Shyft by Damien Boyes

Author:Damien Boyes [Boyes, Damien]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-12-25T00:00:00+00:00

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[fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]

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[02:42:18. Saturday, January 18, 2059]

I’m standing on the icy sidewalk with Michael’s final words hanging frozen in the air. Elder got to Petra. She’s dead now too. For a while, anyway, until her mom gets her a new skyn.

The pain and suffering of ten more lives to add to the list things I’m guilty of. Everyone I touch gets hurt. Patient zero in a world where tragedy is contagious.

Maybe I should just quit. Forget about who I was last time, forget about who’s hurting the people around me and run away, like Dora wants. Staying here is selfish. With every passing day, I leave a longer trail of suffering.

I can’t. Even if I run, trouble will find me. Anywhere I went, more people would end up involved. I need to end this before anyone else gets hurt.

That means finding Elder.

Before I can move my tab relinks and starts madly buzzing at me. I pull it out and huddle deeper into my jacket while I read. A dozen rep-hits on Vaelyn and Petra. Service feed notices about the shooting. Plus three increasingly anxious messages from Shelt telling me to get back to his place. Shit, he insists, is going down.

There’s nothing about Elder. And still Dora hasn’t contacted me.

Where can she have gone?

I hail a Sküte and read while I wait for it to show, tossing the tab from hand to hand every thirty seconds while I warm the other in my pocket. There isn’t a lot of detail yet: scattered eye-witness reports, vague official releases, and conjecture and conspiracy theories of every kind from the Undernet—that Petra was a rogue AI or a victim of a mindjacking shyft or a pawn in a grand political scheme to raise the Mayor’s flagging support. But no one’s saying anything about Petra and the Mayor being related. That secret’s still safe, for now.

Peter Anders resurfacing as a mass murderer? It’s only a matter of time before someone puts it together, then things will really get crazy.

I’m surprised the Mayor let me go, knowing what I do, but I guess they had bigger problems to deal with than babysitting a disgraced cop. Hell, maybe they actually believe I’m trying to help.

The Sküte arrives and I clamber in, give it Shelt’s address, tell it to crank the heater and hold my hands in front of the blowers. My fingers are freezing. I don’t remember ever feeling so cold. This skyn hasn’t had thirty years of Northern Ontario winters to get acclimated to sub-zero temperatures.

Once the blood starts flowing in my hands again, I throw my tab screen to the Sküte’s dash and keep reading, find a bystander video from a half hour ago outside the Fāngzhōu, showing blue and silver Standards enforcement officers keeping the crowd away from the entrance as Wiser and Brewer arrive.

They’re going to see I was there just before it happened. There’ll be questions.

I’m thinking about getting ahead of the situation and calling Agent Wiser myself when the Sküte shudders and the screen winks off.

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