#don’t allow yourself to get stuck in low vibrational habits people places or situations

[boyczar]

recent words of the day as applicable and accurate as a tarot reading

[puckleisdreaming]

The bar was empty apart from one old man over by the slot machine in the corner. He’d been there all night as far as I could tell and hadn’t so much as gotten up to relieve himself in at least the two hours I’d been here. Every now and again he’d post another coin in and pull the big red lever on the side of the machine and it would light up and play a little tune as the wheels spun and then ‘thunk, thunk, thunk’. Sometimes this was followed by a metallic trickle of change as the machine begrudgingly vomited forth some coins only for them to find their way back inside as the man continued to play his games. I couldn’t understand it. They say the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I can’t remember where I’d heard that. But if that’s the case this guy had to be absolutely fricking nuts, like out of his mind crazy considering how many times he’d pulled that fucking lever. Again and again he’d yank it and the machine would make that noise like an old washing machine with a brick in it. I’d come to brood and here was this old nutcase throwing money away over and over and for what? What was he hoping would happen?

I was getting wound up over nothing, I turned back to my beer. It was a miserable night and the damp that the patrons of the evening had tramped in and out of the place had suffused the air with a nasty humidity that fugged up the back of my throat. I kept sipping this beer to try and clear it but it didn’t work.

“You must really hate yourself.” Anette took the stool next to me and looked right at me. The way she was staring it was like she could burn holes in my temple, I just kept staring straight down at the beer. Ca-chunk went the lever as the psycho in the corner pulled it again and tumble tumble tumble went the wheels.

“What do you want, I’m busy.” I took another sip and glanced at her through the corner of my eye. She must have been on a job dressed up the way she was. Her freckled face was framed by crinkly blue black hair. She’d died it a few months back and now it reminded me of the ribbon inside cassette tapes all scrunched up the way it caught the light sometimes. New glasses and boots too, someone was paying her good money. I wasn’t used to seeing her in a dress and the sleek black number stuck out painfully here, if it wasn’t so empty, the attention she was drawing would have made me feel sick. My palms started itching.

“I can see that, just like you’ve been busy every night for weeks.”

“You’ve been watching me?”

“I’ve got better things to do than watch you every night but you know we’ve got eye’s and ears, you weren’t going to be able to just stop calling us and hope to slip away”

“I don’t see why not, it’s not like you need my help.”

I dropped a handful of coppers on the bar for a tip and headed out leaving the beer half drunk, Anette cannoned it down before following me out the door. I pulled my collar up against the rain hoping the foul weather would dissuade her, she had a U-field up. No such luck. I stopped and turned to face her watching the rain as it got caught in the static field being projected by the small device attached to her wrist. The droplets got within a foot of her head before slowing to an eery stop about two inches from her hair. They vibrated slightly caught between their momentum carrying them forward and the static field pushing them away before they spat off the field like water splashed on a hot pan. She stood there fizzing and spitting water out in every direction forming strange rainbows caught in the neon light of the nearby bars and casinos.

“Wasn’t it you who told me only assholes use U-fields? Spraying every passerby without one in the face as you walk by.”

“That was before rain water became the leading cause of skin cancer. Got sick of stabbing myself with a syringe full of Oncoligon every time I got caught in a shower.”

“Rather that than give some poor sod ocular just for passing me in the street.”

“Are we going to do this all night? You’ve been in that bar every evening for three weeks. If you were drinking yourself to death I’d be less concerned but you’re not and you’re not returning our calls so tell me what’s going on with you.”

She was more pissed off than I thought she was, crackling there like a live wire out in the rain. I’d known Anette long enough to know not to get her too wound up, she had a tendency to lose it and like all Neomancers when she lost it people tended to end up needing retinal surgeries. It had been a while since I’d seen her at work but I was watching for the tell tale signs, flickering electrics nearby, a slight glow to her skin.

“We’re friends, I think I’ve been very generous with the time I’ve bought you, but people are starting to wonder when you’re coming back into the fold. I’ve told them all you’re good for it, that you’re just getting your head together but when you took off you made a few people look very stupid and you know what happens when certain people are made to look stupid.

“I told you Anette. I don’t have it. I don’t know what happened in that vault but I don’t have it. If I’d made it out of there with a mancy like that don’t you think I would have made use of it by now? A sorry sap like me I could have sold it for a fortune, paid everyone off, and still had money left over to make a break for it. If I’d collected what we were looking for that night and wanted to make a getaway I would be gone.”

She moved like lightening. The world exploded in agony as ice picks were smashed through my eyeballs and my brain burst with white. Lights out.

I came to on a cold concrete floor, as my eyes began to focus I was aware my clothes were still damp, couldn’t have been long since our little chat. The headache I had was splitting and my vision was fuzzy, my periphery dropping away to a hazy blackness like I had weird tunnel vision. From what I could make out I was in a small room with a steel door, the only light was a fluorescent tube up in the ceiling and there were no windows. Guess I was staying put. I crawled over to the wall and placed my forehead against the cool concrete hoping to curb the oncoming migraine. I hadn’t been hit by Anette before but I’d seen her wipe out others, I found a sudden deep well of sympathy for her victims. She’d been training with someone as well. She’d always been tougher than a carrier like me but I was quick at least and made a living off of being able to get out of trouble. Sure I was a few weeks out of practice but she had definitely gotten faster.

Without moving I considered my situation. Concrete walls, no windows, probably a basement. As it was Anette who picked me up it was most likely one of Desto’s spots but without more information I couldn’t guess where. There were hundreds of Desto’s places all over Avon and I could have been bundled to any one of them whilst I was out cold. Up until fairly recently Desto had been my employer and ever since Anette had joined two years ago she’d been Desto’s number two. Most of Desto’s income came from snatch jobs and implantation surgeries so she had plenty of carriers in her employ. Her mancer’s were always there for when she needed a little more muscle but she preferred to keep a low profile for most of her work. I found a small crack in the concrete wall next to my cheek and traced it with a finger, feeling the rough texture and waiting for the beating that would inevitably be coming. It was the best gig around if you could get into a boss’s good graces but pissing them off was verging on suicidal.

Thinking about that stupid man and his stupid slot machine, how many times had he been there in the weeks I’d been frequenting that place? Every time I’d gone I knew it was stupid to keep returning to the same spot but I’m a creature of habit. I don’t like change. What happened in the vault had shaken me and suddenly the dashing high life of working for a boss didn’t seem quite so desirable. I wanted out and I had let myself dream that word would get back to Desto that the job had gone to shit but all she’d lost was a carrier. She had hundreds of me in her employ, no skin off her nose if one got caught by the enemy and beaten to a bloody pulp. Maybe, just maybe, she’d decide to cut her losses and forget about it, forget about me.

It had been a risky job, we always knew that, but word had gotten out that Jacob had some crazy mancy stored down in his vault whilst he tried to find someone who could make an implant that could carry the thing. Mancies came in all shapes and sizes and the more powerful the mancy the more complex the implant you needed to integrate it. Any sucker can carry the thing around but to properly integrate a complex bit of Arch tech with the human nervous system took serious technology. Most bosses have vaults to keep mancies they find whilst their techs fabricate integrations for them. Even when the tech was done you had to pretty much just hope you were compatible with it. Different mancies integrated with different people. Anette was a neomancer, her little bit of Arch tech that sat in a chip at the base of her skull allowed her to project and control, to some extent, visible light. How? I don’t know, ask the techs, but it’s all because of that micro chip at the top of her spine.

I’m no mancer, I’m a carrier. Outfitted with an all purpose petabyte microdrive in my forearm I can carry pretty much any non integrated mancy as long as I can get close enough to download it. No one fully understands Arch tech but the one thing we do know is the file sizes are enormous. Stupid big. Even the flashest of new computers couldn’t come close to needing the kind of square footage these things needed in dataspace. So they load up people with massive drives, hook the drives up to our metabolics for fuel and send us around to carry them from place to place. Wireless would take years and a simple portable drive won’t do it. You need something with some serious horse power and you know what’s easier than lugging around a hard drive hooked up to a car battery? Knitting a microdrive into the cardiovascular system of a human being.