CD & EA 1.25 - Confession

Trying to build in a little world history here. Let me know if something doesn't make sense!

Happy Thanksgiving! (I know, it's a US thing - at least on this date.)

I'm thankful for all of you and for the chance to get the stories out of my head and into the hands of more and more readers! :)

-Plum

“You sure you and Ghoul can’t come out with us?” Hot Mustard asked as they all waited for their rides. It turned out Host Mustard and Corbitt had taken an AutoCab also—they didn’t fancy leaving their own vehicles unattended in the ABZ.

“No,” Ghoul said before Juliet could think of a response. “Sorry, Mustard, but we have a jam-packed night ahead—double duty.”

“Right on, well, shit, you guys got us one hell of a bonus. Client paid up fast when we sent footage of the peacefully sleeping dreamers after we took off their bindings. Wish we could buy you a couple rounds to celebrate.”

“You’ve got our contact info, Hot Mustard,” Juliet said with a chuckle. “C’mon, tell us how you got that handle.”

“Yeah, tell us,” Corbitt said with a smile. He’d finally taken off his helmet and goggles, and Juliet could see he was a lot younger and more handsome than he sounded. She reflected on that thought—it was weird that a voice could sound handsome or not, wasn’t it? Still, now when he spoke, his southern drawl and gruff tone were balanced by his smooth, even complexion and his baby-blue eyes. Juliet almost slapped herself but was saved from her embarrassing musings by Hot Mustard.

“It’s a dumb story,” he said. “I was eating take-out when I made my operator account. I didn’t think ‘handle’ was something I could skip, and I wasn’t feeling creative, so I just typed in Hot Mustard, 'cause that’s what I was squeezing onto my soydog at the time.”

“Brilliant,” Juliet laughed.

“Well, I’ve thought about changing it many times, but it seems to make it easier to make friends. Other operators are always wanting to know where the name came from.” He looked at Ghoul, and Juliet could see the question on his lips—he was about to ask her where she got her handle. Juliet thought about how Ghoul hadn’t wanted to talk about her teeth, how she’d always wondered if the name was related to them, and decided to intervene.

“Well,” Juliet said quickly, clearing her throat, “We should help you come up with a better origin story for that name, don’t you think?”

“Oh? You got any bright ideas?” Hot Mustard leaned back against the ancient bus stop they were lingering around while they waited for their rides.

“Of course I do,” Juliet said, looking at Ghoul and winking in amusement. “How about this: You were on a tour in the Idaho conflict zone. You follow? You got separated from your unit and were lying low in an abandoned fast-food restaurant when one of the left-over AI swarms set up shop on the roof. You had to hunker down in the kitchen for days, waiting for them to move on. And the only thing you could find to eat in that ancient kitchen was . . .” Juliet looked at Ghoul and Corbitt, and they both shouted in unison:

“Hot Mustard!”

“Oh, lord!” Hot Mustard said, slapping his palm over his face.

“Juliet, your AutoCab is nearly here, and I’m not connected to Ghoul’s data port,” Angel said, interrupting their laughter.

“Oh, sec,” Juliet said, pulling out her data cable. “Ghoul, our cab’s almost here, and I wanted to share this file with you. Let me plug this thing in.” Ghoul nodded and reached up to uncover her port.

“You’re pretty good with that stuff, huh?” Corbitt asked, watching Juliet insert her cable.

“Stuff? You mean data transfer?” Juliet chuckled.

“Nah, well, yeah, I mean all that stuff you did back there to cool those dreamers off. The jammer you improvised . . . yeah, stuff.” He laughed at his vocabulary failings, and Juliet chuckled.

“I’ve got good tech and an outstanding teacher, but yeah, I’ll expect good ratings from you two!” Juliet said, pointing a finger at Corbitt and Hot Mustard.

“No doubt! Hey, don’t feel shy about giving us a good review, too,” Hot Mustard said with a wink, and then the AutoCab pulled up, and Juliet and Ghoul climbed in. Juliet held onto Ghoul’s shoulder, so they didn’t accidentally pull her cable loose while they slid onto the seat. “Hey,” Hot Mustard called as the cab started to inch forward. Juliet rolled down a window, and he continued, “I’m gonna message you two! Let’s have a cookout or something!”

Juliet held up a thumb out the window and smiled, trying to make eye contact with both men as they drove away. “Nice guys,” she said to Ghoul.

“Yeah, they were decent. I’d work with ‘em again.”

“Well, I could tell they’re eager to work with us,” Juliet nodded.

“Wouldn’t you be? We all pulled almost double pay for that dumb job with the bonus. I mean, yeah, your little hack made it easier and a hell of a lot prettier than it might have been, but still, that’s an A-tier payday.”

“Angel, what’s my balance?” Juliet subvocalized.

“You have 40,233 Sol bits, Juliet. Your comparative ranking on my database has risen to the twenty-third percentile!”

“Your database only uses cash as its basis for that ranking, right?”

“Yes, Juliet. If we were to consider property in all of its forms and include the entire populace, the number would be very different.”

“What are you working on?” Ghoul asked. “Your eyes went distant—having trouble hiding me?”

“No, nothing like that. Just thinking about my finances.”

“Well, as I was saying, we’re sitting pretty good right now. That was a sweet gig Temo gave us. I hope it earned us some credit with him, too. Maybe he’ll be willing to help us set up our little heist, hmm?”

“Yeah, I hope so,” Juliet said, giving her data cable a little tug. “No one’s gonna take us seriously if I have to have you on this leash everywhere we go.”

“Careful,” Ghoul said, “Treat me like a dog, and I might start biting!” She bared her teeth at Juliet, and they both laughed for a second, but then Ghoul’s eyes got serious, and her smile fell away. “I hate how this always comes up. Once someone wonders about my teeth or my name, I try to play it off or stall, but then I have it in the back of my mind. I can’t even joke 'cause this stupid story is hanging over my neck.”

“Easy,” Juliet said. “I’m not even thinking about it, all right? No pressure.”

“I believe you, Jules, but the pressure comes from in here.” Ghoul touched her chest.

“Well, we’ve got a forty-minute ride ‘cause this cab is scared of the ABZ, so wanna get something off your chest?” Juliet surprised herself by asking the question. She tended to avoid conflict, much the way it seemed Ghoul wanted to avoid this memory. Shouldn’t she try to talk her into thinking about something else? Wouldn’t it be better to put this off, maybe indefinitely? The thought of Ghoul sharing some awkward secret with her didn’t stir pleasant emotions.

“Yeah,” Ghoul sighed. “I guess so. If you want me to get a different place to stay afterward, that’s cool. I think that’s why I feel like I need to tell you this—I don’t want you to think I was hiding something about myself just so you’d help me. Understand?”

“I guess so, but Ghoul, I’m cool with knowing you the way you are, the way I’ve experienced you. I’m not looking to do background checks on my friends.”

“Thanks, Juliet, but like I said, this is coming from in here, not from you,” again Ghoul tapped on her chest. “Well, you should know I’m twenty-eight. I was eighteen ten years ago—remember what was happening ten years ago?”

“Uh,” Juliet stopped to think. She’d been just a girl ten years ago, barely a teen, but if Ghoul expected her to know about this, it must have been something big, something playing nonstop on the corpo news channels. “Oh! The Colorado Protectorate conflict!”

“War!” Ghoul said. “Don’t let them white-wash that shit. It was a full-on war, and a lot of people died for the cause. You know what it was about, right?”

“Yeah, the, um, Colorado civil government passed some laws that took rights away from the corpos. Um, I think Cybergen was still around, right? Didn’t they own most of Denver? So when the laws were passed, and they didn’t wanna give up what they had, it was the people vs. Cybergen for the most part.”

“Yep, and the only reason you know that is because we fucking won! Corpos are neutered in the protectorate, thanks to maniacs like me,” Ghoul thumped her chest with her chrome-tipped thumbnail.

“Well, aren’t they losing ground? In Tucson, the shit I learned in school basically said that Cybergen cut their losses and left the protectorate with a mostly ruined city and the wasteland around it.”

“Propaganda, sweetie, propaganda. You think the Helios-sponsored public schools in Tucson want people knowing that life can be good without some corp running shit? Anyway, that’s not the point I’m trying to make. At least not tonight,” she said and winked at her with a grin. Then she continued, “I was eighteen, and I was brought up by a dad who hated the corpos, especially Cybergen, with every fiber of his being.

He taught me that they were animals that wanted to enslave humanity, keeping most of us as worker drones while they lived lives comparable to the gods of Olympus. I mean, there was some truth to what he said, but he was extreme. I ate up everything he said, Juliet. I very much wanted to please my father.”

“You don’t think that anymore?”

“Yeah, I do, but I don’t think every person that works for every corpo is evil. My father did, and so did I back then. I was brutal, vicious. My father was the commander of my militia unit, and when we had our first engagement with Cybergen corpo-mil, we caught them by surprise—it was a total massacre. One of their support units, a guy with a sat backpack, almost ran by me, but I caught him. I jumped him from behind, and while we wrestled in the mud and people died around us, I bit his throat out.”

“Damn. Well, it was battle, Ghoul! You did what you had . . .”

“That was just the start, Juliet. My unit, my father, cheered me on. They told stories about me to scare prisoners. Things were lawless, crazy, back then. Everyone was so full of hate. My unit chipped in to get this bite-job for me. They’re chromed plasteel with synth-nerve roots—the real deal. Juliet, I did a lot of terrible things.”

Juliet opened her mouth to say something, but she wasn’t sure what would be right, and it looked like Ghoul had more to say, so she just reached out and rested a hand on her shoulder, trying to keep her face neutral. The idea that Ghoul used her teeth as a weapon on a regular basis was horrifying to her, but she’d figured they were sharp for a reason. Didn’t bangers do stuff like that all the time? The fact that Ghoul was so upset by these memories gave her a lot of credit as far as Juliet was concerned.

“Well, we won, but somewhere along the way, my dad died, and when the fighting was done, it seemed to me that my unit was more afraid or disgusted by me than they were proud. A lot changes in five years, I guess. Anyway, I moved away from the protectorate—I couldn’t stand to see the place, thinking about what it cost. I didn’t feel human again for a long while, and that was with me spending half my paydays on VR shrinks.”

“If you hate those memories so much, why not change your handle? Why not get the teeth changed?” It was an obvious question, and Juliet couldn’t clamp her mouth shut in time to stop it from popping out.

“I think,” Ghoul shook her head. “I feel like it would be cheating to erase that part of me. I did what I did, and now I need to live with it. Juliet, I glossed over a lot of it.”

“Well, if you feel better for having told me all that, then I’m glad I could help. Truth is, Ghoul, I don’t care what you did before I met you. You started earning my trust without even trying. Vikker helped your cause when he told Don they had to hurry and finish with me before you found out.

My memories of you start with you threatening me with a vibroblade and then immediately apologizing and helping me to get through my first gig. Remember that?” Juliet nudged Ghoul, and it got a smile out of the other woman. She leaned into Juliet, resting her close-cropped blond head on her shoulder, and the two rode in silence the rest of the way to the trailer park.

Later that night, when Juliet was lying in her bed, listening to the buzz of the white-noise Angel played for her, she thought about Ghoul and how the woman, just a few years older than she, had experienced so much horror. “All because of where she’d been born—who her father had been,” she subvocalized.

“Are you referring to Ghoul, Juliet?” Angel asked.

“Yes. Angel, what became of Cybergen? How were they still in Colorado after the big war in the fifties?”

“Cybergen and Takamoto reached a ceasefire after the global net and power grid were brought down to tamp down on rogue AI. A coalition of nations and corpo-states that were able to create the first version of today’s sat-net seized the assets of the two mega-corps and allotted them to a new entity—The Cybergen-Takamoto Reparation Foundation. The directors for both companies were executed, and their corporate structures were reorganized into more than a dozen smaller entities with new management.”

“And one of them was in Colorado? And they kept the Cybergen name?”

“Yes, a robotics division. It seems that much of the original corporate philosophy survived the management purge, which eventually proved problematic—hence the Colorado Protectorate Conflict in the nineties.”

“War,” Juliet mumbled as she succumbed to exhaustion and the lulling effect of the white noise.

The next day, Juliet had a blinking tab on her AUI, and when she clicked it, she saw that her operator status had been updated again:

Handle: “Juliet” – SOA-SP License #: JB789-029

Personal Protection & Small Arms License #: E86072801

Rating: F-87-N

Skillset subgroups:

Peer and Client Rating (Grades are F, D, C, B, A, S, S+):

Combat:

• Close Quarters Heavy Weapon Combat - A (1)
• Close Quarters Bladed Weapon Combat - A (3)
• Close Quarters Small Arms Combat - A (4)

Technical:

• Network Security Bypass/Defend - S (10)
• Data Retrieval - S (5)
• Welding - *
• Electrical - *
• Combustion & Electrical Engine Repair - *

Other:

• High-Performance Driving/Navigation - A (1)

“Hey, I’m getting close to an overall D rating.”

“Yes, Juliet, and very quickly, too. You’ll likely still have a ‘new’ rating when you’re in the D-tier rating. That’s admirable.”

“I have ten S ratings on Network Security. No one ever gives out S+?”

“S+ is a difficult rating to achieve in any category. Only individuals who’ve received more than one hundred S ratings are eligible.”

“I guess that makes it hard for some friends to game the system.”

“Yes, that and the cooldown.”

“Cooldown?”

“Operators who rate each other frequently will find that their ratings for each other have steeply diminishing returns. Ghoul’s rating for you last night most likely had little impact on your new status. If you and she did some jobs away from each other for a while, your ratings for each other would be more impactful when you came back together.”

“So I shouldn’t work with her anymore?” Juliet asked, frowning as she climbed out of bed, absently noting that she needed to buy new sheets. She’d washed the ones Mr. Howell had left in the trailer, but they were old and threadbare, and the quilt was too warm for her tastes.

“Not at all,” Angel said, “The more you work with someone, the better you will perform, and your client ratings are more impactful, in any case.”

“Right.” Juliet stretched, picked out some clean clothes, then took a quick sani-spray. When she was dressed, she emptied her backpack into a dresser drawer where she’d put the SMG she’d acquired the night before. She figured she’d probably sell most of the stuff and buy things that suited her better, but that was a job for later. “It’s dojo time!” she said with a smile, tucking her new, never-before-worn gi and white belt into her backpack.

Before she left the trailer, she tiptoed down to the other end and peered through the slightly-ajar door to Ghoul’s room. She was face down on her sheets in her underwear, covers thrown off the bed, and snoring rather loudly. Juliet grinned and pulled the door shut, carefully twisting the knob, so it didn’t click.

As she quietly left the trailer, she subvocalized, “She looked so peaceful, and she’s been so cool to me, Angel. I can’t really reconcile what I know about Ghoul with the story she told me last night.”

“Human psychology is a fascinating topic, Juliet. I listened to the two of you last night with rapt attention.”

“Well, good for you, but it doesn’t help me understand.”

“I’m not sure I can help you with that. I believe you’ve made a sage decision, though perhaps it’s a character trait and not wisdom.”

“Well?” Juliet said aloud as she walked through the trailer park gate, waving at the mustachioed old guard.

“Well?” Angel retorted.

“Well, what is the fucking character trait or whatever? What’s my wise decision?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Juliet! I must still be distracted by the psychological implications of your relationship with Ghoul. You made a wise decision to judge Ghoul based on what you know of her. What you’ve experienced. Had she never confessed her perceived sins to you, then you wouldn’t judge her for them, correct?”

“Yeah, I guess. But that’s like saying I shouldn’t judge a friend I later found out was, oh, I don’t know, a psycho that eats children. You called me a cab, right?” Juliet asked, looking up and down the side street that led away from the park.

“Yes, it’s en route—three minutes. Juliet, there’s one flaw with your analogy: Ghoul isn’t a wanted criminal for her behavior during the war, and she told you herself. You didn’t ‘find out.’”

“I agree, Angel. It is different. Now, let’s talk about something else: I’m about to go to my first real class at the dojo. Shouldn’t we go over how you’re going to assist me? What sort of help would be smart and what would be . . . dangerous?”