A bright neon sign cheerily informed the world that this store was called “Alice’s.” I harboured some serious doubts as to the Alice content of this store. If this place was not connected to the shadowy tendrils of the company that owned this neighbourhood I would eat my favoured hoodie.

The brickwork around it was slowly crumbling away, whole sections of nice red brick replaced by grey plasticrete.

The lights inside were dimmed, an empty store in the middle of the night was truly a rarity in this age. ‘Nighttime is when the city comes alive’ was the go-to marketeering cope phrase to give an explanation of why nobody wanted to live on this planet during daytime. One that was not it’s too hot to exist during the day,’ not that the night was really all that better. I would be sweating under my hoodie if it was not for it being made entirely out of highly-conducting carbon filaments. At night, without the sun to beam heat directly into it the thing cooled me down. Hence: favoured hoodie.

I put my hand on the digital lock.

There was- How do you describe a feeling that doesn’t really exist? I could say a buzzing under my skin, but that didn’t fit at all. It was the closest though.

What I felt could best be described as the feeling of potential. Not some physical thing and barely even a mental thing. Just raw potential writing under my skin, always begging to be let free.

It had been my curse, the thing that had ruined my life. And now it was the only thing keeping me alive.

I loosened my grip.

The digital readout glitched, and throughout the store I knew every camera would be faring the same fate as their feeds stopped making sense. Junk data crammed itself inside as transistors fired at random. All the cameras would be showing now would be multicoloured static. There was a pattern to it. I knew that there was one but none of my attempts to decipher it had been very successful.

If I wanted to figure it out, I would need actual processing power: a computer. But good computers are not cheap, and that wasn’t even getting into their propensity to fall apart in proximity to me.

I tested the door in the hopes I'd managed to accidentally scramble it in a way that opens it.

No luck, I liked to imagine that all my luck was being stored in some vault. Ready to come and make up for twenty years of lost time.

I pulled away from the electronic lock, the display stopped glitching. The readout was still showing nonsense and would be until whatever poor chump who took the fall for this got saddled with fixing this thing.

It was an old model E-lock, faded ‘Waterside Electronics’ label cinched that. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to recall exactly where the circuits in charge of engaging and disengaging the lock would be. Chipped nails tapped on the number pad in an anxious staccato until I froze my finger.

I had it.

Right below the pad, bottom left side.

I don’t know how my ability worked. It sounded silly, like some kind of superpower. All I could do was screw around with small electrical components. Transistors, resistors and capacitors too, if they were small enough. There was some logic to it I was sure, but I just did not have the time or resources to investigate it.

Because this power ruined my life.

There is not a lot of place in this world for people who cause technology to fail around them. I’d been cast out by my family like some kind of bad omen before I’d even been able to really remember them.

I ‘focused’ the feeling under the pad in the area I was sure controlled the locking mechanism. Pushing into the thing. There was no outward sign that I had done anything except for the brief sensation of relief. It was not pleasant keeping everything bottled up like that.

A few moments later there was a click and the lock disengaged. I yanked the door open before it changed its mind. How that worked was one of those things I have been trying to figure out for years. At least since I started using it for small robberies and jobs like this. I had the time to spend these days, it was just a matter of resources now. I could take larger jobs, higher risk, better rewards. But I was not fully convinced that it was worth it, I was surviving semi-comfortably and that was more than most could say.

My best guess was that I was just causing random signals to fire and eventually one of those is the signal that connects to the servo that flips the lock between a locked and unlocked state.

I walked through the broadwave scanner on the doorframe without slowing down in the slightest. I had no metal for it to detect. Not so much as a financial chip lived on my person. That was precisely the issue with my life after all. But I knew it was important to look for the rainbow lining on the oiled lake so there it was. Nobody expected somebody clean. Not when company chrome was a vital part of selling your soul to the system in exchange for not dying for another year or two.

Cameras still scrambled I immediately set to work grabbing everything of value I could. Splitting my haul between the essentials – which were not always a certainty to see available for trading – and more ‘high value’ items. Spare parts, repair materials. Cheap to the average worker sure, free if their company realised that functional workers was actually more profitable than nickel and dimeing their maintenance. But in the circles I travelled in this stuff was worth its weight in gold. I despaired briefly at the lack of any other technology for me to take while I was here, there was no way I would be managing to trade for anything that valuable with what I’ve got.

I turned off two isles down and got to work stuffing a small fluffy pillow into every last scrap of space within my bag. When I wrangled the zip up the bag had a distinct lumb where it sat. That would have to be it.

I grabbed a bunch of protein bars, energy for the highly undiscerning customer; opening one to get back what I had spent today. I always felt awfully hungry after letting loose with my - I refused to call it magic - ability. The one with the perfectly reasonable scientific explanation, that I would get round to explaining if the world would just give me some time. It required energy at least? That had to count for something. Even if I could not figure out any sort of through line from chemical energy to futzing around with technology.

Something glandular maybe? It sounded stupid even with my own limited knowledge.

I slipped out of the store, meagre haul on my back and eyes darting around the street for any signs that somebody had both seen me enter, and cared enough to report that.

Just a weathered man lying half-dead in the alley across from me. I jogged over, giving him a handful of the protein bars for his silence. Closer up I could tell that he was not as old as he looked, also that he was on a quite impressive amount of drugs; who could blame him?

The bars fell from his fingers onto the ragged cloak pooling around him. I fingered the garment. It was a natural fibre. The way it hung off his shoulders told me that it had either been taken from somebody bigger, or that he was once large enough to fill it up.

He said something to the empty air next to me, totally incomprehensible.

I picked up one of the dropped bars. I could just take them back, there were even odds that they were just going to get stolen off of this guy anyways.

I opened one up, putting it into his clammy palm. Even spaced out as he was, the bar found its way into his mouth. I grabbed the rest sitting on his lap and dumped them down inside the front of his cloak, holding my breath.

Not that I smelt much better today. I’d need to find myself a shower soon, any longer and I was risking health complications.

The man’s shirt was natural fabric too. I stepped back and gave him a once-over. Subtle lines stretched across his neck. Lifting his cloak I found more stretching down his arm.

Synthetic flesh? I ran a finger over it, hairs brushed against my fingers. There were minute imperfections and textures that you would expect to find in normal flesh.

Very good synthetic flesh.

I took a step to his right, lifting his cloak. There on his right was a holster without its gun. I tilted his head to the side. There on his neck was a scarred section. Angry red lines.

I stepped back. Mystery of the day solved. Ex-police.

I made good time out of the alley. Not wanting to roll the dice on this guy, he might be fine - the police made a point of disgracefully discharging anybody that was too nice to the poor - but that was nothing even close to a guarantee.

Two alleys later I flipped the hoodie inside out and removed the mask, breathing in the lovely gasoline and plastic fumes with shallow breaths until I had my usual mask back on. I was not confident that it did much for the actual quality of air but at least it did not smell quite so bad. So most people could trick their brain long enough to believe that the air was fine.

I walked along dilapidated streets for an hour, the colours and exact state always shifting and changing but the character of the city stayed the same. It was not all this bad, most of the city was actually perfectly serviceable. Little chunks of the whole carved out by corporations, housing their workers right next to the factories they manned. Around them were all the essentials they may need, also owned by the same company.

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It was a wondrously circular economy they had going on.

But the downside was that if the local corp went tits-up then the whole neighbourhood was abandoned. Maybe it got bought out by a neighbouring corp, maybe it didn’t. I stepped into the threshold of one that didn’t

The road went from ‘bad, but serviceable’ to ‘just bad on the rocks.’ it took all my attention just to avoid falling into one of the expansive potholes or crumbling sections. Any injury, even relatively minor, could mean death.

I gave an affectionate pat to the sickly tree growing out the road in front of my home. It was almost completely choked out by the ever-present smog, but I admired its spirit.

Best I could tell it was the only street tree in the city. They grew in the greenhouses of the wealthy and sometimes in the lands outside. But not here.

I often wondered if there was some significance to that, wracked my brain to find some connecting line between my own oddity and this one. But. . . trees and transistors? I could not find any sensible connecting line to that.

The door to the warehouse I lived in opened easily and closed with some percussive encouragement. The noise echoed inside once upon a time, but at some stage pre-dating my living here some idiots had managed to blow a hole through the roof. I’d draped a tarp across the gaping hole to keep out any rain; I don't want to come into contact with that.

I climbed up steel steps into the overseer's office, My little space carved into the world.

It was not large, barely smaller than the almost faded memories of my modest room. The far corner had a lumpy collection of pillows held together with sewn blankets and bedsheets. A mattress would be near-impossible to acquire with my means and any of the higher-technology solutions were simply not available for me. Also thefts of high-value technology like that were investigated, unlike my small shoplifting which was generally only stopped if it wasn’t too much of a drive for the nearest officer.

At the extra pillowy section was a pile of books. I have bought, stolen, and bartered for every single book I have ever come across. The sum total of my life’s effort was a neat pile of fourteen books. Two fantasy, six science fiction, a small book about a historical play, one beat down old maths textbook, and four nonfictions.

Nothing about computers though. Not to the depth I needed.

I would have liked to be a voracious reader, I think. I loved doing it when I could, but the world was digital now. It took active effort to keep from frying any personal device capable of displaying books; intricate technology like that was more susceptible to my ability. More little parts, I assumed. So I had to make do with reading and re-reading what I had. Paper was incredibly scarce too, trees were one of the things of the past only the rich bothered to curate anymore. And they were not sharing.

There was a metal rack to the side with my possessions, all neatly placed, where I could see it. I would have loved to be more lackadaisical with them but bereft of any way to document what is where. It all needed to be kept where I could do a visual inventory.

Two piles of clothes, and a table with disassembled tech on it rounded the last of my notable possessions.

I emptied my bag, placing the pillow reverently on the loose pile. I’d filled the makeshift mattress so every extra pillow just added to my nice soft pile.

The rest of my haul was tucked away into its respective nooks, and the parts for repair were safekept in the furthest section of the warehouse from me. I could not keep a strong grip in my sleep, if they were too close they’d develop issues and I’d end up trading them for less than I already did.

The other outcasts knew that there was. . . something wrong with me. I didn’t hold it against them, for the most part they were completely correct. I don’t know what they thought it was, faulty implant throwing out electromagnetic waves maybe? But they were aware that around me technology failed and that was enough to stay as far away from me as humanly possible.

It was literally life or death.

I sat back in my pillow pile, taking the new one to my lap and running my fingers on its fluffy surface. Relishing it while I still could, before grime came for it and ruined the finish. I took one of my favourite books out, carefully opening it to my previous bookmark. The pages were yellowed with age and the spine had long since dissolved but the words remained beautiful all the same.

The only sounds were my own breaths, and the odd noise of rats or bugs. Nobody wants to sleep near the lady that causes their cybernetics to glitch. So I had the warehouse and surrounding block to myself.

I closed the book when the pangs of hunger became just that bit too hard to ignore. Delicately, I placed a thin slip of plastic between pages and stowed the book. I padded over to my food stores, running a mental list of everything I had eaten the past week.

I grabbed a selection of bars that had the correct nutrients for me right now, gnawing on them as I took my bag and started loading in the items I wanted to trade.

-x-

I eyed the passing Maglev train with naked envy as it blew past me, grabbing the stray locks of hair to keep them from flying into my eyes. I made a face at how the ends crunched under my grip. An old memory surfaced against my will, of running my fingers through silky locks.

I all but stomped the rest of the way in frustration. I could have that again. Any one of the three big military research and development would kill to have me for study. A non-detectable method of screwing with cyberware is a carrot too big to ignore for them. I just had to give up all agency in my life, spend the rest of my days getting poked and prodded in luxury.

I would be lying if I said that it was not tempting in a way.

But then I’d overhear another story about some insanely horrid thing one of them did to test subjects and the fantasy fell away. Replaced with stark reality.

I would not be sitting there pampered while they studied me. Vivisection was the least of my worries there.

Almost an hour later, blinking out the questing edges of tiredness I crossed into another maladapted section of the city. Few decades ago this was the fourth major military research and production company, Moonshot. They screwed over their workers just that little bit too much, tipped the scales on their delicate balance of human suffering. The workers pooled together to hire a group of hackers to break the company failsafes on their implants and declared open war on their employers.

Most of them died. A few thousand in manufacturing kit, while dangerous, was no match for a battalion of Mars’ finest. But the infrastructure damage was enough to sink the company, they were bought out by the very people they had hired to defend themselves. Mars Heavy Industries didn’t bother fixing the destroyed mini-city, leaving an entire research and manufacturing complex and surroundings abandoned.

The surviving workers had stayed, along with a few of the hackers they had hired. And a community had formed around them. Not the only one in this sprawling mass of a city, but certainly the biggest.

I took a winding route through the shanty town, avoiding the high-tech hotspots. I was keeping my thing under as tight of a wrap as I could but there was always some small amount of leakage. These were not the sort of people who could easily get something fixed if some of their programming became corrupted.

It would be a death sentence.

It was easy to spot the people who knew who I was. They looked at me, my pitch black hoodie. Their eyes then travelled the circuit, from the dirty blonde hair to the faded yellow shirt I always wore when heading here.

Then they adopted one of a number of expressions, surprise, fear, some variant of sadness or pity. And then they made themselves scarce.

The uninformed usually followed suit because basic pattern recognition was one of those skills that came along with staying alive here.

I moved along, a bubble of quiet in otherwise crowded streets and alleys. I stopped in front of a heavy steel door, it was unadorned except for the ‘parlour’ engraved onto the door, with little cybernetic spiders carved around it. I waited for a few moments for the occupant to notice me and perform her usual checks.

“You are suppressed. Good, keep it that way. Come in.” The voice was tinny through the speakers, completely ruining the deep tones of their speaker.

The door swung easily, I affected a sedate pace down the staircase. No need to rush, I would be walking for a while.

I rubbed my arms when I came to the bottom of the steps, staving the sudden chill. The stairs gave way to a wide corridor which ended in a thick vault door. Only a minute of desperately trying to inject an ounce of warmth into my arms was spent before the door swung open. The air that greeted me was still far colder than I was used to, but it was better than the corridor air.

“You’ve gotten a lot better at controlling that implant of yours.” A body lowered from above, torso and head providing the only biological pieces to someone that was otherwise all machine. I suspected she kept the head only to preserve the expertly curated smug grin. “I only had some minor faults and glitches today.” Her head tilted, coming to rest on a cable spiralling beyond her into the darkness, I was fixed with a look of absolute, terrifying interest. “Offer of a bed is still open, I’ve itched to have a look inside you for years.”

Anansi, one of the original hackers that the Moonshot workers hired. She had at some point eschewed arms and legs in favour of melding herself with her workspace. Cables wrapped around her almost lovingly, just open enough in the front to see what she had kept of her original body. I could understand why she’d kept it, she was beautiful in a way that sent shivers down your spine and haunted you when you went to sleep. The cables connecting her and holding her aloft spiralled into the ceiling, wrapping into and around each other almost at random.

I gave as polite a smile as I could. “No thank you.”

She sighed, affecting it subtly by upping the spin rate of the fans in her server banks, and increasing the brightness of the lights dotting her frame.

“A shame. I still do not understand why the people who made you let you go.”

I wouldn’t, was the unspoken message there.

“You know why.” I figured it was wise to just give half-or-none answers, on the off-chance that she had some means of telling lies. She had come up with the theory that I was a failed experiment of one of the corporations. I had done little to challenge this guess, it kept me mysterious but not inexplicable.

It helped that I half-believed that explanation myself.

“I do.” I almost believed the contrition in her voice. “It is strange that they aligned your implant to novel sensations. Attaching it to the visual cortex would have almost been simple. Though perhaps they felt the control was important. But then they neglected to give an easy off switch. . .” I shrugged helplessly while she mused. Anansi loved to unravel any mystery that fell on her lap. I think she took her inability to solve mine somewhat personally. Hence, the constant offers to house me as a live-in test subject.

“I brought some things to trade.” I lifted my bag, breaking off her musing.

“Some scraps? You could get so much more you know.” Anansi lowered herself further, until she was eye level with me. This close I could see the multicoloured flecks in her pitch black irises. I took in her appearance for a moment, lingering on the hints of fat and muscle with naked envy.

I would never be able to eat enough, or richly, to look anything like that.

She smirked, I swallowed. She had done this on purpose, dangling what I could not have in front of me.

“I have jobs just itching to throw you at.” Her smile was all teeth. “I think things like this are exactly what you were made for. Not. . .” She flickered a disinterested gaze into my bag, in the background I registered sounds of heightened activity. “Robbing Alice’s.” I was fixated once more when she returned her attention, radiating self-satisfaction at her deduction.

“It’s beneath you dear. You are worth so much more.” She needled.

“And how, exactly, do you plan to pay me? Cash?” Cash had been dead and gone for longer than I had been alive. Cards too. Money existed either inside the chip your company gave you, or not at all.

Her smile did not dim, if anything it deepened; metallic tips glinting in multicoloured light.

“With knowledge.”

Insectile limbs folded out from behind Anansi’s back.

Held aloft in one was a textbook. Its cover prominently displayed a transistor.

My breath caught. I flickered rapidly between the book and Anansi.

I agonised for barely a moment.

“What do you want?”