CHAPTER 7 - YOU'RE NOT HIS NEIGHBOR ANYMORE

Envy’s circadian rhythm swapped back to human default and calibrated to the backup of her usual cycle. Numb and comfortable in the viscous fluid of the operating pod, she floated in a suspension of life support tubes and warm gel. It was a Promethean Womb, colloquially known as a peedub, and it was like a bigger, more deluxe version of the modest medical pod Dr. Hundo had used to treat Envy’s radiation sickness in the now-imploded cache.

After Envy’s decontamination, Dr. Tasque had spent a solid day scanning, packaging, digitizing, and distributing the inert remains of Envy’s OMNID infection. Sealed sample tubes were packed into blackout crates and labeled for SynCon’s Trine Command in Jakarta. Dunkin Frost himself led the loading crew that brought the samples to staging at the Wolfport fleet logistics rig and saw to it they were handed off to the quartermaster of the USS Bà Triệu.

During her three-day peedub cycle, Envy enjoyed the full spa treatment: telomere extensions, genetic scrubbing, and the other typical operations associated with a biological age tune-up. Despite being well into her fourth century of existence, her biological age hovered around thirty-five to forty, depending on the quality of her sleep and the frequency of her treatments. The silver hair, though, was something that couldn’t be corrected without a scalp replacement, and that was one procedure Envy had no taste for; the aftercare involved too much drainage.

She found that grey hair served her purposes by lending her a distinguished, matronly air.

It took Dr. Tasque the better part of two days to grow the state-of-the-art cyberware necessary for Envy’s new augmentations. Like an impatient baker, she peeked into the spawning drawers now and then to watch the budding synthetic nerves, bones, and sinews spreading like infant roots in translucent soil. When the time came to peel the new limbs out of their gestation sleeves, she took a moment to enjoy the smell of amniotic crispness, coupled with that intoxicating polyvinyl chloride scent one might associate with a brand-new inflatable pool toy.

Dr. Tasque programmed the fairy surgeon to work the limbs in through the membrane of the peedub. Meanwhile, she scooped up some honey-butter noodles with a pair of chopsticks from her noodle mug, and waited for the (ancient) files of Neon Vox’s personal operational parameters to load in.

That morning, the message in her priority inbox from SynCon had been crystal clear:

“Augment agent Neon Vox for maximum operational efficiency based on past preferences. As a PRISMA field operator, your sound judgment will be required to determine the proper synthesis between these two parameters. NEON VOX MUST BE PERSUADED TO RETURN TO SERVICE.”

Dr. Tasque slurped up her noodles and set her snack aside once she was into the back-end of Envy’s biometric data; the old warrior’s brain spread out as a digital map, and Dr. Tasque could, if she were so inclined, make her job a great deal easier by modifying a few choice parts of that brain to… favor receptivity. But that would be logged, scrutinized, and probably violate Envy’s consent rights.

“Human rights,” the doctor mused aloud. “So often the enemy of expediency.”

And unlike deep corporate agents like Envy or Trip, whose very senses and thoughts were the property of the Syndicate’s collective will, Dr. Tasque was a baseliner. She used analogue instruments, stuck to networks she had admin control over, physical interfaces and hand-written code, and had absolutely no cybernetics or augmentations whatsoever. This was her right.

This relative privacy was crucial to her sanity and focus. It wouldn’t do to have SynCon constantly buzzing in the back of her head; ‘crystalized manifestation of all earthly human wisdom’ or not, an introverted researcher didn’t need or want a backseat lab assistant.

With some hours remaining on the proverbial oven timer for Envy’s new cyberware, Dr. Tasque decided to play with the simulations of the OMNID infection she’d uploaded to the PRISMA scientific intranet. Her contemporaries and former peers from her days at the Aleutian Trenchworks were all over the sims already, playing with molecules and gene sequences, making their own predictions, and keeping each other honest with some friendly Fairy races between their pet AI assistants on the gene-sequencing efforts.

“Cheaters,” she laughed and bowed out of the effort entirely and refusing to even try to compete with bespoke AI entities.

SynCon had made her mission clear, anyways. It was time to focus on the task of turning Neon Vox into a 25th century killing machine, whether the old lioness liked it or not.

For Envy, like all anesthetized patients, time was meaningless. In her mind, she’d been duped by Dr. Tasque’s joke about not being a real doctor just seconds before. Then there was a brief gap, like a pulse of nothingness, and three days later compressed into three seconds later.

SYSTEM FIRST TIME BOOT . . .

. . . BENCHMARKING SUBDERMAL RETICULANT . . .

Envy felt a flush of heat, then a surge of cold, as the synthetic mesh beneath her skin connected to her metabolism and tested its temperature regulation controls.

. . . PLEASE CALIBRATE OPTICS.

Envy’s vision kicked on. The world rendered itself fuzzy, then adjusted with a click that sent a surge of electricity through her spine. Now, everything was hyper-defined. She saw the laboratory in absolute widescreen, with enhanced peripheral vision fed by a triple-series of tiny lenses in her temples that looked like three fetching, semi-symmetrical beauty marks leading to the corners of her eyes.

She even had eyes in the back, as two black dots embedded into the base of her skull just below the hairline. The system guided her through swapping through the various dimensions of vision: hyperreality, panoramic, rear-view, and panopticon (a dizzying combination of all lenses).

She saw Dr. Tasque slide over on her wheeled seat and get up close. “How’s it feeling?”

Envy focused on frontal vision and zoomed in to admire a tardigrade wiggling along one of Dr. Tasque’s pores. She zoomed out again and saw her as a bright orange blob in thermal, then a green ghost in night vision, and…

Envy was intrigued. “… what’s ‘spectral’ vision?”

“Ha. Well… if you believe the gas-huffing capybaras working at PRISMA these days, it’s a visualization of electromagnetic fields – like a hammerhead shark’s senses.”

Envy swapped to it and saw the whole lab turn into an abstract painting of vibrating fields. The computer equipment glowed, the circuits in the wall revealed themselves as great vessels of electricity passing through the entire building. She looked up and even saw a distant electrical transformer pulsing energy.

Envy swapped back to normal vision. “I think they might be onto something.”

“Keep playing with it, lioness.” Dr. Tasque’s smile was the bright, professional pride of a lifelong artisan. “The brainlets who developed the cyberware you’re in right now stood on the shoulders of giants – namely, me.”

Envy smirked. “Do not linger over the scenes of your successes, doctor.”

“Don’t quote the Dao De Jing to me,” she wrinkled her nose and stood up from her chair. Tasque slid it neatly across the room with a kick and kept her focus on the diagnostic readouts of Envy’s calibration cyberware. “I’m a Confucian.”

“Laozi,” Envy began, her flawless pronunciation of the name ‘Laotzuh’ sticking out from her typically archaic, West Coast accent, “was the necessary counterbalance to Confucian stiffness.”

“And I’m the necessary counterbalance to your gooey nonsense, lioness.”

Envy felt Dr. Tasque’s gloved hands work along the restraints of her torso and make final adjustments to the marrow bolts at her shoulder socket. The zing of connected nerves brought her bionic arm alive, and the painless, smooth power of the limb was immediately euphoric. She held her hand up and articulated her fingers, admired the patterns of synthetic black skin and safety tattoos around her wrist. There was a device on her wrist, at the spot where a doctor might check one’s pulse, that resembled a patch of smooth, black synthskin with a tiny silver ring embedded.

Envy felt for it in her mind, wrapping her will around the implant and exploring its connection to her brain. She felt a warm hum in her tendons beneath the device; from the tip of a microscopic nozzle, a glistening thread of perfect silver emerged.

“Slicewire,” Envy coiled the silk thread around her right index finger. She admired it in the light. A sick little part of her played with ancient memories over and over.

An intrusive thought: Envy pulling the thread through a human neck like a potter cutting a wet vase free of the lathe.

Chat: “They want monsters. Give them monsters.”

Envy snapped the line back into her wrist. “This is a wetwork tool, doctor.”

Dr. Tasque shrugged. “SynCon wants you back -- guess the aldermen back home are horny for violence again.”

“It’s disturbing that my legacy is the first one they think of.”

“Maybe. But it’s still your legacy.”

Envy reached up with her new, bionic hand and tore the restraints on her chest open. She hit the floor with a thud and looked down over the clean curves of her new legs – geometric patterns done in the style of Taoist alchemy marked where her God-given meat met synthetic flesh. The beehive pattern of black, empty hexagons scaling along her torso gave Fairy Surgeons a map to work with when injecting organ refurbishment needles. All of it was form making love to function, and the starving, transhumanist murderer resting in the blackest valve of her heart shuddered awake with an ecstasy that could only be called sublime.

I’m art.

Chat: Step on us, Mommy.

With her internal commlink reestablished, SynCon returned to her subconscious as that familiar auditory hallucination in the back of her brain: “We respect your decision to recuse yourself from violence. But you are the most experienced agent in this sector of the Pacific; from the Aleutian trench to the fertile plains of Hawaii, every active agent combined falls short of your centuries of experience.”

Envy was not amused. “How many cycles did SynCon practice that little pitch?”

She paced around the small lab. She saw her face distorted in beakers of sizzling neon light. Her hands patted down her body and she found herself wearing a simple, low-cut tank top, her Tao amulet, and a modesty thong. A full-length mirror hung on the far wall, set between two green basket ferns whose vines crawled across the floor to mingle with the cables leading to Dr. Tasque’s truck-sized computer workstation.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

In the mirror, Envy admired herself. Her skin was smooth with reconfigured youth but kept a hint of her distinguished laugh lines and eye bags. Her neck and limbs were as long and slender as ever, her breasts were a bit less loose, and her spine was as straight and open as a teenaged ballerina’s. She balanced herself on the points of one set of toes and extended her arms and other leg out to test her balance.

It was flawless, a mix of finely-attuned inner ears and their own internal gyroscopic assistance membranes; she had the poise of both an acrobat and a surveillance drone.

“I’ll take the upgrades,” began Envy, “and their comped lifetime maintenance in exchange for my recent traumas in the line of diplomatic duty. I’m done being a killer -- it’s bad for my mental health.”

SynCon: “You are the progenitor of the Ghost operatives, Neon Vox – a centuries-old demon of reckoning whose hard work and kinesthetic genius helped define what the Syndicate is today. Digital records of your mo-capped commando performances are laid over the muscle memory of young operatives.”

“I’m human like anyone else,” Envy said, as she snatched up the pair of pants Dr. Tasque offered to her in silence. “I put my pants on one leg at a time – see?”

SynCon: “Are you human?”

Envy buttoned up her stretchy bell-bottoms and went to find her boots. “Yes.”

SynCon: “Your age, your experience, and the fact that you are one of three Class-9 Cyborgs in existence, makes you more of a demigod. You generate clout and liquidity just by existing in any capacity whatsoever. SynCon would like you to leverage that power for the good of the collective, not squander it in some quaint, outdated idea of ‘retirement.’”

“Watch me,” said Envy, as she plucked her coat from the rack by the door and left the lab without so much as a goodbye to the doctor and society responsible for her longevity and power.

Dr. Tasque reviewed the conversation through a window on her tablet – she always had the public SynCon feed on display in the corner of the screen. The back and forth between the Consensus and Envy scrolled as a text transcript all could access.

SynCon spoke through that transcript as well as Tasque’s DMs: “She must be persuaded.”

Tasque typed out a response: “Leave her alone. I know what angle to take.”

SynCon: “Explain.”

“I studied Envy’s metadata and psychological profile for years during my tour of PRISMA counterespionage ops.” Dr. Tasque picked up the keys to the armory and put on her deck coat. “I’ve handled her before; I can handle her again.”

SynCon: “There is no official record of you handling her.”

Dr. Tasque smiled and went for the lab door. “True. I must be mistaken.” She put her tablet into her coat’s interior pocket and muted SynCon thereafter.

Wolfport’s local Folkmote -- a municipal consensus of aldermen and union bosses -- had set some resources aside for their visiting diplomat. Envy was assigned a mid-ranged habitation crate, a month’s calorie and nutrient stipend, fifty-thousand liq straight to her bank account as a bonus for her service, and complimentary stimulus coupons meant to encourage her to indulge in the local nightlife.

After an ice-cold cherry Spiru-Cola, a hot shower in her bathing closet, and a tray of fresh sushi from her crate’s service chute, Envy treated herself to an after-dinner jasmine vape. She leaned out the side of her crate’s only window and admired Wolfport from the forty-fifth floor of the habitation rig’s tallest tower. By now, the sun was entirely set, and the series of rig platforms were a sight.

Holographic ad space scrolled into the infinite dark of the cloudy night sky, like bands of human thought given visual form; these were temptations, libations, armaments, and personal improvements, all wrapped up in pleasing colors and plenty of curvaceous imagery.

Envy watched the cargo lifts ferry hundreds of workers toward her rig, where most of the nightlife was. The gondola lights swayed in the wind, but most onboard welcomed the spray of seawater through the cage – it typically rinsed the smell of fish guts from their waders.

She thought about them, about the millions of people she served. She thought about how the neon lights of Syndicate cities were powered solely by wind, waves, geothermal, and sun. This was the society she dreamed of when she was young; this was the culture she fought for, bled for, lost her limbs for, lost her mind for, and helped break the fascists for.

And I’d do it again.

Chat knew she would and said as much. She enjoyed a plume of jasmine from her little black vape pen and watched as rain spread across the paneled edges of the rig down below.

An intrusive thought: Yi Jing 58, Joy. People who practice the Tao really correctly do not delight in objects of the senses, in wealth and gain; they delight in benevolence, justice, and the qualities of the Tao. So, naturally they have real joy and do not strive for artificial joy.

This was the reading associated with her diagnosis, so many centuries before: Borderline Personality Disorder; it was sometimes called ‘shattered mirror syndrome’ for it being likened to living with shards of broken glass embedded in one’s sense of self. Some also described it as having emotional third-degree burns across the psyche, forever.

An intrusive thought: Yi Jing 58, Joy (continued). People of natural brilliance can only receive benefit if they open their minds and approach people of the Tao with a humble attitude; if they presume upon their status or talent and like to be obeyed but hate to hear honest words… their bad qualities will grow and their good qualities will vanish. If one has great talents, but is haughty and jealous, those talents are not worthy of consideration.

“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,” she said to herself, while tapping her fist against her skull. She stuck her vape pen into her coat pocket and paced by the window. “I’m listening, I’m listening for fuck’s sake, I’m LISTENING!”

Envy shut the window and locked it. She walked out the door of her apartment and rode the rickety lift down to the rig’s recreation mezzanine. She stepped out into a steamy jungle of alleyways and street vendors, shoulder-to-shoulder with the usual rainbow riot of Syndicate citizenry, all of whom had no concept of personal space and saw public areas as a free-for-all.

There were girls with slender arms and black eyes who crouched like frogs, feet flat on large decorative stones and knees up above their shoulders, with heavy tits resting on their thighs as they aired out their skirts and shared sticky pipes of Metasma; they did this to see their ancestors dance through the shape-shifting graffiti on every Syndicate wall. There were anchor-faced roughnecks still reeking of the bioplastic processing vats down by the wastewater treatment pools; their hairy faces had a bald spot here and there from a cable scar kept for edification and masculinity’s sake. These were the back-clappers and hard-drinkers, the whore-fuckers and big tippers who knocked out each other’s teeth night by night and wore them as trophies around their necks to ransom back later. There were Taoist priests in three-color robes kicking up slag and mud with their sandals to read the stains on their skirts; they otherwise walked like cats, with a kind of easy sway that made them seem like they were always right where they needed to be. There were juju girls making tanghulu out of skewers of dragon fruit and hothouse lime, there were window-leaners watching their chipped kids play in the streets, distillery robots clopping up and down the avenues with bellies full of whiskey to dispense from their horse-like faces, vending machines selling therapy for a liq, and whole clumps of scuffed resident non-citizens living off the public feed chutes placed at the ends of alleyways.

Envy did her best to enjoy herself. She bought a bottle of cloudy sake and a candied dragon fruit stick for a little energy. Once she was buzzed, she went down the red lantern alley and picked out a sex worker who had the kind of charmingly crooked teeth she typically enjoyed – she was from Aleutia and had slender shoulders. But this woman didn’t like Envy, because all Envy did was hug her and cry for half an hour.

Envy then wandered to the aft section of the rig and leaned over the railing. She saw white waves foam around the great concrete supports hundreds of meters below. The dark delight had worn off, leaving her with nothing but emptiness and confusion.

An intrusive thought: I am a monster. I shouldn’t be this way. I should go now, while I’m lucid. Jumping over the side wouldn’t be so bad.

“Having a fun night?” Said Tasque from nearby. Envy turned to face her and saw the woman was carrying a long, narrow case with a GYOTA corporate logo on it.

“Just a little suicidal ideation to cap the night off with.” Envy smiled and turned to lean back on her elbows. She had eyes for the mystery case Tasque had to hold up with two hands. “Looks heavy. Hardware?”

“It is. Want to help me with it, maybe go see something cool?”

Tasque pointed up, to the very top of the rig’s conning tower. Envy looked up toward the blinking lights of the tower and saw the mountain of catwalks and ladders as a welcome hike.

An intrusive thought: Yi Jing 2, Earth. Pure yin. Submission to Tao and the laws of God.

Envy took up the case over her shoulder. “One last trip,” she said. “Then home.”

“Then home,” Tasque affirmed, as she led Envy up the many stories of catwalks in the bracing night air. It was a glorious hike, one that had Envy’s freshened heart pumping clean blood from brain to heel. Tasque kept up, being small and fit in her own baseliner way, and within the hour they were at the very top of the rig’s conning tower.

They unfolded some beaten-up old chairs and sat to watch the full moon emerge from clouds. Envy set the case down and rested her feet over it as she admired the sky.

Tasque pointed to the Olympics, whose peaks were wreathed in moonlit mist. “Do you ever get sick of that sight?” She asked.

“Never.” Said Envy.

“You think it’ll be the same, when the Cascadians cover them in that shimmer of theirs?”

“I have no idea,” said Envy. “It isn’t my home anymore.”

Tasque gently brushed Envy’s feet off the GYOTA case and clicked it open. “Maybe you’re a Taoist and I’m a Confucian, but I know we’re both company women – suits for Syndicate. Get the toys, wield the power, answer to the people… right?”

An intrusive thought: The Indicatrix forcing Envy to feel ecstasy in service to the God-Empress, her own sunlit face crying out, babbled words alletu alleja allama allama.

“I don’t know what I am anymore.”

“That was their goal,” Tasque said, as she opened the case to reveal its contents. Envy didn’t look, but Tasque leaned back and left it there anyways. “They wanted to wreck your mind – stab at the heart of Syndicate, show if they can get to a psychopunk like you, they can get to anyone.”

Envy clutched her skull and leaned into her palms and squeezed. Envy knew what was in the GYOTA case. It was a folded exosuit of pressed spidersilk armor, a marksman’s pistol, a handheld power-shotty, a variety of gadgets, and a magnetic sniper rifle. All of it was no doubt bespoke, tailored for her skillset and her personality to the very molecule.

Envy picked up the pistol and racked it, pointed the barrel at her skull, and felt herself crying for the second time that night.

“Tell me who I am… please.”

Tasque didn’t even flinch. There was no frown of disapproval, just acceptance of Envy’s crisis, and the open palms of a supportive stranger. “You’re Earth itself. You’re a sublime expression of life, and every bit of you was grown using the elements of the cosmos. Nothing within you is artificial or alien. You belong here, every cracked facet of your mind, every printed nerve, and every borrowed year – it’s all meant to be. It’s all the will of God, the Way, the Rightful Order, whatever you want to call it. You are here, now, an expression of Earth, and you are beautiful, Neon Vox – you’re fucking Titania, you’re Gaia, you’re Guanyin.”

Envy ground the barrel of the loaded gun against her temple. She tapped it there, rode the spiral tempest on the black sea of her brain, rocked back and forth, felt the empty scars where the Indicatrix’ claws had been days before, and held on. Her trigger-finger itched.

“Do you remember that night,” said Tasque, “when you threw yourself off the fiftieth floor of Taipei 101, back in 2209? Do you remember how the crowds ran in to break your fall with their bodies?”

Envy did remember it. “They called it… a cultural inflection point.”

An intrusive thought: The Indicatrix calling her God-Empress ‘an inflection point.’

“Yes,” said Tasque. “That’s when Syndicate was really born. Our darkest moments give others a chance to shine bright with compassion.”

Envy tossed the pistol back into the case and stared at the red-lensed mask of the Ghost exosuit. She wiped her eyes and set her jaw. “I’ve served dutifully my whole life, I deserve rest, I deserve a chance to figure out who I am… find love or something, I don’t know.”

Tasque reached over to lay her hand atop Envy’s cybernetic fingers, the ones she’d just grown for the woman that very morning. It was a warm squeeze, perhaps genuine fondness for Envy, perhaps artistic appreciation for the operative she helped to nurture. Apparently, touching cybernetics was more appealing to the scientist than touching true flesh.

“Oh, Envy, I understand. The kids today, they look at you and see the queen on the outside, even with access to your surface thoughts… they think you’re some swaggering dominatrix. Forgive modern SynCon, it’s overwhelmed by a bumper crop of horny peacetime babies… they don’t understand how deep your waters go. And they don’t understand you need a firm handler running ops and giving you strict commands.”

Envy gazed up at the moon again. “You’ve been with me a long time, haven’t you?”

Tasque ran her ring finger over the familiar veins of Envy’s bionic hand.

“You know how our corporation is,” said Tasque. “When PRISMA employees have chemistry, don’t separate them. As to why I’m revealing myself to you now, well… I think you’ve had enough voices in your head for a lifetime. You know we have your back, but you’ve never put a face to ops. It seems to me that, after all your years of service to Syndicate and the Pacific Rim InfoSphere Mapping Apparatus, you deserve a more personal touch.”

Tasque withdrew her hand and stuck it back in the pocket of her coat. She joined Envy in staring at the full moon. “So,” she continued, “wipe those tears. Meditate on this auspicious moon. Know that your place in this world is at its foundations. Know that you are revered and admired for more than your aesthetic, your age, what you represent… all that shallow crap. Know that people like me have been guarding you from the shadows of Anon since the very beginning, and we’ll continue to do so, for as long as you submit wholeheartedly.”

Envy’s heart ached at the very idea of submission and service. “I have to set a good example, with so many young eyes watching me from SynCon… I have to be more than a killer. I have to be more than a Ghost.”

Tasque murmured to the moon. “No. You don’t.”

“I don’t…?”

Tasque smiled. The other woman’s eyes reflected moonlight as discs of silver, like the eyes of a wolf in the dark.

“No,” said Tasque. “I like you just the way you are.”