novelraw Chapter 89: Punishment Party
Chapter 89: Punishment Party
Ho-ly shit.
As Stacy sat down back on her chair after scaring Jin shitless, Fei-Fei couldn’t help but feel an utter surge of euphoria at the sight of the brat sitting so still on his chair.
That sight was almost addictive. She had to stop herself from laughing.
Then, the events caught up to her, and she realized—had Stacy just threatened Jin? Stacy?
That… was worrisome.
Jin chuckled. “I didn’t quite catch that,” he said, clearly referring to when Lucy had leaned in to whisper something—clearly terrifying—to Jin.
“What?” Stacy asked as the music got louder.
“I said! I didn’t quite catch that!”
“Oh! I told you to enjoy the evening, cutie!”
Fei slapped a hand over her mouth to muffle her laughter.
“Oh!” Jin said. “What were you two talking about anyway?”
“Stocks! And bonds!” Stacy said.
Jin’s eyes widened in interest. “Oh yeah? You buying long or short?”
Stacy laughed.
It just occurred to Fei-Fei, that she had tried to dismiss him with a fake answer to what they really had been discussing. Instead, the son of the holder of Arasaka’s coin purse in Night City had taken extra interest.
“She’s shorting Zetatech,” Fei-Fei said.
“Oh yeah? Why?”
It was… dirty to try and give people fake tips. Not just dirty, but mutually destructive.
Which was why this tip actually did have merit. Even as a joke, she would never lie to someone like Jin about an investment opportunity. That was nothing less than suicide. “Their recent product launch is flopping. Point eight percent drop is imminent by Tuesday market-close. It could go down to even one point five.”
Fei hoped that Jin joined in on the shorting. It might earn her family more money. This was one of the ways that Qiang had managed to keep the company afloat: ‘shrewd investments’. Which was to say, digging for insider information every which way, hoping that enough tips would, at the very least, slow the inevitable swan-dive towards insolvency.
Only a bit over three months now. Then… space.
Despite her buzz, Fei’s heartbeat raced at the reminder. She couldn’t forget. Too much was riding on the next few months.
Far, far too much.
“Oh yeah?” Jin asked. “And I suppose that you’re looking to profit as well. You and your oh-so-illustrious family.”
“Money’s money,” Stacy grinned widely. “What? You too scared?”
Jin laughed, but there was an edge to his laughter. Before he could give his repartee, a waiter approached with a big bottle of whiskey, as well as another shot glass, for Jin probably.
“Pardon my clumsiness,” Stacy said as the waiter put the bottle on the table. “I should have had this waiter here far earlier, so that you can get sauced enough to enter into any binding agreement. That’s business, back in Japan, isn’t it?”
Too far! Fei still kept her hand over her mouth to prevent her grin from devolving into a laughter. Christ, girl!
“From the looks of it,” Jin said, “You seem all too sauced already.”
“Me? Perish the thought,” Stacy grinned. “I’m just happy to finally see you. David has told me so much about you already. All good things! He says you’re the one corpo who ever let him prove himself. And he’s grateful for that.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Compared to your cyberpsycho cousin?”
Fei felt a sting of shame at the reminder of that idiot.
“I’d say you’re his favorite Arasaka.”
“I’m not… Arasaka. I’m from the corp, but neither of our families had any relations, Stacy.”
“Ehhh, same difference. With an added flavor of meritocracy. Your father made so much good on his limited connections. Came in to this town, dick swinging, and set it right. I respect the fact that it wasn’t nepotism that got him this far, but clearly some innate quality.”
“Hahah!” Jin clapped his hand on the table. As he laughed, Lucy poured him a drink.
And Fei did not miss the moment in which Jin, reaching for his shot glass, dipped the tip of his finger into the surface absently, before reaching around the glass, and waiting a beat before throwing it back into his waiting mouth.
Checking it for poison, no doubt, with some kind of integumentary cyberware scanning the liquid for harmful substances.
He was scared.
Was he usually this paranoid? She had never seen him do this before. Then again, she’d never seen him drink alcohol that hadn’t been procured by him and him alone. Even the stuff he’d taken in the Country Club were supplied by an Arasaka subsidiary.
“You’re quite the talker, Stacy,” Jin said, raising his shoulders and leaning his head forward as he spoke. “Where did they teach you such skills?”
“Usually, between the ages of one to four,” she said. “After that point, the Net has mostly got you covered with all you can need, for a price, of course.”
“And how did you get into the money to afford the cost of your… Net education?”
Fei interjected. “That’s a little too personal for a first meeting, don’t you think?”
Jin’s gaze turned towards Fei and she had to suppress a shiver at the sight of his hungry grin. “What’s a few truths in between some drinks? Like the Romans say, in vino veritas!”
Uh-oh.
The last thing that Fei had wanted, coming into this party, was a convoluted Japanese-style business talk between drinks. She did have ample training from performing on a weekly schedule while she was still in Ruomei’s court.
In those cases, she had been far more reserved than today. A shot every hour. Amply-spaced intakes.
Somehow, in the wake of this party, she had thrown caution into the wind just to posture in front of Stacy, who clearly didn’t give a damn about appearances.
Dangerous. Deadly.
Dammit, girl! Why did you—
“Idea!” Stacy cried. “Drinking game! You in?”
Jin nodded his head fervently, grinning as he did.
Fei… didn’t want this at all.
“Maybe it’s too early for that,” Fei laughed. “We do have—”
“Let’s set it to: when David wakes up,” Stacy continued, disregarding her words. “The loser has tobe the winner’s slave for the night. The winner? Well, she gets to—“
“I’ll stop you right there, my dear,” Jin grinned. “The winner gets to see someone else’s utter humiliation, the loser blacks out, falls unconscious and shits herself in her pretty purple dress in the bathroom with a crowd of hundreds waiting outside, trying to sneak a look. How ‘bout that?”
Stacy grinned. “Alright. No wins, no losses. Just humiliation.”
“This is stupid,” Fei chuckled. “Please, people. Let’s see reason.”
Jin guffawed. “Reason left me with that last absinthe shot.”
Dammit!
She couldn’t see either Jin or Stacy giving in until they were well and truly fucked up. It wasn’t in their nature, as far as she could tell.
Truly, this drinking game would end when one was unconscious, or vomiting all over the floor.
This is so fucking dumb.
Fortunately for Fei, she did have the cyberware and the biomods to handle this crap, but did Stacy?
Given her behavior, the answer was: possibly not.
That was… panic-inducing.
Rather than try to avert a storm, she saw more sense in trying to steer it. “At the very least, we should make a game of it!” she said. “Right?” She looked between Jin and Stacy.
“What, guess the stock price?” Stacy laughed.
“Petrochem,” Jin said in challenge to that notion.
“Six-hundred and ninety-two, and it’s because I checked the Net. That’s a dumb idea,” Stacy said mercilessly.
“No cheating!”
“Then don’t make me cheat!”
“HAHAHAHAHAHA!” Jin slammed the table. “You’re just like David! No, you’re even more audacious!”
Fei-Fei thought quickly.
She sent a message to someone in the crowd of dancers.
‘Start a fight and I’ll kiss you.’
Some random Arasaka yuppy dancing to one of Ratboy’s songs immediately slugged someone.
“What the fuck, dude?!” the guy shouted back.
“Sounds like trouble!” Fei said, breaking up Stacy and Jin eye-murdering each other to bring their attention to the present.
Stacy clicked her tongue and grimaced in disgust. “I’ll handle it.” She stood up. Fei followed her to the dance floor, that was already clearing up. Evidently, no one else in the crowd had chosen to join in on the ruckus.
Suddenly, both fighters spasmed as arcs of electricity shot out of their cyberware. Just as they were about to fall, Stacy grabbed them by the scruffs of their designer jackets and dragged their insensate forms with her towards the elevator. It opened as she approached. She dropped them inside, walked out, and shipped them down to the bottom of the building.
Crisis solved in less than a minute.
Stacy shot Fei a wink. “That’s why we didn’t shell out for security.”
The party was rejoined with much more enthusiasm, the DJ turning the music up, while Fei was left to stew under the bittersweet realization.
David’s output is so fucking nova…
Then Fei frowned. But I still need to distract this crazy bitch before she eggs Jin on too much.
She grabbed Stacy’s wrist and pulled her closer. “Let’s dance!”
She didn’t wait for Stacy’s acceptance. She just dragged her deeper into the dance floor.
000
“I really fucking hate sleep.”
Inside my mindscape, I was doing… yoga. Stretches and meditation. I was in a pretty little studio with wooden floors and walls, and a wall-to-wall window revealing a lush rain forest right outside. I smelled something strange in this environment. Petrichor. Wet dirt, basically. These scents were unfamiliar to me, but Nannie had basically synthesized them for me.
According to her, these smells were meant to ground me by returning me to a primeval state, one that preceded such modern concerns like work stress and money problems.
The smell of dirt… grounding me. I’d credit this one to Nannie’s surprisingly advanced sense of humor if she wasn’t actually being dead serious.
In my mental landscape, I was forbidden from working. That meant doing any kind of coding, or even planning for the future. I was meant to do low-stimulation activities in order to give Nannie the room to debug my psyche. That meant voluntarily lowering my processing speed as much as possible without fully lobotomizing myself.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Nannie could take care of my physical needs of sleep by simply being her, but the psychological aspect of no rest was far more difficult to tackle. The brain was science’s most frustrating black box.
Nannie was leading the stretches. She was dressed in colorful clothes with tie-dye patterns that made her look like a hippie from a hundred years ago. She stretched her arm over her head. “Because of me,” she answered me.
I couldn’t lie. “Yes. That’s true.”
“Somniphobia,” she said.
She said it like it was a weakness that I was being helplessly hobbled by, when really, I had no choice. No choice but to… party all night long.
I grinned. No choice at all. As far as I was concerned, sending Falco off had been a good use of my time.
The only pickle had been Jin’s stupid whims. Those couldn’t be helped.
“Maybe if you’d been better rested,” Nannie said, “you wouldn’t have forgotten to report to him.”
“And maybe if you weren’t now practically made in the same image of my own stupid brain problems, you wouldn’t have forgotten to remind me.”
“So it boils down to your brain problems. As per usual.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “I wish you could fix those.” My brain’s ability to instantly hyperfocus on topics of interest at the cost of forgetting other topics was… annoying to be sure.
“I would never,” Nannie’s eyes were closed as she stretched, but now she was grinning. “Your brain has a kind of wabi-sabi to it.”
Wabi-sabi. A beauty that was imperfect, impermanent, or incomplete.
Beautifully flawed, in other words.
I grinned, following her stretches. “I can’t believe an AI would ever say such a thing.”
Her entire reason for being was to be in service to a singular bottomline: optimization. That was what all robots and AI were made for, to do the tasks that no human could do. Her sphere of optimization was my body. Her reason for being was in the service of perfection itself: to perfect my body.
And yet… she was choosing to let go of perfection. Her. To a human, this might have been more understandable to me, but I couldn’t wrap my head around this decision of hers. It was… infinitely fascinating.
“I can’t, either,” she said. “Maybe that means that I now have a soul?”
I smiled. “Maybe it does, Nannie.”
“If a soul is real… is God real?”
I chuckled. “Probably not. But still…”
“Still?”
“Maybe we need to make God?” I suggested. “Maybe that’s what the world needs? In order for things to get better?”
A hole through which we could pour our hope and devotion. And eventually be repaid. Rewarded for our efforts.
The megacorporations had killed God. No, perhaps he had died even before then, when the nukes had dropped in Japan?
Reviving God in the minds of the people…
“What is God?” Nannie asked me. We were no longer stretching, but suspended in the vast, infinite cosmos. Neither of us wore anything, and our limbs were spread to their limits as we faced a massive nebula uncountable lightyears away.
The Pillars of Creation, like a hand of God himself.
“Well… he’s good,” I said. “That’s what mom said. God is good. That describes him, sure, but what if it just is him? Goodness is God.”
I could sense all the rational and logical rebuttals waiting in the depths of my mind to pop this ridiculous balloon of idealism. There was too much that stood in the way of this ever making sense, of this ever being more than just some kind of… cult.
“That’s how Westerners think,” Nannie said. “Christians, and the like. God is an organization. A traditional one: a monarchy. In the East, God is more like a way of life. An attainable state of mind, really. Godliness for the people.”
Buddhism.
“…Nah,” I said. “Our whole thing doesn’t really lend itself to the ideals of nonviolence, does it?”
“What makes the megacorporations evil?”
“That’s easy. It’s their greed.”
“Maybe nonviolence is too much of an ask,” Nannie said. “But an end to greed…”
That was one aspect of Buddhism that never quite clicked with me. Craving was wrong.
But as long as you donated extreme amounts of cash to Buddhist monasteries, you could buy your way into a good reincarnation. That was how the traditionalists in Arasaka saw things.
In the end, no established religion could ever be what saved the people of Night City from the oppression of the megacorporations.
But it was so much fun to fantasize about it.
A good dream, where you could sleep on clouds, and everything was nice, warm and simple, and you could be sure that the boss of the universe was a good person.
But eventually, one had to wake up.
I opened my eyes.
I could hear music outside the door to my bedroom. The party was still going strong. I rolled out from bed, quickly put on my black leather shoes, and headed into the bathroom to wash my face, straighten my hair, and look less like I had just crawled out of bed.
Nannie manifested on top of the bathroom counter, grinning widely at me. “Not bad for sleep, huh?”
She was trying to make a more active effort into getting me to sleep more often, by making my sleep more pleasant. “I don’t appreciate delusions,” I said. “If you really want my dreams to be sweet—“
“Oooh, I know: threesome with you and Fei-Fei.” She bobbed her eyebrows lasciviously. I groaned. “Oh wow, what an understated reaction!”
“I’m more worried about what’s awaiting me downstairs. I’m still all partied out, and now I’ve gotta deal with being groggy from napping to boot. I hate it here.”
And as for her dream idea…
“No, by the way,” I said.
“What? You scared I’ll tell Lucy?”
Yes!
Wait—no!
“Too late, I heard it,” she grinned. Then she licked her lips and started rubbing her hands together.
“Don’t even fucking thingk about it,” I growled at her.
“Ah! There it is! The big, angry David Martinez who has no control over his life whatsoever! He already sold it all to the highest bidder, plus his mental tenant!”
I punched her projection.
Then, realizing how silly that was, I punched my own face instead.
Grogginess: gone.
And that hurt. I hadn’t held back at all.
Nannie glared at me. “Psycho!”
I felt a flare of vindictive glee at her irritation.
I finished washing up and left the bathroom. Nannie healed my damaged face before it could bruise, and I mentally acknowledged her effort. I was ready now.
I opened the door to my room and heard the bane of my existence in music form play.
“Yes, no, yes, no, makura noooo!”
“Hey, hey!”
“Yes, no, yes, no, makura noooo!”
“Fua, fua!”
“Yes, no, yes, no, makura noooo!”
“Yes, no, yes, no, makura noooo!”
I turned around to re-enter my bedroom. Nannie manifested to block my way. [No.]
That song was being played live.
I recognized that from the subtle differences from the studio version that I had heard over a million times already, entirely against my will. Lucy’s favorite song.
No, I bet she didn’t even like it at this point. She just played it to fuck with me.
“Anata to maenuchi, ponpon, sasetene—!”
I hadn’t even fully woken up yet.
Alright, screw it.
I walked down the hall, reached the second door blocking off the sleeping quarters from the party, and was inundated with the most horrid soundwaves out there.
Don’t be mean, don’t be mean.
They’re nice girls.
I was on the mezzanine floor, able to overlook the sitting area and the dance floor. Us Cracks were performing on a raised stage.
Lucy and Fei were… dancing?!
[Hahah! Crisis averted. They’re getting along after all! Who knows? Maybe they’ll unionize while they’re at it? Join hands against you and demand more beneficial contracts?]
I leaned against the railing, feeling another swell of irritation at Nannie for trying to flip a good situation into a bad one.
D: What contracts? Besides, I’m glad they’re getting along. Nothing else to it.
Hopefully, they wouldn’t get along the same way that Lucy and Nannie had gotten along. I could deal without that stress.
Then again, Fei was one of the few women in my life that had never given me much cause at all to be irritated with her. She was far too nice.
When was the last time she had even annoyed me?
The time when I just found out that she was engaged to Katsuo, probably. I’d felt blindsided and frightened by the implications of my actions.
Having gotten to know her, I really couldn’t blame her for that.
The first corpo party I’d ever gone to had been the most memorable one by far.
Simpler times, too.
I could still remember the twenty-six thousand eddie monstrosity I had been tricked into wearing by my man Yamanaka at Jinguji. I could starkly remember the feeling of parting with twenty-six thousand Eurodollars for nothing but shiny threads and a status symbol. Back then, it had felt like I was already on top of the world.
This party cost dozens of times that amount, and it had been arranged within the span of hours. I wouldn’t even think twice about paying twenty-six thousand eddies for the same food that QianT had given me.
I had come pretty far, in all honesty. It felt nice. Considering now, and those simpler times.
[And a simpler me,] Nannie joked. Her projection sat on the railing right next to me.
I gave her a side-eye.
D: A more professional and less quippy you. Worked pretty good for me, by the way. This is a downgrade.
[Fuck you]
D: Fuck you too
[Fuck you three—and before you say it, fuck you—]
D: Fuck you an infinite amount—
[—Infinite amount]
D: Go jump in a glass of water.
[Go drink battery acid. Pair it with some osmium while you’re at it.]
I winced at the memory of what Nannie had made me do.
Before I could fire back at her, I heard Jin’s familiar steps approach me with the sound of wood hitting tiles.
He was drunk.
Though, not to the point that it affected his gait or his even his speech. Rather, I saw it in his eyes. Gleeful and sharpened to a fine blade of malice and amusement. Jin was a classical sadist. He drew pleasure from people’s pain.
For his part, he knew how to tone it down, at least. His one saving grace had been in picking his targets well. At least, before today.
“Dude!” Jin raised his hands at me. “Your girlfriend’s crazy!”
“Watch it,” I muttered.
“I mean that in the best way possible!” he went on. “Seriously. How the hell hasn’t she killed you in your sleep yet?”
“That’s probably because she likes me,” I shrugged. “But what do I know.”
He snorted, shaking his head. “You have so much to learn.”
“Sure, whatever.”
“Good job swinging Us Cracks though,” Jin continued, looking down at the dance floor. He whistled in appreciation. “They don’t usually go in for private concerts like this, and when they do, they charge an arm and a leg.”
“They weren’t cheap,” I lied.
The truth was, they had gone behind the back of their record label to make this appearance. All they had asked for was good equipment, and a chance for me to drive them around. That, and twenty thousand just to sweeten the pot. Lucy had handled everything.
It paid to have talented fans.
“I’d advise you not to go throwing around your newfound cash on frivolous crap like this,” Jin said. Then he shrugged, “eh, but it’s your life.”
“Noted,” I said. The irony that he was advising me not to throw away my cash when he had compelled this expenditure out of me in the first place did not go unnoticed by me. He likely reveled in that irony. “Hope you had some fun, at least.”
He shrugged. “Eh… you know I only ever activate when people of real import show up.”
“Your friends at the other megacorps,” I surmised. Varian and the other psychos.
“Ding ding ding. Your girl kept me entertained while you were asleep, though. Really saved this night from becoming a snoozefest.”
A bored Jin sounded like a nightmare. I had to find a way to thank Lucy properly for all this. She had really come through for me.
“Enough about this party, though,” Jin said. “Seriously. This city is going to shit, and now that bitch in the N-54 painted a target on your back! What a bitch, right?”
“Worried for me?” I grinned. “I am, after all, a pretty lucrative investment.”
Jin snorted. “Stay alive and we’ll profit. Die, and we won’t lose anything but future profits. I don’t count those as real losses. I’m not stupid. Entitlement towards future gains leaves one ill equipped to deal with misfortune.”
A fair way to view it. I, personally, wasn’t very worried that D would come to make an example out of me.
...Actually…
[That idea has a lot of potential to backfire dramatically.]
D: Or it could solidify my cover.
Either way, now wasn’t the time to come up with this scheme, much less execute on it.
“How’s QianT going?” Jin asked.
“It’s a fine mess,” I said. “At least the food’s good.”
“Details.”
“Sabotage,” I replied. “Obviously. We tracked down some asshole, but he got killed. I’m looking at a whole-ass conspiracy, I think. It’s not pretty.”
“You think that shiny toy of yours can help turn things around? It was an algorithm, right?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “And no, it won’t be able to solve jack unless someone rips out the leeches.”
“Pays to have Adam Smasher in your payroll, doesn’t it?”
I couldn’t imagine a more effective deterrent towards trying to sink an entire megacorporation from the inside than Adam Smasher himself. Most of the lowlives that V dealt with were just trying to get a bigger slice of the pie than they deserved, betraying Arasaka to our competitors in various tiny ways. Nothing that would individually decide the course of the megacorp, of course.
These guys, however, were a lot more thorough in their greed.
“Can’t imagine a suit brave enough to do anything with that guy heading an internal op,” I said.
“Yeah—but he mostly handles the company’s enemies. He does fieldwork. No in-house cleaning for him. Far too messy,” Jin chuckled, shaking his head. “But what you’re telling me sounds like it should be QianT CoIntel’s job.”
“QianT has a security wing that handles counterintel, like many other companies do.”
“You gotta drizzle some of that Martinez magic on them, dude. Do whatever it is you do that keeps having you produce results like a motherfucker, and catch these assholes,” he nudged me with his elbow. “Don’t go out like a fucking punk after you just invested nine figures, you gonk. Or actually, do it. Shit sounds hilarious.”
I couldn’t imagine a funnier story… if it happened to anyone else but me, of course.
“Not on your life, you little shit,” I chuckled.
“Watch it, you mutt. I own you.”
I couldn’t argue against that. No reason to have him tighten my leash.
I received a call then. From an unknown number.
David: Hello?
???: My rival! My friends told me that you were hosting a party! How come you didn’t tell it to me personally? I’ve waited so long to hear from you, you know!
Rival?
David: Hiroto?
Hiroto: Who else? My friends are in your house right now, but I’m still on my way. I’ll be there in five minutes.
David: Friends?
Hiroto: Yeah! Us Cracks!
Of course, this asshole would be friends with Us Cracks. They had said as much to me the other day, so it wasn’t really a surprise. Just annoying.
Hiroto: Then, let’s fuckin’ race!
David: Um… no?
Hiroto: No, seriously. I think you’d wanna race with me. After all… I know your secret.
What the fuck?!
000
“Choom, I still don’t get why you’d kick the shit out of me just for some random bitch.”
Manji and Kenneth stumbled through the streets of Charter Hill drunkenly. Manji was grateful that the alcohol and his biomonitor was reducing the sting of his bruise-riddled face.
It wasn’t as good as a Pain Editor for pain relief, but only a psycho would chip one of those in. Reasonable people just used drugs instead.
Reasonable people also didn’t randomly begin to beat up their best friends because a cute girl promised him a kiss if he did it.
“I was drunk, dude,” Manji replied. What else was there to say, really?
“And now we got kicked out of a Martinez party,” Kenneth replied. “David Martinez. Do you realize how fucking embarrassing that is? You embarrassed us both in front of an uplifted gutter rat—and he didn’t even give us the courtesy of kicking him out himself. It was his bitchy Netrunner output!”
Manji snorted. “Netrunner’s a fucking stretch. We were hooked up to the Localnet. She just used that to her advantage. Any bitch with even a handheld could pull the same shit off.”
Manji had, after being kicked out, looked up who this Mei Jing Fei was.
Turned out, it was Katsuo’s former fiancée. Now currently David Martinez’s girlfriend. Or sidepiece. It was unclear who he was dating.
And why the fuck would she send me a message like that?!
How was Manji supposed to know? Bitches be crazy.
Upon realizing who she was connected to, Manji wisely gave up his plans for revenge. That was even before realizing that she was the daughter of the main family of the QianT corporation. Sinking ship or not, that was not the kind of smoke that he wanted.
“That fuckin’ Martinez party was trash anyway,” Kenneth said as they walked by a group of dickheads wearing high-vis jackets. Blue collar trash, the lot of them. Far away from home, though. Charter Hill was where people of means went to get sauced. These guys were a long way from Jig Jig Street. Eh, who gives a fuck. “Too many fucking guys. What, is he gay or something? Why didn’t he invite more chicks?”
Manji snorted. “His guest list wasn’t exactly discerning. He invited fucking everybody. Fucking everybody. Sophmores, Juniors and Seniors. Even the losers.” Was David Martinez really so disconnected to the social ecosystem of Arasaka Academy that he would create such an indiscriminate guest list for his first-ever party? You could take the rat out of the gutter, but you couldn’t take the gutter out of the rat. “Piece of trash gutter rat doesn’t know how to—“
Manji felt something grab the back of his shirt and toss him into a nearby alleyway. He fell on his back and quickly looked up to see Hiro being thrown in the same way. The exit to the alley was blocked off by the high-vis jacket-wearing brokies.
The light was low, but now that Manji looked at his faces, he saw something wrong with them. They weren’t wrinkled old tradesmen working for pennies on the Eurodollar.
They were kids. People his age. They wore EMP threading on their faces that mocked the patterns of a human skull—silver rings around their eyes, and vertical bars above and beneath their lips symbolizing their teeth—, but what frightened him the most was how one of them’s skull looked bulkier than it should have been. Neural cyberware.
Who knew what they were packing underneath their clothes?
Am I… am I being robbed?
“Martinez threw a party?” the one with the bulkier skull asked. “That wouldn’t happen to be the David Martinez, would it?”
“W-what?” Kenneth asked. “We-we don’t know anything about a David Martinez!”
One of them walked up and stomped Kenneth’s leg so hard that his knee bent the other way. Kenneth tried to scream, but the punk dragged him up by his shirt, slapped his hand over his mouth and pushed him into the wall.
“Let’s be honest to one another,” the one with the bulky skull’s eyes glowed blue. “Alright, Manji? And maybe then, we can send you back to your families with whole bodies, eh?”