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When he came to Motorcity, Mike had wanted to rip out his implants, the ones in his wrists and in the base of his neck. He’d been upset, agitated, had flipped the flick knife out of his boot and threatened to cut them out himself if Jacob wouldn’t do it for him. And Chuck, he’d been even more easily cowed then, less able to speak up, but when he heard that he’d gone shooting up out of his hunch over his plate, all of his six-foot gawkiness getting tangled up in itself, and had squeaked out, “No!”
Mike had looked over at him, eyes hard, but had stilled the knife in his hands, broad fingers steady. His nails were clipped short and blunt, Chuck had noticed, and they dug into the wrapped wire of the knife’s hilt.
“You are going to get infected like – like something awful, I don’t even know,” Chuck had continued, clambering off his barstool. He nearly tripped over his own feet but kept on going, “and that’s after you cut through your own tendons or, or bore a hole through your wrist, and short the implant out and electrocute yourself while you bleed out because you sawed through your ulnar artery.”
Jacob raised his hands, backed off then, had propped himself up against his bar to watch. “I need them gone,” Mike said, voice harsh. He’d pulled off his KaneCo jacket, tied it around his waist to hide the stars-and-sabres logo. His hair was a mess and his knuckles were tight, pale yellow with tension.
“So you don’t cut them out,” said Chuck, beseeching; “we hack them.” And he flicked at his own wrist, sent green infoscreens shooting up – friendly bright green, not cold KaneCo blue. He kept the specs for the hack close to the front of his file-pile, just under the datadumps on all the cars in Jacob’s body shop and the Motorcity anti-tank shields and the list of every eatery in town that let him pay in repairs and IT support. He brought them up, flipped a finger to flip the screen around, and showed Mike.
Mike peered at it through his heavy bangs, eyes narrow. The hack was more of a virus, something that slipped under the firewalls and then into them, turning them inside out, making them recognize KaneCo code and signal pulses as intruders. Chuck’s first try at this hack had been on his own implants and he’d been anxious and sloppy, and the battling codes had sent the whole system into a spiralling malfunction that left him a giant beacon on the KaneCo radars till he’d fixed it. Now the KaneCo radars didn’t so much as hitch as they passed over anyone with the hack, didn’t recognize the heat signature as anything more than really big dogs or one of the mutant rats that lived in the less-used sewers, maybe. Mike scrolled through the specs, eyes passing fast over the foreign code. He raised his head and asked,
“How many people have had this hack?”
Chuck pushed his free hand into his hair, scratched. “Uh. Me, Dutch, Texas grew up here so he never had them, Jacob had a way older type and I think he did end up cutting the whole thing out, for Julie I just built in a stealth mode, uh, I dunno, I don’t remember all of them, I think I’ve done all the people who came down from Deluxe in the past, like, year?”
Jacob pushed himself off his bar and lifted his left hand, the one with the thick leather cuff around the wrist. He waggled his fingers, his nails like slabs, his knuckles like walnuts. “If Chuck had been around when I came down to Motorcity, I wouldn’t have needed to get out the scalpels and I’d still have a working computer. Just let him do it, kid, you don’t want the tendon damage or the scar tissue that comes with home surgery.”
Mike looked them both over again, tension obvious in the skin under his eyes. Chuck’s wrist was still extended awkwardly, green screen wobbling in its hover, and Jacob had his fingers circled around his leather cuff, nails worrying at the buckle. Then all at once Mike’s eyes relaxed, his shoulders came down from their defensive hunch, and a smile broke over the planes of his face.
“Let’s get to business,” he’d said. And he’d watched while Chuck had done his thing, comparing the archived code of his implants pre-hack to Mike’s current set, altering his little virus for best results.
“You’ve got some wicked intense code here,” Chuck said, a little awed. “Kane was keeping you on a tight leash.”
Mike had shrugged uncomfortably at that, strain like a heavy blanket pulling itself over his shoulders. “He had some plans. I don’t know. Not like he told me much.”
“Kane don’t tell anybody much,” Jacob put in. He’d slid behind his counter, checked whatever he had going in his huge oven and the vat bubbling green on the stove. “I worked for him longer than you’ve been alive, son, and he never once told me a thing that he didn’t need to.”
“You worked for Kane?” Mike asked. He shifted on his stool, nearly bumping into Chuck, sitting next to him and pulling code together faster than Mike could follow.
“Head of R&D since before he built Deluxe,” Jacob said, his posture gone rueful, regretful.
“And now you’re, what? Down here serving up dinners?” Mike leaned forward, elbows digging into the bar.
“Gotta keep the people fed,” said Jacob, unruffled. “But naw, I do a bit of this and that. Tinkering, y’know.”
“He rebuilds twenty-first century motor vehicles, and he pretty much single-handedly built all of Motorcity’s defences against Kane’s weapons.” Chuck’s voice was slow for once, absent-minded, as he flicked through pages of his code. “I think I’m pretty much done with this, but the main access point’s in the neck implant, so I’m gonna need you to tilt your head forward?”
Mike bent his neck down, and shoved a hand up the nape of his neck to leave it hair-free for Chuck’s access. Little tufts tickled at his wide palm, escaping through his fingers. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Chuck pull something out of a pocket—
“Are you going to shove a screwdriver in my neck?” he yelped.
“No, no, calm down, dude, it’s not actually going to touch you.” Chuck moved to stand behind him, hunching over his back. Mike’s neck prickled with something like unease. “I just need a clean machine to transfer the virus with, your firewalls won’t accept anything from my own computers, to a KaneCo program they’re dirty. Chill.”
Mike felt something against his neck, like a static charge, and saw the bar in front of him backlit in blue. The blue flickered to green, reflecting oddly off the surface of the bar. The light flickered back to blue, to green, for one terrifying moment to red, and finally back to a solid green. The static presence left the back of his neck.
Chuck plucked at Mike’s hand where it sat against his scalp. “You can, uh, take your hand off now. It’s done.”
Mike let his hand drop. “It’s done? Already?” He stood up, and Chuck backed away, stumbling over his own stork-legs.
“It’s computers, they run pretty fast,” he said. Shrugged, laughed. “I mean I’d like to check the systems over again in a while to make sure all the different patches of code are reconciling nicely, everything’s sort of cobbled from spare parts and stitched up but there’s no reason it shouldn’t all jigsaw together.”
Mike grinned again, and his smile was wide, white, honest. “You are a miracle worker,” he said, sincere. He clapped Chuck on the back and pretended to not notice when it made Chuck jump.
Jacob had retreated to a back room, and now he came back out, both hands encased in faded pink oven mitts, covered in scorch marks and stains. “Now, son, you’re going to have to think of what you want to do while you’re in Motorcity.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Mike shrugged. “Do my best to take out Kane.”
“That’s, uh, a pretty long-term goal,” said Chuck.
“Okay,” Mike had said, and raised three fingers, ticking them off one by one. “Short term: I would like to eat something that isn’t green, bubbling, and showing signs of sentience; I would like some clothing that doesn’t have the KaneCo logo on every seam; and I would like to check out those antique cars you mentioned.”
Chuck glanced over at Jacob, and when he nodded, said, “So I guess that means. The storehouse over in Poletown, then Antonio’s for some food, and then back here to look at the cars?”
“Sounds good,” said Mike, beaming, and if he said it while rubbing at his wrists, well, Chuck wasn’t going to say anything.
“You should show him that old jalopy you’ve been fixing up,” Jacob said, inducing a squawk from Chuck.
“I, I, uh, it’s barely more than a frame with some seats, I’ve only been tinkering with it a little—”
“I’ve seen your tinkering,” Mike said, and let his infoscreens pop up, running smooth diagnostics checks, more efficient and streamlined than they had been half an hour ago. “Now let me see your car, okay? I bet it's amazing.”
Chuck raised his hands and let himself surrender to what was clearly the inevitable.