Neon Dust [Progression Cyberpunk] 2.31 Complications

31 – Complications

Addie stepped out of the shower and, after drying off, took a minute to wipe the steam from the oval, LED-backed mirror. Her dad had installed it—one of the many little finishing touches he’d made to the apartnt they’d built inside the warehouse while she and Tony were off doing other things. The ceiling wasn’t finished; a square hole in the snap-together panels where a vent fan would eventually go yawned into the abyss of the warehouse, but, other than that, the bathroom was almost done.

As the mirror cleared, she stared at herself for a long minute. She was studying the shiny finish of her new Dust reactor’s display. She examined the sleek chro curve, trying to remind herself that it was just hardware, just a piece of tech. Even so, when she wasn’t paying attention, when her mind drifted toward the device without her conscious control, she’d see Zane’s face again—his look of shock, disbelief, and horror as she’d reached around to pull his PAI.

She probed the red, swollen flesh around the implant. It was tender, but not too bad. Surprisingly, the new reactor was nearly a centiter smaller than her old one, and Doc Fox had needed to give her a synthetic bone graft to make the housing snug. He said the healing would take an extra few days compared to a usual install.

When she slid her fingers over the chro-like surface, it ca alive, displaying her Dust levels—1109/5000—her current draw rate—22 Dust per minute—and a rotating, holographic close-up of a sun, complete with solar flares. Living in the Blast had the dubious benefit of easy Dust collection, but it was all dirty, making it less effective by a factor of four than the refined stuff. Still, that count was sothing else. Whenever she felt gross about having a piece of tech in her that had once been in Zane, she’d look at her Dust reading, and her reservations would diminish. “Five-thousand Dust!”

It was a nice display—shiny, as people would say. If she wore a revealing enough top, it would make a splash at the Ninety-nine. She smiled at the idea of flexing on other operators with her Dust count. Of course, she didn’t need to see the display to know her count; it was also on her AUI. “Shiny,” she said, trying to reinforce the idea as she ran her fingers over the smooth surface again. She wanted to believe it, but sothing in her felt like it was more of a scar than an achievent.

She dressed, dried her hair, and then ssaged Tony, asking him if he was up. She knew he probably was. If she had to guess, she’d say he was at the—

Tony: Yo, just finished at the gym. You heard from Glitch?

Addie: Not yet. Today is only day three, though. Should I ssage her?

Tony: Sure, but we could do another job in the anti. Torque said he might have sothing.

Addie: All right, you talk to Torque, and I’ll talk to Glitch.

Tony: Roger, boss.

Addie smiled. He’d been doing that lately, calling her out for acting bossy, but he was always playful about it, so she wasn’t sure if he was serious. It wasn’t like she called all the shots; in fact, she was always more than willing to let him make major decisions. She’d acquiesced about the darn Dust reactor, after all, hadn’t she? She still couldn’t believe she was wearing a piece of tech worth a hundred thousand bits. “Tier four,” she muttered, clicking her tongue.

She’d asked Tony about that, wondering if all tech had so kind of rating on the SOA scale. He’d chuckled at the idea, though. It seed so things were easy to rate—Dust reactors, for instance. They had a value that was displayed nurically: how much Dust they could hold. Other things, like Tony’s arm, would be far more difficult to evaluate. There were all sorts of “stats” for a cybernetic arm, and so were intangible—style, for instance.

No, you’d never find an SOA rating on a cybernetic arm unless it got so expensive and exclusive that only a high-tier operator could swing it. Then, soone with a piece of gear like that might say, “My arm’s tier-one tech, scrub.”

Addie sat on her bed and tried to focus. Why was her mind wandering so much? Maybe she was trying to think of anything but the thing she really wanted to think about—her relationship with Tony. He was more and more sweet on her, she was sure of that, but there was no way he’d normally move so slow with a girl he was interested in. Tony was an operator from New ’Hattan! There had to be more holding him back than his fear of his forr employers.

He said he was doing a counseling program with his PAI, but she could tell there was sothing he still wasn’t confronting, and she was pretty sure it had a lot to do with his last—what? Partner? Lover? Girlfriend? Wife? Her inability to even label the mysterious woman just illustrated how little Addie really knew. She wondered if the mystery woman had been involved with the betrayal. That would surely put a damper on soone’s romantic interests, right?

“Argh!” Addie shook her head, punching herself on the knee. “Quit spacing out!” She cleared her throat and focused on her AUI. “JJ, ssage Glitch.”

“What should I say?”

“Just open the chat.” Addie watched as the appropriate window opened, then she thought her ssage. JJ was pretty good at picking up text from her ntal impulses.

Ember: Heya – any luck on that, um, missing person you’re helping us with?

While she waited for a response, Addie flopped back onto her pillows and pulled up the Dust manipulation exercise app Pyroshi had sent her. It wasn’t a complicated program; it just displayed a three-dinsional model of a hypothetical “Dust flow” and illustrated how to pull it into threads and weave or pattern it. The idea was for Addie to examine the model, watch the animation, and then apply it in practice with the Dust she had stored in her reactor. Once she completed it, she could select the green checkmark, and the program would then provide her with the next exercise.

So far, she’d managed to make it to exercise five out of fifty. That was one thing a new Dust reactor couldn’t do for her: it didn’t make manipulating Dust any easier. No, she’d have to practice and learn that the hard way. As she started the first exercise, a simple twist of two “ropes” of Dust, she let her mind wander a little, and she fantasized about properly fading and being able to move around while she was in the space between dinsions.

Theoretically, she’d be able to walk through walls or even drift up and down through floors and ceilings. Of course, it was risky; just as she’d knocked Mary Harper out of her fade when she’d attacked Tony, soone could do that to Addie. If she were passing through sothing solid… she could die.

She completed the braid, hit the checkmark, and moved on to exercise two: a flat grid of thread lines resembling a tic-tac-toe board. She was just laying down the third line of Dust when her ssage window flashed:

Glitch: Hey, super sorry it’s taking so long, but no, I’m not there yet. I promise it’s not for lack of trying. I have a couple of leads, though. I just need to get past so firewalls and a clever little defensive AI. I’m working on a trap for it. If it works, it should buy enough ti to snoop out what I’m looking for. Give another day…maybe three at the most. In the anti, can you ask your buddy why he won’t return my ssages?

Ember: Okay, I’ll pass that on. I an, about the tiline. Um, what buddy, though? You don’t an Tony, do you?

Glitch: No—Beef! I an, I get it, he’s a hard-case banger tough guy, but that doesn’t an he should just leave swinging from a wire, you know? Sure, maybe I flirt with everyone, and he saw that and doesn’t think I’m for real, but I’m not trying to jerk him around. Can you tell him for ? I don’t think he’s reading my ssages—not after the first one.

Addie giggled, hardly believing what she was reading.

Ember: Wait… How many ssages did you send him?

Glitch: Just the one…initially. So, yeah, maybe three. Four. No more than four.

Ember: Oh. My. Gosh. Beef probably doesn’t know what to do with all that. I’ll talk to him.

Glitch: Thank you, sis! I’m terrible at people. Either they think I’m weird or I co on too strong or… Well, you get the idea.

Ember: I think you’re fantastic. Talk soon.

Glitch: