The Hellflesh Heist (Ch 2 preview)
Biopunk ninja novella WIP
Honored samurai, ruthless ronin, wayward vagabonds, shadowy ninja and helpless villagers... welcome.
Opening Volley
It’s been too long. (It always is.) But I have not been idle. So here’s my latest work-in-progress, chapter 2 from the novella inspired by Bioheist: The Hellflesh Heist. This novella expands upon the very short 1400 words in the game (previewed here). Chapter 2 alone is nearly 2000 words. I’m planning about 10 chapters, all about the same length. For fans of cyberpunk, biopunk, scifi, and far future themes. Without further ado.
Main Event
(WARNING! May contain the following: errors, continuity problems, formatting problems, and material that may not make it into the final work. ...Like you care.)
Chapter Two — The Key
Orie took the vial of light blue-greenish liquid with a dubious eye. Beneath a wrap of biowaste warning tape, its contents, digitus medius, bobbed against the glass, as if tapping at it, trying to get her attention.
"I came for a key."
The Frenchman nodded and smiled beatifically, arms spread, "The Frenchman always delivers, no?"
"This is not a key, it's a finger."
"Key, finger, makes no difference to me. I was paid to hand it over to you." A self-satisfying grin slide over his features. "Here you are. There you are."
Orie was not amused. The client's agent had been corpse cold. Literally. They had spoken to her through a fresh cadaver in one of the many unlicensed undercity morgues. It was the kind of anonymity that only paid out in bullets if jackassery was involved. This wasn't good.
"Very beautiful, eh, mon ami?" The Frenchman was as French as the ruins of Angkor Wat, but he loved affecting the accent, playing the role of whatever it was he saw himself as. Agent provocateur, perhaps?
As for the finger, despite being lopped off at the base where it would normally be attached to the palm, it was clean... for the lack of a better word. No gore or putrefaction. It had the glow of life, as if whomever it had once been attached to was showing Orie her nails. The nail of which was expertly detailed with a living hologram featuring a game character if she wasn't mistaken — Danjiro from Dancing Swords, based on the operatic bunraku play.
She opened her mouth.
"We could do this dance all day, but you and I both were paid better than to do that. AI wager, you were paid a lot better if my fee is any indication of yours. Don't grow a conscious."
The warning was as old as the professional field. A conscious wasn't her problem though. She had allowed that to be ripped from her long ago. In all her time spent running black errands this topped the weird charts. Yet, she couldn't explain why. Wild modifications, mutations and augmentations where par for course in her line of work. Despite the government's official line that "strangeness is to be avoided" and the Emperor's (may he rest in peace) own staunch stance against modifications, there were no laws or restrictions against. There was too much money to be made and so it ran rampant in the streets like young kids on a warm day after school was out. The lower the levels of the arcology, the wilder and darker it became. Dangerous and outright murderous. So a woman's single finger in a vial marked "biowaste" and a job to kidnap the princess. It set alarms off.
"And what do I do with it?"
"The 'call' I received did not explain. The… caller, a very young woman with an unfortunate 'health' issue, informed me a package had been delivered. It had been; found it on my lab doorstep. My SID beeped indicating I had been paid, and the communication cut. So, what do you do with it? You do as I am — whatever it is you are being paid to."
"Retrieve the key. Kidnap the Princess Yoriko of the Imperial Family." Orie had received a similar call from the same cadaver, the corpse's exposed vocal chords vibrating artificially through the gruesome gashes across her throat and upper body. Orie's SID had chimed as the words fell from the dead woman's half-open, quivering lips. Whomever had been controlling her, knew Orie's SID identnumber.
The SID, or Simple Identification Device, was a wafer-thin, sub-dermal device in the wrist of every citizen, implanted at birth, it tracked identity and financial transactions. Orie's was modified, certain blocks put into place, government and Polikou info requests falsified, financial transactions rerouted to more pliable accounts.
The long chain of zeros had been daunting. And decidedly alarming. Orie had tried to reject the transfer repeatedly, but the payment oozed back into her account each time like pooling blood. It was bonded to her. She had no choice. People who speak through the dead don't do rejection. And that had been it. The corpse had tumbled forward out of view of the camera and the line cut. Orie traced the call to an unlicensed undercity morgue out near the border.
The fleshmarket man verbally prodded her out of her brooding thoughts. "Hey, you still with me? I don't care what you do with the finger."
She turned to leave.
He moved to stop her.
Her gun slammed into his gut.
Holding his palms up and out, he nodded to the vial. "Easy. There's one more thing; I was asked to activate the key for you." He took the tube from her, set it into a stand and twisted the top, popping the biowarning seal.
"The hell are you doing?" She took a step back, but in the cramped space of the old lab cubicle, there was nowhere to go.
"Relax. This isn't exactly your first mod," and unrolled a small pack of biomodder's tools on a table.
"My first—" She swore, staring a cold promise of a slow, painful death if the procedure went wrong, she held out her left hand.
He sheepishly scratched his head, "I hate to say this, mon ami, but I think it needs to be your rig—"
The flick of her right hand in the direction of his throat brought tears to his eyes as her flesh grapple, a length of strong flesh, shot out and whipped around his throat. She flexed and it tightened until his eyes started to pop.
"L-Left it is..." He coughed and began to work.
Slapping a local anesthetic patch on the back of her hand, he pulled a looped instrument with squeezable handles and a built-in power unit. Slipping her finger into the instrument, he shifted his posture and weight.
He pull on her finger end and asked her to keep still. The instrument hummed to life with heat and a sizzling buzz. Moments later, a satisfying pop-thonk and the feel of something being pulled away before cold seeped into her hand.
The local was more than enough for the discomfort, but a very unsettling feeling knotted her gut. This was not an auspicious start. At. All. What would happen if she were caught not just in possession of the finger, but wearing it? Would the government be kind enough to give her a quick death? She almost laughed.
Quick, uncoordinated movement from The Frenchman. "Oops. Uhhh... Oh no, never mind. Got it."
Orie didn't even give him the satisfaction of a look. He was an irksome contact, always had been. That he was right about the money only added insult to injury. But this was a damned weird assignment. Dangerous she had done — assassinations, mid-day smash-n-grabs, she even once stole a man's family jewels right in front of a live audience; they had applauded! But this… She'd never seen the likes of it and, if she lived, hoped never to again. Too good to be true. So good it'll screw. Yet you don't pass up money like this. All the pithy sayings regarding money. And so she was standing here. Some other woman's finger in hand... so to speak.
The familiar smell of flesh melding with flesh wafted up into her nostrils with a slight antiseptic twinge as The Frenchman slopped a bonding agent over her hand. "There you go. Give it an hour before you are good. If it fails to take—"
"If it fails to take," her gun came out, "I'll take your head and staple it alive to squid-rhino's asshole."
"Charming as ever," he smiled and melted into the shadows.
Orie exited the old lab into a dry, still hall of metal and nanocontrete steeped in a heavy darkness five floors beneath the city, midway between the castle proper and the border on the wildlands. Retroreflective tissue enhanced her low-light vision, catching the glow of the dragon's gold moss hugging the leaky corridor pipes snaking the walls. The scrape-echo of her footsteps would have been swallowed in any other part of the city by the din of the 20 million who called the capital home, but partial collapse due to unsound structure had forced authorities to evict the residents and local shops. Now the vast maze of memories was a haven for "business ghosts" like herself.
Goosebumps shot up her arms as Orie stepped through a draft. At the sacrifice of actual direct sunlight, this was the only place in the city where the oppressive year-round heat didn't reach. The chill was almost foreign to her, setting off a perverse, irrational fear in her she could not explain. There was nothing down here.
Except when there wasn't.
A fast skittering of feet somewhere in the depths behind her. Picking up the pace, she made it to the ancient cargo elevator she had used for access.
Pressing the button, Orie reached out with the feral sense enhancers installed in the back of her brain...
Here, waiting, she was the perfect target. She couldn't move from the spot; was at her most vulnerable here.
Her senses stretched and prodded. Nothing. Quiet. Too quiet? Too paranoid?
The barest of feelings at the back of her neck…
Orie whipped around, flesh grapple ready, and stumbled backward in shock as a large ghostly form bushed past her. Up and over the walls and into the darkness before melting through the ceiling. Impossible. An uncontrollable pulse of shiver ran up her spine, tingling at the base of her skull.
From… above her? softly reverberating okyou Buddhist chanting. A funeral here in the lightless depths? Or a temple on the floor above? Even so, she should not have been able to hear anything. Queasy squeezed her head and stomach as it grew louder, sending her to her knees. The skittering returned... Orie searched frantically, finally spotting the many-legged ghostly figure as it charged her from around a corner, its distended jaw dragging along the floor, clumps of thin wispy hair plastered against its bloated, mutated figure.
Icy pain stabbed through the back of her left hand as it brushed past her, knocking her to the ground completely, incapacitating pain crippling her entire arm. Her cry was drowned out by the funeral dirge as it grew louder and angrier. A cluster of panicked men and women charged at her, pressing against her, suffocating her. Terror filled their eyes as they, one by one, exploded in blood and viscera. A hallucination! Was she going mad? Had the finger been an augment too far, finally pushing her beyond the capacity to function into oblivion?
Orie closed her eyes against the madness, and teeth chattering, pushed up with every once of strength she had to raise herself to her feet. She dry heaved, a single trickled of bile burning her throat as it slipped out onto the concrete. Her chest squeezed and she stumbled forward against the railing, the metal clanging in echoing protest down throughout the sterile corridor. Then the chaos cease for a single moment, and a whispered voice right at her ear.
Murderer.
Orie collapsed, slumping into a corner as all the pain, voices, sounds, everything... collapsed into a singularity of exhaustion, burning throughout her boy until it dissipated through the finger.
Ding.
The ancient cargo elevator slid open, its skittish light shyly reaching out. Orie crawled in and cursed The Frenchman as she pressed the button that would lead her back to more respectable levels and eventually to the city spilling out from the base of the megastructure.
The finger ached. Looking down at it, she made a fist and relaxed her hand repeatedly to stretch and work it out. She grimaced as the door slowly closed on the darkness. The damned thing better not fall off.
We never meet without parting
Next issue... Some 80s movie madness?
Until then!
Made in DNA