—— Earth-F67X: North Capital City: New Venice

Dom sits down on a folding chair, a few slices of cold kielbasa on his styrofoam plate, an apt foundation to the mound of lukewarm sloppy joe and artificial cheese sauce. Great to pour into his gullet. He can see Han out of the corner of his eye, and notes she’s probably watching him, too. Manspreading, he has a free seat on either side of him. Nothing wrong with that, there are always more seats than people. He turns his gaze to the Dragon, who begins by saying:

“There are several projects we’re considering, for those brave enough to pick them up. Cooperate on which ones you want, work out how you’ll achieve your objectives. I don’t recommend solo play. Always good to have another eye to check your plan for flaws. We don’t want them to look like victims.”

He glances at his notes, then, as if he’s repulsed by them, practically spits: “An Azot performer over in Flatiron. Was processed by the portal security a few weeks ago, coming out of Ximbic. She’s stealing business from human buskers, dancers, and the like. That needs to stop.”

“Next up, a would-be diplomat, probably a spy, from that alien prison camp across the pond, we’ve been observing him for a while. His schedule is on file. Seems he’s trying to negotiate better terms for the xenos in Allure. We can’t be having that, now can we? People need to know they stand on the side of humanity. That means we focus on our own before making life better for those murderous interlopers.”

“Finally, a family of Mirr—those brass asses—got off a hyperlight shuttle from Veris, supposedly they’re part human, if we can even call those people who ran off to the Gnaritas System human anymore. Inbreds, if you ask me. Abominations. Anyway, I guess space is at a premium in Gnaritas, and they want to emigrate here. Let’s give them a reason not to.”

Location: Earth-F67X New New York City, NYU Langone Health 550 1st Ave Manhattan

A mire of intrusive thoughts stifled Genesis' soul, smothering her in a bog of quicksand neck down. Turning blue, the pressure had her bulging bloodshot fish eyes protruding like blackheads between two fingers. She failed to as much as even whimper through the morass of guilt applying pressure to get ribcage. "I don't deserve to live." With so many individuals persevering, tooth and nailing their way through the cesspool which was life, her meandering existence was something Genesis wanted to change. The ebb of emotions dragging her further into the abyss felt more like a riptide, leaving one logical way to escape. Going against the way destiny set out for her only caused suffering.

"Pitty is reserved for those who succumb to the will of others. I am stronger than that."

A voice, thunderous and with conviction, echoed through the ocean, submerging her unmuffled.

"I did not erupt from the womb of a woman to be submissive and reimburse patriarchy. I am no calm waters. I am a force, rapids even…"

The voice resonated with Genesis. Through her flooding ears, the gospel spoken was what aspired to be. Someone who could take reign over and reconstruct the woeful circumstances of her life so far. It was sweet to imagine just for a moment that she could bolster the confidence to be what her daughter needs in a mother.

Nothing prepared Genesis for what she was about to hear.



Upon this epiphany, not only did Genesis bolster enough strength to swim horizontally to the current, but instead of returning to the shore, she swam further out into the sea. Nautical miles even, but now, at a leisurely pace, taking on whatever lies ahead of her.

…

Genesis awoke to the sound of chirping birds competing with the noise polluted city streets below. After opening her almond eyes, the night sky stared back at her, causing her to question why so many song sparrows hung by the window sill parallel to her hospital bed. The whim to let them in overtook her, and once doing so, several nested on her lap and shoulder tweeting up a storm in such a manner convincing enough to believe they were trying to communicate. Genesis couldn't quite articulate it, but it felt urgent. Like she had to leave immediately. But why?

Face to face with the open window in nothing but her hospital gown, a calm breeze ruffled her curlish fro. Looking down stories above the chaotic city streets, there wasn't a way down, but the birds urged her to. As crazy as it seemed, Genesis saw herself taking the leap.

"Ah, Cartagena, you're here. Timely as always. Seeing the patient in room 1107? Right down the hall. I wasn't aware Ms. Morant was a part of the government. When it was requested that she was placed in such a luxurious level of care, I assumed she was famous."

Not one for the small talk, Cartagena's thunderous brown steel toed boots approached from down the hall. As a leader in scientific research within the Mobius Ops, he felt the obligation to see this wonder of science for himself. In his mind brewed a plethora of ways to subvert this technology into the blueprint for the next generation of super soldiers operatives. All in the name of defending against the imminent Val'gara threat. With every inch of progress, Earth-F67X became closer to taking the offensive opposed to its perpetual state of paranoia based defense.

Out of the orifices of Cartagena's rust-colored trench coat, hundreds of thin mechanical fibers wove together, pulling up his bulky emerald plated visor. His deep, unnatural, nebulae-like eyes dilated, focusing its biological scope until the operative's spinning kaleidoscope vision made out the shape of a patient standing before a window in a far left room.

"She's awake. Perhaps I can get some answers. If not, I'll ship her off to New Roswell to deal with Tartalo." Cartagena thought sinisterly. As with just his eyes, he examined Genesis's vitals. "Unbelievable." It appeared as if her body ran with perfect efficiency. Prior to the operative's lumbering frame approaching the doorway, Genesis already felt his intimidating leer. The birds fled.

She didn't know what to think of the strange man's looks. He was a rugged, bronze-skinned individual, not too much off from her complexion, sporting a trenchcoat with an excessive number of pockets. Under was a matte-silver breastplate akin to what gladiators wore but modernized. At his waist, a bandolier of capsules and cork plugged vials of colored liquids. The operative's spiked knee pads were plagued with rust caused. His whole existence caused Genesis to question why such an individual was even approaching her. He was clearly suited for combat elsewhere. The second eye contact was made, none of that mattered. She felt like a cornered fox. Instinctively, her body tensed up.

Clearing his throat, Cartagena's voice softened a bit before he spoke.

"Ms. Morant, it's nice to meet yo–"

He paused, acknowledging the spike of adrenaline visibly pumping into her system. With his microscope eyes, he visualized the mobilizing nano machines in her system.

"BACKTHEFUCKUP!"

The light switch flip to anger in Genesis expression resembled a scowling cheetah. He examined her abromally large canines with visuble concern. Lost for words, Cartagena tried to quell the intensity of the situation.

"I'm just here to ask you a few questions."

Right foot forward, knees bent, right leading arm posed like a claw. She was dead serious. The befuddlement within the operatives head space was short-lived once realizing the Val'gara nanomachines manipulated her to a dangerous level of aggression. Though Genesis' sleeveless hospital gown, his eyes surveyed the extremity of her chiseled muscle definition. Cartagena siphoned the uncountable mechanical fibers present in his body as a response. The tension was so thick in the air that you could cut it with a knife. It was like a western showdown. Who would draw first?

The instant a single fiber left his sleeve, Genesis sprang across the bed with the grace of a cat, springboarding towards Cartagena with the conviction of a lion. Thousands of wires exploded out of his clothes, overwhelming her in a sea of threads wrapping all of her limbs. This included her downward slashing arm, which was just centimeters away from his chest. At first glance, it was easy to mistake her elongated nails as acrylics, but they were outright razor sharp claws. As they crept close to the operative's armor, the bulging vein on his forehead became pronounced. This defied logic. Cartagena could stop a speeding SUV in its tracks, and here he struggled to contain her. She was winning the tug of war, and with a vigorous slash, she shredded his body armor like cardboard, inflicting a grievous cut across his chest.

Blood stained his boots cherry like dripping chateau montrose. Autonomously operating threads performed like stitches sowing his wounds proactively.

No longer playing nice, Cartagena tightened his grip in a fit of rage, outright ragdolling her with the combined might of his bulky grappling frame and constricting threads. He suplexed her, propelling as much of her body as he possibly could through the top of the room's doorframe and into the next across the hall. The entire floor went into a frenzy as patients, nurses, and senior medical pactitioners scrambled to get out of the way, screaming hysterically.

Clenching his chest with his left glove, Cartagena couldn't believe he allowed himself to take such a blow. There wasn't much time to dawn on it, however. Through the walls, he saw the target already up, healthy, and near another open window. His threads urgently contorted themselves, rocketing around and into the next room infused with bioforce, lassoing her as she reverse dove like an olympian into the night. As soon as his rope knotted tight, her body dispursed into swarm of nanomachines, self destructing into the wind, leaving Cartagena wrangling smoke.

She was gone.

Uncharacteristically, a smirk made it onto the Mobius Operative's face. He began to record an audio log of the interaction.

"In a brief moment, she cloned herself and camouflaged traces of her real form that even these eyes couldn't notice. I counted only three blinks on my part throughout the whole exchange. I suppose this settles the debate of whether this technology is worth pursuing..."

The blondie expectantly waited for his reply, keeping her young blue eyes on the man as he tried to collect himself before replying. It was no problem for her of course, all processes usually had delays and waiting for an input was not that grave of a situation, this was no hard real time system after all. “Huh…” She noticed the man staring down at her attire, as well as the bulge within his pants, though something within her made her think about that more. Image processing was something she could do very effectively, so after a few moments she knew what to do.

Reaching for her gun she immediately took it out and stashed it in her crotch, imitating what the man had done but with her small subcompact 9mm pistol. “Is this how it is supposed to be done?” She said as she adjusted the pistol inside her pants. “It seems a bit hard to-” She now tried to whip it out, taking a few moments just to get it out. “-Aim and shoot rapidly by keeping it there…” With her theory confirmed, she once again placed it on her hip, being held by her black jeans and web belt which contrasted with her pale skin, the only thing matching her clear skin being the chrome buckle that kept her pants from falling with the extra weight. Lowering her shirt, she continued her way to the table alongside the man.

Following Dom, Han took a seat. She reached over and grabbed one of the many fold-able chairs that were available and, after grabbing two of the hotdogs and filling them with mustard, she sat down, heeding his advice on the matter of nourishment. “I didn’t remember this place having food-” She commented, looking around as she took a bite, chewed, and swallowed remarkably quickly. Hearing his comment, she stopped herself from talking too much about the interior of the Holy Knights of Terra headquarters and instead focused on answering his question. “I want to shoot things again!” She said cheerfully, her smile contrasting with her statements. “It has been a while since I went to the range, bullets are expensive, and I have not yet used my hog.” Though, she was also left with a small blank, a gap in her memory that she could not call from her libraries. “Dragon? Who is that?”

Her attention was immediately shifted once the Dragon began speaking, her focus being diverted entirely as the other spoke. With laser focus, she listened to what the man was saying, her eyes scanning all his movements rapidly as well as the photos, cataloguing them for future reference like a mechanized target acquisition system. Each of the contracts was interesting, though there was one that felt like the easiest from her perspective, something she could do as a start. “I like the performer one.” She said with a smile after the speech was over, turning to Dom. “May we take it? It seems like the least dangerous.” How exactly Han came to that conclusion was unknown, even she did not why she felt that way.

—— Earth-F67X: North Capital City: New Venice

Damn, she’s fake, but — what was that quote about Hepburn’s character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s? A real fake. Nothing fake about her, just, well, almost more mannequin than human. Yeah, that describes this Han girl pretty well; mannequin.

“Performer? That Azot? Seems easy pickings. Frankly, we don’t need to, err, off it. We can probably trick it through one of those portals, send it to the pink piss streak in the sky. It wouldn’t even want to come back, stinkin’ rat. Bet on it.”

He glances at Han to see if there is any sort of affirmation, even though it was technically him agreeing her to suggestion, then scrawls the number 27 on a sticky and slaps it on the cork board underneath the word Azot and the address 20th and Fifth.

“Altuve’s jersey, good luck. Usually. Pick a word, number, whatever. Random. Somewhat. Easy to recall. They’ll set that as your contact. Anyway, we should get going. Unless you’re still hungry,” Dom finishes, noting the ravenous intake of hotdog and remembering Han’s comment about needing money so she wouldn’t starve or whatever. She is by no means anorexic, but she could use a few more curves. Odd girl. Maybe an immigrant from some impoverished Scand NatStat struggling to compete against Apollo’s government.

Maybe something sinister. A plant.

Dom’s dark eyes narrow in concentration, then he laughs at nothing.

“But yeah, eat and walk. Grab whatever, get steppin before these other Knights beat us to the punch.”

Her thoughtless clear pale blue eyes remained on Dom, completely oblivious to his inner thoughts as she smiled and listened to him explain that violence would perhaps not be necessary. A bummer, Han thought, her smile waning as non-violent alternatives were presented. “Awh-” She let out. Nevertheless, she followed him as he walked over to the board.

“Something easy to remember?” She echoed, bringing a finger up to her chin as her countenance immediately changed. Her focus was spent completely on this simple task, what would be easy to remember? She recalled people would not usually remember long numbers, nor unknown words, but she also had to make it memorable. “How about Lattice?” A simple yet not too simple word, two syllables, and with no real connection to her. She liked it though sought approval from what she now saw as her new mentor, Dom.

Being who she was of course, she got a sticky note and wrote down her new code-name under Dom’s number. Han made sure to pick a sticky note that was magenta in color, and a pen that was red, as to make it very bright to the eye and hard to read, almost asking to be examined further. “Neat!” She exclaimed, her arms forming two handles at her sides as her fists rested on her hips. One affirmative nod later and she was ready to go.

There was just one thing she had to get though. Her head turned to Dom, her smile brightening as he said she could get whatever. “Anything…” She thought out loud as she rushed over to the hotdogs and took a bottle of Canola Oil, downing half of it before capping it again. “Let’s go.”

—— Earth-F67X: New New York City, Chinatown

It took nine hours, well after business rush. The genetic tweakers finally subsided. Mateo lay on warm white tile, curled in the fetal position, automation rinsing the transient fur off his body. Every bone and muscle was in agony, morphing from wolf anatomy to human. In particular, his asshole stung. This was the type of spa he personally avoided, the type where horny patrons saw a wolf chained to the floor and decide to let their deviant kinkster natures run wild.

Bastard! I’m going to kill him. Does Fesyen think my wrath can be quelled by cheap bling? No, it’s not that. He doesn’t take me seriously. He doesn’t know what I’m capable of. Well, the prick is going to find out!

At some point, unnoticed, the loader relieved Mateo of his bonds. Alone, he needed some time to recover, so he found a private booth and locked himself inside until the tremors lessened. Once his fingers were servicable, he took the collar off. He glared at it in his grip. Yeah, it looked sick, favorite color and pattern and all. Matched his drip. But wolfing out without warning was not cool.

Waiting outside the booth, he found his socks and swim trunks atop a teakwood chair; as promised, pristine clean. Clothed, he returned to Feysen’s warehouse.

He didn’t make eye contact with Fesyen or say a word. Just started shopping. He’d pick things up, take a gander, and put them on or put them down if they weren’t to his liking or he heard a chirp of disapproval from the watchful designer. First, he slipped on some a-low kicks with built-in phase-step, then a vintage Arivex air force A2 leather bomber jacket with activatedc camouflage and climate control.

“Good taste for street such pretty trash,” Fesyen purred, “Now sit down and let me do your hair, just as I promised.”

“We’re all street trash,” Mateo mumbled, plopped down on the ripperdoc surgical station.

Including his mastoid implant, this was his second mod. The first that altered his appearance in any meaningful way. Cyber hair. Programmable to look however he wanted. Taken off the day old corpse he dragged in here, now maggot shit. Maybe it wasn’t wise to wear something off a dead body, not because of any serial signatures — long gone, those were — but the karma. Not that karma was a friend to his sorry ass. Anyway, it took three hours of laser-searing his existing follicile roots, shaving his head, applying a cutaneous grid, and then meticulously grafting the synthetic hair into his scalp. A miraculously bloodless affair. The grid meshed with his mastoid implant, which meant Mateo could reprogram his hair with a thought: spiked, forward, linear, neon red.

“Any recommends? Weapons?”

“Mateo, baby, I’m an artist — a collector, not an arms dealer. The best I can do is a Fairbairn-Sykes. A knife, good quality. Worth a prize at the right auction, no doubt. Built-in razzle-dazzle. Mmm. You need pants. Maybe a shirt. Although you have such lovely skin. Covering it would be criminal. Tragic, even. Nano body sleeve, the anti-rape variety gives quite the shock to anyone who touches you without permission. Resembles a tattoo, your choice of pattern animation. Powered by body heat.”

“Fine. And charcoal gray cargo pants,” Mateo included, “light arms resistant, minimum. Better if you have the military grade they give to war journos that can stop mortar shrapnel.”

“Nothing but the best,” Fesyen promised.

Mateo stretched in front of a full-length mirror, flicked the blade in front of him and caught it deftly, well-balanced, and asked, “Remaining credit?”

“I do~o have the right to a profit,” Fesyen answered.

“Then we’re done here,” Mateo agreed, flicked the blade out again, and left a red smile under Fesyen’s chin. He wiped it clean on a bright stack of polylinen on the way out. Didn’t wait to hear the body hit the floor. The loader and warehouse cameras saw him, but their memory units were fried. His A2 made him unrecognizable to the city-level cameras stationed outside.

—— Earth-F67X: North Capital City: New Venice

Dom exited HKT HQ with Han at his side. A sidelong glance. Not his type. Kind of an airhead, although that category of beautiful woman had its niche too. They made their way through the half-flooded subway tunnels of New Venice. At one point, Dom waved at a restaurant named The Frier’s Tuck and said, “Don’t eat there. Was on that show, Bad Dream Cuisine. Their meat is all spoiled, which says something for stuff grown in a lab parasite-free. But the real reason not to go is that they, uh, what’s the word, oh yeah — they garnish with pubic hair if they think you’re Catholic. They think everyone is Catholic.”

Eventually, the pair came to a flight of stairs leading back up to the surface, or at least what use to be the surface. Good luck seeing sky from there. Two perpendicular signs illuminated in harsh yellow neon read Fifth Ave and 19th ST.

“Got a few hours before, well, that’s my business. Keep your eyes peeled. You know what it is we’re hunting yeah? Azot?”

To Dom, Han’s expression seemed incapable of change. Blank, perpetually confused. That’s at least how he read it. Maybe that’s why he identified as a man. They were easy, understandable, relatable. Women were fucking Sphynxes.

“Monkey people, blue and green fur. Well, we see an alien, we’ll know. They aren’t us. Far cry from it.”

Dom turned around and started walking away, watching for any activity. Maybe they’d come across the little bugger.

—— Ximbic-8: Tuscré, the Fae Fields

Portal light etches its way through Czes’ bestial extra-armor and into his eyes, blinding him during his superluminal transit. Though he cannot see, his journey is of no lessened intensity. Goosebumps distort his skin, his hackles rise, and his breath catches in his throat. Without warning, he is falling, spiraling, dying, yet so rife with life and expectation that, rather than dread, his soul swells with wonder. The stimuli calms — he is at peace. Cool grass traces the backs of his bare arms while alien branches sway a gentle frame around the violet-tinged night sky creeping above. Motes of amber and fuchsia drift above him, quite akin to disturbed dander or milkweed seeds. Through it, he can make out Earth; a small blue dot, the size of his thumbnail. Something is missing, he realizes: his defense, his armor, his exo-skeletal beastframe, worth billions of dollars back on his now-abandoned home world, rejected utterly by this place.

Yet it let him enter in.

Guess I’m not evil after all. Maybe ... maybe I just don’t need it anymore.

He sighs, and it is like the demon straddling his chest for the last four centuries is gone.

On the back of his hand, a glow, both in light and in warmth, distracts him.

“Constellation of a baby jaguar sound asleep beneath a shooting star, morphing into a Möbius strip and back,” he chuckles, then drops his hand down on the comfortable blanket of grass, “Sanguine, shimmering, blood. Apt. Sleep sounds good. A truly peaceful sleep, for the first time in forever.”

He nods off, alone but not lonely, bathed in the light of opalescent night.



—— Earth-F67X: North Capital City: Flatiron

When Dom turned the corner of Fifth and 19th, at the foot of the old 115 building, the sky was beginning to dim, which meant very little in such a city of neon night. What struck him was the garish glint of the Empire State Building so distant, yet so bright. Nearer, though, were a slew of run-down diners, salons, and dive bars. Mixed residential, not his thing. A slum, hidden from the light of day by the almost incomprehensible bulk of the Canopy — a behemoth superstructure that made him think of that pre-unification movie, Independence Day. Neither conformed to his preference of a clean and orderly barracks.

Almost immediately, he saw the Azot.

His first reaction, to his chagrin, was smiling. The Azot was in the midst of a one-handed handstand whilst balancing a frisbee on its tail tip. A performing monkey in a dirt-stained little Ronald McDonald costume, green of fur rather than the typical black or brown found to Earth. Same as the color infiltrating clothing design these days, skobeloff. He planned to buy Vesca a scarf in that color.

Get a grip, Dom. You’re here because that alien trash is taking business away from the people and animals that belong on this planet.

He leaned against the brick facade of a building and observed. The crowd seemed pleased, a few creds thrown in the Azot’s pot. Odd, really. Physical money, still a thing? Then it hit him, all of these people were dirt poor. Their coins were probably ancient, found in la-z-boy cushions and between the pages of old books. Everyone here was.

Right after she exited Han began to walk back towards her car. An old relic from before Spain was obliterated by a giant alien city. The silver Mercedes was as sharp feeling and sophisticated as when it was manufactured, mostly thanks to Han being able to service it constantly, feeling every minutiae detail about it and adjusting it whenever she had some freetime. The results were not visible but rather could be felt from the air suspension being lofty yet grounded, enough to feel the road but not so much as to make the ride overly stiff, seats that were black leather yet lacking any sun discoloration or rips from the years of use, and tinted windows that like transitions lenses let just the right amount of light through yet were nigh impossible to see through from the outside. “Us living organisms do not like temperatures that are too high or low so how about some air conditioning?” She said as she strapped herself and took the wheel, letting Dom ride shotgun.

Her driving was not very featureful, in fact, it was almost too stale. She let people merge and any passerby cross the sidewalk, something not very common in New New York. After a few minutes of driving around alternate routes, considering a large highway was still destroyed, she suddenly shifted her demeanor. She shifted down gears and kept the revolutions of the car’s engine a little bit too high before she took a turn at a sketchy road. Her eyes remained locked on a car not too far away from the two, a moment later she spoke: “Sorry Dom but I don’t really like those guys. I saw them from this area’s CCTV before I arrived here and they don’t seem very nice at all!” In reality, she had just watched them as she got close to the local network and decided to let out her inner violence on the probably, definitely, totally, criminal aliens.

What came next was expected. She rolled down her window and pointed her machine gun out of the window like a MAC-11, though not sideways as she was too white for that. Adjusting the fire rate she let a two second long burst out of the gun, her aim unwavering as she sprayed her target. What she aimed for was a parked car, one with quite nice alloys and some aliens chilling. They were listening to some song she did not recognize but assumed was some alien thing that was horrendous, definitely. One of them almost managed to aim his sidearm though being the quicker draw Han managed to gun him down. All three of them were left with between 10 to 13 shots on their bodies from a full power cartridge, mostly knocked out from shock and left to die either from blood loss or organ failure. Once the casing hit the floor, and Han pulled the machine gun back into her car she rolled up the window and sped off to the location. “Sorry about that but I had to really let them know they cannot just park there you know? That’s like loitering and stuff.” She said, her face brighter now.

Eventually, the two would reach their destination, Han stopping the car a good distance away while Dom was sightseeing. “So, how are we getting this guy to follow us?” She asked her colleague for this mission, her hands on her legs as she turned off the car and simply watched from a distance and her gaze moving between Dom and Azot. She really did not understand what he was doing, or that the people around him were poor, but she recalled her mission being something along the lines of teaching him a lesson but not killing him.

—— Earth-F67X: North Capital City: Flatiron

Han’s question snapped Dom to bitter reality, a candid picture of the group in which he was now an embed. Too late for second thoughts. The HKT attracted crazies, and Han was a prime example. Either that, or maybe he just didn’t have what it took to purge Earth of alien filth. That car ride. He winced. Hoped he wasn’t seen as he entered and exited her fancy vehicle, air conditioning be damned. Behind the wheel, she was smooth, perfect, calm. Mechanical, even. A little eerie. And the side roads she took him down, his leg right twitched non-stop and he kept his grip on his sidearm at rest on his thigh — just incase he was her target.

Reality past caught up with present, and he turned to her,

“Oh, so ya decided to follow, huh. How about we just watch this one for the moment, ya know, broad daylight, kids playing on the sidewalk. Not a good look to disturb that,” Dom answered.

Her eyes were dead, he realized. No emotion at all. Crazy white girl unloaded her machine gun in broad daylight, like an old time gangster movie. Dead ass.

“This is for us, Earth’s people. Community. Plus, we don’t wanna tour of Fishkill, ya know?” he joked, “So we watch, wait, and see where he goes. Keep the job clean, dirt free.”

—— Earth-F67X: North Capital City: Flatiron

Just as Dom offered his unsolicited, but in his mind necessary for a psychopath, advice, his phone vibrated to life and busted out an ugly blare. He pulled it out of his hoodie’s kangaroo pouch, glanced at the screen, looked confused for an instant, then went pale — which, given his swarthy complexion, was impressive. The notification prompt merely read CODE GESTALT.

“Work. I have to leave, like, right away,” he mumbled an explanation to Han, glanced around confused, reconnoitered, and nodded resolutely.

“Sorry,” he choked out, turned, and sprinted south down Fifth Avenue. Nearest entrance to the Mainline Defensive Array was 2 kilometers away, a 10 minute run if he pushed his five-two self hard; what he lacked in stride length he more than made up for in robust glutes.

Shit. First time in a year. Is this the real deal? Nah, no way.

Frick, I hope everyone is safe.

This is bad.

It is always bad.

—— Earth-F67X: North Capital City, 4 Pennsylvania Plaza

When Mateo strolled up to the Gardens, he knew what he was getting himself into to an extent. Jag’s crew was the baddest of the ratkings clawing their way through North Capital City, or at least that’s what the rumor mill gushed. Well, not so bad that they’d kill him on sight. That was the main thing. At least, as far as gangs were concerned. Then again, gangs were pretty tame this close to a big military installation like his cousin Dom worked at, the Mainline Defensive Array. Out west, those were real gangs. Xeno hunters. Fathers of the HKT, with bootleg bioforce cannons ripped from alien limbs. Here in NorthCap, the HKT was a joke; little lame xeno stalkers.

A block away, the venue wasn’t as imposing as he remembered. Kind of resembled a toppled water wheel. Not that he knew, personally, what that looked like. Just delineations via web games streamed into his nEXtFlesh, along with dragons, wenches, and pubs. A three-story-tall television screen mounted on the structure looped some sort of skeuomorphic silkscreen animation of jungle animals acting out their roles of predator and prey. Apt. Threw him back to art history class, that Warhol prick. No more basketball or concerts in this arena. At least, not as far as Mateo knew. He sauntered up to the entrance, casual and cool in his new A2. Hoped maybe his wolf sleeve would gain him some favor. If necessary, he could yiff out in loving memory of Hantu Fesyen.

Hah!

Close enough to not have to shout, he gave a chin up head tilt at one of the thugs perched atop a car. An old gas burner, pearl cherry sunset paint job, maybe a Dodge Challenger. Definitely American made, back when that meant something. Now it was only Earth and the damn aliens. Well, they weren’t so bad. At least, not the newer ones. The old creepy ones, they could all burn in a mass grave. Clysm, those old ones were called. From the FCW. Still, none of those turned him into an eternal twink and passed him around, that sin was committed by his fellow humans.

The guy on the car’s hood was big, looked kind of like a rhino with his thick gray skin, wide body, big muscles, and slicked back black hair. Took a moment for Mateo to fake some confidence, but he did, and asked,

“Don’t suppose you guys got a patch of concrete here where a man can curl up without being raped, stabbed, and robbed?”

That elicited a laugh.

Rhino’s fist dropped on the car hood. Mateo thought it might buckle, but it was built out of tougher stuff than the newer plastimolds vehicles used by anyone who could afford personal transportation. Then his ears were hit by a thick Tatar accent, “No man I see, just little boy. Infant.”

Mateo crossed his arms, puffed his bare chest, and shot back, “Legal to kiss or kill. Can’t help it I have a babyface, compliments of the Caths,” and at that he spit on the sidewalk, “But like I said, just need a safe place to curl up tonight. I can pay a bit. Or work for the honor — just not sex. I’m not a hole to be passed around.”

“Hmph, infant talks too much. In. Get,” Rhino gestured over his shoulder to the triple glass doors.

While apprehensive, Mateo decided to maintain bravado and keep to the plan. He made his way inside. A second group guarded the interior, lazy but alert, to whom he extra-casually informed, “Big guy outside told me to come on in for a nap.”

Pulling a cigar from her lips, some girl with a cheetah-print ugly orange boa and triceps as big as Mateo’s chest grunted, “Sleep there,” and pointed down a hall with her smoking stogie, “talk later.” French, maybe? Definitely a wig, with that straight platinum blonde mane. Awkwardly, he squeezed through their makeshift barricade, musty old stainless steel filing cabinets. True to his request, he settled onto a little sleeping bag on a concrete ledge underneath some bleachers still standing. Others dozed nearby, notably agitated in their slumber.

It was hard to fall asleep, ruminating on the horrors waiting to wake him up now that he was in Jag’s debt. It took a while, but he was bushed, and therefore inevitable. Fesyen’s murder weighed heavy, even if Mateo refused to admit that hard truth. Little twerp probably deserved better. When sleep finally claimed him, it came hard. Usually, he dreamed webbed; plugged in, almost awake, lucid. Harder to sneak up on. No option here. Unplugged, normally it was darkness, no sense of time, then awake. Felt like a minute, was actually hours.

That night, he did dream.

It hit different.

A great many people on Earth dreamed the same dream.

Details diverged for each individual, but a sense of choice was ever-present. Prizes behind two doors on the set of a gameshow. A fork in the road along a forest trail. An elevator with two floors, one to stay and one to go. Blue pill or red pill. Sink or swim. Ride or die. One path always felt familiar, the other always promised something novel and phenomenal.

In Mateo’s dream, he raced through NorthCap on a neon red Suz’ki monocycle, chasing down his quarry. The hunt called him, he tasted it in the crisp night late autumn air. Like iron, like rust, like destruction. Not a new sensation, but in this particular case it was distinct; piquant. A capstone. Now a trained killer, a tall card stack in his black deck. He lusted after that big, brass pog to hold it all down. In streaks of vermilion light, the city teetered and coiled as he banked corners and rolled curbs, closing in on his quarry. He didn’t see his target, not quite. Didn’t matter. The person was real, terrified, named. Dad. The self-same shitheel who sold Mateo to the Caths to be their tight hole, because he was too indifferent to secure an honorable means of putting food on the table. His galvanized fist clenched the monocycle handlebar, he heard a crunch. Fake. Fake as his lungs, his eyes — almost every part of him. Why a hunt? Why not a ghost in the night? Silent, fast, sure. No. I want him to run, sweat, fear, piss himself with dread. He deserves more. To be toyed with, to be the victim this time around. Break-neck speed, Mateo careened over a bridge. Below, a canal flowed into the river, slick, shimmering scat and fecund with Hudson trout. Violent jerk on the grip, and the monocycle’s internal gyro whirled upsidedown. Arm stretched out, he aimed. Four whispers hissed along grooves in his wrist, and humming bird rockets erupted against the fleeing car’s exhaust. It flipped, cornered on a concrete abutment, and rolled down into an intersection. A man crawled out a hole where a door should’ve been. Himself hitting the pavement, Mateo brought his monocycle to a screeching rubber-traced halt and placed his Fairbairn-Sykes to his father’s throat.

The scene shifted. Mateo was being asked a question.

“If you could do it all over, would you?” mused an alien voice.

A mirror floated before him, backlit by a diffused gray void. A young man, more cute than handsome, looked back, serious, baffled, concerned. Real, though. He was real, with human skin, human eyes, and a human heart. Not some monstrous terminator. It was who Mateo remembered being, before he became so disgustingly artificial.

The person in the mirror was crying, but relief rather than sadness coaxed forth his tears. Silent, he watched himself. Then in the back of his mind that tender alien voice melodically encouraged,

“Do you seek your wish,
to live a life that’s vaster than your past insists?
If so consider this,
Cling to your dreams
of something more than happenstance causality.
Or merely stumble on,
ignore the door flung open for you for so long.
For this we’ve tried to bide,
a year, an age, an eon,
other planes and frames delayed,
time soon they claim, yours is used up,
decide.
So with this final bid,
we ask of you to ask of yourself ...
Dare you here to live?”

Gray fog dissolved to a brilliant, star-filled, violet-tinged firmament; a panoply of pathways, adventures, and cosmic awe. Cities of drifting purple palisades and glass curtains surpassing anything Mateo imagined, even in his most vivid dreams and immersive nEXtFlesh games, rose from obsidian clouds, translucent shining beacons. Beyond that, his mind’s eye hied in the shimmer of a tear to fields of soft celadon light, of flowers adrip in moonglow, and opalescent birds contrived in stone and wind and radiance. He dared blink, and metal structures clashed in a burning ballad, paying homage to the sunfire furnace of their subterranean source.

Pain in his side sharply struck and he woke up howling.

—— Earth-F67X: North Capital City: the Mainline Defensive Array

Dom burst through security at the Mainline Defensive Array with a badge flash, Trimble Place entrance. Almost fell down the wet tile stairs, but grabbed rail a blink before kissing the on-duty MP’s polished steel toes. Good luck, Trimble was right off the lockers; made sense, most military personnel domiciled just north of the array mid-island in relocated mid-century brownstones. By the time he reached his locker, he hopped on one sneaker until he dislodged his other foot from his sweat and rain-soaked gray sweatpants.

I smell like ass, but ...

Thoughts luxated and out of breath, Dom shoulder-smashed the adjacent metal cabinet, span his combo, popped the door, grabbed a bottle, and doused himself in cheap cologne. In retrospect, might’ve been better to let his musk migrate from civilian grays to combat greens. Too late, he needed to be operational. Almost presentable, he sprinted another kilometer and reported for duty ... only to sit at his drone combat terminal for six hours of intense, maddening, crotch-sweat inducing basically nothing.

Electroskeumemphic scans of Allure City indicated business as usual, a reality confirmed by a dozen other pilots. Alas, no missile strikes today. Thaumic indicators likewise were standard. Every band was disgustingly normal. Assigned persons of interest did nothing relevant, nothing worth killing them over. No real information, just gossip. An alien ship, maybe, in distress, no apparent threat, possibly, ambassador en-route to the EEE, if the thing even existed in the first place. Just a rumor. No confirmation for loose-lipped low-ranks. A second potential signal, nothing definitive. Six hours dilated by tension into six heart-palpitating minutes, he felt a tap on his shoulder, the relief unit.

“My turn, Thug. Ugh, ever shower or is that just the ‘rone makin’ ya ripe? Like rushhour at the whorehouse.”

Exhausted and, at last, adrenaline-drained, Dom merely glared. Chronometer said he’d been awake 26 hours. Bleary and weary, he stumbled back to the lockers, found liquid soap and a stiff towel, and hit the gang showers in pure zombie mode. Still wet, he made a b-line for the emergency bunks, zipped himself into the blackout curtains, and memory banked.

“What the —” Dom shot up, bumped his forehead in the darkness, dropped back. Sheets drenched, cold sweat, gooseflesh. Face wet, too. Didn’t speculate on why. Didn’t wait, but by rote executed what years of therapy demanded: “DisSys: Lis,” he instructed, and his military-grade mastoid implant recorded audio, “Log, private, 3.3.40. Dream, initial sequence: Future, time indeterminate, married to Vesca, two kids—mine, Hell yeah! Not sure how, but with my frozen removed ovaries. Wife not happy about that, called me a liar. Family ruined, made a liar again, hauled away by police as a Xeno serial killer. Gov now Xeno-friendly under ... OH HELL NO.”

Dom breathed deep, calmed himself, and continued talking while the memory remained fresh, “Second part, final: don’t know where I am, when I am, and no certainty on wife or kids. But I’m happy. I wake up in the dark, just like now—total blackout, light and sound-proofed bunk, maybe a bunk, not sure, talking, recounting my dream. Then bam, I realize: I got morning wood. Swollen, engorged, intact, finally fucking complete, functional in every way. No need for therapists or doctors or geneticists. No massive debt military insurance refuses to cover. No homelessness. No kids hating me. And I know ... I know I gotta choose one or the other.”

Dom paused, assessed, then added in a whisper: “It sang to me. It is leaving soon. No more time. We’re cooked.”


—— Earth-F67X: the Kithless

Now the Kithless was without crew or pilot. Nobody was present to take pleasure in the scenery as it surfaced alongside the floating city-state Vervet. Nobody was onboard to admire the sun as it set vibrantly downward, dashed along the waves like the scattered scales of a cosmic golden koi. Fully automated, the yacht docked in the Comte Foundation’s private marina and powered down. In the ship’s lounge, a letter waited patiently for anyone who was eventually curious enough to investigate. It explained in simple terms the absence of the foundation’s president, Czes Schäfer, as well as the foundation’s lead attorney and rights advocate, Lionel Duperie. It further included an apology to the board for lack of advance notice, as Czes’ majority shares had been distributed equally among the foundation’s thousands of employees, worth trillions of dollars, each one made a millionaire overnight and with a vote in the foundation’s future actions.


—— Earth-F67X: Africa: Nyundo, Marange

Ever since that horrible day, bed-ridden. An empath, Makemba sensed the pain of those around her in the long-term care ward. Worse, she felt their pity, for here was her bed, her home, her future, her inevitable death. If not for the Popobawa’s curse, and her duty to heal those afflicted by it, her body would be young and hale. Instead, she was ancient and crippled far beyond any hope of recovery. Unable to change her bedpan. Unable to ebb her empathy. Unable to change the television channel, or better yet turn off the infernal machine and instead read a book. Now, there was her salvation. Audiobooks. She could recline, eyes shut, and let the words rouse her emotions enough to drown out the intrusions of the souls with her in a place of discarded hopes.

Today, the television was on and loud enough to annoy, although she understood only the subtitles. Something about a Rapture, but not quite. Nobody remembered clearly who went missing, despite numbers in the apparent millions. An inconsequential millions, so far. Maybe this wasn’t news, but some fantastical drama set in Japan designed to tease the mind with alternate realities where dreams whispered songs and sweet goodbyes.

Listless, her gaze floated to the time in the bottom-right corner of the screen, next to the ever-scrolling chyron.

3:00 a.m.

I should try to sleep.

Weakly, she tapped a button and activated a dose of mind-numbing y-aminobutryc acids. It lessened the intensity of her empathic curse, but she was only permitted two doses every standard diurnal cycle. Happy for pseudo-silence, as the foreign voices on the television were ultimately white noise, she dozed off.

For her, the decision came easy.

Sun’s high in the sky by the time I leave Luca’s. Another dose of ISAAC floods my neural weave. Slow as apology, I can feel the fog of trauma retreat. I walk the couple of blocks to where I parked Mary, carving my way through the sea of twisting humans.

<< Ascot is going to be a headache. Albion are heavy-hitters with a reputation for stacking bodies. The ICE on that flex circuit was no joke either. Gonna need a decent runner. One that’s cheaper than Eggy.

Ah, fuck. All that time in the deli and I didn’t grab nothin’ to eat. I know just the place. >>

I open the door to Bodega Bacu’s and am greeted by a jangly voice that bleeds through low-fidelity speakers blaring tinny P-pop, telling me to enjoy a tall Falco's Choice Coco-not Piña Slush. Projected neon font jiggles center-aisle across a fat cloud of synthesized tropical fruits that puffs out of poorly hidden diffusers in the shelving. I drop olfac sensitivity by 10% to keep from coughing up a lime.

Stylistic slogans in English and Alpabetong shatter across the broad expanse of Sóse's scuffed and faded bronze Deflexion jacket as he reaches through the holographic projection for a couple cases of electro-lime H2.0. He turns to the register and lines up, partitioning a section of his faculties to review the relevant details to his case.

<< Missing girl. Missing scientist. Worried parents. Dead husband.

Corpo stink all over the place.

What the fuck has Froggy got me looking into? >>

"You. Again? Why don't you just b-b-buy in bulk, ah? You like coming in here or somethin'? Always wasting my t-t-time with small purchases." The question came from the bodega's second-gen AI cashier; a rough simulacrum of the shop's original owner, now dead some 15 years.

"Morning to you too, Bacu. Let me get the waters and two, nah three, yeah three chopped lechon with eggs. Real pork, too. None of that pakshet lab-grown swine you try to pass off to the assholes. Oh yea, extra onions too."

Digital brilliance flashed across the dull copper of Sóse's irises as he paid for his items. The register blared a sour note while the words INSUFFICIENT FUNDS manifested in mid-air as a crimson chyron that scrolled in front of the detective.

<< That ain’t right. Let me check somethi- Oh, that bacon-lipped son of a bitch. He froze my fucking accounts. >>

Digging through his pockets, Sóse produces a handful of colorful datashards that he considers for a moment before setting a pair of chips on the counter. Their edges glowed in alternating lilac and saffron as Bacu scanned the floral motif of their QR codes.

***

Tinted lenses slipped across Sóse’s eyes from zygomatic recesses as he sunk into the plush leather upholstery of the driver’s seat. Massive hands on the steering wheel, he breathed in relief. After a recuperative moment, the engine turned over with a thought from the cybernetic detective.

Ten minutes later I’m coasting along the Palisades Parkway going to town on one of Bacu's sandwiches when a holo-call comes in through Mary’s comm systems.

<< It's MeMe. Shit. >>

I disable the vis-feed before accepting the call.

"MeMe, theyby, sweetheart, I was just going to call you."

"That’s cute but cut the bullshit, hunty, because this is not your momma’s house. I know a growing boy has got to eat and I'm not the only game in town, but you’re treating me like a Flatbush glitchqueen and it’s got me reevaluating our relationship.”

I struggle to choke down the lechon while I wait for the bomb to drop.

“What's this I hear about you doing a job for Froggy Huang?"

<< Best to be honest with MeMe. Never know what they've got tucked away. >>

“It’s a missing persons gig. Real time sensitive. Froggy’s name doesn’t leave as many lips as it used to and I owed him big since that raw deal in Neo-Chinatown. Look, MeMe, I’m headed North out of the city. Froggy knows we’re done once I wrap this up. When I get back, I’ll do your next gig pro-bono.”

MeMe's response hits me at the same time as a notification from Mary’s on-board navigation system informing me of my ETA.

"Tsk. Don’t make it a habit of disappointing me or deals won’t be the only things raw around here. See you later, soldier-boy.”

<< ETA to Belleayre is approximately 2 hours. >>
<< Thanks, Mary. Take over for me, will ya? I’ve got a lot to think about. >>

The ground shuddered as a mag-train barreled by overhead on its circuit towards one of the corporate arcologies suspended over the gleaming New New York Metropolis. The megastructures loomed above the skeleton of the old city, like biblical angels passing judgment on those left below after Rapture. Sheets of condensation dripped from the Canopy's sluice gates and exhaust ports onto Manhattan at intervals in the eternal night, toxic rainfall relentlessly eroding the old world with the discharge of the new.

Crossing out of the Alphabet City enclave into Chinatown felt like stepping through a portal into another world, ghostly halogen hanzi script blossoming across the full visual field like digital lotus flowers twenty layers deep, unregulated adspam slipping over any connection to the Net no matter how remote. A neighborhood at the foot of the Canopy, Old Chinatown was spared the catastrophic gentrification of New Venice by a kilometer of dense city sprawl, becoming a shadowland, dark unadulterated if not for the neon lures of red light akasen brothels and psychonaut dens, each a species of deep sea predator waiting for prey to wander by in the abyss.

The backstreets this far out were inert, halogen signs dead or flickering, the moldering buildings of Kowloon Quarter shuttered and quiet.

"Gun?"

"Yeah."

"Good. Run me through it again." Their pilgrimage peeled back the layers of this far-flung fiefdom of New New York, a maze of narrow paths lit at first by lurid pornographic holograms, fading into holopaint murals on sidestreets claimed by urban subcultures long since mutated into forms unrecognizable.

"Hanzu Fesyen. Niche fashion designer, had clout with some microculture influencers. Liked the Oshima-gumi wavelength for his amphetamine fix. Was kind of a pre-Contact otaku, sold a lot of junk from back then. I think he had a foot fetish or something." The upper left quadrant of the young yakuza's face was a patch of chrome, eye an inset panel of mirrorsteel, shaky hands fumbling as he tried to light a cigarette. Kid was a savant at a console, not so much in the field.

Ixchel watched him for a moment. A corrosive patch of mold clinging to the side of a building illuminated them in its pulsing green glow. The Hispanic woman was taller than her companion and haloed in a nimbus of light, OLED tattoos bioluminescent against bronze skin in patterns that could be microcircuitry or a Mayan creation myth, others inherited from the rest of the pueblos originarios: a grid map of Tenochtitlan, Toltec jade, glyphs of the Zapotec.

"Focus, Zenji. Pump the stims if you can't hold down a thought without twenty screens in front of you."

Zenji took a long drag, strata of rising smoke captured by the glowing ember. Ran a nervous hand through hair coiffured into the latest femto-fad fashion, wild in front, shaved in back. "Couple other interests. Ripper doc, kinda guy that knew what to do with an io if you know what I mean. Modded some of our boys too. He was pretty good."

"Oh? You a cutter now?"

"I dabble."

They emerged from an alleyway half a block from their destination. Ixchel pulled her hood down, glimmering jewelry and jade beads woven into long black braids that fell halfway down her back. The color of her huipil dress shifted according to the way incident streetlight struck the nanoweave. A gawkish Japanese man in a worn Chiba Circuit bomber jacket stumbled after her.



Locals knew better than to get too close to the converted Salvation Army warehouse near the border with Kips Bay. The sort of outsiders that found their way into this corner of Kowloon Quarter were invariably in need of Fesyen's peculiar services. Some time ago the enforcers of the Oshima-gumi yakuza bōryokudan had begun to number among his clients, enjoyers of the fixer's selection of vintage shōchū and plum liqueur.

The warehouse's exterior façade rotted beneath many years of accreted digital graffiti. A short man stood outside it. Sikoja neotraditionalist, Ixchel recognized immediately, complete with conical rice hat and geta sandals in gunmetal gray, doubtlessly extensive cybernetics concealed beneath his heavy black robe. Rather than eyes a visor curved over his face, glowing green dots ricocheting inside the display from surface to surface.

Zenji took the lead, approaching to a respectful distance then bowing ceremoniously. The ronin didn't move a micron, rattled off a few staccato sentences in the lilting syncretic pidgin of the North Pacific Hub. Zenji replied, slower and more carefully; Ixchel could hear the stress he put on the honorifics except when he mentioned her, careful not to suggest she and the Sikoja cyborg could occupy similar station. The lights in the visor aligned themselves along an axis and converged into a single cyclopean point clearly fixed on Ixchel as their exchange continued.

Several factions within the Oshima-gumi offered considerable resistance to the executive decision to employ the services of the occultist from Yucatán.

"Alright, I told him you're cool. Kihachi-san will be our fangshi," Zenji eventually informed her after their negotiation concluded. One of the first Sikoja neologisms Ixchel learned, the fangshi were specialized netrunners, usually experts in some pathologically hyperfocused domain. The technomancer didn't acknowledge her again at any point then or thereafter, turning and beginning to gesticulate as if conducting an invisible orchestra, lattices of ghostly codelight propagating around them, expanding and expanding ever outward.

Zenji was grimacing at her. "We think Hanzu's connected in Nine Suns Tower. Friends in the Yinglong, maybe. There are rumors he might have owed the Red Guild. So they're gonna come looking and the most convenient outcome here is that we get in, get out, and the police arrive before our tong counterparts come in for their own cleanup job."

As if on cue, Kihachi opened his robe and a series of decompression algorithms executed, mathematical abstractions unfolding like origami geometry. Ixchel blinked as a litany of mythological creatures materialized before the ziangshi, projected like film onto the holoscreen of reality and the nonstop marathon of absurdist dystopian sci-fi their present had become, Chinese guardian lions and terracotta apparitions marching outward and effervescing into the cityscape.

"Kihachi-san will simply run interference for us. Nothing too hostile. A few mildly cognitohazardous tautology traps and NP complex self-encryption virals that will leave them thinking like paramecia until one of their buddies does a full reset, maybe need a therapeutic memory scrub if they find it really traumatic, but no harm done in the long run. It's all symbolic. The point is to lay a minefield too overkill to even bother crossing it until we're packed up and gone, like telling some poor asshole he needs to solve a Millennium Prize Problem so he can take a piss. Stag beetles measuring each other's horns rather than fight and waste both of their resources, you know, better than killing each other and everything."

Ixchel rolled her eyes, pushing open a barbed wire gate that hung half-ajar with a single squeal of rusty protest, totally unstimulated by the testosterone fixation of vividly describing how they would incapacitate some poor fools from a rival faction, people who could easily be them if not for the causal shift of a butterfly flapping its wings at god knows what intersection in spacetime.

It wasn't so long ago that underground nanocelebrities and niche influencers came through Kowloon Quarter once in awhile to visit Hanzu, sometimes leaving with pre-Contact relics: gemstones from Jaipur, rare Nike sneakers sourced from a collector in Colorado Springs hours before Dreadnaught shattered the summit of Pikes Peak. At other times they left with the face of a lagomorph. Not anymore.



The warehouse door yielded easily, probably left unlocked by Fesyen's last visitor and totally disregarded by the paramedics afterwards. Zenji's baseline eye was wide as a saucer as they crept over the threshold, the other mirrored inset a warped reflection of the eccentric fixer's studio. Ixchel could feel hair on the back of her neck stand up and steeled herself, sensing heavily the weight of death around them.

Fesyen's territory would be open real estate in a question of hours, as soon as the panopticon surveillance psychopaths noticed on their palantirs and posted their forbidden lore to the darkweb. Lmfao fixer fesyen's a fuckin slab, who's king of kowloon now? pic unrelated lol. Hanzu's hard-earned little corner of the Chinatown curio market would be briefly warred over by local microcultures, strains of bacteria struggling over common substrate, until new borders stabilized after hours or days of bloodshed.

Ixchel didn't need Zenji's ocular mods to see his fear clear as body heat in infrared. She could smell his sweat, the apprehension. Still, the upstart netrunner's intel was on point: Fesyen was the scrupulous sort. Had been. Despite its crumbling outer shell, rows of sterile fluorescent lamps illuminated a space kept compulsively organized, obsessively tidy. Accoutrements of every shape, size and substance lined the perimeters of the vast open room in stacks among other artifacts, low-tech watches and vintage leather footwear sumptuously displayed alongside other commodities.

The metallic tang of blood and antiseptic lingered in the air. Fesyen's private insurance EMS team had already rolled through, tagged the body as a probable homicide, then conveniently forwarded the ping for law enforcement over Oshima-gumi-controlled channels coincidentally experiencing severe packet loss, guaranteeing a few cycles of solitude to look into the event before the police caught wind.

"Ix, it's fucking creepy in here," Zenji said as they rounded a surgical bed on an elevated circular platform in the center of the room, arterial spray like a scarlet Pollock splatter across the plastic curtain circling the ripperdoc's workstation. Zenji was right, but Ixchel didn't dignify him with a response. Distractedly looking everywhere except where he was going, the gokudō enforcer crashed into Ixchel when she stopped moving forward. She didn't budge a centimeter from where she stood, eyes fixed on something in front of her.

Hanzu Fesyen's death mask was one of utter disbelief, as if the disappointment at the lack of pageantry to his demise killed him rather than the ragged red tear in his neck. Rigor mortis and the pallor of the exsanguined rendered him kin to the mannequins modeling his artistry throughout the bleached studio space.

Ixchel's eyes closed. Another spin of the wheel in the self-perpetuating cycles of violence that swallowed her, swallowed the Earth. It never ended.

"This is some seriously cursed shit."

Ixchel heard a click she recognized for the camera app her companion had bootstrapped onto the OS of his modded eye and spun to scourge her hacker companion with the most withering stare he had ever experienced in his life. Fujiwara Zenji was sure in that moment that he experienced the total departure of his soul from his body.

"Are you livestreaming this, pendejo de mierda?" the girl from Yucatán hissed in a single breath that managed to simultaneously curse Zenji's entire lineage to an eternity of torment.

Incredibly, however, the android yakuza returned her stare with indignation, clammy with stimulant sweat, speaking faster than his own brain could buffer, "Do you seriously think I'm, like, single-celled? This is top tier content, I'm probably gonna rail some ketamine to chill out when I get home because looking at dead bodies is seriously fucked up, then pop some stims to edit this until like noon tomorrow so I can post it to my Soulcast before a thousand shit-eating plebs post their AI gen garbage from 23chan memes and my art gets sucked into the content singularity."

The infinitesimal red notification dot in the corner of his eye disappeared despite his protests. Still staring, Ixchel made a show of maintaining eye contact while she drew a long, jagged artifact from the folds of her dress: a wicked-looking knife, hiltless, more a shard of obsidian than an object meaningfully shaped by any blacksmith's hand, raw iridium cutting light into a rainbow across the edge of its dark stone blade. It drank the light around it, in stark contrast to Ixchel's luminescence.

After a dramatic pause, she gave a titanic sigh and the tension between them evaporated. "Go collect the security feed then scrub everything. This is going to take me awhile."

Ixchel glanced at the fixer's corpse and with an expert flourish pricked her other hand with the knife, a single scarlet bead growing fat on her fingertip, dropping into the thick puddle of Hanzu's blood. It rippled, and something began to stir which was not meant to be called back over the boundary it had crossed. She began to whisper in Nabʼee Mayaʼ Tzij, the oldest tongue, a spell soporific to the spirits of the underworld Xibalba, words to coax secrets from the lips of the dead...



Pruned of error by selection pressure, demanding a pinnacle of rigorous execution, every variable tuned to the principal components of the other, he realized in its wake that their act of ecoterrorism was a plot requiring perfect mathematical precision: who better to execute it than Vernon Hayes, statistician employed by the Metro Transit Authority, a man that understood the stochastic flow of commerce across New New York's infrastructure like a phlebologist observing the course of blood through vasculature.

And its jugular was the monolithic Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Years of careful planning went into the creation of NEW DEAL, into the subtle manipulation of complex chains of cause and effect, time to orchestrate and infiltrate the proper circles. All along NEW DEAL had been the puppet of greater forces, and Vernon Hayes instinctively knew that ultimately his pact was with the all-devouring dragon of capitalism, too beaten in life to naively believe in a shady cabal of trillionaires interested in ecorevolution.

He saw himself clearly in hindsight, too caught up in the rush to go deeper into the rabbit hole and see where it led.

The last twenty-four hours were an epinephrine smear in his memory. Collapsing ferrocrete as the shoulder of the BQE disintegrated under the demolition charge, fireballs of shrapnel falling over Brooklyn Bridge Park, his heart thundering in concert to endorphin microinjections. Screams that untethered Vernon's humanity from the skein of this life with the laser scalpel of murder, terrorbird mech maneuvering adroitly afterwards through smoke and bedlam to the dropoff point. He reeled at the horror now that it was over, but in the heat of the moment the aggression implants modulating his personality were sky high on the dopamine rush.

An encrypted communique reached the ecoterrorist as a genome technician went to work purging Vernon Hayes from the Earth. The fentanyl submerged him in the deep sleep of anesthesia while CRISPR kits scrambled every marker gene and microsatellite signature to make his new identity inscrutable to the inevitable forensic traces Vernon would have left behind. Craniofacial reconstruction, skin pigmentation alteration, enzyme profile edits so that even the sweat of his new self smelled different.

For a time in the narcotic twilight, he dreamed still frames from the explosion. Then he shifted REM cycles and the military grade AI mods interfaced with his cerebral cortex, co-opting certain brainwaves to teach him the memories of his new life by the light of phosphenes. In the process he subliminally decrypted the transmission from codename Cánshén.

The message from his mysterious benefactor was a koan riddle, identical to every prior communication.

A man waits beside the stream where his father taught him to fish as a boy, but his father has been dead for many seasons, and the flowers of the persimmon trees no longer bear fruit. The man asks no one, What is the meaning of these lives we lead?

Seventeen hours later the man who had been Vernon Hayes found himself glancing down at his new identicard under the nuclear sun up in New Haven, near the bridge over the Quinnipiac. Harold Strauss, mechanical engineer. To go from theoretical to applied mathematics redoubled his disquiet.

A ghostly voice answers him on the wind, What is the price of rice in old Edo?

Vernon -- Harold -- knew precisely where Cánshén, the Silkworm God, established their meeting location. Their rendezvous point was surprisingly straightforward despite the poetic obfuscation. There was a place Vernon Hayes loved most on Earth, and that place was right where he sat in a tucked away corner of High Rock Park in the woodland heart of the Greenbelt on Staten Island.

At the terminus of a meandering trail far from the beaten path, a single bench overlooked a great pond, older than man when he was a boy and today still unpolluted by the toxic biochemical runoff of the arcologies. A haven in nature, kept carefully apart from the sprawling dystopia of North Capitol City. His father brought him here when he was a child and even then he marveled at the lives of the fat, lazy trout swimming slow spirals through clean water.

NEW DEAL had been an ambitious project, he mused, a successful project, disruptive no matter how slightly to the industries of Empire, still dominating the news cycles... soon to be swept away in the daily whirlwind of tragedies. Vernon Hayes already had been, like so many other lives as a result of his actions.

Harold Strauss stared into the pond and wondered if by tracing his finger along the vermiculated scales of the fish he might draw a line back to an Earth lost in the cinereal mists of time, an Earth before yesterday, before NEW DEAL, before Vernon Hayes ever learned the name Cánshén, before Contact. He did not recognize the world, or the man it had made of him, reflected back across that pristine water. He hadn't in a long time.

Yes, he thought, taking a deep breath as his OS ran a quick diagnostics check on the military-grade mods whirring to life beneath casual clothes fit for the end of summer. The intuitions that made Vernon an attractive target to Cánshén and whatever shadowy power she represented now cleaved to a new and disturbing conclusion about his part in this mess. He had many questions in need of answers.

What is the price of rice in old Edo?



Zenji drained a sake bottle with one hand while the other splayed thumb and forefinger to zoom in on the holoscreen superimposed over the back of their booth at the Ramen Broadcast, a chain of low-end diners affiliated with the Oshima-gumi family. The privacy filter occluded their business from anyone curious enough to eavesdrop, an uninspired aquarium scene from a documentary on coral reefs extinct since the early 2020s. Even Ixchel took the owner's reassurances of seclusion at face value, begrudging the organized crime outfits of the Sikoja sprawl and their NCC offshoots one fact: they took honor seriously.

Zenji's baseline eye was unfocused, jumping along the seams of its saccadic movements, fingers twitching spastically to a thousand cyberspace stimuli.

"Oh, Ix, this Fesyen guy was one eccentric little freak. He has sorted binary trees of gossip files on every acquaintance, a gigaton of dirt on everyone he's worked with over the years. It's gonna take me awhile to get through all this stuff."

Ixchel Xiadani Xultún, daughter of both Maya and Nahuas, the peoples of the Maize God and Quetzalcoatl, was not feeling her best just then.

A crystal philter rested at a tilt before her on the scored laminate of the table in their booth. Inside a roiling black fluid ever pushed at the boundaries of the flask, the blood of Hanzu Fesyen eager for freedom. The fever of the underworld reached through Ixchel, binding some shadow of the fixer's blasted soul to her grim fetish, a guiding light shining in from Xibalba... Sweat dripped off her brow.

"That's great, Zenji. Any luck on, you know, finding the guy that killed him?"

Zenji pried himself away from the holoscreen and Ixchel immediately recognized the apologetic look in his eye. "Oh, uh. Yeah, no, the guy's wearing an Arivex, jacket like mine but a nicer brand and a better model." He popped his collar self-deprecatingly. "What can I say, the man has drip. A2 blurs his identity in the feed. If you gave me awhile I could maybe piece something together out of the noise but we're talking high tier net wizardry and uh, not on the timescale we're operating on here."

Ixchel nodded, exhaling deeply. "Alright. We'll do it my way then." Zenji looked at her with an endearingly worried expression. She opened her mouth and a micropore on top of the philter, letting a single viscous drop of Fesyen's blood fall onto her tongue. Ixchel had time to set the flask down and grip the edge of the table, sucking her breath in sharply, eyes fluttering shut and opening again obsidian black, like portals into vacuum.

The logographs and Mesoamerican tattoo glyphs along her skin fluoresced, searing bright then smoldering, magic seals restraining the spirit that the medium invited into her body for however brief an interval, multiple redundant failsafes set to eject it back into the underworld at the slightest indication of foul play.

Slowly, like the head of an Olmec statue grinding on its vertical axis, Ixchel's face rotated independently of the rest of her body to behold the scared-shitless yakuza netrunner sitting beside her. Zenji fixed his friend and whatever else happened to be renting her headspace with his most supplicant stare, the one he used to give his mom when she logged him out of the matrix and told him to get his sorry ass to class if he didn't want to end up a yakuza dog like his father.

"Uh, right, this was supposed to be like vidchatting or something. Mr. Hanzu Fesyen, sir. Just c- call me... Hanzo. Hattori Hanzo, right, anyway, we're trying to figure out what happened to you. If you get any kind of connection to the net down there, it'd be great if you could like, forward me the coordinates of the guy that cut you."