All names, characters, entities, and incidents portrayed in this story and its related stories are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, corporations, and products is intended or should be inferred.

Juliet let her head bounce with the music blaring through her implants, vibrating through the bones in her skull, almost like she was in front of one of the big speakers at a show. The night was hot, and she smelled something fierce from sweating in her rig all day, but that was the price you paid for OT, and she needed the damn bits.

The synth-voiced singer broke into a resounding chorus as the beat really dropped, her discount implants rattling her molars together, and Juliet thought back to the last show she’d seen in person. It had to have been five years ago now, and that brought about a bunch of other memories she wished she’d left buried—thoughts of her mom heading to the Seattle megacity with her new husband, thoughts of Emma—her sister and roommate—getting arrested, and put away up in Phoenix, thoughts of working this back-breaking, nowhere job day in and day out so she could put some corpo-issued protein squares in her pantry and keep her subscription to the net active.

“Come on, Fee Fee,” she breathed, still bouncing with her music, her long blue-black ponytail whipping from one shoulder, arcing in front of her eyes, and then over to the other. She’d had it tied up in a bun all day under the hot metal dome of her welding rig’s helmet, and it wanted to feel the air, even if it was hot and dry.

She balanced on a pile of old scrap outside Fred’s Salvage, waiting for her ride. Felix was notoriously late, and it was Friday—she was starting to worry she might be stuck ‘til morning when she could call someone else—maybe her cousin. “Tig, pause the music and call Felix,” she subvocalized. The music kept blaring, her personal AI completely missing the message. “Tig!” she shouted this time. “Pause the track!”

“Paused!” the tinny, robotic voice responded through her auditory implants. Juliet could change his voice and had done so a few times, but she found the goofy, echoing, metallic voice amusing and thought it reflected the PAI’s capabilities rather well—he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, as her old grandpa would’ve said.

“Call Fee Fee,” she said, stretching her neck until it popped.

“Calling Felix Delgado,” Tig said, and then Juliet heard the *beep*, *beep* of the line trying to connect. She kicked out her feet, her heavy, steel-toed work boots like ankle weights, threatening to pull her long legs out and overbalance her, and then a little musical note sounded, indicating a completed connection.

“Jules!” Felix said, and she saw his face in her augmented display. Her retinal implants were cheap as hell, so it was grainy and blocked out a good portion of her vision, but she was glad to see him. He had a lovable face with high round cheeks and big teeth sporting too many gaps, but he smiled like he was a fashion model, and she loved him for it. He’d done something to his eyebrows, notched them, and thickened them at his aunt’s beauty shop, probably, and he looked adorable.

“Fee! Did you forget about me? I told you I got off at one!”

“Oh shit, Jules! I’m so sorry! Shit got crazy tonight! Me and Paulo went to Sunkissed—shit was popping off! Jules, a real banger fight broke out! Some of the gearheads from down south of sixth were messing with a real fine lady, someone from the foothills. Jules, I mean, she was fine! Hair nicer than yours, you feel me?”

“Fee, what the hell? I’m sitting out here, alone, outside the scrapyard, nothing but coyotes and moths for company, and you’re telling me about some fine princess? Where are you?”

“I’m getting to that, Jules! Anyway, she turned out not to be some nice princess, you feel? One minute she was sitting there, sipping some x-steam, and then, *bang*, out came her fucking monoblade. You register? An honest-to-Jesus monoblade. She cut one of the bangers in half, and she didn’t even stand up! Jules, his guts fell all over the floor!”

“Fee! Where. Are. You?”

“I’m really sorry, Jules. I’m trying to tell you what happened, but the long-story-short is I had to take Paulo to St. Mary’s.” Juliet could see, from her grainy image of Felix, that he was driving and only half paying attention to their conversation.

“Tell me you’re on your way, Fee,” Juliet said, sighing heavily and slapping one of her heavy welding gloves against her thigh.

“I’m sorry, Jules. They wouldn’t see him. We’re on our way to the megacity.”

“Phoenix? What the fuck, Fee?”

“Jules, he needs his hand put back on!”

“I get it, but you shoulda called—at least sent a message! All right, I gotta try to figure out a ride. Tell Paulo I hope it works out.” Juliet gestured with her hand, ending the call. “Dammit!” Again, she slapped her gloves against her thigh. “Nobody’s gonna come out here at this hour, are they, Tig?”

“Would you like me to order you an autocab, J-J-Jules?”

His corny, robotic stutter made her laugh, as always, and she said, “No, Tig. That’d eat up all my OT, and I’ve got rent due.” She stood up and stretched, arching her back to an eruption of pops and cracks. “Damn, that rig gets heavy on a double, even with the flex-steel limbs Fred added last month.” She gazed into the black night of the Arizona desert and contemplated how she’d get back to her apartment. In a fast car, she was a good forty minutes outside of Tucson, and even in 2107, there was a lot of dark desert between her and the blazing lights of the city she could see on the western horizon.

“Dammit. Do I spring for a cab? Do I just crash here? Tig! Bit balance, please?”

“You have seven hundred and twelve Helios-bits available.”

“Seven-twelve. Shit. Even if this OT hits my account tomorrow, I’ll be short. No cab for me, and, of course, Mark locked the gate when he left. Tig, call Mark.”

“Calling Mark Lyons,” Tig said, dialing up Fred’s night shift manager.

Juliet listened to the beeps and connection tone, and then Mark’s bald, middle-aged head appeared in all its grainy glory in her vision. “Mark!”

“Juliet? Why you calling? Something happen at the shop?”

“No, Mark! My ride flaked, and I’m locked out. Any chance you could swing me a lift or come back to open up? I don’t wanna spend all night out here. I can hear the coyotes, the bugs are swarming the lamp, and it’s hot as hell!”

“Jeez, Juliet! I just sat down, and I’m already two beers in. I’ve got a date with my dream-rig, if you know what I mean.”

“Ew, Mark. I don’t wanna know what you mean. Could you put your, uh, date off for half an hour? I know you don’t live very far . . .”

“You’re messing up my Friday . . . oh, all right, Juliet. Only ‘cause I like you, though. Maybe we can get a brew after a shift, huh?”

“Um, yeah, maybe. Thanks, Mark! I’ll see you in a few, right?”

“Yeah, sure. I just need a minute to get my . . . boots back on.” His long pause before he said “boots” made Juliet’s mind jump to a lot of conclusions she instantly regretted.

“Thanks, Mark,” she said and flicked her fingers, ending the call. “I bet I can talk him into a ride back to town. I’d rather not sleep here tonight, Tig,”

“Would you like me to book you a motel?”

Juliet laughed, “No, Tig!” She paced around in a little circle in the illumination thrown by the single floodlight outside the salvage yard, swatting at the bugs that had come out of the woodwork, attracted to the light. After just a minute or two of pacing, she saw bright, high-quality white headlights and purple underglow and knew a vehicle was approaching that definitely didn’t belong to Mark.

She wasn’t sure why, but Juliet stepped out of the circle of illumination and crouched behind the scrap pile she’d been sitting on earlier. Why was a smooth ride like that coming out to the scrapyard in the middle of the night? She watched, between two folded sheets of tin, as the low, long sedan rolled up to the gate. It was black and shiny, not a single scratch or scrap of dust—the thing must have had a static shield. “Rich . . .” Juliet hissed, crouching even lower as one of the black-tinted glass doors popped open, slid back with a hiss, and a man stepped out.

He looked familiar to her, and Juliet had to think for a minute about where she’d seen him. His hair was black and combed straight back, heavy with some kind of product, and he wore expensive clothes but styled like a banger—a banger that made a big score.

He walked up to the gate, kind of shuffling like he had all the time in the world, and produced a key, and that’s when it clicked; this was Freddy’s—Fred’s—cousin, Tony. He’d been to the shop a few times, dropping off cars of questionable origin for salvage, and Juliet knew Fred probably looked the other way for him when it came to showing ownership.

Tony pushed the gate open, then shuffled back, climbing into the sedan, and it slowly hummed forward, gliding over the rough gravel like it was the smoothest pavement ever laid. Juliet could feel the thrum of the hydrogen-powered engine, and she knew that thing was fast with a capital F. “Probably has a huge bank of batts, too. Talk about torque,” she hissed, watching the violet tail lights drift into the stacks of old wrecks and machines and the piles of scrap Fred had yet to move.

Curiosity getting the better of her, Juliet darted through the gate, ghosting the slow-moving sedan, hugging the scrap piles to keep herself out of sight. The car glided deep into the yard, stopping by one of the hammer shredders. Juliet crouched behind a stack of old appliances, watching between an ancient white SureJet washer and a nameless yellow fridge. This time, both front doors opened, and a tall, androgynous person with a white mohawk opened the driver-side rear door, helping a frail, cane-wielding, old woman stand up out of the sedan.

“What’s this? Weird-ass group of people to have a midnight party at Fred’s . . .”

“Would you like me to search the d-d-directory?” Tig’s robotic voice blaring into her implant almost sent Juliet into a fit—she gripped the old washer tightly in alarm, her heart racing at his intrusion into her sneaking mindset.

“No, Tig. Go to sleep,” she subvocalized, and this time the goofy PAI heard her, and she saw the little “Zzzz” symbol in her retinal implant, telling her he was offline.

“Get him out,” the old woman said, moving around the sedan, stooping over her cane to look at the trunk. She wore an honest-to-goodness veil attached to her maroon-colored hat, and her polyblend dress had matching maroon flowers printed into the silky white fabric.

Tony and the Mohawk both moved to the trunk, and when Tony clicked a button on his fob, causing it to pop open, they both rushed to struggle with whoever was inside. Lots of grunting and cussing from them both ensued, and finally, after a few meaty *thwaps* they pulled out a third man and threw him onto the gravel-covered ground at the old lady’s feet.

The man wore a white jumper with orange stripes down the side, and it made Juliet think of an interceptor pilot, “Or someone from a mental institution,” she breathed. He had close-cropped blond hair, and, even from twenty meters away, Juliet could see the purple, swollen nature of his face and the shrink-cords on his wrists and ankles. “Godric,” the old woman said, her voice warbling and cracking. “Reset the implant and take it out. Don’t make me ruin you bit by bit.”

“Bea? Is that you? I can’t see so well right now,” the man said, lifting his bound hands to rub at his face.

“Don’t play the fool, Godric. We know you can see better than any of us. Come now; whatever ails you, we can fix it. Reset the device, remove it, and we can return to the institute. I promise you’ll be top of the list when we work out the production kinks.”

“If I remove it, I’ll be dead inside two minutes. If you kill me, no one can reset it. Seems we’re at an impasse, hmm?”

“Watch your tone,” Mohawk growled, kicking the bound man in the back, eliciting a grunt and cough, and Juliet thought she saw something darker than spit come out of his mouth.

“Would you like Tony to start feeding parts of you into that shredder? Do you think we might bargain more amicably if you were just a torso and a head? I know your nanites will keep you from dying—rather makes my job easy, don’t you think? Removing that concern?” The woman pressed her cane into his forehead, cruelly twisting it as he struggled to regain his breath.

“So my choices are to either be tortured and dismembered or to die? Fuck you, Bea.” He held up his hands, still bound, over his face, waiting for the kicks to come, but Bea held up her cane, keeping Mohawk at bay.

She leaned over and spoke; this time, her voice sounded almost sweet, sort of like Juliet remembered her grandma’s voice, “Godric, if you’ll work with me, I promise we can save you. We have a stasis kit in the car. Reset the device, remove it, and we’ll stabilize you—bring you back to the institute until we get things figured out.”

“Why bring me here, then?” Godric coughed, his breath wheezing.

“Convenience? Intimidation? You know how these things work, Godric. Come, I’ll give you my word.” Bea held out a shaky hand, her bent, dark-skinned fingers glittering with jeweled rings.

“I do. I do know how these things work, Bea.” Godric reached up his bound hands, but as Juliet struggled to see from her hiding spot, zooming as much as her low-end implant would allow, rather than take the veiled lady’s hand, one of his fingers folded back, and a fine mist sprayed out, fully engulfing her.

“What?” She stumbled back, coughing. “A phage? You fool!”

Juliet’s eyes bugged out as she watched Tony and Mohawk stumble away, coughing, and then things really went sideways. Bea, still coughing, tried to waddle back to the car, but she fell to her knees, then flat on her face near the rear tire of the sedan. Tony grabbed his throat like he was choking, dancing around madly, and Mohawk fell to his back, feet kicking up like a dying cockroach.

Godric, still coughing, struggled to a sitting position and looked directly at Juliet between the two ancient appliances. His eyes gleamed like orange LEDs, and he said, “Don’t come closer.”

“Shit!” Juliet said, ducking lower. She stared at the ground, her mind racing. Should she run? “Yes, I should fucking run!” She stood and turned, but the man called Godric called out to her.

“Wait! Just wait a minute. Let the bacteria do its thing. If you don’t touch them, you’ll be all right.”

Juliet froze and looked back just in time to see Tony collapse, jerking spasmodically like Mohawk. She wasn’t an idiot, “That shit was airborne. Tell me true: am I dead already?”

“Not airborne,” the man coughed. “It was a mist. The bacteria can’t live outside a wet environment.” He glanced at the writhing, coughing, spasming trio that had, only moments before, been threatening his life. “They’ll be dead in a minute. I won’t last too much longer, I’m afraid. Come on! Help me stick it to these assholes one last time, huh?”

“This shit’s crazy, friendo—way beyond what I want on a Friday night. Corpo-sec coming? Those guys work for Helios?”

“No, they’re out of Phoenix, WBD. You’re clear for an hour or more.” As he spoke, Tony finally stopped jerking and lay still, and Juliet thought she could see the skin on his face turning black. Godric partially obscured the old lady, but Juliet could see her feet sticking straight out, not moving at all.

“They’re dead. You just killed them all,” Juliet said, her voice barely above a whisper, but the man somehow heard her, even from twenty-five meters away.

“They’ve done worse. Believe me; they’re not worth a single tear—not even their mothers would mourn them.” He coughed, and it sounded deeper, wetter. “I only have an hour to live, tops. Come closer—the bacteria’s inert by now. I’m not contagious, all right? I have a phage fighting it in my body. The implant,” he coughed, then continued, “programs the phage, fighting the bacteria, but it's slowly losing ground. Look in the trunk and find the first aid kit. Look for an aerosol antiseptic.”

“I’ve got a guy coming to pick me up,” Juliet said, slowly edging forward, wondering why the hell she wasn’t running in the opposite direction.

“This won’t take long. You’re going to want to get the hell out of here anyway. WBD will coopt some satellites. They’ll get your sig and follow you. You gotta get lost in a megacity, maybe get off-planet.” He eyed Juliet as she got closer, “Welder?” He asked, noting her scorched, heavy-denim overalls. He saw her nod and continued, “Maybe get a job on a salvage rig or go to one of the colonies.”

“Why the hell would I do that? I should just run and call the cops!” Juliet was only a few feet from the man, and she glanced sideways at the closest corpse—Tony. His body was being eaten from the inside; she could see it—his skin was turning black, and his fingertips were gone, little white bones sticking out of the black flesh. “Flesh-eating? This is nasty stuff. . .”

Every bone in her body said, “Run!” Still, she hesitated, waiting to hear the weird, bound man out. As she looked at him, waiting for him to finish coughing again, she saw that his bruises were gone—his face was unmarred.

“Trust me—get the antiseptic. I’m about to give you something worth more than . . . well, worth more than anything I can think of.”

Juliet edged around him, looking into the sedan's trunk, and said, “Why would you do that?”

“Because you’re here. I’m about to die, kid. I’m about to fucking cash in, and the only thing I can think of doing is keeping these bastards from getting this implant. You’ve got a target on your back anyway—WBD’s gonna track you down for questioning. They make people disappear all the time. Just fucking trust me, please!” He barely got the last word out before he fell into another coughing fit. Juliet saw the first aid kit, a big red box with a white cross, strapped to the side of the trunk.

She unhooked the kit, opened it, and found the aerosolized antiseptic. She retrieved it and turned back to the man. He’d stopped coughing and was lying on his back, eyes unfocused as he gazed upward into the black sky. “The stars . . .” he said. Juliet looked up but saw no stars—hadn’t seen any in years. The haze from the megacities made that hard these days.

“What’s WBD?” she asked, moving closer to him with the can of antiseptic.

“Western Bio Dynamics Corp. They could buy Helios a dozen times over.” His eyes regained focus, and he looked at her. “Give me a minute,” he said.

“Sure . . .” she said, figuring, at the very least, she could turn and run—he was still bound, after all.

“Charlie, initiate factory reset,” the man called Godric said. “Confirmed. Confirmed. All systems. Understood.”

By that point, Juliet had figured out that Godric was speaking to his PAI. He was doing what the woman he’d just killed had asked him to do—resetting whatever device she’d wanted him to give up.

“That’s that,” he said, his breath wheezing in his throat, “I’ll be dead in minutes. You have a PAI, right? You gotta remove it.” He, as if in illustration, reached up to his PAI port at the back of his neck, straining with his hands still bound, and forcefully folded back the synth-skin flap with his thumbnail, ejecting the silvery button-shaped device. As he pulled it out, thousands of tiny nanofilament fibers trailed after it, glistening wetly in the air as he held it out for Juliet. “Spray it down.” He nodded to the antiseptic.

Juliet didn’t hesitate; thinking of the rapidly decomposing bodies nearby, she liberally soaked the device and the hand holding it with antiseptic. She must have nearly emptied the can before he coughed and, with a wet, wheezing voice, said, “You gotta put this in you. Initiate it. Once it’s active, tell it to mask its signature.”

“You’re fucking rockers if you think I’m porting that thing!” Juliet said, backing away.

“You’ll have WBD goons on you before midnight if you don’t. It won’t mask itself until you tell it to, and you can’t do that until you port it.”

“This is too much. I’m out.” Juliet started to walk away, but Godric called out to her, and his voice was so raw, so thick with emotion, that she stopped to listen.

“Listen! Those people destroyed my life, and I’m just the most recent test subject. They’re users and get rich off the backs of people like us. Don’t you want a chance to level the tables? Don’t you want a chance to get out of this shit? I’m giving it to you! They don’t know you, won’t know you have it. If you get out, get clear and disappear for a while, you can use it to . . . well, to do all kinds of things. I know you don’t have a reason to, but trust me! I’m dying here; I don’t have anything to gain by tricking you!”

Juliet turned and took a step back toward him, “How’d you get the bacteria? The infection? Why would they poison their test subject?”

“Oh, that one’s on me.” He coughed wetly as he tried to chuckle. “I stole a sample from another one of their departments. I was going to use the device here to weaponize it against WBD. It almost worked, maybe too well. I suppose if I’d had some better phage tech, I could have fought it off longer or cured it, but . . .” His words broke off in another coughing fit. When it ceased, he pulled his sleeve away from his mouth and said, “I can’t see. I’ll be dead in less than a minute. Please! Take it.”

Juliet gingerly reached out, taking the clearly high-end PAI from the man’s hand. She backed away a step, looking at the device with wide eyes—this thing had to be worth thousands, no tens of thousands of bits.

“I wasn’t joking,” rolling to his side, coughing out a pool of wet, bloody phlegm. “Back away. I’ll be swarming with those bugs for a few minutes.” He waited while Juliet backed up several steps. “You gotta activate it now—they’re already tracking it.”

“Seriously?” Juliet backed up another couple of steps, then she sprayed the rest of the antiseptic on the PAI, shaking it so the fibers jostled around, allowing the fluid to sluice over them. Something in her wanted to call the corpo cops. Turn in the device, and tell them her crazy story about what happened that night. Another part of her wanted to grab this chance, grab it like it was a rope being lowered to her, ready to pull her out of the sinking, dead-end life she’d gotten herself into.

“Do it,” the man said, then he coughed another thick gout of blood and lay still.

Juliet backed still further away, turning toward the gate and seeing no sign yet of Mark’s beat-up truck. She resisted the urge to look up at the sky, where she knew thousands of corpo satellites were floating, watching everything that happened on Earth. She figured they’d watch this whole scene play out. Watch what that fool did, pulling this thing out of his neck and then handing it to her. They’d track her, and she’d never see the outside of whatever facility they took her to again. This was some seriously shady shit, and they wouldn’t want her spreading the vid.

Juliet sighed and tapped a knuckle on her forehead. She didn’t even have a vid—Tig was asleep, and she hadn’t started a recording. “So, what’s the difference? If they catch me with this thing in my pocket, or if I turn it over to the Helios cops, or if I put it in my head—any way you slice it, I’m fucked.”

Seizing an impulse, she reached up and pulled back the synth-skin covering up Tig’s chip, and she dug one of her fingernails underneath it, gently teasing it out. She’d already put him to sleep, so the only thing she noticed when she pulled him out was the strange, creepy sensation of cold tickles along her spine and the base of her skull as his monofilament tendrils pulled free. “Ungh,” she grunted at the strange feeling.

She rolled the damp tendrils, far fewer than the ones protruding from Godric’s device, around Tig’s chip and stuffed him into her overalls pocket. That done, she held the mysterious PAI up, found the pairing button, and touched it. The device beeped, and the tendrils began to writhe. She held it over the port at the back of her neck, and the shimmering, translucent nest of impossibly thin wires found her signal and began to crawl into the port, sliding down her spine and up into her skull cavity with a cool electric tingle. They crawled around her brain and spine, looking for the right places to settle, and when the tendrils were fully engaged, she pushed the chip into the slot and folded her skin back smooth.

Holding her breath and walking slowly toward the scrapyard gate, Juliet waited for the new PAI to calibrate. At first, she thought it might have been ruined, that it wouldn’t work at all, but then a status bar appeared in her retinal implant, and she knew it had made at least that connection. The bar indicated that it was initializing and that it was at twenty-two percent.

Juliet stepped outside the gate, pulled it closed, and relocked the magnetic padlock. She didn’t know what else to do—she needed to disappear for a while, which started with convincing Mark to drive her home, something he wouldn’t do if he realized there were four dead people in the salvage yard.

Juliet believed a corp, especially a big powerful one, wouldn’t think twice about making someone disappear to protect some new, valuable tech. No, she had believed that—had been sure—but now she was second-guessing herself.

“Would they ice me just for being a bystander?” Now that she’d put the device into her port, she knew she was good and truly fucked. She’d punched an irreversible ticket, inserting that PAI—there was no way they’d let her go back to life as usual.

She sat and waited, thought about calling Mark again, and realized she couldn’t until her new PAI came online. She looked at the status bar, saw it was at seventy-four percent, and tried to wait patiently.

She’d just noticed some yellow headlights coming down the road when she heard a chime in her auditory implant, and a message appeared, accompanied by a crystal clear, pleasant feminine voice with a neutral, nondescript accent:

***Initialization complete.***

***All AI systems are functional.***

***Connection to satellite network successful.***

***Host bio-compatibility 96.342%. Enhanced learning functions enabled.***

***Integration with auditory and retinal implants at 100%, operating at partial functionality due to hardware limitations. No other implants were detected.***

***Host repair functions offline—no matching hardware.***

***Host weapon systems offline—no matching hardware.***

“Hello. May I introduce myself? My name is Angel, but I can guide you to the correct menu if you’d like to customize my persona. Also, I’d like to make you aware that it seems the Western Bio Dynamics Corporation is actively seeking to identify you and pinpoint our location.”

“Holy shit,” Juliet said.