We welcome you to the City-State of Santa Onofre. Located on the southern coast of Kalifornien between The Republic of Texico to the south, the Corporate territory of the GmbH to the north, and tribal territories to the East, Santa Onofre welcomes all comers and has a relaxed border policy. We register all entrances and exits of people crossing our borders, but sometimes unsavory elements make their way into our jurisdiction. Therefore, we urge you to read the following rights and responsibilities that apply to all entrants to Santa Onofre to protect yourself. You agree to these terms and conditions by entering our territory. Ignorance is not an acceptable excuse.
Santa Onofre has a right to self-defense that extends to all within our borders. If at any time you fear for your life, you may defend yourself to the best of your ability using whatever means necessary. As a result, you may see people openly carrying personal weapons and heavily armed corporate security teams. Note that this right is curtailed slightly within the city center, and only the Santa Onofre Police Department and Military have complete weapons rights. Corporate Security has rights on company property and when protecting corporate assets, including personnel. Licensed Contracted Combatants, known colloquially as Stormers, have a limited right to carry weapons anywhere within the city and full rights to protect their client’s interests. Note that the Santa Onofre PD and Military may curtail these rights at any time, and firing upon either or damaging city assets will result in termination.
Unfortunately, criminal elements have used these rights to sometimes impinge on the rights of others. Most criminals are lone operators and are easily dealt with. Violent crimes are almost non-existent within the city center, ports, and residential neighborhoods surrounding our core. However, when you leave the city center, things become less safe when you enter the older communities beyond Bonsall. Often these towns cannot afford their own police patrols and must make do with local militias and private security. The safest community is Fallbrook, which has several local militias easily identified by their colorful names, such as the Blood Owls, the Dead Eyes, Azure Tigers, and Gold Pistols. Further east and south, Palamesa, Ridgecrest, and Rainbow communities are designated At Risk. You must protect yourself or hire an escort through these neighborhoods.
If you live in these areas, urge community leaders to pay for security and services so that residents may once again join the economic activity that has made Santa Onofre a prosperous City-State!
Weaponry is available to purchase at shops nearby all border crossing stations. Please only buy from reputable dealers with the City Seal in their windows.
Border pamphlet
“The Right to Self-Defense in Santa Onofre”
Safety and Rights Board, City-State of Santa Onofre
January 3rd, 2188, ESC
Fallbrook Neighborhood
City-State of Santa Onofre
Reality of Erde
February 4th, 2192 ESC
Althea was treated to breakfast by both the Búhos de Sangre and the Los Ojos Muertos members. They went to a small birria storefront nearby that they used as a neutral meeting ground. The shop owners kept giving them nervous looks every time a gang member started with their rough teasing but soon calmed down at the size of the orders. The smells were wonderful, and the stew was one of Althea’s favorites since coming here, but sadly it was usually out of her reach financially. Today, though, she had seconds and thirds handed to her as various gang members came to her, and she fixed their cyberware, whether it be software tweaking or small adjustments.
This was one of the reasons she was not only tolerated but left alone. Althea would fix almost anything for anyone if they fed her, and they all knew it. My sisters would be laughing at me if they could see me now, she thought. Little Hungry Althea begging for scraps of food and repairing anything. She had even done this in her unit, repairing things the scientists didn’t have time to fix. The physical systems weren’t similar, but she had learned by downloading all the schematics of the various devices and learning them at night. Luckily, all the software was based on the Mechanese standards that most manufacturers now used.
She finished calibrating Lil Yaz’s left eye. Unfortunately, it had developed a glitch where it looped once an hour. Althea found the software bug, removed it, and patched it. Her programming skills had gone up in the last eight months, and she often had to break into older systems using a patchwork of different Realities technology. The toughest systems she had had to get into had ironically been the powerplant that the Búhos de Sangre had brought her to before her last job. It was a Federacy-made grav tank powerplant and had nothing in common with any Mechanese or GmbH architecture. It had taken her two days, but she had eventually figured out the odd programming architecture and how to turn it on without irradiating the neighborhood. Which was a good thing because it was highly radioactive inside the case.
She nervously kept checking her bank account status until the server blocked her from trying any more attempts that day. Somehow, the gang members had multiplied, and she ended up fixing more than twice the original ten, but she had overlooked that because several valid food vouchers had appeared each time someone sat down. She looked over arms, legs, eyes, and other parts. One man tried to get her to look at a genital replacement, but both Buchon and Lil Yaz yelled at him while Althea stared, frozen in shock. She finally left the restaurant around eleven in the morning, yawning.
The streets were filled with cars and people, but they were on errands or shopping at this time of day. There were occasional rainstorms as a skyship passed overhead and shed water from its exit from the Sky Hurricane. Althea passed a store that had collected the runoff water and filtered it, or so the Standard German, Texican, and Modified Japanese signs claimed. Althea had once tried the water, found it full of pollutants and bacteria, and warned people to boil it and refilter it before drinking. It wouldn’t be necessary if Fallbrook could pay for its water like it used to, but the Main city had cut off the water to a trickle that was monopolized by a few places within the town.
Althea turned off Main Street, west on Clemmens, and continued towards the increasingly dilapidated part of town. Old parking lots were filled with ruined cars that hadn’t sold for the last fifty years and were little more than skeletons that were being slowly chopped and turned into other things as people needed the metal. An old furniture shop still had going-out-of-business signs in the broken-out windows. Sunlight filtered through holes in the roof, and she could see the moldering remains of unsold cushions in the back. The smells around here were not the best, but she was happy that the sewage system still functioned. A plague outbreak last century had taught the council of Santa Onofre that working sewers for the poor also protected the rich.
There was a commotion where Clemmens street started to go up the hill. A large black wedge-shaped vehicle, with the blue lights of private security, had landed there. The logo of a small company, Shisan Keisei Tochi Hoyū Group (Wealth Creation Land Holdings Group), was on the side with a stylized gold boat in the middle of a bland field. The vehicle had a flat black windscreen and was tall enough for a fairly tall soldier in full gear to stand upright. There were large doors on the side that looked like they slid towards the back, one of which was open slightly. Two lightly armored soldiers were outside guarding the vehicle, which had a few spots of bright metal where someone had taken a potshot at it.
THIEF! BOUNTY 5000Marks! floated over the vehicle in bold letters in a combination holographic/AR sign. It showed the picture of a lightly tanned man with Asian features and a neat corporate haircut of brown hair off of what looked like a company ID. He could have easily disappeared into any crowd being fairly young and non-descript. Althea remembered her bank account with its pitiful 300Marks and suddenly wished he was around for her to turn into these people. She immediately shook her head. No, it could be he was getting screwed like she had been earlier in the day.
I’m an awful person, she thought. I can make it. I have enough food vouchers if I do some odd under-the-table jobs until my account unfreezes.
Passing by the vehicle, one of the two private guards walked to her and handed her a flyer written in Anglian Elvish. “Five-thousand Marks for the apprehension of this thief, Miss,” he said in the same language. He was dressed in black body armor with tactical webbing and a half-faced helmet that exposed only his mouth. Althea suspected that the helmet would seal the moment there was any trouble.
She looked at him and took the flyer, nodding. “What did he steal?” she replied in the same language. It sounded flat and robotic, like she was reading off a script. Which she was, having downloaded the language as soon as she had spotted the flyer in his hands. The pronunciation guide floated in her vision, and his words were automatically translated as she heard them.
He grimaced and said, “I wouldn’t know, but it was bad enough that the company needs him back. So please bring him to us, or just call. It’s still 2500Marks if you give us information that tells of his whereabouts.”
You probably wouldn't pay me anyway even if I gave you the info and you managed to catch him, Althea thought, seeing that there wasn’t any contractual information on the flyer. So instead, she looked at the information about the bounty, reading the looping elven letters out loud for practice, “Krita Shinawatra. Male. A subject of the Empire of Japan. Thirty-two years old, 165cm tall, 55kg. He may be armed. Contact Wealth Creation Land Holdings Group security if spotted. Needed alive.”
The man smiled and nodded, “Yes, that’s right. Just call us if you see him, all right? Thank you.” He backed up and pulled another flyer from the vehicle handing it to an Ogre man and speaking in his rumbling language.
Gotta hand it to him. He’s talented with languages, Althea thought before walking away from the crowd and putting the flyer in her pocket. But, unfortunately, that guy’s probably been picked up by one of the local gangs, and the company will have to filter through thousands of false leads. So she continued up the hill that led to the old cemetery and the favela that was her current home.
Althea turned west and walked about a kilometer before turning north again. She climbed the hill that was a maze of old shipping containers and cargo pods from both trucks and ships. They had been standardized and were easily stackable, so people had bought a great deal of them and started making houses out of them. Many of them had windows cut in them. Porches were built out of any materials available, and awnings had drying laundry flying from them. The containers were painted in a riot of colors, with each person choosing their own. Boards, concrete, and asphalt paving stones lined the middle of the small lanes that made up streets. Small, rickety walkways linked the higher levels over her. She waved to people as they saw her, careful not to expose her teeth. The kids loved her fangs and called her the Jaguar Bruja, but the adults were much less appreciative.
The smells of many species, cooking foods from at least a dozen cultures, soap, hot metal, dirt, and rust greeted her nose. There used to be the scent of bodily waste when she first moved in. She couldn’t stand the smell and really wanted to be able to take a bath. So she had dug, and lain pipes scavenged from abandoned buildings and started building rudimentary sanitation plumbing when she wasn’t working. Work was being done before she returned home, and she found out the locals were adding on and continuing the work. As one of the residents put it, “We can’t have you shaming us by doing everything. We can help too.”
Not heading home immediately, Althea went towards the back of the favela near the cemetery. When she got there, a huge hole where the boulder had been pulled out of the earth greeted her. Tire tracks led away across the graveyard, where headstones had been knocked over by the driver. She sniffed the air and looked at the tracks. Five or six people, all human, some with cybernetics, had done the job. Maybe some others who had been looking over the destruction left. Ah well, it wasn’t as if anyone had owned the rock. The residents had ignored it as it was too big to move, but Althea had been slowly turning it into a copy of a Big Festus about four feet across. She had even carved nice little sesame seeds for the bun and had gotten the textures just right.
Ah, that was a lot of fun to make, she thought. In the meantime, I can make some more little statues to work off this stress. She found a shovel that someone had been using halfheartedly and began filling in the hole. Someone would probably put a container over the spot now it was clear. She pulled several stones from the earth she was using to fill the void in the ground and piled them up to carry home. Several ideas filled her mind of what to make from the stones once she brought them into her small shipping container studio apartment.
Althea sat on the ground with her back to the container homes, staring across the cemetary. The other favelas on the hills to the north were similar to this one, smoke from cooking fires adding to the haze. Gunshots and the occasional scream reached her ears. It wasn’t as bad as at night, but Fallbrook wasn’t as safe as the neighborhoods to the west. It wasn’t a combat zone like the towns to the south and east between here and the Skyports in the no-mans land of the deserts past Pauma Valley. She kept her ears pricked for any sounds out of the ordinary in her favela. The local gangs left this place alone, and the few crazies that had tried to threaten the elderly or young in her neighborhood soon found out that she lived there and wouldn’t put up with any nonsense.
Althea wasn’t surprised when the kids found her about half an hour into her reverie. Her ears and nose had picked them up as they crept up on her, but she played along with them when they jumped out, making growling noises and fake shooting sounds with their fingers.
“Graaaw!” “Bang! Bang!” “We got you, Bruja!”
“Ah, you have got me,” Althea said in a monotone and pantomimed a dying scene grabbing her chest and falling to the side, closing her eyes, and sticking her tongue out.
“No!” one of the boys said in disappointment. “You got it all wrong. You have to yell like you mean it!”
Althea blinked and sat back up, and looked at the boy. He had the small furry brown ears and a black nose of a Federacy cat recomb. “Joshua, I do not yell,” Althea said in her flat voice. She looked at the other children, a mix of humans, Devonalis, a feathered harpy girl, and a purple-scaled reptile child with feathers for hair she hadn’t yet met.
She waved to them and picked up the rocks she had gathered. “What is your name?” she asked the lizardfolk girl. The girl started in surprise and hid behind a few humans.
“She’s Dizhkee,” one of the girls said, and the lizardfolk girl’s skin changed in odd colors as she looked at her new friend like a betrayer.
Nodding, Althea said, “It is nice to meet you, Dizhkee. I am Althea Ventricorum d’Argus.” She pulled a rock from the pile and held it in her hand.
“Don’t let her give you all those long names,” Joshua said. “She’s the Jaguar Witch!” The other kids corrected him in Texican, but he waved his hands around.
“She doesn’t look like a cat,” the girl said quietly. “She doesn’t even look like a witch. She’s just an elf.”
Althea blinked and smiled inwardly, “What do you like, Dizkhee?”
After the other kids prompted her, the girl colored light green and then said, “Dragonflies. We used to have them at home, but they aren’t here.”
The kids smiled knowingly as Althea started to scratch and poke at the rock. She had looked up Anglian dragonflies on The Network and cross-referenced them with images and sculptures of the insects as soon as the child had mentioned them.
“Oh, they are beautiful, are they not?” Althea talked as her hands moved across the stone. Her claws carved the rock seemingly at random. Pieces fell off and were placed on the dirt in precise areas around her.
“Oh yes! They are like little jewels flying around,” the girl said, excitement in her voice if not on her face. Her skin had turned a darker green as she talked.
“Tell me about your home,” Althea said as she paused and sorted the rocks.
“Well, it was in the wetlands of southern Ostania,” the girl started up. “People called it a swamp, but it isn’t. We don’t live in nasty swamps. Unlike the other clan to the west, we care for our land,” she chattered.
Nodding, Althea let the feelings of the girl’s words take her to the girl’s homeland, imagining the scents of a clean healthy wetland with houses grown from trees. She took some of the discarded pieces and carefully sliced them apart with her nails. Soon four tiny translucent wings appeared, the illusion created by carefully carving holes in them, leaving only the cross sections. Then leaves were carved from the same piece. Next, another rock was chosen, and she made a tiny branch, six legs, and a small body. Finally, a smaller green pebble was chosen, and Althea made the eyes. She started poking the parts in precise areas and assembled a small figurine.
“And my family had the best fish pens,” Dizkhee said. “Well, that was before the war, but then we moved here, and my dad is gonna work hard, and we’re gonna go home again.”
Althea held up a dragonfly figurine that was about thirteen centimeters across. It was a little dusty, but it looked lifelike. You might have thought it was real if you just glanced at it. The insect looked like it was in the process of leaving a tiny branch with leaves.
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Dizkhee blinked and tilted her head. The odd colors were back. “Wow!” she exclaimed and tilted her head to look at it.
Althea moved it towards the girl. “It is yours. I enjoyed making it,” she said in her monotone again.
Her scales flashed pink, and Dizkhee flailed her hands, “I can’t! It’s worth too much!”
“Oh, here we go again,” one of the kids said as the others started laughing.
Althea looked at the pile of stone chips and dust on her lap and the ground. Her left hand picked up three rocks while the right held the figurine. Holding the rocks up to the lizardfolk girl, the biofem asked, “What is the value of these?”
The girl blinked and looked at the rocks, “They’re rocks. They aren’t worth anything.”
The dragonfly figurine was held up in her right hand, and Althea asked, “The value of this?”
“I dunno, but it looks like it’s worth a lot!” Dizkhee said.
“Wrong,” Althea said flatly, fixing her with her pale eyes, her long ears perking up.
“Wrong? But!” Dizkhee protested.
“An hour ago, it was worth three rocks,” Althea said quietly. “I did not turn them into jewels. It is still those same three rocks. I just found what was inside them and carved away the rest.” She placed the figurine into the girl’s scaled hands.
“I…” Dizkhee started.
A laugh interrupted her. “Don’t fight it. She always does this,” Joshua said with a huge grin. “She likes making these. We all got them.”
Dizkhee nodded and took the small dragonfly. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
Althea stood up, brushing off her clothes, “You are most welcome. Think of your true home when you look at it.” After all, it’s the least I can do to make you forget you’re here, she thought.
###
She stood on a walkway balcony railing on the fourth floor of the container stacks, around the corner to the entrance of the shipping container studio apartment Althea had rented. Clothes fluttered on lines hung between the units in the warm early afternoon breezes. Water collection units on top of the containers slowly dripped down the side of the stacks where they leaked. She was sleepy and annoyed. Someone was in her house. Althea had scented it well before seeing the telltale data tampering on the lock to her door. The strawberry vape smoke was tainted with a few anti-anxiety drugs and perfume over human smell and cybernetics. She checked the few security cameras that residents had. There was a gap in the ones that led to her home, just a few seconds here and there, but following it, she traced the person entering her shipping container. She rebuilt the data of the missing seconds and spotted the intruder.
Female, average height and thin, pink neon hair, wearing the outfit of a medium-priced club prostitute. At least to the AR sensors. She stripped the AR coding out of the playback and nodded. Her features and body lost their femininity, but the clothes and hair she could tell was a wig now remained the same. The person had at least applied the makeup right, she noted. It would keep the average person without AR augmentation or glasses from looking too closely. She now had a decision to make. Staring at the container, she saw the person sitting on the edge of her bed by the heat and suppressed data signatures.
Althea left a decoy data signature, turned off her own datasphere and augmented reality sensors, and then flowed towards her door. She popped the lock and moved into the room in a crouch. In the dark of her studio apartment was her target. Althea had painted the drywall as if you were on the balcony of a wooden hunting lodge in the trees overlooking a jungle on Mechanon. A silver city with its pyramids and towers was in the distance. Animals were here and there among the trees, and figures of her sisters were hunting them. On the side that depicted the hunting lodge, she had shelves of statuary in various states of being made. There was a small salvaged table where she ate and worked on her projects. A chair was also there, one she had scratch built out of metal and wood she had found lying about. Rag rugs covered the floors. In the rear was her bed. It was a small twin, only big enough for herself, with a mattress purchased at one of the local shops. The unit bath and kitchen were behind her bed, hidden by a beaded curtain she had made out of stones and pieces of glass she had threaded together while bored. The clubber was sitting on the end of her bed.
The clubber was still turning in surprise when Althea reached them and placed her gun to their temple, her other hand around the human’s throat. She ran over the datasphere of the person and found layered fake identities that eventually revealed the truth under the encryption. They were good, but they were not Mechanese.
“Shinawatra,” Althea said quietly as he swallowed. “Do not move, or I will kill you.” He nodded. “Should I refer to you as she, or is this a disguise only?”
“It’s a disguise,” Shinawatra replied in a reedy, almost squeaking falsetto. He had dropped the vape stick onto the multicolored woven rag rug next to the small bed he was sitting on. “Please don’t kill me. I have a job for you, Miss d’Argus.”
Althea released his throat and quickly checked him for weaponry. She tossed the purse with a small 6mm pistol to the other side of her studio container near the closing door. The salvaged hydraulic door closer she had installed was still working as intended. A signal from her locked the door with a click. She let out a little sigh and said, “Turn off your datasphere entirely, Mr. Shinawatra.”
“But my dis…” he started. Althea gestured with her pistol, and he complied.
“Explain to me why I shouldn’t just hand you over to Wealth Creation Land Holdings Group security for the bounty,” she said matter-of-factly. “Five thousand would last me two months,” she said as she pulled up her chair and sat in it, gun still pointed directly at his forehead.
“They’re going to kill me,” he said.
“That is not my problem,” Althea said quietly. “What did you steal that is worth having them hunt you?”
He blanched and shook his head, “I didn’t steal anything except myself. I don’t want to be a slave anymore.”
Althea blinked at him incredulously, “You do know about the indenture system they use here, do you not?”
“It's not a contract! It's my company. I have to escape, I’m not staying here!” he said with a bit of hysteria. “I have a skyship waiting to take me off Reality.”
“Again, not my problem. You have broken into my house and said you have a job for me. Not any Stormer, but me. How do you even know about me? I’m no longer listed on any Licensed Contracted Combatant Job boards anymore. I’ve also been just blocked from using most job apps until my arbitration case is done,” she said. The scent of fear wafted from him, and she saw his body temperature elevate in the multiple hues of her infrared sight.
He swallowed and nodded, “Yes. Look, I need an escort to my skyship, and you’re the only person with a twenty-star review on the Stormer board.” She cocked an eyebrow at him, and he continued. “You did that job for….”
“Wolfoods. It was a botch. My client’s rivals were double-crossed, and I had to kill everyone except the client and the team from Toucan Foods. Sacred Heart took half my pay because of the injuries my client suffered,” She said with a sigh. “I stopped checking that board after that job. I don’t do Stormer work anyway. I won’t go off Reality.” She holstered her gun. “Twenty stars? You had better come up with a more convincing lie. They only go up to ten.”
“It’s true!” he insisted. “You got ten stars from both Wolfoods and Toucan Group. Even Sacred Heart Medical left a note in there that you prevented the death of two of their clients by taking the blows yourself.”
Althea rubbed her stomach. The bullets had bruised and battered her but hadn’t gotten past her armor. It still annoyed her that she had gone through that much pain for what she could earn in a week of normal work. If she hadn’t been a biofem, she probably would have died.
“How much?” she asked quietly. “Will it be official or under the table? You’re worth five thousand right now.”
“F…forty!” he stammered.
Althea blinked, “I don’t think I could get two Big Festus Meals for forty Marks.
His jaw dropped. “Forty Thousand, Miss d’Argus,” he said after a moment. “I can pay ten thousand up front.”
She let out a little snort. “You have my attention, but be assured if I am double crossed, I shall turn your body over for the bounty. Also is it official?”
He swallowed and nodded. “I understand.” Afte a pause he added, "Yes it's official, but it's not on the board. It's set to file at the completion or failure of the mission."
She sighed and asked, "Do we have a time limit and what's the location?"
Nodding he said, "Skyport 37-C. We have to be there by tomorrow morning at 7 am."
She stood up and gathered the weaponry in her small studio container apartment. “Alright then. I need to take a quick shower,” she said, dropping the pistols into a lockbox welded to the floor across from the Unit shower and in front of the kitchen against the back wall with its one burner and tiny sink. It contained several other guns and a machete-sword she had confiscated from a mugger. “I suggest you do the same afterward. Leave the makeup on, but I will redo your hair and apply a scent blocker when you are done.”
At his confused look, Althea said, “Hooker outfit. At least it gives you a reason to be here in my room. In addition, the abuelas will have another story to tell, and no one will associate a bounty with a casual sex encounter.”
He looked alarmed, “Are we going to…?”
She looked at him flatly and turned on the water as she entered the unit bath, “No.”
###
Half an hour later, showered with her makeup gone and hair tied in a queue, Althea put on a black ballistic undersuit with armor strapped over her chest, vitals, shoulders, arms, and greaves. She had locked down the data in the favela. Any mention of the bounty’s whereabouts was routed to a dead address that she could monitor. There had been two reports of sightings, but none associated with her client’s current disguise. This news should have relieved her, but it just had her on edge.
Several charged shielding gems were fished out of her lockbox, and Althea placed them onto slots on her armor. Then, she strapped her sword to her left hip and a small laser rifle on the chest carrier. Her 12mm pistol went into a holster on her right hip. Extra shielding gems went into her client’s purse along with the tiny pistol he had brought. She had received a contract from him to deliver him alive and without permanent injuries to a Skyport ten kilometers outside Santa Onofre in Cahuilla Tribal territory. In addition, she received a small data drive containing ten thousand marks as an upfront payment, with the remainder held by the Skyship crew. She had run the electronic cash through her internals and made sure it was real and the money wouldn’t be frozen from her use in her main account.
Shinawatra was finishing up changing into one of Althea’s spare ballistic undersuits. Though she was always on the edge of being homeless, she refused to have no armor or weaponry, especially in a city-state where guns were as plentiful as leaves were back home. Instead, most of it had been in-trade for repairs of cybernetics or minor programming for the local gangs, along with a hot meal. She was possibly the cheapest and most reliable cybernetic mechanic in the area and had been able to trade for fairly good gear. A window appeared in her vision as she sent a request to connect to both Lil Yaz and Buchon in a lite battle net client.
What the fuck? Lil Yaz said, startled as she accepted the connection request.
Madre de Dios! Tayah? Buchon said, less upset than the other gang leader as he accepted the access request.
Yes. I apologize for the suddenness, but I have a Stormer contract, Althea sent to them. A cute bowing cartoon kid version of Althea emoji and another emoji of Althea embarrassed popped up. She had modified and customized the emojis to be cuter for when she got together with Ticualtzin, but she really wanted to show them off as well. Corporate security may be rushing around after me. I only ask that you do not join them. She sent each of them 2700Marks.
Ok, Lil Yaz said. This is about that bounty for 5k? You paying us both to back off?
Yes, this is half now. If I survive, you will both get another 2700Marks, Althea replied. An Althea emoji holding a cash bag with a large M on it appeared.
Tayah, we gonna have words how you jacked into both of us, Buchon said in annoyance. So you got a backdoor in our heads?
No, I do not, an emoji of her shaking her head in panic with her arms crossed popped up. This is called the battle net and is the primary way Mechanese communicate with one another. All your wetware is based on the same Mechanese technology I am made of, so you also have access to this system to a lesser degree. Althea paused and sent humbled and apologetic emojis. I would not have done this unless the need was great. You are my friends. I would never do this lightly and would pull out if you refused access.
There was a pause, and Lil Yaz spoke up first, Can you teach my people to do this? You said we all have access to it.
I want access to this too, Buchon said.
Althea twitched a little and then let out a sigh emoji. Yes, I will teach you. However, it shall not be as effective. A cute picture of Althea in a scientist outfit teaching at a whiteboard showed up in the system. We are currently using my body as the main processor over The Network. You do not have the required speed, so emotions and pictures will not be available.
Fine, Buchon said. But you and I. We will have words, Especially cause you got emotions and crap now.
An emoji of Althea showed up with a sweatdrop. She changed the subject. I need to get out to Cahuilla territory. I know both of you have contacts out there. Can you inform them that I am coming? She sent a pleading emoji.
Man, mini-Tayah? With expressions? This is fucking weird, Lil Yaz said. Shoot us some cash to bribe them.
Moments later, both of the gang leaders got another 1000. That left Althea with 2600 left out of the original 10k. She could still make a tiny profit with that even if things went south. Then, Althea said, Quickly come, quickly go, with an emoji of her chasing after a 100 Mark bill.
Hahahaha, Buchon’s laugh came over the battle net. Tayah, you’re actually a fucking riot. Alright, my friend. I will keep my people out of the chase for this bounty. We’re gonna have carnitas during that discussion when you get back.
You better be fucking inviting my group, Lil Yaz interjected. It’s Tio Alex making it, right?
Yeah… Buchon replied slowly.
His carnitas are the best! Lil Yaz sent a cartoon emoji of herself with a knife and fork. Hah! I fucking did it! Tayah, don’t you die on us before eating Tio’s cooking!
Twin emojis of Althea eating a cartoon piece of meat and bowing in thanks popped up. Thank you, my friends. I will shut the battle net down now. I will only re-activate it in dire need. At their acknowledgments, she shut it down.
Althea nodded and checked over Shinawatra physically, her face not betraying the conversation she had just had. First, she checked her client’s appearance against the AR disguise he had on earlier and rebuilt it to her own satisfaction before reapplying it to him. Next, she changed the identifiers on both their dataspheres, building false identities that might not stand up to intense scrutiny, but would fool the average bounty hunter. Lastly, she placed several holographic emitters onto her client. They were easy to remove from broken advertisement boards. She had been using them to amuse herself with pictures of Tiki.
“Stay still,” she commanded and copied the AR disguise data in the emitters, then turned them on. She then pasted three of the emitters on the ceiling of her studio. Then, turning them on, holographic doubles of Althea and the clubber appeared on her bed.
"Wow," Mr. Shinawatra said, now looking and sounding like the female clubber he was disguised as. "But aren't we supposed to be here?"
Shrugging, Althea had the emitters start projecting the areas surrounding her client and he disappeared except for a slight blur as the view behind him was projected into the front. They turned off and Althea looked him over again. "Won't last, but we can use them for a few minutes at a time. Should be good enough to throw your masters."
Now, I just have to transport him through hostile territory to the Skyport without either of us dying. Althea let out a snort and patterned. Should be simple.