J4CK3D

[kiyakotari]

For my fiction course we had to write a short (4-6 pages) focused scene. Here's mine. It's Hiiroshi-centric with appearances by Aiko, Daiichi, Hideo, and a random bum (for those who have some clue as to what that implies). For anyone else who happens on it...ah...call it a cyberpunky o-fic drabble.



J4CK3D

Masashiro Hiiroshi stomped up the sidewalk, hands shoved in his pockets and shoulders hunched.  If other people were too slow getting out of his way he shouldered past without acknowledging them – but there weren’t enough idiots out today for the minute acts of aggression to really take the edge off his frustration.  Despite his small size, most people dodged him automatically, thanks to the jagged, stylized spider emblazoned on the sleeve of his hooded sweatshirt.  The larger matching insignia on the back of the garment guaranteed that no one he did run into followed him to make an issue of the encounter. 

The Black Widows were a fairly new force in the constant dance, the shift and push and pull, of the city’s gangs.  Yet they’d already carved out a well-fortified niche for themselves in the street hierarchy, and had shown no signs of slowing down on their climb upwards.  No one in their right mind would risk angering the Widows by touching someone who wore the spider, not unless they had a damned strong gang affiliation of their own to back them up later.

Hiiroshi kicked a discarded can, sending it clattering against the wheels of a parked car.  Permanently parked, if the thick rust and broken windows – rough slashes in the code that made up his vision – were any indication.  Abandoned in its dotage, just like the rest of this ruined city, he thought.  Well, I’m not anywhere near that yet!  I’m far from useless - how dare they leave me behind? 

Almost without conscious thought he activated the video mode on his corneal screens, playing the recorded conversation from earlier that morning over yet again.  He walked on auto-pilot, awareness focused half on the street around him and half on the images dancing superimposed over his code-translated view of the real world.

#

“Why can’t I come?” The words were petulant and angry, quite unlike the eight-year-old hacker’s usual controlled behavior, and he knew it, but he couldn’t seem to stop the tone from coming through.

Daiichi’s face was impassive as always, artificial red-disk eyes whirling slightly as he processed what he was seeing.  He shifted his weight, the only outward sign that he was at all surprised by the outburst, and glanced at the stack of crates and shipping containers that the Widows’ leader was perched on.

Hideo shook her head, an elbow propped on one knee, her other leg swinging casually.  “You’re too young, kiddo.  I’d take you behind me any day in a Net run – hell, I’d back you up there! – and you know it, but in the physical world you’re still too little.  Everyone’s got their place, and yours is here, not out on a hit like this one.”  Her eyes narrowed just a bit, nearly hiding the bright yellow dashes of the biomech augmentation implants that had replaced her irises years ago.  “Besides, the guns we’ll be using are too big for you to handle.  The recoil would knock you right over.”

“Bullshit.”  The word was bitten off, hard edged.  Hiiroshi didn’t wait for a reply before pushing forward with another line of argument.  “I could be backup!  I could wait with the getaway team.”  He wanted to stomp his foot, but he didn’t.  Such infantile behavior would only emphasize his age, and that would guarantee his exclusion. 

“No.  I don’t want you anywhere near ground zero on this one.  You’ll stay in our territory today.”  Hideo’s tone was flat and precise, the words an order.

Hiiroshi opened his mouth to protest despite that, but Daiichi cut in, the cyborg’s voice gentle but firm.  “All someone has to do is switch on an electro-mag pulse to queer your implants, and then you’ll be dead in the water, Hiiro.  Your neural systems are too heavily reliant on your Net jack – it’s not like me risking losing the use of an arm for a while.  You’re too integrated.  This is going to be tough enough without having to worry about hauling your catatonic self out of the middle of a firefight.”

Hiiroshi’s mouth snapped shut and he stared at both of them, then turned on his heel and stomped out of the warehouse. 

#

Hiiroshi snarled and deactivated the video feed to his corneal displays.  His age and size had occasionally been a factor in his role in gang activities, but this was the first time he’d ever been completely excluded because of them.  It was ridiculous.  It was frustrating.  The gang was his family, or at least the closest thing to it he’d ever known, and he wanted to be there to help them.  I should be there, damnit!  I’m just as capable here as I am in the Net!

He turned a corner, and without even looking down stepped around a charge junkie huddled under some newspapers on a doorstep.  The scrolling, indifferent code told Hiiroshi that the man’s mouth was open, eyes wide and glassy, the port behind his left ear snapping and crackling as the fix shocked him into oblivion.  The Net jack added more facts to the symbols as well, subtle twists that sketched out how much charge was left in the cartridge, how long it would be before the man’s biological systems gave out at that level of usage.  Hiiroshi took all the information in habitually, without really considering most of it.

Something flickered, a sudden burst of familiar data at the edge of Hiiroshi’s perceptions, and he turned to face it.

Aiko walked sedately up the other side of the street, her appearance as always incongruous with the city around her.  Sleek black hair, ruffled petticoats under her knee-length skirt, and lace falling over her hands to hide everything but her fingertips.  She carried two large books, and he snorted at the sight of such antiques.  She was the only person he knew who still used such an inefficient means of information storage on a daily basis.

Then again, she was also the only person he knew who didn’t have a port.  He honestly didn’t understand what Hideo saw in her.  Sure, she was pretty enough – the code that described her was always oddly elegant, a quirk that stood out even in his view of the world.  He supposed her black hair with those weirdly blue eyes probably made for a pleasurable dash of exotic spice, but eye color was easy enough to change, and hair even easier, so that couldn’t be it.  She was remote, unapproachable – Hiiroshi was sure that she still insisted on ignoring Hideo’s overtures – and seemed uninterested in anything but her studies on…whatever it was she studied.  She was bizarre.  Even Daiichi thought so, and his views on people were always solid, so it couldn’t be that Hiiroshi was just missing something obvious about her.

Hiiroshi shrugged and crossed the street anyway – it wasn’t as if he had anything better to do with his time.  He dodged through the steady flow of commuting cars, ignoring the shouts and blaring horns that protested his lack of consideration. 

Aiko looked up as he approached.  She always did that, even though he would have sworn up until that moment of eye contact that she was permanently even more disconnected from the meat world than he was when jacked deep into the Net.  The young woman blinked once, slowly, then stopped and watched him with that impassive face of hers.  She would make a hell of a hostage negotiator, a tiny corner of his brain observed wryly.

Hiiroshi waved one hand, a limp little movement.  “Hey.”  Now that he was face to face with her, he wasn’t sure that coming over had been a good decision after all.  He toyed with the idea of just walking away again, no matter how rude it might seem.  

Aiko tilted her head.  “You don’t happen to know where Hideo is, do you?”

Hiiroshi stared at her for several long moments.

Aiko’s expression didn’t change, but something about the set of her shoulders whispered that she wasn’t impressed by his lack of response.  The slight sense of disrespect – he was a Black Widow, and even if no one on the streets messed with her for some reason, he was still higher on the food chain than she was, no matter what Hideo’s interest in her might be – goaded him, sparking off the frustration he’d been stewing in all day.

“Why should I care?  They decided I was too little to go with them today, and that’s just fine by me!”  He was almost shouting, fists clenching by his sides as he squared off against her.  “And it’s none of your business anyway.  You aren’t even one of us!” 

The code told him that Aiko’s pupils dilated by two millimeters at his outburst, but other than that she didn’t react at all.  The wash of bitterness he felt at her discipline in the face of his own loss of control served to tamp down his temper just a bit, but he was still fuming.

“So they’re hitting another gang today.”  It wasn’t a question.  “I see why they left you behind.”

The words were a slap in the face, but it was the tone – flat, clinical, uncaring, and so certain – that set him off again.  “What’s that supposed to mean?  You think I can’t cut it?  Huh?  You think I’m not good enough for a rumble?  That I can’t –”

There was no warning, no indication at all in the near-precognition of Hiiroshi’s coded vision that she was going to move.  One moment her arms were supporting the books as she blinked at him, and the next second she was right in his face, both volumes shifting to rest on just one forearm. Her freed hand struck too quickly for him to process, resting lightly on the jack hidden beneath his hair – the palm of her hand brushed the port behind his left ear as he started to jerk away, but then he froze in alarm.  One twitch of her fingers in the right place – severing the feed from his jack implant – and he was blind.  He’d never seen her move that fast.  He’d never seen her even give a hint that she knew the first thing about fighting.

Hiiroshi gaped at her, too stunned to think of a way to escape from that gentle threat.

“If you’re not capable of defending yourself against me, then you’ve got a long way to go before you’re an asset to Hideo.”  Aiko wasn’t even gloating, simply stating facts.  It was hard to argue with that.

She dropped her hand away from his implant, stepped back again, and looked at him.  Her face was still carefully neutral, that strange non-expression, but there was a sense of something else underneath it now.  Hiiroshi wasn’t at all sure what that something might be.  He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“Go back and wait for them, and maybe you’ll be able to help patch someone up.  And ask Daiichi to start teaching you how to fight – how to really fight.  The bits of street scrapping you’ve picked up are useless against someone who knows what they’re doing.”  Aiko walked past him then, continuing down the sidewalk without looking back.  “When you see Hideo, tell her I’ll be at the usual spot.”

He stared straight ahead until that last, offhand comment – at that though he spun around, watching her walk away with her ruffles and her lace, just as out of place as always.

Well hell. Maybe Daiichi was wrong for once.

Comments

[danaka-dollfie.livejournal.com]

*melts into a puddle of goo* Eeeee that was awesome! Just awesome! ^____^ Luv reading and learning more about them! Aiko rocks that's for sure *grins* That's exactly how I pictured her to be hehe. Man Hailey's all raring to jump in there and interact too XD.

This also helps because I've been meaning to write some more of Hailey-Keelan and Xane's back story so this is good motivation!

[kiyakotari.livejournal.com]

**grin** Glad you liked it.

[greenjudy.livejournal.com]

Beautiful, well-paced, self-contained but also pointing cool, creepy tentacle-feelers out at much larger story material. Hiiro's situation comes through really well through the POV, subtle but clear, the depth and the incredible hassle of all his implants.

I had no idea Aiko was such a bad-ass.

[kiyakotari.livejournal.com]

**huge grin** Well, Aiko was raised by Jian and Wren. She's a bookish girl in lolita digs who's more than capable of putting her foot through a door (genetic manipulation, after all, is something that does carry on to the next generation...and Wren's not psi like Darryl, but she's certainly manipulated to hell and back).

Hiiro is so much fun to write. We had to write a short exercise in class where we took a single 'item' or possession of our main character and did two points of view on it, one where it was appealing to them and one where it was abhorrent. I did Hiiro's Net jack. **grin** The class loved it.