Fede left a note on the fridge comp that he'd joined a study group for a couple months' intense prep work and would be gone a lot. Before he'd left the kitchen the fridge bonged at him and he saw a response from his Mom asking what it would cost. He keyed in that it was free in exchange for using branded materials, and shortly after she responded with an OK. That was all. Fede cleared the screen and stared at the smirking milk carton, the icon the manufacturer had chosen to represent its software. He felt sick.
Walking back into the living room he pulled his army-navy surplus backpack over the shoulders of the hacked adjacket. Its pockets were full of cables, jacks, minidisks and various types of flash media. He was pretty sure that everything he was going to do would be software, but he didn't want to have to wait for a run to Radio Shack for lack of a cable. His bag was full, almost too full, but it still seemed strange to Fede that he was about to walk out of the room he'd spent most of his life in and didn't need more than two cubic feet of it. He'd wiped the cluster and pulled the cable so nobody could access it from the net. To Fed's eye the regular pulse of the cluster's LEDs seemed like a glaring omission, the lack of irregular flashing to indicate up/downlinks as startling as a flatline to a med student. Fede grimaced, shifted his weight. No one else would notice.
He pushed a black knit cap down on his head, gothic print spelling out "Geek" in white lettering across his forehead. He walked out the door. As he went he flipped his goggles on and wobbled down the steps. Soon he was at the train station, then on his way downtown. The apartment grew distant; he thought of other things. Fede tracked the glyph on the little map in the corner of his vision automatically, his fingers clutching and spanning the chord as he exited the train. He was coding voraciously, line after line flowing through his fingers, precompiles whirring in the background as he pulled objects from predefined libraries, modified them, dropped them in the hopper for cross-compatibility checks. He was in the zone again, his feet finding the pavement automatically. As per Tonx's instructions he'd plotted a new route so he didn't come to the store the same way, and he followed the map overlay without thinking about it. His mind was consumed with the structure of the program he was writing, the delicate architectures of subprocesses hanging in his mind. At random intervals his chord squirted encrypted and compressed chunks of data to one of a series of secured servers according to predefined daemons he'd integrated into his development environment. Fede was zoned in, feeling the code. He flowed.
He'd put on his backpack with both straps and his lungs emptied to vacuum when the backpack's handle was yanked backwards. His vision swam, his eyes suddenly unable to distinguish between the overlaid code and the street in front of him.
"Pay me" a dull voice demanded. Fede looked up, the overlays fading as he focused beyond their reach. The rainbow mohawk decorating the skinny Asian youth in front of him vibrated slightly as he cocked his head at Fede and raised a thin, perforated eyebrow. Half a dozen black metal rods punctured its length, tiny OLEDs pulsing blue at their tips. Fede blinked, saw the street was mostly deserted, wondered if it had been when he'd walked into it.
"I said pay me, man" repeated the boy. He'd had extensive muscle work done to his shoulders, but it hadn't taken in his arms. He looked as though someone had slid oversized sausages into his collarbones, huge slugs of muscle twitching under his skin. He forearms were spindly by comparison, a grotesque man-boy combination. He was wearing a muscle shirt and had thick tattoos scrawled across his biceps. The ink was mottled where the tissue had wrinkled up, the muscles there rejecting the treatment so obviously at odds with his genetics. Somebody behind him said something in a language Fede didn't understand, and the boy laughed. Fede twisted and saw a couple Samoan-looking men standing behind him. They both sported various kinds of facial piercing and fat slabs of muscle work, their mowhawks looking like a child's party decoration as perched on daddy's pit bull. One of them held Fed's bag with a huge hand, smiled when Fede tried to squirm to see more of him. He twisted back, noticed that there were several more mohawk-sporting youths standing around him.
"You want cash or credit?" the first guy asked, raising his other eyebrow as he imitated thousands of immigrant Asian workers in shops the world over, unconsciously mocking himself. Fed realized his mouth was open. He couldn't talk; all he could think of were the lines of code he'd been working on.
One of Samoans swayed into view and gently lifted Fed's arms, carefully working the straps of his backpack off his shoulders. He smiled as he worked, ignoring Fed, and shortly after disappeared again.
"Okay, good" said skinny. His shirt was too short and Fede noticed his belly button was an outy. It was disturbing, seeing that little lump of flesh protruding between his shirt bottom and the top of his pants.
"Now give me the gogs and keys and we'll talk, okay? Have a nice talk."
Fede tried to run.
It was a bad idea. A dozen multicolored gang members grabbed hold of him and pulled him to the ground. Somebody kicked him in the stomach and he doubled over in a bright sticky flash of pain. In a moment he found himself zip-tied and on his face, his hands behind his head and his legs pulled up behind him, zip-tied to the straps on his wrists. He heaved for breath, gasped a mouthful of grit from the street as hands started running through his pockets.
He'd just started breathing again when the hands slowed, then stopped. He became aware of a quiet, rapid conversation in a language he didn't understand taking place just beyond his field of vision. The shiny black toe-caps of a small pair of army-navy's stepped in front of his face, oversized heavy canvas cargo pants tied into their tops with expert laces. He followed the legs upwards, saw where a tight nylon turtleneck was tucked into a big leather belt, wrapped around a slim woman's torso. He followed the swell of her breasts over the taut stomach, caught her big dark eyes and the soft smile on her lips. It was Cass.
"You just got expensive, Feed" Cass said, her smile suddenly gone. She nodded and someone cut the zip ties loose. He scrambled to his feet, almost fell as he noticed the universally unhappy faces which surrounded him. All the rainbow boys wore matching petulant expressions, brows knit and arms folded. Cass said something to them and Fed's bag landed in front of him with a crunch. Slowly, bits and pieces of his things were tossed on the pile. "Okay?" asked Cass to Fed, her hips canted, eyes twisted narrowly.
Fede rummaged through the pile, failed to find his backup. "My H.D." he said "my backup's gone."
"What's it look like?" she asked, slowly.
"Black. About this long. Three ports and a v.2 PCMCIA slot on… "
"Good enough" she interrupted, turning to Skinny. He looked like he'd swallowed something spiny and distasteful and was studiously ignoring them. Cass shouted a word at him, and when he jumped she followed it with a long string of invectives. He waited until she was done and inhaled sharply, shouted back a similarly unintelligible range of tonal adjectives Fede couldn't follow but certainly understood. He paused to inhale again and hurled a final word at her. A silence the size of Montana dropped onto the street. One of the Samoans to one side of Cass blew out his cheeks and turned red, glancing to his huge partner is shocked embarrassment. Fede didn't know what that word meant, but he tried hard not to remember it.
Cass's eyebrows had flown to the delicate arch of her forehead when he'd finished, and now her lips slowly twisted into a vicious snarl. She paused, reached into her jacket. Everybody's eyes followed her hand as it slipped inside the pocket there, slowly retracted holding a gunmetal grey, square object the size of two packs of gum.
She flicked her wrist and the voice comm snapped open, a hyperkinetic techno tune exploding into the air in fully rendered midi. Everyone jumped. Skinny grimaced, mashed his teeth together, the tendons in his neck pulling taut. Cass hit a speed-dial number and held the phone to her ear. Skinny leapt forward, his hands flailing and an unstoppable stream of begging demands flowing from his throat. He danced around as Cass kept the phone firmly in place. Suddenly he leapt to Fed's right to grab his backup drive from behind the back of one of his minions. He pressed the drive into Fed's shaking hands and pleaded to Cass, crouching in front of her as though he was about to cry, actually getting onto his knees as she regarded him. Fede clutched the drive to his chest and she snapped the phone shut, smiled sweetly at Skinny.
"You can fuck off now, okay?" she asked in jilted English, a perfect impression of a cartoon anime girl. The rainbow boys disappeared, funneling through an alley at a trot. Cass unfolded her arms and turned to Fed. "You're more of a pain in the ass than your brother is." She adjusted her jacket and the phone disappeared.
"How'd you do that?" he asked.
"I know his mom" said Cass. "Now you want to tell me what the fuck you were thinking?"
"I wasn't paying attention" he said. He was shaking, his stomach a cold fist. "I was coding."
"You were coding" said Cass flatly. "Of course." She laughed, shook her head. "My percentage just raised, I'm telling you that. Dumb shit motherfucker… " she strode over to a garishly bright biodiesel scooter. It was the same one he'd seen pushed down the street the day before.
"Hey, didn't those guys have that scooter yesterday?" he asked, pulling his bag back onto his shoulders. She folded her long legs gently around the creaking vinyl of the seat, palmed the lock off. "Yeah" she said. "So what?"
"Never mind" said Fed. His wrists ached and his lungs hurt. "What are you doing here?"
"Saving your stupid ass, mostly. I was delivering. Hop on and I'll take you back."
Fede straddled the tiny scooter's seat behind her, its steeply angled plastic driving his crotch into his brother's girlfriend's lower back. Her arms stretched out in front of him, the tiny hairs on the back of her neck tickling his nose as he tried to hold on to the seat. She smelled fantastic, musky and fresh, and his groin sprang to life as he slipped once, twice into the seat and against her.
"You trying to kill me with that thing?" she asked with a smile, her breath sweet on his face. Fede blushed furiously, his mouth stammering. "Don't worry honey, I know that size isn't everything."
She laughed at her own joke and pressed the ignition. The scooter shuddered to life, hydraulics lifting it up off the street. The smell of burnt toast exploded through the air.
"Smells funny" shouted Fede over the buzzing roar of the engine. The scooter was excruciatingly loud, far louder than an engine that size should be.
"Modded like hell" she shouted back at him. "Like everything else."
She pulled a shiny black helmet over her head, reached back and grabbed his arms and wrapped them around her. The rubber of the tires snatched hold of the concrete and they rocketed up the street, the hydraulics in the scooter tilting sharply to keep their weight distributed over the center of balance. The engine noise crept to a high-pitched whine as Cass banked right and they cannoned into an alley, flying over cobblestones and out into an empty marketplace. She flipped their weight the other direction and wove through the shiny metal posts used to hold tarps over tables when the market was in use, turned again towards a short hill. She was practically sitting on him by the time they flew off the top of the hill, the bike snapping its wheels back under them from the distorted configuration it had used to push them up the slope. They landed with a thump and she swerved around a broken-down VW bug, its battered carcass perforated with tiny bullet holes. The bike downshifted as they slowed, then sped up going down a long hill past boarded-up windows before turning into another alley. Cass let the bike coast out, the angry squeal stuttering out into a slow guttural growl. Eventually she stopped in front of a three-story brownstone with two floorless metal decks curving out from the top floors. The windows were dark behind sheets of grime, the bottom floor windows hidden behind black plastic spray boarding. Cass got off the bike and switched it off, peeled the helmet back to reveal a blazing, idiot smile.
"Goddamn, that shit's hot!" she said. She tossed the helmet to Fede and told him not to move, turned and waltzed into the apartment like she was going to powder her nose. He was breathing heavily.
Two minutes passed. Five. Fifteen. Fede was seriously considering contacting his brother when Cass appeared again, chatting sweetly with someone as she crossed the threshold and out onto the street. Behind her followed the most horrifically modified person Fed had ever seen.
Most of the online fights these days were between mods, people who'd had their bodies augmented to minimize the damage they received and maximized the damage they could dish out. The giant who followed Cass made her look like a child, was a caricature of what a man could imagine being. Muscles the size of Fed's thighs wrapped around his arms, snaked up to where his neck should be, but wasn't. He had had his ears removed, tiny holes ridged with chemically induced calluses. His nose was also gone, replaced by tiny slits that made him look snakelike, and his eyes peered from within heavily muscled tissue implants. His brow had been grown out, probably using coral bone grafts, and when he spoke Fede saw that his lips had been reduced and his teeth uniformly replaced with titanium incisors. The metal plates under the skin wrapping the top of his head gave him an animal look, made his head appear to be growing straight out of his torso, and as he gently raised Cass's hand to his face in a parody of a gentlemanly kiss Fede could see his hand had also been modified. He only had three thick fingers on each hand, burn-treatments and bone-replacement surgery turning delicate body mass into hammers mounted on the end of the man's wrists. For the second time that day Fede felt like pissing himself, and then the man turned and looked over Cass's head to stare at him.