Selba Prime Concern - Kids Corner
Word of the Day
ElectronicSpeech (n): ElectronicSpeech is a core product of Asynk Core's Biosynch technology. Almost always called eS for short, ElectronicSpeech is a way to have a voice conversation with any one or more individuals with World access. Unlike a full sensivise session, eS has no emotional transmission, and only sends what the user thinks of saying. ES users do not need to speak aloud to transmit, but often do anyway.
The remainder of the meeting went how the remainder of meetings tend to go once the people in charge leave: so nothing of actual substance happened just a lot of portends to this and that eventuality if this and that contractual obligation isn’t fulfilled. Basically, each peon had his or her pet projects to purport for their master and Cirrhosis was expected to take notice of this very important imperative passed on from said master. All in all, it amounted to an hour long bitch-fest which Cirrhosis struggled to appear interested in. Most of the demands were things he was doing already (appear in public wearing Suzaku’s symbolage), things he would do eventually (groom yourself for the race), or things he had no actual control over (win the race).
Cirrhosis left the massive complex in the heart of the Crimson district a little dazed. He got his eButler to hail him a cab and decided it was probably about time to get back to business. Armor Trapezium didn’t give the air of a guy who would just wait calmly at a fountain for him if he was late.
The trip back was quick, the train arrived a little after he got to the station, and the walk to the center of town was pretty uneventful. The central plaza is about four hundred meters in diameter, with tall hotels on every side, and four large pedestrian thoroughfares leading in at the cardinals. There is a ring of small open-air restaurants with tables and chairs circling the bungalow used for cooking various delicacies of the Central7, with a particular interest seeming to be Earth cultures. Then closer to the fountain, a ring of merchant booths and stalls, selling this and that trinket from all over the galaxy, again tending to be more Earth focused than anything else. Then there are benches circling the large central fountain.
The fountain itself is about five meters in diameter at the base, with trellises growing smaller at about every three meters from the bottom. Six in all, they feature elaborate sculptures of tiny creatures playing in the water, many have jets where their mouths should be and supply the fountain with a more intricate display than the central geyser would offer. Most of the water comes from the very top, shooting at a high pressure that almost hits the clear composite dome before falling languidly from level to level, as the smaller jets squirt at each other playfully.
Cirrhosis can see about a hundred places for Armor to attack from, but at the same time there are no less than ten people staring at him right now. Being a celebrity does have perks when meeting assassins. If he gets shot here, which is entirely possible, there will be witnesses and people to call ambulances and the authorities. Although he’d like to avoid police interaction for as long as possible.
“Waiting long?” Armor mutters from behind Cirrhosis. Cirrhosis turns to find the man in a simple suit, a bit better dressed than last time. Cirrhosis came directly from the meeting, so he is wearing a light gray three piece with a gold tie held to his shirt by a Captain Suzaku’s tie-tack.
“And here I thought I’d be overdressed.”
“You know why I am here.”
“Actually, buddy, I don’t.” Cirrhosis is pretty sure he does.
“You weren’t supposed to come back here, Induction.” Armor says through gritted teeth.
“Heh. Well, duty calls. I didn’t really have a choice. Company man now.” Cirrhosis says pointing to his pin.
“So you think because you came here to sell motherfucking chicken wings it’s okay for you to break your agreements with us?”
“Look. I get it. I got out and that was only because I accepted banishment from all Destiny controlled locations. I get it, I totally avoided Lowers like it was the plague back on Selba, but I am here to do business.”
“What the fuck kind of business do you think we’d want to do with you?”
“Are you feeding this directly to the man in charge?” Cirrhosis says, turning away from Armor, scanning the nearby area for anything of interest. Mostly looking for other gang members, but not seeing anyone who would fit the bill. Armor is a pusher or an enforcer, but nothing like a higher up that Cirrhosis will need if he is to get to Code Name.
“Why the hell would I be doing that, I’m just on cleaning duty, no reason anyone would want to see that.”
“Okay. So you are feeding it then.”
“What?”
“I’m going to say this very slowly, so you can pick up on all of it.” Cirrhosis grins as he turns to Armor, who has a gun in his hand, hidden under his suit jacket. Cirrhosis has a stun-spike in his palm, his hands placed in his pants pockets. They both look to be having a comfortable conversation to passersby.
“Oh yeah?” Armor grunts angrily.
“Toro Abobo sent me here. I need information, you give it to me and I am gone.”
“Why would we do that?”
“Because unlike me or you, Toro is dangerous. He doesn’t get what he wants; he can do things that our little fucking minds couldn’t conceive of. He’s fucking insane and he has enough money to pay off the Federalis, let alone whatever shit ant little GovNet agency Torch has.”
“If he is so fucking grand, why do you need us?”
“One of your guys did something to Toro, affected his interests. Toro doesn’t want to have to get his hands dirty if he doesn’t have to, but… Let’s just say I’m ‘good cop’ and you aren’t going to want to meet who comes sniffing at your door when you turn me away.”
“Heh. Well you convinced them to listen to you, I guess.” Armor takes his hand out of his pocket and turns away. As he starts walking down the steps from the fountain his head cocks slightly to the side. “Coming? Or I could just beat you unconscious and drag you there.”
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever.” Cirrhosis mutters, bluff successful.
The wide open central plaza has four major roads, well, two that cross at the fountain. They take the east route along the river which eventually empties into a lake on the eastern side of the dome. The wide avenue is surrounded by tall starscrapers, most hitting the composite or coming awfully close. Some house stores or restaurants at their base levels, so there are quite a few shoppers milling about the street. Cirrhosis makes notes of every exit route he sees, which is any side alley that doesn’t end in either building or recycling unit. Armor is keeping a good pace, and is always sure to stay out of easy conversation distance.
“Where are you?” Cirrhosis tries eSing Last, getting bored of people watching. Seen one rich fat guy, seen every rich fat guy. This street is literally littered with them, to the point that you’d think he’d wandered into the LTZ somehow. The women look well kept though, lots of pretty faces and well geneered bodies wrapped in shitty dime store souvenir T-shirts with motion adverts touting the ‘best’ whatever the hell local dive shit hole. Most are for a place called Chiki Chiki’s Hot Box of Lox, which Cirrhosis will attempt to remember not to go to.
“About to go into a shoot in Crimson.”
“Ah. I just left Crimson, probably headed to something similar.”
“Oh. Oh shit! You are with that guy aren’t you?”
“Yeah. Having a scenic stroll down—“
“What is this street called?” Cirrhosis asks a woman passing by. She recognizes him instantly and smiles, attempting to be seductive a few years past her sell by date. Not that that would stop Cirrhosis if the beverages were flowing correctly.
“Isst.” She smirks as she says it. Cirrhosis smiles a broad toothy grin, and gives her a kiss on the cheek.
“Thanks.”
“Um… Yeah.” She giggles like a girl ten years younger, and Cirrhos
is trots off to catch up to Armor. He actually catches Armor watching him over his shoulder, which gives Cirrhosis a good chuckle.
“Isst. I’m not sure where I am going, but I’d recommend you get ready for things to get serious.”
“I’m supposed to stay here.”
“Yeah…”
“Did you want me to come with you? When you leave?”
“I mean if I live through this, I thought…” Cirrhosis shrugs, not that she could see him shrugging. Shrugs don’t translate well in one's voice. Armor is laughing to himself.
“Oh. I mean. I guess. Do you think they’ll sue me?”
“Maybe. Look I don’t know, I just thought that you were in this with me now, but that’s okay.”
“Is it?”
“Fuck. I really shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Well, if you aren’t dead later you should text me.”
“So you work for me then?”
“Amongst other people, yes.”
“Right, right. You’re in my latest ad campaign for the Race.”
“No. That was Last Chance.”
“I’m sort of disregarding that advertisement.”
“For obvious reasons.”
“You did the respectable one, correct?”
“Yes. That and you’ve directed three sensivise dramas that I’ve starred in.”
“Oh. That’s why you look familiar. Sunbeam?”
“Sunshine Apocalypse.”
“Oh right. Okay, that makes sense.”
“Do you actually not know who I am or are you just pretending so that you seem more important?”
“A little of both?” Truckee drunkenly shrugs. Sunshine laughs heartily, swigging another mouthful of whatever the hell sort of black vodka Truckee brought up front with him. Sunshine would do an advert for free for the liquor, although she doubts she’ll ever remember the name of the company at the rate they are presently consuming.
“So, you got stuck in this how?”
“Well, I hired Epic here to find who stole my rock. We caused a bit of a ruckus, and because of my extreme debt…”
“How extreme?”
“Extremely extreme. Trust. Anyway, we caused some problems and there was questions about the security in my building and then one thing leads to another and I am a suspect.”
“Security problems?”
“A lot of unauthorized people were running around, and the net crashed right before the incident. Some gang members threatened me in an elevator, gang members to whom I owe a lot of money. You got shot at by someone who had just left my building, right?”
“Yeah, I think he followed me after I left.”
“What were you doing in the office?”
“I had just finished some second unit shots for the pro-motion adverts, and I went to the main office and dropped off my temporary code key. My check was getting wired to me when the net crashed.”
“So you went to my main office, but not my personal office.”
“What? Yeah, I guess. I was just leaving and I swear I was being followed, but I didn’t see the guy in the bad suit until I hit the pavement.” Sunshine mutters, trying her hardest to remember the details.
“Interesting. What happened to the guy?”
“Pepper almost choked him to death, and the cops took him away.”
“Pepper?”
“No, the choked guy.”
“Oh.”
“Well, the guy deserved it, he did try and kill me.”
“I guess.”
“You aren’t very sympathetic.”
“Waste of time. Care to open the next bottle?”
“Okay, you’re a little sympathetic.”
“Do you know who was following you? What gang he was with?”
“Pepper didn’t know. I thought he was another bounty hunter after my head.”
“Did you have a bounty when you hit the street?”
“I know I did by the time we left the store.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah. It is, isn’t it.”
Some clunking can be heard from far down the hallway, it slowly gets louder. In the cockpit, lights that were red start turning green, this and that meter fills and a rumbling returns to the cabin. The kind that you don’t notice is there until it is gone.
“Oh shit. We actually might not die here.”
“Yeah, maybe somewhere else. That’s at least a start.” Sunshine says with a toothy grin.
“Hey, try and have a little faith in your Captain, huh?” Epic chuckles as he enters the room.
“Where are we going?”
“Sunshine, where did Pepper say to meet him?”
“He has this farm on Checktiza.”
“What? I am not going there. That place is for heathens.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Okay, mother-fuck the both of you, we are going to Checktiza. Now buckle in before I vent you both into space.”
“Oh shit.” Truckee mutters, pulling himself wobbling into his chair. Sunshine’s grin disappears as she struggles to cork the bottle and stand and sit into her chair at the same time. Sunshine slips, and due to the light gravity, sort of drift-falls into the hallway. Gotta be serious with drunks if you want action in any sort of reasonable time period.
“Ma’am! Please walk the other way, we are disembarking!” Big yells, catching Sunshine by the shoulder, ensuring she doesn’t land glass first.
“Get up here; we’re spooling in thirty seconds.” Epic mutters through a grin. How he manages to get saddled with this many loads is beyond his comprehension. Whoever is at the forefront of this is getting a boot pretty far up their intestinal tract.
Checktiza is the forth planet in the Olmni-Ou Galaxy, and is firmly in the Sprawl. While Olmni-Ou has been a stop across the Sprawl for almost six hundred years, Checktiza was only firmly inhabited after the postwar colonization boom. Checktiza is a largely agrarian planet, as the jump-stop related business is based around the seventh planet, Olm-Tuvok. Regardless, for a Sprawl planet Checktiza is largely crime-free and generally stable. Run by a business dynasty, lead by Jor Usukta, a second tier nephew to Corialis. Someone who was always more of a tool, an brand over-extend, more so than any sort of genius in his own right. This said, Jor and his family are still obscenely wealthy. Wealth can cause problems for some, but peace, like anything else, can be bought. Civil unrest is completely foreign to Checktiza, a sleepy planet with no aspirations to greatness. How does it stay this way? Well, it’s easy when you can just reassign people to other planets when their aspirations overreach your expectations. Usukta also has a heavy ownership on Isis, one of the Central7. You prove to be too energetic, want up the corporate ladder; well you get shipped off to where you belong.
As such, Checktiza is forcefully kept backwater. Better to provide geneered food items to its neighbors, and other high labor and low wage items. With the level of technology, however, even the high labor jobs are relatively low in general labor. So even though Checktiza is the ‘bread basket’ of the Sprawl, it probably has fewer citizens than Hess or even Torch.
Tracts of land are run by robots, and small families. They live the luxurious life of the underworked and underpaid that can only be enjoyed by people with no aspirations for anything else. Citizens line up every ten years to vote, and always vote exactly the same way. Freedom and uniformity aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive when the electorate quite honestly doesn’t care. Keep the paychecks coming in, keep off their land, and the people of Checktiza don’t give a fucking rat’s ass what you do.
So, as one could obviously deduce, with a planet-wide shrug attitude, Checktiza is full of ‘quirky’ individuals. Religious extremists, fundamentalist geneticists, and sexual perverts exist in a patchwork society where the only rules are ‘produce your share’ and ‘stay the fuck off my lawn’. Cities are not the norm for Checktiza, and there is only one with a spaceport. The c
apital, Olm-tok. This is where Usukta lives and runs the business side of Checktiza, surrounded by men a little more ambitious than the rest, but not ambitious enough to get transferred off-world.
Epic manages to get docking clearance at the orbital station, which stays geo-locked with Olm-tok. A couple of rungs, a joke of a customs scan (they didn’t even pick up that Big is AI), and the four fugitives are on a baked potato headed downward.
“They seriously just let four wanted criminals onto their planet with, what, no problems?” Sunshine texts Epic, right as they sit down. Epic is buckling Big into the special child’s seat they gave them. The thing has like six extra straps and they are all really tiny and difficult to fasten. Big is attempting to help without being too suspicious. Truckee is looking out the window, just happy to be near some civilization where he is not being shot at. Also he’s still a bit drunk, and is presently attempting to fight off vertigo related nausea.
“I may have hacked their stuff a little, but their incompetence is why Big got through without an explanation.”
“But I can tell he’s an android with my bare eyes. He’s built like a six month old and he’s walking upright. That alone, makes no sense.”
“You were the one who kept talking about how backwater this place is.”
Sunshine shrugs. “Valid. But still, how good of a hacker are you?”
“It’s not about being good. It’s about paying for good shit. Never skimp on hacks. Never.”
“I’ll keep that in mind?”
“Hey, you never know.”
“I guess I really can’t argue.”
Sunshine looks at Epic, then at Truckee, back to Epic.
“What?” Epic asks finally.
“Do you honestly think this is going to work out?”
“For you, probably. You really don’t have anything to do with anything. If I can get you to Pepper’s without us getting nabbed, we’re leaving you there.”
“What about meeting up with him?”
“No way to.”
“You can’t like, send him an encrypted message or something.”
“Did he tell you to do that?”
“No. He said that would lead Stardust to me. But don’t you have like, a special secret way to do that.”
“Nothing Stardust couldn’t hack. Or whoever else is on to us now. This is bigger than her. Someone is paying her. A lot. Someone is paying other people a lot too. Right now I have about two ideas as to who that might be, but without a bit more information I have no idea what to do. Something about this, something isn’t level. The pieces just don’t… fit.”
“Pepper would know.” Sunshine looks out the window. The land is blurry with the flames of re-entry licking at the outer shell of the ship. Something about it is still comforting though.
“That’s why I’m going with you. I have no idea where he is, but if we’re lucky, he made it here. Honestly, Stardust probably killed him days ago.”
Sunshine turns sullen, her eyes watering. She had honestly thought everything would be fine. I mean, sure, not fine fine. That woman screaming is probably going to keep her from sleeping in anything other than a drug infused haze for a good couple of months, but still. Epic is strong, Truckee is connected, and Pepper…
“Look. I have no idea what I’m saying, okay? I don’t deal with normal people often.”
“Uh.” Sunshine looks at Big, who is masturbating despite his being tied down rather severely. A feat of engineering, to be sure.
“Right. Exactly. I don’t know what to say to you. It’s just. Well, let’s see what we see when we get where we’re going. Sound like a plan?”
“Sure. Whatever.” Sunshine mutters, still quite sullen.
Epic looks at her, a level of concern plays across his face for a brief moment, but is immediately gone in a scowl. Epic stands, and heads down the aisle to grab a drink.
The hallway is thin, Epic has to turn and walk sideways past a woman talking to her child as she attempts to calm it. The kid is fussing a little, which is to be expected in intergalactic travel. No matter how good the technology gets, there is something physically disconcerting about exiting or entering a planet’s atmosphere. Epic manages to squeeze by when he hears something. A small buzz in the corner of his perception. Epic turns on his full sensor suite without so much as thinking about it. There is a very heavy bandwidth conversation going on in the bathroom stall to his direct left. Epic dips into the right room and sits down, making a show of looking like he’s going to go, and actually realizing that it isn’t a half bad idea.
He hits a little green lance in his peripheral display, the hacking engine unfurling around his sight like a map. Waves of transmission energy are shown echoing out from their sources, the one of interest is bright green. Highly encrypted and quite strong. Whomever is doing it must have a state of the art rig, and an agreement with the company running the shuttle. No one could miss this, but in Checktiza, no one is looking. Perhaps that is why security was so lax today, someone was paying it to be lax.
Epic has his eButler download the transmission as he attempts to decode it. His bone amps start getting rather hot from the expenditure, this being a massive drain on his processors. Almost unbearably so, Epic decides it best to stick to just downloading. He could probably get into the cast, but not without either telling his location or leaving himself vulnerable to whatever electronic warfare might be lingering outside. Too much risk with the kids in tow. However, once they get planet-side, Epic will be looking into this further.
Epic sits in the bathroom for a good forty minutes, waiting for the transmission to end. Eventually it does, and he waits in the bathroom ten minutes after that, and heads back to his seat. Truckee is awake and a bit more cognizant now, but Sunshine has long since crashed.
“Where have you been? This is probably the least interesting flight I’ve been on in days.”
“Someone is up to something. Question, how did you find out to contact me?”
“To hire you?”
“Yes. How?”
“You were listed on the company files. I needed someone fast, and you were listed as a previous employee. Well, as ‘employee’ as someone like you could be listed, anyway.”
“For T-Net?”
“Yes.” Truckee turns from the window to look directly at Epic. Epic is looking back towards the bathrooms.
“I’ve never worked for T-Net.”
“So you think?”
“Set-up. From the beginning.”
“Why?”
“Hard to say. You and I both have enemies, perhaps we share one.”
“That is likely considering the length of my list.”
“And mine. Either way, something is going down on Checktiza. We need to get somewhere safe so I can focus on decryption. “
“And the girl?” Truckee looks at Sunshine, fast asleep between them, her arm around Big. Against his own inclination, Truckee actually feels bad for her. Thrown into something she has no bearing on or with, and for what?
“She might be stuck with us until this is over. My guess is the race is some sort of prime day in this time table. Whoever stole the gem is either going to sell it by or use it by then. We need to figure out what’s going on before the race, and we have to get you back on Selba in time.”
“Oh. Fuck. I forgot I was hosting that.”
“Does this gem really ‘do’ something?” Epic looks at Truckee seriously, Truckee nods slowly in agreement.
“It’s… it’s hard for me to explain exactly. It. Fuck. Well, it…” Truckee looks out the window exasperated. Epic frowns, leans his chair back a bit. The ship is traveling like a normal terrestrial plane now, it will still be another couple of hours before they land in the station.
“Hmm. Try and get some sleep, you’re still a little drunk to be of use.”
“Right.”