Noviko’s home was a single habitation tube at the base of a forty-story residential habstack, colloquially referred to as a hive. Now, it was not an ugly or cramped hive, full of sticky fluids and teeming with nerve-stapled drones shuffling to and fro from work without a shred of human complexity. It was a modular nest of individually-fabricated hab tubes, all printed to order from the GYOTA foundries across the Pacific Rim and delivered by ZON courier ships. Citizens would work together to form these modular communities and maintain them with pride; an individual’s hab was more than just a bespoke space filled with all the nooks, curves, and crannies one needed for cooking, sleeping, entertaining guests, workshopping, and/or hosting a business. It was home.

Indeed, a hab was an expression of who you were, and a hab was the right of every Syndicate citizen. Perhaps more than biological immortality, access to the total sum of all human wisdom through the MetaNet, life-affirming enrichment VR, or access to premium companionship, Syndicate citizenship was coveted for access to a hab. Residents had the misfortune of needing sponsored space, and usually stayed with their extended family, spouses and/or polycule who already maintained a citizen hab large enough to support the number of individuals registered to it.

Given that human movement was not criminalized in Syndicate, migrant workers, those with wanderlust, or those with any reason whatsoever to relocate could have their hab removed by engineering drones and placed onto a ship, into a submarine, or even transported to another rig entirely. Removing a hab did not collapse the habstack, as the ‘stack’ itself was a powerful scaffolding meant to lock hab units into place. The stack could stand on its own (though sometimes habs had to be rearranged into patterns that better distributed weight). These relocation exercises were the reason why all furnishings in Syndicate, from keyboards to vases, were manufactured with magnets or smart-adhesives to their bottoms.

So, some habstacks had empty hexagon spaces where habs were to-be-installed or had recently been removed, and while awaiting new tenants, the scaffolding structure resembled the empty hexagonal nest structures of nature’s most settled creatures: insects. A residential stack was therefore affectionately called a hive, out of admiration for the natural world and its ability to produce wonders well before humanity ever came along as evolution’s darling showstopper.

With a convenience store rice triangle and nip of spiked Speedrunner’s Choice in her belly, as well as a new mole inked onto her face, Noviko arrived home with minutes to spare. She smooshed her hand against the biometric reader on her door and it beeped with recognition. The entry bulkhead loosened its seal with a hiss, and she grabbed the power crank to unlock the barring mechanism. Her front door swung open, and she stepped into the mud room, which was a space about the size of a small bathroom. The walls were full of nooks containing everything from hanging vines to key rings, incense cases to ZON parcel deliveries, sandals to sculptures, and scuba masks to swimming fins. As she slipped out of her sandals, she could feel the gurgle of the warm liquid coolant that ran through the floors; this meant someone had the hab’s processing unit cranked up enough to render a simulation or weave geometric encryptions.

Given that her four-year-old son was more interested in ninjas than qubits, Noviko assumed it was the former. “Trip Tanaka-LaCroix!” She called out with a smile. “Step off the VR, mommy’s home!”

As she slipped on her house shoes and unsealed one of the mud room windows, she dumped out the ash of her incense holder into a compost chute and lit a new stick of patchouli. The silky smoke drifted out the window and took with it any vestiges of negativity she might be carrying into the home. She winced as she heard the VR gear tear off and hit the floor.

“Trip,” she called out again, “ready or not, I’m coming in!”

A little boy shrieked like a samurai charging his foe: “AAAAAAAAH!”

As she stepped through the curtains into the living space, she was attacked by a ferocious little boy with the big brown eyes and dusky skin of his father. Noviko took the plastic play katana to the thigh and slumped most convincingly. “No! I am assailed by a vicious ninja!”

“I have you now, Mommy!” Little Trip grinned with a naughty gleam in his eyes. Noviko slumped to her knees, clutching her ‘wound’ at her thigh.

“You fiend!” She gasped. “Striking an unarmed woman?!”

Trip lowered the sword and frowned. He then threw his whole torso over in an overblown bow. “It was just play, mama! Please forgive me!”

“It’s too late… for that…” Noviko slumped onto the floor and made quite the show of breathing her last, rattling breaths. “… I… loved you… eeeeugh…”

Trip dropped to his knees and threw his arms out over her. “NOOOOOOOO!”

And that was when she sprung her tickle trap. “YOU FOOL!” She yelled.

She then scooped him up like a sack of rice and tickled him while carrying him about in the crook of her arm. He kicked, laughed, begged for mercy, but she inflicted five seconds of tickling for her troubles, then casually yeeted the child onto the spongy couch cushions. He bounced and then got to jumping up and down while chanting ‘mommy’s home’ over and over and over and over again.

At the bar by the kitchenette, Trip’s nanny sat with his face slumped across the surface. His eyes were dark with exhaustion, and he watched Noviko fix tea in silence.

“I’m sending you triple-rate,” said Noviko, with as much empathy as she could manually inject into her tone. “I apologize for last night… and this morning. Was he… manageable?”

“Your son,” began the nanny, as he rose like a wet noodle from the bar, “is inexorable.”

“That’s… a word for him, yes.”

“Like the great tide that sweeps all life aside, he is inexorable, an elemental force that never stops, never tires, and never shows mercy.”

Trip jumped up and down on the cushions pumping his fists into the air while screaming: “INEXPLICABLE! INEXPLICABLE TRIP TANAKA!”

With that, the Nanny gathered his tote, and walked toward the exit.

Noviko scrambled. “I loved the poetry you posted last week, by the way!”

“You have guests,” said the nanny, before leaving through the bulkhead, never to return.

“What?” Noviko looked to the curtains of the mud room. “I didn’t authorize… oh.”

She saw familiar, polished black boots beneath the curtains.

And then she heard a sound she wished was not familiar:

Schlorp. Schlorp. Schlorp.

She shuddered. “Excuse me,” Noviko cried out toward the mud room. “There is a little boy in here! There will be no jellyfish tossing, thank you! And oh, one more question if you don’t mind -- WHY does he still have the damned jellyfish?!”

“Mama, what jellyfish???” Trip had scurried over toward the mud room. Noviko rushed to intercept but wasn’t quite quick enough. Agent Vox stepped through curtains and towered over little Trip. The young lad stared up at the armed woman in black with his mouth hanging open like a dead tuna’s. Noviko scooped him up into her arm and held him against one of her wide, powerful hips. The glare she gave Vox could have peeled paint off a destroyer’s hull.

“Noviko,” Agent Vox bowed. “My apologies, but this can’t wait.”

“And so you bring this icky business to my home? How will I be compensated for this intrusion into my private space? What restitution will there be for my poor tile floors that now suffer beneath your pretty little jackboots, Agent Vox?”

Schlorp, schlorp, schlorp. A little seawater splattered onto the mud-room tiles from the old man’s constant stirring of the jellyfish bucket.

Noviko noted Agent Vox’s eyes briefly glow yellow, indicating that she was both a cyborg with synthetic eyeballs, and that she was transmitting funds. Noviko manually willed her UI down into her vision and saw that she had been granted a single unit of clout, a political currency that allowed an individual to be party to covert communications and the highest levels of Syndicate business. A unit of clout could also be exchanged for enough liq (standard day-to-day currency) to enjoy decades of relative privacy and inaction without being pestered by SynCon.

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Noviko had never been given clout before, and so her heart raced. “Should I be flattered or frightened that I have been given such a gift before even doing my job?”

“Call it a gesture of good will,” said Agent Vox. “For reasons I can’t disclose, PRISMA has faith in your ability to accomplish this task.”

Schlorp, schlorp, schlorp went the bucket behind the curtain. There was gentle babbling and quiet ululations to go along with it. Whatever the case, the old man from the gondola certainly seemed calm enough to wait to be seen by his assigned psychopunk.

“It’s a simple exorcism, agent, I’ve done thousands.” She set Trip down. “Trip my sweet, go play in the VR pod. Mommy has work to do.”

“I wanna watch,” Trip whined.

“You are too young for this, Trip – and there’s nothing to watch, besides! You’re too young to watch grown-up sensory streams. Get in the simulation pod and I’ll turn on sensory deprivation.”

Trip huffed. “No!”

Agent Vox drifted down into a loose squat and put herself at eye level with Trip. “Trip Tanaka,” she said with a wide, warm smile. “I understand you want to be a Ghost when you grow up. Is that true?”

Trip nodded so hard Noviko feared his little neck might snap. “Yeah! I want to sneak around and do cool stuff and have a GUN!”

“It’s not just about the gear and guns, little man,” said Vox, “it’s about the heart behind the armor. Ghosts obey their mothers. And more than anything, they keep secrets. Are you going to be someone who can keep secrets, Trip?”

“I will.” Trip straightened up. “I am.”

The VR pod dangling from the center of the living space was a deflated cocoon with wires and goggles hanging out of it. With a little more gentle insistence from both mother and corporate agent, the little boy crawled inside, put on the child-sized implements, and sealed it up behind him. Noviko touched the sensory deprivation controls from the outside and activated the parental safety lock, then set the timer to one hour.

“Thank you,” she said to Vox. “With his father off in Okinawa, it’s been…”

“My dad just about raised me by himself,” Vox replied with a nod. “Mom was a steelworker foreman, I get it. You’re doing a good job, nobody questions it.”

Noviko always knew it was true but hearing it from someone like Vox made her heart lighten up and her eyes get a little misty. It was nice she was permitted by SynCon to indulge herself now and then without being shamed for it.

Vox eyed her up and down once, then averted her gaze so as not to be rude and/or creepy. “I take it from the hormone levels I’m reading from your biomon that you feel relief. Good – that was the point. If you’re ready, let’s get on with this,” said Vox.

“What a romantic, casually mentioning to a lady you have access to her biological metadata in conversation. You must be quite popular in love.”

Vox smirked. There was a twinkle in her eye as she turned and vanished behind the curtains to the mud room. She returned moments later to lead the old man into the living space. He was as wide-eyed and vacant as ever, but he smiled when he recognized Noviko.

Noviko returned the smile and noted to herself that someone had shaved the old man’s head, revealing the surgery scars and bulky old neural implant rig behind his ears. She gestured for him to join her by the window. There she had a brass prayer gong hanging by a stand against the wall. Beneath it the gong and set into the floor itself was a blackwalled computer cluster with two simple ports on either side of the thing’s on/off switch.

Noviko reached up behind the back of her head and dug around in the great mass of her thick, dark hair to find the false skin covering her neural implant jack. She peeled the skin back, pinched the jack, and drew it out to connect it to the computing cluster in the floor.

“Lama soso futuli bishba?” She said in improvised gibberish to the old man, while jiggling the cable between her head and the computing cluster. He watched with wide eyes, then set his bucket down at his feet. When Agent Vox went to move the bucket, the old man screamed at her in gibberish, prompting the agent to back off with her hands raised.

“The bucket is sacred to him,” said Noviko.

“So we’ve gathered,” said Vox. “Sedatives must be wearing off.”

“Of course you drugged him. Ugh,” Noviko rolled her eyes. “Well, I should hope it’s wearing off, because this doesn’t work on drugged patients.”

Vox didn’t respond with words. She drew her utility pistol and popped open the tranquilizer barrel. With a clean snap of her wrist, she ejected the tranquilizer round and caught it between two spidery fingers to show it to Noviko.

Noviko squinted at the tranquilizer round. “A child’s dose… good. Fine. Should be fine.”

Satisfied, she then helped the old man find the neural jack behind his ear.

This implant is the size of a bar of soap – it’s massive! How old is this fellow…?

With some gentle instruction, the old man tugged out a jack much like Noviko’s. He offered it to her with big, trusting eyes. She took it gingerly and pulled it down to connect to the computing cluster in the floor. She did not turn it on yet. Instead, she reached for the soft mallet leaning near her gong, then tapped the gong. A resonance thrummed through the whole hab, and she focused solely on following her intuition in swirling the mallet around the gong to manipulate the vibration frequencies. Over and over she did this, loud and soft, lingering and quick, high and low, until the old man was lulled into a state of natural calm. His face was peaceful as he sat sagging over his jellyfish bucket. Then, and only then, was when she flipped the switch.

CONNECTING . . .

. . . BLACKWALL DETECTED.

BLACKWALL ENCRYPTION ANALYSIS . . . COMPLETE.

ASYMMETRIC BINARY ENCRYPTION DETECTED.

Binary encryption?! This man’s implants truly are ancient!

. . .

ENCRYPTION BROKEN. BLACKWALL BREACHED.

INTEGRATING CONSCIOUSNESS . . .

DYAD COVENANT ACHIEVED.

DISINTEGRATING PRIMARY HALLUCINATION “REALITY”

. . .

The agent, her son, the hab, the world… all of it washed away like sand in a hot shower.

. . .

RENDERING NEW REALITY. . .

. . .

She was in the depths of the sea. She could breathe the water. Above was darkness, below was darkness. Above and below ceased to be meaningful. She could not even tell which way her bubbles drifted when she blew them. In the distance she saw lights rendering into view. The lights grew closer and larger, and soon she recognized them as enormous jellyfish, all glowing in stunning shades of bioluminescence. The way their lights shifted along the color spectrum in precision patterns and precise rhythms of on and off indicated to Noviko that they were communicating with each other. What was more, it felt they were communicating with her, but she could not understand what they were saying.

This was far and away the most bizarre mindscape she’d ever rendered into. Noviko reached inside of herself to dig around in her repertoire of psychopunk tools. She activated her ego sonar and followed her instincts. Those instincts told her to dive down, deeper into the dark. As she did, far below more lights were rendered. This time, it was the geometric lights of a city in the night, all built around winding veins of bubbling lava and boiling geothermal vents. It was a trenchworks site, the deepest reaches of Syndicate’s civilization, and where it was said all manner of spooky research and development occurred at the source of every region’s SuperGrid power plant, where electricity was not diluted from leagues of travel. No one without clout could witness the interior of a trenchworks site, and clout could only be earned in special circumstances, or through at least one century of proven, selfless service toward Syndicate’s collective well-being and broader political, military, and/or scientific interests.

Agent Vox’s voice came through like a radio handler in her ear: “Testing tertiary monitoring connection. Do you hear me?”

Yes.

“Noviko, I want you to remain calm while I deliver an official advisement from PRISMA. Be advised: What you’re about to see may disturb you, however, it is necessary that you see it in order to complete your assigned task. You will not be forced to do this task, per your rights under the Trine Accord’s mutualism charter. In order to ensure you are not being coerced, I ask now with three-hundred and sixty-million concurrent viewers present: Do you consent?”

Excuse me, how many are watching?!

“Do you consent?”

I… don’t know. This is frightening.

“PRISMA Actual is monitoring this psychopunk and supporting you with additional cluster resources. The only damage you risk to yourself right now is psychological.”

That’s my concern.

“And ours. But you must consent to proceed. Do you consent?”

… I consent.

“SynCon established and witnessed. All sensory data beyond this point is cloutwalled; viewers without sufficient clout, or who do not wish to expend clout on this information, will be expelled from the stream in ten seconds.”

Oh great goddess of the Soldered Sun. What am I getting myself into?

“Cloutwall up. Proceed into the site and locate the patient’s ego.”

I’ll do my best. Please stay close.

“I’m right here monitoring your vitals and progress.”

Even if this was a purely virtual space, knowing Vox was watching over her was reassuring. Down she went, further into the depths of the trench.

Noviko did not need to breathe, but the reflex to hold her breath felt like a bubble in her brain. She willed herself to ‘warp’ further down into the trenchworks site, through walls and a rapid slideshow of places within and without the area that the old man’s conscious ego had visited and remembered. Because they were dealing with the subconscious, and not a direct material recording of sensory data, everywhere she went was an unreliable impression linked to a memory associated with a powerful emotion, such as joy, fear, sorrow, wonder, et cetera.

She did sense some joy and some wonder in this place, and how could she not? Anyone who had ever visited such a marvelous facility would feel those feelings to some degree. But, as she probed further through sterile hallways and glassy tanks filled with the impressions of flickering limbs and bioluminescent bodies, of moon pools containing colossal squids the size of submarines, of trench marines walking the ocean floor in their powered armor gunning down… something, something silent and fast…

No. No, in the case of this poor old devil whose mind she now shared, the primary emotion she associated with every square inch of this place was not wonder or fear.

It was terror.