Waking Dream by Nolan Edrik

Author:Nolan Edrik [Edrik, Nolan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-02-28T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 39

“I don’t care who he is, I’m not taking off my hands,” Maya said.

She glared at Bango and the bodyguard as they stood outside the club’s back door. The stench of garbage simmering in the Miami heat clawed at her throat. She wanted more than anything to go inside and meet this mysterious professor who knew everything about every advanced AI on the planet, but she couldn’t stomach the powerlessness of detaching her hands.

“For one, I don’t trust your guys to not jerk themselves off with them while we’re in there,” she said. “And two, I don’t trust them not to lose them. Those are top-of-the-line Exotechs, all modded up the way I like them. Took fucking forever. And three, I won’t go into a strange club with no fucking hands!”

“I understand,” Bango said, pacing around the alley. “I knew Professor Vast was paranoid, this is a bit much. I didn’t even know it was technically feasible to embed surveillance devices in mechanical hands.”

“It isn’t. He’s fucking with us. It’s a power play.” She shot a mean glance at the bodyguard. He didn’t react.

Bango put his hands on his head in resignation.

“How about this?” He motioned to Fitzroy, one of his guards. Fitzroy had a hook prosthesis. He claimed his hand had been lost in a shootout with the Feds. Bango said he lost it in a bet with a pimp in Thailand. Both seemed equally likely to Maya. While he could have afforded an actual hand, he said he liked the hook, that it looked cool and made a nice weapon.

“May I?” Bango asked Fitzroy.

The guard held up a hand to ask for a moment. He jammed a pack of cigarettes into the hook, pulled one out with his good hand, and stuck it in his mouth. Bango lit it for him, then grabbed Fitzroy’s arm, wrenched the hook out of the socket, and handed it to Maya.

“Hook OK?” Bango asked the guard.

The man raised his cuff to his mouth and whispered into it. Seconds later, he nodded.

Maya sighed and, with Bango’s help, detached her hands, passed them to Fitzroy, and locked in the hook. She clicked the pincers open and shut, and glared at Fitzroy.

“You screw with those, and I’m gutting you with your own hook, got it?” She jumped toward him and placed the sharp tip between his legs.

He gulped and nodded.

…

The guard led them through the club slowly. Maya got the sense that they were being monitored, scanned, checked for bugs.

Scan all you want, she thought.

Without her glasses on, the club was hilarious. For one, the walls were cracked cinderblock, covered in crude, sexual graffiti and unintelligible conspiratorial ramblings. And yet, amid the squalor, the patrons were immaculately dressed, their posture erect as they daintily sipped glowing cocktails.

On the dance floor, the revelers swayed as if adrift on an imaginary breeze.

What were they, Maya wondered. Willow trees? Jellyfish?

She’d never know, never see the illusion they were all sharing through their glasses, never hear the music piped in through their buds.

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