I can’t be sure about it, but it must have been around the time that the cyborg put me through the third wall that I began to wonder if I’d made some bad life choices.
“I think the point is not to let him do that,” the voice on the other end of my comm said sarcastically.
“You’re just a font of fuckin’ wisdom today,” I said. “Can you find me an exit, please?”
I picked myself up out of the pile of rubble. It would have been easier to list the places that didn’t hurt. Looking around, I didn’t see the cyborg anywhere. “Pointer, I need to get out of here before—“ I was interrupted by a sudden need to duck as this swinging massive metal fist barely missed my head. I needed to put as much space between this hunk of junk and me as possible. “Hey man,” the cyborg yelled, “THIS AIN’T ME!”
Could have fooled me, I thought. Every time I have to come down here to the Dregs, I get beat up, shot up, or screwed up. You’d think I’d learn, but a job is a job and this one was going to pay. I was just about there before my friend Chuckles showed up. I stopped running and turned around. Sure enough, he wasn’t chasing me. It seemed like he was having a problem. “I don’t know what’s happening right now,” he paused and convulsed like he was about to throw up, “but something’s wrong.” Then, and this was the damndest thing I’ve ever seen, he just stopped. Still as a statue, glassy-eyed and unblinking, just….stopped.
“Boss, I’ve got your exit lined up,” Pointer said.
“Yeah, I…” I was slowly edging closer to this statue in front of me, fascinated. “Boss?” Pointer was getting nervous on the other end. “Hey, I don’t want to rush you, but you did ask for—“ I cut him off “I know, Pointer, I know. It’s just…this cyborg just friggin’ stopped in front of me and he’s not even blinking.”
“Boss, you need to get out of there. Now.” Pointer was insistent. “He’s a piece of tech. What do you do with a piece of tech that’s glitching?”
I was right up in front of the cyborg at this point, waving my hand in front of his face. “I toss it in the garbage, and right now I’m wondering how it’s op…er…ating?” As I moved almost nose to nose with the Cyborg, it blinked, then blinked again, and the half of his face that was still human twisted into an evil grin. “Reboot complete.” He said.
“Oh, crap.” I turned to run, but he had other ideas and tripped me up before I could get going. I ate a face full of concrete. He was on top of me before I could get back up. He reared back with his large metal fist, I closed my eyes and tensed up waiting for the impact. I heard the distinct sounds of servos shutting down, a powering off, and the full weight of this beast just fell right on top of me. “Well,” I said. “Did you do that?” I asked Pointer.
“Do what?”, he replied. “Ok, I guess that means no.” I dragged myself out from under Chuckles and got back to my feet. “Every time. Every damn time.” I looked back down at Chuckles, who just appeared to be asleep this time. “I think he’s just taking a nap,” I told Pointer. “Route me out of here.”
——
A discerning person such as yourself might ask me why I keep going down to The Dregs if I keep meeting the business end of someone’s weapon of choice. My name’s Kimbal, and I’m what you would call a tracker, I find lost or stolen stuff, and nine times out of ten, that lost or stolen stuff ends up down in The Dregs, which is the badly lit underbelly of VA2, The Plex where I live. It’s an underground pit of poverty, despair, and more human byproducts than is polite to discuss.
The thing is, I’m from The Dregs. At least, that’s what I was told. I have no idea whether or not I was born the old-fashioned way or grown in a vat. I tend to think the latter because I have no idea who or where my parents are. So, I was a kid rat from The Dregs. I know what it takes to survive down here because I had to. However, you can’t take The Dregs out of the kid rat because I keep ending up down here.
This last little misadventure had to do with finding a guy. That was him. Mostly. See, he’s not all there, almost literally. His body and spare parts are a guy named Stamp. But the part of him that was mad at me? That wasn’t him. Something happened to him, and I was hired by someone to figure out what. As you might have guessed, I wasn’t able to get too close to him, but my little friend on the other side of this earpiece might’ve been able to pick something up IF HE WAS DOING HIS JOB.
“I’m working on it boss,” Pointer said.
“Anything yet?” I was still picking out cinder blocks and drywall from places I didn’t know I had. “Well, I can’t be sure,” Pointer continued, “But…”
“But what?”
“But it looks like Stamp was completely wiped.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means that Stamp is gone, boss. His personality was erased by something, and it came from his augmentations.”
“Malware?”
“I don’t know. I need to do some more work on this. You might want to come in, I don’t think there’s anything more you can do tonight but get in more trouble.”
“Copy *that*,” I said. As I made my way out of The Dregs on foot—word to the wise, don’t come down here with transpo and expect it to be there when you’re ready to leave—I kept returning to that moment when Stamp rebooted, for lack of a better term. It looked to me like he rebooted, and then something caused him to shut down. I’ve been around augments before and have never seen that happen, so I had some questions. First, what would cause that, and that’s something for Pointer to work on. Second, if Pointer’s suspicion is correct and it’s some kind of malware, then can it be spread? Third, and this might be more of a problem for what passes for a police force around here, did Stamp just die in front of me? I thought about going back to check, but frankly, that would be the one time Leo would show up. I’d rather they come asking questions instead of me giving them an easy answer right off the bat. Leos despise The Dregs about as much as I do, so anything quick and easy will do, whether or not it’s correct. Besides, Leo and I have a history. It’s complicated, but suffice it to say they are not fans of my work partly because I have occasionally interfered with their, ah, ‘investigations’, but I’m pretty sure I’ve disrupted some possible revenue streams for them. Nothing is clean in The Dregs.
I mentioned I was a tracker and a finder of lost things. Over the years I’ve become a little bit of a collector of vintage items, a topic that Pointer never lets me forget when I slide open the door to my loft. Today, he was unusually quick about it. “You’re not stuck in this place all day,” he said, “but I hear that stupid little “Hi There” every time that door opens. I’m going to self-terminate, I swear. Can you please, PLEASE, do something about it.”
I opened the door to my fridge, and red and silver job with Coca-Cola on it, and pulled a bag of sugary liquid out and popped the top. “Send to Jerry, I need him to make another batch of this soon.”
“Yeah, because nothing’s more important than your sugar high. Got it”. Pointer was not happy, but he rarely ever was. I did my best to let it roll over, Pointer was my ARP, and Augmented Reality Partner. ARPs had been around for years, but Pointer was special. He was one of the first in a new line to receive personalities, and I don’t *think* he was supposed to be a surly little smart-ass, but he’s my surly little smart-ass. He was never sold to the public, and I acquired him the same way I acquire most things: Persuasion, Money, and not an insignificant amount of deviousness when it’s called for. Besides, he reminds me of a character in a book I’ve read a million times, and I like that. “I get it, Pointer.” I put in as much feigned annoyance in my reply as I could. He’s fantastic when he perceives that he got under my skin. “Myke called, she’s wondering if you could spare a brief moment of your time in between disasters to spend some uninterrupted—I’m sorry, that should read uninjured—time together?”
“I’m surrounded by comedians today”, I sat down on the couch and took a swig of my Neo-Coke. “So, you’ve been working on Stamp’s little glitch?”
“Yeah, and I found something that shouldn’t be there.” That got my attention. “Oh really? Talk to me.”
“I’m throwing to the screen,” he said, and my main screen in the living space pulsed into life. “Ok, so in a normal augment like the kind Stamp has—“
“That’s a normal augment?”
“Strangely, yes. It’s not like ordering a number 2 at the counter, but chop shops have a lot of the same tech manuals they work from. Anyway, this is what the main board looks like in a normal augment.” The main image then slid to the left, with a new image occupying the right side of the screen. “This is what I was able to scan from Stamp when he rebooted. It wasn’t there before.”
In the center of the main board, almost etched into the material and across several important connections was the word TSUNAMI. “That doesn’t look good.”
“It’s not. It’s not healthy, either. That was what caused the eventual shutdown, and in an augment like that, it affected life support. I’m afraid if he didn’t get immediate help—like within 5 minutes—Stamp’s physical body didn’t make it.”
“Damn.”
“Here’s the thing, though,” Pointer continued, “Stamp’s personality wasn’t wiped. It was written over thousands of times. Every time it rewrote, it took more resources from the augment, and it maxed out the system. That forced the reboot, followed by what you see here.”
“So Stamp’s personality was written over?”
“Yes, but not wiped. It might still be retrievable from somewhere, like where he got the augment in the first place, or if he paid for some kind of storage. Dregs, though, so…not likely?”
“Right. So, this got a lot more interesting.” I said. I took another sip of my Neo-Coke. “I’m gonna go catch up with Myke for a minute. Call ahead and let her know I’m coming. And Pointer?”
“Call Jerry, I know, I know! You and your…whatever that is. Looks awful.”
“Don’t knock it, it helps me put up with you. Back soon.”
The door slid open and said “Goodbye”
“THAT DAMN DOOR!” Pointer screamed as it slid closed behind me.