Cyber Dreams 4.24 - Larry Fine

A little twist in the plot here. Or at least a change in motivation. Enjoy :)

-Plum

Larry let his golden fingers clink against the glass, tapping out a gentle tune, something that had been buzzing around in the back of his head all morning. Was he nervous? Probably. He’d never been to a place like this, a place for the new and old money to mingle, where the modern aristocrats made decisions that would affect entire economies. Was this it? Had he pissed off the wrong niece or nephew of the wrong mogul? Was he being brought here to be made to understand his sins before they took him away to disappear? Well, they could keep him guessing, but they wouldn’t see him sweat. No sir.

Larry leaned back into the thick cushion of the posh couch and let his feet extend to the ottoman, his shiny, polished, vat-grown, calfskin boots with their golden toes winking in the diffuse light that streamed through the window. If they were going to off him, then he’d go out with style. He’d worn his best suit, burgundy, as always, but much finer than some of his earlier ones. It was hand-tailored just for him and not by some auto-tailoring machine. He looked around the parlor at the antique wooden furniture, the ancient books, the maps, the paintings, and the wet bar. More money was on the walls of this little, unused space than he’d earned in a decade. It really drove home the notion that despite his nice suit and his office space by the ports, he had a long way to go.

“Mr. Fine?” The woman had approached silently, and he almost jumped at her soft voice, but he held it together and managed to keep from shattering the glass he held in his mechanical grip.

“Yes?”

“Sir Rodric is ready to see you, but first, he’d like to request that you install a bit of software.” She held out a tiny black cube with a thin cable protruding from one end. It had a standard data jack prong.

“Oh?” Larry set the glass down, and, without thought, his lips spread in his characteristic smile, something he’d trained himself to do ever since he got his new teeth. That smile hadn’t come easily—he’d spent the first two and half decades of his life with broken, missing teeth. He’d conditioned himself to smile with his lips only, barely opening them when he spoke, speaking behind his hands, constantly ashamed of the mess his stepfather had made of his teeth. When he’d finally made that first big payday and gotten his golden grill, it was like he’d been born again. A new man that old friends couldn’t reconcile with the old Larry. Well, if he were here to meet his maker, he’d go out with a smile.

“Yes. It’s only a formality—something required of contractors at this level of business. It allows for secure communication between you and Sir Rodric’s office.” Again, she pressed the little device toward him. Larry sighed and took it, still smiling. His data port wasn’t covered with synth-skin. He had a high-end model, and he wanted people to know it. He plugged the little drive in and watched his AUI, waiting to see what it would do. A few seconds passed without any indication that it was doing anything, and then it beeped.

“All done,” said the woman, holding out a hand. Larry shrugged and unplugged the little device, and handed it over.

“Pretty painless.”

“Right this way, Mr. Fine.” The woman, young, attractive, too polished to be a receptionist, led him down the hall and gestured to a partially open, enormous wooden door that Larry could’ve driven a troop transport through. “Sir Rodric is within.”

“Thank you, miss.” Larry tipped his burgundy fedora and winked. The gesture caught her off guard, and a flicker of a smile touched her otherwise dour expression. Mission accomplished. Larry stepped through the enormous door only to be greeted by a great hall lined with equally expansive windows. He had to pause in the doorway when he saw the view from those great diamatex panels. The windows opened onto the raw landscape of Callisto, only lightly affected by the terraforming efforts taking place outside the domes.

A steep slope fell away from the windows, enhancing the sense of scale as Larry looked out, seeing hundreds or thousands of craters on the icy, shimmering moon’s surface. The sky outside the dome, as always, was inky black, but making up for the lack of atmospheric color was the enormous form of Jupiter lurking out there in the depths of space. It was a view of things he’d seen plenty in his time on Callisto but never in such close, sharp splendor. He had to remind himself to start breathing again as a man to his right cleared his throat and said, “Hello, Mr. Fine.”

Larry turned, almost startled, and saw the man who’d invited him, Sir Rodric Berrington, standing before an antique fireplace mantle. He held a glass of liquor in one hand, and he delicately sipped it while Larry started forward. “Well, hello there, Sir Rodric.” He was going to offer his hand to shake, but Sir Rodric gestured to a high-backed leather chair and then turned to sit down himself. Larry stopped his forward momentum and turned to the chair. Fine with him, he supposed, if the rich bastard didn’t want to be friendly.

“My assistants tell me you’re one of the more discrete ‘fixers’ on Callisto.” Sir Rodric wasn’t a tall man or large in any way. If Larry were going to describe him, he might use the adjective mousy. Yes, he had thin, short brown hair, a narrow face, good teeth, and clear eyes, but nothing special. Nothing that screamed, “I can buy half the corporations on Callisto and still have money left over to ruin a nation or two.”

Still, at the man’s words, Larry perked up. Maybe this really was about a job. He tugged on his burgundy lapels, straightened his jacket, and sat up straighter. “That’s right, Sir Rodric. I worked painstakingly to build a reputation of discretion.”

“I’ll be blunt, Larry. Do you mind if I call you Larry?”

“Not at all.”

“No one can ever know that I’ve met with you. If I choose to hire you, no one can ever know that, either. If word got back to my wife or if certain associates knew of my predicament, things could get ugly for me. If things get ugly for me, I’ll be certain anyone associated with me finds things growing ugly for them. For that reason, for your protection, we won’t have a contract, and any record of our meetings or calls will be deleted from your PAI. Do you understand me?”

“Of course, sir.” Larry began to understand what he’d installed in the waiting area. Sir Rodric wasn’t asking him to delete things; he was saying that it would happen whether he wanted it or not. The contract thing was kind of annoying—he’d hoped to improve his fixer rating with this job. In any case, it was clear Rodric could pay his bills, and he doubted he’d stiff him.

“Well, my wife is currently in Europe, and I’m going to try to keep things that way until we solve this little predicament. Ah, I should explain what the predicament is.”

“I’m all ears.” Larry, of course, grinned hugely, but Sir Rodric’s dour expression didn’t change.

“You see, while I have many children, I have one who’s especially dear to me. A daughter I’ve raised here on Callisto and whom I’ve spent the better part of a decade grooming to take some of the reins of my businesses.”

“Very nice, sir.” Larry grinned and drummed his fingers on the armchair, wishing he had a stiff drink. Would it be out of order to stand up and walk over to the little bar? Hadn’t he seen rich folks doing things like that in vids? No, no, he cautioned himself; sit still, Larry. Hear the man out.

“It is very nice, but when you value something, it has a way of biting you in the ass when something goes wrong with it.” It wasn’t lost on Larry that Sir Rodric was referring to his daughter as a thing. “My daughter has gotten mixed up with a few friends that are rather bad influences. She’s left Callisto, in fact, jailbroken her PAI and refuses my communication attempts. I’ve paid some information brokers great sums to find out where she is, and the news isn’t good.”

“Oh?” Larry leaned forward with interest. This was getting more and more juicy. Despite his eagerness to hear more, a tiny voice in the back of his head was screaming something at him, something about whether a man like this would ever let someone who knew such sensitive information walk away.

#

Larry stretched back into his pillow, his silky sheets sliding over his body luxuriously. One thing he didn’t skimp on was sheets. No, he’d slept in some terrible beds, more nests, really, in his life, and those days were over. He quietly stood up, intent on using the restroom, and he’d made it halfway across the living area when some movement from the other end of his loft caught his eye. Larry paused and watched as Cleo made soft, dreaming sounds and rolled over again, rustling her sheets. He walked over to the little bamboo-patterned room divider and looked in on his daughter.

Cleo was a miracle to him in every way. It was a miracle that she’d survived what happened to her mother, a miracle that she’d turned out so gentle and kind, and, most of all, a miracle that she actually loved and looked up to her dad. He was standing there, watching her soft, steady breathing, looking at her peaceful, innocent face, when his AUI started blinking, and an incoming call notification caught his attention.

“Shit,” he muttered and hurried away from Cleo’s section of the loft and over to the kitchenette, where he flicked on the noise suppression field and the coffee machine in that order, and then he took the call. “Good morning, sir.”

“I’m not hearing good news about your progress.”

“Sir, this is a complicated operation you’re trying to set up. I’m having trouble finding the right talent. Hereford’s Vengeance won’t just take anyone in, they’re . . .”

“I don’t have time for excuses, Larry. I need results. You don’t think you’re the only person I have working on this job, do you? If you can’t make something happen, one of your competitors will. Larry, you understand I can’t have loose ends lying around, don’t you? You don’t want to be a loose end; you want to be a nice tidy knot tied off with a fat payday and my satisfaction as a customer.”

“I understand.” This wasn’t the first veiled threat Sir Rodric had thrown at him lately. The man was growing more and more desperate, and Larry really was having a damn hard time getting anyone to work with him on what was turning out to be something of a suicide mission. Any pilot with brains could see that writing on the wall, and the ones who were dumb enough to bite didn’t have what it might take to pull the whole thing off. “It’s a real catch-twenty-two,” he said, putting his thoughts into words. “The pilots who might be able to do it aren’t interested in the risk . . .”

“What do you need to make this happen, Larry? More money? Fine, I’ll increase the pot to one point five. Will that incentivize some pilots? I’d make it an even two million, but how about this instead: one of my assistants has come to me with an interesting angle. There’s a pilot, Raymond Edgars, who owes me a lot of money. Maybe you can convince him to take the job. Tell him I’ll forgive his debt.” Sir Rodric’s voice had grown increasingly sharp as he spoke, and now he positively barked, “Why am I even paying you? I’ve done half the job for you!”

Larry opened his mouth to reply, but Sir Rodric cut the connection. “Well, shit.” The more he dealt with Sir Rodric, the more Larry began to wonder if he should have run the other way when he’d gotten the invitation to their initial meeting. He knew it was a pointless speculation, in any case. He couldn’t go back in time; besides, no one turned down a meeting with a man like Sir Rodric. “Calvin?”

“Yes, Larry?” His PAI had a pleasantly mild Australian accent, and it always made him smile a little when he heard his voice.

“Can you get me in touch with the pilot he mentioned, Raymond Edgars?”

“Yes.”

“Also, get me a list of the top-five rated combat operatives who have responded to the posting. We need to make this happen, or I think Sir Rodric is going to have us replaced.”

“I don’t want to be replaced, Larry!”

“No, Calvin, neither do I.” With dread in his heart, Larry started thinking about how he could leverage the debt this Raymond character owed to Sir Rodric.

#

Larry drummed his fingers, as was his habit on the side of his glass, but the lack of a metallic click caught him by surprise. He looked at his hand, saw long, slender, feminine fingers with well-manicured nails, and dropped the glass. It fell to the ground and shattered, spilling ice but not much liquid onto the patterned concrete. Larry stared at his hand, the pale flesh, the soft skin, and the hairless knuckles. “What the fuck?” he asked, but his voice sounded wrong. He looked across the table and saw . . . himself. Larry’s world began to spin, began to tumble, and then a voice came to him, clear and sharp and full of concern, “Juliet? Juliet, what’s happening? The activity on the lattice is off the charts.”

“Lucky, what’s up? You look like you’re about to puke. Hey, can we get someone to clean up this glass?” Larry, no, no, not Larry . . . Juliet recognized the voice. It was Nick.

Juliet shook her head and clamped her palms over her eyes, pressing hard until the synth-nerves behind the implants sent signals to her brain, making weird, colorful explosions appear in the darkness. Angel spoke into the void, “Are you all right? The lattice is cooling.”

“Dammit,” she said softly, then she subvocalized, “I was him, Angel, even more than when I was in Tono’s head. That time, at least, I felt like I was a passenger, like I was watching and feeling things unfold. This time, I was Larry!” The memories she’d experienced were still fresh in her mind, the sensation of being Larry still bewilderingly real. She almost felt like her skin didn’t fit right, that the sounds coming into her brain through her auditory implants weren’t right. Even her AUI looked off. She pulled her hands away from her eyes and saw Nick and Larry staring at her with obvious concern. A waiter was kneeling beside the table with a dustpan and hand broom, scooping up the broken glass and ice.

“You good?” Nick reached a hand over to grasp her wrist, and Juliet recoiled. Why would he touch her? Then she realized, again, that she wasn’t Larry. Nick was a lot closer to Juliet than Larry. They’d spent weeks together in a tin can flying through space.

She forced a smile. “Sorry, sorry. I get migraines sometimes, and this one came on like a runaway bus. My, uh, nanites are adjusting. I’ll be okay in a minute.” Juliet made eye contact with the waiter, a young man with curly black hair. “Sorry about that.”

“Happens.” He shrugged and stood. “I’ll send another lemonade your way.”

“Goodness!” Larry chuckled, and Juliet felt queasy again, watching him. It was like looking into a mirror but knowing the reflection was wrong. Parts of her brain were clearly struggling to catch up to the fact that she was Juliet, not Larry. “Startled me when that glass fell!”

“You haven’t always walked around with muscle, have you?” Juliet’s question must have caught Larry off guard because he closed his perpetually grinning mouth, hiding his golden teeth for a moment as he hunted for a response.

“No, no, I haven’t. Pretty expensive, you know.” Juliet knew that was the case, that he’d only recently hired the muscle to protect him not from enemies but from his current client. When she’d “been” Larry, she’d fundamentally understood a couple of things. One, Larry was a pretty good guy, a straight shooter who’d never double-crossed anyone. And, two, Larry was in way over his head with this Sir Rodric fellow, in over his head and worried that he would be made to disappear, or worse, something would happen to Cleo. On top of that, she knew he had spyware in his head that would most definitely be sending pictures of her, Nick, and anyone else Larry met right back to Sir Rodric.

Juliet’s mind raced with all the implications this scenario had for Nick and her and, she supposed, the other people involved. Ray was almost certainly a goner. Worse, even if Larry got the job done, there was a chance Sir Rodric would make him disappear. He didn’t seem to be the type of man who liked other people knowing his business, and having his daughter rescued from pirates was certainly “his business.” What would happen to Cleo without Larry? Juliet felt a pang in her chest and realized she was irrationally fond of the girl. She was worried about her future in a way only a parent could feel. Would this fade? Juliet hoped so.

Juliet knew Nick didn’t want to abandon Ray, but perhaps more troubling than that was that Juliet didn’t want Larry in trouble. She’d connected with him profoundly, and she hadn’t come away with anything other than a sense of fondness for the man. He was a hard worker who’d overcome terrible odds to get where he was. More than that, he’d done it without screwing anyone over. He was honest and loyal and put on a false front of vanity to cover up his deep-seated insecurities, and he’d do anything for his daughter. Had she really learned so much from being in his head for just a few seconds? She couldn’t explain it, but the answer was yes, and now she couldn’t walk away, not knowing the kind of trouble he was in. She cleared her throat and said, “I’m feeling better.”

“That’s good!” Nick looked like a fish out of water, completely thrown off by her sudden outburst and now her strange question about Larry’s muscle. It might help if she could remember anything from the conversation the two men had been having. Maybe he’d been waiting for her to interject for a while now.

“Well, I don’t know about you, Nick, but I think this job sounds like a good opportunity. I’ll sign on to be boots on the ground if you still need an operator, Larry.”

“Oh? Really?” Larry asked while Nick’s eyes widened, and he looked at her like she’d sprouted a second head.

“Yeah, for sure, Larry. We can get this done for your client.”

“We can?” Nick cleared his throat. “Right, we can. For sure, Larry. One thing, though, I want to have some say about the interceptor you purchase at auction. I have standards, you know.”

“Excellent! My client is going to be thrilled! Listen, I have to talk to him about the specifics for buying the ship, but if there’s any way we can get you involved in the purchase, I’ll be sure to work it in.” Larry was visibly relieved and excited; his gold-plated digits were drumming on his thighs, and Juliet knew he was bursting with relief. “Nick, Lucky, I’ll have my PAI send you over a contract, okay? In the meantime, why don’t I head back to the office and start working on those logistics? I have a plan for your “tryout” to get the pirates’ attention, but it needs some fine-tuning. Would that be all right?”

“Yeah,” Juliet said before Nick could say anything. “We were going to get dinner anyway, and we have some things to discuss. You know, between us.” Juliet winked at Larry. Then she turned to Nick. “Don’t we?”

“Yeah.” He rubbed at his rough stubble and nodded, locking eyes with her. “We sure do.”