Bitstream

14.4

It doesn't take long for me to get the hang of things. A lot of the tasks are monotonous: scanning and tagging, moving material with pallet trucks into storage units, sorting boxes on a conveyor, and, most importantly, avoiding The Overseer like the Black Plague. It isn't particularly evil beyond being scary; its primary function is to carry heavy material to the very top of the racks. Its secondary function, however, is to slide across the ceiling, drop down over your head, flash you with blue light and announce:

"Deviation detected. Employee 8-1-5-8-5-1 write-up submitted for review."

Other than that, it doesn't do much. But I've got a feeling it's capable of a whole lot more – if Sloan ever decides it's necessary. In that case, I'm supposed to, as she put it, 'use my imagination.'

Vander, who's been tinkering with the coolant system for the last couple of weeks, says he's mapped the whole building, including the ventilation blueprint. One detail sticks out: the transparent booth in the lobby where the man keeps my visor is on a different circuit and control system from the surrounding area. In theory we can overload the booth's heaters and force him out long enough for me to swoop in and grab the visor. The snag is being seen coming or going, so we'll need a distraction. The other snag is access to the heating controls – they're in the security shack by the front gate. Breaking into that is going to require just as much finesse as getting into the foyer booth – or so I thought at first.

According to Riven, most of the security staff at this station go on regular smoke-breaks. They're not supposed to, but since the shack is located outside, they don't have to worry about The Overseer swooping down over them and issuing write-ups.

On paper the plan's simple; in practice it's messy: slip into the security shack while the guard's on a smoke-break, jack my neural wire into the control panel, and copy the programme and server software to my internal storage. After my shift I'll ping Dance so he can brute the server with his brickie. We'll time it so the booth overheats until the man inside has to bail – Vander will keep him occupied long enough for me to grab the visor, bypass the scanner and sneak it onto the floor. From there I'll wait for a quiet window to nudge the Lumina trucks' routes and nick a copy of Sloan's shard.

Though, I'll cross those bridges when I get to them.

So, a couple of weeks after my first shift, in the run-up to the Lumina trucks' departure, I'm stuck "doing biofuel" with Riven, which basically means hauling the dropped-off drums from the front yard into the building. Apparently they feed the big machines: boilers that stop the storage racks freezing, backup generators that kick in when the grid hiccups, and the industrial burners that torch refuse and busted parts.

It isn't my first time handling biofuel, but it is my first time doing it in this kind of rain. Keeping my balance while reaching into the delivery truck, unloading a batch and hauling them onto the carrier is a challenge. Augmented strength takes most of the strain, but it does nothing for traction.

Riven's impressed. "Not many people can curl seventy pounds of liquid," she says, crediting my criminal past. I don't tell her the truth about being an enforcer in The Scrubs, not yet. Don't want her marching to Sloan with a handful of notes – you know, in case I rub her the wrong way.

Though, to be fair, she's been friendly so far. Shown me the ropes, told me where to go and what to avoid – exactly what she's doing now, all while I'm eyeing the security guard getting ready for his smoke-break.

The outside area is long and stacked with more trucks than I could have possibly imagined. The ground is all asphalt, threaded with runnels where water slips towards grated drains. Tire tracks carve dark rivers in muddy understone; pallets and crumpled cardboard cluster around yawning loading bays like driftwood. The overhead gantries and catwalks cut the sky into industrial teeth, and there are sodium lamp halos rising from vents, turning puddles into muddied mirrors that catch the blinking drone lights snapping through the sky. Near the front entrance (by the truck gates) is the security office: a small cube of a place. When I haul the last batch of biofuel drums from the delivery truck onto the pallet carrier, Riven sits up on top of it and gives me a satisfied grin, her pink hair hanging out just barely beneath the swell of her corpo beanie.

"Good job, Mono," she yells over the wind as she puts the carrier in gear. "I have to hand it to you: for a newbie, you sure pick things up quick."

"This supposed to be difficult?" I joke, sliding the delivery truck door shut. Not even a second later the AI embedded in the truck switches on, and it starts backing up towards the open truck gates, probably the last one of the night.

"Not when you have super strength, I suppose," she calls, steering the carrier into the interior bay. "Can probably hop on break after this!"

"You go on without me," I say. "I'm gonna head to the bathroom around the front."

"Don't take too long," she says. "We're not supposed to be out in the yard unless tasked."

"I'll only be five minutes," I reply. "Save me a seat by the heater – it gets cold with the damn ventilation problems. Lander should have it solved soon though – so I heard."

She laughs, a hawkish little sound that reminds me of Cormac, eases the clutch and drives off. "No promises," she shouts, swallowed by the warehouse shadow.

When she's gone, I drift towards the AI-driven delivery truck and fall into step beside it. It rolls towards the exit gate near the security shack, where the guard comes into full view: a middle-aged man in heavy cargo pants and a weathered leather jacket, his gut pressing against his belt like a dam about to give, a thin white work shirt doing its best to hold the line. It's too rainy out for him to smoke by the door, so he walks over to a half-open window instead, flicking his lighter under the metal awning and cupping the flame with both hands. He's still close – very close – but the door is ajar.

I'll have to move quick.

Right when the truck passes through the exit gate, I sneak over to the security shack, careful not to make a sound. The door's old – non-automatic – so I have to nudge it open fully with a painfully loud creeeeeeak. Luckily the fat man is too busy swiping through his phone to notice.

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Inside is dark; the only light source comes from the monitors overhead displaying the feeds: a grid of tiny windows swapping between different cameras throughout the complex. A single swivel chair, a heap of plants on the far right, and on the left: the control panel for the heating system. It looks like something dragged out of the seventies and barely kept alive. The screen is a patch of underpolished glass framed in yellow plastic.

Right where Vander said it would be.

Wasting no time, I creep up to it and stick my neural wire into the control port. An option to download the external data pops up on my neural display; I select 'Download', and a minute passes before it finally completes.

Done, just like that. Now all I have to do is send it onto Dance after hours, and we can come up with a plan to—

"Shit," the security officer yells from outside, his voice muffled by the relentless squall. When I peek over the window, I see him flicking the smoke away in a hurried panic. Was I spotted? I don't know, but I move fast, over to the plants on the far right side. I slide into them like a rat in a hedgerow, leaves folding over me with wet, apologetic fingers. The dirt smells awful, as if it hasn't been replaced or cleaned in over a decade, but I suck it in anyway, peeking through the dark as the officer rushes inside and shuts the door behind him. I expect him to look around for me, but instead he heads over to the swivel chair and plants it with so much force the seat almost bursts off the cylinder.

I don't understand why he's in such a panic at first, but then I hear that familiar sound from outside: the heavy whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of hydraulics working in tandem with piston limbs. It's her.

The door to the office swings open, and on cue a stroke of lightning lights up the figure standing on the other side. Sure enough, it's Sloan Harrow, all seven feet of her mechanical body. She steps into the building, her eye flashing red, and I instinctively duck lower behind the shrubbery.

"Harris-szzzz," Sloan says.

"Oh, hello Ms. Harrow," he says, a hint of nervousness in his voice. "Rainy out, isn't it?"

She stays silent, and all I can hear is the steady hiss of her limbs as she turns to face him, hands behind her back. "I like the rain," she begins. "It tends to keep me calm when I go out for walks-szzzz. You can understand the need for a walk every now and again, can't you?"

He swings the swivel until his belly is facing up at her. He keeps his head down, hands pressed together as if in prayer. "I think everyone needs a walk – every now and then. Especially in this city."

Sloan hums, a small, knowing sound. "Is that why you left your post without authorisation, Mr. Harris? To take a walk?" She pauses. "Or was it to sneak a smoke-break? The same habit I specifically told you was against regulation during induction?"

There's some silence for a moment, and then Harris lets out a sigh. "I admit, I might have tried to sneak one in – normally I'd be right by the door, but because of the rain—"

"I don't care," she says, taking a step towards him, bending ever-so-slightly so that her eye is directly over his head. "Do you know why we have regulations in place, Harris?"

His hand moves to the flap of his work shirt and stays there, his lips seeming to suck at an invisible straw. He looks nervous. Especially around the eyes. "For safety."

"And what else?"

"Efficiency and productivity," he finishes.

She nods. "If anyone were to sneak into the office and steal important, confidential information about the building – or steal anything at all – whose fault would that be?"

Again, he takes his time before responding. "Mine, Ms. Harrow."

She chuckles softly, though it's so sharp it sounds almost like a scoff. She stands up straight again. "In any other place in this state, especially a place as confidential as this, you'd be killed. Ward has policies-szzz in place that prevent that, much to your benefit. But that doesn't mean I won't completely destroy your record and make sure you never get employed anywhere else in this city again. Is-szzzz that understood?"

"I understand," Harris says. "It won't happen again."

"I know it won't," she says, "because I'm going to be keeping a very keen eye on you – along with anyone else threatening to damage the system. The only reason you're here, the only reason you can go home and indulge yourself-szzzz on enough food to feed a family of five is because people do their job. Let this be your final warning, Harris-szzzz. I don't give second chances."

At the line I don't give second chances, I immediately think of Cierus; she'd said the same thing to me over fifty years ago, right before she betrayed me, back when she and that bitch Calyx Ward got my father killed. I clench my fist, and in doing so accidentally tear a root out, causing a subtle crack.

Sloan is halfway out the door when she suddenly stops.

Shit.

After a moment, she says: "Did you see anyone come in while you were out for a smoke?"

"No – I was only gone for a couple of minutes."

More silence, and my heart is pounding against my chest; any harder and I fear Sloan's augmented ears will pick up on it.

She turns around, walking ever-so-slowly over towards the shrubbery, towards me. She stops halfway, and her eye turns blue, scanning. "Oh, I see-szzzz," she says, and I think that this is it, that she's about to reach down and crush my skull before I even have a chance to explain myself.

Hiss.

She turns and walks towards the doorway again. "Those plants need to be watered, and the pots-szzz need to be changed. Otherwise you'll attract vermin."

He looks over at the dense shrubbery. "Oh," he says. "I'll get right on that. There's some soil out in the back somewhere."

"See that you do," she says, and steps out of the shack, not bothering to shut the door behind her. Giving him an opportunity to grab some soil for the weeds is probably tantamount to him going out for a smoke, but he doesn't seem to think so. He grabs his keys off the counter, heads outside, and locks the door.

I let out a relieved sigh. Well, shit.

When he walks off, I push myself up out of the dirt, stinking of mud. At first I'm thinking that there's probably no way out of here – that I'll have to hide under the desk, wait for him to come back, and sneak out while he's working on the soil – but, I remember, there is another way out: through the half-open window under the metal awning. I hurry over to it, give a quick peek outside, and when the coast is clear, I put my leg through the window and squeeze out to the other side.

Sloan Harrow is nowhere to be seen, and neither is that chubby man on his final write-up, so I quickly make my way towards the central building.

My break's already close to being over. If Riven asks what took so long, I guess I'll have to use the classic excuse:

It was one hell of a dookie.