NOVEL NEXT 2.24 Get-a-Gig
*WANTED*
For financial crimes against The Bazaar™ and wanton destruction to The Privateer®
Operative "Green Ghost"
Species: Reptile Hybrid | Gender: Male | Age: Late 20s
Known to use chemical weapons and cyber assaults
REWARD: §1,000 bargaining credits at The Bazaar™
Operative Jenakite
Species: Rodent Hybrid | Gender: Woman | Age: 27
Considered armed and prone to property damage
REWARD: §800 bargaining credits at The Bazaar™
Unknown Bodyguard
Species: Human (Pure) | Gender: Unknown | Age: Late Teens
Seen using powered armor and attack robots
REWARD: §500 bargaining credits at The Bazaar™
Unknown Associate
Species: Human (Albino variant) | Gender: Male | Age: Mid 30s
Possible cultist or social deviant, approach with caution
REWARD: §300 bargaining credits at The Bazaar™
TOTAL REWARD: §2,600 bargaining credits at The Bazaar™
Salazar sighed. "Well, shit."
"At least they used a good picture for you," Ricky said. Salazar's bounty used an older picture of his Ratfink days, racing an open-topped hot rod away from security forces. Ricky's picture was a frozen video frame, caught mid-conversation with someone wearing a chest camera that gave him an unflattering angle. "Can't even tell my gender. Though I guess I do look pretty androgynous in mine…?"
"At least they have a full picture of you! Only my lower half is visible, and that's still half more than Phanya," Tapper said, pointing to Ricky's picture. His legs stuck sideways out behind Ricky's back, as Ricky shielded Tapper away from the camera. It looked like he was arguing with a security guard right before they ran away and fell off the Privateer.
"Tapper, it's a good thing that we don't also have bounties," Phanya explained, and lightly flicked him on the head for emphasis. "Sometimes you want people to think you're just equipment. And I simply didn't do anything wrong."
"Worst part, it has us grouped as if we're a crew." Despite his moaning, a grin tugged at Salazar as he continued, "But at least it knows I'd be the leader, since I have the biggest bounty by far."
Skidmark looked at everyone over the top of his tablet, and raised his one eyebrow. "So you ain't doing the whole 'celebrity merc crew' thing, Ghost?"
"Hell no! I work alone, because it avoids this," Salazar spat, and he jammed a finger at Jena's and Jellico's profiles. Jena's portrait used a selfie where her middle finger dominated the foreground, and Jellico only had a terrible AI-generated approximation of his face. "This whole thing happened when those two tried to steal my mark!"
"Well, I'll still tell the 'finks that the whole lot is off-limits, just to avoid confusion."
"Thank you, Mister Skidmark! Would your company also, perhaps, have some quests available to assist us in paying off these bounties?"
Skidmark slowly replied, "Uh, we don't outsource… quests like that. But if your friends are short on cash, the nearest job board would be at the train station."
Salazar groaned and pinched his nose. "And I was really hoping to avoid the PSIkers, too. Ah well. Thanks Skids, maybe I'll come back after I ditch this lot." The two clamped forearms again, and Salazar waved for the others to follow him. "Come on, let's get this over with."
Ricky suddenly threw up his hands and nearly shouted, "Wait! We can't leave yet! I have so many questions! Like, I heard a mechanic talking about gearboxes. Is that literal? Are you guys so oldschool that you still use physical gearing??"
His ramble had grown mildly frantic, but Skidmark smiled at him. "Damn right we do, nowhere else still knows the secrets for a proper manual transmission. And we're keeping it within the Ratfinks, sorry kid." Nothing else Ricky said would budge the head mechanic, and he followed the others in a slow sulk.
"Handsake, now Ricky is going to try and join a gang after this is over," Phanya half-joked, half-bemoaned as the party piled back into the jitney.
Salazar barked a quick laugh in response. "Good luck with that, they would eat him alive. Hey, buck up, kid," he said, waving Ricky towards the front of the car. "I've been driving all morning, it's your turn now. Just keep following the train tracks and we'll hit the PSIker cult soon."
Tapper's curiosity perked up, pulling an idiom alongside it. "A foggy mind is easy to bind. Mister Salazar, why are we intentionally visiting a cult?"
Worshipers of Phase Shift Instability were not a cult. At least, according to the Church of Phasic Enlightenment they were not a cult, and they demanded to be taken as seriously as any other church. But unlike other churches they were decentralized and nomadic, with rules and rites that shifted from one group to the next. They didn't even have scripture or a main deity, and to those on the outside were just as amorphous as the Phase they worshiped. Tapper logged all this information with a low confidence threshold, as Salazar showed clear bias against the worshipers in his explanations.
"The only reason this group of PSIkers had settled down is because of the train station. Ironically they stabilize the shockwave with their weird brain shit, so they get the main cut of ticket sales and everyone else gets to deal with having them as neighbors," Salazar finished. "Hopefully we won't have to deal with them directly, depending on where the runners hang out. Now let me nap in peace, or I'll feed you an EMP grenade."
Tapper's list of questions had only grown during the explanation, but he opted to let Salazar rest. His predictive algorithms were not as patient, and with nothing else to occupy his attention they tried to extrapolate meaning from the strange terminology. How could a church assist with operating the trains? Especially when the other residents supposedly ran everywhere? Why would a gang form around using motor technology that's hundreds of years out of date?
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Instead of answers, Tapper found corn.
The jitney rounded a tall garbage dune and Ricky slowed to a stop, silently gawking at the veritable forest that suddenly appeared in their vision. A shock of woody stalks sprouted out of a wide crack in the tarmac, with spindly vines and long leaves twisting around metal support beams to reach nearly ten meters tall. They grew in a knotted mass too thick to see through, and nearly every stalk that could reach the open air sprouted several ears of corn. Even from a distance Tapper could see that the corn grew unnaturally large, with the biggest nearing half a meter long at his approximation, and those were the first targeted for harvesting.
A handful of people patrolled the outer edge of the forest, all wearing loose brown robes and followed by small robotic wagons. Some used poles with bladed hooks to cut the corn free, ducking away from the falling ears with practiced ease before dropping them into a wagon. Others used laser pistols to sever the stalks with little concern for setting the entire plant ablaze, and a few didn't carry any tools at all. They merely waved their hand at a stalk, and the largest ear would detach seemingly of its own accord, and Tapper replayed the video to ensure that he hadn't missed anything.
"Huh, so they're growing corn here too," Salazar said. He took a moment to stretch and yawn, while everyone else pretended that he hadn't startled them. "Told ya these cultists weren't very smart."
"What is the correlation between corn and intelligence?" Tapper asked.
Phanya snapped her fingers with sudden excitement. "Oh I remember this one from Wiessa's rants! Let's see here, it's a hybrid of corn, bamboo, and… kudzu vines, I think it's called. It grows super fast, it's highly invasive, and it's an affront to nature, somehow." Phanya beamed at herself, she never thought she'd have reason to remember Wiessa's one failed attempt at teaching botany.
"And it's patented," Salazar finished. "If the corn doesn't eventually destroy the town, then a corpo-sec burn unit will. All so they can eat something that grows out of the ground? Stupid."
Ricky frowned. He didn't remember Wiessa's lessons at all, but he did recognize how often corn gets mentioned in advertising. "I thought corn was used in, like, all food?"
"Well yeah, but at least in real food the corn is processed and flavored," Salazar said, before he clapped his hands once. "Doesn't matter, we aren't going in there. We're just here to make some money and keep it moving, do any of you have any advanced run experience?"
Phanya leaned back and grinned. "You saw what kind of advanced running I can do."
Ricky scratched his chin. "My suit can give me a pretty good burst of speed, but I'm still fine-tuning it."
Tapper raised his hand. "I made my walking program myself! And I have a perk that enhances my capacity to run."
Salazar stared between them, his long jaw hanging open slightly. "You're fucking with me. Are you fucking with me? I can't tell with you lot anymore."
The party chuckled, only for a moment. Tapper didn't want to risk further annoying their guide and said, "I assume you are using a colloquialism for employment, but unfortunately Fableton has no such system or clearance."
Salazar sighed and his shoulder slouched, with an equal mix of relief and resignation. "That's what I figured, not many villages can afford the satellite connection. So consider this your introduction to Get-a-Gig." Salazar pressed a button on his wrist and a hologram appeared, showing a simplified human wearing a business suit from the waist up. The figure lacked any sort of head, with a § symbol floating just above the vacant neck as it posed with a thumbs-up. A blue circle enclosed the figure, along which the name and slogan slowly spun: Get-a-Gig, Bootstraps for all ages!
"Basically, it's an app for freelance work," Salazar explained. "Take a job, do the job, get paid. Thing is, the pay for normie jobs suck and we'll never make enough to pay off the bounty. The real money is in going for runs." The floating logo vanished and a menu appeared, and as he spoke Salazar tapped through sub-menus too quickly for anyone to follow. "No idea why they're called runs, but that's where the gray market jobs are hidden, and outside of civilization we need to find a job board to refresh the offerings. There's a whole process to access them, and fees and shit, but luckily for you I have some spare burner accounts to get us started right away. They're rare and pricey, so feel free to thank me whenever."
"Wait hold up," Ricky asked instead. "If they're so pricey, why not just sell the burner accounts?"
"Would if I could, but I can't sell digital goods out here. We'd need to make it to the city proper first to find a fence — that's someone who sells things outside of corpo control — and we'd be hounded by other bounty hunters the whole time. Which brings me to the next big question: I know the frontier villages can be… rough, but have you kids actually killed anyone before?"
Phanya huffed and said, "We aren't kids, but… well, not directly. We've fought off plenty of raiders that were trying to kill us, though."
"There were a number of indirect fatalities in the mall dungeon as well," Tapper added. "I demolished the lower half of a bulk cyborg and he very possibly bled out afterwards, does that count?"
Salazar closed his eyes for a second, and when he resumed talking he used a slow and measured tone. "You all aren't listening to me. The bounty posting doesn't say we need to be taken in alive, so if anyone is desperate enough they will absolutely try to kill us."
"Your concern for our safety is greatly appreciated, Mister Salazar!"
"I'm not concerned for your safety, I'm concerned you'll goof around and get me killed."
"Then rest assured that I shall protect my friends from any ne'er-do-wells by any means necessary."
Salazar opened his mouth, and froze when the words caught in his throat. He still couldn't put his finger on what, but the robot shifted in that subtle way again. Its stance, the tone of its voice, even its dumb wiggling eyebrows whispered the potential for danger to Salazar's mercenary instincts, and not in the same way as other killbots he had encountered. "I… wow, I think I'm starting to see why you have such a large bounty by yourself. Just so long as you're all aware of what we might have to do, especially with how much attention you attract."
"Hey now, it's not like we start trouble on purpose."
"So? You three are as subtle as a neon brick." Salazar started counting off on his fingers, "We have a teenager in a homemade exosuit, stomping around like Frankenstein."
"I'm 18, dangit!"
"Then grow a beard. Next is a freakishly tall chick in freakishly colored clothes, practically a walking beacon."
"I have… reasons for that."
"Nothing can justify that outfit. And lastly, especially a robot that just… gods, everything you do is weird."
"Thank you!"
"Not a compliment. You're a trio of sore thumbs! Trouble keeps finding you, and now the trouble is going to be carrying guns. I'm not used to that, I've made it this far by working alone, working quietly, and working smart. And since I doubt we'll get to do any of that for a while…" A wave of anxiety hit Salazar, spiking his blood pressure enough to trigger his AI assistant Soni. She automatically played gentle electronic pulses through his implants, designed to counteract stress signals and help settle his nerves. Salazar took a steadying breath, and everyone else chose not to notice. "Alright, let's get you kitted and get us paid."