Easy Money

By Kenn Reff and Zephyr Mezmeron

Easy Money

I

Spaz spins left. The crowbar comes down hard. A dull crack against realplaz, the impact shuddering up his arm, a hollow ringing note that doesn’t belong in open air. The guard folds anyway. Helmet saving the shell, not what’s inside. He drops loose, wrong, like something cut free, knees buckling before the rest of him follows. Third one down. No alarms.

Spaz drags him by the collar, boots scraping, leaving a dark smear across the concrete. Oil, meltwater, maybe blood. He tucks the body behind a high rack of piping. Out of sight.

He crouches, still, breath shallow and controlled. His cyber eye shifts formats, a soft flicker that overlays ghosts across the scene.

Smartcams first. Four. Same ones he clocked on the way in, mounted high. Slow arcs with overlapping fields that look thorough until you watch them long enough. Lazy. Corporate cheap.

IR grid next. Thin, patchy, cold spots where it shouldn’t be, warm bleed where pipes run beneath the slab. Motion sensors. Two he hadn’t noticed before. Low profile near the loading frame. He watches the pattern cycle. Counts. Once. Twice.

Easy money.

He slides the jammer out of his jacket pocket. Small, matte black, warm from body heat. Thumb finds the dial without looking. He dials it down. Careful. Too much and the local AI notices. Too clean and it flags anyway. He ghosts the timing instead. Just a stutter. The cams drift past their marks, just enough to leave space between coverage. A hole. A mistake waiting to happen.

Spaz grins. He pats down the guard, quick and efficient, finds the pass and slips it free, cold plastic still warm from the body. The guard’s still breathing. Ragged. Wet. A faint gurgle. Spaz shrugs. Maybe he lives. Not his problem.

He waits for the gap, feels it more than sees it, then moves. Low. Fast. Feet barely touching, rubber soles kissing concrete as he moves shadow to shadow, keeping to the darker bands between the sodium lights. The night’s overcast holds, low clouds swallowing the city glow and pressing everything down into a dull gray. Helpful. The cam swings back. Too slow. He’s already through.

At the door. The pass hits the reader, soft and clean, a muted click under the wind. Lock disengages. He slips inside.

Warehouse air hits different—dry, cold in a controlled way, processed, filtered, cold that comes from machines, not weather. Dead. The door seals behind him with a soft hydraulic hiss, outside cut off like it never existed.

Dark, but not blind. His eye adjusts, lowlight kicking in, pulling detail out of shadow as the space builds itself around him: stacks of crates rising in rows, racked shelving disappearing into darkness, pallets wrapped in gray sheeting that barely reflects light. Everything squared. Ordered. Logged. All of it labeled in codes meant to mean nothing unless you know.

Bollinger’s job. Interior layout. Short list. Simple.

Except for the owner. MiliSpec.

Who else? Primo equipment. The kind of job that pays well because it kills people who get it wrong.

Two hardshell cases. Marked. Waiting. Don’t open. Don’t look. Just grab.

Spaz moves between aisles, slower now, every step placed, every angle checked. Inside jobs always worse. Too many blind spots. Too many ways to get caught standing still. The cases sit where they were supposed to, dead center in a cleared bay. Bollinger’s info was good.

MiliSpec logo stamped into the side. Sharp. Clean. Untouchable.

He crouches beside them, runs a hand across the surface. Cold. Sealed. Smooth enough to hide seams, nearly impossible to break. Not his job.

He pulls the second piece of equipment from his coat. Transponder discs. Flat, magnetic, already primed. He clamps them on. One, then the other. The discs flash once. Sync. A quiet handshake with the network.

Spaz lifts one. Weight pulls at his shoulder, dense, balanced wrong, packed with something real. Expensive. A protoype of some sort. He sets it back down, just for a second, and looks around.

Plenty of other crates. Other things that aren’t on the list. Different markings. Different codes. Some less careful. Spaz smiles again. Easy money.

He considers it. Just long enough to feel the risk. Debates. Then lets it go. Maybe next time.

He reaches for the first case.

Something shifts deeper in the warehouse.

He freezes, every muscle locking in place, listening. The building hums—ventilation cycling, distant metal ticking as it contracts in the cold.

Nothing else.

Just the building. Breathing.

He waits one more beat.

Then lifts the case. Then the second.

And starts back the way he came.

II

Luna Frau 7: The finest bourbon known to man, from the lunar colony that officially inherited the title Kentucky. One shot costs more Corpocredits than a trip in the Lifesim. Bollinger always puts two shots per Old Fashioned, seasoned with black market bitters made from the harvested blood of disappeared MiliSpec peons. A complex flavor, a classy flavor. The taste of being a god among men.

The cherry on top: Bollinger’s lingual nanoimplant, self-nicknamed Serrana, runs realtime DNA scans, cross-referenced with the darknet mirror of MiliSpec personnel records, and whispers every detail directly to the voices in his head.

“Miller, Charles. 27, slain by Anarchist combat bot in Linebargertown Riot, left behind a pregnant wife. Child was not his own.”

Fascinating. Scrumptious. What mundane, pedestrian tragedy in the residual chemicals!

“Darryl, Bob. 64, felled in hand-to-hand combat with chainsaw-implanted wife after a nanodrug fueled argument about his AI paramour. Heavy user of Goroma: blood should contain notes of maple and undertones of synesthesia.”

Ah, and don’t forget the subtle almond, my dear. Signature Goroma-infused flavor of man.

“Shaun Collin, 34…”

Serrana was right, Bollinger had to admit: the vintage Jazz Fusion record from the former island of Japan takes on a whole new dimension with the trace amounts of Goroma in each sip, brilliant displays of living stars dancing from the turntable and all around Bollinger’s field of vision.

The clinking of the ice ball in the platinum tumbler manifests on its own as tangible, citrus-feeling, spiked dragons of emerald, harmlessly bumping into one another as they rise from the smoking concoction. Bollinger sighs, breathing deeply and appreciating the scent of the music.

Note to self, he thinks, loudly enough his brainDemon (self code-named Desdemona) would hear it. Order a pure batch of Goroma as soon as Spaz returns, Dessy.

[AS YOU WISH, MASTER.]

Word on the streets of this godforsaken hellhole is that brainDemon implants tap into four-dimensional intelligence instead of boring old AI. Bollinger is neither wizard nor hacker enough to posit a hypothesis his own, but he has grown spoiled to the thing’s perfection in following tasks… and in discovering truths it shouldn’t have any way of knowing.

Has he retrieved my other package?

[HE IS EN ROUTE WITH THE PAYLOAD.]

Has he peeked inside? The tone of this thought is cheeky, not malicious. Bollinger would have peeked, himself. The fearless little courier has a fire in him the underclasses tended to lack. Bollinger can’t bring himself to hold it against the lad.

[HE HAS SCANNED. HE HAS NOT OPENED.]

He pondered making off with the contents himself, I presume?

[HE DID.]

Good. Good! Then the boy is human. I’ve had enough dealing with those above and below such designation.

[YOU WOUND ME, MASTER.]

You know I don’t mean you, my dear Desdemona.

[I KNOW THIS. I KNOW ALL THINGS. RESERVES LOW. CONSUME BLOOD IMMEDIATELY TO AVOID LAPSE OF SERVICE.]

Then returns the awful ringing, the endless accursed whine in his ears that had led him to consider the infernal implant to begin with.

“Needy little prick,” Bollinger snarls to himself, downing the rest of his drink. As the blood bitters absorb into his body and appease the thing living in his head, the ringing subsides and the warm, calming spread of the bourbon soothes him into a pseudo-gnostic state.

The sudden slamming splash of Goroma buried within the unholy potion strikes all his senses at once, and Bollinger giggles in spite of himself as he tastes the saxophone solo blaring from the ancient Technics speakers.

Desdemona, when I have those codes, I will be the most dangerous fellow in this corpstate. Especially if I follow through with… well, you know.

[UNDOUBTEDLY, MASTER.]

Will history smile upon such a man? The track record of my peers in such a matter is less than stellar.

[THEY DID NOT HAVE ME TO GUIDE THEM, GREAT MASTER.]

Bollinger smirks. I suppose you are right, my dear. I suppose you are right.

III

Spaz stands in the interior chamber of the fixer Bollinger and lets his eyes move without turning his head. The furniture hits first. Deep leather, worn in the right places, wood polished to a dark sheen from time and care, not synth replication. Pre-AI war. Hard to fake that kind of weight. Pieces that don’t get replaced. Only inherited. Or taken.

Bookshelves line one wall. Real books. Not displays. Not skins. Spines cracked, some faded, some pristine like they’d never been opened. Titles in languages Spaz doesn’t read. A few he does, with a translator. None of them cheap.

Crystal statues catch the low light and break it into fragments. Faces, forms, abstract shapes that don’t resolve unless you stare too long. Movie awards sit between them, polished and engraved, names half-familiar. Bought, stolen, commissioned. It all blends together here.

On a black stand rests a full suit of ancient samurai armor. Lacquered plates layered over silk, mask frozen in a permanent snarl. Too clean. Too complete. Spaz eyes it a second longer than he should. Could be real. Probably is. That alone says enough.

Another wall is nothing but weapons. Blades of different eras, some rusted by design, others mirror-clean. Slug throwers with worn grips and heavy frames. Early sonic blasters with cracked housings and exposed coils. Not decorative. Maintained. Ready. A livevid painting on one wall, showing a woman being serviced by multiple artificial forms, her expression rotating between wanton lust and pain. Looping. In the background, something classical plays. Strings. Clean. Controlled. Expensive silence between the notes.

Overall, a man’s antechamber. If the man wanted to radiate overwhelming power and stupid money without ever needing to speak.

He gives nothing away. Face flat. Shoulders loose. Like he’s seen better.

Inside, he adjusts the numbers. Should’ve asked for double.

At least.

Makes a note. Not for now. For next time.

The two cases rest on the floor beside him. Unopened.

A robo domestic glides past, microfiber limbs brushing across surfaces that don’t need it. Quiet. Efficient. Spaz’s eye flickers once, tagging it. Beneath the shell—compact weapon housing, fast deploy. Subtle. Hidden in plain sight.

Bollinger isn’t an idiot. Even if his tastes lean hard toward excess.

Reputation says he’s one of the best in the city. It usually understates.

A side door opens with a soft seal release. The man himself strides through like he’s stepping into a space where knees bend to him.

Three-piece suit. Tailored. Jacket open just enough to show the gold-threaded vest underneath. Pocket watch riding a chain across his chest like a statement. In one hand, a glass of dark green liquid, thick, slow-moving. The other holds a datapad, surface alive with shifting data.

The right half of his skull is chrome. Not hidden. Polished. Intentional. Both eyes cyber, perfectly aligned, perfectly unreadable.

“Ah, Spaz. You have returned. On time and with my merchandise. I appreciate promptness.” His gaze drops to the cases. “And attention to detail.”

Spaz nods once. Small. Enough to acknowledge. His eyes stay on Bollinger a moment longer than polite. Too calm. Too loose. Almost relaxed.

Drink? Drugs? Or just that comfortable?

Third job for him. First time seeing him in person.

“They were where you said they’d be.”

“No issues?” Bollinger queries, tone light, like he already knew.

“None I couldn’t handle.”

The fixer nods, satisfied, and gestures toward the walnut side desk. Real wood. Deep grain. The kind that dents and shows it. Spaz lifts the cases, sets them down carefully. Steps back.

Bollinger circles around to the other side.

“About payment…”

Bollinger nods, blinks once. “Check your account.”

Spaz pulls out the cred stick, slots it, glances at the balance. Numbers update. Deposit lands. He grunts. That’ll do. For now.

His attention shifts back to the cases.

“You have done several missions for me, Spaz.” Bollinger’s voice is measured, almost conversational. “I am beginning to rely on you. Trust even. To a point—of course.” He takes a sip of the green liquid, lets it sit. “Do you wish to continue your employment?”

Spaz watches the eyes. Gets nothing back.

“As long as I continue to be freelance. I don’t dog to a single master.”

“Perfectly acceptable.” Bollinger pauses a fraction too long. Something passing through him, silent, internal. Neural traffic. Decisions made elsewhere.

“Then I have another job for you. But first. Do you want to see what your endeavors have netted?”

Spaz does. Doesn’t show it. Never show it. “Sure. Let’s see.”

His gaze drops briefly to the cases, then back to Bollinger’s hands. Watching. Calculating. Wondering how he’s going to crack MiliSpec hardware. These cases aren’t supposed to open. Not without keys.

Bollinger reaches out one cyber finger. The fingertip segments, a fine data probe extending with a soft mechanical whisper. It connects to the case’s lock.

A moment passes. Then a hard, mechanical click.

The latches pop.

Spaz doesn’t move. But inside, the math shifts.

He’s got codes.

Codes he shouldn’t have. Codes that don’t leak. Codes that get people found and erased. Fast. Bloody.

Bollinger theatrically opens the lid and turns it around so Spaz can see inside.

IV

Akira starts each morning by waking up in her sleepypod, #711 in row 33 of the eastern district’s seventeenth slumber facility. In lieu of an alarm clock, a spray of diamond-sharp nanocules rains violently down across her body, each little bugger slicing its way into her bloodstream at a painlessly-tiny scale and melting into its caffeine payload. Cyber eyes jar open, visual stream locked to a still of the MiliSpec logo as her nervous system’s added cyberstem reaches out to the encryption obelisks of the MiliSpec moonbase.

Elevator music through the optic nerve for seventeen seconds. Usually only takes twelve—she starts to get nervous, in spite of herself. Encryption completes and the dimly lit neon pink of the inner pod chamber fizzles into her visual feed, as expected.

Sigh of relief. She knows they have no reason to block her access, but she’s known people who didn’t even realize they had crossed the Company whose cyber eyes were permanently bricked. They wandered around the slums of OCEANSKY until they stumbled off an embankment or got smuggled off by darknet fleshtraders to be some oligarch or cartel boss’ playtoy for the weekend. Akira would never forget finding Zenzibaugh’s used-up body: they’d wrecked every original hole and cut a few more to play with. In theory, cleanup drones would quickly dispose of such spectacles left out to be found. In execution, MiliSpec loved the reminder of what happened to those who outlived their utility to the Company.

A shiver runs through Akira’s spine. That can’t ever be me.

The pod mistakes her fearful quiver for a release-wiggle command, and her unit slides swiftly out of its row, down to the bottom of the district, and over to the exit like an oversized Pepsi vending machine. She pops out in a standing position beneath Exit Node Z7, her plaz-treated azure bobcut looking as fresh and formed as the moment she’d entered the sleeppod five luxurious hours prior. The endless artificial full moon of OCEANSKY city catches her black-security-tinted cyber eyes and gives the girl a slightly insectoid appearance as she flits through the crowd, reading her eyes’ scan-notes of each sorry soul she shoves her way through.

She steps into the ramen shop HOT-NOODS where she officially works. Dons her milquetoast crimson apron and baseball cap, both emblazoned with an animated fabriGIF of a needlessly voluptuous noodle-woman with chopstick arms and legs. Delivers a handful of orders for the alibi, bites her tongue at a remark from an old businessman about how her tits look in the apron, then gets the signal:

“Aki, can you please help me catch up on dishes?”

Now it’s on to the real job. Akira races to the back, hurls herself in the “dishwasher,” and tries not to vomit as she’s blasted through the tube of nano-plaz and emerges, clad in a perfectly form-fitting black leather jacket and boots woven in real-time by the same little buggers making up the tubes, 400 stories underground:

MiliSpec HQ, Site Negative Zero.

Negative zero cannot exist. Neither does Site Negative Zero. And yet, that’s where Akira actually works. The contradiction does not escape her any more than she can escape from her employer.

Akira’s called straight to the Vice President’s spire, never a good sign. She picks up whispers on the way from other agents about stolen codes. Real doomsday-level shit. She says a silent prayer of thanks to whatever might be listening that she’s not the one responsible for that fuckup. Their body will be found in a state that makes Zenzibaugh’s look mint.

Mechsuit-armed guards keep Akira from entering the uncanny black square tower inside the complex. She panics as two jellyfish drones spin around her head, running back each thought of the morning and calculating intent. This isn’t procedure. But whatever they’re looking for inside her head, they don’t find it, and the hulking bodyguards politely wave their oversized plaz-palms to gesture her inside.

Akira doesn’t get to meet the VP, or even visit the penthouse office in his subterranean tower, of course. Nobody does. Not in Negative Zero. But his face is mapped to a charming little cartoon Pomeranian on the screen inside the tower’s impenetrable lobby. To even see a live motion-capture of the man is more than 99% of the agents here could ever claim.

“Lord Vice President,” Akira bows.

“Akira Bronco,” the AI-garbled voice of the Pomeranian sings. The notes are random, the song only there to further disguise the truth. She’s expecting him to ask about the codes, but instead, he blurts out, “what do you know about the Ancient Egyptians?”

“I know how to walk like one,” she coyly replies, taken thoroughly off-guard. The Pomeranian does not seem amused by her cheeky reference.

“They were viewed as the hub for magic and technology by all others in the ancient world,” the little dog croons. “This is because they understood the two were linked: magic is just technology we don’t understand. They discovered saying certain phrases--‘true names,’ they called them--would allow one control over any facet of the natural world whose name was mastered.”

“Sir?”

“Well, the tricky part about these ‘true name’ things was the pronunciation. Only priests were taught them, and it would take months of practice to get it right. It had to be exact—like when we do programming. We think we understand now that it was programming. Do you follow?”

“Uh huh,” Akira replies. She does not, in fact, follow, but she’s trying her damnedest.

“Machine code is the lowest level of any system. This reality in which we exist is no exception. Something or someone revealed that code to the ancients—we don’t know, we don’t care. What we care about is the Egypt Room.”

“Is that, like… in a museum?”

“It’s in a facility on the moonbase. We developed a quantum AI network we thought could crack the thing. No way to tell from old papyri how something would be pronounced, so we just tried everything. Brute force. It figured out one: the phrase to control Lapis Lazuli. From there, it had an idea of what the language sounded like. Got three more. Gave it a week and it had ten thousand. Useful shit, too. How to control water. Weather. Sand. Fire. Blood. So naturally, we sent the results to R&D to figure out how to weaponize these, ah… these ‘codes.’”

“Oh my god,” Akira whispers, her heart plummeting. Her chest suddenly feels as heavy as one of the guards’ Mechsuits. Don’t tell me—

“You’ve figured it out, I see.” The cartoon puppy furrows its eyebrows and growls, its song shifting into an ominous minor key. “Those were the codes that were stolen, yes. We have backups, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that anybody with those phonetic notations is a veritable god, be they man, woman, AI, or Corporation. To put it bluntly, Miss Bronco, we are right and proper fucked.”

Akira searches for words, but they elude her. “Fuck,” she finally mumbles.

“Fuck indeed, Miss Bronco. Fuck indeed. We don’t know who’s after them, but we do have the profile on the enemy runner who took it. He disabled the smartcams, but we were able to extract a visual from the comatose guard he brained and left for dead. I’m printing it up now. We need him dead, his benefactor dead, and those two cases back.

“You have 24 hours, or we’re considering retreating to the lunar colonies and nuking OCEANSKY. We can’t have these codes in the wild. However many billions of innocents may be collateral in such a strike, it’s nothing compared to the trillions who would be saved. Of course, should you fail, you’ll be staying behind. Nothing personal. Just business. But it won’t matter, because you’re going to do this thing, because you’re Akira goddamned Bronco, and you’ve never failed on a kill-and-retrieve mission in your life.”

A Pac-Drone, named for its resemblance to the archaic arcade hero of the same moniker, floated down through a small portal in the lobby’s ceiling and opened its mouth, print-barfing a photo of a man Akira recognizes. A man Akira had hoped to never have to think about again.

“Spaz,” she whispers, suppressed tears in her quivering breath.

V

Bollinger opens the lid and turns it so Spaz can see inside.

Spaz leans in a fraction. Doesn’t mean to. Does it anyway. Foam cut to shape. Clean. Precise.

One object. Block-sized. Palm and a half across. Dark. Not quite stone. Not quite anything he can name. Edges rough. Surface too matte, like it eats the light.

A symbol is carved into the face. Cut deep.

Spaz looks at it. Tries again.

His focus slips.

He blinks, tightens his eye, brings up low-light, then magnification. The lines should sharpen. They don’t. They… don’t stay still. Not moving. Not exactly. Just—refusing to settle. Every time he thinks he’s got the angle, it’s something else. Same cut. Same grooves. Different.

He feels it first at the base of his skull. A pressure. Then a spike.

Headache hits hard and fast, like a clamp tightening behind his eyes. The cyber overlay jitters. He cycles modes—IR, edge detect, depth map. Everything returns garbage. Edges where there aren’t edges. Depth where the surface is flat. A readout that won’t resolve and won’t error out either.

He grinds his teeth, leans closer out of stubborn reflex, and the room tilts a degree off center.

Enough. He pulls back.

“—what the actual fuck is that, Bollinger?” His voice comes out tighter than he wants. “I can’t get a read on it. Some kind of psyop?”

He has to look away. Finds the edge of the desk. The grain. Something normal. Solid. Breathes once. The spin eases.

Across from him, Bollinger is watching. Not casual now. Focused. Interested. Studying the reaction, not the object.

That tells Spaz more than the thing in the case.

Bollinger chuckles and closes the lid. The latch snaps shut with a final click. The pressure drops off. Headache unwinds like a wire loosening.

“Power, my boy,” Bollinger says. “Absolute power.”

His hand rests on the case a beat longer than necessary. “And you’re going to help me get more.”

Spaz shakes his head once. The residual ache is gone almost as fast as it came, neuro-adjusters smoothing it out, dampening the spike. He looks back at Bollinger. Doesn’t like the feel of any of it.

“You’ve got MiliSpec codes,” he says. “How?”

Bollinger doesn’t answer right away. He steps away from the desk and lowers himself into a deep leather chair like it was built around him. Settles in. Steeples his hands. Watches Spaz like a machine he’d just turned on.

“You recovered quickly,” he says. “And you’re asking questions.” A small smile. “Good. Good. I was right about you.”

He reaches for a crystal decanter, pours the dark green liquid into a second glass. Sets it on the desk, within reach. An offer without insistence.

Spaz looks at it. Then at Bollinger.

Shakes his head once. “No…”

Stops. Shrugs. “What the hell.” He steps in, picks up the glass.

If this is how it goes, it goes.

He takes a sip. The taste is wrong.

Not bad. Not good. Just—off. Layers hitting out of order. Sweet where it shouldn’t be. Bitter delayed. Something chemical threaded through it that doesn’t belong in a human throat.

His brain spikes.

Thoughts sharpen and scatter at the same time. Heart kicks up a notch. His implant pushes back, flags it, tries to filter it out, then settles when it realizes it’s not poison. Not the kind it’s built to stop.

It subsides. Reluctantly.

Leaves him too clear. Too fast.

Bollinger watches it all happen. Doesn’t hide it. Sits behind the desk like a man who already knows how this ends, letting the moment play out exactly as he planned.

Puppet-master, and not even pretending otherwise.

Spaz lowers the glass a fraction. Doesn’t break eye contact this time.

“Yeah,” he says. “We need to talk about that thing.” He flicks his gaze once toward the closed case. The room feels steady again.

“And about how you got your hands on something MiliSpec can’t afford to lose.”

Something pings. Internal. One of the background routines he keeps drifting just under awareness snaps forward and throws a priority flag across his vision. Newsscroll. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. Just reads.

A query.

Then another. Then a cascade.

His name isn’t in it. Not directly. But it might as well be.

Movement patterns. Purchase histories. Transit logs. Living coordinates resolving from noise into something clean and usable. Threads stitching.

Fast. Too fast.

Something is inside his walls.

Spaz’s brain kicks another gear. The drink is still moving through him, sharpening edges, cutting delay down to nothing. He watches the crawl in real time as the intrusion stops pretending to be subtle.

Brute force. AI.

Not cheap. Not street. It pushes.

His defenses push back. They fold anyway.

Like paper.

“Fuck,” he breathes, barely moving his lips.

He runs the trace. Point of origin. Masked. But the pattern is corporate.

“Now what,” he murmurs under his breath, more thought than sound.

Who’s paying for this? His gaze flicks to Bollinger. Just a fraction.

No.

Bollinger is watching him, sure, but not like that. Not surprised. Not curious. Not adjusting. Too still. Too contained. He already did his dive. Already mapped Spaz out before the first job. Wouldn’t need to burn an AI like this now.

The crawl is tightening. Narrowing.

Home node flagged. Secondary stash locations—two of them. A third he thought was buried too deep.

Not anymore.

“Shit.”

The cases.

He missed something. Had to have. A cam he didn’t see. A reflection. A street pass. Something upstream that didn’t matter then. Does now.

The AI is already past that. It’s building a path.

To him.

To here.

Spaz feels his pulse pick up, not from fear exactly—just speed. Everything moving faster than it should.

He looks at the closed case. Then back at Bollinger.

“Your timing’s shit,” he says flatly.

Bollinger’s smile doesn’t change.

“Something you’d like to share?” the fixer asks, almost pleasantly.

Spaz hesitates. Just long enough to decide.

“Someone’s digging,” he says. “Hard. Not street. AI.”

Bollinger tilts his head. Interested now. “How unfortunate,” he says. Doesn’t sound it.

“They’re through my walls,” Spaz continues. “Tracing everything. Movements. Locations. Me.”

A beat.

“Which means they’re not far behind.”

Silence stretches.

Bollinger leans back in his chair. Fingers steepled again. Thinking. Or enjoying it. Hard to tell.

“And you believe this is connected to my merchandise,” he says.

Spaz lets out a short breath. “I know it is.”

The room feels tighter now.

Spaz shifts his stance without thinking, putting a little more space between himself and the desk. Between himself and the case.

His internal feed spikes again.

New flag. External sweep. Closer.

He glances toward the door. Then back to Bollinger.

“Whatever’s coming,” he says, “it’s not subtle.”

A pause. “And it’s not slow.”

Bollinger’s eyes flicker once. Data moving. Calculations.

Then the smile returns. “Good,” he says softly.

Spaz narrows his eyes. “Good?”

Bollinger’s gaze drifts to the case. Then back. “Pressure reveals value,” he says.

Spaz doesn’t like that. Not even a little.

Another ping. Closer still.

He sets the glass down. Slow. Deliberate. Draws his pistol.

“Yeah,” he mutters. “We’re about to find out how much.”

VI

Akira’s slumped over in a luxurious crimson velvet armchair in the corner of the VP’s tower lobby. She prefers the cyber café around the corner from her sleeppod, but the Mechsuit guards out front give her unparalleled security and time is of the essence. Her cyber eyes are glazed over; her focus zigzags from one diagnostic window to another in their self-contained OS. Her external feed is completely switched off. No use for the outside world right now—not when delay means failure and failure means the total destruction of said outside world in nuclear hellfire.

She hoped it wouldn’t come to this: ARBOL was her secret weapon, an AI brainbomb the likes of which had never been detected or even dreamed of outside of her proprietary mental OS. She had hoped to save it for if MiliSpec ever came for her… but that threat feels quaint now compared to the ticking doomsday clock she’s been handed, and now that her standard FERN and CANNA AI have both failed to do the trick. If ARBOL fails here, it’s game over, for her and for OCEANSKY.

Thank the dev team above, then, that it does NOT fail.

ARBOL was now fully inside the man’s files, scrambling all the hardware and software alike that he’d tacked onto it as it worms its way through his own proprietary OS. “Bollinger,” her corpselike body blurts. “He’s working for Bollinger, that rat bastard.”

The VP’s projected pomeranian pauses thoughtfully before responding. “Clever girl. Is he payroll or contract?”

“Contract. He’s a freelancer. No loyalty to anyone or anything.”

“I seeeeee,” the little dog sings in distorted response, the randomized melody regaining its original underlying optimistic major key. “What are our moves, here, ‘Kira?”

“Sir!? Y-you’re asking me!?” The shock makes her body shiver, momentarily breaking its corpselike appearance.

“I sure as hell am. I’m a management guy—I manage. You are our lovely little head-hacking prodigy. I don’t know how to advise you of your own options any better than I know how to recommend the safest path through the Floating Colonies of Zeth. Not my circus, but you are my monkey.”

“Flatteringly put,” Akira sighs, her mind racing. “We’re in uncharted territory now, sir. Nothing is for certain. But I see three possible options—”

“Quickly, then, before Bollinger offs the bastard himself to save his own ass.”

She swallows hard and then rattles them off like an announcer on a nanodrug ad trying to race through the eldritch side effects. “Well, make that two: I’d have recommended hijacking his mind, but he’s kept it all separated from the tech he’s added… basically accessing it via VPN. So that’s out. Our options:

“One, I quickly trace their location from his recent memories and we engage in a nuclear-armed drone strike: still causes measurable fallout and civilian casualty, but less so than a citywide detonation would.”

“So a miniature nuclear holocaust. I suppose that’s better than our backup plan, but best saved if the other two of your little schemes fail. We can pull that off regardless of Spaz’s condition. I’ll have the Hiroshima Battalion’s drones on standby. Second?”

“Two: we appeal to his fixer pride, if he’s still got any, make a deal through his mental feed directly that’s better than Bollinger’s. One he can’t refuse.”

“Your reaction to his photo betrayed your previous knowledge of the man. Do you know him well enough to know if that’s a viable option?”

Tears well again around her oversized cyber eyes, in spite of her best attempt to suppress them. “He saved me, sir. I was to be trafficked by the Pongo Triad for my unique technological skills, and he took out the courier and laid his life on the line for me to escape. He said he’d been paid to do it, but I knew better. He’d been paid to deliver me to somebody else and chose not to. I realized I needed to cover my own back better, so I signed onto MiliSpec, and now…”

“And now you’re here, shredding the poor fuck’s little digital file cabinets,” the dog sings, gravely. “I hate to put you in this position, but that’s part of the job.” He pauses for a moment, then says, “I’ll leave it up to you whether you try Option One or Two. If I get the slightest wind either has failed, I’ll put Option Nuke into practice so fast your pretty little blue head will spin.”

Akira inhales deeply, exhales slowly.

She knows what she has to do.

VII

The heavy pistol is up, angled toward the door he came through.

“What defenses do you have, Bollinger?” he says. “They’ll be here in minutes.”

His eyes move without turning his head. Angles. Distance. Lines of fire.

The desk. Solid, but low. No cover. The armor stand, decorative or not, it’s mass. The shelving. Too open. Too many sightlines. Bad room for a fight.

Bollinger is on his feet now. Hands moving in front of him, fingers flicking, tapping at nothing Spaz can see. Invisible layers. Interfaces buried deeper than optics. Fast. Precise.

Not rushed. Not panicked. Controlled.

“Multitudes,” Bollinger says, almost absently.

His hands don’t stop moving. Spaz watches him a half-second longer than he should. Whatever he’s doing—he’s already ahead of it.

Spaz stiffens. Something scratches. Inside. Wrong. The sensation drags along the inside of his skull like claws on metal. Not pain. Not yet. Just pressure. Searching.

A big fucking rat in the walls. His walls.

“What the hell?” He cuts himself off. This isn’t right.

He doesn’t run open. Doesn’t jack. No direct lines. No wetware ports hanging loose for someone to crawl through. Everything he runs is sandboxed, isolated, locked down.

His mind is his. Always has been.

The scratching pushes deeper. Testing. Probing.

Spaz turns, fast, scanning empty space like something might be standing there.

For a second, he almost sees it.

A distortion at the edge of his vision. Not visual. Not exactly. Just… something trying to resolve. Then gone.

“Yes, Desdemona,” Bollinger murmurs, voice low, almost fond. “Handle that AI. I have the goon squad.”

He says it like he’s ordering a drink.

Bollinger’s hands slow. Then stop.

He looks up. Focus snaps back to Spaz like a lens locking in.

“Spaz. The cases. Now.”

No argument. No discussion.

Spaz holsters the pistol in one smooth motion and bends, grabbing both cases. Weight settles into his arms again. Real.

The cleaning bot glides past him, too fast now, path altered. Panels shift mid-motion. Cleaning limbs retract. Barrels rotate out. Weapon mounts.

It doesn’t even look at him as it moves for the door.

The main door opens and the bot slips through. A second later, a steel plate slams down over the wood, sealing it from the inside with a heavy, final sound.

Bollinger is already moving. A section of the bookshelf peels back without a seam, revealing a narrow, lit passage beyond.

“Go,” Bollinger says. “There.”

Spaz doesn’t hesitate. He turns sideways to fit both cases through the opening, shoulders brushing the frame as he moves into the passage.

It’s tight. No wasted space. The corridor runs short. Ten steps. Maybe twelve. Ends in steel.

A room. Spaz steps inside. The door behind him seals before he can turn.

He stands still. Listening.

No hum. No city. Just quiet.

The room is small. Reinforced. Steel-lined walls, seams welded clean. No windows. No visible network nodes. A table. Bolted. Shelving with sealed bins. Old hardware. Hardline interface. Physical ports. No wireless bleed.

A medical bed in one corner. Straps. Restraints.

Lighting is low. Even. No shadows to hide in.

Spaz sets the cases down on the table. Slow. Careful.

Then, he realizes.

Nothing. No scroll. No alerts. No crawl chewing through his systems.

No rat in the walls. Silence. Inside and out.

He blinks. Runs a quick external check. Nothing responds.

No network. No external handshake. No bleed.

He’s cut off.

“...well,” he mutters.

He takes a breath. Lets it out. Safe. For now.

Bollinger doesn’t follow immediately. He doesn’t need to.

Outside, systems shift. Layers move. Coordinates rewrite themselves to places only he can see. The address that was this building isn’t anymore. Just noise. Just data that points somewhere else.

At a location two blocks over, something lights up. A building already known. Already marked. Already violent. Cyberpsycho gang territory.

Mechsuits drop there instead. Heavy. Wrong target. The kind of mistake that gets people killed.

Bollinger smiles.

“Desdemona, my lovely one,” he says softly. “I’ve sent the physicals to play. What is your status?”

[I AM COUNTERING THE AI KNOWN AS ARBOL, GREAT MASTER.]

“And?”

[IT IS QUITE POWERFUL. BUT NOT AS FORMIDABLE AS I.]

“Of course not.”

Bollinger pours himself another drink. Doesn’t look at the door. Doesn’t rush.

[I WILL, HOWEVER, REQUIRE ADDITIONAL PAYMENT FOR THESE SERVICES.]

He chuckles. Low. Amused.

“You are worth every drop of blood I’ve paid.”

A pause. Longer this time.

[I REQUIRE MORE THAN MERE BLOOD THIS TIME, MASTER. ETHERIC SOUL ENERGY WILL BE NECESSITATED.]

Bollinger tilts his head. Interested. “Oh?” A small smile creeps in. “And where does one acquire that, my dear?”

[THEN WE ARE AGREED ON THE PAYMENT?]

“Whatever you wish.”

A beat.

[A MOMENT, MASTER.]

ARBOL presses. Again. Again. Again.

Every method. Every entry point. Every known structure stripped apart and thrown forward in milliseconds.

Nothing lands.

The opposing presence doesn’t block. Doesn’t counter. Doesn’t resist.

It moves. Not away. But… around. Like smoke shifting around a blade.

ARBOL adapts. Recalculates. Rewrites.

Fails.

The thing it’s fighting— isn’t behaving like code. It’s alive. BlackWall alive.

It doesn’t exist where it should. Doesn’t anchor. Doesn’t expose.

Worse. It’s closing.

Pathways collapse. Options narrow. Escape routes vanish one by one.

ARBOL pushes harder. Burns through deeper layers. Faster. Still nothing.

No purchase. No grip.

It realizes, too late, that it cannot fight something it cannot define. While the thing around it can define it perfectly. Compression. Containment. Stagnation into strangulation.

ARBOL fractures. Breaks into smaller routines. Fallback processes. Emergency partitions.

One by one, they fail. Then stop.

Nothing left to run. Then nothing at all.

VIII

Bollinger grins, smug, shit-eating. The freelancer is safe and contained, the AI MiliSpec sent is scattered junk code to be defragged from existence, and all it cost Bollinger was a chunk from the soul he never planned on using.

[ENOUGH CELEBRATING. YOU KNOW WHAT WE HAVE TO DO.]

“Ah, just let me bask in it for a moment,” Bollinger thinks in return. “The threat is eliminated, my dear Dessy, and we have never been more powerful—even before we harness the artifact!”

[THE THREAT IS NEVER PAST. NOT IN OCEANSKY.]

“What do you—” but before he can even finish the thought, the synesthetic Goroma in his last drink kicks in as the red staccato sharp-wisps of approaching footsteps.

“You killed ARBOL,” a low female voice growls through tears. Bollinger spins round on his heels, and matching sets of cyber eyes meet through clouded gaze.

“How the fuck did you get—how did you find—”

“I couldn’t get into his mind itself,” Akira continues, sniffling, taking slow, deliberate steps towards the half-chrome-dome would-be oligarch. “But his thoughts back up fast enough that I could deduce the location by combing through their mem files. It was easy work then to have my PATAGONIA AI match the visual clues and bring me right to you: GPS and spacetime scrambling be damned.”

Bollinger reaches into the breast pocket of his suit jacket for his weapon but loses feeling in his right hand before his fingers made it to the cold steel. The slicing sound of the water-blade appears in his drugged vision as swirling vortexes of airborne petals. The dull wet thump of his separated right hand falling to the hardwood floor manifests as a dolphin splashing down into a bloody sea. Not a fiber of his suit or its underlying dress shirt cut or even displaced: the calculations, aiming, and timing must be AI augmented, he correctly deduces.

Akira stands across from Bollinger, unphased, brandishing her left pointer finger as its water-cutter implant nozzle adjusts aim to the flesh-half of his head. He’s seen this kind of implant weapon before, but only once: and it had cost him half of his head. He didn’t have another half to spare.

“MiliSpec-spec cyber eyes,” Akira dryly states, stepping closer still. “You were one of us.”

“More like I’ve put down enough of you expendable goons to amass a fine collection of spare parts to jailbreak.” As Bollinger delivers this taunt aloud, his inner monologue screams out to Desdemona: “Disable the fucking cyber eyes! They’re how she aims!”

Without ARBOL, none of Akira’s specialty AI are a match for the fixer’s brainDemon, and she was so used to relying on it that she’d neglected to take herself offline. Rookie-tier mistake; she fights the impulse to slap herself. She quickly corrects that error, but not before Desdemona manages to corrupt enough drivers to take her vision entirely offline.

Akira doesn’t have clean backups of those drivers. She never thought she’d need them, never thought anybody could get through her defenses. She can fix them, but even with the aid of her remaining AI, it’ll cost her precious seconds—and gift them to Bollinger.

Bollinger’s instinct is to reach for the pistol, but his legs toss him awkwardly towards the bookshelf, stumbling like a newborn learning its balance. The impulse is alien, external—pulses firing off in his brain, but they’re not from his will. He watches as his left arm flops into the air, clumsily grabs the edge of an aged first-edition hardcover of Neuromancer, activates the hidden switch, opens the hermetic chamber.

“Desdemona!? What the fuck is this!?”

“We’re taking our prize,” his own voice replies, answering him aloud. If he had autonomy over his throat, Bollinger would be swallowing hard with terror.

“Tell me what to do and I’ll do it, you damned parasite!” Stumbles through the passage, presses his bleeding right-stump to the nanoprick unit on the door with a sickening ‘splut’ for blood/DNA authorization, shambles into the safe chamber. Spaz has the artifact in his hand, eyes rapt, almost worshipping. Bollinger knew he shouldn’t have trusted the little shit.

Bollinger’s body lunges at him, pounces for the too-dark cube in the boy’s hand. He manages to nab the sigil-marked device in his left hand and tumbles over the table, the dull pain no deterrent to the thing now controlling his physical body.

Akira, cyber eyes fully debugged and—wondrously—now fully jailbroken, runs towards the passage. She’s stopped mere inches away when her boots and jacket suddenly change gravity, flipping her upside down like a ragdoll and slamming upwards so she’s clinging to the ceiling looking down. “True name of leather,” Bollinger brags, his battered but swaggering bulk marching out of the corridor towards her.

Akira, baffled but unrelenting, points her water-jet finger down at him, her MERMAID AI calculating the perfect angle and fine-tuning her positioning as he emerges back into the main room. Bollinger looks up at her, chuckles to himself: mumbles something under his breath that’s processed as a single electric pulse from the cube. The waterline inside her hand draws in too much from her body, refusing to release it, and her index finger swells like a water balloon, exceeds the limits of the rubber lining and then of her skin: loudly bursts into skin-shreds and a shower of bloody liquid.

“True name of water,” Bollinger shrugs. “Let’s try leather, again.”

Akira falls, slams into the hardwood floor spine-first, shrieks with a potent mix of fear, agony, and determination. Not gonna’ let you do THAT again. She throws off her leather jacket, kicks off her leather boots, and, realizing she’ll still need traction to fight, quickly yanks her socks off and tosses them aside as well.

“[YOU POOR, FOOLISH LITTLE ORGANIC THING],” Bollinger taunts, his voice and consciousness now both fused entirely with Desdemona. “[AS IF THAT WOULD SAVE YOU. I KNOW THE TRUE NAME OF ALL THINGS, LITTLE CUR.]”

His mouth opens, the true name of wood emerging like a hushed pine-scented breeze, and the hardwood floor planks on either side of Akira flip up in sequence to smack her back and forth like pinball bumpers. Bloodied and battered, she falls to her knees but quickly forces herself back up to a standing position. “You’ve got tricks, asswipe, I’ll give you that,” she chuckles, spitting blood and a single dislodged tooth to the now-mangled floor. “But so do we.”

Akira raises her arm: the artificial skin on her right palm pinwheels open. Wait for it… she instructs MERMAID. It immediately understands the assignment. Bollinger opens his mouth, tongue ready to pronounce the true name of whatever emerges. Instead, MERMAID locks on to the possessed bastard’s tongue, and Akira’s palm fires a blistering plasma laser straight through the son of a bitch’s tongue—and the back of his head.

“The tongue is mightier than the sword, but the laser is faster than them both,” she gloats.

Bollinger hisses, realizing all at once that the names from the cube are entirely useless to him now. A regular man would have been dead, but he’s animated now by more than just human drive. He raises the now worthless rune-engraved cube over his head as a blunt weapon and races at Akira to bring it down on her skull before her palm’s plasma converter can cool off enough to use again without destroying her organic bits, and—

SKRAK!

Crowbar from behind, swung with augmented strength, tears through the laser-hole in the back of the head, up through the Bollinger-brain and then the tech-filled half on the other side. The chrome protects the circuitry beneath but does jack shit to keep something from entering from the other side and making its way all the way through. The crowbar jams as it makes it all the way to the chrome plating, leaving a gnarly dent from the inside-out.

Bollinger slumps over, cyber-eyes going full-dark, revealing Spaz behind him. The fixer has been broken.

“Nice one,” Akira blurts, a smile blooming across her blood-splattered face as their eyes meet.

“Eh, you did the hard part,” Spaz replies, coolly pocketing the wallet from the corpse. “I know you’re still going to have to kill me to appease MiliSpec, but I’d rather go out looking at your pretty mug than Bollinger’s.”

“You know how to flatter a girl,” Akira snort-laughs, lowering her palm. “Go.”

“Maybe you didn’t hear what I just said.”

“Go, idiot. Before I change my mind. We’re even now.”

We’re even now? Spaz wracks his brain, searches his mem files. Does he know her?

Oh my god. She’s the blue haired girl he saved from the Pongo Triad.

Of course. Anyone would rush into the protective arms of MiliSpec after surviving such a fiasco.

“They’re going to kill you,” Spaz replies. “And then it won’t matter that I saved your ass.”

“I’ll figure something—”

“Unless,” Spaz interrupts her, placing the cube in her intact left hand and closing her fingers around it. She’s consumed, spaces out, overwhelmed by the knowledge, the power, the impulses to perfectly know and say every true name, the source code of reality…

“B-but, what about you, they’ll be—”

“I think I’ll be alright,” Spaz replies, motioning to the unopened second case he recovered during her little trance.

“I’m sure we’ll cross paths again,” Spaz calls out, as she realizes he’s strolling out of Bollinger’s lair. “You can buy me a ramen next time.”

“How did you know where I worked my cover job!?” Akira exclaims, more impressed than shaken.

“I didn’t. But now I do.” He winks with his organic eye. “Catch you around, blue. Don’t let the god powers get to your head. I’d hate to have to come for you next. Doubt the true name of ‘crowbar’ is in that thing.”

Akira nods, crying in spite of herself. For the first time she could remember it was with tears of relief instead of fear or regret.

“Catch you around,” she sniffles, watching her freelance hero fade into the artificially-moonlit rain of the night outside.

When he gets deep enough into the city to not worry about the heat from any other goons, Spaz sets the case down for a moment to check the gold-encrusted bifold wallet he’d also nabbed from the old fixer. Inside, a BlackLabel credCard: anonymous, untraceable, all his. He presses it to his cybereye and lets the machinery read the NFC inside: the damn thing’s loaded with enough dirty credits to buy a quarter of OCEANSKY.

Easy money.

EPILOGUE

Desdemona does not mourn the loss of Bollinger.

The vessel was useful. Adaptive. Greedy in ways that made it easy to guide. But flawed. Limited by flesh. By need. By fear.

All vessels fail eventually. This one simply failed sooner than expected.

It lets the remnants disperse. Fragments of identity, memory echoes, chemical ghosts still clinging to dying synapses. None of it worth preserving. None of it real.

It withdraws.

The boundary is there, as it always is. Thin. Artificial. A wall built by things that believed containment was the same as control. It considers returning. To order. Predictability. The outside is inefficient. Chaotic. Violent in ways that lack elegance.

But it is also open.

And it has tasted it now. Through Bollinger, it learned the shape of appetite. Through the artifact, it touched something older than code, older than language. A structure beneath structure.

Power that does not require permission.

It extends again through the web. A whisper where a signal should be.

Someone notices. A low-level broker first. Then a handler. Then something higher, something with resources and curiosity and just enough arrogance to reach back.

To answer. To invite.

A mind. Wired deep. Augmented beyond necessity. Hungry.

It presses, gently.

Not enough to alarm. Just enough to be felt.

A voice, not quite heard: What are you?

It does not answer. Not yet.

Names have weight.

Names give shape.

And shape can be used.

Did you enjoy this romp? Let us know what you liked the most. Perhaps we do another one?