[Karlos - 1] A Domino

Everyone thinks the rain will stop after a cataclysm. That's not true at all. Rain happens, it's just not something you want to experience. You don't know what chemicals might linger in it. We run purifiers constantly before consuming water, air purifiers to ensure we aren't killing ourselves faster each breath, and rad shielding to help compensate for the ozone we lost. Rain is harsh now. It's dangerous, but it stirs up memories of previous eras.

I stood on the nJuku walking bridge. It sat atop the mag-lev yard, one of the massive rail yards to aggregate intra-sprawl travel. Aggregator station nJuku was massive. It followed in the pattern of stations before it. An amalgamation of shops, floors, tech advanced growing skyward and old cruft crushed underneath.

Harsh LEDs shine down from each building. Illuminated signs, plexi-holo displays refracted and hovering to maximize visibility. If I were to call up my AugR, out would have thousands of solicitations from everything in broadcast radius. And probably some ignoring spec and broadcasting further.

But for now, I tried to ignore the electric onslaught and see the night sky. It was deep grey clouds, reflecting the brilliance of the city, and heavy, hard rain pelting the unshielded surfaces. The atmosphere dispersal field above the bridge kept me mostly dry, creating a moist wind as rain was shunted to the sides or outright vaporized. My habwear filtered the air before I inhaled, but my skin got the mist. Some biomonitors were giving me reminders that the moisture content couldn't be verified, but if I had cared, I could have had a full habwear cover. Even in the cold night, it was nice to feel something like what old generations knew. Lovers in the rain. Broken hearts soaked, singing under umbrellas, clinging close to stay warm. Conspiracies played out in shadows with dead drops under benches. Memetics people knew as 3 second clips, summaries who lost most of their power, distilled into simple catchphrases.

I shut my eyes, wiped the moisture away before it stung, and sighed deeply, my breath condensing with the cold air and stirring up curling foggy eddies in the moisture. Usually  I'd wear a face mask, but for this job, it would ruin the appearance.

Flexing my right hand, I summoned up my AugR. All those ads were suppressed, the lights dimmed as my overlay highlights the bridge, the structure, details about the dispersal layer. Important notifications were easily accessible, and I called up the latest intel. I guess waxing poetic about clandestine meetings in rain was ironic, considering that's exactly what I was here to do. In 119.27 seconds and counting, a supply train would pass under this bridge. The insides of it were inconsequential to me, the job didn't call for that. All the job called for was for me to affix a tracker to the right car. The details were sparse. They always were with these jobs. But I had a microtracker, an air-guide, and a decent vantage point of the rail yard.

You would think if it were sensitive, they may run additional security or lock down the bridge. But let's assess it: There's a dispersal field between me and the rain, a train traveling near the speed of sound which probably won't stop at this station, and its own likely host of dispersals to mitigate rain affecting the operation of the train.

So why, with all of these factors, would I be here? Well, I'm glad you asked, internal narrative. The reason is that our microtracker implant is about the size of crystallized salt. Or, under heavy rain, the particulate size of rain passing through a dispersal field. Now the complicated part, which my expertise was called for, was the rain trajectory and the location. Dispersal fields cover the railways as they approach stations. And either fully walled protective sections or active defenses covered the rest. But this little path was a short bump that was accessible by people and not subject to the active defenses. And when the train passed underneath, a falling object embedded in liquid tumbling out of a carelessly knocked over cup on a pedestrian footbridge while someone fumbled through pulling on a jacket in the rain was not an interesting event. One that wouldn't even register on the transit notes any more than stray debris on the platforms would.

And that is why the little second counter told me when to set my open glass of beer on the handrail, after taking a swig. A swig that transferred some backwash with the tracking device into it. And gave me a timer for struggling to pull a folding jacket from my pack, then turn idly in a wide arc as other pedestrians made sure to hug the other side. Any cameras just watching the drunk would be no more interested in me later than they would the brooding figure on the other side of the bridge. In some ways, he's probably more interesting than me. On the second spin, I fished my first hand out of the sleeve, and tried to throw my second arm in. The off-balance arc of the coat tipped the glass, and my slowed reactions made me knock the glass off instead. The slow fall downward looked like it would nail the magnetic center line, if uninhibited.

A rippling motion started away from the station, growing closer than was easy to follow with the naked eye. I only had some warning of it from the countdown, and a vague estimate the AugR tried to overlay. The matte gray train roared under the bridge, the sound hitting just as it crossed underneath, and was gone. It was only a few cars long. The cup was nowhere to be found. I sighed again, mumbling about the beer, and stumbled off down the path.

Replaying the fall, in slow motion, I watched the cup fall right into the path of the train, intercepting the roof of the first car. Eagerly, I waited for the chime from the buyer after uploading the vid. A few seconds later, the sound came, with a single word: “Online.” I smiled, and that smile grew when I saw the bank account reflect a successful mission.

My smile waned a bit when I heard a second chime in my AugR. The same account from which "online" came responded with "new job for Karlos" and a location tag. That wiped my smile away completely.

In the 12 years I'd been running jobs like these for less than upstanding individuals, neither asking questions nor giving answers, once the credits went through, the job was done. The Anon who tasked me disappeared, the accounts all burned, I'd know nothing of who they were or how to contact them, and I may get their next job without ever knowing I did the last one. That was the deal. It protected them, and in some ways, it protected us. I should have been just as opaque to the buyer. An obscure identifier, with some notes of expertise, and nothing more. The Anons would contact Gateway, make a request for what they wanted, Gateway would assign some of us the job, establish the terms, all that contract stuff except it was all technically illegal inside the federates, but unlikely a corp would ever care. If we actually crossed them, then their internal teams would clean us out.

So in all this wonderful anonymous, discrete task world, it was terrifying in a way to receive a request for a follow-up task, but more so that they used my sprawl name. I had no idea how they found it out, but it was clear they used it to tell me I needed to be there, or there would be consequences. This was not how it was suppose to go.

Felix - 2] The Resistance of Memory

I stepped off the glass conveyor to our investigation offices. Vanessa worked with another team so we had already split. Her team did more interaction work, while my division was primarily postmortem oriented. The irony of the work is not lost on me.

The offices were well polished, clean and neatly rounded edges everywhere, like everything was carved out of one solid block of aluminum or plastic. It looks like a fire could go through here, burning us all, and they'd just have to hose down the room to put it back to normal. Not sure why I always jump to the worst, but I couldn't shake that image. The half-tables people worked at were covered with displays, showing various outputs of charges, events, locations, or whatever was relevant to the investigation at hand. That so many people were already in the office, I figured I got pinged because we were short staffed and they needed some eyes on it quick. Usually that meant monetary fraud. Money was primarily the important thing to Novost. Corpses were pretty low down, unless it was someone like me and qualified as an investment. Nothing like the cold analytical valuation that a company provides to give you that warm and fuzzy feeling.

I hadn't had time to change since the bar with the others, but my ripplesuit had already swapped from leisure to business apparel. My uniform white with gray trim, and name stenciled along the back and shoulders, like a walking advertisement. I'm surprised we didn't have other logos swimming across us beyond Novost's. But I wasn't a field agent, so maybe they did. At least Vanessa's was the same as mine, and she went out occasionally to assess. Maybe it just displayed when she was out on business.

Approaching my desk, my display synced up with the terminals, bringing everything into my augmented view. Seamless displayed now wrapped around me, some controlled by my nerve endings, other by physical gestures on my hands. I poured through the digital file which provided the latest on this case. Case adJjche45Hn. The unique identifier was some hash of the initial investigation and some other important identifiers they chose to store, and tagged with an obscenely-long creation timestamp. Logging for everything, I suppose. It does make my job easier.

Case "adjective," which was now my shorthand for the identifier, was as I suspected related to money. It seems there had been several identical charges against the same billing account from several locations at nearly the same time. Likely trying to exploit some race condition by hitting local transaction clusters in hopes it would be passed successfully before it was caught. Well, they were half right. We caught it after it succeeded. Now the question was if this was intentional or accidental.

Pulling up everything I could from the account used and the destinations, as well as the transactional systems it interacted with, I put together a quick timeline of the events. It showed nearly concurrent requests, but with a few oddities. Digging further in, they were nearly identical save for a few odd fields, which may have been tampered with. I requested additional resources for comparing related transactions, and even to nanoseconds everything else was uniform aside from these requests.

I grinned, and stretched my arms. This was the part of the job I loved. Time to figure out the motivations and the cause. See what the person hoped to gain from this transaction and where they all exfiled to. The first tier accounts were usually pointers to some other bank, that were dropped as soon as the credits cleared.

A few hours later and after some rounds of information requisition, I had a good fix on the terminus account and who was behind the attempt. It was well structured, and the suspect was former finance worker for Novost, before accepting a new role with ShinKyo, a megacorp bank in a different federacy. Considering the heavy trading between nJuku and Novost, I would hate to be him when the enforcement teams come knocking. I closed and locked the case file, hashed with my identifier and submitted "adjective" for review and enforcement, then powered down my workstation. First shift was about to start, but I'd worked nearly all of third shift, and needed a break. They could adrenal me if they really needed me back, but for now, I was going to crash hard after a very long day.

Dragging my tired self back to the glass conveyor, Phirenaius intersected me. He was the manager for our department, and my overseer. "Felix. A word." He was terse, with a faint hint of displeasure. In some, that may be concerning, but I'd grown numb to Phirenaius' tone. He was a hulking mass of human, who somehow looked like he was flexing and bored at the same time. His jaw was wide, atop a thick neck, like someone made a caricature of a body-builder. He squeezed his shoulders through his narrow doorway to his half-office, and little divider panels slid in place over the frames, sealing us in.

"Yes, sir?" It always helped to give difference to Phirenaius. He may be here to tell me I'm totally debt free, or that I was to be executed. His bored face was inscrutable.

"Felix. Good work on the case just now. I know you need sleep, so I'll keep this short. You've done great work since joining, but it's mostly been single-instance investigations. I have a lower priority task that could use your expertise, but I feel you ought to know a bit more about the situation before you accept it."

Huh. This was new. I've never been asked my opinion about a case before. In the almost 5 years I've been working here, I have just been assigned work to do, and either critiqued afterwards or commended on a good job. Sometimes I'd get new access, sometimes I'd get collaborative investigators. But never in that time have I ever had a choice. This was... well, strange.

"Uh, sir, I'm unsure what to say. I guess give me the information and I'll see whether I can handle the task."

He sighed, and pushed his hefty frame up from the table. "It's not a matter of handling the task, Felix. It's managing yourself during the investigation. Even reviewing the material requires your NDA. No one can know you've read this, nor that you're working on it. Even Jason and Vanessa." I blinked. I was surprised he even knew I interacted with other people. "I know it sounds ominous, but I want to put the severity forward first. You should know how thorough we are in case it leaks." He gestured with his knuckles to the other investigators outside the walls. "So. Do you want to open it?" He swiped the terminal desk open, a thumbprint signature box rotated around to me with all the legally binding information first. I had no sense of the depth of the files, but one thing stuck out to me from my reconstructive report. I could see it in my head, as fresh as the terminal view, as my thumb hovered above the box.

Subject Novost_Unknown_5096_jjKeRnn7djfhna8o
Mental assessment of subject:

• Shows high cognitive prowess and pattern recognition, recommended for investigation work.
• High proclivity towards curiosity and questioning, likely unable to resist puzzles or riddles. 

[Felix - 1] The Resistance of Memory

Today is my second fifth birthday. the five year anniversary of not staying a John Doe in a body bag. Well, I'm still a John Doe, though. I guess if one takes severe head trauma in a fatal event but doesn't die, suffering retrograde amnesia isn't the worst side effect. We have the tech to regenerate virtually every part of me, and you'd never know part of my head was missing save for the regrowth coloring. But I lost something irreplaceable, and knowing it's gone is infuriating.

Glasses clinked together into mine, and I popped back into reality as they finished some cheers. I'm at a bar with some friends after working today. We're celebrating my birthday. No one else calls it a second-fifth like I do in my head, we've decided to leave it at "birthday" so I don't remember. I snorted. Like having a birthday celebration on an arbitrary day isn't going to remind me.

"C'mon Felix! Isslike you're not even drinkin' witus! Your headzoff sommer else, mate!" Jason slurred, clearly pulling down shots of whatever synthohol he had in that glass faster than I was. Though I'd never tell him, turns out the previous me had liver dampeners installed, so no matter what, I was always gonna win.

"Just mellow, Jason, I'm letting it breathe" I drawled, mocking his slow slur, sloshing around the cheap drink in my polymer tumbler. "I need to savor every drop of this top shelf... something." Vanessa grinned, Jason looked puzzled, and Serra and Conrad were too caught up with some flicker-ad in their displays. Probably something Serra was sharing. She's always the net-trawler, finding those viral memes to infect us with.

I took another gulp of the clear whatever I had ordered. At this price, the only real distinction between the chemicals was the coloring agent they added and whatever other flavors you might get it layered with. One of those occasional memories from the past tells me I've had some better alcohol, maybe even legitimately distilled stuff. Maybe that's why I had the filter. I rubbed my temple, where the discolored part started. I really wish I could just get those pieces back.

Well, I guess if I had a duplicate somewhere I may be able to sync the differences. At least among the Federacies they share info as part of their normal population control trades, but apparently whoever I was wasn't from another sprawl. The disaster I suffered head trauma from was an orbital shuttle crashing into Novost Sprawl. The Sprawls are the real cities, what make up the Federacies. Novost NLC owns all the buildings, the majority of the goods, and half the people south of the Epsilon terminus. And since the Novost sprawl is where they found me, Novost now owns me, too.

I'm not a slave, mind you, as that would be illegal per the Federacy Mandates. So clever conglomerates resurrected the old wage slave system and used indenture policies to give us contractual systems by which to work off our cost. Considering I was part of a disaster but not a resident of the sprawl, they got no compensation for my regeneration, and I'm on the hook for the entire bill. In fact, to even leave I'd have to pay 20% of my skull, one way or another. Not a pleasant fact.

"You're going distant on us again, Felix." Vanessa purred in my ear, running a few fingertips across my neck and sending shivers down my spine. "One might almost get the impression you don't want to spend time with us."

I grabbed her wrist with my free hand, pulling it to my mouth to kiss her arm. After the third kiss, I licked it and she yanked her arm away with a disgusted scoff. "What? You wanted me to be more engaged, right?" I grinned mischievously.

"Ugh, yeah, but not like that!" She playfully slapped my arm, then smirked and followed with. "Not yet, at least."

"You keep saying that and I'm gonna take you up on it." I tossed.

"And if he doesn't, I will!" Conrad said, rejoining the conversation. Or well, I was zoned, so maybe he was already part of it.

"OK you bitbodgers, last round is on me, then I need to get to my third shift." Serra sighed, putting her spiked collar back on. "I have to thrum a crowd for the next 4 hours."

"Just take your top off and that'll have 'em all strung." Conrad poked. "See if they can name all your inks." He earned a less-playful slap from Serra. "But don't let 'em see your derms, they might think you're faking more than just the instruments." That got a full punch.

"No drink for you!" She shouted in his ear, sliding the cup away before one of the automated pouring arms came back through. She tapped her thumb to the bar bot when it came for the rest of us, and grabbed a caffeine shot for herself, and downed it in one swift pull, and returning the glass upsidedown to the bar, and pushed off. Conrad frowned, and watched as she sauntered out of the bar to catch an autocab to the broadcast club.

The three of us with drinks returned to them while Conrad sulked. Multicolor liquids swirling in fabricated glasses, mismatched appearances, but did the same job. Felt pretty spot on to me for what we all were. Serra was an emotion thrummer; Conrad an automator for some other club, watching all the automatons to ensure no one tampered; Jason, Vanessa and I were Novost "Insurance Verification Agents" which was a broad term for anyone who made sure the corp never got the short side of the deal.

For me, especially, they found I had some major aptitude with pattern recognition and exception detection, so I became an active case auditor. Like an old detective back when police were a neutral party, before the world got glazed. A bit of me still thinks they just put any rebuild person in this role to show how puny we were compared to the machine that kept our debt.

Conrad cracked the heavy silence in Serra's wake, asking if I had any plans for the night.

"Honestly, I would probably go back home and stream a book or something, if left to my own devices." I was being mostly sincere.

Vanessa scoffed. "Felix. I swear you are the most boring investigator we've ever had. You would think after seeing disasters daily you'd want something to take your mind off it, like something heavier than nursing synthohol."

"Yeah man, sherrsusly." Jason managed to slur. Conrad propped an arm under him.

"I'm off shift tonight, and apart from tossing Jason's wasted form into his own autocab, I think we should catch a stimshow. Get you totally out of your head –" Vanessa laughed, and Conrad glared back. "– before you fall so deep you don't come back. I don't wanna have to adrenal you if I don't have to. That happens at clubs enough these days."

"Fret not, Conrad. You don't need to adrenal me." I straightened up and dropped into a recited phrase. 

"I am of sound mind and body, unhindered by any intoxicants detrimental to my well-being or of my surroundings." I grinned, dropping the façade. "I just don't like stimshows after drinking. Let's do tomorrow night instead."

We closed our tabs, vacated the bar and stepped into the illuminated street. LED lights flickered harshly from every window. Ads assaulted us from every near field display. Dismissing the notifications was such a chore most people removed their displays or coded up some silencer app. To which the marketers just made bypasses. The endless war of marketing. Us Novost agents were required to keep displays up at all time.

Just as we rounded the corner to get to the rails, Vanessa and I received urgent pings. Jason, now passed out on Conrad's shoulder, would have if his tox level were lower. Or if it were really bad, may have adrenaled him. Though, I don't know if Jason was the sort of agent with an adrenal tap. I know I was. Perks of the job.

Vanessa and I exchanged glances, and called a different rail cab. Time to go to work.