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Sometimes I write fiction. And by write fiction, I mean I get about 2 pages into a novel that I never pick-up again. Instead of just letting them moulder on my hard-drive, I’ve decided to start a feature on Dang Dude, What the Heck? where I occasionally publish these beginnings. In doing so I’m offering them up to the public. Feel free to use them to start writing your own stories. Take whatever part of them you like, if any, and use it as your own. I won’t tell. Or just read them and take them for what they are.
What the corporations don’t tell you about the datatrance is that it destroys your soul. It turns you into a husk. A shell of your former self. All your memories are erased, removed to make space for the information that flows through you. The docs that do the procedure leave enough personal stuff so that you can remember your name, and how to drink water, and breathe, but that’s about it. To them everything else is just dross, extraneous information cutting into their profit margins. When you sign up, the nice man at the clean white desk tells you that you’ll get everything back once your term is up. He’ll probably even tell you that he once entered the trance. Talk about how great his life has been since then. If it’s a really classy outfit, he’ll even show you where they put the nodes and how the company paid for a real zhuzh plastic surgeon to cover up the scars once his time in the trance was over. Then, now knowing that everything will be gravy when you get out, you’ll say goodbye to your life and sign a three-year contract.
That’s what happened to me at least. Or I think it happened. I can’t remember it really. What they don’t tell you is that putting the memories back in isn’t as easy as taking them out. In fact, for some people, it’s next to impossible to cram everything back in there. I’m one of those people. Just about three years ago I signed a contract with Peeters-De Smet, one of the upstart Belgian data farms. They were a classy place. The white clean desk their nice man sat behind even had a jug of free lemon water on it. Real lemons and everything. I signed that contract as quick as I could, watched the bits go into my account, and then went into the trance. When I came to it was three years later and I couldn’t remember a thing. Except for the fact that my name was Briggs. Briggs Hammet. And that Peeters-De Smet wanted me dead.
Bits aren’t hard to find in Reogen Confluence. As long as you’re willing to work for it. The big companies were all here, Justinius, Raven Corp., Mann-Hammet, you get the picture. When the big guys show up they bring with them their little remoras, their subsidiaries, a million private companies leeching off bits of business from the big guys wherever they could. New companies offering services sprang up in their wake, feeding of the effluence of the giants. Of course, people specializing in the slightly off-beat markets slinked in too. If there had been any functioning political system they’d have been of dubious legality, but since the Great Collapse, legal didn’t really mean anything anymore. But most of these guys still wanted to maintain a less-than-visible presence. That’s where the work was, at least for a nobody like me. If you were willing, they’d hire you.
You might be asking yourself why I need money. Everyone knows a datatrance contract pays well. And they do. It’s how they get away with the destroying your soul thing. But experimental surgeries to try and recover your lost memories are expensive. As are the various protections that I’ve purchased to keep myself below the radar of Peeters-De Smet. My bits ran out pretty quickly and left me in need of a job if I wanted to stay alive. That’s how I became an assassin.
I doesn’t really make sense for me to be telling you this story. But I need to do it. I started writing down my thoughts so that I wouldn’t lose them. A way of keeping track of who I was now, while I tried to find out who I was before. It was after my first kill that I bought a little space on the commercial neuralweb and set up a little encrypted hole for myself and my journal. I know the commercial neuralweb isn’t the most secure place on the planet, but it’s the only space I could afford. Sue me. I journal about all types of things - what I remembered, new people I had met, my day to day life, my kills. I used to take all this stuff for granted, but after my mind got blasted into smithereens by those damn Belgian medtechs, I knew that memory was sacred. Nothing, nothing was more important than your memories. I wanted a record of everything that I had done. A record that I could go back to whenever I needed it. And know you’re reading it. Bully for you.
Anyway enough bullshit about me. You’re not here to listen to me whine. You want to hear some stories about how I killed some people. Fair enough. I like those kinds of stories too. At least the current version of me does.
My current contract was for an arms dealer in Shangzou. Carpenter had given it to me.
“This guy’s tough Briggs. Name is Jormand. Armed eight ways past Mars. Security is tight, even in the neuralweb. You’ll need to prep.”
“How’s the pay?”
“Could be more.”
“But could be less too?”
“Could be. 1800 bits. Plus expenses.”
“Timeline?”
“Two weeks. The sooner the better.”
“That’s not long.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“Damn right.”
Carpenter rolled his eyes at that one. But I needed to play the part. If you didn’t act a little like a macho dickhead then the jobs would dry up.
“All the info you need is in the usual spot.”
I nodded and turned to go.
“Wait. Briggs.”
I stopped and turned around. Carpenter stared at me, an odd look in his eyes.
“This one’s got some kind of stink on it. Be careful.
“You know I always am.”
“I’m serious Briggs.”
“Alright. I’ll triple-check my shit. Any clues on what might be bad?”
“No, just bad juju from this one.”
I nodded and left his office. Carpenter worked for Chang-Hammet. His official title was Vice President of Strategic Reorganizations. In reality that meant that he handled whatever wet-work the company needed doing. Most of the jobs were against small start-ups trying to horn in on Chang-Hammet business. Occasionally there’d be a hit against one of the other big guys, but I wasn’t going to get anywhere near that kind of work any time soon. I’d even heard about individuals hiring Carpenter to set up jobs, but that was only rumor and I certainly hadn’t received any of those.
That conversation with Carpenter had me a little shaken as walked through the Chang-Hammet building. He had never told me to be careful before. He seemed actually concerned about me and this job. I had only been working for him a few weeks, but that was odd from everything I’d heard about him. He never expressed concern about a job. Assassins were expendable. Most of us only lasted about a year, at best. Hell, I had come close to kicking it on my last job. The target had pulled out a nasty neuralnet bug that had almost fried my brain to a crisp. Carpenter hadn’t been worried about that job at all.
All of these thoughts poured through my head as I walked down the street toward one of the cafes that I frequented when I needed time to think. I still couldn’t afford an apartment and had to sleep most nights in one of the little coffin hotels that took up most of the real-estate in Reogen. I spent the rest of my time in cafes and walking around. Kept me fit at least. And hard to find, which had probably saved my life more than once.
I guess this would be a good time to describe where I live. Reogen Confluence. Located right smack dab in the middle of the Atlantic it’s picturesque, adventurous, burgeoning. At least that’s what an ill-fated ad campaign once described it as. It may have once been those things, but it functions mostly as a way to quarantine people who don’t like rules. It’s the thorn in the side of right thinking people everywhere.