CD & EA 1.15 - Taking a Breath

Good morning! I appreciate any feedback - am I getting too bogged in the details? Is it getting boring in the chapters where the plot doesn't move a lot?

Thanks :)

-Plum

“What do you mean my car’s burned?” Juliet wheezed as she sprinted around the corner. For the first time she could remember, she wished the sidewalks were more crowded.

“I mean burned in the figurative sense. A drone must have been searching for you, saw the ping from the data cube, and then followed your vehicle to the drug store. Your car is burned.”

“Fuck!” Juliet hissed, realizing she’d lost not only her new vehicle but also the shotgun and Vikker’s cube. “I should’ve had you crack and rip that cube a long time ago.”

“I’m tracking your AutoCab’s progress. Turn left at the corner and keep running straight. So far, there aren’t any direct pings from any of the drones overhead—it’s possible your pursuer searched in a different direction.”

“Good,” Juliet paused at the corner, leaning against the hot bricks of an office building, and looked back over her shoulder. She saw two people, and they were both walking the other way. Taking a deep, shaky breath, she rounded the corner and resumed running down the sidewalk. She’d only gone fifty yards or so when a sleek, dark blue sedan with black windows and a bright yellow AutoCab logo on the hood slid up next to the sidewalk.

Juliet didn’t need Angel to tell her to get in. She rushed to the door, pulled the handle, and slid into the comfortable bench seat. The cab almost immediately started to drive, and Juliet figured Angel was communicating with it, paying, putting in a destination, all the things that usually took a minute or two for a person. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“Good morning! I’m taking you to your destination at the corner of Carver and Mill,” the AutoCab said.

“Yes, we’re switching to an Easycab at that location, Juliet. Then I think you should go to a different part of the city to do your shopping.”

“Huh, switching cabs?”

“In case your pursuer studies the satellite imagery of the area and figures out you got into this one. You’ll walk a block or two, passing through some lobbies while I alter your ID signature several times.”

“Who was that fucking guy?” Juliet asked, sitting back and sighing loudly.

“I suspect he was a bounty hunter. I don’t believe he was working for WBD, though—they never had access to Vikker’s cube or knew you were working with him.” Angel’s words chilled Juliet, and she leaned forward on the seat, gripping her knees and shaking her head.

“What the fuck?” she said aloud. Then, as paranoia struck her, she subvocalized, “You think Vikker’s friends are looking for who killed him?”

“The possibilities are too numerous to speculate, I’m afraid, Juliet. It could be his enemies as well. Perhaps the people who hired the hunter are insurance investigators or creditors. You’ve cut ties with the cube now, and I’ve had your identity masked the entire time you’ve been outside Dr. Tsakanikas’s office. You should be clear of them now.”

“Your destination.” The AutoCab said, pulling up to the curb. Juliet hopped out and, following Angel’s instructions, wove a meandering path through a hotel lobby, a business park, and then through a two-story parking garage to another street where she hiked a block to an intersection where a yellow Easycab was waiting. Angel said she’d changed her ID signature six times during the walk, and it was unlikely anyone would be able to follow her progress.

Over the next few hours, Juliet traveled via cab to the west side of Phoenix, visited a drug store, a Tevlo’s, and then, at Angel’s urging, walked for a while and took a bus to the northern edge of the downtown district. She was lugging a big canvas backpack with tool pouches and loops that she’d bought at Tevlo’s. It was stuffed with three changes of clothes and all the personal hygiene items she’d almost bought at the first drugstore. “Find me a hotel where I can do some laundry, Angel. Also, what’s my bit balance?”

“You have 7,523 bits, Juliet.”

“Great. It was afternoon, and the traffic around the downtown was very different from that on the outskirts of the city. Just on the street she was walking along, surrounded by skyscrapers, there had to be a thousand cars and bikes slowly moving north and south. Even in the heat, hundreds of people were on the sidewalks, and Juliet was starting to relax, feeling anonymous again and far enough removed from the encounter in the drugstore to imagine it was behind her.

“Sign me up for the job that’s tomorrow. I need to start making some cash now that I’ve lost my fourth vehicle in two days.”

“To be fair, Juliet, the bicycle hardly counts as a vehicle, and the van didn’t belong to you.”

“I don’t care! Can’t you see how fucking ridiculous this is? I mean, I’m a goddamn welder!” Juliet would feel strange yelling at her PAI while walking down the sidewalk, but she was hardly alone; nearly everyone walking by was absorbed in a conversation with an electric ghost—either giving instructions to their PAI or on a call. Some just had glassy stares as they strode along, and Juliet knew they were looking at something on their AUI, a map, a vid, a video message—it was hard to tell.

Angel, apparently not able or willing to try to deal with the outburst, simply said, “There’s a hotel on the next block that boasts a laundry room and fitness center. Look for a white sign with a green, neon tree—Palo Verde Inn and Conference Center.”

Juliet didn’t reply, and after a moment, a blinking tab appeared in her UI. She opened it to display the job she’d mentioned:

Posting# A774

Requested Role: Data Retrieval

Rep level: F-S+

Job Description: Accompany team of operatives into the East Phoenix ABZ, infiltrate hostile encampment, retrieve data from an encrypted device.

Compensation: 8200 Sol-bits

Scavenge Rights: Shared

Location: Phoenix ABZ

Date: September 9, 2107

“Yeah, that’s the one. Sign me up.”

“This posting indicates that hostile encounters are quite likely. Are you sure, Juliet?”

“Yeah, I’m not going in as a shooter, am I? Angel, I’m sick of getting pushed around—I need to start taking the reins. Does that make sense?”

“To a degree, yes. I think we should visit a weapon store, though, Juliet. There are less bulky weapons than the electro-shotgun that might serve you well.”

“Noted,” Juliet said, stopping to stand before the Palo Verde sign. It was, indeed, a real neon sign. She could tell by the actual tubes on the white backing, though it wasn’t lit up at the moment. The building was a sleek, dark-gray tower, and the lobby was busy with patrons sitting on the faux-leather couches, standing around vidscreens, and congregating by the elevators.

Looking through the glass doors, Juliet felt like a rat looking at a pond full of brilliant koi fish. The people within were elegant and wore suits, if not high-end designer clothing. “Angel,” she subvocalized, “how much does a room here cost?”

“Between two and eight hundred bits, depending on the room.”

“Does it seem like a good use of my funds, Angel?” Juliet was expecting to teach the PAI a lesson—to let it know that it wasn’t okay just to pick the first hotel it found with laundry services, but Angel, as usual, surprised her.

“Normally, I would agree that this is an extravagant cost, but I think, for perhaps a night or two, this will be a good place for you.”

“Explain,” Juliet said, still standing outside on the sidewalk, watching the refined people within through the crystal clear plastiglass doors.

“I have two reasons for my conclusion. One, your pursuers are aware that you stayed in a rather inexpensive hotel last night. They might conclude that you are doing so to avoid attention and to conserve funds. Thus, they’ll likely focus their attention on similar locations. Two, Juliet, you’ve had a mentally and physically taxing few days. You should stop and take a breath. You should invest a little into your welfare.”

“I . . .” Juliet was unable to think of a response. Angel was so different from what a PAI should be, even the high-end ones that had personality toggles. “I can’t argue with that, Angel. Can you check me in?”

“Yes, though you’ll have to present yourself to the clerk.”

“Right,” Juliet said and stepped toward the doors. They noiselessly slid open, and as she walked past the threshold, she was suddenly met with soothing classical music and the low hum of conversations taking place around the vaulted, richly appointed lobby. “A noise screen?”

“Yes, they value privacy at the Palo Verde. You’ll note the lack of surveillance; I read an online testimonial that indicated the owner would rather forgo cameras than be forced to hand the footage over to authorities.”

“Huh,” Juliet said as she walked over the marble and pale green carpeting to the front desk. There were four clerks spaced out on the long counter, and Juliet walked toward the one on the far right, a young woman with neatly quaffed pale pink hair and a smart gray dress skirt beneath her pale green hotel employee jacket.

“Hello,” the woman said, smiling brilliantly as she stepped up to the counter. “Are you Juliet? I believe your PAI just sent me your credentials.”

“That’s right.”

“Let’s see—you’d like a single queen suite? I have one at our base price of two hundred and another on the seventy-third floor with a lovely view of downtown. That one is three-fifty.”

“Well,” Juliet thought about it and decided that if she wanted to improve her mental health, she might as well go all out. “I’ll take the one with the view.”

“Lovely. Laundry services, complimentary breakfast, and the fitness room are all on the second floor. We’ll need a transfer of . . .”

“Can you handle the rest with my PAI? I’m exhausted.”

“Oh, certainly. Let’s see,” she glanced at her data terminal’s transparent screen standing between the two of them on the counter. Juliet couldn’t see anything on it from the rear, but she knew the other side was opaque and filled with information. “Yes, I see the funds have been transferred, and your preferences have all been filled in. Excellent. Please just look into this little lens for a moment,” she said, tapping a small glass circle on the top edge of her screen.

Juliet looked at the lens, and then the woman nodded and said, “That will allow you access to the elevators and your room. The retinal scan is encrypted, and the Palo Verde cannot—would not—copy or share that information.”

“Thanks,” Juliet said and started walking for the elevators, feeling more and more like a fish out of water every second she stood in that fancy room with all those fancy people milling around. She subvocalized to Angel, “How can they scan my retina? I have cybernetic eyes.”

“Your implants, like all legal ocular replacements, are equipped with synth-skin derived retinas—they are programmed with your original retinal scan when first installed.”

“God, I never thought of that. So, the doc did it legit? I have my old retina image?”

“Yes, he seemed to follow the letter of the law when it came to that part of your surgery.”

Juliet walked up to the bank of elevators, and one of them slid open at her approach. She stepped in, and either the elevator knew where she was going, or Angel selected the floor because it started to climb to the seventy-third floor. She decided it was probably Angel. How would the elevator know she didn’t want to do laundry or see another guest?

Her room was nice, but nothing amazing. The bed was fluffier with better linens than the one she’d had the night before, but the room wasn’t much bigger. The bathroom was the real game changer, though—a big porcelain tub, a glassed-in shower, and plenty of towels drew a strict dichotomy with Juliet’s previous life experiences. After looking around the room, she turned to the opaque, gray windows and said, “Angel, can you make the windows see-through?”

“I believe they're controlled via a remote control, but I could hack it.”

“Nah, wait.” Juliet looked around and saw, on the faux mahogany nightstand, a little silver remote with two buttons. She threw her pack on the bed and picked up the remote. When she touched the top button, the window snapped from pale gray to perfectly clear, and she saw a high-rise view of a megacity’s downtown area for the first time in her life.

The megatowers were all in view, soaring high above the older-style skyscrapers, dwarfing them like redwoods in a deciduous forest. From her vantage, a few miles from the true downtown where those towers stood, it felt like she was about half as high as the megatowers, but she knew she was probably much lower than that. Still, it was amazing seeing the colorful, enormous structures shooting up into the night sky while she looked out over the smaller buildings leading up to them.

Massive advertisements adorned the sides of the towers and the smaller buildings nearby, and though they were tacky and not exactly nature’s greatest treasure or humankind’s best art, when you saw so much color and moving, flashing light, it was like taking in a constant fireworks explosion. “Wow,” Juliet said.

One ad caught her eye on the side of an enormous tower emblazoned with a red “Zi Corp” at the top—a larger-than-life rocket erupted at the base of the building. It flew to the top, riding a realistic, fiery plume and the smoke cloud it left behind. When the rocket disappeared through the top of the tower, a banner floated up behind it, “Ride to the stars! PanSol Shuttles!”

“Pretty wild view,” Juliet said. She went over to the bed and opened her heavy pack, taking out her toiletries and a bag of snacks she’d bought at the drugstore. After eating some protein squares of various flavors, a bag of zucchini crisps, and drinking two room-temperature beers, Juliet soaked in a hot bathtub for the first time in many years.

That night, she slept in clean undergarments in the most comfortable bed she’d ever experienced, with the windows open to the bright lights of downtown Phoenix. She tried to dream about space travel and magical new cities, but when she woke up, she couldn’t remember dreaming about anything.

Juliet showered with actual hot water—there wasn’t even an option for sani-spray, and then went to the second floor, where she ate real-tasting bacon, eggs, waffles, and coffee. After her stomach was full, Juliet washed her old clothes and returned to her room, where she contemplated leaving some belongings behind or taking everything with her. “Angel, was I accepted for that job tonight?”

“The application is still pending.”

“Well, sign me up for another night in this room,” Juliet said, then she put her extra clothes into the room’s little closet and, with an empty backpack, made her way to the hotel lobby. She was dressed in sturdy black jeans and a long-sleeved, cottony gray pullover shirt with a dark blue “Tevlo” over the left breast. She wore new work boots, though she sorely missed her old broken-in pair. Of all the little belongings she’d abandoned in Tucson, she felt the loss of those boots the most.

Her new boots looked nice, and they were sturdy with a black plasti-weave layer over the toe box, but the soles and leather were stiff, and she knew they wouldn’t be truly comfortable until she’d worn them for many, many hours. Still, she felt a hundred percent better than she had the night before, and she walked out of the lobby with her shoulders back and her head high, staring back at the other people milling about the lobby. She felt a little thrill of victory as each one of them looked away first.

“Your Easycab is waiting outside, Juliet. I’ve selected a highly-rated gun store only a few miles from here.”

“Good.” While she was riding in the cab, halfway through the short trip, Angel spoke up again.

“You’ve been accepted for the job, Juliet!”

“Yes!” she clapped her hands together, suddenly realizing that she’d been stressed about not being accepted—she needed to keep making money, and this seemed to be her best option. Juliet really had no idea how competitive those SOA postings were. Was this a sign that she had a sought-after skillset, or was it a sign that the people doing the job were desperate and took her as a last resort? “No way to know yet, I guess.”

“The job begins earlier than the last one, Juliet. You’re to meet the team at a bar called The Black Goat at six this evening.”

“Okay,” Juliet said as the Easycab pulled up to a curb and announced her arrival. She stepped out onto a sidewalk, still on the edge of downtown and bustling with people. The store before her was called Mackenzie Arms. A very cyborged-out guard stood outside the door, his robotic, piston-like arms hovering near the hilts of two very large semi-automatic handguns he wore on his military-style belt. Juliet stepped toward him, taking in the weird way the synth-flesh on his face merged with the chrome plate covering his forehead and skull.

“No loaded firearms allowed inside,” he said, his voice surprisingly smooth and pleasant.

“I don’t have any.” Juliet held up her hands.

“What’s in the pack?”

“Nothing—I brought it to hold whatever I buy in here.” Juliet shrugged out of her dark brown backpack and unzipped it to display the cavernous interior. The guard looked at it, and she heard something clicking in his optical implant, and then he nodded.

“Enjoy the shop.” The door slid open as if on cue, and Juliet walked in. The front half of the store was dominated by sales racks displaying boxes of ammunition, holsters of all kinds, and a wall adorned with various types of ballistic vests. The rear half had a horseshoe-shaped display case behind which half a dozen sales personnel stood and walked, helping customers or, in the case of one woman, stared at Juliet.

“Hey, doll. Can I help you?” the woman asked as she moved further into the store toward the display case. Juliet regarded her—a middle-aged lady with natural brown hair. Juliet didn’t think she’d stand out in a crowd if not for her wild ocular implants. Her left eye was perfectly smooth and red, the right was white, and they each had crosshairs in the opposite color that appeared and then faded away every couple of seconds. She realized she was staring and cleared her throat.

“Oh, hey. Yeah, I need to buy a couple of weapons.”

“Sure! What’s your poison?”

Angel had primed Juliet on what sorts of things to ask about. The PAI seemed to have a disturbingly extensive knowledge base of weapons and self-defense items. Juliet had come to understand that Angel’s ability to walk her through the use of the electro-shotgun had only been the tip of the iceberg. “I need a pistol meant for close-quarters defense. Something like a Garnet Taipan.”

“The Taipan, huh? Quite a little canon. Alrighty.” The woman walked down the case, and Juliet saw her ask one of her associates to move. Then she slid a panel back and reached in to pull out a compact, black pistol. She walked back to Juliet and set the gun on the counter. “You’re aware that Garnet named this model after a viper because it looks like a small package, but it packs a hell of a bite?”

“Yes,” Juliet said—Angel had filled her in on why she liked the weapon. “It’s designed to minimize failures; it’s small enough to conceal while able to pack rounds that will fatally wound or incapacitate an aggressor with one shot.”

“That’s right! You know your guns, huh?” The woman picked up the gun and handed it to Juliet. It was bigger in her hands than it had seemed—a four-inch barrel extending over the tips of her fingers while the dense, compact frame rested on her palm.

“Heavy,” she said, feeling the weight as she wrapped her fingers around the grip. It was entirely black—the metal, the plastic grip, everything. Above the trigger was a curved, half-circle magazine that wrapped up from the left side of the gun, over the barrel, and ended on the other side of the chamber. It looked almost like the cylinder on a revolver, but Juliet knew, from speaking to Angel, that it held twenty needler-round casings.

“That magazine is its best feature, you know that?” The saleswoman asked. Juliet looked at her with a raised eyebrow, so she continued, “It moves mechanically through the firing chamber, kind of like how a revolver functions. That way, even if a round is dead when you pull the trigger, the next one will come under the pin. Duds and jams don’t happen.”

“Touch the button at the front of the magazine on the left side,” Angel said. Juliet did as she asked, and the magazine popped open on the front side, exposing the twenty empty cartridge bays.

“You have shredder cartridges?” Juliet asked.

“Oh, sure, hon. They pack a punch, though—this thing’s gonna buck like a pony.” She looked Juliet up and down, taking in her attire and then her long, calloused fingers. “I guess you know that, though?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“How many boxes?”

“Two,” Juliet said, already aware that each box held fifty casings.

“What else you gonna need, hon?” The woman asked, turning to look through the stacks of ammo behind the display case.

“I need a six-inch vibroblade, an inside-the-waistband holster for this gun, and a ballistic vest that looks like something you could wear around town.”

The woman straightened up with two little boxes in her hands and looked at Juliet with a grin. “Well, assuming you have a license, you sure came to the right store, didn’t you?”