“Then, why—”
“Why didn’t Jenks get tweaked? Like I said, only for quality-of-life. Just look at that happy bastard. His life would be total quality at any size.”
“But they couldn’t know that when he was a baby.”
“Mala wouldn’t let them do it. Jenks says once she got the doctors to admit that him being small didn’t mean he wasn’t healthy, it wasn’t even a question for her. Didn’t have anything to do with the Gaiist stuff at that point. He says she was just sick of people telling her that there was something wrong with her kid.” She stopped and looked around. “And I’ve totally been walking the wrong way.”
“What’s first on our list?” asked Sissix.
Kizzy pulled out her scrib. “Plex cleaner,” she said. “Followed by scrub bot dispensers.”
“Can we get unscented ones this time?” Sissix begged. “Ashby always gets the lemon ones, and I hate coming into the bathroom after cleaning day and smelling citrus.”
“You’ve got something against being lemony fresh?”
“You know iski?”
“No.”
“Yes, you do. Little green fruit, grows in clusters of three?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Smells like lemons, right?”
“Kind of.”
“Yeah, we anoint our dead in iski juice.”
Kizzy laughed. “Oh, no, eww. Okay, unscented scrub bots it is.” She took another look at her list, and tapped it emphatically, like a politician making a speech. “Listen, we are going to be a rock-solid shopping team today. We’re sticking to the list, and that’s it. I always spend way too much here on shit I don’t need.” Something over Rosemary’s shoulder caught her attention. “Like those.” Without another word, Kizzy ran off toward a stall full of juggling supplies.
Sissix sighed. “And so it begins,” she said, watching Kizzy dig through a box of shimmering batons. “If you thought today was about getting supplies, you’re wrong. Today is about Kizzy wrangling.”
As they walked after the mech tech, Sissix put her arm around Rosemary’s shoulder. The easy familiarity made Rosemary blink, but she also felt a spark of pride. Even if she got mugged before the day was out, at least she was in good company.
Jenks walked down the ramp to the underground tech district—or, as it was better known, the caves. At the entrance, an Aandrisk man with a stun gun sat on a stool near a multilingual sign. The text read:
THE FOLLOWING ITEMS CAN CAUSE HARM TO TECH, BOTS, AIs, MODDED SAPIENTS, AND SAPIENTS USING PERSONAL LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS. DO NOT BRING ANY OF THESE ITEMS INTO THE CAVES. IF ONE OR MORE OF THESE ITEMS IS IMPLANTED ONTO OR WITHIN YOUR BODY, DEACTIVATE IT BEFORE ENTERING.
Ghost patches (surface-penetrating ocular implants)
Hijacker or assassin bots
Hack dust (airborne code injectors)
Improperly sealed radioactive materials (if you’re not sure, don’t chance it)
Anything running on scrub fuel
Magnets
At the bottom of the sign was a handwritten addendum, only in Klip:
Seriously, we are not fucking around.
As Jenks passed by, the Aandrisk nodded congenially, his twin ocular implants glinting in the busy artificial light. Every shop and stall in the caves had different lighting mechanisms to help distinguish themselves from the others. The caves were a cyclone of ambient blues, shifting rainbows, simulated sunrises, projected starfields. Within each shop, the lighting could be appreciated, but in the corridors in between, the overlapping effects created an odd mishmash of color and shadow. It was like walking through a drunk kaleidescope.
Jenks felt at home in the caves, and not just for the endless rows of neatly packaged, hand-hacked goodies. Many of the folks there were hardcore modders, people prone to removing their own limbs in favor of synthetic replacements. Walking through the caves, you might see metallic exoskeletons, or swirling nanobot tattoos, or unsettlingly perfect faces that betrayed a weakness for genetweaks. Facial patches, dermal ports, homebrewed implants. Alongside such oddities, his small stature was nothing special. It was hard to feel weird in a place where everybody was weird. He took comfort in that.
He walked through the pathways, making mental notes of places he’d have to check out later. Jenks was a veteran of the Port, and he knew that there was only one acceptable place to begin before he started throwing credits around.
The shop front he arrived at wasn’t as fancy as some. A sign made from a broken circuit board hung overhead. Old bits of junk had been stuck to it in the shape of letters. “The Rust Bucket,” the sign read, and in smaller letters, “Tech Swap and Fix-It Shop,” and in smaller letters still, “Pepper and Blue, Proprietors.”
Jenks stood on tiptoe to look over the top of the counter. Pepper was hunched over a work bench, her back to him, muttering to herself. She reached up to scratch the back of her hairless Human head, leaving behind a smudge of machine grease. If she noticed, she did not seem to care.
“Hey, lady!” Jenks barked. “You know where I can score some stim bots?”
Pepper turned around, not bothering to mask her irritation at being asked such a stupid question. Her face brightened once she realized who was doing the asking. “Jenks!” she said, wiping her hands on her apron and coming around the counter. “What the hell are you doing here!” She knelt down to give him a friendly hug. The hug was warm, but her arms were thin. Too thin. For as long as Jenks had known Pepper, her hugs always prompted a burst of sympathy within him.
Pepper and her companion Blue were escapees from a fringe planet called Aganon, one of the last bastions of the Enhanced Humanity movement. Unequivocally cut off from the Diaspora and the Galactic Commons, Enhancement colonies bred their people in gestation chambers, basing their genetic makeup on calculations of what their society would be in need of once they reached maturity. Their genes were tweaked beyond recognition, improving health, intelligence, social skills—whatever was needed for the jobs they were destined to fill. Menial labor was performed by people bred without any genetic alterations at all, save two: infertility and a lack of hair (to make them easy to spot). The Enhanced were so convinced of their superiority over the laboring class that they had been utterly unprepared for Pepper’s improbable exodus, which began with a lucky late-childhood escape from a tech manufacturing plant, and culminated within a massive junkyard that became her temporary home. There, among countless other cast-off things, Pepper found hidden treasure: a derelict interstellar shuttle. Using only what scraps she could find, Pepper patched and hacked and coaxed the shuttle back to life. It took her over six standards to get the thing flying, and nearly a standard more to steal enough fuel. The cost of her freedom was severe malnutrition, which had almost killed her by the time her shuttle was picked up by a GC patrol ship. She’d been on Port Coriol for eight standards, long enough to become a staple of the local modder community, and her health had been well looked after during that time. But though she loved to eat (she had taken her name after discovering the joys of seasoning), her metabolism just couldn’t catch up. Her waifish body was never going to fill out.
The fact that Jenks and Pepper could be standing in the same place—she from a world where genetweaks were a mandate, he from a mother who had shunned traditional healthcare altogether—was a real testament to the openness of the Port, as well as the weirdness of Humanity. It was also probably why he and Pepper had always gotten along so well, be it out of compassion or sheer amusement. Well, that, and their deep, undying love for all things digital. That undoubtedly helped.