ABC - Penance

Roche Apartment Building, North Bank District

By the time I got to Georgia’s apartment tower I had already made two other stops. First stop was to hand over my odorous bag of soiled clothing to Mrs Wei-Fang at the Super Fast Dry Cleaners.

She had opened the bag, taken one hasty glance at the contents, then sealed it up like it contained toxic waste. Which to be fair it did.

“Two days, fifty Pandas” she had declared succinctly and I had agreed. The suit had cost me a lot and I had no spare so it had to be done.

Second stop was to drop Minke at my Papa’s gym. She had asked me if I thought he would let her train there. I made a quick call, gave Papa a heads up on who she was, and he had surprisingly agreed. She had ridden over on the back of my bike, eagerly perched on the seat behind me and my spare helmet on her head.

“Play nice” I had warned her after I handed her over to Papa’s care. She had grinned excitedly and promised to behave. We had already discussed what he was going to teach her, a mix of kick-boxing techniques and straight out boxing that my father excelled in.

Minke was a knife fighter, yet every Arena combatant needed to know good foot and hand work in order to survive. I had seen her take down Steel Hammer using only her bare hands and boots, so there was some raw talent waiting to be developed.

From there I had ridden over the canal and into North Bank, ending my ride in the basement of Georgia’s building. Cameras watched my every move from the moment I turned into the access ramp and tracked me as I walked to the elevator doors.

I lifted my eyes to the camera over the elevator doors and waved.

“Hi Georgia, it’s me” I announced.

The doors pinged and opened for me, so I stepped inside and hit the button for her floor. As always, I wondered if anyone else lived in this apartment tower. There were vehicles parked in some of the bays yet I had never seen another living soul during my visits to Georgia’s den. Then again, if they were as reclusive as my friend they might never leave their apartments either.

She was a living relic of the V-Bomb back in 2020, one of the Changed, so she didn’t venture out into the world. Like everyone else alive at the time, her DNA had been rewritten by the Virus. In her case, she had been in her mother’s belly waiting to be born.

Most of those who Changed did not survive the process. Many became living Zombies, raging wildly and spreading the viral infection before the mutations killed them. Georgia’s mother had survived the infection relatively unaffected, but her unborn daughter had been savagely mutated in vitro.

Georgia had lived and been born to a mother who loved her, no matter what the Virus had twisted and changed in her daughter. The infant had been born fully Awakened, in her case a functioning Pre-Cog from the day she drew breath.

The elevator doors slid open and I stepped into Georgia’s foyer, an empty space with a single chair facing a wall sized screen. A solitary door faced the elevator, closed for now.

“Hello my lovely!” Georgia’s beautiful face spoke to me from the screen, the massive image dimensions showing off her flawless beauty. Many clients who saw her face online thought it was a simulation, with perfect symmetry and blemish free. The truth was she was even more gorgeous in real life, but I was one of a privileged few to see that.

“Hi Georgia” I smiled back warmly. She triggered the door release that lead from the foyer and I stepped through, letting the auto-closure mechanism seal it shut behind me. I strode down a long corridor, unlabelled doors to either side of me.

At the end I came to her work room, the one door I had gone through so many times before. I pushed it open and entered the presence of the best Net Diver in Spitfield and quite possibly the entire Zone.

She was in her motorised chair as usual, her face, neck and right arm only exposed. The left arm and everything below her neck remained hidden beneath a heavy fabric covering. Georgia had a chair set beside her for me and the coffee machine bubbling steam on a nearby table.

My friend never drank coffee, yet she had gone to the effort of having a full coffee machine installed and learned how to use it, purely for my benefit. It always gave me a nice warm feeling to know she valued my friendship so highly.

“Your phone is bugged” she announced as I sat down and I looked at her in sudden alarm.

“What?” I gasped. “How can you tell that even before I show it to you?”

I had indeed been about to drag out my phone, intending to show her the data packet from Ms Prendergast. I took it out and held it gingerly, examining the innocent looking device as if it were a bomb.

“I’m a Pre-Cog, Luisa” she reminded me quite unnecessarily. “My consciousness is running about five minutes in the future at the moment”

“Oh, that makes sense” I replied.

Georgia had tried to explain it to me once, how her mind worked with her rare Ability. She said the best analogy was her body lived in the present, but her conscious mind existed anywhere from a few seconds to minutes in the future. It gave her a sense of disconnection the further ahead her mind roamed, so most of the time she stayed less than ten seconds forward of the ‘now’.

She saw the future like a whole series of movies, starring the same actors in roughly the same roles but made by dozens of different directors. The most probable futures were in the centre of her awareness, with the less likely outcomes ranging in diminishing strength to either side.

Depending on which possibility she focussed on, she could see what decisions lead to those outcomes, working backwards to try and decide what she needed to do in order to make them happen. Or to stop them from happening.

The biggest drawback was that her awareness was only centred on herself. She could not see what my future held unless she was with me at that time. Events that happened outside of her perception could only be observed by whatever impacts they had on her own life.

Her one overwhelming fear, the one all Pre-Cogs shied away from, was to see blank emptiness in the future. If the future was gone, it could only be because she was gone.

Like so many Abilities, it had its upsides and downs. For Georgia, it had stripped away all her chances of a normal, happy life. Yet she persisted and I had never once found her maudlin or depressed. For all the crappiness my life had given me, seeing her live like that had given me strength.

“Stop staring and give me your phone” Georgia said, interrupting my thoughts. She had her well manicured right hand held towards me so I placed the infected device in her palm. With rapid moves she activated my phone and laid it against a magnetic induction reader.

“Uh-huh” she spoke to herself, eyes roaming a wide holo-screen in front of her. Images and data streamed across the display. “Looks like someone wants to keep a track of your location. Have you accepted any data packets recently?”

“Yeah, that’s why I came to see you” I admitted. “I am chasing down that guy for Jericho-Three. I got a lead on someplace he might have been working and they gave me a copy of his Personnel file”

Georgia extracted the relevant packet, stripping the malware from the file before she opened it. She frowned and looked over at me, still sitting gobsmacked in my chair.

“Okay, the tracking software was definitely attached to the data packet” she confirmed. “It’s a simple enough piece of code, using your phone’s own carrier signal to send a GPS link to the other party. The coding to hide the malware is quite sophisticated though, so the person who sent this packet to your phone may not even be aware it was in there”

So the Prendergast bitch may or may not have known she was bugging my phone when she gave me the data. It could have been linked to the Personnel file by someone else, on the off chance a snoop like me came asking about Jake Fong.

“Can you identify where the tracking data is being sent to?” I asked her.

“Not yet” Georgia confessed with exasperation. “The data stream goes to a BOB drive in Port August. When they want to know where you are, they’ll access the drive then. I’ll post a Sentry on the drive, so when it does get accessed it will send me an alert and I’ll try and trace it”

I pondered her words.

“So you think I should leave the tracking malware on my phone?” I asked.

“If you want to find out who is tracking you, yes” she agreed. “I can add a kill switch into the code so you can disable it when you want, but you won’t be able to restart it. Once you kill the tracker, it will stay dead”

“Sounds good to me” I replied, so Georgia worked her Net Diving skills for a couple of minutes on my phone then handed it back to me. “Thanks” I said and pocketed the Judas device away for the moment.

“Now, is any of the data in the packet actually useable?” I continued. Georgia was flicking sections of the packet onto her screens, cross checking addresses and contact details with known registers.

“It’s all a work of fiction” Georgia told me bluntly. “There are no contacts, addresses or even personal references that stand up to close scrutiny” She paused and a small grin crept across her beautiful face, her white teeth flashing at me in sudden excitement. “Except for this guy” she amended.

She brought an image onto the screen. It showed a tanned, dark haired man in a private uniform of some kind, maybe a security guard. He was listed as a Personal Reference for Jake Fong and according to Georgia he really existed.

“So who is he?” I asked her and she did another cross check against a private Security Agents register. It wasn’t a publicly accessible register but that hardly stopped her from mining what data she needed from it.

“Zeus Tubbs” she answered. “He works for Spitfield Automated Network and Distribution”

“Who or what are they?” I pondered. “What’s the connection to Jacob Tan?”

“Amongst other things, they are the primary distributor for Wonder Bars here in the Zone” Georgia told me.

I dragged my eyes from the data screens and my face lit up with understanding.

“Holy shit, girl, you found me a lead!” I shouted. “You’re the best”

I leaned forward to give her a hug then stopped myself. We had never been a touchy-feely kind of friendship so I pulled back and sat on my chair. For a moment I thought I saw a flicker of disappointment pass across her face then it was gone.

“Yes I am” she agreed in an even tone. “I’ll send your department the bill for my services as usual”

“Thanks Georgia” I replied. The moment to share a human connection with her had passed us by and I did not think I could drag it back.

=====

Canal Bridge, South Bank District

I called Ghost as soon as I left Georgia’s apartment and arranged to meet him at the pathway that ran under the Canal Bridge. It formed the natural and socio-economic barrier between the North and South Banks so was a good meeting spot for us.

It was getting into late afternoon by the time I heard his big hybrid motorbike rumble up to the street side parking. I was still sitting on my electric sports bike when he pulled into the empty bay at my side and I watched him with envious eyes.

My bike was fast, with the rapid acceleration a good pair of electric motors gave me. The bigger motor drove the rear wheel and a smaller unit provided extra traction and handling for the front wheel. It had cost me two thousand Pandas, second hand, and it was my prized possession.

Yet I would have killed for a bike like Ghost’s. It ran off a hybrid power source, using a liquid hydrogen engine for power generation, constantly recharging the batteries that drove the front and rear electric motors. The black and steel beast stood as high as my chest, looking normal sized when the huge figure of Ghost was sat astride the machine.

With a full tank of Liquid-H, Ghost could cruise for over a thousand kilometers, twice the range of my rechargeable batteries. His top speed was about the same as my bike, the only reason I didn’t try and steal the machine away from my partner.

That and the fact he would kill me stone dead if I even breathed on his ride. Standing too close to it even now got me a scowl.

“Let’s take a walk, Detective Gaunt” I suggested and strode away from our parked bikes, heading down the grassy slope to the canal edge. A hard paved pathway ran along the water’s edge, marred here and there by graffiti swirls and tags.

I waited at the concrete lined bank, my eyes watching the water and bits of plastic trash flow past on their long journey to the outlet near Port August. Ghost stepped silently to my side, about two arm’s lengths away and grunted to let me know he was there.

“My phone is bugged” I began the conversation. “Georgia tells me it’s a piece of tracking malware and it came with the data packet I got at Wonder Bar”

“Is that why you left your phone at the bike?” he asked. I nodded confirmation.

“So our target is still working for them?” he added.

“Maybe” I conceded. “Or he left them with some bad blood, so they may be looking for him too. If I find him, they can find me and get their guy”

“So why try and kill you in their factory?” Ghost wondered aloud. “Killing a Police Inspector in cold blood would bring all kinds of shit down on them” He turned to me, his flesh and metal eyes boring into me. “It still should. You could have reported the attempt and gotten the whole factory swarmed by Police and Guards”

“Yeah, and I think that was the intention” I answered evenly, my eyes still watching the water. “I don’t think the Wonder Bar company was behind it, at least not the management. It may have been an opportunistic attempt by someone within the business. I just don’t know so for now I am going to keep myself out there, dangling on the line”

“You are making yourself into bait” Ghost warned me. “Even if you catch the prey, the bait gets gobbled up”

I smiled at him, turning my face towards his flat, darkly scowling face. At times like this he reminded me so much of Clancy it made my chest hurt.

“Think of it as more of a decoy, luring the enemy into my range so I can strike”

Ghost gave a short snort of what I construed as laughter.

“You’re a fist fighter, Alvarez” he grumped at me. “Your range is crap”

“That’s why I have you, Ghost” I assured him. “You can cover my ass while I am dangling out in the open”