Cyber Dreams 4.37 - Tornado

I feel like things are getting complicated. How do you all feel? Am I going off the rails? Love to hear your thoughts :)

-Plum

“So you’re interested, good. How about we have a little one-on-one after dinner, hmm?” Mary winked and sat back, clearly considering the matter settled.

Juliet felt someone jostle her arm and turned to the person to her right, a wiry, hard-muscled man with a short fringe of fine, silvery metallic hair along his jawline that ran up his sideburns and blended into the bizarre, silvery spikes of his hair. He looked almost like a cartoon character who’d been electrocuted. His strange ocular implants didn’t help matters—he must have had his orbital bones modified to allow for the oversized orbs that sat in the sockets. They had matching, expansive purple irises that glittered with gem-like sparkles. When he spoke, his thin, rubbery lips stretched weirdly, making his entire face kind of a caricature of humanity. “Lacy, is it?”

She tried to contain her surprise at his odd appearance and nodded. “Yeah.”

“I’ve heard some intriguing things about you and your partner—quite a haul you brought in. I’m Roy, by the way.”

“That’s Captain Roy to you, Lacy,” Mary said with a chuckle.

Juliet glanced at Mary, watched her smirk and take a drink, then turned back to Roy. “Tornado?”

“Hey! You’ve heard of me?”

“Sure.”

“So rumors around here are that you’re cold as ice. Slaughtered the crew of that ship, huh? Not very Jolly Roger of you.” Roy had a strange way of speaking that went beyond his odd facial expressions. Whenever he said a word with more than one syllable, he emphasized the first and hardly enunciated the following ones. It gave his speech an odd cadence that perplexed her. Maybe her expression changed as a result, but Roy chuckled and said, “Did I offend you?”

“No.” Juliet narrowed her eyes and locked them on Tornado’s, opening her mind as she waited for him to realize that was all she’d say.

Not talkative, eh? Well, the rumors are true. Wonder what Moon wants with her.

“Care to tell me a bit about yourself? What brings you to the Jovian System to ply your particularly rough brand of pirating?”

Juliet didn’t want to engage in conversation; it wasn’t Lacy’s thing. She covered for her reticence by taking a sip of her bourbon, then, firmly remembering how intimidating Ghoul had been when she’d first met her, she set the glass down, turned to look Tornado full in the face, and rasped, “No.” The whiskey helped make the hoarseness in her voice authentic, and Tornado, though he didn’t look happy, nodded and picked up his wine for a sip. Juliet knew she had a golden opportunity to get some information out of this guy. He was, supposedly, romantically involved with her target, after all. Still, she couldn’t suddenly turn Lacy into a chatterbox. She had to play this right. When he set the glass down, she spoke, hoping to catch him off guard, “Fresh start, I guess.”

“Oh? Well, that’s a good enough reason, I suppose. Plenty of people here are hoping to start over for one reason or another. Isn’t that right, Captain Moon?”

Mary was in the midst of a conversation with the woman to her left, and she turned to Roy and frowned, holding up a finger. Roy sighed, annoyed or disappointed, and Juliet filled the awkward silence, “Plenty?”

“Right. Obviously, we’ve got people hiding from corpo-sec; the law takes many flavors in the system, and we don’t all fit the mold, you cop me?” Juliet inhaled, her mind spinning for a perfect response and also trying to make sense of the “cop me” slang. Did he mean feel? Follow? She decided to go with simple vitriol; it felt in character for Lacy.

“Screw corps.”

“A woman of few but meaningful words,” Mary said, finally extricating herself from her conversation. “What are you asking me now, Roy?”

“I was just mentioning to our new friend that many among us came for a fresh start.”

“Yeah, obviously. Or because, you know, they’d be locked away or spaced if they tried to enter a port.” Mary snorted and drained her wine, holding up the empty glass and shaking it at a nearby synth. Juliet looked around the table and realized there were now four synths standing around, all with very robotic appearances, like the bartender. She hadn’t seen them come in. Had it happened when they brought the wine—when she’d been lost in Mary’s head? The idea bothered her, but, at the same time, she didn’t feel very emotionally troubled. She wasn’t feeling hungover with foreign feelings and weird thoughts and memories like she had been when she read Larry’s deeper thoughts. Was it because she’d only taken a glimpse?

“Hah, eloquent as always, Mary.” Roy spread his enormous smile, exposing too-white, too-straight teeth all the way to his back molars.

“Lots of synths,” Juliet grunted, trying to turn the topic away from her and her motivations for coming to the Jovian System.

“Oh yes! You come upon all manner of interesting cargo when you're a pirate. One of our bigger scores involved these synths—we took a Zi Corp cargo transport with a thousand of these things bound for an ore processing plant on Ceres.”

“Yeah,” Roy added, “they’re technically maintenance labor synths. We’ve done some tweaking with their personality algorithms, though.”

“Ah! Dinner!” Mary said, loud enough to stop the conversations around the table and bring everyone’s attention to the side carts where the aforementioned synths were removing the domed, stainless covers from the food trays. Of course, everyone, lubricated by booze, hammed up their reaction to the reveal.

“Goddamn!” one man howled, lifting his wine glass. Others simply oohed and aahed, but Juliet could tell they all wanted to please the host. Juliet looked at Mary, waited for her to meet her gaze, then nodded and raised her whiskey glass in a silent salute. After that, they got busy eating, and things got a lot quieter as far as conversation went.

The meal was good, no denying, and Juliet was surprised by the fare, from freshly baked chicken still on the bone, so you could tell it wasn’t grown in a vat to seasoned, roasted root vegetables to hot, baked bread to three different kinds of pie. She ate a lot, figuring if she was building a personality for Lacy Blake, she might as well enjoy food. While she ate, she took sidelong glances at Roy Tornado, wondering what she should do to capitalize on the lucky happenstance that put him beside her.

He seemed friendly, if strange, but who was she to judge? Wasn’t everyone a little strange in the messed-up society they were all struggling to survive in? What was her baseline for normal? The suits and corpo drones in the media? Taking a second look at her thought process, she wondered what she was doing but quickly figured it out; she was trying to psych herself into using the lattice for another deep dive hot on the heels of the one she’d just done with Mary. She was trying to minimize the man’s strangeness so she wouldn’t be scared to go into his head.

Thinking about that, while she forked another mouthful of chewy, roasted parsnip, she considered her luck with “deep dives” thus far. Each time, she’d found what she wanted. Was it because her psionic ability somehow recognized her desired outcome and searched the target’s mind for relevant information? When she dove in, she always had something in mind. With Tono, she’d wanted to expose a weakness. With Larry, she’d wanted to know more about the job and his motivations. With Mary Moon, she’d wanted to know her intentions toward Juliet. Each time, she’d gotten what she wanted. Was it luck? Coincidence? Skill? Juliet figured that with three samples, she could rule out coincidence.

If she managed to either skillfully or luckily find what she wanted from Roy, it might make the rest of this operation a hell of a lot easier. Could she throw that kind of opportunity away because she didn’t want to suffer from an “emotional hangover?” She shook her head. What if it was more than just lingering emotions? What if her mind grew cluttered with memories and feelings and started to cull some? What if it culled the wrong things? What if she began to develop multiple personalities or something equally as disturbing? Of course, she didn’t know anything of the sort would happen, but she was smart enough to be scared.

“Angel,” she subvocalized, “I’m going to try to get into Tornado’s head. Don’t let me space out too long. If I start to do something weird, break me out of it. You know how?”

“I can try some methods I developed for breaking you out of a true-dream. It might not look pretty, though.”

“Rather I have some kind of fit and blame it on bad cyberware than . . . something else.”

“All right. I’ve got you, Juliet.”

Angel’s reassurance was just what Juliet needed to hear. “Show me a captured image of Tornado’s eyes, please.” As a big window opened in her AUI, displaying a still image of Roy’s weird, oversized, glittering eyes, the noise around the table died down. Angel was helping her concentrate by dampening her auditory input. Juliet stared into those eyes and focused, pretending she was looking into the real things, boring into the brain of the man beside her. As uncanny shadowy images and snippets of Tornado’s voice began to bombard her, she really focused, picturing Sir Rodric’s daughter, mentally asking, “What’s the deal with you and Antigone?” Suddenly, Juliet’s reality was washed away as a vivid scene grabbed her, immersing her in sounds, smells, sights, and feelings. Juliet began to remember . . .

Roy leaned forward toward the surface of the little motel mirror. He gently tugged the skin around his eyes, frowning. Were those synthetic bone implants failing? Why was his skin swelling at the corner of the eye?

“Staring at yourself again?” Antigone’s trill of mocking laughter caught him by surprise, and Roy dropped his hand, straightening and turning away from the sink. He nervously smoothed his ChromaWeave hair implants, the sharp, prickly metallic strands tickling his palm. He offered her a half smile, turning up the corner of his expressive lips as he walked toward the bed.

“Thought you were asleep.”

“I was, but I had a nightmare. Something about waking up in a sleazy motel with a pirate.”

“Sleazy? Should I be offended?”

“Only if you think I’m wrong.” She scooted up against the pillow, letting the sheet slip off her chest, exposing her smooth, blemish-free skin. Roy focused on her left breast, grinned, and stepped forward, reaching for it as he leaned over, aiming to kiss her. Antigone had some of the softest lips he’d ever felt, and he wanted more of them . . .

“Easy, now.” She shifted away. Holding up a hand to forestall his affections. “We need to talk.”

“Yeah?” He kept advancing, pushing her outstretched hand aside and kneeling on the bed beside her. His face was just inches from hers, and he felt himself getting aroused as her hot breath feathered the bristles of his beard.

“Yeah,” she panted, and he thought she would give in, embrace him, even, but then she scooted sideways, pushing against him. Seconds later, she was standing and picking up the neon-yellow jumper she’d been wearing the night before. “We need to talk about who I am. Who my father is.”

“Oh?” Roy took her place on the bed, propping the pillows up and laying back with a lazy smile. “I think it’s a bit early for me to meet your old man.”

“Yeah, that’s true-true, buddy. He’d have you stuffed in a box and shipped off just so he could watch a vid of you being spaced.”

“Sounds scary.” Roy smirked and shook his head. Girls—always thinking their dads were the big bad wolf. Well, she didn’t know Roy; he was the wolf around these parts.

“He owns half of Callisto and a controlling percentage in a dozen major corps throughout the system. I’m not joking.”

That got Roy’s attention. She was fine and fun to talk to, but maybe she’d make a better ransom . . .

“Don’t think it, Roy! Come on; we had fun, didn’t we? I wanna see you again, and if you play your cards right, you’ll get a lot more from being my friend than you will for trying to screw me over.” She zipped up her skin-tight jumper and sat on the faded blue armchair near the dresser. “Do you wanna hear me out?”

Roy reached down to his boot and pulled out his knife, the one Skelly gave him, idly twirling it between his fingers. “I’m listening.”

“I want to get away. I want to get away, and I want to find a way to ruin him. I want you to help.”

“Huh?” Now Roy was more than interested; he was piqued.

“I have connections in the businesses. There are people working under my father, people who’ve handled his affairs for decades, and some of them are tired of him. Some want to see an end to his control sooner rather than later. I know, I know. They’re vultures, and they’re out for themselves, but I’m not stupid. I won’t give them everything they want. Anyway, it’s beside the point. Roy, my father’s evil—pure, unfiltered, one-hundred-percent, grade-A, genuine, electro-plated-chrome evil. Do you want to help me take him down?”

Roy’s heart began to hammer in his chest, and, like a build-up of static electricity, he felt a wave of something rush through him, and his whole body jerked. His knee lifted and slammed the table, and he looked around, blinking his eyes rapidly. No, he corrected himself. Not his eyes. No, this wasn’t right . . . Juliet slapped a hand to her face, rubbing her eyes, and slowly, the buzz in her ears began to separate into distinct sounds—music playing, people talking, silverware clinking. One voice was closer and more insistent than the others. “You good? What happened? I ask you something wrong?”

“Juliet!” Angel’s voice cut through the noise. “You were deeply engrossed by something, and Roy asked you about your flight experience and the kinds of ships you’ve had. I tried to get your attention, but you didn’t hear me, either. I waited as long as I could, but I could see he was getting agitated by your silence.”

Still reeling from the sudden change in her mental perspective, struggling with the weird sense of being outside herself, not herself, Juliet lowered her hand and turned to face Roy. It wasn’t hard to put a rasp in her voice; she felt like she’d just woken up. “I took a hit to the skull a while back. Fragments in there. Sometimes I . . . zone out.”

“Jesus. Can’t get ‘em out?”

“Working on it. Treatments aren’t cheap.”

“You bothering my guest, Roy?” Juliet turned to the voice and locked eyes with Mary Moon’s golden irises. She started to smile but froze it halfway, remembering she was Lacy Blake, and she didn’t smile unless she was doing something cruel. Roy answered Mary, but Juliet didn’t hear it. Unbidden, unwelcome, even, she picked up a very clear thought from Mary, but she recognized it as being spoken speech, or in this case, subvocalized.

Galaxy? This chick seems off. She just about had a stroke eating dinner. I’m not sure she’s as good as people think. Arrange a little test for her after we’re done meeting. Have one or two of the synth units jump her. Go ahead and give ‘em a gun.

Juliet, still looking at Mary while Roy blathered on, narrowed her eyes and grinned. It wasn’t a smile, and it definitely wasn’t friendly. Mary’s eyes widened slightly, and she broke eye contact, focusing on Roy. “Anyway, Roy. Be nice to my guest. I might have some work for her.” With that, she turned back to her neighbor on the left and began a hushed conversation about someone named Ophelia and the absurdity of her hair.

Roy, too, got busy speaking with his other neighbor, and nobody else bothered her while she ate, giving Juliet plenty of time to ruminate about her strange feelings and the disturbing things she’d learned. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Antigone again, felt the lust she’d—Roy had—felt, and when she opened them and focused on her food, she had to remind herself that those weren’t her feelings. She—Roy—had wanted to help Antigone, and it wasn’t just for the bits; he’d been smitten with her. There was no way, if things hadn’t changed drastically, Antigone would go back to her father willingly. On top of that, now she had to worry about getting jumped by synths aiming to prove she was all bark and no bite.

When everyone was stuffed, and people were regularly excusing themselves to find a restroom, Mary stood from her chair and addressed the table again. “Thanks for coming to my little banquet, folks. You know how we operate here in the Vengeance! When one of us scores big, we all score!”

Shouts of “Here, here!” and “Damn right!” and various other encouraging phrases interrupted her speech, so Mary paused, smiling, and sipped her wine.

“All right, enough. Now, listen; the Red Betty is heading out for another big score in a week. If you or your captain might be interested in tagging along for a piece of the pie, hit me up. I’ll be seeking another frigate class, half a dozen interceptors, and a cargo vessel.” She held up both hands as excited clamor began to take over. “Hold up! Yeah, I know it sounds like a big operation, and it is, but we aren’t going to take a shit in our backyard. This one’s a good ways out, so don’t bother me if you can’t commit two weeks to the operation.” Once more, she lifted her glass and held it out. “Okay, get out of here! Mingle! Party ‘til you can’t walk straight.”

As people shoved their chairs back and stood, moving back to the bar area, Mary locked eyes with Juliet and said, “Shall we?”

Juliet jerked her thumb at Nick, where he sat across the table, deep in a conversation with TC. “Simon?”

“Nah. I don’t need him for this. Come on.” Mary turned toward the door she’d come through earlier, and Juliet stood, a little excitement making her breaths quicken and her heart race at the thought of going off alone with that woman, at the idea that an ambush was waiting for her somewhere nearby. She tamped it down, forcing her face to remain impassive, bored, even, and followed Mary through the door. Anyone who knew her, though, might have seen how her fingertips lightly drummed the side of her Texan’s holster. She was wired up and ready.