NOVEL NEXT Chapter 67: Prohibited Markets II
"Stop there," Betelgeuse instructed, his fingers twitching. "Mask. Off."
Sighing irritably, the figure halted its step and brought its third hand down over its face. Each of those sinuous fingers bent and gripped onto the edge of that black mask, and a clicking sound issued, like a hidden clasp had been released.
'… That shit looks like 'facehuggers',' he mused, thinking back to the pictures and artists' impressions he'd seen before in a book, the sudden remembrance taking him by surprise and also making him a little nostalgic. It must have been the one with the scaly flying lizard-thing on its cover, the book in Edom-Zeta's main library he'd seen since he was a toddler but which he only started reading… maybe three years ago—Speculative Existences Pre-Old Empire, if he remembered the name correctly.
More clicks. Then, the mask peeled away upward to reveal—
A fair-complexioned female face—oval, impossibly smooth and beautiful to the point of artificiality. Her nose was small, flattish and slightly upturned, and the pupils Betelgeuse observed were wide and strikingly blue. Her lips were red and full, and as she exhaled her mouth released a wispy stream of smoke that curled away upward and disappeared into the cracked concrete ceiling. Her cheeks tapered off downwards to a small and slightly over-sharp chin, but overall it was clear that her features had been artfully created by some face-tekkie with a formidable sense of natural aesthetics, and not simply molded to fit an AI-Tableau's extrapolation of what the original (unaltered) face's beautification would look like.
And despite the fairness of her skin everything about her physiognomy screamed dark-skin to Betelgeuse, as though such fairness merely made of her a different flavor and not a different race altogether. He wasn't about to mistake her for a Jegorichian, for example.
"So, this is kakPurpleGhost," Betelgeuse said, scrutinizing her lineaments and committing her compelling features to his memory. So much incongruity was made between her face and her overbroad body that his mind interpreted her form as something altogether surreal.
"Well met," she said finally, noticing Betelgeuse' keen attention and smiling sweetly at him. Her voice was impossibly deep, deeper even than what was naturally possible for a man. "I have satisfied your condition, Mr. Beetlejuice. Now you must satisfy the essential criterion of sale. I want to see the product."
"... I have it here," Betelgeuse said, loosening the chest strap that fastened his Incunabula-bearing pouch to his body and then undoing its clasp and digging inside to retrieve a thin artifact, an Incunabulum with a translucent cover and whose scratched surface caught the dim overhead lighting in dappled and bulbous shapes.
The woman's expression fell immediately upon seeing the condition of the product. Betelgeuse raised the Incunabulum and, when the woman did not react, held it out, only to have it swiped up by that muscular third arm; his left hand shot out just as quickly to grip onto the woman's right sleeve, to prevent her from absconding and to keep her in close enough proximity for a death-match grapple if things got to that.
She shot him a queer glance but otherwise did not comment, quickly returning her gaze to the Hollow grade Incunabulum Betelgeuse had furnished her, her third hand pressing its thimbled fingers flat upon its scarred surface, the metal its thimbles sparking static arcs and vibrating at the contact.
"... The condition is exceedingly poor," she muttered, after inspecting the Incunabulum for no more than a single minute. She brought her right hand up and flipped open the cover, scanning the Increment etched within.
Betelgeuse knew the gist of what she would find, because he had, after the conclusion of the first deposition session yesterday, managed with no small amount of difficulty to locate a free-access library somewhere in the Central Courts Complex. He'd found the unrestricted section sparsely furnished—the shelves had been populated with little more than propaganda and autobiographies by famous and wealthy Saltillans—but managed to locate an Aluaan-to-Common dictionary which he used to decipher, imperfectly, the Hollow Incunabulum's Increment.
The Aluaan syntax had escaped him, which was to be expected, but his efforts revealed that the Incunabulum had been originally conferred onto one 'Shorla Altevestan' (which was the best way he could decipher those abugida phonetics), and that the subject-matter of the Increment had been some form of increased cardiovascular capacity.
"You made a sell-side listing on the uHIM.0 market," the woman said, her voice edged with annoyance, and she raised her blue eyes at Betelgeuse and stared accusations into his eyes. "You do know that refers to medium quality? Don't need a kakking scanner to see that this quality is absolute garbage. You're trying to fob off shit on me, aren't you?"
"So I gathered.," Betelgeuse said, his voice thick with affected nonchalance. He waved away her indignation and met her gaze with eyes that were deep and edgeless pools of ice. "I take it you're searching for another illegal graft?"
"What's it to you? At this kind of quality I can't give you more than rough-quality prices. That means," she said, attempting unsuccessfully to shrug off Betelgeuse' grip and clicking her tongue and then raising her right wrist-transceiver and flicking at the screen, "it's about thousand-fifty at current estimated-prices."
"Not to mention," she continued, returning her attention to Betelgeuse, "that this product has clearly gone through one or two shavings. Someone's removed the non-substantive portions for other graftings."
1050 Chit, she said. I distinctly remember the last estimated-prices for uHRM.0 being around 1200 Chit, but that was two days ago now, when I was at Bazza's Kafay. Perhaps prices have dropped, though there's no way for me to know.
Regardless, I can't be bothered quibbling over this. She obviously wants the Inc—maybe there's another way to sell this.
"Well Ms. kak, all I can say is that the Increment is a relatively useful one, I'm sure you can see yourself," Betelgeuse said, smiling wide enough to show his teeth. "… It's a pure augmentation, no deleterious effects. I'm sure it will be easy on your tekkie, hey?"
She raised an eyebrow and met his eerie smile, her face suddenly emptying itself of expression. "Huh. Here I thought Taffies cun't read Aluaan."
Betelgeuse suddenly wondered to himself where the nearest convenience store was and whether it would still be open by the time he was done. He needed some water. Damn was he thirsty.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
"... I suppose it is the first time you're doing this," the woman continued, when it became clear Betelgeuse wouldn't reply. "I'll unfortunately have to submit a ticket explaining that the product is of sub-par quality and that this sale should be booked under the uHRM market. In short, I'll only release to you one-thousand-and-fifty of the total two-thousand-eight-hundred-and-seventy-seven Chit in escrow."
"I'll take one point five instead. You can explain all of what you just said to the Marketplace, be as thorough as you need to, whatever it takes to release the thousand-fifty, but you'll transfer four-fifty to me here and now," Betelgeuse said, maintaining on his face that wide Cheshire grin.
The woman grimaced to hear this. "It's a bad deal, Mr. Beetlejuice. Your product is on the lower-end of the quality scale."
"I don't believe it's all that. Otherwise you'd have called off the sale the moment you read that Increment—which you're still free to do, call off the sale. But I'm saying that the Increment is worth four-fifty additional. What say?" Betelgeuse smile widened so far his cheeks pushed his eyelids together.
"... Two hundred."
"I won't go lower than four hundred."
"Three hundred."
"You're testing me."
"... Was worth a try," the woman sighed, her brilliant blue eyes lowering to the ground. "You seem to know your way around Incunabula, for someone so…"
Betelgeuse clicked his tongue.
"Well, whatever," she scoffed. "I'll submit the ticket and flash you four hundred."
"... Deal," nodded Betelgeuse, his smile returning to split his face straight down the middle. It was a smile he had been practicing in the mirror. The smile of successful business. The smile of triumph. Nothing so great as the small victories that paved his way to his ultimate goal.
What was his goal?
Did he want to return to Earth? Did he really want to save Chrysilla?
Or was it…
"Hey man you look like a fuckin' creep when you smile, y'know that?" the woman groused, causing Betelgeuse' cheeks to twitch slightly.
"Transfer the money to my digiwallet," Betelgeuse said, releasing his hold on the woman's sleeve.
He activated his transceiver's 'Receive' state and tapped the device to hers and a dull buzz let him know that a transaction had gone through. Bringing the screen up to his face, he read the automated message:
'400 Chit has been transferred to your digiwallet and automatically converted to 57.14 Credits at an exchange rate of 7 Chit : 1 Credit.'
And he flicked at the transceiver screen to check his digiwallet balance: 63.13 Credits
"I've received it. My thanks to you… kakPurpleGhost," Betelgeuse said, sounding out the woman's INC Marketplace moniker in full for the second time and thinking to himself how much of an unwieldy name that it was.
"That's just a spoof," she chortled, letting a little lightness into her mood. "You can refer to me as Kanogg, Mr. Beetlejuice."
"So it is."
"Hah! Well, hold on while I submit the ticket and you can check on your end that the money has been released from escrow," the woman—Kanogg—said, tapping away at her wrist-transceiver.
Betelgeuse scratched at his scalp and let his smile drop off his face. Unlike Kanogg, he didn't have any way of accessing the Protectorate-Intraweb from his wrist-transceiver—the TAF were generally allergic to any kind of easy access to information. Knowing just how inane and chaotic Intrawebs tended to be, Betelgeuse supposed the TAF rulemakers had a point.
But it did make things difficult for him. How was he supposed to confirm that the money had been released to him?
He figured he should just come out and say it. Perhaps there was some easy solution to his conundrum.
No, give it a moment. Let Kanogg do what she had to do first. If he came out to say it now, then there was a chance that she would try something funny.
So he stood there for several minutes and watched time tick to the blink of that one tinkling tube-light down near the stairwell entrance. He stretched his back and felt his pouch to make sure everything was right with his own Incunabulum. He glanced at Kanogg's third arm dangling above her head and took note of how it gripped the Hollow Incunabulum in that arachnoid splay of fingers, and attempted to visualize the bones that ran through it
"I'm done," Kanogg finally said, and as she looked up her third arm lowered the Hollow Incunabulum behind her head and secreted it into a hidden pouch. "Should be released to you right about now."
Betelgeuse folded his hands across his chest.
"... Hey. You may not know this, but I don't have any easy way to access the INC Marketplace. My transceiver can't connect to the Intraweb."
Kanogg's face cycled through a variety of emotions, from incomprehension to irritation to outright anger before settling into an uneasy calm. It mesmerized him, the way her perfectly fabricated features could so easily flit from one emotion to another. It wasn't entirely out of the question that she had found some way of lacing subliminals into her lineaments.
"The fuck you want me to do about it?" she managed.
"Do you have any way I could… easily check it on my end?" Betelgeuse poked. It couldn't hurt to try. He could stand to save on time and money.
"Mr. Beetlejuice…" she began, suppressing her temper and evidently thinking carefully about something. "... I may have a way. But it's a mod, and you'll have to pay for it."
A mod. That CDF chap, Ferli I think his name was—he mentioned the Protectorate has in place a blanket prohibition on mods. Seems to me like Kanogg's rather steeped in the Saltillan underworld.
"No money," Betelgeuse said. "Is it something you have with you now?"
Kanogg's lip curled, and she extracted a small interface-chip from her own transceiver and held it up. It was no larger than the tip of her finger, granted that her finger was very large.
"This is it. And in exchange you'll have to do something for me," she said, her voice turning sly, her face morphing from irritation to solicitation in an instant. "You seem to know your way around Tzevtaos, Mr. Beetlejuice, and I could use someone who will help me source for them in the main city. They do tend to be better quality around here."
Better quality, she said. So she hunts in the Nook for Incunabula and then grafts them onto her brain-meridian. No wonder…
Then it means that my own powers can be augmented if I graft Frederica's Incunabulum. But what of the side effects?
"And if I agree, you'll give me the mod? For my own private use?"
"I will," Kanogg smiled, and Betelgeuse mimicked her.
"You'll pay me for each Inc I supply," Betelgeuse said. It was a statement, rather than a question.
"I will, but at a discount to current estimated-prices," Kanogg said, scratching at the nape of her neck with her third arm's twisted middle-finger.
Betelgeuse thought for a moment, running the numbers through his mind. Given the upward trajectory of Incunabula prices—influenced, no doubt, by the ongoing conflict against the Chimerae and simmering civil unrest—he figured he could accept a discount as large as 20%. A reasonable price to pay if everyone on the INC Market place turned out as opportunistic as Kanogg. It would save him more than a few fights.