Copyright © 1994 by William C. Dietz

“Market discipline must be maintained.”

Chairperson of the Board Margaret Hopworth-Smith

We rose from the depths of the Urboplex like a plague of sewer rats, drifting upwards on crowded platforms, riding the humanity-packed escalators, or climbing hundreds of stairs to emerge blinking from seldom-used exits.

We were a hard-eyed lot, younger rather than older, and almost universally desperate. For we were the bottom feeders, the lowest-ranking members of a long, hard food chain, willing to do what it took to survive, and well aware of the fact that whatever value we had was related to brawn rather than brains. Something I’ve been short of ever since a portion of mine were blown out during the Battle of Three Moons.

You remember, the Battle of Three Moons was the key battle in the Labor War fought between the deep-space tool heads and the corpies. I was a Mishimuto Marine back then, and, according to my service record, one tough hombre. Anyway, the loss of that much gray matter makes me a bit slow at times, which is why I eke out a living as a bodyguard instead of doing something more respectable. Not that I have many clients, which accounts for my willingness to do less desirable tasks as well.

I left the low-rise lift tube, walked the short distance to the high-rise tube, and stepped inside. It was packed with the usual mix of droids and day workers. The robots didn’t give a shit, but the humans made room for me. Lots of room. More than I needed. It might have been an especially polite crowd, or it might have been the fact that I stand seven feet two inches tall, weigh two-fifty, and have a triangular-shaped skull plate. It extends across the back of my head and points forward towards my nose. That, plus a lot of short, prematurely white hair, makes me stand out in a crowd. The white eyebrows, bright blue eyes, and squared-off chin help too. But all of us tend to stand out, the men and women who live by the gun, and risk their lives for less money than a taco vendor makes in a day.

Not that we are better than taco vendors, because it takes real guts to go home to a crummy little cube, kiss the wife, play with the rug rats for an hour, grab some sleep, get up in the wee hours of the morning, make the tortillas, fry the soy, prepare the lettuce, cheese, tomatoes and salsa the customers expect, haul your stuff two miles through scum-infested corridors, and set up shop. Not just once, but day after grueling day. Now that takes guts. Real guts. More guts than most shooters have.

The doors whispered closed, the platform moved upwards, and the air was thick with at least thirty kinds of fragrance, cologne, perfume, deodorant, and shampoo. I grinned. No matter what sort of scent my fellow passengers wore, it wouldn’t cover their lower-level stink. Fear and poverty works its way in through your pores, penetrates your guts, and pollutes your soul. It makes you do what you’re told, say what’s safe, and kiss corpie ass.

Which could account for the fact that the lifers keep us around. You can program a droid to kiss your butt, but they have to obey, and that takes all the fun out of it. No, there’s nothing quite so elevating as to have a real honest-to-god sentient by the short hairs. That’s real, that’s fun, that’s power!

A woman caught my attention. She was on the other side of the platform and looked good in her T-shirt, waist-cut jacket, and matching pants. She might have passed for anything if it hadn’t been for the telltale bulge of a cross-draw hip holster and the wary look on her face. Our eyes met and she gave me a slow, deliberate nod. The kind one pro reserves foranother. I nodded in return, knowing we understood each other in ways the people around us could never comprehend. We knew what it was like to kill people no worse than ourselves, to sleep with one hand on a gun, and live with our backs against the wall. Yeah, we knew and it didn’t make a damned bit of difference. Because knowing doesn’t mean jack shit. Life sucks, and that’s a fact.

An ad for Duane’s Big and Tall Shop was projected into both my ears as the lift tube’s computer ran a superficial analysis on my appearance and chose what it deemed to be the most appropriate commercial.

The platform slowed and stopped on Surface Levels 1, 2, and 3 before the woman and I stepped off. We avoided each other but knew we were after the same thing. Money. Five hundred smackers for a single day’s work. More moola than I had made during the previous month. It’s rare for a real dyed-in-the-wool member of the Big Board to put out a call for one shooter, much less two hundred and fifty, so there would be plenty of takers. Especially since there were no requirements beyond “a reasonable degree of mobility and a valid weapons permit.” Or so the ads said.

And, thanks to the preference shown to disabled veterans, I had a permit. Brain damage and all. Scary, isn’t it? But that’s how it is in a world where poppers pop, snatchers snatch, and bodyguards guard.

The day workers scattered for their temporary jobs while I made my way through a labyrinth of corridors, sky bridges, and hallways before arriving at Droidware HQ. I have trouble with directions sometimes, so I had scouted the path twelve hours before and committed it to memory.

As with most corporations, the lifers had taken good care of themselves. The lobby was a huge affair that featured acres of dark red carpet, tons of gray-white marble, and what must have been a thousand board-feet of real mahogany. A golden “D” graced the back wall and shimmered with internal light. The woman at the front desk was real. Real pretty and well aware of it. She stared at the top of my head as she handed me the baton. “To your left.”

The baton tugged towards the left and I obeyed. The woman I had seen in the lift tube had arrived ahead of me and disappeared through a pair of double doors. I followed. Outside of some small vid cams that oozed over the walls and ceilings, the hallway was completely bare. The woman passed between another set of double doors. I followed and stepped out into a good-sized auditorium. A bin had been provided for the batons, so I added mine to the rest.

The auditorium was equipped with rows of starkly utilitarian chairs and a small stage. The floor consisted of polished concrete and slanted down towards an industrial-size drain. Not the sort of place to entertain share owners, but just right for an assemblage of greasy, grimy, lower-level scum like ourselves.

Fifty or sixty shooters had already arrived and managed to look studiously bored. I knew a few of them and nodded politely. No one asked me to sit next to them, nor would I have accepted if they had. It’s better that way, in case you end up on opposite sides of a fight, and a whole lot safer. Friends can betray you. Strangers can’t.

I chose a seat towards the back, found that my legs wouldn’t fit, and stuck them out into the aisle. A hard case with a fist-flattened nose nearly tripped on them, opened his mouth to say something, and caught his reflection in my skull plate. I smiled and he moved on.

Shooters of every possible size and description continued to arrive until the place was more than two-thirds full. It was then that the lights dimmed, the forward wall shimmered, and some broadcast-quality 3-D video appeared. The piece ran ten minutes or so, and did a bang-up job of describing Droidware Inc., the high-quality robots that walked, crawled, rolled, hopped, skipped and jumped out of its highly automated factories, and the almost godlike crew of full-time employees who ran the company. All thirty-six of them. The last of these, a grotesque apparition who had what appeared to be a hundred-year-old head on a twenty-five-year-old female body, bid us welcome and introduced a man who appeared as if by magic at the center of the stage.