“They just tried to rape me, Kiro. Twelve of them. On a skyway. Thanks to you.”
His expression hardens, and he puts the box back down.
“I… How is it my fault, Ash? How do you know that’s what they were going to do?”
“Because they told me, idiot!”
His tone turns dismissive.
“They were probably just trying to scare you. They wouldn’t have actually done anything.”
I want to scream. How can he be so dense? I’ve told him a million times what life is like for me online.
His eyes widen.
“Is… is that blood on you, Ash?”
I reach up and rub my cheek, feeling sticky wetness. Must have gotten splattered worse than I thought.
“Yes, Kiro. That’s what happens when someone tries to rape me. I fight back.”
Kiro’s face turns furious.
“Every time, Ash! Every time I make some new friends, you have to screw it up. Always overreacting, playing the drama queen. Everything always has to be about you. Now they’re going to hate me.”
I pause, dumbfounded. People swirl around me, shifting glances and mutters trailing in their wake.
“Seriously? I tell you that I was just almost raped and your response is to blame me for ruining your life? What the fuck, Kiro?”
He paces in and out of frame, his fists clenched.
“No, Ash, you listen to me for once. You always complain about how hard you have it, how difficult things are—”
I can’t control it any longer.
“Shut. Up.” The intensity of the words feels like it should tear out my vocal cords. “You haven’t visited Mom in over two years—always making excuses about how you don’t have the time, but I always see you in the Game. You say you love her, but you abandoned her, and now you’re abandoning me. Just like Dad. IonSeal and Mikelas? They’re monsters, Kiro, and you waltzed right over to them and served me up on a silver platter.”
“…Fuck you.”
The connection goes dead, the ugly red light of a block symbol flashing in front of my eyes, and it’s all I can do not to punch the wall. Instead, I stalk into a nearby restroom, close the door to a stall, and scream for ten seconds, all the rage I can’t show the world. Then I punch the wall and walk out.
“You’re late.”
I glare at Jase, but he doesn’t notice. He’s too intent on the disassembled haphood scattered over the table in front of him, broken edges carefully splayed out in an autopsy fan. I close the door behind me, cutting off the sounds of Johnny cooking.
“I had to deal with some shit,” I respond, as evenly as possible.
“Anything I should know or care about?”
I think about the last thirty minutes of my life.
“Yeah, don’t bet on IonSeal to maintain their ladder position next league. I just castrated a quarter of their guild.”
“Castrated?”
One of Jase’s rickety chairs nearly collapses when I slouch into it.
“Yeah, castrated. I sliced their dicks off with a knife. Look it up.”
Jase pushes his glasses up onto his forehead and gives me a strange look, finally noticing the bloodstains.
“I know what ‘castrated’ means, Ash. It seems a little excessive, though, even for Ditchtown. This is the real, not the Game. They’re not gonna respawn.”
I look back at him, expression flat.
“Mikelas and his little band of boardshits were planning to rape me in broad daylight, middle of a skyway, and I gave them the option to walk. They got everything they deserved.”
Jase stares at me in silence. The seconds stretch on, and I wonder if I’ve lost another man in my life by sticking up for myself, but then he swallows heavily and shrugs.
“If you say so. I’m just a little worried about you, Ash. That’s pretty barbaric. Gummies might come looking. They don’t give a shit about the murder rates out here, but if they feel like you’re threatening their manhood, even by proxy, they might do something about it.”
“Barbaric?” I try not to take my anger out on Jase, but it’s hard. “Threatening their manhood? Maybe they should try getting threatened with murder and rape every day; their rules targeting women that they put in place. Twelve Gamers assaulted me, Jase, fully coordinated, and there wasn’t a fucking gummie in sight to try and stop it. Lemme know if that changes your viewpoint on what’s ‘civilized’ and what’s ‘barbaric.’ Fuck the gummies. If they want to come after me, they know where to find me, apparently along with the rest of this damn city. I’m done apologizing for being attacked.”
Jase slides his glasses back down.
“Okay, okay, you know your life better than I do. Peace. And yeah, this place fucking blows.” He beckons me over. “Anyway, come take a look at this hood. Whoever made it stuffed it full of IP traps, but I managed to get it open without frying the insides. Or myself.”
I lean down next to his shoulder, our ears almost touching, adrenaline aftereffects still churning my insides.
“What, exactly, am I looking at?”
He points slowly at what looks like a tangle of fine metal spaghetti in the middle of the dissected hood, nestled deep within the other components.
“This right here.”
“Jase. If you don’t explain what ‘this’ is, I swear…”
“Easy there, tiger. Oh, that’s right, your glasses aren’t synced. Here, ride my feed.”
A small icon appears in my vision, and I tap it open. Technical diagrams and links to the ’Net appear, overlaying the scattered mess of circuits, memory boards, and polymer casing. I focus in on the cluster of metal, eye trackers in my glasses bringing the pertinent information into sharp clarity.
“A graphene quantum computer? That doesn’t make sense. No one’s cracked Q-dots yet.”
Jase’s voice is sober.
“Apparently the silkies did. Ash, this is some heavy shit. Like, ‘people getting disappeared’ heavy.”
“Why? What does it do?”
“Well, I took a look at the internal coding of the non-impossible-computer parts, the ones still working, and near as I can tell, based on your description of what happened with Brand, these things are designed to infiltrate people’s minds. More specifically, the mind of anyone who wears them for longer than six hours, at which point it can start giving them instructions.”
“What? Mind control? Are you kidding me?”
“Nope. Sounds like sci-fi crap, but it’s sitting right there in front of us.”
“…Wow. How does it do it?”
“I’m not totally sure, but it looks like the hood extrudes carbon nanotubes that make their way through the skull to infiltrate synaptic junctions. That’s the initial data harvest. The quantum computer builds up a profile, figures out which neuron triggers what, and once it has enough, it starts altering their perceptions by jolting specific clusters. I don’t know where the instructions are coming from yet, but I have a couple guesses on how to look.”
“What’s it changing? In the brain?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. I was able to retrieve the last few seconds of visual display—take a look.”
A window expands in my vision, first person perspective of the past. Wooden decking beneath my feet, weathered crates surrounding me in the dark, my hand flashing toward a lean shape, blurry motion, then nothing. I frown and play it back, slowing everything down, focusing on the shape.
It appears to be an old-time pirate, captain of a sailing ship, dressed in flamboyant silks. A red fist insignia is visible on the left breast, a thin blade held swept back in its right hand. As my viewpoint lunges forward, the blade falls and the figure locks its hands around my outstretched wrist. The last frame is of a crate filling my vision.