Part IX

“Transfer Initiated”

The words that changed everything for me.

They flashed across my optics and then there was blackness. I don’t know how long I floated in the dark beforeOHMYFUCKINGGODTHISHURTSPLESEGODMAKEITSTOP!

Ever had the sensation of your entire body being ripped to shreds and put back together again? No?

Good.

I don’t suggest you try it. It hurts. A lot.

The ripping started in the back of my head and expanded from there to encompass the entirety of me. It wasn’t just my body, it was by brain, my spirit, everything that made me ME, was being turned inside out and then I was rushing along a tunnel of light.

So…I’m dead and there really is an afterlife. The bitch gutted me and now I was dying.

I was so fucking close to making all my dreams come true and now, all of it was gone, taken away by some cybered assassin’s Rippers. Ain’t that a bitch?

The light raced across my field of vision, getting faster and faster, the pain getting worse and worse.

I have no mouth and I must scream.

Fuck you, Harlan.

Blackness and blessed numbness.

Unfamiliar words floated across my field of vision.

“Alien nanites 95% purged.”

“Cortical uplink damaged beyond repair: unable to reestablish uplink with Union.”

“Cortical uplink damaged beyond repair: unable to reestablish uplink with Enclave.”

“Suggest immediate return to Union Haven for repair of cortical uplink.”

“Acknowledge?”

“Acknowledge?”

“Acknowledge?”

Fucking acknowledged!” I screamed inside my own head. The scrolling words stopped.

Everything was still black.

I had the mother of all migraines but oddly enough my guts didn’t hurt anymore. I felt as weak as a kitten and numb, my whole body was numb except for the headache that made me want to puke from my toes up.

I did the only thing I could think to do. I laid there and pointedly did not move.

How long I stayed there, pointedly not moving, registered in optics that didn’t look the same.

43 minutes, 22 seconds. That’s what flashed across my field of vision as feeling returned to my body.

When feeling did return it did so in a body that wasn’t mine.

Eyes that weren’t mine opened and looked across the wreckage of my apartment.

What I lacked in beauty and grace I more than made up for in intelligence. I was quick witted and smart so it didn’t take me long to figure out the what, if not the how.

I was in her body. I knew it was impossible but there it was. Impossible or not, I was lying on the floor in a skin tight leather body suit with a left hand coated in blood from my old body. Everything felt different. Setting aside the sensation of unfamiliar skin, a changed center of gravity and a lack of years of fat brought on by emotional overeating, I felt…phenomenal.

I felt potential in me, like a coiled spring just waiting to be released. I wanted, I needed, to move, to leap up.

So I did.

And tried to land face first on the ground but something inside me kept that from happening. I felt a rush of air and balance was forced. I made a three point landing that felt so graceful I could cry. Until I saw what I had landed next too.

My old body was on the ground and it wasn’t dead. My old mouth gaped like a fish desperately trying to breathe. Blood had run out of said mouth and nostrils and the look in my eyes made me gasp.

This wasn’t an empty shell. Something was in that meat and since it wasn’t me it could only mean one thing. My erstwhile killer had traded places with me and was experiencing the painful death from being gutted that she had intended for me.

I wish I could say I didn’t have any sympathy but I wasn’t that cold. I knelt down beside my old shell and picked up my- her, head and put it on my knee.

No one should die alone and in such agony, with such fear. Not even the person who meant it for me.

“How did this happen?”

She shook her head and tried to speak but only gurgles came out.

Her mouth moved, making words I could understand but not hear.

I nodded.

“I’m sorry.” I snapped her neck.

It was a mercy.

Answers died with her but there was no way I was linking our brains together again.

Almost an hour after she had kicked the door across the room and no one had come to investigate. If they had they would have called 911 and since there wasn’t a SMI aerodyne hovering outside my window and a tac-team in the apartment it looked like the basic rule of living in a shitty arcology applied.

“Don’t get involved.”

Good for me but I still needed to get out of here. Whoever she worked for might send more and I wasn’t used to this body.

This female body…

Elation at my changed fortune would have to wait. I needed to go.

I took quick stock at what I had on. A Second Skinâ„¢ Armoured slicksuit with composite plates over the torso, a pair of Glock X390 Genie Guns with variable ammo, Militech DK-70 Monokatana, and class-III Rippers in both hands.

Jesus. I was a walking army.

Paired cybereyes, tactile and sensory boost and at minimum, level III Kerenzikov-Yutani Boosterware. Some kind of subdermal plating, and a nervous system so wired I couldn’t even begin to guess at what all I had in it. And a pair of cyberfangs connected to a shredder-nanite reservoir. How could I forget those given the gaping hole in my wall. I should be a posterchild for cyberpsychosis and whilst she didn’t seem batfuck crazy, anyone who did what she did couldn’t be the most stable of individuals. At least I wasn’t entering into a dissociative state and feeling the urge to start killing everyone in the Arcology.

Yet.

I did a quick once over of my flat, taking what few items I really needed and tossing them in a bag. Item the first was my credstick which, with a simple wave over the cooling hand of my old meat was open for use by Me V2.0.

Did I mention always having a certain gallows humour?

I looked around at the remains of my old life one last time. I wasn’t ever coming back here again and whilst there was a certain satisfaction in knowing that there was also the stark terror of having no idea where to go, who was after me, and why.

The datachip. The answers were there. I grabbed it, a few empties and a portable copier/reader and tossed the lot into the bag.

Remember the one person I mentioned earlier that knew the real me? Yeah, that’s where I was going. No one else was crazy enough to believe what had happened to me and brilliant enough to put the pieces together.

Mad Mary.

Brilliant and crazy. She loved and hated me. I mean it this time when I say I’m not getting into it.

Techie, Edgerunner, mad scientist. Mad Mary is the most brilliant person I know and one of the most eccentric. She’s done more brainhacks and psychotropic drugs then the next 10 people I know put together. The end result is a brain that processes information so fast it makes me look like I’m standing still. The other, not so good end result is that she’s…off.

Way off.

Out the door and down the hall to the lift. I feel the interface plugs behind my left ear and plug in one of my chips. A menu pops up showing the full suite of programs on the chip; my Oh shit list. Instantly another menu pops up with a different set of programs. Stunned, I stop for a moment in the hallway.

She has crap on here I’ve only heard of, and some of those only in whispers. I thought I was a hotshit Netrunner but she — me, puts that to shame. She was a real combat runner.

I’m in Netspace as the lift heads to street level, hitting my own data fortress. This is a new perspective for me since it reacts pretty poorly to an unknown WF signal and I find I have to fight my own ICE to get in. It’s easy. Easier than it would have been for me before. One powerful Jackhammer knocks down my data walls and lets me input my own code into the mainframe, disabling the real nasty shit before it deploys. I settle into familiar space and call up a window, dialing Mary. I snap an Imposter into place and I’m the old me in Netspace.

“The Ice Queen is dead, long live the Ice Queen.”

The window fuzzes out and a familiar face appears. “Hi, I’m not in, leave a message and I’ll get back to you. Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-“

“Funny. Cut the shit and listen. I need your help, Mary.”

“Always so chipper, Johnny. But you aren’t Johnny, you have the Ice Queen face and mannerisms down pat, you’re in the data fortress and your signal masking is topnotch but you ain’t who you say you are so I’m going to melt your brain in ten seconds unless you tell me what’s going on.”

Told you she was brilliant.

“I need your help to tell me what’s going on, Mary. Something impossible happened tonight and I need you. Anyone else hearing this story would say I’ve gone crazy but not you.”

“Mary, do the words ‘Union’ and ‘Enclave’ mean anything to you?”

That got her attention. She stood up straight and her eyes narrowed. “If you are who you say you are than you know where my second bolt hole is, you know how to get in and survive. If you make it to me I’ll believe you. If you die then I’ll strip the pieces from your corpse.”

I smirk. “Dead is dead.”

“Parts is parts.”

We finish it together, “Dead guys is parts.”

Her smile vanishes. “One point to you, you win if you survive. You’re meat until I see you standing in front of me.”

The connection ends.

Bitch. Her second bolthole is in what used to be East LA. I’m in the Oakland Arcology. Close to four hundred miles, through free fire zones, corporate controlled areas and the old interstate system. Nomads and biker gangs.

This is going to be great fucking fun.