Chapter Text
The sky above Lake Michigan was the color of a bullet. A one inch thick veneer of muddy snow blanketed the streets, piling up on dumpsters and swelling into drifts in alleys, suggesting that there was a harsher bout of weather soon to come. Clusters of human-made buildings rose from the locus of downtown, clashing with the asymmetrical, organic curves of the newer trollish architecture sprouting from amongst them. Blazing technicolor holoscreens scrolled across the upper levels of most buildings, creating a canopy of neon that wove across the city. The narrow strip of the Mag Mile clung to the edge of the frozen lake, its turf grass hidden under a layer of white.
You wouldn’t expect anywhere to get snow in 2409, what with the ozone layer lying on its deathbed and the polar icecaps being permanent residents of the past tense. She’d heard it was something to do with increased moisture in the atmosphere, something to do with climate swings, something to do with the environmental dangers of terraforming. Whatever it was, it certainly never reached Los Angeles, which hadn’t seen a flake of snow in the last forty years before it fell into the sea.
Roxy Lalonde stepped off the public lift, and the doors slid closed behind her. Standing ankle deep in a drift, she reached down and scooped up the first handful of snow she’d ever touched.
It was cold. Experimentally, she licked it. That was probably unsanitary, but given that it tasted just like what you’d from expect day-old street snow, she spat it out immediately, so it didn’t have the chance to do her much harm.
Welcome to New Chicago, said Hal. Red text scrolled across the corner of her visor, and the AI’s camera whirred as it did a full three-sixty of the area. Just like Old Chicago, except polluted, unfriendly, and ruled by a species of hyper-wealthy monsters. Oh, wait.
“Cry all you want, country boy. At least this place is above sea level.” She took a deep lungful of air. It smelled like saltwater and smoke. Lake Michigan was undergoing some development on its eastern bank to construct homes for seadwellers seeking subaquatic property.
Country boy? I was born in Austin. You crawled out of the woods somewhere in upstate New York.
“Firstly, Dirk wrote most of your code when he got bored on a flight to D.C., so I’m pretty sure you don’t qualify as a Texas native. Secondly, I grew up in SoCal. And thirdly, country boy isn’t a birthright, it’s a state of mind.”
What, a man can’t make an observation or two around here without being called a yokel?
“Babe. C’mon.”
All I’m saying is, if worrying about climate change and wealth inequality makes me a Podunk local, then call me a cowboy.
“You know,” said Roxy, cheerfully, starting off across the street, “I remember when Dirk was the most dramatic person I knew.”
What are you talking about? I’m agreeing with you. Hal’s cursor blinked innocently in the upper corner of her visor. Yee haw.
A row of glittering shop windows flanked her on the left, while a steady stream of lifts zipped to and fro in the street to her right. Most were of troll make, with domed roofs and rows of twelve-paned windows in neon colors set into exteriors that gleamed like insect shells. At a distance, they resembled metal centipedes, sans the legs, hovering a few feet above the ground through use of Crockercorp tech. Those who walked — and more did than she would have expected, in this weather — wrapped themselves in bulky parkas and thick snow boots, visors glowing a full hemospectrum of colors through the swirling mist, swaddled so thoroughly it was almost hard to tell who was human and who was troll.
Roxy pulled her scarf higher up over her nose and exhaled, trying to create a pocket of warmth underneath it. She’d worn the warmest clothes she had, but coming from California, that meant a pair of relatively un-tattered jeans and a leather jacket layered over a sweatshirt, with an old set of pink gloves someone in the commune had knit for her that’d long since sprouted holes in the fingers. Her sneakers had been soaked through within seconds of getting off the lift.
With her gun slung across her back and a suitcase in her hand, she’s pretty sure she looks like some wayward lovechild of the Punisher and a Rogers and Hammerstein protagonist. Nevertheless, nobody looked twice at her. Nice thing about cities, she supposed, as opposed to forty-person human communes: if you don’t stick your nose in anybody else’s business, they’ll keep their noses well out of yours.
Jesus, I’m cold just looking at you, Rox, Hal complained. Get a taxi.
“Don’t need one,” she said. “It’s not that far.”
Crocker Estate’s two miles north of here, and it’s about to snow. ‘Not that far’ means different things in Chicago and Bakersfield.
“Buck up. I’ll be fine.”
If you say so. Who needs all ten toes, anyway? I have it on good authority that eight is much more aerodynamic.
“Are you gonna pay the cab fare? Cuz if not, this broke girl is walking.”
I could wire you a few million from one of the peerage’s offshore accounts, if you’d let me.
“Yeah, so could I. You know what I could also do? Time. In prison. For that thing.”
You’re assuming you’d get caught.
“And you’re assuming you wouldn’t?”
I’m assuming that A.I. have a leg up on humans in terms of leaving digital traces, given that we interface directly with programs instead of using an intermediary tool to manipulate the binary. Which is true. I’m assuming a fact.
“Sure,” she granted, “but if you do get caught, that’s GG. Least when I’m hacking, people don’t get a peep show of my dendrites if I get it wrong.”
That’s never happened to me. My dendrites remain unseen by human eye. My circuits remain unmolested. My memory banks are as pure as the driven snow.
“Congrats, you’re a virgin. You want a medal?”
You have no mind for metaphor, fleshbag.
Roxy grinned. She passed a yellowblood hunched over in the enclave between two buildings, cradling a sopor pan in their hands, gaunt hollows under their cheeks and a wild, sleepless, haunted look to their eyes. Her step flagged, and she paused to watch them take a long drag from the pan. Their face eased over immediately with the bliss of dreamless sleep.
Humans couldn’t get hooked on sopor — brain chemistry wasn’t wired right for it. That didn’t mean she didn’t know how it felt.
She kept moving.
It had been three days since she’d flown out to Crockercorp HQ in Seattle for the job interview. ‘Interview’ was a strong word for it; a grumpy indigoblood had scowled at her over his desk and barked rapid-fire questions about her loyalty to the Empire and appreciation for the Heiress’ baking vlogs until he seemed satisfied, and then sent her out without once asking about her qualifications. Granted, she hadn’t really applied for the opening so much as been drafted for it. A summons had appeared in her inbox one day in Imperial pink script, demanding that she submit her resumé and complete criminal record for perusal, and it wasn’t until she’d already sent both that she was allowed to know what the position even was.
Chief Bodyguard to the Heiress, Jane Crocker. Of all things.
Seventy-two hours later, Roxy was in New Chicago with every personal belonging she owned stuffed in a suitcase, and had only a vague understanding of why. She could hack her way in and out of a tight corner, sure, and you didn’t last long in the human communes without knowing your way around riflekind, either. But it was laughable to think that she was the most qualified individual in the world to guard the second most important person in it.
Not that it made much difference, in the end. The Imperial Office of Employment had sent her a notice informing her of her new salary, and Roxy regarded herself as a pretty virtuous person, generally, but at the same time the list of things she wouldn’t do for that much money was very, very short. ‘Move to Chicago’ wasn’t on it.
Dirk had left a year earlier, anyway. Headed off to live in Austin, of all places, despite the city being near abandoned after it flooded. Apparently he wanted to get in touch with his roots, whatever the fuck that meant. More likely he got sick of people. Anyway, without him there, the commune didn’t have much in it capable of tempting Roxy to stay, much less six figures’ worth of temptation.
Hello? Hal asked. Ground Control to Major Rox? You can shave fifteen minutes off if you turn left here.
“Oh.” She shook her head, sucked in a gust of frigid air to clear her head, and turned left. “Thanks.”
Dirk had built him for her as a sixteenth birthday present. “Every cybernaut worth their salt needs a sidekick,” he’d said, handing her a remodeled Hubtopband, complete with automatic rifle scope and wifi connectivity. “Try this one on for size.”
“What’s it do?” She’d clipped it to her right ear and slid the lens over her eye, blinking as it cycled through the startup routines and keyed itself to her iris.
“He,” Dirk corrected. “And he’s me. Me from five weeks ago, I mean.”
“You’re the A.I.?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not him. But he’s me.” Then, hesitating, he said, “More or less.”
Hal had turned out to err on the far, far side of ‘less.’
Cross the street.
“Roger, roger.” She did. Following Hal’s instructions presented a mixed bag, typically, since on the one hand, he was bound by his programming to perform the tasks she asked of him, but on the other hand, Dirk hadn’t put anything in there regulating the manner in which the task was performed. That was a lot more wiggle room than she figured he’d originally intended. And Hal could turn circumventing his subroutines into an Olympic sport.
A long, wide street opened up in front of her as she turned, with six lanes of traffic moving in either direction, and a sidewalk broad enough to fit two full-grown purplebloods lying head to foot. But the road was much more densely populated than the sidewalk, and the crowd thinned the further she walked along the street, leaving her conspicuously without cover. She also didn’t fail to notice that most of the people this far north were trolls, and highbloods, at that, with the warmest among them a chrysanthemum blue. One of them bared their teeth at her in passing, and she couldn’t figure out whether that was supposed to be a threat or a catcall, so she just increased her pace and kept walking.
Heads up. Flies at your seven.
Her heart takes a running leap, but she keeps her pace even. “How far?”
A block and closing.
“We haven’t done anything wrong. For once.”
You have a GBF the size of a horse’s tibula strapped to your back, you’re carrying a suitcase, and you’re a human in the middle of the Highblood District. Better actors than you would fail to come off innocent, under those conditions.
“Did Crockercorp file my residence permit yet?”
I don’t know. You don’t give me access to your inbox.
“Shit. I don’t, do I.”
She activates the rearview camera in her visor and spots the police car, blue and red neons blazing as it freewheels down the street. Too close to run. Not that she could evade them for long, anyway; it’s not her city, not her digs. The most she could do on foot is find someplace to hide, and the time’s long passed when that wouldn’t look suspicious as a rainbow drinker at a blood bank.
No. I seem to recall it was something about ‘setting reasonable boundaries.’
“And I stand by that.”
I’m riding permanent shotgun on your life and livelihood, here, Lalonde. Why are government invoices your line in the sand?
“It doesn’t really matter what the line is,” said Roxy, “so much that the line exists in the first place. Distance?”
Five hundred meters and closing. Our chances of successfully losing them are a soft twenty-seven percent.
“ATTENTION CITIZEN.”
Make that a hard thirteen.
She ducked behind a broad-shouldered troll and turned up her collar to hide her face as much as possible, pretending she thought they were talking to someone else.
“CITIZEN IDENTIFIED: ROXANNE LALONDE, HALT.”
“Fuck.”
Two point nine nine repeating, reducing exponentially by the millisecond. Want me to run the odds of this being a random search?
She came to a halt, setting down her suitcase, and lifted her hands in the air. The lift slid into the curbside parking lane, and a pair of flies got out.
They were both a warm indigo, dressed in Imperial blacks, with the bright, artificial wings marking them as members of the Empress’ Finest strapped to their shoulders. The plates on their armor resembled an exoskeleton — an intricate network of interlacing joints and shifting scales, all the same glossy black of adult trolls’ skin, although these ones in particular looked a few years shy of their last molt. A special Crockertech nylon weave clung to the skeleton frame of their wings, like the gossamer strung from the pinions of butterflies. Thus, the nickname.
People exaggerated the wings’ functionality for dramatic effect; without sufficient updraft, they couldn’t get far off the ground, and mostly served to give wearers a bit of an edge when trying to make long jumps or taking an otherwise bad fall. A far cry from the movies, where they were sent zipping around in midair like a hummingbird on a speed trip.
They carried stun sticks at the hip, but were probably packing, too.
“Evening, officers,” she said, plastering a smile on her face. “Afternoon. Noonish. Whatever. Problem?”
Do we have a plan of attack for this? Or are we just rolling with the punches?
One of them — a beefy blueblood with two feet and a hundred pounds on her snapped down his visor and squinted at the holster on her back. “You got a license for the gun, miss?”
“Yep,” she said, drawling the vowel, popping the -p.
Ah. Lying. I assume you want me to forge that, unless you’ve been filing paperwork behind my back.
A beat passed. The fly’s mouth flattened.
“You wanna get it out?”
“Sure,” she said, reaching slowly for her palmhusk, and stared hard at the cursor in the corner of her visor, hoping the AI would take the hint. “Give me a sec.”
She tapped a few random commands into the husk, giving Hal time to work. After a second, a pink hologram sprung to life above the husk’s projector. It was, to all appearances, a government document, marked with the Imperial insignia and everything, proclaiming one Roxy Lalonde to be the perfectly lawful owner of one Mark II Girl’s Best Friend sniper rifle.
The fly squinted at it. “This is from California,” he said.
Oh, eat my entire ass. I’ll bet you a gig of storage that the permits cross state lines, Violet Beauregarde over here just doesn’t want to admit he fucked up.
“Yeah,” she said, attempting an amicable tone. “Just moved, actually. Haven’t had time to register it yet. Couldn’t ship it here, for obvious reasons.” She laughed, high and reedy.
His mouth twisted, but he let it slide. “What’re you doing this close to the Highblood District, kid?”
She put away the palmhusk. “My job,” she said brightly. “Recently hired to work for Crockercorp. Supposed to report to the Crocker Estate, ASAP, soon as I get here.” She hefted her suitcase expressively. “Thus, the luggage. Uh, as you imagine, this Cali kid doesn’t have a whole lot of warm clothes, so if you don’t mind—”
He pulled out a tag scanner. “Tag, please,” he requested. She couldn’t tell if he was peeved or just bored; it was always hard to tell, with trolls.
“Look. There’s no need for this, okay? I’m not here to cause trouble—”
“Tag, citizen.”
The other one is reaching for his stun stick.
She bit hard on her cheek to keep a retort down and tugged down her collar, curt. It exposed the thin slip of plastic adhered to the skin above her collarbone, blinking dull green to indicate its connection to a local network. The fly aimed his scanner at it and washed it in black light.
The scanner would cross-reference the tag ID with a file in the Empire database. It’d hold everything from her criminal record to test scores to tax returns. In a hot second, they’d have anything they wanted on her, and she’d have jack shit to do about it.
She starts babbling. “I know I don’t have a permit to be up here, okay, but look, like, I deadass just got hired three days ago, today’s my literal first day — you can call Crockercorp, if you want, right, they’ll back me up —”
The scanner beeped, and the fly’s eyes widened.
He backed off like she was infectiously diseased. “Yes’m,” he said quickly, and oh, well. That was new. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am, didn’t realize you — anyway. Yes. Our mistake. Won’t happen again, I promise.”
She tilted her head. “O…kay?”
“We weren’t informed you would be arriving. Of course, in the future, we — again, our mistake. Give our fondest regards to the Heiress.”
He gave her a short, stilted kind of nod, which she thinks might have actually been an aborted bow, and backed off another few paces, as if she needed a four foot radius of bubble space to walk down the street. “About your business.”
It doesn’t make any sense. Unless Crockercorp already updated her employment records, which doesn’t make sense either, since she hasn’t even started yet. But it’s the only thing that would explain them treating her like a seadweller out of the blue. The company composes nine tenths of the world’s wealth, the last tenth being the personal funds of its CEO, and isn’t so much a private corporation as a privatized form of government. Getting to call yourself an employee of the real deal, and not just a wager grinding for some subsidiary, is like naming yourself a member of the peerage. It’s part of why she took the job in the first place.
That, and the serious benefits. Hitmen didn’t get dental.
Why Crockercorp would care about getting her name on the roster so quickly, Roxy doesn’t know, but she’s got places to go and other things to be baffled by, so she leaves the gift horse’s teeth well the fuck alone, nods, and takes off speed-walking down the street, tossing a lazy salute over her shoulder.
Did you hack the scanner?
She mutters, “I thought you did.”
No. Looks like we’re chalking it up to good luck.
“Aw, shit,” she whined. “Probably just used up my yearly quota.”
Maybe this just means you’re in for a lucky year. To quote Alexander Pope: Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
She smirked. “But what about yours?”
I’m afraid to say that my tits remain hopeless.
She climbed the stairs to a skybridge ferrying people across an intersection too busy to be guarded by a crosswalk and descended onto the next street. The chatter of crowds thinned out the closer they get to the residential parts of NC; since the lifts ran near silently, the bustle of the city came more from the clamor of construction work and the cold, omnipresent voice of the Imperial Drones gliding over the streets than anything the citizens did.
A billboard on the side of a skyscraper switches from an ad for the new Martian colony to one for the Heiress’ Grubtube channel, gutsyGumshoe, bearing a picture of Crocker herself holding a bright red mixing bowl and a brand-appropriate scarlet fork. A coif of short black hair curls around her temples, perfectly tucked into place, and held back from her forehead with a gleaming red tiara. She just got her braces off two months ago; it was a public holiday. Her eyes are unnaturally bright blue, like shards of copper sulfate under light. She grins at the camera easily, knowingly, as if she can see the passersby looking at her and is smiling back at them in particular. It’s the kind of smile that’s selling something.
What do you think she’s like?
“Crocker?” Roxy averted her eyes from the screen and crossed the street. The taller buildings were beginning to fall behind them, leading into a shorter, more sprawling area of elaborate homes and immaculate townhouses. White brick and coils of wrought iron, layered with plastic neon to give them pops of color, sat high off the street and connected by way of pristine stone stairs. All the windows were tinted to opacity. The place was still crowded, and the packed, claustrophobic aura of a metropolis hadn’t left it by any means, but here, at least, you could entertain the idea of personal space. Buzzing streetlights cast pools of fluorescent light on the snow.
Yeah.
“Dunno, I guess.”
Do you think she’s really good at baking? Or is that a marketing ploy? You know she’s not really baking things, on her show. The food’s all fake. That’s the only way to make it look edible, after it’s been sitting under stage lights for a couple hours, or however long it takes to film.
“Anyone who pretends to bake that much is probably at least kind of good at it,” Roxy reasoned.
I suppose. Left here, and you’re home free.
She turned the corner, and promptly pulled up short.
The street corner across from Roxy was swallowed by an enormous townhouse, built from pale grey brick with black windows, with window gardens sticking out from each that sprouted fuchsia tulips and olive grey vines — real vines — that climbed up and down the walls. A holofence of solid white twice Roxy’s height walled the house off from the public and street below, glowing and emitting the faint hum of laser energy. Paparazzi flocked around it, all but flinging themselves against the shield, creating a cacophony of shouting and the odd chittering screeches of trolls.
Roxy took a deep breath, tightened her grip on the suitcase, she crossed the street and plunged into the crowd.
She had to fight for every inch of it. They were packed in and writhing, struggling against each other so close that they head-butted each other with their visors when they clashed, and even when she tried to slip through the crevices left between, someone or other would throw an elbow her way or sidestep to try and crush her out.
The appeal of holofences was that they were supposed to let authorized persons through without harming them, and keep unauthorized persons out. That didn’t make the idea of pushing her hand towards an eleven foot glowing slate of lasers any more appealing.
She grit her teeth and wedged through, all the same.
The light parted for her, and she passed. This got the paparazzi’s attention.
“Hey!”
“Hey, you!”
“What’s your name? Where are you—”
“Can you confirm Miss Crocker’s appearance at the gala next w—”
“What’s your business here?”
“Miss!”
“Do you have business with Miss Crocker?”
“Do you have time for a word!”
Roxy’s shoulders hunched. She took the stairs up to the main entrance two at a time.
Finding no doorbell — or if there was, it was too techy to resemble anything Roxy had seen before — she grasped the knocker on the door, an elaborately carved cuttlefish, and rapped it thrice. A moment passed.
The door cracked open a sliver. A short burgundyblood stood in the opening, built like a brick wall, with hair that was slicked to a tip at the back of her head. Although three, maybe four inches shorter than Roxy, her horns stretched above Roxy’s head, bent backward at the top and ridged. A birthmark dotted her chin. Her glasses were so thickly tinted it seemed inconceivable that she could even see out of them.
“Hi,” Roxy said tightly, picking up her suitcase again. “Roxy Lalonde, professional hacker, newly minted bodyguard to the stars. Let a girl in, wouldja?”
She got a thorough once-over in return.
“You getting me, friendo? Roxy Lalonde. I can repeat that for a voice recognition system. Or fingerprints. Crockercorp took mine when I got hired for the job, so I know you have them, somewhere.”
The butler reached for something behind the door, and then brought out a tag reader.
“Oh, come on. Really? How many people do you get that can pass muster at the holofence? Do you wire up your face recognition systems to let the rabble in?”
The butler said nothing. Roxy couldn’t even tell if she blinked, because of the shades.
She groaned, and then wrenched down her neckline, baring her tag. “Fine,” she said. “I mean, fuck privacy, right?”
The butler grunted, glancing at the tag reader. Then she backed away.
Roxy darted through the door. It swung shut behind her, and the chorus of the paparazzi vanished. Silence settled over the room, complete and eerie.
The Crocker Estate foyer was a tall, narrow chamber with a spiral staircase in black marble curling up along the curved back of the room. A mural of the Condesce possessed the whole back wall, stylized, with the Battleship Condescension rising from the sky behind her. A domed white ceiling above them dangled an elaborate crystal chandelier from its center. Arched doorways lead off to the left and right of the foyer, beyond which lay large, exquisitely furnished rooms, of which Roxy only got a glimpse before the butler interrupted her musings with a little cough and gestured to the stairs.
“You’ll be wanting to meet the Heiress,” the butler said dully. Her voice was deep and throaty, with a lowblood accent so thick you could cut it with a knife.
Roxy choked. She hadn’t been expecting to meet her so soon; she’d expected to have a few hours, at least, to clean herself up and maybe put together something to say. She hadn’t thought Jane would even be at home, on a weekday, her schedule presumably being packed to hell and back, and had figured she would have a comfortable amount of wiggle room in which to settle before staring into the face of Crockercorp.
“Heiress,” she managed, shortly followed by, “I mean, right, yeah, Heiress. Chick I’m guarding! Heard of her. Ha.” She forced a laugh.
Watch out, we got a smooth operator over here.
She gave her visor a hard thump on the side.
The butler sent her an odd look. She smiled apologetically. “Old model,” she said. “Got a programming error that makes it act up sometimes.”
That was uncalled for.
“But I’d love to meet her. I mean, if she wants to meet me. Does she have the time? If she doesn’t, I get it. Don’t want her to drop out of an important meeting for lil old me.”
The butler did not appear impressed. She started climbing the stairs without checking to see if Roxy was following first.
Real charisma bomb, that one.
The upstairs of the townhouse opened into a spacious hallway. The butler didn’t get far before she stopped at a door of dark oakwood and jerked her head toward it meaningfully. Roxy came to the startling realization that the Heiress was probably behind it.
“Wait,” she said, an unexpected surge of anxiety rising from her stomach. “Hold on. I need to, um. I gotta pee. Like, something awful. I—”
The butler ignored this, and pulled open the door.
Jane Crocker was the rare case of someone prettier in person than they were on TV. Broadly speaking, nothing about her was different. Same cap of curls, same neat little triangle of a nose, same round, owlish specs. Even the same eyes, a blue so bright Roxy had always assumed it was digital editing. But she was older off camera, with lines under her eyes and less makeup — which in turn makes her less girlish — and her clothes were a far cry from the cute outfits she wears in the vlogs, which typically involved poodle skirts and overalls and cargo shorts. Before Roxy, she wore a crisp red blazer and slacks, complete with tie. A red visor extended from the tiara atop her head.
But she was sixteen, and no amount of makeup or clothes or exhaustion could make her not sixteen. And after the initial shock of seeing a face she was used to watching on billboards and magazine covers in the flesh, the intimidation factor faded away, and Roxy found herself staring at a teenage girl.
When she stepped into the doorway, Jane looked up from her husktop and smiled. Her teeth were perfect, whiter than snow.
“You must be Roxanne Lalonde,” she said, rising. She crossed the room quickly and held out her hand. “Good evening.”
She didn’t introduce herself. Roxy got the feeling it wasn’t so much arrogance as respect for Roxy’s intelligence.
“Just Roxy,” she said, and shook the Heiress’ hand. “Rox will do.”
“Roxy. Welcome. How have you liked New Chicago?” Jane folded her hands expectantly. Her smile had not wavered once.
“It’s — cold.”
“Yes,” she laughed. “Unfortunately. Better not to get caught outside in January.” She noticed the gun on Roxy’s back, and her eyes widened. “Goodness.”
“Hm? Oh,” Roxy giggled, tugging on the strap. “Yeah. I’m riflekind. Comes with the territory. Not much of a point to picking the deck if you’re not gonna carry around something that spits serious metal, right?”
“I’m spoonkind, myself,” Jane said faintly, still a bit goggle-eyed, and Roxy came damn close to rolling her eyes, because of course she is. But the Heiress shook it off quickly and refocused on Roxy’s face, pointedly ignoring the gun.
“Would you like anything? Tea, caf?”
“M’good, thanks.”
“Have you any business in the city? We can arrange transport to take you wherever you need, but after you start work, I’m afraid your schedule will be somewhat wed to mine, with the exception of your days off.”
“That’s chill. I mean, uh. No thanks.” Roxy warmed under her unfailing attention. “Only been here a few hours. Don’t really know anybody here to have business with.”
“And you came from California, correct? It’s warm there. I imagine the shock might do a chap in.” Her smile changed, shrinking, but into something slightly warmer. An English lilt caught her vowels and tossed them around with soft URP, just stiff enough to seem artificial without being overpowering. “You’ll have to wear something a bit bulkier than that if you want to keep happy, here.”
“Sure,” Roxy said, politely, and added ‘coat’ to the mental list of things she’d buy as soon as she got her first paycheck.
“Have you been shown your rooms?”
Roxy’s brain had a moment much like what she imagined a husktop experienced when you had eight applications running and tried to open a ninth. “Rooms?”
“Yes.”
“I have rooms? Plural, rooms?”
Her mouth twitched, a bit amused, a bit perplexed. “Well, perhaps more a bedroom than a suite, but we wouldn’t make you sleep in the yard, Ms. Lalonde. We’re not quite that mercenary.”
“No, yeah, I got that, I just — you know what, I don’t know what I figured.”
“It should have been in the packet sent to you by Crockercorp after you were brought on,” Jane said quizzically, tilting her head.
“Ah,” said Roxy, and having flashbacks to the huge PDF sitting in her inbox, which she had received, checked for malware, and then immediately ignored. “Yep. No. I remember, now. The packet. Yes! Gotcha.” She flashed a thumbs-up. “Sorry. Took a sec.”
“Okay,” Jane said, clearly letting it go not out of gullibility but of generosity. “I expect you’d want to see your quarters, then. To get cleaned up after the journey.” She stepped past her, out of the office, and held the door. “I’ll show you there. You can leave your suitcase with Marsti, she’ll take it.”
Roxy took one look at Marsti and understood that this was a surprise to both of them. Nevertheless, Jane had said it in a way that didn’t leave much room for disagreement, so she gently settled the suitcase on the floor and gave the butler an apologetic grimace. It didn’t seem to help, much.
“This way,” called Jane, who was already halfway down the hallway. Roxy tripped to catch up.
The winding interior of the apartment was as gorgeous as the rest of it, furnished with dark hardwood and pearl-pink walls, dotted by the occasional side table bearing an expensive-looking piece of china or a potted flower. The blooms were all fat and full and luscious, even in winter. Each door bore a gold plate embossed with the name of the room behind it, including ‘LIBRARY,’ ‘VR ROOM,’ ‘LEISURE ROOM,’ and one simply called ‘JANE.’ The lattermost room sat at the very end of the hallway, which terminated in a broad, spotless window looking down onto the street; Jane stopped at the door across from hers. Its plate was blank. There was no doorknob that Roxy could see.
Jane pressed her thumb to the print reader beside the door and it chimed softly before the door slid back into a socket in the wall, soundless. “The interface on the inside has settings you can use to key it to your print,” she informed Roxy. “You can also grant temporary or permanent access to someone else by entering their Crockertech ID. Keying your print will also let you access the suite of rooms permitted for the chief bodyguard, including the kitchen, library, leisure room, et cetera. All rooms use the same door mechanic; as long as you don’t go switching thumbs with anybody, you should be able to get in anywhere you’re supposed to.” She grinned a little at her own joke.
“Cool,” Roxy said, eyeing the scanner. In Cali, they’d used keycard scanners, or even analogue locks, if they were especially antsy about whatever they were locking up. Maybe this was standard fare for troll living. “Cool, cool. So your print will unlock it, too?”
“Yes.” Jane at least had the decency to look abashed at this probable violation of privacy. “In the interests of efficiency in times of emergencies, I and a few others have our prints registered for your lock. Head of Crockercorp Security, for example, can open any door in the house. It’s a safety measure.”
“Can I change that?”
Jane blinked. From her expression, it was entirely possible that had never occurred to her. “No,” she said. “You can give access, or take away access that you granted in the first place. You can’t bar higher-ranking officials.”
“Uh, okay.”
“It’s for safety reasons,” she repeated. “Really, it’s in both of our best interests — and I would never enter without your permission except in the direst of emergencies, you understand. I respect your space. It really is for instances where communication is absolutely vital — the walls are soundproofed, you see. So this measure is in case of a fire, or a home invasion, where I might not be able to inform you in time, otherwise.”
“Sure,” said Roxy, as if that did anything to soothe her whatsoever. “Sure! Sure. Um. That’s cool.”
Marsti trudged up behind them and deposited Roxy’s suitcase just inside the door, dropping it with a heavy thunk. Roxy winced.
“Will that be all?”
Jane nodded perfunctorily, and then turned to Roxy. “Will it be?”
Roxy stuttered, caught in the unexpected situation of being asked for orders and blindsided by it entirely. Marsti waited, staring at her dully.
“Uh, yeah. No, I’m good, thanks.”
Marsti bowed low to Jane, her horns coming close to scraping the floor, one hand tucked behind her back and the other held across her waist. The act nearly folded her in half. Then she straightened and performed a shortened version to Roxy, keeping her hands at her sides, but bending deep at the waist and holding the pose for a few seconds before releasing it and walking away.
Jane didn’t watch her leave. “I hope you get settled well,” she said warmly, placing a hand on Roxy’s shoulder. Her hands were soft, her nails perfect robin egg crescents. “Tell me if you need anything.”
“Thanks,” Roxy said, a bit weakly.
Jane nodded graciously, and then followed Marsti up the hall.
“Oh — oh, shit — uh, J— Miss Crocker? Your Highness?”
Jane turned, laughing a little. “Jane will do perfectly well,” she said. “I’m not a princess.”
“Jane,” Roxy repeated. “Yeah. Do I have access to your room?”
Jane gave her a funny little look. “Of course you do,” she said. “You’re the head of my security detail. What use are you if you can’t get to me when I need you?”
Roxy struggled to keep her face neutral. “Course,” she said. “Just checking! Laters.” She stepped quickly into the room and shoved her thumb onto the interior print reader, closing it.
She stood there for a moment, face warm.
Well. At least we know the disarming lack of boundaries is a two-way street.
She blew out a long breath through her teeth in reply, raking her hands through her hair. “Six figures,” she said. “I’m getting paid six figures to let Jane Crocker have a key to my bedroom, and you know what? I’ll take it.”
Jane Crocker and assorted Crockercorp officials. You don’t even know who all can get in here.
“I’ll just remember to lock up my shit when I leave,” Roxy said, slinging the gun off her back and bracing it against the wall by the door. “Easy peasy.”
With what? You pack your own chest of drawers in that suitcase?
“See A point: six figures. I can afford to buy some padlocks, Halexander.”
Whatever you say. It’s not my panty drawer being left unguarded.
She reached for her suitcase and turned around, taking a sweeping look around the room. The far and right walls were consumed by a wraparound corner window, offering a panoramic view of the streets below. A row of troll buildings drew a curving black skyline against the dark red sky in the distance, while the dull luster of lifts passing to and fro on the street below illuminated the roads. The carpet was light grey, and matched the silver drapes, which had been drawn back for her arrival; the walls were dark charcoal, almost black, and accented with a tortoiseshell marble fireplace to the right of the door where a fire in its dying stages crackled quietly. A chaise lounge was tucked into the corner, and the king-sized bed was buried beneath a mountain of pillows. An en-suite bathroom could be glimpsed through an open doorway on the opposite side of the room, and a walk-in closet through a doorway adjacent to it. The whole thing, even by conservative estimates, cost more than Roxy had ever made in her life.
A bouquet of gorgeous purple roses sat on the bedside table. A small white note was tucked in amongst the blooms. Roxy approached and pulled it out, unfolding it.
)(ey gull
enjoy ya new digs
Roxy checked the back. There was nothing more.
“Huh.”
Well, look at that. Not one day into your new job and you’ve got a secret admirer.
She folded the note and slid it into her pocket, dumping her suitcase on the bed. “Whatever. They are nice digs.”
Obviously.
Unpacking was a short process. She unloaded her clothes and tossed them in the closet’s wardrobifier, not bothering to organize them, before pulling out her husktop and settling it on the bed. Then she removed her laser gun and its holster, which she hung on the nightstand. Hauling a sniper rifle around got unwieldy after a while, and she figured it probably wouldn’t fly everywhere. The rest of her stuff she decaptchalogued from her sylladex, and then she was done. There wasn’t much. She’d never had much to begin with.
“Hive sweet home,” she proclaimed, and keeled over facedown on the bed. It wedged her visor against her face.
Wonderful.
“M’ gonna sleep for a thousand years.” It was muffled to incoherence against the comforter.
It’s only 20:32. And you haven’t had dinner.
“I’m on west coast time.”
It’s earlier there.
“Whatever.” She pushed herself up and shrugged off her jacket, tossing it haphazardly onto the chaise. “It okay if I put you on sleep mode, lil man?”
I suppose. I’ll scrounge up an internet connection and entertain myself.
She slid the visor off her head and reached over to settle it on the charging stand next to the bouquet. Her right eye took a second to adjust, reorienting its perception of color without the tinted filter of her lens.
Her husktop hummed the three-note Crockercorp jingle as it booted up. The desktop was a photo of her and Dirk on the Santa Monica pier — three years ago, and a year before it went under. His hair was shorter, still ragged from the godawful haircut he’d given himself that summer, and hers was dyed platinum white instead of its natural gold. She was sprawled across his lap with an arm hooked around his neck and the other outstretched to snap the photo, winking, her tongue stuck out; his eyes were hidden behind his shades, as per usual, and he wasn’t smiling, per se, but there was a softness to the lines around his mouth and brow which suggested that if he were a different person, he might have been. He had a smudge of ice cream under his bottom lip.
An unexpected pang of loneliness struck her in the sternum. She missed her twin.
The chat client opened automatically as part of the startup process. At the top leftmost corner, a green dot appeared next to the familiar orange handle.
tipsyGnostalgic began bothering timaeusTestified!
TG: hey d
TG: whats hangin
TG: just got to the new casa and dude
TG: duuuuuuuuuuude
TG: ya girl is channeling her julia roberts
TG: getting pretty womaned all over here
TG: luxury.jpg
TT: Well, hot damn.
TT: Did you end up marrying rich after all?
TT: Do they know you don't have a dowry? Don't tell them until after the honeymoon.
TG: puh lease
TG: who needs a dowry with an ass like mine
TG: and n e wae naw its my room at crocker estate
TG: im parked across the hall from ms heiress herself
TT: No shit, really?
TG: deadass
TT: Nice.
TT: Tell me you're going to steal something.
TG: dirky NO
TG: i am being a loyal employee up in this bitch
TG: i am getting m fuckin honor code on
TG: ya girl is earning that dolla
TT: All that talk of eating the rich, and yet in the moment of truth, she betrays us.
TT: How does it feel to be an instrument of the bourgeois, Roxy? Do you feel the heat of a million proles watching you with resentment?
TG: bijon i AM the bourgeois now
TG: did u see how much im makin when my first paycheck comes around im gonna buy a fuckig plane
TT: You may have wealth, but you will never have the moral high ground.
TG: alas
TG: allow me 2 serenade u with my tiniest violin
TG: so tiny
TG: so sad
TG: howre things down in tejas
TT: Quiet. As per usual.
TT: Some radicals attacked Houston the other day, so some of the locals are worried that we're up next. But I'm not.
TT: Consider it one of the advantages of living in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere, U.S.A.: no one cares enough about your territory to target you.
TG: r the drones still hangin around
TT: Yes. But you get the idea that they're here for the revolutionaries, not the residents. It's not ideal, obviously, but they don't seem to give two shits about the people who live here, so we can go about our business for the most part.
TG: wish i could say the same
TG: 3 guesses who got pulled over 2day!
TG: asked to step over i guess
TG: wasnt drivin when it happened
TG: all the same
TT: Wait, what?
TG: keep a lid on it nothin happened
TT: What did they want?
TG: just to fuck over a human prolly
TG: like theyre flies they dont need a reason
TG: but heres the fun bit
TG: they peeped my tag and basically shit themselves
TT: What.
TG: ya
TG: being a crockercorp wagedrone has its perques
TG: score 1 for the sheeple amirite
TT: So they really keep kosher about pissing off pinkbloods up there, huh?
TG: ubetcha
TT: At least you'll be out of trouble, then.
TG: bitch who do u think ur talkin to
TT: My mistake.
TT: *At least you won't get caught, then.
TG: better
TG: and dont u forget it
TT: Wouldn't dream of it.
TT: I've got to go. One of the neighbors wants to squeeze in an extra hour of work on the water filtration plant before dark, and I'm the only one who knows how to do-si-do with a power coupler without blowing off his own fingers.
TG: aight godspeed
TG: txt me if u need advice
TT: Course.
TT: Talk to you later?
TT: I'm close to finishing the holoprojector. I could probably have the video call function up and running within a couple of weeks.
TG: sick
TG: this place has wild tech bro im sure i can find one around here
TG: miss seein u
TT: Yeah.
TG: yeah
TG: welp
TG: off u go
TG: try not to fuck up the power couplers
TG: remember 2 break the circuit before u start fuckin with the wires
TG: im not there to resuscit8 u this time
TT: Thanks for that.
TT: I'll keep it in mind.
TG: do
TG: keep wise big bro
TT: You too, Rox.
timaeusTestified ceased bothering tipsyGnostalgic!