Another macho, business-slick in a suit with a gym bag slung casually over his shoulder, but it’s clearly heavy, which is a tad more promising.
And. Hey, there.
I reverse direction, grinning. Of course, I’m contractually obliged to let one of the fulltime members of Clan Stinger take the glory, but is it my fault I’m intuitive? If I’ve encountered the target previously? I send a msg to the crew, but who knows how long they’ll take to get back up here. It might be too late by then.
The people behind me don’t take too kindly to me switching against the flow. Some of them have their phones held up at arm’s length, beaming laser slogans in all caps above their heads: ‘ALL ACCESS’ and ‘PASSES FOR THE PEOPLE’. Some of the protesters don’t smell too fresh, and there’s a higher content of street kid per capita than usual.
And I finally twig why it’s so packjammed down here. The protest. Great fucking timing, although maybe that’s the point – to make it more challenging.
I shove through the press of bodies back towards the kiosk where the podgy girl is attending to a protester with springy little dreads and a leather bandolier strung with audio chips instead of cartridges that are broadcasting slogans at decibel in most of the official languages.
‘I’m sorry, did I leave my phone here?’ I have to shout over the chips, pushing rudely in front of the protester, who skeefs me with a dirty look, to get to the counter.
The apparently not-so-dullard cow ignores me. And what choice do I have, kids? Really? The .44 is already in my hand, it’s only a thirty degree flex of my arm to pull it free of the holster and swing it up so it’s level with the bridge of her rather neat little nose. ‘I’d suggest you surrender the merchandise.’
The protester squawks and leaps backwards, knocking over a rack of mags, but the resulting crash is drowned out by the electronic chatter of the chips and the protesters shouting and the ambient crowd sounds.
The cow whimpers. She’s gone all pasty, which throws her zits into relief. Cunning bitch. Gotta admire the acting talent. You’d think she was the real deal.
‘I don’t have time. Just give it over.’
She opens her mouth as if to say something useful, but then goldfishes soundlessly.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’ I press the gun against her forehead. ‘Three, two…’ And sudden she finds her voice.
‘I don’t got nothing! Please!’
‘The package?’
‘Take it! Take it!’ But she fails to hand anything over, covering her eyes and quivering instead. I’m aware that a space has cleared around me, and my phone is vibrating frantically in my pocket.
‘Just give me the package and I won’t have to shoot you,’ I say, real slow, so she can’t misunderstand. Maybe I got it wrong and it’s the hip gangster girl or one of the heavies after all. In which case, I might have blown the whole fucking mission, exposed us too early. Fuck. And now I’m not so sure I looked at the picture properly in the first place. Maybe it was some other ugly fat girl plus wishful thinking on my part. Or maybe she’s an unwitting mule.
I vault over the counter. She shrieks and wedges herself into the corner, weeping now. I pull her down, so that we’re out of the limelight, crouched behind the desk. ‘Everything’s sony, honey, just chill. Stay right there. Don’t you move.’ I keep the gun on her, hunting around. ‘Where’s your bag? Where’s your fucking bag!’
She points wordlessly at a turquoise tote on a shelf. I press it into her hands, even though she doesn’t want to take it.
‘Open it.’
‘I don’t got nothing. I don’t.’
‘Did anyone ask you to hold something for them? Or give you something? A present?’
She’s scrabbling in her bag, spilling prettifiers onto the carpet, sobbing so hard her words hitch. ‘My… my… boyfriend.’
‘Yeah? What did he give you? Where is it?’
‘Th-this.’ She yanks off a plastech keyring attached to the bag’s handle – a mini-figurine of Anika, the virtua pop star.
‘Be careful! Shit.’ It’s not inconceivable that the bomb would fit inside a keyring. I take it from her gingerly and stow it in an inside pocket.
‘Now close your eyes.’
‘Why?’
‘Cos I’ve been wanting to do this ever since I met you.’
She shakes her head vigorously, sobbing hard. I shrug. She should have known what she was letting herself in for when she took on the assignment.
I pull the trigger.
The .44 kicks in my hand with a sharp metallic roar. Which should have been the end of her, only the blobby cow is still shrieking, clawing at the wet gobs splattered across her face. She squeals even louder when her hands come away sticky with sheen. I am way pissed now, kids.
‘What are you doing? You’re analogue, baby. You’re out. Fucking go down.’
She holds her hands out to me, all shaky disbelief, and catches me left-field by starting to cry, little pathetic mewlings.
‘Oh. Hey. Everything’s sony, okay? It’s not… Look.’ I’m about to wipe her forehead to show her, but I don’t want to get the dye on my BabyStrange, so I grab her by the wrist instead. ‘It’s purple, see?’ Inexplicably, she starts crying harder. ‘It’s not blood. You don’t gush purple. It’s just a game. It’s icy. Okay?’ But she’s sobbing so uncontrollably, I don’t think I’m getting through.
I holster the gun and start sliding away from the blubbering girl, making sure I still have the keyring. The hippie with the audio-chip bandolier barges in. ‘Bro, that was so uncool.’
‘Hey! She was registered gameplay. It’s not my fault she’s a rookie.’
‘Oh yeah?’ He bends down, comes back with her handbag and dumps out the phone, turns it over to show me. It hasn’t been chipped for ingame. It’s so outmoded, it wouldn’t even support the tech. Shit.
I hightail it through the crowd, ignoring dreadlock boy’s recriminations shouted after me. The protest is going off, it’s too thick to move without worming between the bodies, and the amplified chatter is deaf-making. I duck down besides a motobin that’s been stopped in its circuit by the human traffic, humming quietly to itself, and check my phone. My msgs display various riffs on ‘where the hell are you?’ from all three of my clan mates.
Surprisingly, Ibis/Julia is the most graphic of all of them, threatening my mother with violence if I don’t get my skinny ass down there immediately. Maybe I’ll take her up on it later.
But right now I have bigger pilchard to panfry. I skip the rest of the msgs and reload the target list, flipping through the visuals to saggy cow, who is indeed the girl I just fragged in the face, down to the last inflamed zit. This is all seriously dubious.
>> Weird stuff going on. Think the mission has been compromised. Could we have got bad intelligence? Considering mission abort? Confirm?
I sit tight and wait for an answer. The motobin is a little slow, only now detecting my proximity. It swivels on its axis and gapes its flap at me hopefully, waiting for a deposit. No one gets back to me, not even Twitchy, who is supposed to be holed up at high altitude.
Fuckit. What else to do? I throw myself back into the fray, all bargey elbows to get through the toyi-toyi, because the protesters seem to be holding fast to their positions. If they hoped to stop the station functioning today, they’re doing well.
From the plastech pedestrian tunnel that crosses over the junction, I can see it’s mal chaos below. On the platform, only heads are visible in the mesh of people, like coloured pixels, shoving in different directions. The trains are at a standstill, but there are bursts of flashfire going off inside the compartments, six or seven while I’m watching. I skeem I’m not the only player here today with corrupt data.