Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Fourteen - Opposites Distract

“It’s an accepted fact that the average American diet was worsening year-by-year, but I think it really took a hit the day the FDA merged with Nars-Mestle.”

--Chef Boy Kardi, last aired episode of his cooking show “Proper dishes,” 2034

***

We walked down the centre of the road, mostly because it allowed us to keep an eye on everything and if something ambushed us, it would give us more time to see it coming and to react. Also, it was strange and novel to walk down the middle of the street.

“You ever been to the museum?” I asked.

“Do I look like the museum-going sort?” Manic asked right back.

I shrugged. “Hey, don’t knock museums. I became a samurai in one.”

“Wow,” she said. “Talk about nerdy.”

I blinked. Did she think I was that kind of girl? I... didn’t care that much about the impression she had of me, but it still stung a little that she didn’t think I was a punk. “Yeah. I was with the other kids from my orphanage. It was this big PR stunt thing. Then aliens came pouring out of the sky, crashed through the ceiling and things kinda went to shit from there. I ended up with a pipe through my chest.” I tapped the spot. “Anyway, it turned out alright in the end.”

“Huh,” she said. “Don’t have as much of a story as that.”

“Really? Far as I know, most people that get picked to be samurai get a shitty start. It’s fine if you’re not ready to talk about it, though.”

She scoffed. “I didn’t get run through or anything. Me and a couple of... acquaintances all discovered that our go-to aug-doc was fucking with us.” She touched her exposed stomach. “He sold us these colon-integrated stim injectors. CISIs, you know? They can give you a long-lasting hit of something fun if you activate them. You can load yourself full of Ziggy, or Propi or your opioid of choice before a fight. Gets your heart kicking to the beat and with the right cocktail you can’t bleed and you’ll keep going for a minute after you’ve died.”

“Something wrong with the installation?” I asked. I’d never been able to dream of affording that kind of self-modding. Not to mention, the orphanage was liable to rip anything too good right out of me to sell it off.

“Worse. He did good work, but someone from a band I know started running the numbers and it turned out three or four of us had the same serials on our CISIs. Which, yeah, that’s not possible. Turns out he hawked out these cheap-ass Chinese knock-off models. 3D printed, backroom shit. So we went off to kick his ass.”

I nodded along. I was already iffy about modding myself any more than I had. It was... I don’t know, just kind of squicky. I didn’t mind the eye, or the arm, but that was because I needed it. The internals were pushing it. I might give in one day, but I’d put it off as long as I could. Her story was like a lesson on why it could be a bad move.

“Where do the aliens come in?” I asked.

“Oh, when we drove out to his place, it’s near the river, we found it getting hit up by aliens. The others fucked off, but he had clients in there, you know? Mostly local whores and shit, but... yeah, they weren’t going to last. Bummed a shotty from a friend of a friend and ran in.”

“Big fucking hero, huh?”

She snorted. “Yeah, sure.”

I checked a map of the city while we chatted. The museum of Natural History was only a block down from where we were. “Just around the corner,” I said. “You know the place at all?”

She made a vague so-so gesture. “A little? Driven past it enough times. Been living in this shithole city for five or so years now.”

“Where were you before?” I asked.

“Mega-city York,” she said.

I whistled. And she was calling this place a shithole? Then again, I couldn’t complain too much, this was about as far from the place I was born as I’d ever gotten. “Well, Myalis thinks there’s a hive in there. I think we ought to check it out because something’s not right about this incursion.”

“What’s not right about it? Aliens show up every few hours, we kill them, then more show up.”

“That’s the thing, we should be seeing a lot more. Maybe only a dozen show up on day one, but by that night there should be three dozen, and by the next morning it should be a hundred or two. Just a few little bands of low-tier models? Over days? Just got this feeling that something weird’s going on.”

She linked her arms together behind her back, then stretched until her spine popped. I tried not to stare at her chest. I didn’t need to. I had a perfectly starable chest back home.

“I’ll go in first,” I said. “Stealth’s kind of my gimmick.”

“And you’re going to leave me behind?” Manic asked. She sounded a bit peeved about it.

“Hey, if you want to come, feel free,” I said. “But I’m not big on babysitting.”

“I can pull my own weight,” she growled.

I grinned behind my mask. Gomorrah was going to be horrified when she met Manic. The woman was like an older, meaner version of me. I was actually impressed that we hadn’t turned to blows yet, actually.

The museum wasn’t anything as fancy as the museum I’d turned into my home. It was a three story building with a large glass front. A screen covered one surface, from the ground floor all the way up. One of those perspective-based 3D advertising things that were real popular about ten years back.

It looked like the museum was actually pretty nice, otherwise. Not too many ads, and it seemed pretty clean. “What gives?” I asked.

“That place? Dunno. It’s a museum some of the time, and the rest of the time it’s used for like, fancy parties and shit.”

“Ah,” I said. Probably a place for philanthropists to hob-nob then. “Well, whatever, through the front door, yeah? Myalis, can I get a Laser Pointer?”

One laser pointer, coming right up.

Manic gave me a strange look, but a box appeared next to me and I pulled the top off to reveal my new toy. One of those Sunwatcher bullpup smgs I’d been practising with in mesh-space. There was a slight difference to the feel of it in real-space. It had more weight than a virtual world could properly simulate, but otherwise, it was pretty much the same.

“You armed, or you going to take them out with a winning smile?”

She laughed then reached to the small of her back. What she came back with was a relatively small handgun. “Got this thing. It fires a resonant frequency. Melts the aliens right up.”

“Oh, hey, I used something like that before. A lot, even. It’s a grenade though. Good AOE, keeps an area safe.”

She nodded, then looked at my gun, then her own. Hers was a lot smaller. I could almost see the math being worked out behind her eyes. “Give me a sec,” she said before frowning.

“We’ve got all night,” I said, even though it was mid-day at most.

It took a minute, but eventually, Manic nodded. Then a box thumped down by her feet. She grinned, kicked the top off, then pulled out a much larger gun. It looked like the high-tech great-grandchild of a double-barrel. “Bass-cannon,” she explained.

“Cool,” I said with a nod.

“You wearing ear protection in that suit, because this thing’s loud as fuck.”

I laughed. “I should be alright,” I said. “Right Myalis.”

One moment, I need to ask Vanguard Manic’s AI the specifications of that weapon... yes, your equipment should be able to handle indirect fire. Please don’t take a blast to the face unprotected though. It’ll make your cybernetic eye malfunction, and also melt your brain.

“Should be good,”I said with a thumb’s up.

Manic grinned, then the sides of her head shifted and the ‘skin’ over her jaw moved up and over her ears while plates on the side of her skull lowered to meet them so that her ears were entirely covered and I could see the linkages and wiring of the augs planted into the bone of her skull and jaws.

“Let me try this thing,” she said.

I stepped back.

Manic stepped up.

She cocked her gun which whined like a microphone getting bad feedback. I stepped back a bit more as she started to laugh and pressed the gun in against her shoulder. The barrels flipped and extended, forming a pair of large, glowing disks. The noise grew and grew until the pitch hit a point where I couldn’t hear it at all.

With a single heavy whump that displaced the air ahead of her, Manic fired.

The front of the museum exploded.

I was pretty sure they heard that all the way across the city.

“Ah, fuck,” I muttered. “She’s not like me. She’s the opposite.”

***

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