“Neither. And two weeks old will have to do.”
“I’ll shit an entire baby if those codes work for anything other than a trap door with alligators.”
She flipped through the papers, clearly not seeing anything she liked. “Ugh. Yeah. We’ll probably die.”
“We, though. It’ll be fun.”
Tubba gave us a look as we came back through the burger place. We went outside and Marine led me around the corner to an alleyway where she slung the backpack off her shoulders. I’d expected she was going to store the codes, but instead she pulled out a holographic engraver and a laptop. She handed them both to me.
“Do it.”
I deeply considered making the obvious joke. I was going to do a voice and cover myself and everything. Seemed too obvious, so I let it go. And beyond that, Marine had a really bothered look. She wasn’t the type to plead. I wanted to ask her. Was it the risk of jail? What bothered her about it? AI wasn’t really any more meaningfully illegal than anything she had me do. And if someone knew about it and wanted her snatched up by WorldGov, there wouldn’t have been a robbery.
I took the tools and the folder. It was an hour sitting in an alleyway, exploding the folded holographic pattern so the program on the laptop could make sense of them. Then the writer took another half hour. Marine paced the whole time. The engraver clicked open and gave back a small rectangle, now much shinier than the hazy lump of silicate glass that went in. I held it up, turning it back and forth in what little light there was in the alley.
“This what they use?”
Marine came and grabbed it, flipping it over in her hand. “I’m pretty sure, yeah.”
I stuffed the tools back into the backpack and stood up, dusting my ass off.
“Well, let’s go be spies.”
Chapter
FIVE
So we were doing the part they normally skip in the movies. Getting on a bus to go break into Vircore. It still bothers me fairly deeply that people call them hoverbuses. It was a branding thing by the company who came up with the technology. Most roads were being retrofitted to assist self-driving cars when this New Mexico startup came out of nowhere and convinced the WorldGov to give them contracts for bus lanes using their magnetic tech. At the time, everyone was completely convinced that the whole deal was some sort of blackmail scam, but then they published the specs on the electromagnets. They were highly directional, insanely low power and, if the marketing was to be believed, eco-friendly. Everything was so minimal that eco-friendly hadn’t been a necessary issue for decades, but it still acted as a weird byword for good in people’s minds.
The buses were nice, though. No real sense in complaining about it. They were all polymer interiors, waterproof. That meant hobo piss wasn’t an issue even in the shitty parts of town. Every night, they noodled themselves back to their depots or whatever and did a whole cleaning cycle. If you were ever up early enough to get on a first run bus, they smelled like some sort of burning plastic and mint. Like someone was chewing gum at a tire fire. It tended to fade, but the bus we had gotten into still had the stink even in the late afternoon. There were private booths. Basically, toilet stalls you couldn’t shit in. They acted as premium seats and took up the back half of the bus. Greeting our impending death with niceties seemed like a waste of cash, so it was normal seats for us.
The row along the traffic side of the bus was empty, though nearly all the private booths had red lights glowing on the handles. A few people sat across from us. That really seemed to preclude talking about the task at hand. Marine mostly just stared down at the silicate card, looking sad and distracted.
It was on the brink of occurring to me that we were about to do something absolutely suicidal and that I had no perfectly good reason to go along with it when a woman came onto the bus with a goiter on her neck the size of a small moon. Medically speaking, I have no idea what a goiter is. Is it full of fluid? Is it just a bunch of gross cells? Is it one of those things that grows teeth and hairs like some sort of aborted fetus come back for revenge? No idea.
I nudged Marine and pointed and made a “Ewww, gross, right?” face and she just looked really disappointed with me. Ridiculous. Talking about gerbil ass physics one minute and the next she’s too good to be weirded out by a goiter. And… wait a minute.
No, no, no. She’s… don’t you fucking sit next to me lady. Oh god. She’s doing it. Right next to me? There’s like ten seats. The whole rest of the fucking row is open. And I’m on the goiter side. You can’t… look, I know this isn’t sensitive, but you can’t just put your goiter next to people, okay? But then, if you have a massive, disgusting neck lump that you’re just parading onto a bus like it’s a shitting trophy, I guess you’re probably beyond advice on the social contract best practices.
I looked to my left and it was right there. There were three of the thickest black hairs I’ve ever seen poking out of the mass. They weren’t natural. This woman was clearly turning into a fly and this meaty juice bag on her neck was going to pop and infect me with it and we were going to get turned into fly people. I squirmed and the goiter lady didn’t even blink a fucking eye. I mean, I was squirming crazy obvious. She was probably getting all cooch juicy. This was probably her thing. Fucking sickos, man. Public transport
