I looked at the conniving witch to my right as she conveniently finished messing around with her bag just as we finished our little conversation.
“Ah I did bring the right models, good. If I’d accidentally brought one of my special ones that would be a real waste. So then, let’s be getting on with the trip then Kaiser. Thank you.” Allie said as she closed her bag and looked at me.
“You really remind me of Anna sometimes. Must be a generational…” I started to say but something about the tiny shift inside her eyes made me shut up. “Sorry. I know you don’t get along, I shouldn’t have said that. But you are very good at managing people you know?”
She unfroze her soft smile and the subtle eye change was gone like it wasn’t there.
“Well I should expect so. I’ve been managing people for over a hundred years after all. Oh god it really is nearly two hundred isn’t it? Not that you’d notice much has changed on Earth at least…” She said before looking out the tinted window to the view of the parking area as the car started and began to navigate through the lanes to the exit.
“Really? I’d have thought a lot would have. That’s a lot of generations.” I responded. It was a real long time, tech moves on, ideas move on, people move on.
“Oh there’s lots of stuff different, new ideas, new culture, new cities, small changes in the global power spheres, some technology has shifted focus as it’s got a little better. But Earth doesn’t get to change much, too many fingers in the gears down here in the cradle of humanity, too many people wanting to keep their part of the machine the same and too powerful to break away. A lot of innovation is pushed out to the stars away from where it can disturb the power balance down here. Earth might have largely recovered from the various wars of the past but civilization didn’t really and in the time since has only become more sectioned off into static clusters controlled by small groups of powerful people, many of which barely even visit Earth anymore because it’s not as advanced or comfortable even if they are the reason it’s like that.” Allie answered, still watching the window as we passed parked cars quickly.
“Is Mars different? Or Luna? Or Jupiter?” I asked. I only really knew these planets as places people lived in any great number.
“Oh Luna is worse in a lot of ways, as far as the average citizen is concerned anyway. At least there the corps keep their tech up to date, including civic engineering and agriculture and so on. Nation building stuff.” She said glumly, putting her elbow on the door and placing her head in her hand. “Mars is a bit like Earth from when I was a baby like you, lots of hardship to keep life livable because the infrastructure wants to collapse around you all the time but there’s a lot more to go around less people, more space, more food, more luxury. Maybe I’ll move out there soon, a decade or so. A bit of nostalgia would do me good and it’s no worse for travel options these days as far as work is concerned.”
“So Jupiter is the good one then? It’s the newest as far as I know. Must be the fanciest with the newest tech.” I offered.
“There are good places anywhere Mal, it’s how much you have to carve out to get a good place is different. Jupiter is just the stations and they vary a lot, the nicest ones are little paradises with views of Jupiter outside every window. Others are little more than shipyards with apartments bolted onto the sides like a fungus, low oxygen, low water, low food. There’s all sorts in between.” She offered as we left the parking structure onto the feed road into the under highway. “There’s also the jovians around there as well, you’d get a kick out of them. Jovian born humans with genetic factors that make living there easier, the project never reached true success but there’s millions of them now. Tall, long limbs, bald all over, very dry, weird eyes. Very weak physically but they almost always have cyberware or a power suit on, can’t even handle one G for more than a few minutes without falling over and months in gravity can be lethal. Upside is apparently low food and water intake, very good balance, motion control and radiation resistance. Something about their biology being gravity independent thanks to special mucus membranes, not sure on the details of that one.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of them. Never seen one though. I’ve heard they were meant to be a sort of space human for traveling beyond the system but I read that a long time ago. Might be wrong.”
“The project went through lots of names and controlling parties, there were lots of dead ends and funding problems so the project was never one thing and it was never well managed. I’m amazed they even made a viable human cloning program out of it even withe the old post war system to copy off. It went from humans for living on moons to humans on stations to humans for extrasolar generation ships to space humans to station humans. Eventually whoever was in charge just told them to finish what they were doing and stop adding stuff and a few tens of thousand of them were born over the next decade. I remember it being big news back then before it faded into the background, the jovians got named as jovian humans because that’s where they were born for the most part and that was it. From there they just multiplied among themselves and standard humans until a whole load of jovians were around.”
“Wait. So if a jovian and human have a kid, it’s a jovian?”
“No, it’s a mix. Usually you just end up getting a bit of a mess who needs cyberware to live properly. The two extremes might still both be human but living as one or the other is harsh unless you’ve got the full tool kit. You get kids who can’t float around forever because their fluids don’t work right and their bones will break down, but if you put them in simulated gravity then the poor things can barely walk. Luckily the jovians are some of the foremost cyberware developers in the system, and I don’t just mean cutting edge stuff I also mean volume. You could likely get what we’re going to buy today for a third of the price or less at the right station around Jupiter, just because it’s everywhere.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“You think we’ll get… I don’t know… lunian humans or martian humans at some point?”
“It’d be lunarian, that’s what they consider Luna born people today at least. I doubt it personally, the last human offshoot program was such a long running disaster of over design and bad delivery. They never did make jovians how they wanted them to be even after all that time, money and effort. I’ve heard of lots of smaller scale projects, mostly black ops weapon programs of various flavors and have only leaked their existence after some human based monster of some sort went rogue somewhere. People have always said that the dyeusians exist, spooky bed time stories for spacer folk on long trips through the system. Humans who grew up on secret stations around the sun and genetically made to feed on radiation and light while being twelve foot tall, can fly through vacuum and fire lasers from their toes or whatever. They don’t exist. The solar stations do, not the weird plant giants.”
“Feels a bit weird though, seems like a big world and I’ve spent ninety percent of it in the same district.”
“Mal, you’re ten. You’ve lived near enough five percent of my life and I’ve still walking around just fine. You’ll have your chance to go out into the wider system and find the same human problems are everywhere just like everyone does, even if the humans in question and slightly taller and lankier than you’d expect. But then we’re hardly the most human even in this car Mr metal head. We’re about to find you some new arms, that’s at least a third of you chromed out of humanity Mal. You might not have moved far from where you grew up yet but you’ve moved out of what you were quite a bit even at your very young age.” Allie said as she turned from the window as we entered the tunnel of the under highway proper. The dim lighting around the edges not giving much to look at outside the bright lights over the road.
“Yeah I guess.” I said, falling contemplative in my seat.
-
The journey through the under highway soon led us up and out onto the normal above ground highway and the dull orange glow of the sunset. I looked at the city streets around us as we drove and not much was different outside of a bit more lighting and less gangers around, at least in this area.
We passed along the highway and off at the first exit ramp onto a normal street where the traffic slowed us down quite a bit. People heading home from a days work in the city or maybe heading out early to the bars and clubs.
As we were sat in stop and start traffic Allie finished whatever she was doing on her interface and turned to look at me.
“So we’ll be there soon and I need to run you through the first timers stuff.” She said.
“Alright, rules and so on.” I said, sitting up and paying attention.
“First is the entrance and exit, you pay twenty thousand to enter. You pay five thousand when you leave. If you don’t pay when you leave then you’ll not be allowed in next time. Don’t skip paying when you leave, it’s how they track who is in there and who isn’t, it’s part of the security. So twenty five thousand is the cost of doing business here. That alright?”
“A little costly but yeah, fine.”
“Your a baby still Mal, you’re walking in with all the costs of doing big table business without the money to pull out the whole worth of a night market. You’ll be fine in the future and getting some experience now will do you good even if you have to fork out for it.”
“Alright, next rule?”
“Obviously no violence, you don’t have weapons on you but if you did you would keep them stowed. Any weapon cyberware is locked and kept cold. If you endanger the market then you’ll likely be killed very, very quickly. If you are too hard to kill or just far too connected then you’ll just cause the market to end and really annoy a lot of very dangerous people at various levels of pull and power.”
“I literally couldn’t pose a threat right now, I was almost defeated by a door on the way here.”
“Ha. Next is selling and buying, you’re not selling anything tonight right?”
“Nope, just arms and anything else I can afford after that.”
“Alright well, its five percent of sales in general. This one is following normal rules but you do get the odd night market that has different rates if something is going on. Don’t worry about that for now, there’s also rules about haggling that are important to remember.”
“I’ve only haggled over string burgers.”
“Mal. Everyone can haggle, if you were selling and didn’t want to haggle then you’d just be asked to leave. But you only get three offers, if the seller doesn’t want to sell then they don’t have to. If you try to keep haggling then you’ll be asked to leave. Just three offers. It’s meant to keep people from becoming angry over long back and forth sessions and prevent bad blood. Don’t know if it works.”
“What if the seller want to sell it to me afterwards? I’ve already made my offers and moved on to something else, now I can’t offer again.”
“People use these markets to build contacts, if you really wanted something then just leave the seller your contact details in case they reconsider an offer or want to sell it out of the market.”
“Complicated and a little odd but alright, anything else?”
“There’s some stuff for auctions and lotteries but there’s none of those this market so I’ll just skip them. Crime is a thing and there are market guards around so if someone lifts something from you covertly then just tell a guard and they’ll get it back, you’d have to be very unlucky to attract the attention of the kind of thief who could actually escape market guards. Outside of that try and stay near me as we move around, you don’t have arms remember and I don’t want you causing a scene trying to do something with your foot.”
“Damn. Alright, yeah I’ll stay near you. No worries on that front.”
“That should be enough to not cause any issues, you mind telling me your budget? You don’t have to obviously but I could think of some possibilities with your arms with a number to work with.”
“Uh. Just about four hundred thousand. Bit more than I’ve had all at once before.”
“More than I had at your age, I can think of some good model lines for that. Actually finding them will be another thing. Do you have any preferences? Weapons, tools, armor or whatever?”
“I think I’d be happy with some sturdy and strong combat grade arms, that’d be better than what I had before already before any bells and whistles. You know?”
“Smart choice. Also saves us from having to think too hard about altering them to fit your small frame. A lot of combat grade cyberware is quite adjustable but when you start adding in weapon systems and so on you really cut down on available adjustment scale.”
“I’m not that small.”
“Aw. I’ll keep an eye out for the pieces I’m thinking of but if you see something that stands out to you then call me over. I’ll tell you if it’s secretly trash or not, there shouldn’t be too much of that kind of ware on display at the night market but you never know. Outside of that what were you thinking of getting?”
“Uh. I don’t really know. I thought I’d blow all my money on arms to be honest. Cyberware is expensive.”
“Not quite that expensive, not without bells and whistles as you said. You’ll have enough left over for some other stuff. Do you need anything?”
“I need something for my breathing, lung damage. Something for my intestines, damage there too. I’d like some muscle and bone for my back as well, so I can rely a bit more on the meat between my arms and head.”
“Let me check my data sheet.”