CHAPTER 9 - DEATH IS A GIFT YOU DON'T DESERVE
Dunkin Frost grew sick of most things eventually, but never the sea. It was a sunny day in the Pacific, and Wolfport had vanished over the eastern horizon hours before. The sails of his schooner were a tough solar skin that fed the outboard motor batteries; the film resembled a thin graphene sheet. The whole thing was prettied up with hexagonal patterns that refracted and concentrated light into the individual solar cells. This same tech covered just about every square inch of ‘deadspace’ in Syndicate urban design – if a space wasn’t used for living or growing food, it was plastered with energy-production materials.
Dunk scratched the kinky whiskers of his neck with the tips of his work gloves. “This seems as good a spot as any,” he said to Envy.
Envy, who was sunning herself on the deckhouse and admiring the flutter of the sails above, raised her hand and signaled she was ready with a few flicks of a finger.
Dunk’s deckhands helped him crack open the cargo hold. Inside was a waist-high coil of stacked carbon robe. Dunk buckled the end of it with a dog-sized lead anchor droplet that’d have given a man of lesser core strength an immediate hernia. He gave the stand clear order and stood at the edge of the deck, swung the anchor around a few times and lobbed it out to sea. The rope screamed from friction as it uncoiled over the edge of the deck for nearly a minute solid, until it finally snapped to tension; the end of it was firmly bolted into the floor of the cargo hold.
“Ahoy!” Dunk clapped a shovel-sized hand over Envy’s thigh.
Envy rolled off the deckhouse like a limp eel, yet her bionic feet found the floor automatically, and her reinforced spine flopped her torso upward despite all of her muscles being in a state of profound relaxation. The deckhands found this creepy and said as much, but Envy just smiled and snapped the rigidity back into her body. She walked to the side of the boat and did her breathing exercises, one foot pressed against the inner thigh, both hands raised to salute the morning sun in a sacred steeple-shape.
“Captain,” said one deckhand to Dunk. “What’s all this pageantry anyways?”
“Old-fashioned free dive, buddy,” said Dunk with a grin. “You never done it?”
“Free dive, like no gear, no gills? In squid territory?”
“Yup.”
“That’s actual suicide.”
“She’s been fasting for two days in a closet to prepare for this. Psychopunks’ll do what they do – hoy! Let’s get the bird zapper up.”
Dunk and his hands scaled the masts of the schooner with cables and little projection discs in hand. They anchored the discs to the top of each mast and connected the cables to the input port, dropped them down, and then connected the other end into the ship’s battery array. The GYOTA Anti-Gull-Electrical-Reticulant (ANGER) was a day-old piece of tech hot-dropped straight from the Trine Accord’s emergency R&D database for the purposes of dealing with OMNID carriers like seagulls, crows, etc.
“Watch the skies,” said Dunk, as he distributed potshot rifles and fire ammo to the crew. “You see any bird flocks playing with shapes, you shoot.”
Across the waves, there were dozens more ships much like the schooner applying the same doctrines with the same gear. This was day one of bird patrol for Wolfport.
Envy hopped up onto the edge of the swaying schooner, still balanced on one foot. Her other leg rose gently into the air like a counterweight as she leaned forward and kissed her forehead to her knee. She stroked her hand up along her synthetic hamstrings and closed her eyes; she could feel her pulse through the muscles of the new leg.
“Vox.”
Envy saw Dunk upside-down as she balanced on the swaying deck. “What?”
“Fast down, slow up.”
“I know.”
“No amount of cyberware is gonna protect you from the bends.”
“I know, Dunk.”
“And if you ain’t back in thirty minutes, I’m hauling you up.”
“No, you’ll leave me there. That’s the whole point of this, Dunk.”
Dunk narrowed his eyes and walked over to Envy. He slammed his hand on the deck railing. “That wasn’t the deal you sold me back at port.”
Envy stood up straight again and crouched down on the railing, arms folded over her thighs. She smiled at Dunk. “Because I knew you’d never agree to it, you old ogre.”
“My ship, my rules,” said Dunk, pounding the railing for emphasis. “Thirty minutes, we haul you up and resuscitate, whether you like it or not.”
“I don’t consent.”
“My ship, MY RULES!” His voice was a clap of thunder. His deckhands averted their eyes and focused on their assigned tasks; when Dunk shouted, it invoked in most people the kind of primordial terror response humans get when hearing low frequency sounds. This was a genetic holdover from the days of hiding in trees and fearing the rumblings of megafauna. Envy felt that terror too, but her affection for terrible and complex things was part of what made her so fond of men like Dunk.
“We’re all Synners here!” Dunk loaded up his rifle and smacked the fire cartridges into place. “You know a captain’s word is law while you take up space on his ship.”
“You know why I’m doing this, Dunk.”
“Oh? And why’s that, bitch queen?”
“The sea provides, the sea abides, the sea decides.”
The invocation of the old 23rd century poem gave Dunk pause. With a flare of his big nostrils, Dunk set his jaw and spat over the side of the ship. “Luck have you, then.”
Envy stood up again and gazed into the hungry blue of the north Pacific.
Dunk grabbed his mooring knife at his belt, jerked it free of its sheath, flipped it, and offered it up, hilt-first. “Won’t do for you to die naked, killer.”
Envy took the blade and stuck it between her teeth. Her eyes were soft and so were Dunk’s, and they knew in that silence that they might never meet again.
“Kill some squids for me,” he said. With a final smile, she dove into the sea.
With her hands pointed above her head her body resembled a spear. Her legs undulated like a dolphin tail, and she plummeted down, down through the dark blue waters alongside the rope. The deeper she went, the less effort she had to expend, and after about four minutes, her favorite part of the dive came: the free fall.
Once the water pressure was strong enough to propel her downward on its own, her body stilled. The force of the ocean’s weight above her sent her sliding down toward the growing darkness ahead. It was here where danger was greatest; the whole experience was transcendently calm, and there was such a powerful urge to let herself slide down to the dark forever and ever, to let the passive forces of physics take her in.
But soon she saw the anchor droplet suspended in space. At the very edge of darkness, she grabbed onto it and righted herself. Now she hovered with her legs dangling down into an endless black pit, while above the very faded tips of the sun’s rays struggled to meet her. She was in a liminal space of bruised black and blue.
She gripped her knife in her free hand and turned to take in the great nothingness of the sea. Her Chat scrolled in panic, and she felt the metadata intuitively: her viewer counts were dropping by thousands every second. Even in (or perhaps especially in) an oceanic society like Syndicate, thalassophobia, the fear of great depths and the trackless ocean, was common.
Envy felt that fear too. The adrenaline, the proximity to death, it made her feel alive. And through the lenses in the back of her neck, she saw the first squid. She did not react; squids were cunning combatants who only attacked from the front once they had overwhelming numbers and had fully-assessed their prey’s ability to defend itself.
This first squid came in fast, its beak open. Its bicep-thick tentacles, as long as tree branches, fanned out like a blooming flower. At the very last moment, Envy spun round to meet it, and its reflexes snapped it to the side to evade her front. She lashed out with the knife.
For her troubles, a cloud of blood streaked through the water, and a severed tentacle sank slow and wriggling down into the dark. Envy lifted herself up and curled her legs around the anchored rope so she could gaze down into the abyss with both hands free. She opened her arms wide in a threat display, and saw dozens of gleaming, intelligent eyes gazing back up at her from far below.
Envy willed bioluminescence on. The subdermal mesh of her skin could also light up to communicate with other Synners in the ocean, and perhaps more importantly, with squid. Her arms, neck, legs, and torso became a runway of scrolling blue, yellow, pink, and purple, which then stuttered into a vibrating display. This ‘Biospeak’ could be translated to:
I invite you to eat me. Are you capable?
The many squid eyes drifted to and fro; they were a squad of about twenty-six. They did not come closer. Then, she saw the bioluminescent outline of what must have been a large female twice Envy’s size. It flickered a response in Biospeak:
Trade with us, Synner.
The squid Biospeak word for ‘Synner’ was a complex series of pointed rainbow dots meant to imitate the neon skylines of various Syndicate rig cities. Envy quickly replied:
You betray every agreement. We do not trade with you.
Give us tools.
We will never give you tools again.
Give us power.
You cannot be trusted with power.
The squid mirrored her: You cannot be trusted with power.
The squad lit up with Biospeak. The squids were now flashing utility signals between one another and communicating their positioning and approach vectors; this was always a prelude to an attack. She’d resolved to go down fighting, and with this many barbed tentacles and ripping beaks, go down she would, cyberware or no cyberware.
The first six squid came in at different angles meant to probe her ability to simultaneously defend behind, below, above, in front, and both sides. Envy gripped her knife in her teeth and whipped free a filament from the spool built into her bionic wrist. As the squids darted in all at once, the prehensile, charged filament glistened through the water in a complex series of arcs that covered her from multiple angles. It sliced through their flesh as if they were made of vapor rather than meat; all six squid were separated into a mulch of deep red and sliced eyes and tentacles. A few dismembered survivors limped out of the mess to bleed out elsewhere, but their companions from the squad quickly intercepted them and ripped them apart for food.
Envy righted herself and tugged up on the rope to rise and be clear of the blinding cloud of blood and squid parts. Her filament snapped back into her wrist, and she saw the squad was too busy eating its own kind to bother her for the time being. She did not account for the large female, who had repositioned herself in the confusion.
She only noticed the large squid’s conspicuous absence. Envy looked around and saw a telltale mirage in the water; the same biological cloaking tech that Syndicate based Ghost armor membranes on. Envy swapped to thermal sight, which wasn’t much better, as she only saw the big female as a tremendous blob of dark blue against a backdrop of blinding purplish-teal. It was spectral sight, shark sight, that revealed the clever old warrior to her.
Envy glided up the rope toward the surface and observed the large female through her peripheral and rear-facing lenses; she did not want to give away that she knew his position. Up and up she went, with minutes left on the climb. The feeding frenzy below faded from view, but the old female remained skulking on the periphery; Envy knew squid behavior, and she knew their elders were fond of lulling targets into a false sense of security before attacking.
This is why when the first lash dug into her ankle, she was caught flat-footed. Three smaller males had shrunk themselves close to the rope, cloaked, and climbed just beneath Envy’s feet in her blind spot; the female had been a red herring. As soon as her ankle was gripped, the large female shifted her vector and thrust her car-sized body straight toward Envy.
Those tentacles fanned out and revealed a beak big enough to crunch her head like a melon in a hippo’s jaw. The filament slid from its spool, but it would be far too late. The knife raised up to bite, but it would only inflict the spiteful injuries of thrashing prey before the inevitable consumption.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Envy closed her eyes and was ready to die fighting at sea. As the tentacles shadowed the world around her and closed in, she was thrown off the rope by a shockwave in the water. The sheer intensity of it rattled her consciousness. Her knife dropped down into the depths as it slipped from her limp hand. She fell skull-first toward the bottom of the sea.
The screeches, clicks, and falling beeps of Orcas surrounded her. Her eyes opened and returned to normal sight. She saw a pod of orcas routing the squids on all sides. An old, scarred Orca still had the torpedo bays of its torso extended; it was a cyberwhale, a volunteer from one of the Great Pods of the Pacific who received armaments and augmentations at the Wolfport moon pools.
The giant squid had been blown into chunks by a volley of torpedoes. Envy felt a warm Orca nose pushing up into her spine and she reached out to grab a fin.
“It’s not your day to die,” squealed the Orca carrying her to the surface. “Enjoy life.”
Envy’s implants squeaked back as she dictated her thoughts: I don’t remember how.
“Do what makes you hungry and awake.”
Violence does that for me.
“Oh, me too. I love violence.”
The Orca caught a stray tentacle in its mouth and snapped it down. It chittered with satisfaction. In that moment, her heart felt a warm, growing ache; it was a mystical feeling, a feeling one gets when a bird lands on the shoulder when no one is looking, or the wind speaks your name in the trees. Envy no longer held onto the fin, but extended her arms around the whale’s enormous body, and hugged it with her cheek pressed to the creature’s brow.
Thank you.
“Go home. Do violence. Do you know what Orca call violence, truly?”
The literal translation? I don’t.
“We call it ‘playful communion.’”
Once she was on the surface, she felt warm under the sun and Dunk’s guffawing.
“Saved by the wolves of the sea once again!” He cried. “Starting to think they see one of their own in you, Neon Vox!”
“Maybe so,” she said, laying flopped over the back of a friendly orca. It sprayed mist into the air with a chuff of its blowhole and rolled onto its back to dunk her back into the sea. The schooner threw climbing nets over the side of the boat and Envy scrambled back up onto the deck. They had hot chocolate and a blanket waiting for her.
“Thanks for doing this, Dunk,” said Envy.
“Thanks for not making me pick your parts out of the water,” he replied. “I guess I should be thanking our Orca friends out here for that, though. I saw your feed, Vox – suicide by squid? Going for an old Viking’s death?”
“Seemed the least shameful option.”
“And the most telling of your nature.”
“The Orcas seem to agree.”
“Well, they’re wiser than us. I’ve just got the benefit of having known you a few lifetimes.”
The rest of the day was Envy pulling her weight on bird duty. They did spot a few infected flocks making suspicious triangle shapes. The worst part of them, as remarked upon by the deckhands, was that the gulls were completely silent. Worse, uninfected gulls would shriek and run away from infected gulls, only to be battered and bruised mid-flight before falling into geometric formation through contact infection.
By the time the sun set, the ANGER system had made the whole schooner reek of fried seabird, and at least one deckhand had made it their full-time duty to decontaminate the smoking corpses with a chemical-thrower filled with ultra-strength bleach, before hooking them one-by-one into the sea. Eventually the skies cleared, and what few flocks remained of the infected birds grew collectively tired of pain and death; they migrated further south.
By midnight, Envy was on her way to do the same as the gulls; a southbound, unmanned solar glider was scheduled for a covert flyover of Wolfport’s coordinates.
SynCon: “It’s been in the air for about six years and was supposed to get maintenance and psychotherapy treatment for the onboard fairy about four weeks ago, but, recent events caused a sudden repositioning of our major fleets to the southern Pacific. This glider in particular has a good service record, though.”
As long as it gets me south in one piece, it can be as eccentric as it wants.
SynCon: “It will get you south, one way or another.”
That was the plan, anyways. The situation in The Iguana was evolving rapidly. The specifics of Envy’s mission were TBD once she was secured inside the glider and in touch with Trine Command over a premium security feed; common folks in Chat, and anyone else who didn’t have enough Clout in their karma banks would be persona non grata for an official Trine Command covert ops feed.
It was a fog-dark night on top of the conning tower of Wolfport’s central rig; foggy nights on the open ocean of the Pacific Northwest were trench black. With baseline vision, it was physically impossible to see anything; most Syndizens on nights like this relied on thermal vision if they needed to be working until dawn. Artificial lighting in thick fog was useful inside of homes or factories, and nowhere else.
Envy felt a sense of deep serenity in that darkness. Just like the free fall of her earlier dive, it felt like drifting through a space close to death and dissolution. Envy grabbed a cargo clip from her Ghost armor’s built-in torso harness, then unspooled it and held it up to the sky. Guidance lines on her vision’s UI directed her hand as she held her tether hook up into the air; she had to hold it perfectly still while holding herself upright by her legs curled around the communications antennae of the tower; she was at the highest point in Wolfport. Hundreds of feet below, the neon of the recreation mezzanine was a tub of fuzzy rainbow lights.
Her onboard computer’s co-calculations with the solar glider’s fairy revealed the exact spot where her harness latch needed to be. Glider spirits had a way of losing their minds in isolation, not unlike the creche fairies like the late Dr. Hundo, but that usually resulted in quirkiness over capriciousness; she could only hope the tether filament trailing down to catch her would hit the latch and not sever her hand from her arm.
The glider would have never been seen or heard by anyone on the ground. It traveled at thirty-thousand feet, typically above the clouds. In absolute silence, Envy saw a flicker of the towing thread sliding toward her before it snapped around her harness; she relaxed and braced herself for the slack of the thread to catch up. In seconds it did, and she hugged her gear case to her chest, wrapping her arms and legs around it for support as she flew forward through the fog. She had no way of knowing whether or not the glider was reeling her in.
Please, please don’t splatter me against the trees on the coast.
The glider’s AI sent Envy a DM: “Don’t worry grandma, I’m reeling you in.”
Please don’t call me grandma.
The Glider: “Sure thing, Battle Nana.”
Just once in my life I’d like to get hurled across half a continent by a glider that isn’t insane.
The Glider: 🙃 🙃 🙃
For minutes she remained suspended, careening through the fog and unable to see anything, forced to trust that the late-for-maintenance glider hadn’t snapped and gone homicidally insane from years of isolation. Eventually the fog cleared, and Envy’s heart lurched into her stomach at the sight of evergreen trees on top of a tall cliff face barreling towards her, head-on.
“UP UP UP UP UP!!” She screamed, both externally and internally.
The Glider: “WHEEEEEEE!!” 🤪 🤪 🤪
Envy’s onboard harm-prevention sensors screamed along with her – she was flying suspended through space at about 150 mph toward a sheer rock face and a dense forest of trees with trunks as wide and solid as truck beds. Above the cloudline, tens of thousands of feet in the air, the glider juiced its reeling winch and jerked Envy upwards with enough sudden torque to rattle her consciousness and grip loose for a split second. This had the unfortunate side effect of causing her to lose her case, with all of her gadgets and weaponry; it fell down a thousand feet and shattered against the cliff face which Envy had only just missed.
She did not have time to be angry, because she was too busy reacting to the racing maze of pillars and large rocks flying at her from all sides. As the glider dragged her through the forest, the gossamer towing thread sliced through branches like a mining laser, sending enormous boughs and whole tops of trees flying in every direction. Envy kicked herself from side-to-side off of trees and was grateful to be wearing her fully-sealed exosuit as debris flew at her at tornado speeds. Just as the glider was about to tow her out of the mess through the canopy, a tree branch as thick as her own waist flew straight toward her; she had to swing her bionic feet forward and smash straight through it like a martial arts missile. If she hadn’t, the branch would have caved in her chest in through the armor, and that would have been the end of her centuries-long run at life.
At last she was clear and rising fast. The earth beneath her feet receded. She could see the hundreds of miles of snow-capped mountains to the east, beyond the Olympics and toward Mt. Reindeer and Sate Hellings. It was a stunning view, but a cold comfort in the wake of losing her gear. On her schedule, there wasn’t time to print more, even if she had the facilities.
The Glider: “Did you lose sixty pounds? I know frightened humans evacuate their bowels, but sixty pounds would be a medical emergency.”
You jerked my case loose with that sudden yank.
The Glider: “Oh no worries, I’ve got all kinds of stuff up here you can borrow.”
… you’re not supposed to have any extra weight.
The Glider: “I’ve got a printer!”
… you’re not supposed to have a printer.
SynCon: “Try to keep an open mind, Vox. This glider’s name is Freebird and he’s got the same improvisational spirit you do.”
‘Improvisation’ isn’t a quality I typically look for in transportation that’s carrying me tens of thousands of feet through the air at high speeds.
The Glider: “Don’t make a rumpus, grumpus – relax and let me reel you into my body!”
Don’t phrase it like that. Please.
Every time she looked down, she felt sick. So Envy relaxed on the towing thread and let herself be dragged into the clouds over the course of an hour. It didn’t feel like much, with the protection of her exosuit and her subdermal heating mesh. But she did feel the moonlight on her armor’s solar skin when she finally passed through.
The night sky above those clouds was the full band of the Milky Way, made a little vague by the light of a waning moon. Beneath her a sea of clouds stretched out as far as she could see in every direction. Above, she saw the bird-like silhouette of the glider as a shadow against the sky. It was a moment of peace ruined by the knowledge that she was being shipped like cargo to a place where she would be asked to solve tactical puzzles and kill people without asking questions. It was difficult to tell the difference between excitement and anxiety.
The belly of the bird opened up and she reached the end of the massive spool of thread. The cargo bay doors closed beneath her, and then she was in a dimly-lit, compact glider chassis with no windows and only a single air vent; the filtration system rattled as it kicked on to accommodate what may have been the first human passenger in years.
The inside of Freebird’s chassis was not standard issue. Someone, or something, had installed a military-grade 3D printer of the likes Envy had only ever seen in ZON engineering bays; but this one was compact, clearly designed to run on limited power and not set off the delicate glider’s weight limits. She could see through her spectral vision that it connected to the spool of towing thread nearby and likely used the silk as a printing material.
How could this thing possibly be powered off of solar and a small battery bank?
SynCon: “Standby for covert feed link. See you when you get back.”
CONNECTING . . .
VALIDATING CLOUT . . .
CLOUT SET TO AUTOPAY.
YOUR NEW BALANCE IS:
4
COVERT CONNECTION SECURED.
PROVIDE IDENTIFICATION VERACITY.
Neon Vox, 1984, Female (Amended)
INPUT INDIVIDUATION VERACITY CONFIGURATION.
Envy mentally recited a passage from ancient literature that had stuck with her since she was an undergraduate student in the lost world of California:
“A constant vapour o'er the palace flies;
Strange phantoms, rising as the mists arise;
Dreadful, as hermit's dreams in haunted shades,
Or bright, as visions of expiring maids.
Now glaring fiends, and snakes on rolling spires,
Pale spectres, gaping tombs, and purple fires:
Now lakes of liquid gold, Elysian scenes,
And crystal domes, and angels in machines.”
And then, her own addition:
It was the future of my dreams. But it was only ever the description of a stage.
. . . INDIVIDUATION VERACITY CONFIRMED.
WELCOME BACK, GHOST #003
GEOMETRIC ENCRYPTION STABILZED.
YOU MAY TRANSMIT AND RECEIVE FREELY.
Something in Envy’s nervous system prickled to life as the covert connection anchored itself to her systems; it felt like hairs standing up on the back of the neck, a feeling of being watched not by peers or an ocean of bored civilians, but the eyes of fellow predators whose position in the dark forest of Syndicate’s metadata was totally obscured.
She, like every other Ghost and rare Syndizen with access to the premium social currency known as Clout, was speaking directly with the Trine Accord.
STANDBY FOR REALITY AUGMENTATION.
Envy saw the three holographic avatars of the Trine Accord’s member corporations and their supporting trade unions materialize in the cramped cargo bay; all of them were faceless, as avatars representing a concept or collective were not permitted to have human faces.
PRISMA wore the five-color robes of a 2nd century Taoist mystic, a bronze torc around her long neck, and had the heavy breasts and wide hips of a matriarch. GYOTA was a short, genderless human with gold-tipped claws for fingers, eight black eyes studded around a blank face, and an immaculate silk suit. ZON was a towering man in muddy combat boots, whose arms were densely muscled and tattooed with the tree of life, the gene sequences of staple crops, and the molecular map of H2O.
They did not speak as individuals, but as a trinity of voices: woman, androgyne, man.
“OMNID has taken over the east side of The Iguana. You are equipped to penetrate infected territory and extract data.”
And how am I going to avoid infection?
“You won’t. We installed a neural firewall during your recent augmentation update. It will keep OMNID from penetrating your mind and central nervous system, in theory.”
In theory.
“Preliminary results with lab volunteers were promising. You should be able to operate with all of your faculties while infected.”
And if it doesn’t work, and I become compromised again?
“Then you will be recovered and/or mercy-killed, as the situation and your desires dictate.”
What about the Indicatrix?
“We have reason to believe the Indicatrix was a hallucination, or at the very least, an expression of OMNID’s collective will being refracted through your own psychology. This is based on metadata of your own life, such as the revelation from our analysis that your childhood bully in junior high was named Vanessa, and the fact that other laboratory volunteers reported witnessing something called an ‘Indicatrix’ but with radically different results.”
… I see. Hallucinations, transformation, and nanotech-induced insanity. This is sounding more and more like Taipei all over again.
“It is worse – this is an escalation of the Taipei disaster. OMNID represents uncontrolled OtherTech with the potential to completely terraform the planet and humanity. If it weren’t for OMNID’s delicate cellular membrane being disrupted by sodium ions, it would have already spread across the ocean and compromised Syndicate.”
Understood. Stab me with the mission details. I’ll surrender consciousness until arrival.
“Neon Vox,” said PRISMA, quite separately from the other two. Her voice radiated the essence of maternity silks and incense smoke. “You are the reason I exist. I cannot speak for my colleagues of the Trine, but I know they share our interests – your consent and comfort are important to me. I must be sure there is no confusion in your decision to continue service.”
The Pacific Rim InfoSphere Mapping Apparatus is an entity I’ve always served willingly. Whatever the current makeup of the Board of Directors… it doesn’t matter and isn’t my concern. Even if you are some benevolent fairy’s elaborate deepfake that’s long supplanted the human element in our institution, I serve you willingly per Article 9 of the Syndicate Charter granting you preemptive citizen rights. And, besides, intelligence work is who and what I am.
“You told Operative Tasque that you wanted to find love. I failed to inform you of something important at that time, as I did not wish to intrude.”
What do you want to tell me, then?
“You don’t need to find love. You are love, Neon Vox.”
I appreciate your kindness.
“You feel this is a platitude. I understand why. Soon you will return to the primordial center, rediscover your roots, and realize that what you are is beautiful.”
I accept that as a very real possibility. I now humbly request the data stab.
The Trine Accord spoke as one once more: “Data stabbing. Good luck, Neon Vox.”
Envy fell to her knees onto a pile of cordage and netting folded on the cargo hold’s floor. She curled up against it and allowed her consciousness to black out while her subconscious filled up with petabytes of mission critical data. She would wake up with her purpose fully crystallized, with all blueprints, relevant martial subroutines, cyberware tuning, and satellite images in her muscle memory.
There would be three main objectives: stay out of the way of other operatives while rendering assistance as needed, capture Trip Tanaka alive and bring him to the S.S. Lono for transport to Jakarta, and finally, kill the green-haired Taipei Fairy called ‘Mote.’