don’t like working with children. Regardless of “inventiveness” or “potential” they still end up in “body bags” all the same.” She said, doing air quotes for the three phrases.
“I’ve found her work has done me good, but I’ll be honest that even at my age it’s got me nearly put down a number of times. Even my first job nearly ended up being flooded in a tunnel as I led a quiet guy through the sewer.” I said, showing my hands in surrender to her point.
“Don’t get me started on Marchand. We’ll be here all evening. I’ll get you some ware to take home, I assume Marchand’s current doctor’s are trained enough to handle installation of grades two and three?” She said, getting up from the chair and walking over to a dark cabinet against the wall and opening it to show a locked vault-like safe inside it.
Allie pressed a palm against a seemingly random patch of steel and the whole front of the safe shuffled and then she reached to the side and pulled it open to shows a bunch of square shelves with different pieces of cyberware in them, some with multiple smaller pieces. The piece that most caught my eye was what, if I wasn’t wrong, was a hidden, deployable shoulder mounted micro-missile launcher. Allie caught my sight drifting over to it as I nodded in response though.
“Hah. Mal you couldn’t even afford to restock the micro-missiles. Don’t even dream of that kind of thing until you’re pulling in decent money and start building up some passive income or your own operators under you.” She said, turning from me back to the shelves and rummaging through the different compartments looking for something.