Jerrig sat in his apartment and tried to become one with the beanbag. He lifted the syringe for a 3rd time, and for a 3rd time, he put it back down. He didn't trust the drugs to do the job. His childhood friend, Nigel, was dead. He had seen some things tonight that made him paranoid. Hell, he was scared. He hadn't been scared in so long, that it was hard to admit he could even still feel that way. Scared and alone. His vision fuzzed around the edges.
"Damned cyberware!" he croaked out, but he knew these were real tears, from real eyes. His own. Jerig stabbed the syringe into the bean bag repeatedly, trying to wrestle with his grief and frustration. Trying to keep down the thoughts..
'I'm a pussy!' he remembered how he scuttled home from the bar.
'I'm a fucking coward!' he rememebred abadoning the girl in the alley, how her eyes turned to him pleading while he stood there the a hardon, lighting a ganger's cigarette.
'I'm a lonely bastard with no friends!' he remembered how Enahj, Trudy, and Jaff turned their back on him. How he closed Eli's eyes when he still in London. How he held Nigel as he died.
The stabbing turned to slashing as images flooded him. How he walked past his dying friend and never stopped to look at who was screaming in the lift. Never bothering to check it out. Even WISHING he'd stop screaming so HE, Jerrig, the Complete Prick of the Known World, could get back to mixing his little cocktail and have a serene trip on the bean bag!!
"RRAARRRGGGHHH!!!" he screamed out to the cracked ceiling before collapsing onto his forearms, breathing harshly.
After a while, his vision cleared and he became first aware of the little styro foam balls sticking to his arms. He noticed how they seemed to dance back and forth in time with his breathe. Then he became aware of a banging on the wall from his next door neighbor. She was shrieking at him in Vietnamese to quiet down.
Jerrig stood up shakily and slumped against the wall. He had torn his bean bag.
"Shit, I don't own a vacuum cleaner," he mumbled allowed to himself. The banging on the wall, now against his back, kept up. He threw open his door and went to the next door. Pausing a moment, he listened. She was still yelling. He took a breath and kicked down her door.
The tiny crone inside screamed and tried to swing with the broom she using on the wall. Jerrig caught it and lifted her up 3 ft before tossing her into her kitchen. She made a grab for her knives, but he knocked the stand aside with one swing. He lunged forward and grabbed her by the robe she was wearing and slammed her into the cabinets. Pitifully she clawed at his arms, babbling in her language.
"SHUT UP ALREADY!!" He bellowed. She stopped breathing.
"Now I've stopped screaming already! QUIT WITH THE FUCKING BANGING!!"
She nodded her head and he dropped her ass first into her sink. As he turned to go, he heard her scramble to get out.
"Next time I turn on the disposal." and with that he slammed the door shut.
*******
Dr. Varnen climbed out of his PAS and wiped the sweat off the back of his neck. All he wanted right now was a Saki Surprise and a little uplinking with his favorite nurse. He typed in the perimeters for the bots to collect the cyberware from the last patient and went into his office to kick back on his futon.
Mimi walked in right on cue.
"Doctor, here is a repeat customer here interested in purchasing." He opened an eye and thought for the umpteenth time he was going to have to upgrade her. Her sentence structures were shot and her memory kept dumping at 9am every morning.
"Whom is it, Mimi?" he grumbled, then got up. She obviously didn't have the room for the info. Damn, her dump was starting way early. He threw on a lab coat and stepped out into the reception room. A gangly man whose overalls were too short for him was sitting on the couch. His feet were planted on the floor, yet his knees were nearly chin level.
"Case! How are you today?" The man stood up and nervously fidgeted. "Oh, hello, Doc, I was wondering if anything fresh came down the pike."
Dr. Varnen clamped a hand on Case's elbow and gave him a friendly squeeze. "Indeed I do! I just got finished with a piece of prime." He paused outside the door to the lab and pointed and finger at Case, "You get FIRST pick, my friend!"
Case grinned like a child and followed the doctor in. With a sweep of his arm, he presented the new set of tubes and tanks holding the seperated remains of one Krissen R. Noel. Case went up to the jar holding a pair of green eyes.
"These are pretty."
"Yes, but the best is still on the table. I held it for you."
Case approached the table and stared. Dr. Varnen smiled and headed back to his office, "I'll leave you 2 alone." and with that he closed the door.
Case tentatively reached out and touched the arm. It was still warm. He picked up the skin and stroked his cheek with it. He could feel the blood drying on his cheek, but not before he felt the softness of a woman. He looked at the head. Hair still attached. He sniffed it cautiously. A light aroma of phermone perfume and shampoo seemed to slither through all his senses.
Case looked down at the face. Lips removed but eyelids were still intact. He heard the door open behind him and he turned to the doctor. "You're a genius! An absolute craftsman! It's still warm and no accidental cuts."
Dr. Varnen proudly drew himself up to his full 4ft 5 inches. "Yes, m'boy, that's why you pay me," he hinted lightly as he held the door open for Case. "Would you like something to carry her in?"
Case seemed torn at this, but finally said, "No thank you, I'll just it out of the store." He reached for his wallet.
Catherine flipped through her emails behind her firewall. She wasn't tired, but she was bored. She just couldn't seem to get to sleep. She wondered how C@ was doing, and if the daemon remembered to shut off all the lights for bed time.
She found a new job assignment waiting her group for the next morning. That wasn't there before, but it only proved her theory that some corporates never slept. She opened her boss's email and grabbed the attachement. It was a form to rehire Krissen R. Noel.
'But they declared her dead before she even left work.' Cathy thought. She ran a trace on Krissen's Trauma card, wired to her neurl processor. When the neural waves in her brain stop - ie she ceases to live - then a signal from the processor kicks in causing the card to break.
"Somebody up above just got mad at her and probably declared her dead to create a lot of paperwork in the morning. Damned corporates and their weird jokes...huh?"
Krissen's card was broken about 3 hours after she left work. The report next to it was that the card had been stolen and used by someone in the CZ. A report on that incident had been filed with the police and was available to her.
"Oh, thank god. She just lost it."
Cathy then went through Trauma Team's node and looked up the new number sequence for Krissen's replacement card. 3 were created at the same time to prevent gaps in the records in case of theft or loss of card.
The new card had been broken 2 hours later. Catherine looked in stunned amazement at the screen's text.
".... Card #4536J77BioTechInc990 recieved signal at 03:45am. Card Not activated."
'She never got her replacement card. She died but the card was still in the Trauma Team headquarters. They couldn't find her.' Catherine sat in disbelieving silence. Krissen was reported dead 30 minutes before she logged out. Then 2 hours later, her card is stolen and triggered. Then an hour and a half later, her dead man's switch kicked in, signalling the time of her neural death. And now 15 minutes ago, she was given the order to rehire her. Cathy rechecked the time on the email; 02:55am. Before Krissen died.
Cathy got up and turned off the screen, leaving the info still up, and went for a walk down to the basement.
Jerrig was annoyed, angry and annoyed. He decide then and there to rip out this fucking headware and get something new. It was bugging the hell out of him. He still couldn't sleep. He couldn't watch vids, he couldn't even fucking jack off without some little light show going off in the back of his head. And the drugs were obviously not doing their job. He grabbed his jacket and went out into the streets for a 3rd time that night. 'Thank god I don't have a job.'
The air was warmer now and seemed to have lost some of it's dampness. The smell of trash of thick in the air. Jerrig picked up a piece of rebar and walked down to the only ripperdoc he knew that dealt in parts and surgery.
A tall nurse in a tight white uniform answered the door. Her outfit belonged in a fetish magazine for adults who like to dress up or in an old black and white movie. Even had the hat which was resting on her gossamer hair, which looked gray to transparent depending on the light.
"Hello, sweet thing, I need to make a purchase. Is yer boss in?" he smiled at her as he leaned against the wall. She smiled back stiffly and turned around, "This way, sir."
'Cripes, a frigging sex droid,' Jerrig thought as he followed her in. 'Still, decent model, pretty life like" he thought as he admired the way her ass sashayed,'It's not like she'll ever have a period or wrinkles.'
As Jerrig followed her down the dark grey hall, he looked up to see a monstrosity calmly walking towards him.The world and all its sounds ceased to exist and Jerrig's universe couldn't pull itself from the eyes. The face didn't seem to fit right, that was the problem. The eyes were holes in a mask where another pair of psychotic blue seemed to peer out from. They roved over Jerrig, more the bulging eyes of a rampaging horse than a human's. It appeared to be naked, with small breasts jiggling from too high up on the chest. The skin was drawn tight around the stomach and the pubic region had a square look; the lips were spread so open they fanned out the pubic hair in an almost reverse of the normal triangle. Then he saw the flaccid penis swinging pendulously from beneath. The metallic smell of blood nearly gagged Jerrig as it walked by and he flattened himself against the wall to avoid contact, but all the while, he couldn't keep from staring at the eyes. The eyes and the hair. Amber hair. In waves. He'd seen that hair color and style tonight. The images of the alley flashed through his mind as the creature passed him and approached the door. He saw the staples on the back of the neck, along down the spine until the division was too wide and a thick thread laced down the rest of the back. An odd belt which could only have been the arms gave the whole abomination an apron like look.
The creature who was a man turned to Jerrig as he opened the door and stretched the face into a ghastly red lipped smile, and Jerrig knew. Nigel. The fags from the bar. This was the guy. This was the psychopath who haunted the edges of Jerrig's reality all night. And now he was looking right at him.
The door closed.
The nurse stopped and waited after noticing he had slipped out of her 4 ft perimeter. "This way, sir."
The spell wouldn't break and Jerrig's feet were slow to respond, he couldn't be sure that he had indeed been left alone. Then he turned and followed the nurse bot into the office, thinking to himself, 'Maybe I was wrong. Maybe that ain't the guy.'
The droid slipped and fell, he automatically bent to help her up and froze. The room felt damp, like a sewer. Like the walls were covered in something wet. It looked like a bad paint job with red laquer. The head in the trashcan wore a surprised expression. 2 hands were cupping either side of the face. He looked up at the ceiling and saw splotches of red on the dark grey tiles, threatening to drip. The observation window viewing the lab was trimmed with intestines, giving the already iron scent of the air an acrid edge. A little bot was pitifully wedged into the doorway leading into the lab, beeping helplessly. Without thinking, Jerrig stepped gingerly over it and breathed deeply the sterile air of the lab. He saw a nerual processor in a cleaning vat and grabbed it, tank and all. He stepped back into the office and when cautiously straddling the dead bot, his boot came down on top of something and he began to slip on the nearly tractionless floor. He leaned against a wall and looked around the room. He noticed he had nearly slipped on a severed foot and began to chuckle.
"I nearly lost my footing!" he began to shake and quiver. 'My god, I'm laughing at his jokes. What the fuck?!'
The droid had picked herself up and Jerrig could see the slick red blood coating the left side of her uniform. He quickly ran for the door. Behind him, he could here the sexaroid asking the doctor if he wanted a Saki Bomber.
The door hadn't even closed by the time he was across the street and tearing down the alley.