That’s where I’ve been the last 2+ years; playing with toy soldiers.
Four tabletop rule sets, six supplements, numerous one-shots. Add to that the current slate of WIP: another stand-alone game for Osprey Wargames, two new five-part adventures, and a full-length second edition/variation of an existing game.
I run both weekly and monthly war game/RPG sessions these days, and now have a hobby-related FB Group with roughly 1.8K people from a dozen or so countries.
I’ve even managed to hammer out a novella at some point: Soul Cache. Which is included in the print collection of short stories, Fits and Orisons. Currently on my office computer is third Exclusion Zone short story, the first draft of a dungeon crawl novella, as well as the mountain of notes, drafts, and research for the four-part post-apocalyptic fantasy series , Shattered Worlds. (link to part 1, Broken Moon) And let’s not talk about all the other, previous projects languishing in digital limbo.
So yeah, I’ve doing word stuff the last three years. Just not here. *
By this point however, it’s glaringly obvious my war game/RPG work draws several orders of magnitude more attention than my fiction ever did. (oh well…) Which brings me to the question of merging HSSJ with Stalker7. Seems to me what I need is a central hub, a single site that highlights both my games and my stories. I need to not only work smarter, but respect the support I’ve received over the years by offering consistent content and engagement to anyone interested in either facet.
That said, in the coming weeks I’ll investigate the procedure, time, and expense required to merge the sites without losing connections and content. For now though, both HSSJ and S7 will stay as is. Updates as the situation develops.
Thank you. Have an excellent day.
there was a legal FUBAR in there too – a spurious shakedown for cash by a B-List SF writer and his gaggle of out-of-state lawyers over the use of the word ‘hardwired’. TL:DR – I got had, trapped on a technicality. I was reliably informed by attorneys that I would have won any case brought against me, but would have had to underwrite the time and expense of defending myself from 2/3rd of the way across the country. Cheaper to take the hit and pay them off. Live and learn. My brush-pass with the big time, I guess.
AI-generated illustration. ‘cyberpunk commando hacking a terminal in a corporate facility’
On Random. Coming from someone who spent nearly four decades in the trades, 25 years in custom glass work, and currently writes spec-fiction and indie war games.
___
– Hasn’t technological innovation changed the face of labor and jobs for centuries in every field?
– Were there boycotts, social backlash, new laws introduced to curb the use of robotic assembly lines in automotive manufacturing in order to preserve the human workforce? (Answer: No – not in any meaningful way.)
– Why should artists and artisans be exempt? What about the countless thousands of other workers down throughout history in other fields whose jobs were changed or eliminated by machines?
– Do we shame/blame/restrict the one-man street busker using a Korg Volca Sample Playback Rhythm Machine for ‘denying revenue to fellow musicians’ ?
– At the risk of sounding rude – is much of the current push back really just Cultural Luddites whining now that the indifferent tide of progress has arrived at their door?
– Regarding cost: do artists and artisans have the right to demand, to enforce, the purchase of their products at higher prices when for many people, less expensive, machine-made goods suffice for their particular needs and are within their budget?
– Shouldn’t people be allowed to use, to purchase what they want? Doesn’t the final decision and ultimate responsibility rest in the hands of the consumer?
___
Below are six examples of text-prompt, AI-generated art. I spent twenty bucks and a few hours of mucking around with the program.
When I did stained/leaded glass work, I occasionally had that potential client who would point out that they could purchase an entire leaded glass entryway at Home Depot for the same price as I was asking for custom panels. They were correct.
Of course it wasn’t an accurate comparison; mine was one-of-a-kind, custom design, colors, exact fit, etc. As opposed to an assembly line, limited selection, mass-produced product. But it was their home, their money, their budget, their decision.
These days, as a ‘Very Small Business’ i.e. a one-man outfit working out of a home office, I’m watching costs, trying to break even, and scrambling to pay bills like everyone else. I hire artists, editors, and graphic designers whenever and wherever I can. But also need time and money-saving tech.
When I already use GIMP, Canva, Shutterstock, and Word Editor to help my work, reduce costs, and make ends meet, why not use AI-art as well?
Is it unethical to do so? Am I somehow callous, disrespectful, sabotaging creatives, stealing income if I use the program for my work?
With the release of the Soul Cache for audio, (as well as for Kindle and in print) I figured it was time to mention the other stories of mine that are available at Audible.
Tales from the Exclusion Zone
For those of you familiar with the STALKER setting – the book Roadside Picnic, the Tarkovsky film of the same name, and the Chernobyl-centered computer games – there are two short stories set in the mysterious Exclusion Zone: A Prayer to St. Strelok, and Strange Treasure. If you’re in need of a quick vacation from the real world, you can tag along with Zone Guide, Yuri Bonyev into the most heavily quarantined place on the planet.
NEAR-FUTURE MILITARY SCI-FI
THE STONES REMEMBER
If you’re more in the mood for some ‘15 minutes in the future‘ military action, there’s Hard Kill, The Stones Remember, and Sozo. Covert operations, Russian invasions, and veterans facing down traffickers, it’s all here.
A CELTIC-FLAVORED GHOST STORY
For lighter fare, The Barrow Lover is the story of two friends mucking about with buried treasure, a royal murder, and one angry ghost. Nice way to lean into the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day – if you’re so inclined.
All of them run a couple hours or less, and with a fine job by all the narrators, any one of them would be an easy way to take the grind out of some drudge work or liven up your daily commute.
That’s it for now. Thanks and have an excellent day.
“A rich and meticulously described setting makes for an undeniably immersive reading experience. Two (augmented) thumbs up.” – Kirkus Review
I paid a lot for those two sentences. I mean, there’s more to the review but that’s the blurb-able bit.
Yes, Kirkus reviews cost money. No, that’s not a guarantee of a good review.
So why spend the cash and wait 2 months? Because after ten years, three novels, four novellas, and five short stories I finally felt like I’d written something worth submitting, worth dropping the coin on.
That’s not to say I consider Soul Cache to be flawless or a short-form superlative example of the genre. Or even that Kirkus – respected as they are – is the definitive appraisal of my writing skill. I just remember finishing the story, after a much longer and more difficult process than I expected, and hearing in the back of my mind: ‘Here is something that could stand in the public market. Can hold its own. It’s actually pretty good.’
Meaning that it struck me I’d created something worthy of professional assessment and I wanted to hear that assessment bad enough to drop the money for a 321-word review.
Money well spent? Will this translate into sales and agents and movie options? Who knows? That’s another thing that is definitely not guaranteed. By life, the writer gods, or Kirkus.
Dumb, vanity move? Did I experience a surge of inspiration and creative confidence as I turn toward my next fiction project? Mmmmmm, not really. Honestly, I read it. breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t horrible, and thought, Well… Time to get back to work, I guess.
Which is what it all comes down to, emotionally exhilarated or not; putting my ass in the chair and chiseling away at the next story, trusting that by forging ahead and doing the work, the next one will be a little better.
Maybe even good enough to warrant another Kirkus Review.
That’s all for now. Thanks for stopping by. Have an excellent day.
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If you’re interested, you can read the full review HERE
Soul Cache. A story from the streets of New Kowloon is available electronically for Kindle at Amazon HERE. Or in print as part of a collection of short stories, HERE.
I’m pleased to announce Soul Cache is now available for Kindle. A crime thriller novella set in future fictional New Kowloon, Detective Zeki Pemburu hunts a serial killer, his only leads the victims’ last moments illegally obtained from their neural chips. If you’re feeling a little technoir, this should scratch that itch. I’m also working on adding it to my catalog of Audiobooks. Watch for that announcement early next year.
For those of us who prefer print books, Soul Cache will be included in the upcoming collection, Fits and Orisons.
Once that is complete, I’ll be returning to the post-apocalyptic fantasy series, Shattered Worlds. Book One, Beneath the Broken Moon is available on Kindle and will also appear in print late in 2022.
Thank you for stopping by. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.
Feels like I was slogging through a fog, haunted by constant, low-grade anxiety from all the Huge, Bad Stuff happening around me. Sorta like seeing kaiju fighting in the distance everywhere I looked, knowing it was devastating and tragic no matter the outcome, and wondering what the hell I was gonna do if they stomped their way closer to my little house.
With 2021 drawing to a close, I have no reason to complain; I mean, I’m still alive, healthy, married. My family is good. I still have friends. Still chipping away at the To Do list, albeit in a slower, different way. And while I’m unconvinced we’re out of the Weird Woods yet, I have plenty to be grateful for.
FICTION
On the writing front, I finally finished another piece. “Soul Cache” is a cyberpunk, technoir, crime thriller. A short novella at 25K words/75 pages, it centers on an aging homicide detective hunting a serial killer in grimy, crowded mega-city. His only clues are the victims’ last moments, data he obtained by illegally hacking their neural chips. (it’s all fun and games until someone suffers Dissociative Identity Disorder. or gets brutally dismembered)
It’s slated for release 17 December and up for pre-order now at Amazon. Click HERE if you need a digital stocking stuffer this Christmas.
It will also be part of a print collection of short stories coming out early 2022. (for those who prefer holding a physical book.)
TOY SOLDIERS
Tabletop gaming has been taking the lion’s share of my creative attention. Echoing Willie Sutton, the audience response to my games is, well, a helluva lot more than my fiction, so… yeah.
Adding to the Exploit Zero and Nightwatch family of wargames is Insurgent Earth, a tabletop tactical miniature adventure game where players fight against alien invaders. Designed with Solo and Cooperative play in mind, you and your friends will band together, form a resistance cell, gear up and take back our home planet.
Even though the core dice mechanics are well established, our game group is running extensive play tests to smooth out the additional, RPG-lite elements for the player characters, and the command-and-control of the game-driven alien invaders. Everything needs to be as smooth, solid, and simple as possible; hate it when rules get in the way of an enjoyable game. Insurgent Earth should be out mid-2022.
In the meantime, you can drop by Stalker7.com for battle reports and other cool toy soldier stuff.
OTHER THAN THAT
The foreseeable future comes down to getting through Christmas and New Years celebrations. My kids and grand kids should be here Christmas morning, so I thank God for that.
Oh and The Witcher Season 2. That’s cool too.
In the meantime, I’m going to keep my head down, keep praying for God’s peace, paint some toy soldiers, and start pecking away at book two of the Shattered Worlds series, Scorned Lands.
First ten chapters/fifty pages of current WIP now available as a PDF.
A Cyberpunk Crime Thriller, Soul Cache is a sliver of technoir set in fictional, future New Kowloon. A desperate homicide detective resorts to dangerous and illegal software to stop a serial killer. Can he catch the murderer before he loses his mind?
No shock I was late to the station the next morning.
I hadn’t slept. Or if I had, it was six hours of nightmares punctuated by unconscious exhaustion. I crawled out of bed sometime before the Big Lights blinked on feeling like I’d been dragged by a truck down a hundred kilometers of bad road. A cold shower, cold tea, and cold noodles got me on my feet. Two Zhan Ma dermal patches kept me there.
I headed to the work. Back in another autocab, I tried to get Lau out of my head by trawling the highlights from the night shift briefing. There was the usual quota of domestics, drug dealers, and drive-bys. Four Local Alerts topped the list.
First was a warning issued for the Hot Chow vendors on Sham Shui Po Street. Seems they’d been shut down by the Health Committee for using tainted loom beef. The vendors denied it but eleven hundred cases of food poisoning said otherwise.
Next, Shìchǎng scum bag luminary Hodoh Nghia, the puppet pimp, had been shot at – again – just after 0300. Someone serious this time, heavy caliber tungsten steel rounds had pierced his armored rickshaw. One had drilled a neat hole through his leg. He was currently lawyered up in a hospital screaming litigation against the LNKPD, claiming we deliberately reduced the police presence around his brothel, thereby endangering him – which was partially true, by the way, because Nghia was a manipulative bottom-feeder who profited from poor people’s desperation and other people’s base appetites. The other half of the reason was the Council wasn’t keen on the possibility of permanent records of visitors to his establishment.
Some gangster once commented the street found its own uses for things. Item three was a prime example: apparently a group of squatters in an empty warehouse in To Kwa Wan were using the power plant from a de-commissioned armored vehicle as a generator. Steady lights, WiFi, heat, simple perimeter security, the place had better amenities than a chunk the standard habitation blocks in the district. Word was another group of homeless had called it in and the investigating officer had the impression the rivals were more jealous that the warehouse bunch were charging for hot showers than concerned they had access to military surplus.
I wondered what Fat Quan knew about this. Another reason to pay the gutter king an official visit.
Last was a warning about potential civil disturbance in the So Uk area hab-stacks, specifically the units owned by Sino-Robotics. One of SR’s local factories had changed over to full automation and was coming online today. This meant increased profits of course, but also a metric shit ton of workers suddenly laid off, the majority of whom had undergone job-specific cyber-modifications.
The modifications had been mandated by Sino-Robotics to meet increased productivity quotas, but workers had been given the option to keep their positions so long as they underwent adaptive replacement surgery for the augments. The upfront costs were underwritten by SR of course, with low interest repayment deducted from the worker’s weekly salaries.
That was three years ago. Today, hundreds of massively indebted workers were about to be furloughed by the company that had required the cyber-augments in the first place. To do the jobs they’d just lost.
Hell, I’d riot too.
I’d nearly made it to my desk before Captain Lee pinged me. “Where are you with the murder case?”
Murder cases – plural. At least he was paying attention now. Gotta take what you can get.
I scrambled for an explanation but this wasn’t a discussion. “My inbox is flooded with formal information requests from reporters,” he continued. “And did you see the news drones loitering outside the station? I counted eight. Eight, detective.”
He counted eight drones…
Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.
I could hear him seething. Jen Cheung’s photos in mind, I took a chance he wanted a reply and chose my words carefully. “Sir, new evidence suggests the killer or killers have specific anti-corporate sentiments. I’m looking into aggrieved parties with criminal histor – – ”
I guessed wrong.
He cut me off. “It’s obvious the killer is anti-corporate, Detective. WayGo is one of the top transport companies in the hemisphere. You must have more for me than that. What did the lab report say?”
“Inconclusive, sir. The crime scene was sanitized, the body wiped down the same as the previous seven.”
Captain Lee hissed like a broken steam pipe. “Detective, a District One citizen has been brutally murdered. I need you to focus, not rummage through old cases. WayGo’s COO called me last night and both the Mayor and the Council scheduled a press conference for this 1600 this afternoon. People are looking for answers. Important people. The Shìchǎng District Police Department will not let them down. We need to make an arrest.”
Press conference that afternoon, the good Captain wanted something – anything – that would help him save face in front of all those Important People. I knew that, and part of me knew I should give him a something, even if it was wrong.
Stroke and stall, that little part of me said. Lie now, buy time, fix it after.
Maybe it was Lau’s ragged scream echoing in my head or maybe I’d just stepped in enough bullshit over the years. My job was to catch killers, not save his reputation.
I cleared my throat. “Sir, what we need is evidence. Absent any witnesses or definitive lab data, all I can do is task the station A.I. with sifting security and traffic video logs. Even then, Shichang is a dark district with terrible coverage outside the shopping areas and the killer has been extremely careful both in selecting victims and crime scene locations.”
“Those sound like excuses,” Lee snapped. “I know you’re getting near retirement, Detective ,but you need to resurrect the young Zeki Pemburu -the man who caught the Stonecutters Island Killer – because right now, you don’t seem to be doing much detecting.”
“Sir, listen – – “
“No, you listen to me, Pemburu. It was because of your service record that I went out of my way to assign you one of the new drones. But there’s a new round of efficiency and budget protocols at the end of the year, and given your age and lack of supplementary augmentations, your redundancy factor in the metric is, frankly, quite high.”
“Captain, my physicals are above standard, my Chip ware is current, and my closure rate is seventy-two percent.”
“I’m talking about dedication,” Captain Lee snapped. “Commitment to the job and the department. You have the minimum augmentation required for police work these days. Now perhaps your old school methodology worked back when you entered the force but today’s officers graduate the academy with an arsenal of cybernetic modifications above and beyond the baseline requirements for policing this century’s urban landscape. You don’t even have a cyber-limb, for god’s sake. I’m doing everything I can to enable you to retain your position, but if this incident isn’t resolved quickly, I’ll be hard pressed to justify not earmarking you for early retirement come the end of the fiscal year.”
I was absorbing that unsubtle threat when two messages popped up in my peripheral: first was high priority from Tech Department demanding I schedule a sync-session with my Turd Copter ASAP. The second was from Jen Cheung: there was another body.
Near Soy Park.
“Captain, I need to go. I have lead.”
“I want a full report before – – ”
It was my turn to cut him off. Old school methodology … Fuck him.
I checked my coat pocket for the Faraday pouch and headed for the door.
Sonia said later I walked back into the autopsy room and stared at the corpse of the brain-popped ganger for a full minute. Utterly still, not a word. She didn’t know who looked worse, me or the dead guy. She asked what was wrong but I left without as much as a glance.
I must have turned my Chip back on at some point because the next thing I remember was the back seat of an autocab. It was stopped at a red light and the bloody glare smeared on the lexan window stung my eyes. My joints ached, my nerves were on fire. It felt like my brain had been split by a hatchet.
The taxi started moving. My phone rang: Jen Cheung. “Am I bothering you?”
Images battered at my mind like moths at a screen. A woman’s face, a loop of club music, laughter. “Yes.”
“Bullshit. I know you’re not asleep. Locater says you just left the Morgue. What were you doing there?”
Lau screamed. My hands kept wiping at phantom blood, sticky and hot. I clenched my fists to stop. “Looking at Lau’s body one more time hoping something would happen.”
“Did it?”
I truck horn blared. I flinched, felt my head lift off my neck. Revulsion and relief heaved through my body. “No.”
“Well, I got something for you.”
I tried to focus, bit the inside of my mouth for real pain and tasted blood. Bad idea. “What do you got?”
Jen Cheung was excited. “So I’ve been going over the crime scene photos, yeah? The Butcher. Dismembering and arranging the body parts is a display, I know. Part of a sick ritual. But the first six were patterns. Symmetrical puzzle pieces, but just patterns, right?”
The Voice shouted, furious and insistent, muffled like the other end of someone else’s phone argument. Lau was sobbing. Warmth spread at my crotch. I didn’t look to see if it was real. “You getting to a point? It’s late and I’m dying here.”
“Point is the last two were different,” Cheung said with certainty.
I shook my head to clear it, sat up. “Different how? What do you mean?”
“I mean not symmetrical. Obviously. At first I thought the killer was going abstract. Psychopath art. But something bugged me; the torso sideways just so, an arm bent there, the head under the leg here. It felt specific, you know?”
Damn. I’d missed it, juggling too many other things. I blinked and logged into the NKPD Net to access the Forensics files. The constant updates were annoying and intrusive, and I’d put off that month’s, so my connection lagged. “So what are you thinking? Specifically.”
“That the Butcher isn’t just showing off their kill. It’s something else.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated on Jen’s voice. Other noises fell silent. The pain subsided. My Chip finally chimed a secure connection, but Cheung was already explaining.
“So this afternoon I found a drone shot from victim number eight taken from the garage ceiling. Straight down over the body. That’s when I saw it.”
The taxi rolled to a soft stop in front of my apartment. “Saw what?”
“The WayGo Transport logo. The company Henry Lau worked for. Get this: the Butcher used his body to make the corporate logo.”
My skin goose-fleshed. “Holy shi… Are you sure?”
The cab door lifted. I blinked payment, climbed out and headed for the front of my building.
I heard her smile. “Bet your ass. Sending images now.”
My optic flickered as two photo files arrived: a CSI image and a GIF off the WayGo letterhead. I opened them. The pictures dropped to fifty percent opacity and merged, one over the other, Hanzi lines with severed limbs.
“Alamak,” I breathed. The shapes matched.
I stumbled though the lobby, stopped. “Wait…You said the last two bothered you. What about number seven?”
“That was tougher,” Cheung said. “But it turns out that victim was a per diem at a Sino-Biopharm lab in D-Five. And SB is part of the CP Group.” She paused. “Check this out.”
The blandly named CP Group was a founding member of the Asian-Pacific conglomerates club, with direct influence in seven countries in this hemisphere alone, and a corporate security force to rival all but the top twelve standing militaries. A quick check on the Wiki entry for ‘omnipresent global financial entity and soulless multinational’, CP Group would be Item One.
Two more images in my display. I watched CP Group’s logo blink open and melt into another CSI shot: Theresa Tse laid out on a green floor, arranged just so.
The blood drained from my face.
“I think our killer is anti-globalist somehow. A Seattle 2049 manifestant,” Jen Cheung concluded. “I mean, if these aren’t anti-corporate statements, I don’t know what is.”
I was alone in the elevator. The images hovered in my peripherals. My body was one giant dull ache. My brain had crashed. Cheung’s voice cut through the fog. “Hai, Zeki. You still there?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m buffering.” Jialat. I was drained. It was past time for sleep.
Jen waited a moment, then, “So the killer hates corporations and knew them, right? That what this means?”
The elevator doors slid open. I shook my head. It was frighteningly empty right then. “Knew of them, stalked them maybe. Easy to find personal info online.”
I stopped at my apartment door. “You went over the other victims’ files. They weren’t corp?”
Cheung snorted. “This is new New Kowloon, who isn’t corp to some degree or another?”
I nodded absently. “Hey, I’m home. I’m spent. First thing tomorrow I’ll go over the other vic’s profiles to see if they have any connections. To WayGo, each other… Any common thread.”
“I can do it.” Cheung said.
“You must really want to make detective.”
“I’m going to make detective, Detective. Do you think Tse and Lau were targeted because they were corp? ”
“Looks that way but I can’t be certain. I’ll dig. A per diem pharm-tech is probably clean but maybe Lau was dirty: IP theft, espionage, embezzlement, a mole for a rival, something.”
“Maybe WayGo was in some kind of trouble,” Cheung suggested. Tired as I was, I could hear her wheels turning. “Financial, a takeover… something that.”
Cheung definitely will make detective.
“Get some sleep,” she said. “I’ll let you know what I find in the morning.”
I signed off, opened my door. The hall light went on as I shuffled in and kicked off my shoes. I’d made it to my bedroom when another NKPD message appeared: the IRA software patch was complete. My aerial drone was ready and I was scheduled for synchronization tomorrow, first shift.
“Flying Shit Cakes,” I mumbled.
I went to undress and found the front of my khakis were damp. Dark.
Good point, I thought. They were stacking up against me fast, those points.
“Which, like I also said, is why this…” she hissed as she nudged the pouch, “is restricted by international law. God Almighty, Zek. We barely process our own thoughts correctly, let alone someone else’s. When a corporate wire head first discovered the neural buffer overflow, researchers thought they could read minds. Eighty percent of the first accessors snapped. The other twenty percent were so fucking scrambled, it took weeks for them to recover a stable identity. We’re talking about deep diving into the weird liminal space between meat and machine. You can lose your shit touching another person’s mind like this. Lose yourself.”
“Touch their soul, you mean?” I asked softly.
“I mean invade it on their worst day. Hell, their last day.”
The silver pouch sat between us radiating ugly endings like an exposed nuclear core.
I ignored it, pushed through. “Seven victims, Loi. Seven. Each one sliced , chopped, and arranged like a meat bouquet.”
“And the ever-vigilant NKPD has no leads. Nothing?”
“Would I be asking you for that if there was?”
“So no DNA?” she scoffed. “I find that hard to believe.”
“They’ve lifted a metric shitload of ambient, traces but nothing substantial around the bodies. I told you whoever is doing this is extremely careful.”
“What about video?” She countered. “We live in a surveillance state, for God’s sake. Big Brother and Big Sister are watching. Between the state security net and social media, the whole world’s gone Panopticon.”
“The future is here, it’s still not evenly distributed, Loi. You know that. That’s why you’re still down here. Go two blocks off Shao-Bei Street, public security is spotty at best. This is a dark district. Thirty-plus thousand people per square kilometer, ninety percent day laborers, bottom rung service workers, and their families. Hell, a quarter of them aren’t even Chipped. Extending the public security net for a bunch of immigrants and refugees isn’t high on the Council’s budget. So long as the Shao-Bei shoppers are unmolested, the city only cares if there’s a goddamn riot.”
She looked away at that. I caught myself, suddenly grateful for what she didn’t point out.
She cleared her throat. The awkwardness dissolved. I took a deep breath and continued. “Look… the bodies were all found in dead zones. This is someone who knows this district, knows how and where to hide. A predator. I have to stop them or more people are going to get carved into anatomy displays. To do that, I need to step outside the lines.”
I nodded at the pouch. “Show me how this works. Please.”
Loi clenched her teeth. Stared at the pouch. Then at me. “If you die, don’t come crying to me,” she said finally.
She tipped the silvery sack and slid its contents on the counter; a small, gray box with a stubby antenna and an LED display, and a crimson flash stick. Both had ‘Fishing Gear’ written on them in Chinese.
Loi picked up the box. “WiFi extender. Very short range. Turn it on and you have an ultra-secure wireless network within a 3 meter radius.” The flash stick. “Go-to-prison-for-the-rest-of your-life splice-ware. Slot it in the extender’s USB and let it run. You need the target’s PIP, but Personal Internet Protocols are synced to the individual and heavily encrypted for a reason. This will cut through that for a limited time. PIP encryption changes at random intervals as part of the security, so whatever you’re doing, you need to do fast.”
She set the flash stick down with a snap and scowled at me. “And don’t lose your mind or have a hemorrhagic stroke while you’re at it.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“You’re light years away from your best, messing with this.”
I couldn’t disagree.
I put the box and flash stick back in the pouch, put the pouch in my jacket pocket. “What else? There’s always something else.”
Concern flitted across her face like the shadow of a sparrow in flight. She tamped down on it and turned back to the prosthetic hand. “Neural chips run off bio-electricity. The circuitry starts to fragment and degrade once a person dies. I have no idea what you’re going to find or what condition it’ll be in when you do. If you’re lucky, there will be nothing left and you can apply your idiocy to regular police work.”
“Thanks,” I said.
She sucked her teeth, yanked the cloth off the hand and went back to work. “Just bring that back to me when you’re done, understand?”
“I will.”
She waved one hand again without looking my way. The lights brightened and the door unlocked. “You better, Zek.”
I walked outside. It was nearly two a.m. The smell of street food sat heavy on the cool night air. The shift-change crowds were gone and the traffic noise was subdued. If I looked up and squinted, the warning lights winking on the underside of the Terrace could almost pass for stars.
Late as it was, pouch weighing in my jacket pocket, I felt lighter somehow. Something I hadn’t felt in weeks. Like hope.
My stomach rumbled and I made a beeline for the nearest food stall.
I was halfway there when a NKPD alert bloomed in my mind: another body. Dissected. Arranged.
Hot Space Station Justice 