The coin flipped up and down, again and again, shining a bright silver in the streetlight. It flew into the air, then back down into Stockholm’s hand. He watched with melange of interest and impatience as two figures emerged from the darkness and into the light: a young Lowlifer kid who seemed too jumpy for Stockholm’s liking, and a hooded guy with eyes that shined brighter than the street lights above them. Even with his sunglasses, Stockholm had to squint when he looked at his face.
“You must be my guys,” Stockholm said, pocketing the coin. “I'll be your chaperone for the night, but before we head off, let’s go over the ground rules: No amateur dramatics, no histrionics, and no lone wolf, rogue element bullshit. Do exactly what I say, when I say it, and we’ll all be a little richer by the end of the night. I'll even see you safely home to daddy, got all that?”
The pair nodded anxiously. It’s almost as if they understood. Maybe they did.
Since when did Stockholm get paid to babysit? Whatever, a job’s a job.
“Good,” he said, “stick to the plan, and this will be a simple, in and out, no fuss job. Let’s hit it. Simple.”
Stockholm had no idea he’d be eating his own words by the time the night was through.
High Tech, Low Life.
“I can’t believe this.” He could, actually. That’s what pissed him off the most, though the current situation was definitely a runner up.
Stockholm threw the corpse down into the middle of the alley, then paused to catch his breath.
“Oh god... Oh Christ... You said this would be simple, in and out. They’ll come looking for us now, and the cops...”
Stockholm looked, with a hint of frustration and impatience, at the trembling kid leaning against the wall, then back at the body. Despite being a nervous wreck even before the job started, the kid was right. This was supposed to be simple, no one was supposed to die.
“Okay, first things first, help me get this off.”
Stockholm motioned to the mechanical appendage on the body now laying in a pool of rainwater and blood, bad weather for Cybergraft salvaging.
“You’re kidding, right? We need to get out of here, forget the arm!”
Stockholm removed a small tool from his coat pocket and knelt down.
“There’s no way in hell I’m letting good Cybergrafts go to waste. Get down here and help me get it off.”
The kid took a quick glance at the body, then nervously shook his head. “I can’t...”
Stockholm let out an exasperated sigh. “Fine, shut up and keep watch then.”
He turned back to the body, eyeing the hole in its chest made by a shotgun blast. Stockholm wasn’t impressed; he’d been putting holes in things long enough to know a decent hole when he saw one. He also noticed the cold, lifeless eyes. “So much for bright-eyed,” Stockholm thought to himself, remembering how the hacker’s eyes had had a bright glow to them. Cybernetic eyes, useful for that line of work. Stockholm ran his hand over the hacker’s face, closing his eyes. Not out of some kind of respect for the dead, they just creeped him out.
Stockholm switched the tool on and got to work removing the steel limb. “I hate these VersaTools,” he muttered. “Way too clunky. Not to mention they bring out a ‘new and improved’ model every other month, bloodsuckers.” Under different circumstances, Stockholm probably would have noticed the irony in that. Maybe he would have laughed, too.
“Wait, you’re gonna do that right here? Shouldn’t we at least get off the streets?”
“Where do you think we are?” Stockholm growled. “I didn't have time amidst all the gunfire and the running, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t notice any places to dismember a corpse in a hurry, did you?”
“Bu-“ Stockholm cut through the objection with a glare so sharp, it could have made quick work of the arm. The kid closed his mouth and turned from the grim surgical display happening at his feet, instead focusing his eyes nervously on the road through the chain-link fence, keeping watch for any Peacekeepers that might come to sweep the sector.
“Gotcha!” Stockholm’s eyes widened in triumph. The arm was loose enough now that he could just yank it off. He placed his foot firmly onto the ribcage of the dead Mindjacker, and gave a sharp pull. The arm broke free of its socket.
“Now for the messy part,” Stockholm murmured. He withdrew a blade from the sheath on his boot, and, with surprising speed, cut through the wires still tethering the arm to the hackers brain. Blood and electrical sparks shot from the mechanical wound, Stockholm narrowly avoided most of the spray, his sunglasses shielding him from the rest. He rose to his feet, and examined his prize with a sinister grin, like a predator that had just finished grazing over its prey.
“Not bad,” Stockholm said, wiping blood from his chin. “These kind of grafts sell pretty good on the second-hand market, heheh.” He undid the buckle on his satchel and stashed the arm inside.
“You’re hysterical,” the kid snarked. “Can we get out of here now?”
“Come on, lighten up,” Stockholm said. “No point crying over spilled blood.”
“Lighten up? They were ready for us back there. The second he jacked into the mainframe, they were all over us. And you’re telling me to lighten up? Rifter is gonna kill us once he hears we screwed this up.”
Off went the sunglasses, so Stockholm could stare the kid dead in the eye. But without them, the sickly glow emanating from the streetlights and neon signs above made him squint a little. “We?” That pissed Stockholm off enough to throw his sunglasses into the darkness of the alley. “You think it’s ‘We’ now? Let’s get two things straight: Firstly, I don’t answer to the mighty Rifter. Secondly, I did what I was paid to do, which was to cover your asses while you did the hack. "
Rifter. Really. You don’t scare people with a name like that.
“Now,” Stockholm took a slow breath, “while I was busy ‘screwing up’, did he even manage to finish the job?”
Stockholm nudged the body with his foot, drawing the kid’s panicked eyes down to the floor.
“I-I don’t know...” he stammered. “I was keeping my head down the whole time, I think I remember him saying he got what we came for...”
“Then what I need is in there.” Stockholm pointed at the hacker’s head, then stared intently at his knife.
The look of horror on the kid’s face renewed.
“You can’t be serious,” he said, quickly backing towards the fence. “No way, I draw the line at arms."
Stockholm chuckled. “Relax, there’s easier ways of doing this.”
He knelt back down and sheathed his knife, then took his palm tablet from his pocket and plugged it into the socket on the Mindjacker’s right temple. “Damn shame leaving hardware like this behind, though, I’d be set for a month if I sold one of these.”
Neural drives were pretty popular on the second-hand cybernetic market, and they never asked questions. Having data storage inside your head has all kinds of uses. From hackers and underground couriers, to corporate employees and students, the fabric of technology was woven into all layers of society.
“TRANSFER: 100%.”
Stockholm stood up, blinded again by the glare of the neon lights; he hated those things, too bombastic. He sighed, remembering a time, 20 years ago or more, before the city was a city. Before another city grew on top of it like a scab, hiding the filth and danger of the one below, but never healing it, before the curfews. Before the neon.
What happened?
That was a question for a better day. Stockholm pocketed his tablet, then reached into his inner coat pocket and fumbled around for those beloved sunglasses…
He kicked a bottle right over the fence. Fuck. His best pair, too.
“Let’s get moving,” Stockholm said. The kid eagerly obliged, and the pair set off into the maze of alleys.
Stockholm eyed the ground as he walked, looking for his most prized possession. He couldn’t have thrown them too far.
As they rounded a corner, he bumped into an abnormally large dumpster… on legs.
Except, as far as Stockholm knew, dumpsters didn’t walk around, especially not on a weekday. In the split second between an inhale and an exhale, Stockholm had jumped backwards and drawn his .45. In the same moment, he also heard the familiar clacking of metal and the sound of a chaingun being revved up.
The two duelists stared each other down for a long, tense second before the revving slowed, and finally stopped.
“APOLOGIES, CITIZEN. IT WAS NOT MY INTENTION TO PHYSICALLY ENGAGE YOU.”
Stockholm ran his eyes up and down the dumpster, then slowly holstered his gun upon realising it was, in fact, not a dumpster. He hated dumpsters, almost as much as he hated neon lights, impractical and foul smelling.
“No harm done,” Stockholm murmured, not taking his eyes off the robot as he walked past it, maintaining a wide distance, as wide as the alley would allow. The robot continued down the alley, fortunately not noticing the body as it went by.
A robot janitor, huh?
Stockholm had seen a lot of strange things in his life. One more couldn’t hurt.
Even holstered, Stockholm couldn’t help but instinctively caress the hammer on his gun as he began to search for his sunglasses.
The city had changed.
And, annoyingly enough, there was normally only one way of stopping change. Even more frustrating, Stockholm thought as he cleaned dirt and blood from his reclaimed sunglasses and pushed them back onto his face, he would have to be the one to stop it.
“That was close,” said the kid, removing Stockholm from his thoughts. “What do we do now?”
There was that “We” again. It was enough to make Stockholm’s back stand up in anger.
Stockholm re-examined his tablet for a map of the city.
“There’s a subway one block from here, we’ll take that to the freight sector, then hitch a ride on a maintenance lift to get below.” It had been a while since he’d been topside.
“Won’t they ask questions?" the kid asked, his hands still shaking.
“On the freight level? Nah,” said Stockholm, trying to sound more unconcerned than reassuring. “Everyone minds their own business down there, keeping your head down is the only way to survive these days. Speaking of which, we should stay off the streets as much as possible from here to the metro line, don’t want to get caught outside after curfew, especially after that mess back in the tower.”
The two continued their slow but deliberate movements through the shining steel labyrinth. The Overcity was still relatively new. With more and more buildings going up every day. Cybergrafts meant physical labour could get done in a fraction of the time it used to take. Buildings were razed to the ground in a single morning. With gleaming, metal foundations erected by the afternoon. And finally, framework would stick out from the ground by nightfall, aiming toward the sky. By the next day, layers of steel and glass would wrap around the frames, like a metal flower blossoming to greet the dawn, its petals shining in the sun. Day after day, the people of the city would wake up to find a brave new world awaiting them. Everything was made better, brighter, stronger. The streets were cleansed, the vagrants, the criminals and the undesirables were swept into the Undercity, or systematically vanished.
But Stockholm didn't think of it as a monument to mankind’s progress. All he saw was a mask for what lies beneath. Something dirty and dangerous, but alive and exciting. The steel up here was orderly, efficient, and cold. Below, it twisted and rusted in all directions, but pulsed with energy. The real face of the city, of humanity, existed on the ground, not in the sky.
Emerging onto the street, but making sure to stay in the dark, Stockholm spotted the subway station. He nudged behind him with his elbow to get the kids attention, who was too busy looking everywhere except where they had to go. The force of Stockholm’s elbow made him jump slightly.
“We’re here.”
“What’re we waiting for? Let’s get out of here.”
Stockholm rolled his eyes. “Haven't you learned anything? There’s eyes and ears everywhere up here, and we don’t have permits to be in this sector. Not to mention this..." He patted his satchel, the fingers from the metal hand jutting out the side. “They’ll be watching the entrance, we need to find another way onto the platform.”
“This is stupid, there’s no one ther-”
“No one you can see,” Stockholm cut in flatly. He’d gotten good at seeing things that didn’t want to be seen, he wouldn’t have survived this long otherwise.
A few minutes passed, Stockholm remained in the shadows, studying the entrance. Waiting for anything out of the ordinary. The kid stood beside him, trying to notice whatever it was Stockholm was examining, but he was young and ignorant.
“There’s no one there, screw thi-”
Stockholm turned around with lightning speed, grabbing the kid by the throat and slamming him against the alley wall, raising him off the ground. The kid’s feet kicked and struggled, to no avail. Stockholm had come too far and risked too much to get caught now. Nothing was going to stop him, not tonight.
“You even think of going out there before I decide it’s safe, and I’ll personally eviscerate you.”
Stockholm tightened his grip. He already had a reputation as an intimidating guy; this kid was no exception to his quick temper. He clutched Stockholm’s arms and struggled under the chokehold.
“O-okay...” he whispered.
Stockholm let him fall the ground, coughing and spluttering.
Machiavelli once said it was better to be feared than loved. That’s how Stockholm liked to operate.
But within the space of a blink of an eye and a heartbeat, something happened. Something stupid.
The kid lost his nerve, Stockholm feared this would happen before the night was through, but now he couldn’t stop it. The kid had pushed past him and was already halfway across the street, making a beeline for the station. At the same time, a police cruiser turned the corner, sirens blaring. They’d been waiting for this, just like Stockholm had been waiting for them. He withdrew into the alley, his right hand hovering over his gun.
“THIS IS THE CIVIL PEACEKEEPER SERVICE,” the megaphone on top of the cruiser blared into the night. “LAY DOWN FLAT ON THE FLOOR AND PLACE YOUR HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEAD.”
That was the cue for the two undercover Peacekeepers loitering at the station entrance to reveal themselves, brandishing badges and barking orders at the kid.
Stockholm prepared for the worst, drawing his gun and bracing himself for a fight.
“God dammit,” he muttered. He didn’t have the patience for this.
The kid was out of options now, there was nowhere to run.
“You must be my guys,” Stockholm said, pocketing the coin. “I'll be your chaperone for the night, but before we head off, let’s go over the ground rules: No amateur dramatics, no histrionics, and no lone wolf, rogue element bullshit. Do exactly what I say, when I say it, and we’ll all be a little richer by the end of the night. I'll even see you safely home to daddy, got all that?”
The pair nodded anxiously. It’s almost as if they understood. Maybe they did.
Since when did Stockholm get paid to babysit? Whatever, a job’s a job.
“Good,” he said, “stick to the plan, and this will be a simple, in and out, no fuss job. Let’s hit it. Simple.”
Stockholm had no idea he’d be eating his own words by the time the night was through.
High Tech, Low Life.
“I can’t believe this.” He could, actually. That’s what pissed him off the most, though the current situation was definitely a runner up.
Stockholm threw the corpse down into the middle of the alley, then paused to catch his breath.
“Oh god... Oh Christ... You said this would be simple, in and out. They’ll come looking for us now, and the cops...”
Stockholm looked, with a hint of frustration and impatience, at the trembling kid leaning against the wall, then back at the body. Despite being a nervous wreck even before the job started, the kid was right. This was supposed to be simple, no one was supposed to die.
“Okay, first things first, help me get this off.”
Stockholm motioned to the mechanical appendage on the body now laying in a pool of rainwater and blood, bad weather for Cybergraft salvaging.
“You’re kidding, right? We need to get out of here, forget the arm!”
Stockholm removed a small tool from his coat pocket and knelt down.
“There’s no way in hell I’m letting good Cybergrafts go to waste. Get down here and help me get it off.”
The kid took a quick glance at the body, then nervously shook his head. “I can’t...”
Stockholm let out an exasperated sigh. “Fine, shut up and keep watch then.”
He turned back to the body, eyeing the hole in its chest made by a shotgun blast. Stockholm wasn’t impressed; he’d been putting holes in things long enough to know a decent hole when he saw one. He also noticed the cold, lifeless eyes. “So much for bright-eyed,” Stockholm thought to himself, remembering how the hacker’s eyes had had a bright glow to them. Cybernetic eyes, useful for that line of work. Stockholm ran his hand over the hacker’s face, closing his eyes. Not out of some kind of respect for the dead, they just creeped him out.
Stockholm switched the tool on and got to work removing the steel limb. “I hate these VersaTools,” he muttered. “Way too clunky. Not to mention they bring out a ‘new and improved’ model every other month, bloodsuckers.” Under different circumstances, Stockholm probably would have noticed the irony in that. Maybe he would have laughed, too.
“Wait, you’re gonna do that right here? Shouldn’t we at least get off the streets?”
“Where do you think we are?” Stockholm growled. “I didn't have time amidst all the gunfire and the running, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t notice any places to dismember a corpse in a hurry, did you?”
“Bu-“ Stockholm cut through the objection with a glare so sharp, it could have made quick work of the arm. The kid closed his mouth and turned from the grim surgical display happening at his feet, instead focusing his eyes nervously on the road through the chain-link fence, keeping watch for any Peacekeepers that might come to sweep the sector.
“Gotcha!” Stockholm’s eyes widened in triumph. The arm was loose enough now that he could just yank it off. He placed his foot firmly onto the ribcage of the dead Mindjacker, and gave a sharp pull. The arm broke free of its socket.
“Now for the messy part,” Stockholm murmured. He withdrew a blade from the sheath on his boot, and, with surprising speed, cut through the wires still tethering the arm to the hackers brain. Blood and electrical sparks shot from the mechanical wound, Stockholm narrowly avoided most of the spray, his sunglasses shielding him from the rest. He rose to his feet, and examined his prize with a sinister grin, like a predator that had just finished grazing over its prey.
“Not bad,” Stockholm said, wiping blood from his chin. “These kind of grafts sell pretty good on the second-hand market, heheh.” He undid the buckle on his satchel and stashed the arm inside.
“You’re hysterical,” the kid snarked. “Can we get out of here now?”
“Come on, lighten up,” Stockholm said. “No point crying over spilled blood.”
“Lighten up? They were ready for us back there. The second he jacked into the mainframe, they were all over us. And you’re telling me to lighten up? Rifter is gonna kill us once he hears we screwed this up.”
Off went the sunglasses, so Stockholm could stare the kid dead in the eye. But without them, the sickly glow emanating from the streetlights and neon signs above made him squint a little. “We?” That pissed Stockholm off enough to throw his sunglasses into the darkness of the alley. “You think it’s ‘We’ now? Let’s get two things straight: Firstly, I don’t answer to the mighty Rifter. Secondly, I did what I was paid to do, which was to cover your asses while you did the hack. "
Rifter. Really. You don’t scare people with a name like that.
“Now,” Stockholm took a slow breath, “while I was busy ‘screwing up’, did he even manage to finish the job?”
Stockholm nudged the body with his foot, drawing the kid’s panicked eyes down to the floor.
“I-I don’t know...” he stammered. “I was keeping my head down the whole time, I think I remember him saying he got what we came for...”
“Then what I need is in there.” Stockholm pointed at the hacker’s head, then stared intently at his knife.
The look of horror on the kid’s face renewed.
“You can’t be serious,” he said, quickly backing towards the fence. “No way, I draw the line at arms."
Stockholm chuckled. “Relax, there’s easier ways of doing this.”
He knelt back down and sheathed his knife, then took his palm tablet from his pocket and plugged it into the socket on the Mindjacker’s right temple. “Damn shame leaving hardware like this behind, though, I’d be set for a month if I sold one of these.”
Neural drives were pretty popular on the second-hand cybernetic market, and they never asked questions. Having data storage inside your head has all kinds of uses. From hackers and underground couriers, to corporate employees and students, the fabric of technology was woven into all layers of society.
“TRANSFER: 100%.”
Stockholm stood up, blinded again by the glare of the neon lights; he hated those things, too bombastic. He sighed, remembering a time, 20 years ago or more, before the city was a city. Before another city grew on top of it like a scab, hiding the filth and danger of the one below, but never healing it, before the curfews. Before the neon.
What happened?
That was a question for a better day. Stockholm pocketed his tablet, then reached into his inner coat pocket and fumbled around for those beloved sunglasses…
He kicked a bottle right over the fence. Fuck. His best pair, too.
“Let’s get moving,” Stockholm said. The kid eagerly obliged, and the pair set off into the maze of alleys.
Stockholm eyed the ground as he walked, looking for his most prized possession. He couldn’t have thrown them too far.
As they rounded a corner, he bumped into an abnormally large dumpster… on legs.
Except, as far as Stockholm knew, dumpsters didn’t walk around, especially not on a weekday. In the split second between an inhale and an exhale, Stockholm had jumped backwards and drawn his .45. In the same moment, he also heard the familiar clacking of metal and the sound of a chaingun being revved up.
The two duelists stared each other down for a long, tense second before the revving slowed, and finally stopped.
“APOLOGIES, CITIZEN. IT WAS NOT MY INTENTION TO PHYSICALLY ENGAGE YOU.”
Stockholm ran his eyes up and down the dumpster, then slowly holstered his gun upon realising it was, in fact, not a dumpster. He hated dumpsters, almost as much as he hated neon lights, impractical and foul smelling.
“No harm done,” Stockholm murmured, not taking his eyes off the robot as he walked past it, maintaining a wide distance, as wide as the alley would allow. The robot continued down the alley, fortunately not noticing the body as it went by.
A robot janitor, huh?
Stockholm had seen a lot of strange things in his life. One more couldn’t hurt.
Even holstered, Stockholm couldn’t help but instinctively caress the hammer on his gun as he began to search for his sunglasses.
The city had changed.
And, annoyingly enough, there was normally only one way of stopping change. Even more frustrating, Stockholm thought as he cleaned dirt and blood from his reclaimed sunglasses and pushed them back onto his face, he would have to be the one to stop it.
“That was close,” said the kid, removing Stockholm from his thoughts. “What do we do now?”
There was that “We” again. It was enough to make Stockholm’s back stand up in anger.
Stockholm re-examined his tablet for a map of the city.
“There’s a subway one block from here, we’ll take that to the freight sector, then hitch a ride on a maintenance lift to get below.” It had been a while since he’d been topside.
“Won’t they ask questions?" the kid asked, his hands still shaking.
“On the freight level? Nah,” said Stockholm, trying to sound more unconcerned than reassuring. “Everyone minds their own business down there, keeping your head down is the only way to survive these days. Speaking of which, we should stay off the streets as much as possible from here to the metro line, don’t want to get caught outside after curfew, especially after that mess back in the tower.”
The two continued their slow but deliberate movements through the shining steel labyrinth. The Overcity was still relatively new. With more and more buildings going up every day. Cybergrafts meant physical labour could get done in a fraction of the time it used to take. Buildings were razed to the ground in a single morning. With gleaming, metal foundations erected by the afternoon. And finally, framework would stick out from the ground by nightfall, aiming toward the sky. By the next day, layers of steel and glass would wrap around the frames, like a metal flower blossoming to greet the dawn, its petals shining in the sun. Day after day, the people of the city would wake up to find a brave new world awaiting them. Everything was made better, brighter, stronger. The streets were cleansed, the vagrants, the criminals and the undesirables were swept into the Undercity, or systematically vanished.
But Stockholm didn't think of it as a monument to mankind’s progress. All he saw was a mask for what lies beneath. Something dirty and dangerous, but alive and exciting. The steel up here was orderly, efficient, and cold. Below, it twisted and rusted in all directions, but pulsed with energy. The real face of the city, of humanity, existed on the ground, not in the sky.
Emerging onto the street, but making sure to stay in the dark, Stockholm spotted the subway station. He nudged behind him with his elbow to get the kids attention, who was too busy looking everywhere except where they had to go. The force of Stockholm’s elbow made him jump slightly.
“We’re here.”
“What’re we waiting for? Let’s get out of here.”
Stockholm rolled his eyes. “Haven't you learned anything? There’s eyes and ears everywhere up here, and we don’t have permits to be in this sector. Not to mention this..." He patted his satchel, the fingers from the metal hand jutting out the side. “They’ll be watching the entrance, we need to find another way onto the platform.”
“This is stupid, there’s no one ther-”
“No one you can see,” Stockholm cut in flatly. He’d gotten good at seeing things that didn’t want to be seen, he wouldn’t have survived this long otherwise.
A few minutes passed, Stockholm remained in the shadows, studying the entrance. Waiting for anything out of the ordinary. The kid stood beside him, trying to notice whatever it was Stockholm was examining, but he was young and ignorant.
“There’s no one there, screw thi-”
Stockholm turned around with lightning speed, grabbing the kid by the throat and slamming him against the alley wall, raising him off the ground. The kid’s feet kicked and struggled, to no avail. Stockholm had come too far and risked too much to get caught now. Nothing was going to stop him, not tonight.
“You even think of going out there before I decide it’s safe, and I’ll personally eviscerate you.”
Stockholm tightened his grip. He already had a reputation as an intimidating guy; this kid was no exception to his quick temper. He clutched Stockholm’s arms and struggled under the chokehold.
“O-okay...” he whispered.
Stockholm let him fall the ground, coughing and spluttering.
Machiavelli once said it was better to be feared than loved. That’s how Stockholm liked to operate.
But within the space of a blink of an eye and a heartbeat, something happened. Something stupid.
The kid lost his nerve, Stockholm feared this would happen before the night was through, but now he couldn’t stop it. The kid had pushed past him and was already halfway across the street, making a beeline for the station. At the same time, a police cruiser turned the corner, sirens blaring. They’d been waiting for this, just like Stockholm had been waiting for them. He withdrew into the alley, his right hand hovering over his gun.
“THIS IS THE CIVIL PEACEKEEPER SERVICE,” the megaphone on top of the cruiser blared into the night. “LAY DOWN FLAT ON THE FLOOR AND PLACE YOUR HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEAD.”
That was the cue for the two undercover Peacekeepers loitering at the station entrance to reveal themselves, brandishing badges and barking orders at the kid.
Stockholm prepared for the worst, drawing his gun and bracing himself for a fight.
“God dammit,” he muttered. He didn’t have the patience for this.
The kid was out of options now, there was nowhere to run.