The gunplay is simpler
He sent out the paychecks. Divvied out the bonuses. Sent reminders to Klara and Lucy about upcoming birthdays. Paid out the rent for the Allworld office. Auctioned for mem and forwarded a few job numbers to Lucy to see if she could get the teams to sell their scraped mem to one of his shell companies. He had a lot of those. Always tried to buy the other side’s mem if he could get it. They usually sold some to recoup their losses, but never would have sold it in a million years if they had known. One of many aspects of the game he was picking up on, and one which another Michael probably knew twenty years ago.
An hour evaporated. Then another. He checked the anonymous deep feed, the so-called Marks, or what used to be called the pwnboards, for any postings about Liquid Light. Of course there were none. Not yet. Lucy was too good and the team was too small for anyone to care. Still, good to be in the know, though he could only browse briefly. It disgusted him too much, seeing names and dates of birth and the rest of it up for sale.
“Org: Coalescent, Constellation franchisee for 4 years. I’ve got markups on three entire teams for sale.”
“Org: Synervo. Former GSK subcontractor. Full stack. Selling piecemeal or bulk (for a discount).”
And so on. And these were just the lower-level guys. Most of the real action never saw the Marks. The expert hunters would contact a team the moment the job went live and offer to sell them info on their opponents. Of course it was looked down upon. Of course the Boards marked any proven face buyers with a big X. Of course it tanked your value. And of course all the big orgs did it.
Little fish in a small pond, they were. But one day.
He set a reminder to have Gradie confirm his code name. FiveSeven had a nice ring to it, but he hadn’t chosen or even seemed that enthused about it. Philip would laugh at his superstition. A word and a number. You shouldn’t want to be remembered anyway. Should change names every time you change teams and let your skills do the talking. Ironically, the only other team member who shared his philosophy on code names was Lindsey, who couldn’t stand him. Outlaw 11 and Nomad 9. Michael heard wedding bells.
He smiled, looking at the roster. Sam had just told him the story about her own name a few days ago. Philip had called her monkey, like a skill monkey, the way she picked up driving and first aid and sabotage like a sponge, and also maybe because of her choice of snacks and that one time she had picked a mag off the floorboard with a de-sandaled foot. At some point, one of their old team members or contractors had said “What’s your name?” without giving much indication who he was talking to. She had started to say "Sam", stopped herself, and Philip had replied ‘monkey’ before she could remember the code name. She had turned to Philip and said, “Hey monkey, I’m monkey too!”. He went to the boards that day and registered her. She had apparently been pretty pissed.
“I wanted something cool!”
“Thank God I saved you from that.”
It had grown on her. Would Fiveseven grow on Gradie? Every time Michael had asked him about his code name, the kid (kid. He had picked up Philips shit. The guy was pushing 30. Michael really was getting old) had stared out like he was pondering some philosophical dilemma, which really pissed Philip off.
“Just keep him as is. I don’t even want to hear what moronic name he has brewing.”
And about Gradie.
A Spirit born into a Hardworld. Michael had never seen or heard of such a thing. Lucy guessed he had been trying to wake up as a newborn Spirit on the ball, pushed into the Hardworlds, and forgot the whole thing. Would explain why he was learning so fast, why he had been able to drop in on his own that first day, why he had rejected the Other so thoroughly. The twins had called his Spirit Dense, an idea adapted from the theology of the Samsarans, who believe you are drawn to places in the Other based on the “weight of your sins”, a concept most people, like the twins, cleaned up into a more neutral horoscope style gradient, and which also posited that only some people with the right Spiritual make up could ever enter the most airy region of the Other, namely Paradise, or more importantly would even want to.
Whatever the reason, he was learning fast, though Philip disputed it.
“Sam picked up just as quick and with less fucking attitude.”
Though she had never been able to push anything, which Gradie had done his first day, Michael declined to mention this to an already agitated Philip.
Maybe that was why he brought him on. To have his own Sam, his own apprentice. Someone he could selfishly guide into his ideal of a Hardworlder (though Philip seemed to have no interest in Sam’s advancement beyond ensuring she was paid well, though he had bristled at the idea of Gradie being “assigned” to her, until it was revealed in the Clubhouse training that she could shovel shit on him just as good as Philip).
“Mind if I ask why?” Lucy had said, sarcastically, arms crossed and eyes blazing, East Texas twang bursting at the seams, when he had informed her via his car’s video comm that he was looking at bringing on a new team member.
“He followed me out of a Hardworld and had never even seen the Other.” He had felt at the time that that would clinch it. That she would actually “ooh” and “ahh” and want to meet the guy right away. God damn he was an idiot.
“Did you show him that video?” She asked, lips pressed, glare softened into a dead stare that told him she was holding back a laugh, which was just such a detail that made him use a video comm with Lucy whenever possible. She was a master of keeping her voice clean, but her face was an open book.
Still, in this case it backfired. She had really hurt his feelings. He had a soft spot for the “video”. A friend had helped him make it a long time ago, a friend who now existed only as a burnt-out silhouette in his memory. And besides the nostalgic attachment and artistic expression he so rarely got to indulge, he had also shown the thing to a handful of newborns he had found drifting around the ball, who had somehow broke free of the Allworld’s automated onboarding system, which had its own “videos” and brochures and “counselors” but which relegated the Hardworlds to like one sentence and handwaved the Demon wars as overblown growing pains that were far behind this present world. How could a Spirit born in a Hardworld get started on something like that?
Lucy had accepted his reasoning at the time, probably in part because she expected the guy to wash out, but once his orientation was done, that very day as it turned out, and the office job had come across the desk, she had tried to put her foot down.
“This is all very fast Michael.”
“You already scanned him. How many new hires would have let you do that?” Michael had known she had tried to scare the guy off by going deeper than protocol required, but didn’t want the headache of calling her out on it.
“He will be a liability, Michael. He knows our fucking names. He could easily—”
“I will have a lock on him. He will be put with EP and she will have him by the ear the entire time.”
Since he had been able to get the rest of the team on board mostly by describing Gradie as an “intern” (though Luke and Celeste could not have cared less had he hired a pig with a gun strapped to it), Michael tried it with Lucy. He should have known better.
“People intern all the time on teams. Didn’t you—”
“Yes, but not for a permanent position, and you know damn well that nothing about how you’re treating this guy is “intern”.
She had a sad look on her face, like him taking on Gradie was linked somehow to his insistence on the minimization of collateral, a naïve romanticism that would soon be crushed by iron reality. It pissed him off, and he snapped at her. It was his fucking team after all!
“All right then,” she had replied, simply, icily, woundedly.
That had been rough. Takin a lot of apologizing, stung like hell, made him feel like an animal that had ripped its own flesh on barbwire while trying to attack its packmate. She was, after all, all he really had.
And the job itself had been a fucking rollercoaster. Gradie had slipped through his fingers, and while he was trying to track him down without letting EP know he had lost him, Sam slept in and was AWOL for half the fucking thing. Luckily Philip had been too prideful to make anything about that. Then the guy popped up at an office building a few minutes’ walk from the targets POE (which EP would have found much sooner, had she actually been looking for him. “I’m sure he’s hassling some poor girl somewhere.”) and it had all gone off so well, he was sure Lucy would have to apologize for doubting the two of them with egg on her face.
Not so much though.
“So you lost him.”
“He made the kill!”
Lucy and Philip had thrown so much water on his parade at that point that he almost felt like the God damned job had gone to the other team. But at least Philip had, begrudgingly, accepted that Gradie was here to stay. He thought that was the end of it. Until a few weeks ago.
“So do you know why you hired him yet?” Lucy had asked him, suddenly.
“I’ve given you plenty of reasons!”
“So that would be a no.”
He stared at her, tried to dig deep, to summon some answer he was ignoring, something she was apparently able to see so easily, something he was hiding from himself.
“I guess because he reminds me of me. All ability, but no memory, in a way. It’s almost like he’s forgotten how to be a Hardworlder and I’m just reminding him. I guess if I can get him there, then I know I can get it back, you know?”
She had stood there, not giving him any indication that this answer was what she had in mind, so he went on.
“And I guess it’s been good to have someone who sees everything fresh. Sees all this for the first time, with no real hang-ups. I’ve been so caught up in what was taken from me, in wondering what, I’ve forgotten how to just enjoy it. And God damn, you can’t deny he’s happy to be here.”
Still, the same stare.
“So is that what you were thinking or,”
“I’m not thinking anything. I’m asking you.”
He stood up flung his arms up and yelled at the ceiling to keep from screaming at her.
“What the fuck! I already told you!”
“So then which reason is it?”
“All of it! Why does it matter! I wanted him on the team and he’s here! Don’t I get to recruit! Isn’t personnel my fucking job?”
“I don’t want you trying to get something out of him that he’s never going to give you.”
He had nothing to say to that. He just stared. Then, finally,
“Ok. Alright, I don’t know, Lucy, what the fuck are you talking about?”
She had looked at the ground, nodded, disappointed, which infuriated him, then said she had to go and excused herself.
And for some reason that had been the end of it. He knew, only because he had learned, finally, that her disappointment hadn’t been meant for him, but for herself.
“I can never get people to understand what I’m saying,” she told him later.
“You can always—” He had stopped himself. No. No she couldn’t. As the keeper of secrets, she couldn’t just open her mind to another party. If she couldn’t get it understood by words alone, she had nothing else.
But,
“You could always connect to me, Spirit to Spirit,” he had said, as softly as he could, and she had looked at him with a shock he still couldn’t decipher.
“No.”
“What? Why not? There’s no secrets between us, Luce.”
She had said nothing, but he got the idea. Yeah, actually, there were.
What could she possibly be keeping from him?
He closed the management terminal and opened Matt’s attachment. Enough wondering. Enough beating yourself up with questions. Time to get some answers.
