[Original Novel] Metal Fever, Part 3

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I brokered temporary peace with Aubrey by ordering a large pizza. Treaty of Tripoli, I call it. Tripoli Pizza is the joint, that’s why. Nothing to do with eighteenth century moors. “Make sure there’s chlorella and spirulina on the half with algae.” Health food on pizza? Kinda missing the point of it in my book. May as well add a diet cola to the order if that nasty shit were still legal.

The drone arrived with the pizza halfway through one of my favorite stories. Why is that always the case? It’s like they know. First drone only had the drinks. I checked the order and sure enough, a little disclaimer at the bottom stipulated that orders exceeding a certain weight would be sent by multiple drones, driving up the delivery fee considerably. Fuckity fuck.

Crabjuice, though. That’s my jam. I never remember the taste is weird, only that I didn’t regret it afterward, which is why I keep buying it. It tastes the way an aquarium smells, but sugary. The animated label displays the mischievous little crab mascot pinching a hole in the diving suit of a conshelf maricultural farmer. He shakes his fist angrily as the crab dances about in glee. “Ocean’s finest!” the scrolling text reads. “It’s crabulescent!™”

“I dunno how their lawyers defend that” I muttered as I handed the other bottle to Aubrey. “How do they quantify crabulescence?” She groaned, flopped back on the ratty old sofa and returned to her game. When I studied it more closely it was one of those weird religious games. The ones designed as a vehicle for ideology at the expense of the gameplay.

“OT commander”. From what I gathered by watching, the goal was to use the E-Meter rifle to blast away ghostly “Thetans” attached to “Wogs” under their control, transforming them into “Clears”. I couldn’t hear her cussing out the other players. Subvoc. I could see her throat moving like crazy though.

I sat on her legs, after my request that she move them went ignored. She beat on me for a little bit but swiftly re-immersed in the game, not wanting to move down in the rankings because of the distraction. I paired with the wallscreen and had it display the news. Being lenticular, Aubrey continued to see and hear her game while I got something wholly different.

Aerial drone footage of blondie’s flaming wreckage. He marched angrily around the edge of the fire, shouting, crossing his arms, then throwing them in the air over and over while his buddies sheepishly sat by the road waiting for the cops to arrive. “We can confirm the identity of the gunman as Maurice Tittle.” I spit out my crabjuice. “Maurice Tittle!” I cried, laughing so hard it was a struggle not to throw up.

Aubrey glared and hushed me. I pouted. “Maurice Tittle, though. That’s fuckin’ jokes.” The anchor paused for asinine banter with the others. Some marketing formula decides how much screen time they can devote to that, fostering the illusion that they’re regular ass people you might meet at the pub despite being full metal and current as fuck.

The one whose voice suggests she was female at one point or now prefers to present that way looked something like Malibu Barbie’s pink plastic ferrari if it were humanoid, with gaps here and there just to show off the gel muscles at work. The presumably male one is carbon fiber, everywhere that isn’t display film. Most of it displaying paid ads.

“Bone chilling! In a manner of speaking. Any word on the ID of the victim?” Barbiemobile shook her streamlined pink head, oversized anime style eyes blinking. As if they would get dry if she didn’t. “Preliminary information indicates that aside from the minor infraction of entering the highspeed tunnel network in an effort to evade his assailant, he incurred no further violations which warrant releasing his identity at this time.”

I pumped my fist. “Sufficient!” Cherish the small victories. Further fist pumping transpired as the second drone arrived with our pizza. Thirteen seconds late meant the pie was free. Not the delivery though, that’s where they screw ya. Makes you feel like you’re getting one over on ‘em, but they still make their money.

Aubrey disengaged from her game long enough to begin wolfing down pizza. “That’s terrifying to watch. I swear your jaw unhinges like a snake so you can fit more pizza in there.” She growled and resumed gorging. She never puts on a pound though. Which baffles me. Her arms and legs are prosthetic on the inside. How does she burn the calories?

“So, this was around when the bio arm trend started.” Crabjuice isn’t alcoholic, but does contain THC, bonded to the dairy content. Which strongly inclines me to tell long winded stories Aubrey is guaranteed to find riveting, provided she’s had at least as much to drink.

“Full metals used to be a popular bogeyman in the media, to soften their image they’d go get a biological arm put on. Something to humanize them. As if to say hey buddy, I may look scary but I haven’t lost the human touch.” Aubrey nodded, head in my lap, staring up at me.

“I went in to talk to Dinesh, the dealer who sold me the mech arm. Duplicitous, scheming, machiavellian little twerp, to list some of his redeeming qualities. Anyway, he says “You still got that mech arm? That’s on the way out, scares people. What you really need is a biological arm. Mech arm says you’re a badass, maybe dangerous. Is that really what you wanna send out? A bio arm says you’ve got heart.” So I say show me what you got. And I shit you not, it’s my old arm. Still has the tattoo of your name on it. Shady little shit tried to sell me back my old arm.”

Aubrey burst into a fit of gigglesnorts, then choked on the pizza she was eating. Then, satisfied she would not asphyxiate, resumed gigglesnorting. When she goes full metal, I’m completely certain nobody will know she was ever a woman. Supposedly goldfish are the only animal which occasionally forgets it cannot simultaneously eat and breathe. Supposedly.

The crabjuice was putting me to sleep, so I accessed my medical implant and had it release some mild stimulants into my blood. Aubrey out cold, snoring like a buzzaw, but for me the night had only begun. I couldn’t use the elevator on account of my apartment being in the lowest tier of the pricing structure but it’s not like climbing stairs tires me out.

Once on the roof, I approached the edge and identified tonight’s target. One of those cohabs the government keeps building. Something about how we fucked up the ocean and it’s begun releasing methane. Just speeds up, as the more methane it releases, the hotter it gets, which just makes the methane ice at the bottom melt faster. Moving us all indoors seems like putting a bandaid over a gushing wound, but what do I know.

What I care about is that the priciest apartments are all along the outer wall, for the view. And the walls are weather treated metal. They haven’t finished building the ugly thing so the security coverage is patchwork at best, and I know how to knock out specific areas for a couple minutes. Rather, I know a guy who sells the software I use to do that. Sometimes fighting smart means knowing when to involve somebody smarter’n me.

I pop off the external part of my bone conduction implant and pop on the custom one. It’s wired into a green laser pointer. By pointing it at the windows, miles away, the vibration from the sound inside that room is transferred as fluctuations in the beam back to my implant, which decodes it as sound.

“-I like the blue one. No, really! I’ve told you, I’m not just trying to get us out the door quicker. Although the party is in eleven minutes. No, now it’s ten.” A woman’s voice begins shouting unintelligibly. The man’s voice falters. “I’m not rushing you, just keeping you apprised. I really do like the blue one. John and Felicia will want to have drinks and catch up at midnight when the party’s over. You remember John and Felicia don’t you?”

A window of two hours. Overkill. I descended to the ground floor, using the vendor app to request my bike on the way. It was just being released from the alcove when I arrived. Fully charged! I nodded approvingly. “That’ll do, bike. That’ll do.”

I almost forgot the sidecar. Never know what size the haul will be. Carries its own supplementary batteries too, and I was gonna need ‘em. Mech arm was still in there, so on a whim, I tossed in a portable air compressor. You never know.

I launched the attack on the out facing cameras and sensor clusters about a mile out. I could see hundreds of little blinking lights suddenly go dark. A countdown appeared in the corner of my vision. Nine minutes. Never mind how long they’d be at the party. If I didn’t get out in time, Panopticon would record my stupid mug in ultra high def from a thousand different angles.

I slowed down somewhat as I approached the outer wall so as not to damage my shocks. This cohab is shaped like an immense truncated cone. As such, the outer wall is a steep slope. Not enough that I could get up it on my bike, except for the mags. Trouble was, they drain the shit out of the battery even just holding the bike to a wall. But then, I didn’t have long to work in the first place.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 4!}