17 – Out in the Cold

  Their car on the train was almost empty, so Lemon sat close to Hector and took advantage of the quiet. “Why didn’t you just tell that guy you weren’t um, Paul, or whatever his name was?” She tapped his knee, indicating his body, he supposed.

  Hector frowned, looking around the train car, ensuring nobody was close enough to easily hear them. “Then I’d be a ghost.” Silently, his angry inner voice continued: a ghost walking around with no ID. He’d take me in so they could unmount my neurodeck and scan it.

  “Oh, right, right.” She nodded, but her eyes said she wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “My ID having a glitch, saying I’m dead, is better than no ID.”

  Her eyes widened. “Ah!”

  As she leaned back, Hector stared out the windows. They were traveling at an angle to the distant spaceport, but he could see the towers and launch platforms some of the heavy-lift ships required, and there was a broad swath of exhaust in the sky from a previous launch. He watched for several minutes, surprised when there weren’t more launches in that time-span. He would have thought that a city the size of Helio would have dozens of ships coming and going every day. Could be wrong. Things were different from when he’d last been alive—all the more reason he needed to get connected.

  “You know, I looked up that word—revenant. I hope you were just being moody. There’s more to life than trying to get back at the people who did you wrong,” Lemon said, pulling him out of his reverie.

  “Not for me.”

  She tilted her head, her straight blond hair bouncing with the movement. “Why?”

  “I made an oath.”

  “But you died, right?”

  He shrugged. “I’m alive now.”

  “Tell me something more…please? What kind of person were you?”

  “A soldier.”

  “Just a soldier, huh? For the Empire?”

  What other kind is there, girl? He pushed the angry voice down. “Yeah.”

  “This must be a big change for you, then.”

  He nodded.

  Lemon huffed, leaning back again, but before Hector could relax and return to window-gazing, she said, “Well, who, then?” He looked at her, the question plain on his face, and she clarified, “Who wronged you?”

  “That’s what I need to find out.”

  She grew quiet after that, and Hector knew, maybe buried under a thin layer of denial, that she was probably putting the pieces together. He’d asked her to research enough to give her some clues, especially his name. Still, he wasn’t worried; Lemon didn’t strike him as a backstabber.

  At one point, Hector glanced at her, saw her eyes were nearly closed, but that she was staring out the window, busy with her own thoughts. He liked that about her; she spoke when she had something to say and asked questions that came to her, but she didn’t feel the need to fill the air with meaningless chatter. He’d had teammates like that back in the day—a preferred character trait.

  If he weren’t a ghost—a revenant, as she’d so appropriately reminded him—he might wonder more about her story. He might ask how long she’d been working as a doll, or why. He might even ask where she was from, if she’d ever been off-world, or if she had a family. His oath was all he could afford to care about, though. He’d lost too much of himself—anyone he’d cared about, his career, his place in society, his reputation. That said, he couldn’t bring himself to ask those questions of Lemon.

  As if his thoughts had summoned her awareness, she looked at him, her gray eyes a reflection of the sky outside the window. “If we’re going to shop first, we should get off at the next stop.”

  He stood, glad for the distraction from his introspection. He lifted his duffel from the seat beside him and slung it over his shoulder. The train slowed, and he grabbed a handrail for support. Watching the station approach through the window, he saw the nearby buildings were industrial, much like the ones near the apartment stacks they’d visited the day before, but these looked newer—lots of curves and diamond-glass windows, and a lot less graffiti. The train came to a stop, the doors opened, and Lemon stood, leading the way out onto the platform.

  This time Hector hesitated before stepping off, looking left and right to ensure no PKs were waiting for him. He wondered at the abbreviation and why he’d never used it in his old life. He supposed it had to do with the fact that he’d always been on their side of the law; peacekeepers had never wanted anything to do with him. His life had been on Legion bases, battlefields, and in the conclaves of the nobility. PKs were for the baseborn.

  Seeing no sign of his new nemeses, he stepped off the train and followed Lemon to the stairs. The weather hadn’t improved while they’d been on the train. If anything, it was worse. His coat did a good job cutting the wind, though, and Lemon’s puffy, cream-colored, knee-length one looked warm. As she started down the steps, she looked over her shoulder and said, “I figured you might want to avoid getting surprised stepping out of the elevator.”

  Hector grunted his agreement.

  They needn’t have worried; the sidewalk below the platform was deserted, save for a steady stream of workers hustling toward their factories with their heads down and their hands in their pockets. The dreary lighting, the stiff wind, and the miserable-looking corporate laborers reminded Hector of some of the older cities he’d been to on Earth. So far in the city of Helio, he’d spent most of his time at a strip club, a fight club, and the locale around those establishments—probably not a good representation of the general mood.

  “People struggling in Helio?” he asked.

  Lemon looked at him in surprise, her eyes wide. “Are you starting up a conversation?”

  “Just curious what’s changed.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I last died.”

  Lemon scowled, but she gave up, recognizing he wasn’t going to elaborate. “Yeah, people struggle. I do better than most of the workers out here or over in the stacks. People work to eat, they sleep, and then they work to eat some more the next day.”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “They have money to bet—money for prostitutes.”

  Lemon glared at him again, and he felt a little guilty. Dolls didn’t like the clinical term for their profession. “Well, the Empire has laws that make sure we can earn just enough to keep us from rising up. At least that’s what Grando says. There are always enough bits left over to buy some time on the net or, if you save, to spend a night out on the town getting drunk and watching idiots beat each other bloody.”

  “Or to hire a doll once in a while?”

  She mock-curtsied. “Yes, or that.”

  Hector smirked, and they walked in silence, heads down against the chilly wind, until they rounded a corner and she pointed, saying, “There’s an outlet store there at the corner.” Hector looked up and saw an enormous, square, gray-plasteel building with a small parking lot at the front left-hand corner. The top of the building was adorned with two-meter shimmering silvery letters that spelled out “ArcLight TC.”

  “Any good?”

  “ArcLight?” She shrugged. “Value cybernetics, but they have some high-end models. Unless you came into a pile of bits last night, I wouldn’t worry about those.”

  Hector had only seen a handful of autonomous cargo vehicles since they’d left the train platform, so he led the way across the street, not bothering with the crosswalk at the corner. “How far is the ID fixer from here?”

  “My mapper says four klicks.”

  Hector nodded. It would be good to get connected and have a mapping app of his own. His deck had plenty of memory and processing power—probably hundreds of times whatever Lemon had going on, especially considering she didn’t have a local AI. “We can get a cab out here?”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem.” She stepped up to the storefront, loose flyers from outdated sales flapping in the stiff wind. The plastiglass door beeped and slid open, and a wave of warm air blew out as the two of them stepped inside. The storefront was clearly an afterthought—a place to make a few in-person sales and sign for deliveries while the real business took place in the factory. Even so, it was warm and bright, and there were a dozen display cases set up showing off the company’s wares.

  Hector walked up to one that promised eye implants and peered inside. Twenty or so models sat in plain white boxes, each stamped with a colorful label in half a dozen different languages—Iris-7, SightCore Mk III, Optilense S4, OmniSight, TruVision, VisionNode E, and a dozen more. He supposed it wasn’t strange for a factory store not to have much in the way of sales material, but he’d hoped for more than just product names.

  “Anyone here?” Lemon asked, peering toward the camera hanging over the vacant counter.

  A speaker crackled, and a heavily accented voice—something from the European continent on Earth—came through. “One minute, please.”

  Hector gave up looking at the generic boxes and walked over to the counter while they waited. Lemon followed him, asking, “You want eyes and a wireless jack?”

  He nodded.

  “My lens mods were just five-hundred bits. I’m sure you can get something better, though.”

  He turned to her, looking into her big gray eyes, outlined with black liner and decorated with soft, silver-blue makeup. “That your natural color?”

  She smirked, shaking her head. “A girl never tells.”

  A door slid open behind a stack of plastic boxes, and a small man in dingy off-white overalls stepped up to the counter. “Thanks for waiting.” He was thin to the point of frailty, had patchy hair, and sported yellow eye implants with maybe a hundred tiny black pupils on each one. They made Hector think of a bug’s eyes, and he was instantly put off by the strange, alien look. “We don’t get a lot of walk-ins.”

  Lemon seemed unbothered by the man’s appearance. She leaned forward and jerked a thumb at Hector. “He doesn’t talk much, but he’s looking for implants, um, I think…” She looked at Hector. “You don’t want full eye replacements, do you?”

  Hector shook his head. He was on a budget.

  “Right, so, lens implants at least, and he needs a wireless jack, probably as part of an auditory package.”

  “Oh?” The man nodded, smiling as he licked his thin lips; his tongue darted side to side, and Hector found his fists clenching below the counter. The clerk tapped his overalls where his name was stitched into the fabric. “I’m Ilya, and I can tell you about a combo package we put together just yesterday; we update it once a month.”

  Hector nodded. “I’m listening.”

  “Right. It features our OptiLens S4 implant system—lens, nanite-modded retinas and irises, and of course a nanite interface for the optic nerve. We pair that with our Gravity Eclipse 7S auditory augmentation. Are you familiar?”

  Hector shook his head.

  “They’re both a step up from our Basics line—part of what we call Enthusiast Grade, but they’re still pretty, um, budget-conscious. I guess I should ask you about your budget, but—”

  “He’s not looking to break his bit-vault,” Lemon interjected.

  “Then this will be good. As a package, you’ll pay twenty percent less than if you bought either piece individually.”

  “Wireless?” Hector asked.

  “Yes, sir. The Gravity Eclipse has UltraBand connectivity.”

  Hector wasn’t familiar with the term. “Can I connect to the city-net with that? Make calls?”

  Ilya looked at Lemon sideways, arching an eyebrow as if to ask, “Where’d you find this guy?”

  She frowned at him, then nodded, gently patting Hector’s shoulder. “That’s pretty standard.”

  “How much?” Hector clicked his skull-shaped ring on the countertop.

  “Forty-two hundred bits.”

  Lemon looked at Hector as he thought about it. “No problem tying it into an existing neural implant?”

  Ilya shook his head. “Nothing in the hardware, but you’ll need the doc to do a proper tie-in with synth-nerves—I mean, any decent auto-surgeon can do it, so unless you go to a back-alley chop-shop…” He trailed, off, shrugging as his strange eyes rotated, his many irises flickering with tiny lights as he looked at Hector’s face.

  Hector’s fist snapped out, and he grabbed the clerk’s overalls. “Don’t scan me.”

  “Just a surface and signal scan! I didn’t see anything!”

  Lemon put a hand on Hector’s wrist, and he glanced at her, saw the tiny shake of her head, and released the man. “Sorry,” he murmured.

  Ilya smiled effusively. “Hey, I get it. People like privacy. So? You want it?”

  “He can program his ID into the retinas?”

  Ilya looked at Lemon and nodded. “Sure. I mean, that’s standard. The system will let him do all sorts of customizations, too—even have some motion settings if you want, like sparkles or swirling rings or—”

  “I’ll take the package,” Hector said, having heard enough.

  “Okay, let me grab your boxes.” He waved a hand toward the many display cases. “These are just for, um, illustration.” With that, he turned and disappeared around the stack of large plastic crates again.

  Lemon looked at Hector and clicked her tongue. “You can’t go grabbing people like that! He might have called security or refused the sale.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Hector tried to mollify her with a smile, but he knew only half his mouth moved.

  She took it, though, nodding as she asked, “Should I call us a cab?”

  Hector nodded, and as her eyes unfocused, the clerk returned with a pair of small white boxes. He held them up. “Need a bag?”

  Hector shook his head and partially unzipped his duffel. “I’ve got it.”

  Ilya nodded, but he didn’t hand the boxes over. “Okay, just need payment. You have a bit-locker in that ring?” He reached under the counter and pulled out a small chromed data deck. “Just tap it here.”

  Hector clicked his ring against the deck, and Ilya held up a grease-stained thumb. “Got it.” Hector wished he had his new implants in already so he could interface with the bit-locker and confirm the guy didn’t just rip him off. He figured he was pretty safe, though; the “TC” in the company’s name meant they were an Imperial trade consortium, and that meant they weren’t likely to steal from customers, at least not beyond overcharging for their goods.

  Ilya pushed the two boxes to him, and Hector stuffed them into his duffel. Looking at Lemon, he asked, “Ready?”

  “Cab’s eight minutes away.”

  “You’re welcome to wait inside,” Ilya said. “Weather’s getting nasty.”

  “Thanks.” Lemon offered him a rather sweet smile, and the clerk looked down, muttering something about unpacking some stock as he shuffled around the pile of crates.

  Hector moved to the door, peering out through the glass, watching bits of plastic and paper trash ride the flurries as Mars’s Mother Nature swept the streets. Their motion made him think of something, and he asked, “How far out do the grav fields extend?” He’d taken the gravity for granted, but he could tell it was more than it should be; it felt like a standard Earth G. There had to be generators in the city.

  “Um, I’m not sure. A ways, I guess?”

  Hector nodded, shifting his gaze upward into the gray clouds. Even the yellow haze was gone from the sky. “How long’s it supposed to last?”

  “The storm? A few days, but the wind won’t get much worse than this. I mean, so they say. Lots of rain, too, but no snow.” When he didn’t say anything more, she asked, “Want to get some food after we visit the ID guy?”

  Hector’s stomach told him the answer before he had a chance to think about it. “Yeah. Let’s do that.”

  Lemon nodded, and then she leaned against his shoulder. Maybe it was because she was chilly, or maybe she was just getting comfortable with him; it didn’t matter. All Hector knew was that it felt good, and it made him feel guilty for feeling that way, so he pulled the door open and stepped out into the wind.