FSE

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I used to be an office drone. That seems like a lifetime ago now. The smell of soykaf, and the idle banter of the middle managers as they watched us work. The terminal with the sticky keys that nobody bothered to fix. The uniform little cubicles filling the room, obscured from any public facing areas. Dim, dingy, and soul-crushingly depressing. They say it's on purpose. Keep everyone tractable. Compliant. I say they're too cheap to bother with an interior decorator. Grinding us down is just a bonus. Not that it matters now.

You ever get wrapped up in something so much bigger than you, you can’t even figure which way the exit is? So far down the rabbit hole you can’t make heads or tails of it anymore?

Of course not. You still have your SIN. That’s why you’re reading this on a backnet message board. Be sure not to use any terminals that can get traced to you, and learn where the cameras are before you end up like me.

Of course, I say that, but it wasn’t some idiot running his mouth that cost me my career, among almost everything else in my life, the crater it was.

I used to work for ARES. Maybe I shouldn’t say that openly, but frag it. Any breather with two neurons to spark together could have figured that out. Like most of the drones in their corporate office, I spent most of my time doing just enough to not get fired. It wasn’t a bad life, exactly. Dull. Ordinary. There was a kind of safety in that. A familiarity.

Or so I thought.

The problem with working in a branch office is that you have just as much access as most other places, but a tenth of the security. Call it a hunch, but looking back? I say half of what happened was entirely an inside job.

They hit the cameras first. It couldn’t have been difficult. No need to bother searching for the mainframe, there was a physical access point in the security room. The security room right there in the goddamned lobby. I found out later they’d already taken down the old bastard napping inside with a suppressed SMG, and subsonic ammunition. Quick and relatively quiet. He didn’t have a chance to hit the alarms.

While the decker slipped in and got the run of the place, the enforcer moved in, slipping past the patrols with ease, since they had eyes in every corner of the building. Maglocks slid open, as the enforcer approached, and just like clockwork he was into the back offices.

I don’t remember why I was in the management wing. It seemed unimportant at that moment. The troll grabbed me from behind and put his spurs against my neck. The high carbon steel blades anchored to the immense bones of his hand would have made a mess of my suit, not to mention my carotid, so I did what anyone would have, in that position. I bluffed.

“I was just heading back to my office”, Whatever it was he wanted, it wasn’t worth killing me over. It certainly wasn’t worth me dying over. “We could play it cool. Real easy.” As if I had the authority to give him anything he wanted. But he didn’t know that, and I spent the next forty seconds trying to figure out my play. What could I possibly do?

Forty seconds is a long time with a warhawk pistol pressed against your fourth lumbar vertebra. If he’d squeezed that trigger, the bullet would have come out about my stomach… along with the fragments of my shattered spine. I’m surprised I didn’t piss myself.

When we got into the room, I was going to just cross it, but he grabbed me by the neck, and walked me very carefully around the perimeter. He snarled something at me about trying to trigger the silent alarm with the floor plate, and whipped me with the gun. As the blood dripped down the side of my head, I found myself staring at my bosses terminal.

Those few seconds felt like an eternity. I didn’t know the bastard’s password. I didn’t know anything about his terminal. But as I tapped the power on the monitor, I felt the strange relief wash over me. Who the hell leaves their private terminal unlocked? For just a moment, I almost wanted to blame him for the whole mess. It was a cathartic notion, but quickly dismissed when the reality of the heavy pistol against my skull took center stage.

Navigating the files and transferring the ones the runner wanted was simplicity itself. I kept my eyes on the terminal and didn’t ask any questions. I kept my hands where he could see them, and just waited it out.

“See? Play it nice and cool. How about I just sit here for a while? I never saw you.” I more pleaded than said.

“Suits me fine.” The gravel voice replied. “You just sit tight and maybe you won’t eat a bullet today.”

I really should have considered the fine print on that deal.

He slipped out and I gave it a count of ten before I considered doing the same, standing up from the chair on shaky legs to try and manage my way out of the room. But the fresh realization caught up to me before I could manage a step, and I sank down heavily into the plush surface of the desk chair again.

I just gave someone a bunch of computer files off of a supervisor terminal. Cameras saw the whole thing go down. ARES corporate wasn’t going to care about the how or why of it. They were just going to crucify me to appease the higher ups on the chain.

I’d be lucky if I even made it to a cell.

As if on cue, the blaring klaxon of the alarm sounded in the hall. I had only the span of minutes to either save my ass, or kiss it goodbye.

I had options. I could either duck out and try to evade the patrols and just get out of the building. Stay out of their reach and take my chances in the streets just like that. I could try and talk my way out of it, cooperate and hope to get a pink slip instead of a firing squad.

Or I could try and wipe the local server of the footage.

After all, I had an unlocked supervisor terminal at my fingertips.

Pulling the emergency cable I kept in my pocket, I shoved the socket into the datajack in my skull. I should have been less forceful, maybe. But screw the headache, I needed this done, yesterday. Tapping into the network was easy enough from this side of things. The office security was designed to let a supervisor credential through. Period.

It was my best chance, as I slipped through the walled garden of the office network, navigating as quickly as my neurons could fire to get to the security master node. The span of seconds, sleazing my way through the network to redirect the security team away from this side of the building. Grabbing the datafiles for the security cameras straight to my internal storage, and wiping the whole damn thing.

I set the cameras to record a ten minute loop over themselves, and changed the password to the maximum sixty four character limit of random noise and garbage before I jacked out. I was careful to wipe down the keyboard, and anything else I’d touched, before I slipped out into the hallway, and back to my cubicle as though nothing had happened.

It was a tense day for all of us, my wariness about the security patrols sweeping back and forth wasn’t any different than anyone else’s at face value. I doubt any of us got much real work done.

As I walked out of the building, I saw the crime scene tape, the officers taking photographs and writing notes, shell casings strewn across the floor, each one marked with a little yellow placard. They hadn’t moved the body, it seemed. A pool of blood beneath the security guard, who was slumped against the wall as if the tired old ork had just fallen asleep with the door open. I tried not to see it. Tried to unsee it. In the end, all I could do was keep on walking. Flush the thought down the memory hole, and pretend I didn’t have it.

I never learned his name. Maybe none of us did. What did it matter now? He was dead.

He was dead, and if anyone found out how I was wrapped up in this, I’d be joining him.

Home was scarcely more than a coffin motel. The concrete building stood cracked and weathered off a dingy side street in the back end of the side of town no smart cabbie will take you. It was a good place to find all the wrong things, and the wrong place to attract attention.

As I slipped past the alleyway and rounded the corner to the filthy stairs of the building I called home, a familiar voice called out to me from beside the dumpsters.

Beryl, one of the local prostitutes. Pretty, for an ork, if a bit tall. She was half a foot taller than me, easily, but despite the prejudices never had an unkind thing to say to me. Word was she used to be a runner, but took a stroke of bad luck in a place that wouldn’t knit right. A wealth of information if you were willing to buy her time for conversation, but most people… most people wanted the other things she could do with her mouth.

“Drek, you look done in. Don’t tell me your cushy little office job is that hard on you.” She teased, as she waved me over. It wouldn’t be the first time I took her up to my cheap little room and we broke some piece of furniture or another. Sometimes she even stuck around to eat my food and drag me into the shower for more. She knew me better than most.

“Job’s fine, got tangled up in a runner’s business. Don’t want to talk about it out here. Coming up?” I asked, hooking a thumb over my shoulder. It piqued her curiosity, but she only arched a brow in response.

“You buying?” She asked, running a hand over her pendulous breasts, barely restrained in fishnet and the barest patches of latex. I knew exactly what she looked like beneath the outfit, the way her russet nipples carried the shine of bronze piercings; a pair of horseshoes she swore were good luck, if you tongued them just right.

“Neg on that. This time it’s tits for tat.” I quipped, shaking the image out of my head. “You want the fresh dirt, I got more of it than I know what to do with. Up to you, chummer.” I said as I turned back to the stairs.

Beryl’s innate curiosity made her choice a foregone conclusion, and I knew it. As we made our way up the stairs, she sighed in resignation, stripping out of her top before I even had the door open. It was a welcome bit of comfort as I slid the cheap lock shut behind us, and all but shoved her down on my bed.

Beauty of an ork was often in their savagery. Her strength and size meant she gave every bit as good as she got, and as tense as I was, today that meant we were both going to have bruised hips and pleasant, if a bit fuzzy memories.

I didn’t bother pulling out of her, and she didn’t ask. Her pleasured grunting as I pumped my hips into her culminated in her wrapping her legs around my back, pulling me in to kiss me in a savage intimacy. Something I knew for a fact she didn’t do for just anyone.

In the afterglow, I ran my hand over her bare stomach, and sighed up at the ceiling as she watched me. The old scars that riddled her body rose and fell, strained against every breath. I could see the worst of it, where the shrapnel tore open her side. She was lucky to live through it. A few of her organs had to be replaced with cybernetics, and it was touch and go for a long time. But she lived. Everything has a price.

“So?” She asked, as I touched her in a way that was much more intimate than the sex we just shared.

Her scars were comforting to me, in a strange way. She’d been through it. She’d seen and done and lived. She was still here. She made it, didn’t she? One way or another, she stuck around.

“The branch office got hit today. Small team. I have the footage.” I said, tapping the side of my head. “I was the star of the show. Corporate doesn’t know that, and with any luck, it stays that way.”

“Fucking hell.” She said, as I pulled out an old rig. A ratwork of cables and chips barely functioning as a machine. But it was invisible. Not on any network. It couldn’t be networked at all. My private terminal. It looked more like a box of spare parts unless you knew where the right switches were.

I jacked in and copied the files over, keeping the original set in my onboard chips. She watched the footage, several video streams displayed in simulcast. The troll enforcer gunning down the poor bastard in the security room, quick and efficient. The decker sliding into the chair, oblivious to the blood spatter left behind. Hands flying across the terminal, capturing the video feeds and relaying instructions as the enforcer wove his way through the building.

And me, oblivious office drone, walking towards the management wing for some stupid office errand. All of the sudden the troll swept in from behind, carbon steel blades against my neck and for the briefest moment, I felt the ghost sensation of it. The memory of how warm they were compared to me.

She whistled as she watched me talk, there was no sound, but she mouthed along a little bit, and nodded. Nodded again as I sat at the terminal, and began tapping the keys to transfer the information to the removable drive.

“You’re fragged if they ever see this. This isn’t the only copy. The decker wasn’t an amateur. Look.” She said, pointing at the feed of the security room. The decker pulled a datastick out of their pocket, slotted it, and snatched it up as they left, synchronized with the enforcer, right back out into the streets.

“Kept their faces hidden the entire time. Could be any troll. And I don’t have any idea about the decker. But you? Fuck. Your goose is cooked, man.” She shook her head at that. “Shit’s insurance. You open your mouth, you’re the only one they can go after.”

I knew that, hearing it from her wasn’t comforting at all.

“Keep your head down, chummer. Maybe you get lucky and nobody catches on. You wiped the system, right?”

“And looped the cameras, and locked it up tighter than tight. Going to take a miracle to get into it, and nothing to find when they do.” I said, shaking my head. “Only thing that went right for me today.”

“Might be the only one that mattered.” Beryl said, bringing her hand to my cheek. “Gonna grab a bite before I head out. Want anything? Besides another go?” She asked, with a teasing wink.

“Yeah, actually.” I said, with a sigh. “Keep your ear to the ground. You hear anything bad, let me know to hit the ground running.”

“Sure thing, chummer. Wouldn’t want my favorite fuck to feed the fish.”

Some things never changed. I was glad she was one of them.