Smack!
I clutched my face in cold defiance, sharp daggers of pain piercing my skin in waves, reworking my pain threshold in real time. Sparks flew across my cheek as I lowered my hand to my neck, feeling the synthetic tissue convulsing—recalibrating to the stimulus.
My freshly implanted bio-nerves were taking a moment to catch up, and the resultant cognitive dissonance hadn't been my only problem.
"What's the meaning of this—"
"I'm done with you guys!" she yelled before I could finish. Stomping her foot as shards of glass whirred through the air, her humming resonance technology boots pulsed. The three others stood idly by, watching the scene unfold before them. Had it not been for my complete lack of concern, I might've gone red with anger or blue with shame; I had done neither.
"Then leave," I responded, turning away from her gaze to walk toward the center of the junkyard where a large heap of trash towered into the sky.
As my feet crunched against the scattered crushed cans and broken glass bottles containing any mix of neuro juice and strong liquor, I could feel her gaze burn into the back of my skull.
"That's it, then? No trying to explain yourself? No apologies? Just a 'so be it'? Have you really the nerve to leave me for dead inside a corpo's mindscape, then pretend that none of this concerns you—like your behavior doesn't affect other people's lives!"
It was only at these words that I decided she was worth my time. "Well, it was you or us—"
"Bullshit! You're a fifth-dim cyberskid—that guy's firewall was grade-school. What would it take you? A few minutes with some junkyard res box and a few neurojacks? But the moment I trip a thought trap, what do you do?"
Of course, the mission. The one we were all dumb enough to take.
"You don't need to—"
"You pull the plug on me! Leave me to be cleansed in his bio cache. Now, what's your excuse?"
Although I'd always tried best to remain calm, her words dug into flesh like shattered glass. I curled my fingers, stepping just inches from her face.
"Varina, I told you what to do before the mission: listen to the dim deck, don't touch his entropy signature, and don't take more than was necessary. I don't know what it was you did in there, but once you're flagged as foreign data, you are just that—code to be disposed of. Any of us going inside while he was undergoing a cache disposal would've been suicide."
She was silent, clasping her lips in what could've only been unbridled anger. I lowered my gaze to the ground, shaking my head at the dump below. I could only close my eyes at the complete shitshow things turned into.
Just a few days ago, the gang and I got a great deal to jack some midline exec for his information. Go in, infiltrate his bio cache, retrieve schematics for some design, and then provide it to our dealer as a data chip.
We were in over our heads. We'd only taken small recon jobs and basic info jacks on randos, but with Finn being able to melt any modern structure with his pyrotechnics, Corvin having enough recon skill to catch the time each guard goes on bathroom break, Anton's monstrous strength that can bust through solid steel, and, of course, my cyberskidding ability—that is, hacking any equipment under the scientific umbrella of M-Tech—that allows me to encode up to the fifth dimension, we figured if anyone could pull it off, it would be us.
That was, until we realized that we didn't have anyone who could move through the extra-dimensional landscape called the 'brane' to retrieve the actual data, called a branewalker. They're hard to come by, usually because you had to either be a DEVA—stupid, non-human, viral bastards that terrorize humanity—or be a member of NADE—arguably worse, human frag-wits who have so valiantly failed to get rid of the DEVA threat.
So, what better way to circumvent that problem than to recruit an absolute amateur to learn from scratch, guided only by the universal map to the informational mindscape—called the dim deck? Just how bad could things have gone?
I sighed, grazing my fingers against fried circuitry in my chest, hearing it thrum its tired tunes. "Look, I did try to save you, but the firewall almost had a mind of its own. Don't you see my chestplate? It got fried the moment I tried overwriting his defenses. There's no way I would just leave you for dead like that, Varina. Please, believe me."
She was quiet, but her brows were furrowed in just as much indignation. For a second, I could've swore I saw her mouth a "no", but no audible sound came from her lips. It seemed like she would smack me again as her shoulders tensed, but she only groaned with frustration, her limbs falling as the burning fire in her pupils began to dim. "Okay... I believe you. But still, you didn't even bother to leave the security systems open for me. I had to manually find my way through the vents with a circed neuro transplant."
I nodded, preparing myself to lie like usual. "You're right. I screwed up; there's no excuse for hanging you to dry like that. What'll it take to make it up to you?"
She looked to the sky as if there were anything to see besides the fake blue encapsulated in the Iron Dome. I knew that expression—pretending to be in thought when she'd already made up her mind, but I played along anyway. "Hm, I suppose there is one way. How about a date?"
Predictable.
"If you insist. Do you have a time and place in mind?" As I spoke, I pulled out my phone, sifting through the nearest search engine. Blocking out her words as she spoke about a favorite dish or whatever, my attention was affixed at the three to my side, all of their lips expanding into smiles.
"Alright, I'm off then, Finn, Corvin, Anton. And don't forget the date, Snow!"
I watched as she walked off into the distance, waving back at us. Once she'd gotten far enough to be unable to hear me, I let out a great sigh of relief, falling to the heap of trash behind me. The rest of the gang followed suit, positioning themselves to my sides.
"Snow, I don't know how you so consistently get these girls to listen to you," Finn said, wrapping his arm around my shoulders. He was lanky yet headstrong, screws peeking through his blond hair. The kind of guy you'd always rely on, even if physicality wasn't his strong suit.
Corvin and Anton laughed, equally patting my back.
"What's even crazier is that she didn't even question whether you actually retrieved the data," Corvin added, chuckling to himself. The guy was, as best I could put it, average. There were small cracks in his skin representing where he had synthetic flesh, but you couldn't tell at a simple glance. This was in contrast to his perky, black hair which might've been some of the only natural hair in all of Anaheim.
"Catch." I threw three data chips, watching as exactly one fell into each of their hands. The following gasps and stifles of astonishment were enough to make me smile.
"No fucking way, g. Don't tell me that this is what I think it is." Anton gulped, opening a dispatch in his neck that acted as a port to information. He was a big, brutish guy whose muscles seemed to have muscles. And his speech matched that, crude even if he were talking to the president of Heim. His black hair was also unearthly straight, reaching the base of his neck.
"Fucking blasphemy," Corvin hissed, reeling from the sudden influx of information ramming into his brain like a battering ram. He'd already inserted his chip, and it was working fast.
"Yo, this shit is totally synth," Finn enthused, scratching at his neck. The information had almost completely entered his mind, yet it still took a moment for him to recover.
I looked to my own information port, pulling out the chip that'd stayed inserted since the mission. "You guys go through all of it? What do you see?"
"An endless blue that seems to glow; clouds moving along the breeze; this is the real sky, isn't it?"
I laughed once. "That's it, Finn. It's real footage of the sky."
All three of the guys howled in disbelief, holding their data chips up like they'd been carrying the holy grail.
"Holy shit, dude. This thing's totally hardlight for us—I mean, we could probably score ten million creds just from one of these. How did you get your hand on this?" Finn asked, standing up. He brought his data chip forward, looking down at my hands, but I shook my head.
"Keep it." Reluctantly, he put it in his pocket. "Getting it's the funny thing, though. While Varina was sifting around for the schematics, I happened to come across some unfamiliar Qubytes. I ran through them and saw that they encoded for the 'sky'. After that, it was only a matter of putting it in her data pocket without her noticing."
Finn stared at me questioningly for a moment, looking to Corvin and Anton who both sat equally confused. "Wait, so you're to tell me that you were able to supplant key information like that without physically being in the Mindscape? That's insane dude; and you didn't get flagged?"
I chuckled to myself, not bothering to respond.
"Holy hell, you're the one who set off the thought trap."
"Guilty as charged," I said calmly, tapping Finn's shoulder.
"Dude, that's scrambled," Anton interjected, his voice a grumble. For a second, I thought he'd been serious, but the thick air was almost immediately dispelled by his loud laughter. "But that's just the type of shit you'd pull!"
"And to think you were all frosted, going, 'guys, this is bad,' and, 'guys, we need to get out of here!' You knew it would happen, yet still took us on that ride," Corvin added, standing up from his pile of trash, "you're a real null-face, you know that?"
I sat back further into the trash, smiling at the thought. "Yeah, I sure am."
"The bastard enjoys it!"
"Real masochistic of you, Snow. Almost makes me angry."
"How about we show him, guys!"
As the three playfully tugged at my sides, I closed my eyes, letting them relish in the fun. On the other hand, I was smiling myself, though not at their banter. No, it was at how well my plan came together.
"Alright, but hold on Snow," Finn said, releasing his pull on me and stepping back so that he would garner everyone's attention, "how exactly did you get the data if Varina had to dump her data pocket to get out of the bio cache alive?"
"I took a backup of all the code she picked up by serializing its information into my computer."
The three erupted again, each standing up with their arms in the air.
"Holy shit, dude, you rock!"
"That's our skid!"
I hummed to myself while propping myself up, grabbing another data chip in my pocket. "Well, crew, how's about we split the reward between us—a fourth for each."
The three of them nodded, although Finn had an inch of scrutiny within his eyes. "What about Varina?"
"Eh, we can cut her a piece on the next go-around. This job was a little too big for a freshie like her. I'll ping y'all the credentials for mission cleanup." Looking to the larger city, I hold up the data chip with the schematics so they could see.
"You got it, boss!" one of them said, the voice a little too distant to be recognizable.
And just like that, I'd finished the meetup with my gang. Now, to settle more personal matters.