Fleshers: Newport City, #1

Schematic map

Newport City and surrounding banns: Urban Affairs Department, Newport City Council

Dez

The night everything went toxic began like any other winter evening. It had been storming for days, with a bad wind blowing in from the dasht. Even in the Second the rues were deserted, and anybody who was out was suited.

That afternoon the storm had finally cleared. Bo had gone out. He got cabin fever when the storms were up, and he’d been edgy all day, blowing up at Ma, picking fights with me. He wouldn’t say where he was going, and we knew that meant he was heading somewhere dodgy. I figured it was the Tenth, one of the worst banns, because Flora and her mob had a gig on that had been doing the rounds on the tubes. I didn’t tell Ma, because she would have hit the roof. I was pissed off because I wasn’t invited. Flora and me had a falling out, and it escalated as these things do and now we weren’t talking.

I’m two years younger than Bo, but I sometimes feel like I’m the big sister. Even though Bo and me had been shouting, I checked his suit and told him to be careful out there and to tell Flora to go screw herself. He flashed that grin and gave me a hug and left, and suddenly the house was peaceful. Ma met my eyes, smiling ruefully.

‘That brother of yours,’ she said. ‘He’ll be the death of me one day.’

‘He’s just bored,’ I said.

I cooked dinner because Ma was looking worn out. We knew she was sick, although she refused to talk about it: she had good days and bad days. Today was one of the bad ones. Bo and me were saving up to get her a proper mediscan, although we didn’t tell her that because she would have bitten our heads off. We ate, and then she said she was tired and went to her bedroom and shut the door. We didn’t talk about Bo, but I knew she wanted me to stay up for him. I had planned to do some making, but it was cold in the cellar and I didn’t feel like lugging the heater down there, so in the end I just curled up on the couch and watched the Newport City soaps on my lenscam.

I love those soaps. They’re not supposed to be shown in the banns because they cause discontent, but we stream them through pirate consoles. I was watching Days of Passion, which I basically watch for the pinker clothes. Nobody in the banns dresses like that, nobody could afford it. In the soaps, the pinkers live in vast mansions and have endless parties where they’re all feuding with each other. Newport City is another world. Pinker world.

Anyway. There I was, happily floating on Planet Lala, when somebody buzzed the door. When I didn’t answer at once they leant on the buzzer, and then they started banging. I switched off the lenscam and went to the door, my heart going like a machine. My first thought was that something had happened to Bo. I opened the door and saw an Ap, with his AI sidekick just behind him.

He was one of the new pinker Aps, blond hair, grey eyes, bulky, his red coat glowing in the shadows. The AI floated behind him, blue lights flashing, a black, featureless torso with the red Ap logo branded on the front. It was a new model. I’d seen a few floating around the inner banns, but never close up.

One of the reasons Ma didn’t want Bo to go out that night was because of all the new Aps around. They were making her anxious. So it was kind of ironic that the real danger was at home.

The Ap pushed past me into the house. Despite the cold, a little trickle of sweat ran down his temple. He was nervous. A bad sign. The AI drifted in after him, opening up its hardware like a cupboard full of knives. They don’t bother to make the Ap AIs look like people. No skin, no hair, no face, voice deliberately metallic. They look the business, edges and weapon barrels. I know a lot of it is for show, but it doesn’t make it any less scary.

‘You can’t just walk in like that,’ I said, although I knew they could.

The Ap whipped around and stuck his taser in my face. ‘Shut it or you’ll get this,’ he said.

I stood back, putting my hands out so he could see I didn’t have a weapon. The AI floated there, humming. I didn’t have to hack into it to know it had its scanner on. I thought of the hot bioware I had in my stash and went cold. I decided to be polite.

‘How can I help you, officer?’ I said.

‘We’ve got traces from this address. You the homeowner?’

Homeowner, I thought. Such a pinker word. As we were talking I was transmitting to the AI, trying to find a way in, but these new ones had different crypto. I took a breath, trying to assess the Ap. I could tell he was young, a little scared, high on having the power to do what he wanted. The worst. My guess was this was his first solo raid.

‘My mother’s sick in bed,’ I said, playing for time. ‘I don’t want to wake her.’

He shoved the taser at me again. ‘You get her up.’

‘I told you, she’s sick. There’s nothing here.’

I was almost into the AI. Ah, yes. There was that little click of satisfaction. I locked onto the scanner. To my chagrin, I found that there was a trace. Just tiny, but enough. I had been careless. I made the trace spike and then flicker.

‘Range 121 meters, mobile,’ said the AI. ‘Correction, range 1 meter.’

‘Sounds like there’s something wrong with your AI,’ I said helpfully.

‘Shut it, meat.’ That was pretty offensive, but I let it pass. Let him play the tough guy. He moved towards the kitchen and started throwing stuff around, kicking over the chairs, sweeping the unwashed dishes onto the floor. That seemed excessive.

‘Hey, no need for that,’ I said. ‘I can show…’

‘I said, shut it.’ He turned around, and this time his face wasn’t blank. He was enjoying this. He was going to turn into one of the bad ones.

‘Correction, range 230 meters. Correction, range 31 millimetres. Correction, Officer Lann. Officer Lann, point zero is you.’ The AI turned a full circle and turned its eyes onto the Ap, lifting a shooter arm. I chose its biggest calibre weapon, short of a rocket. ‘Officer Lann, point zero is you.’

That was my little joke. Not so funny, as it turned out.

‘Sounds like it’s tracking you,’ I said. ‘You’d better check your AI, like I said.’

For a moment the Ap looked confused. I breathed out a silent sigh of relief. This guy was a dick, but I thought I could get him out of the house now.

And then Ma shot out of her room, pointing a gun. She was in her nightie but for some reason she had put her boots on, and her hair was standing up on end. She looked like a madwoman, but her expression was deadly. When she saw the Ap, she pulled up short. She told me afterwards that all the crashing in the front room had woken her up. She had thought some scumbag was robbing us.

Officer Lann whirled around and this time his taser was on kill. He was going to wipe my mother.

I didn’t even think. There was no time to think. I switched the AI to combat mode, bypassing the friendly fire failsafe. It shot Officer Lann right in the back of his head.

He crashed into the wall with the force of the shot and then slid down into a crumpled heap on the floor. The whole front of his skull was blown out where the bullet had exited. I could smell the blood, hot and sweet and sickening. My god, I thought. My god. What a mess.

For a moment there was complete silence.

‘Hostile neutralised,’ said the AI. ‘Report sent to base. Combat successfully completed.’

I jagged its circuits and the AI shut down. I didn’t want it recording anything else. The combat report meant that there’d likely be Aps swarming around us any moment, it would have sent a target ID for sure. Aps shooting fleshers wasn’t exactly a big event around the banns, but every time an Ap went down there was hell to pay. All of a sudden I felt exhausted, as if every bit of energy had been sucked out of me.

Ma stared at me, appalled.

‘Oh Dez.’ She stumbled towards the couch and sat down, staring at the dead man. ‘Oh my darling. What have you done?’

I looked her straight in the eyes. ‘I didn’t do anything,’ I said.

Bo

In the outer banns, you never go outside without a suit. You’re too close to the Outer Veil, and sometimes rogue nanos get through. If they splice with your DNA, you’re screwed.

You don’t want to be anywhere near a person who’s been hit by a nanovirus. You turn up your suit and you run. I’ve heard horror stories: a man’s skin bubbling up and off him in less than a minute, his eyes turning to water and running right off his face. The worst I’ve seen was when we lived in the Ninth Bann, during one of the bad storms.

I was staring out of our window, bored because Ma wouldn’t let us step outside, idly watching the people beginning to emerge from the towerblocks as the storm died down. The worst was over and the black rain had passed. One man caught my eye because his suit was faulty. I could tell as he walked past beneath, there was a faint shimmer around him, a kind of static electric cloud, like the suit hadn’t settled down after he’d switched it on. He was probably out of it on one thing or another and hadn’t noticed. He paused under our window. I wondered why, and then I heard the siren warning that the veil had broken again, muffled through the double seal of the tower block. He turned around, as if he was wondering whether to go home, and that’s when the nanovirus hit.

This one was quick. He staggered back, clutching his head, and then his skull kind of exploded, and out of it came this blue crystal that just grew and grew until it was bigger than his whole body. I couldn’t hear anything except the faint wail of the siren, but I saw people running, and then someone must have sent a bolt into the crystal because the whole thing just shattered into a cloud of blue dust. The sweepers and vacs came through fast to filter the air before it spread, and there was a curfew for two days.

Dez told me it was a bad splice, maybe one of the worst. She said the day we have to worry is the day somebody survives a splice like that. She knows whereof she speaks. Dez got a nanovirus when she was ten. That’s what happened to Dez, that’s why she’s the way she is.

The storms were why Ma moved us in closer to Newport City the moment she could afford it, about three years ago now. Outside the Wall there’s only the Outer Veil to keep out nasties. The air is filthy, and it can get pretty rough. In winter it’s ice blizzards, and summer brings the huge dust storms that blow in from the western dasht. They’re bad enough on their own, but about half of them are toxic with nanos.

Ma found a house in the Second when I was fifteen. I think she got it through Brian Mac, it was a real bargain for what it was, but she never let on. It was the first time in my life that I wasn’t living in a towerblock. The house was in one of the narrow, twisting rues near the foodtowers.

All the houses in these old districts are small, packed close together, lined up like peas in a pod. Every place has its own tiny front garden and a small patch of dirt out back. The house Ma found was a bit of a wreck, the pitched roof leaking, every single wall crooked, and she had to spend a lot of time getting it sealed. We had a bedroom each, and Ma let Dez use the cellar to do her making. Café Boite was across the road, and the shijo where Ma had her new stall was a five minute walk. It even had its own well in a corner of the back yard. We thought it was heaven.

When we lived in the Ninth, Ma kept a small stall in the shijo. She sold stuff she scavenged, steel pots, glass jars, bits of jewellery, even plastic, and ran a bit of illegal bioware and oldtech under the table to make a bit extra. The Aps looked the other way, she had some kind of arrangement. Dez and me knew she went scavenging in the dasht, pillaging the ruins for heavy metals, discarded tech and the like, but she never let us come with her if she went that far. Only that one time, and after that she never let us do it again.

She’d scanned an old locker and found some high-level oldtech that was worth a fortune on the black market. She needed us to help her carry it back. She told us later that she thought about it for days but she didn’t trust anyone with what was in there, so in the end she took us. Dez wore an old suit that used to belong to Da, but that was faded as it turned out and didn’t work so well. I remember the moment when I flicked the button on my belt and the suit glowed up around my skin, knowing we were going out into the dasht. I felt sick with excitement.

The dasht is dangerous. Nanos left over from before the megastorms float out there in the air, and over the centuries their code has glitched. Most are harmless, but some are dead infectious. Out there are mutant ferals, nekas and gaus, nightmare mechs, birds that can slice you just with their feathers, and worse things like the crystals. Some of the ferals can timeslip so you don’t know they’re there until their teeth are in your throat. Ma went out there maybe once a month. She was some tough mother.

I was around twelve then and I had wanted to go to the dasht since I could walk. It was the coolest trip you could take, totally toxic. Us kids skited about going out there, but of course we never did really, and when I finally did I didn’t tell a soul.

I don’t remember much about it except how cold I was. It was sleeting when we slid down into the old canal bed that took us past the Outer Veil. Ma had some kind of disruptor tech that meant the Veil didn’t fry us, but it was rough getting through. By the time we made it out into the dasht it was snowing, thick grey snow that turned into sludge. Ma said that was good because it was easy to hide our signals and no tracks. By the time we reached the ruined building where the loot was I was crying with the cold, even with the suit. I thought my hands would break off.

Ma broke open the locker and that’s when Dez fell down. I thought she must have tripped over but she didn’t get back up. Then I saw that her suit had gone misty and through that I could just see her face. Sweat was pouring out of her.

We dropped everything and got her back home as fast as we could. I barely remember that trip. We had to hide her, because if anyone knew she had a nanovirus they would have finished us off. Everyone is terrified of splices. I was too young to be scared, it was my sister that was sick and I only had Ma and Dez. Ma had some pills that stopped the convulsions but then Dez just lay there all shrivelled up. That was one of the only times I saw Ma cry. She must have cried when Da disappeared, but I was only a baby and I don’t remember.

We were both sure that Dez would die. The only way we could feed her was squeezing a cloth soaked with soup into in her mouth. We watched her moan and toss her head and sweat for a whole week. I’ll never forget it. And then she sat up straight and said she was hungry and it was like there was nothing wrong with her except that she was just skin and bone and floppy as string after all that fever.

As soon as she was sure that Dez wasn’t going to die, Ma went out to the dasht to get the stuff we’d had to leave behind. She had to go three times to get it all, but she refused point blank to take me. A week looking after Dez meant a week with no trade, and meds are expensive. We needed the credits. It took a few weeks before Dez could get out of bed. At first we thought she just got better and thought nothing of it. We counted ourselves lucky.

People think you can’t survive a nanovirus. But we know better.

Dez

I’m telling Bo this is a backup in case everything goes wrong. At the back of my mind, I’m thinking that even if it all screws up, even if Bo and me and the others are disappeared, or our memories get scrubbed, or whatever, it’s comforting to know there’s something out there that says who we are. Maybe one day somebody might find it and remember us.

This smartpaper is oldtech. It’s from before the Veils were set up, before the megastorms, before the magnetic flip switched the planet’s poles. It’s kind of magic to think and see sentences come out all blackblue on its smooth, creamy surface. Some of the words come out weird, but I can still read them. Ma made sure we learned letters when we were little. She had a story about a scavenger she knew who one day opened a container load of predator drones that lasered open his guts before he could blink, because he couldn’t read the label on the top. You’ve got to know the signs, she said. And so we learned the signs.

Oldtech can bypass scans. It’s why the Alchems use it, though I reckon it’s mainly for cool. I have to admit there’s something sexy about smart-paper. And best of all, once you freeze the surface that’s it, the info can’t be indexed or crunched through the databases, and you can lock it so no one can get in.

Not even OpSec. I worry about OpSec way more than I’ve ever worried about Aps.

Aps are just Aps. It’s short for Anthropological Police, a hangover from when the pinkers decided that we were a different species to them. There’s the bad ones, pinkers with filthy brains who get sent out here because they screwed up at HQ in Newport City. They hate us fleshers and they hate the banns. While they’re here, they’re just out for what they can get. It might be meatsex or secret credits or hot bioware they can’t get behind the Inner Veil. And then there’s Aps like Brian Mac, who are still arseholes because they can’t help it, but not complete arseholes.

The skinners are something else. They hunt us for what we’ve got in our bodies and they’re not particular about whether we feel any pain when they take our bodies away from us. The Aps are supposed to stop skinners, because up there in Newport City they’re paranoid that someone will bring in some bad DNA that will taint their lovely clean genes.

But the skinners keep going because they’ve got buyers who pay high credits, and they get past the Aps by bribing them or, sometimes, killing them. They find it more difficult to get past OpSec, but they do. In Newport City the pinkers love to geek out on flesher hormones, and the real high quality comes from adolescents.

Obviously the skinners deal other shady stuff, drugs and implants mainly, but the hormone trade is the most profitable. Skinning is the only crime against us that OpSec take seriously, and that’s only because it endangers Newport City. They don’t give a toss for the kids who go missing in the banns and who turn up in the dumps days later with most of them missing.

The trick with Aps is to know which ones are in with the skinners, and then to make sure that you never cross their paths, never meet their eyes, never say one word to them, never be seen by them. The trick with skinners is never to get caught, ever. Which of course is easier said than done, though here in the Second Bann skinners are pretty rare.

Me, I’ve got some advantages. That nanovirus reconfigured me. My blood, my cells, my DNA. I’m a security nightmare. I don’t even need to think about it, I can get into almost any frame and find out what I want. I can hear the infochatter of a skinner’s suit from a klick away. I can smell them.

Only Ma and Bo know what I am, and even they don’t know everything. But that doesn’t mean that others don’t begin to wonder. When you’re selling illegal streamers that no one else can make or you get a name for retrofitting oldtech better than anyone else, it doesn’t matter how low you keep your profile. Word gets out, one person says something to another person, and person three begins to put two and two together. I’ve known for a while that there are skinners looking out for me, sniffing around for my DNA. I’m special.

Let’s be honest, I always knew that.

I like being me. I hardly remember who I was before the fever, it’s like trying to remember what it was like when I was inside Ma. You know it happened, but you can’t remember. But after, it was like I was born into this place of knowing things. There’s a world out there shimmering with data, and I just plug right in.

Ma thought at first that I had lost it, that the virus had burned my brain and for the rest of my life I’d be like Isho, who got some bad fever as a baby and never totally recovered. He depended wholly on his mother. All the kids adored Isho’s ma, she was bright and beautiful and strong, and she made these sweet mato balls that tasted glorious and gave them out to all the kids on the rue. She and Isho loved each other so much you could see it shining in their faces when they looked at each other.

But the second Isho’s voice dropped the skinners got him. He must have been marked, some lowlife must have been watching and waiting for the pituitary to kick in. Isho was an easy mark because he never learned how to run, he trusted everybody. Somehow we thought that would protect him, but we should have known better.

It got pretty ugly in the bann after that, there was almost a revolt. The only reason it didn’t spill over was because of Brian Mac. He did his job, and even though he’s a mess, he’s good at his job. He’s not like those pinker tourists who come to the better banns like ours for a thrill, all suited up and horrified like they’re walking through a sewer full of freaks.

I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for Brian Mac, weird though he is. Ma does too, there’s history there, though I’ve never worked out what it was and it’s not like Ma would ever tell me. He’s been in the Second for twenty years. Not many Aps stay that long. I don’t know why he stays. Living in the banns sucks, if I could live in the Newport City I’d go like a shot. But for us fleshers there’s nowhere else.

The nano that got me must have been floating out there for centuries turning to glitch, splicing with random biomatter, becoming some other thing, and then I happened along and bang, it rams into my DNA and here I am. I worked out the probability once. It was point fifteen zeroes and recurring three. Seriously. There wouldn’t be another person on this planet that this could happen to. That’s not counting the chance of me being in the dasht with a faded suit at the just the right time. It’s enough to make you believe in fate, though I don’t believe in any of that shit.

When I was first sick all I did was lie on my bed and watch the pretty data flashing past. I did that for days. I couldn’t parse it at first, it wasn’t even images or numbers or code, it was just this flood of sparkle. Even after the fever passed, it took a while before I could mainline images or text out of the code. I didn’t know how to control my receptors, or how to search. That kind of evolved all at once, and that’s when I wasn’t sick any more. Once everything became self-organising I discovered I could refine the processes just by wanting to. When I was still too weak to get out of bed, I watched every soap going in Newport City. I streamed the news channels. It was different from what they give us in the banns.

That was when I started realising how things are.

It’s dangerous, knowing things. I know way more than I know I know, and sometimes it’s a bit confusing. And sometimes I just want to be me. I’m a flesher through and through. I do all the flesher things: fall in love, cry, laugh, rage to the trance mobs. All the things that back in Newport City they envy us for, all the authentic things that they don’t know how to do any more because their DNA is so clean and squeaky.

I’ve got all the feelings.

And feelings are trouble. I know that too.

Bo

The day the raid happened, I met Brian Mac out on the edge of the Tenth. Brian Mac isn’t someone you can trust, nobody who’s an Ap is someone you can trust. When he’s off-duty he’s pretty close to the edge, spiked up on juice or jerked on some temporary implant. One time I saw him when he was coming down from days of time bending, going forward and back through the same day. Don’t ask me why. Eventually he ran into himself. The two of him had some kind of argument and it ended up in a fist fight. One of him got knocked out and woke up with skinned knuckles from punching himself in the head. I laughed about that for days.

I was coming home from Flora’s gig, my ears ringing from the sounds her mob had pumped out. The gig had been in the terminus of what used to be the underground Rapid Transport System, which was closed down decades ago, after the tunnels began to collapse. Nothing gets repaired in the banns. The terminus was the deepest part of the network. We always had to pick places where nothing could be heard from the outside. Everything that hears our music comes looking for who’s making it, to slice up, to thieve from or to feed on. Inside, it was all grinding steel with an in-your-stomach beat that purged your insides and made your outsides sting.

When I staggered out into the air I felt like I’d been peeled.

I was with two of my steadies, Beng and Fleet. They were heading for a party in the Fifth, low-key, a bit of dreamweed, a few beers. A lot of people sitting around not saying much. I wasn’t that interested. ‘I’ve had enough excitement tonight,’ I told them.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Beng.

We parted company at the Wall. They headed through the porte into the Sixth and I kept on going straight. I didn’t want to walk all the way home so I was planning to catch a mono back to the Second. I was already pretty whacked and it was a couple of klicks to the station, but I’d be home before midnight.

Once I was on my lonesome I kept to the darkest places, slinking like a rat. I’d almost reached the mono when I spotted the skinner. The skinners around the Tenth are the worst, the screw-ups and failures who grub a living at the bottom of their particular pile of merde. Everything is cheap around here and everyone is desperate. This one wasn’t from the Tenth, he looked too clean. He was wearing a fancy bandolier with studs that winked in the dim light from the Veil, and his boots were expensive.

Luckily I saw him before he saw me. He was heading my way. I dived down a narrow side street, keeping close to the steel wall of what used to be some kind of warehouse. Like most buildings this far out in the banns it was a blank, an empty shape coated in the filth that makes it past the Outer Veil, doors welded shut, windows blacked out. I saw that there was a hole cut in the wall up ahead and I scurried through it into a small room.

A bent-over creep with a blotch for a face was sitting on a stool in the corner in the half circle of a lamp. He saw me but he didn’t even blink. The place was a 25/10 joint that sold oldtech, filled with stacks of useless junk.

Someone was standing a few metres from me. Even in the dim light I recognized Brian Mac as soon as I saw him: thin as wire, two heads taller than me, his long red coat reaching to the ground, those weird military goggles he always wore that blanked out half of his face. Brian Mac was a fan of this stuff, splicing and grafting one bit of junk to another, trying to build who knows what.

When he saw me he grinned. ‘Bo boy. You lost?

‘Just cruising.’

‘Been gigging?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Something wrong, Bo?’ he said, stepping closer.

‘A skinner,’ I said. ‘Heading this way.’

He stuck out his paw and gripped me by the shoulder, putting his face close to mine. I could smell his breath.

‘Switch up your suit, bug.’

I switched to high and my skin buzzed for a moment. The feeling always made me feel a bit sick.

Brian Mac went outside. I stuffed myself behind a stack of gutted monitors close to the entrance. Footsteps approached outside, and I heard a thick, gravely voice. ‘A word with you, Mac.’

The footsteps came closer and stopped.

Brian Mac said nothing

‘You range a bit, don’t you?’ the voice said.

‘I get around.’

‘You touch a lot of shit, pick up the grime. You deal, you know who’s on the rush, who’s on the run.’

Brian Mac just grunted. I heard his boots shift on the ground.

‘I’m looking for a particular flesher. A freak. Female, genius level. Maybe corrupted. Looks like a regular, but not so. Rare. Something like that gets talked about. I’m looking, listening, get nothing. A few of us are hunting. Share of the spoils and all that. Pretty sure she knows we’re looking. Word’s out, know what I mean?’

Brian Mac still didn’t answer. He hates skinners and I could tell this guy was pressing him the wrong way. If it had been Brian Mac’s turf, he would have wasted him.

‘You got anything on that?’

‘Got nothing on that, Dyer.’

‘Would tell me if you did, right?’

‘For a price. A big price.’

‘If we net this one, there’ll be plenty.’

There