ELECTRONIC EYE

THE PROMOTION

CONTENT WARNING: The story you’re about to read has dark themes and portrays immoral values. You will probably find this story to be disturbing, as is the author’s intent.

Please continue with this in mind, and at your discretion.

“Ew. He thinks we’re dating?” Allison asked, her cigarette hanging from her bottom lip as she schooled her round face into a moue that looked a little too forced.

“I guess because he sees us go in here together?” She gestured up at the broken camera that no longer rotated. She and Allison would smoke in the fire escape, next to the sign that said ‘NO SMOKING / NO FUMAR,’ which she found comic because spanish was banned in the building despite it being the EFZ. Some loyalist had scribbled out the sign’s text with a permanent marker. The irony of smoking next to the admonition had been lost on Allison, because Allison was an exceedingly dull and tedious person. But their shared habit had made them compadres who would escape to the disused staircase and gossip.

“Does he think you’re a dyke?” Allison asked. “You have dyke hair.”

“No, I think he think’s I’m a guy.”

“What, like an invert?”

Her throat closed slightly. “No,” she said, dryly, before ashing her cigarette on a railing. “No I think he assumed I was a guy from my name and just,” she shrugged, flicking her cigarette down the middle of the stairwell, listening for when it hit the concrete seven flights down. “Decided to double down on the assumption.”

Allison did not bother putting her cig out when she tossed hers. It landed on the steps between the sixth and seventh floors. “You didn’t correct him?”

“No way. He likes me for some reason. He’s considering me for floor manager after he gets promoted.”

Allison rolled her eyes. “Some reason. It’s because he thinks you’re the only other white guy in the section, if he thinks you’re a guy. Deontae’s numbers are way better than yours. Mine are too. You’re like, one of the worst performers on the floor.”

“Yeah he…made some reference to me being the only,” she articulated scare quotes: “‘Reliable sort’, when we talked. He complained most of the time about how many C2-Ms there were on the floor. I thought he was firing me when I got called up.”

“Everyone thought you were getting fired,” Allison said, placing another cigarette in her mouth. “But you’re getting promoted? And invited out to sushi?”

“Yeah. Never had sushi. You coming?”

“Fuck no! I can’t have people thinking I’m some dyke. And if I were I wouldn’t dyke out with you, no offense. You’re old.”

“I’m thirty. You’re like, two years younger than me.” She moved to light Allison’s cigarette, but Allison stepped back and produced her own lighter.

“Three and a half. Thirty’s old. And you like, don’t know shit about shit, you have dyke teeth, you’re too skinny, and you’re too close to the Cutoff.”

‘The Cutoff’ was the informal term for the expiration of the Unmarried Female Employment Term, which ended at a woman’s 31st birthday. From ages 14-30 anyone with C2-F citizenship could hold a job without being married. Most were married by 17, but some, like Allison, remained unmarried, either by choice, in order to continue working and dodge the childbearing requirement, or due to personality, which she suspected was the likelier case for Allison.

She did not fear the Cutoff, because she did not have C2-F citizenship. She had C1-M citizenship, which was likely why Millowner thought she was a man: legally, she was one. She avoided the CS’s sieving review thanks to her dubious chromosomal sex, an oversight that was never followed up by personal interview. Nobody suspected someone going by the name of Jack Meunier to be an invert. Not enough to actually bother dispatching an agent. There were easier targets in the EFZ.

She tried to reassert the subject. “I don’t think anyone would think you’re a dyke. Nobody from work would see us, we’d be in the city proper. C’mon, you wanna try sushi, right?”

“No, sushi’s dyke shit. Who the hell wants to eat raw fish? Might as well eat box.” Allison said, taking a drag from her fresh cigarette.”

“Jen will be there.”

Allison raised an eyebrow. ‘Jen’ was Millowner’s secretive girlfriend that he never shut up about. He described her as having ‘the mind of a financial sage with the body of a sixteen-year-old girl and the libido of an eighteen-year-old boy.’ She managed Millowner’s assets and investments, and apparently sent him a bawdy message every five minutes that he would laugh at loudly in his office, the sort of laughter only the seriously disturbed could muster that much of in a day. There was a running pool among the office workers on whether Jen existed. This gave Allison pause. “There’s no fuckin’ way, right? I mean, a troll like Millowner could never bag some teenage super-genius comedienne nympho, right?”

“Money talks,” she said quietly. “Money talks, walks, fucks, and has asthma.”

“No amount of middle management money would make me wanna spread it for a humorless fat cunt like Wilson Millowner. I mean, not at the rate he talks about. Everything he talks about her doing is the kind of fantasy the dumbest kind of guy would have. Like, he said that he had a three-way with Jen and her twin. He’d need to be like, at least a multimillionaire for a three-way with the kinda guy who looks like him, and I’ve seen the kind of car he drives,” Allison took a drag, and then, because she was tedious, added: “Not a multimillionaire car.”

She opened her mouth to counter that she had known twins with terribly low standards before but was interrupted by her digital watch, the alarm reedy from age. She smacked the yellowed crystal face of it to silence the alarm. “You coming, or not?”

Allison nodded. “Fine, but if any of the guys ask I’m going as your friend because I just really want to try sushi.”

She said, “I’ll send you the address,” and made her way back towards her cube. She gave Millowner a thumbs-up as she passed his office. He nodded, holding his phone under his chin and apparently relating the news, before uproariously laughing at something said on the other end. She found her cube and sat at her desk, opening her terminal.

Deontae peered over the wall, looking down at her through his coke-bottle glasses. “You left your terminal on,” he said judgmentally.

“Thanks for turning it off, Deontae.”

“You know, Argus pays us very well to maintain a high level of security in Praxus. You should respect that paycheck by maintaining a level of security in your own cube.”

Argus did not pay very well, and the security of Praxus was laughably easy to circumvent if you knew how, especially in the EFZ. But she bit back any retort and just said, “Thanks, Deontae. That’s good advice.”

Acquiescence only enraged Deontae. Some people were like that. Deontae had little real power as a C2-M but was the floor’s highest earner, and that came with some tattletale privileges. “I don’t think you’re going to last here much longer if you don’t shape up, Jack. I saw Mister Millowner chewing you out. I’m just looking out for you. If you want to blow off my advice, it’s your ass.”

“Actually, Deontae,” she said, turning away from her desk and spinning lazily in her office chair. “Wilson called me into his office to let me know that he was getting promoted.”

Deontae narrowed his eyes. “And why would he—”

“And he’s gonna need a replacement manager.” She laced her fingers together. It felt a little rotten to crush Deontae like this but he was being a massive tool. “Seems like I’m in the running. He didn’t tell you?”

“Don’t fucking—”

“He also invited me out to sushi tonight. Guess that’s going to be my secondary interview.”

Deontae prepared more incredulous bitching, and she prepared her own abusive rejoinder, but Elroy, a worker in the cube over, groaned “Shut up, both of you.”

Deontae moved to the other wall. “Did you hear what Jack said? Why the fuck am I not getting promoted?”

“You know why the fuck you’re not getting promoted. Now shut the fuck up and get back to work.” Elroy said, and that was that. Deontae looked at her with murder in his eyes, but did not say a word as he sank down into his cube. She heard him angrily typing at his terminal.

She turned to her own. There were five windows on the display. A large square one, the drone that flew over the city, observing the streets, tagging with little green squares every known residence. She minimized the window. Even if there were vagrants out, it wasn’t worth the commission she’d get by having them processed. Instead, the other four windows, live feeds from wide-shot cameras, called her attention.

In each one, a different person, highlighted by a green box, were shown working. They were the industrial sector feeds, on the south side of the EFZ. Two suspected organizers, one suspected drug smuggler, one suspected economic fainéant. Their personal information: name, age, citizenship rank, ethnotype, blood type, family history, medical records, all of it would scroll in a little window if she moused over their green boxes.

The percentage of profit extracted from prisoners all went to the company, but when she was a manager, she’d finally be able to get a taste of her department’s total peonage from the convict lease. By sending those organizers up, she was paying her future self. All she needed to do was impress Millowner at sushi.

---

She wore a suit to work, which she suspected was a factor in why Millowner liked her, but she put on the slightly nicer of her two prêt-à-porter jackets and a silk tie that her roommate had planned to get married in. She combed her dyke hair and she brushed her dyke teeth. She packed her gloves, I.D., money, mugger money, checkpoint money, and keys in the appropriate pockets. Then, she went about carefully obscuring edged weapons about her person. A thin skewer under her lapel, a fighting knife against her back, a balanced knife for throwing in each shoe, and a thumb dagger hidden under her collar. These were all made from hardened plastic, in order for her to carry them into work without setting off the metal detectors. It was better to have them and not need them than to need them and be without. She checked her watch. 21:03. She would be late. Work ended for management at 18:00 but she and the other workers were scheduled to work until 20:00. She had twenty-seven minutes to cross the EFZ into the city proper and then to the sushi place. She checked herself in the mirror. Despite her efforts, she still looked like a dyke.

---

She was lucky that Jack Meunier had C1-M status. It made her exempt from an eyeprint scan at the checkpoint, which was not impossible for her to subvert, but the flash made her uncomfortable. She was sensitive to it. The checkpoint PMC guards had glared at her. She did not think they suspected her of being a woman. They had stared at her nose long enough that they were probably wondering in their heads if “Meunier” was some kind of gypsy name. To her knowledge, it was not. The types of PMC goon who operated the checkpoints had their own opinions on which persons of European decent should qualify for C1-M and C2-F status; Praxus had been generous to amateur race scientists with a capacity for extreme violence, but their logic was a crucible which wanted for new people to burn.

The buses were cleaner and faster in the city proper, but just so. People were expected to clean up after themselves, but nobody did, and after years without upkeep it smelled like a morgue. When she disembarked, she needed to pause for breath. She barely heard the drone that was flying over the EFZ. She looked for it in the sky, the kite-shaped aircraft that swam across the night. It seemed so much further away now, darkening fewer stars from this angle.

She looked at her watch as she crossed the threshold into the restaurant. 21:44. Not good. Millowner liked punctuality. She gave his name to the maître d’, who led her to a raised section of the restaurant, where she was instructed to take off her shoes. She pulled them off slowly, making sure the knives inside were carefully tucked into the insole and out of sight, before being led in her socks to a table that was set into the raised section to make a sort of floor-level booth table.

“Hey, Jack-O!” Millowner said. Seated across from him was Allison, who was wearing a dress and earrings, and the most bemused expression she had ever seen on the usually bland woman. Across from Allison, next to Millowner, was a tripod stand and a telescoping rod which held at eye-level Millowner’s phone, with the brightness turned up so high she could barely see what was on the screen.

The maître d’ bowed and left her to this shitty tableu of a wheezing asthmatic, a tedious office worker, and what appeared to be a remote caller. She asked, feeling stupid: “Jen couldn’t make it?”

“No Jack,” said Allison, grimacing into a smile and nodding towards the phone “That’s Jen.”

Millowner gestured at the cushion across from him. “Dozo, dozo. That’s japanese for ‘please sit.’ As is tradition in Nihon, we are sitting seiza. That’s japanese for ‘Japan’ and for…how we’re sitting.” He was sitting like a villain in a kung fu movie, on his knees with his hands akimbo at his hips, making very grand gestures across the table. He also seemed to be wearing a traditional japanese silk robe, and was barechested underneath.

She kneeled, and immediately felt it in her scar tissue. She sucked in the urge to groan, not wanting to give credit to Allison’s accusations that she was old.

“I thought you would have had Allison accompany you.” Millowner said. Strike two, she thought.

Allison opened her mouth, probably to announce that they weren’t dating and other ruinous details, but she beat her to it, saying “I had to go to my apartment to change. It’s a bit further south than hers. I apologize for being late.”

This seemed to satisfy Millowner. That or he was far too excited to introduce his…phone. “That’s alright I guess. We’ve had cha and saké and conversation aplenty. But I’m being impolite.” He gestured to his left. “You’ve heard plenty about her, but I’d like to introduce you to Jen Kurohime, my kanojou-daisuke. My waifu.” He moved as if putting his arms around a person, cupping the air around his phone. She briefly glanced at Allison, who bore an expression that skipped nausea and went straight to the verge of puking.

Her eyes had adjusted to the low light of the booth and the high brightness of the screen. Displayed on the screen, in a simulacrum of a pastel-shade bedroom, was a girl. Or, what appeared to be a girl. ‘Jen’ looked as Millowner had said: half-european, half-japanese, teenaged, with bright blue eyes and very white teeth. The virtual thing smiled, and said: “Kon’nichiwa, Jack Meunier-san, I have heard much about you, in regards to your professional standing and mentsu.”

‘Jen’ sounded younger than sixteen. It took all of her effort not to make a face. She thought the natural reaction of most humans at your bosses’ virtual child bride would be a disgusted frown so deep it cracked the edges of your mouth, or the most understandable murder-suicide in history. She said coolly, “Uh, konnichiwa, Jen. Nice to finally meet you.”

The phone giggled, “Your pronunciation is so bad, baka.”

She was dizzy. Allison looked ready to pass out. There are situations so awkward where you wish that a meteor would fall from the sky and take out the city block you were in. In that booth, she felt as though maybe a nuclear strike was appropriate.

Millowner laughed again, loud enough that it turned heads in the restaurant, and the virtual girl giggled demurely with him. Tearing up, Millowner said: “Sorry, if you knew what baka meant, you’d have laughed too.”

She forced a smile. She said, “I guess I am a baka,” and a piece of her that she would not get back was lost.

Allison stood up. She said a very rushed: “I need to use the bathroom,” and did not wait for her to make room, stepping over her and half of the table and going to search for somewhere to hide. Terrified of being left alone with the man and the phone, she also stood. “I’ll…go with her.”

“Good idea,” Millowner said. “Japanese are perverts by nature. Luckily for Jen-tan, so am I, but it’s smart to look after your woman.”

She couldn’t even muster a response. She bowed out of reflex, and hurried to find Allison.

---

They had cracked the window and were sharing one of her cigarettes. Allison was red-faced. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. This is so much worse than her not existing.”

“Yeah, I know. Shit, interpolators have gotten way more advanced since—” she caught herself, “since I last checked.”

Allison burned down half the cigarette in one puff, before going. “Fuck you’re old. Do you just, not get the news? That’s not an interpolator, that’s a plexus.”

“Can you skip the abuse and just tell me what that is?”

“Basically,” Allison began, before narrowing her eyes. “Very basically, it’s an interpolator, but instead of running off of a server, it runs off of a single privately-owned LPU.”

“What, like the city programs?” she asked.

“No. The LPU it runs off of isn’t an entire person, just a partial brain used as a processor,” Allison said. “Usually an orphan or a convict from the Tower. The wetware is cheap, but the actual cybernetic hardware that goes into it is…” she made a big gesture. “If Millowner’s making plexus money as a floor manager at Argus, we must be really getting shafted. Either that or he has good blackmail on someone high up.”

“Well, if I cinch this promotion, I’m taking you with me,” she said magnanimously. “My first decree as manager will be to make our smoke breaks forty-five minutes long.”

“Thanks Jack,” Allison said, with no real gratitude, “but when I got here, Millowner told me I was in the running to replace him too. Apparently being punctual gets you a lot of mentsu with Jen. And when I get the job, you’re not getting dick.”

“What? But you’re a C2-F!”

“He listens to what the dead-child-powered sixteen-year-old says,” Allison shrugged. “And you see, I have a certain rapport with that dead-child-powered sixteen-year-old already.”

She began to realize that Allison was more competitive than she had first assumed. Tedious and dull, but dangerous, which made Allison rise in her estimation, just so. “We really have to compete for the praise of a dead-child-powered sixteen-year-old?”

“Yeah bitch,” Allison made a circle between thumb and forefinger, and placed it in front of her groin, “and by the end of the night my mentsu’s gonna be so big and hard you’ll be begging for a taste. I’m gonna be blowing hot mentsu all over your face, neck and chest when I get that promotion.”

“Dyke,” she said, before tossing the cigarette into a toilet.

“You wish,” replied Allison, who turned to the mirror and took a moment to fluff her cleavage and play with her perfectly middle-parted hair. “I’m just half-cut off of that saké. You get a lot of mentsu by going drink for drink with the boss.”

“Is that so?” she asked, straightening her tie.

“Don’t try it, Jack. I’ll out-drink you, Millowner, and the computer,” said Allison.

She indicated that she would like to see Allison try, and after some more verbal sparring, they returned to the table. The waitress had brought out three bowls of miso soup, and, after some reproachment from Millowner, brought out a bowl to set in front of the phone as well. She took the opportunity to order soju. She was determined to catch up on intoxication, but didn’t want to suffer the ureal taste of saké.

The miso soup was good. The soju helped with her nerves, and by the time the waitress came to take their sushi order, she felt loosely confident in her ability to speak japanese. One of the men who taught her to fight had, at a point in his history, been a yakuza, and while the few words she had learned from her quondam boxing coach had been slurs and swears, she could remember vaguely how to pronounce the names of the sushi dishes she wished to order, while Allison ordered entirely in english.

“Have you had sushi before, Jack-san?” asked the computer.

“Not before, Jen…chan,” she tried to remember some japanese savoir-vivre. Her coach had not been big on traditional etiquette.

“So familiar!” The girl on the phone screen hid her mouth behind her hand when she laughed. “I appreciate your attempt at keishō, Jack-san, but we’ve only just met.”

“You making a move on my girl, Jack-O?” Millowner asked. There was no threat in his voice, but her heart still sunk to pickle in the soju in the pit of her stomach.

“No sir,” she said, trying to remain upright. Every atom of her being wanted to crawl under the table. She wished she could turn invisible, or explode.

Millowner cackled again. “Don’t worry, you and Jen-tan are going to get well enough acquainted soon.”

“Yes, Onie-sama.” ‘Jen’ said. She did not hear enthusiasm, simulated or otherwise, in the fake girl’s voice.

She did not know what this implication meant, for her promotion or her mentsu, but remained quiet until the sushi arrived. For as much as she drank, Allison seemed to be able to put back twice as much, and seemed half as drunk for it. Her cheeks and her ears felt hot, and it was only through sheer force of will that she was able to keep up conversation.

She found that she did not much care for sushi. She thought it would be like like an expensive-tasting gimbap, but there wasn’t much done with the raw fish to make it taste like a luxury item. She could barely taste any of the roe added for flavor, and suspected that it was some kind of long-running practical joke to make westerners pay top dollar to eat flavorless fish spooge. She quite enjoyed the eel roll, which was sweetly marinated and garnished with mayonnaise, but found sushi, as a venture, a disappointment.

Allison, for her part, had annihilated the sushi. Allison seemed to want any excuse to keep her mouth full, if only to keep from participating in conversation with ‘Jen’. Millowner was too busy talking to partake much in the meal. He seemed preoccupied with a cycle of disparaging her coworkers, drinking, laughing his deranged laugh, pausing from that laugh for a puff from his inhaler, drinking, and fawning over his phone. At one stage in disparaging her coworkers, he called a few of them words that cannot be rendered here, expounding: “...there are certain types given to labor, and certain ones given to administration. Jews and east asians, with their naturally high IQs and work ethic, are sometimes too smart for leadership roles. They’re given to scheming, it’s why they’re good analysts and accountants. S’why I need you two, you’re both of good stock…although, Jack-O, you could come off as swarthy at times.”

She had read a pamphlet on racial hygeine before. It was the only scientific literature that was free. But it had bored her so much that she had given up and resigned herself to racial inferiority. She knew that “swarthy” was a comment about her nose. Allison had tanned darker than she did in the summer.

She readied a prevarication, but Allison cut her off by asking: “What does Meunier mean, anyway?”

She froze. She had known, she knew, she could have recalled about two bottles of soju ago, but right now it just sounded like vaguely european vowels bracketed by mushy european consonants.

The plexus saved her bacon. “Meunier is the French cognate for the surname Miller!” it helpfully provided. “Parlez-vous français, Jacques-san?”

“Uh, oui, très très peu,” she replied, exhausting her knowledge of français.

“Well that explains the nose,” Millowner said. “Don’t worry, you can get it fixed if you get this job. Or your girlfriend, if she lets you.” He winked at Allison.

Allison immediately said, “I’m not so sure,” covering herself by adding: “I mean, paying for Jack? A little non-traditional, if you ask me.”

“Right,” Millowner said. “Right, a man should pay his own way.”

“Absolutely right,” Allison said, nodding.

She took another drink of soju, making eye contact with the simulated girl in the simulated bedroom shining out from the screen. She felt an immediate pang of intense loneliness. The soju did not help with the feeling, but she drained the bottle anyway.

“So, your name means Miller, eh?” Millowner mused. “I guess it was destiny for you to work for me. Do you believe in nominative determinism, Jack?”

Not having a name made it difficult to believe that one’s name held any bearing on their destiny. “I’m open to the idea,” she hedged. “I’ve never seen it fail in practice.”

Millowner pointed at her. “Good. An open mind, I like that. Now,” he turned, “Allison.”

“Yes?” Allison asked, the picture of sober curiosity. She had no idea how the tiny woman was able to drink so much and remain upright.

“Allison Füchs. What’s that? What is Füchs?”

“It means ‘fox’ in German.”

“It sounds like Fucks,” Millowner said.

“Not really, it’s—”

He continued, “When you read it, it looks like Fucks. Allison Fucks.”

She was suddenly aware that Allison was being bullied. She did not know if this was to test her mentsu. She did not know if she was supposed to defend Allison, or to show loyalty to Millowner. She suddenly felt the urge to touch Allison, to shield her somehow.

“I’ve heard it before,” Allison said coolly, taking another sip of saké.

Millowner raised his own cup of saké, before looking at her. “Does she?” he asked. His voice was low and conspiratorial, like they had moved on to the ‘sharing secrets’ of the terrible evening.

“Does she…I’m sorry sir, I don’t understand.” She understood. She did not like it, she did not want to understand, but she did.

“Does Allison Fuck?” Millowner’s eyes were fixed on her, but she did not budge. She felt Allison’s eyes on her as well.

Her throat was dry when she said: “Allison is exceptional in everything she does.” She did not know why she did. Maybe because she thought Allison deserved the praise, or because she thought Allison deserved to be sexually embarrassed. Maybe because she thought that Allison was secretly a dyke, and she believed that all dykes besides herself were good at sex.

“I’ll consider that a glowing performance review,” Millowner said, scuzzily making eyes at Allison. She did not feel very possessive over her coworker but she did want to punch his lights out.

Allison, the picture of composure, inclined her head. “Jack’s just being nice, I’m not exceptional in everything. I’m a terrible cook.”

Millowner laughed so suddenly and so loudly that she jumped. “You’re smart, Allison. I didn’t peg you for it before tonight, but you’re smart. Now,” he said, turning to the phone. “What do you think, Jen-tan?”

‘Jen-tan’ seemed to take some time to process, before saying: “Both Allison-chan and Jack-san have excellent mentsu. I like them both, Onie-sama.”

Millowner seemed delighted at the appraisal. “I like them too! And I’m sure you’re getting seepy, my waifu. I think we should take them home for dessert, so you can get some rest on the way.”

The image on the screen yawned, and Millowner gingerly plucked his phone from the stand and turned it off. “Low battery,” he said. “She gets sleepy as an indicator. Don’t worry, she’s a firecracker at home. Come on, I’ll treat you to some ice cream there.”

“We should probably get back to the EFZ. I don’t think I can eat dessert,” she said.

“Jack’s just being polite. We don’t have a car to follow you, but we’d love to join you for dessert,” Allison said bracingly, adventurously putting a hand on hers.

“Please, there’s plenty of room in my backseat for the two of you. It’s past curfew in the EFZ anyway, and the rates hotels charge here are tsujigiri.” He winked, “That’s japanese for ‘highway robbery.’ Come on, before the people here try and push that nasty green tea ice cream on us.” Millowner rose quickly, grabbing his phone stand and marching a little unsteadily to find his shoes. She rose to follow, and caught Allison smirking at her groan. Her knees felt like they were on fire.

---

The back of the car was plush, and warm, and she felt sick. She breathed deeply. The plexus was apparently able to control the car remotely, and so Millowner spent most of the ride talking to them and drinking. She understood that it was a nice car, although most cars she had been in had been terrible cars, and so all cars with all the upholstery still inside the leather were ‘nice cars’ to her. She articulated the compliment to Millowner, following it by cheekily asking how much he paid for it. “If you don’t mind me asking, of course.”

“Not at all. It was a cool three mil off the lot. Of course, that’s with all the upgrades, like the remote driving and corinthian leather. Smooth ride, isn’t it?”

She nodded, before looking at Allison pointedly and mouthing: ‘Multi-millionaire car.’

Allison rolled her eyes, saying loudly: “You must be getting a lot in peonage to be able to swing it, then? Guess that’s our hard work paying off.”

“Yeah, well it manages the payments. I actually get a lot on credit, and Jen-tan manages my financials. I don’t have to worry about it, she handles everything, from taxes to investments. I just let the money roll in. That, and I get a modest stipend from my father.”

Allison narrowed her eyes and mouthed: ‘Multi-millionaire father, idiot,’ at her.

Millowner did not see their non-verbal conversation. He was busy producing three white little pills from the glove compartment, and she watched as he swallowed one of the pills with a shot of liqour. He proffered the remaining pills and the bottle. “Here,” he said. “So we don’t get tired.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“This is my driving cognac. Just a pick-me-up for when I’m going to and from work,” he said, wobbling the bottle. “And this,” he said, indicating the pills, “Is a surprise.”

Allison took both pills from Millowner’s hand, downed both, and leaned forward. She realized with dread what was about to happen. Allison’s mouth made contact with her own, and she felt Allison’s tongue, tasting of sushi and horrible rice wine, press against her lips. She did not feel the pill being pushed into her mouth, just the tongue. Allison was making a noise. She realized with horror that she was also making a noise. Millowner said, “Hot,” but turned away as the car pulled up to a gated apartment complex.

Allison drew away, and mouthed: ‘Mentsu,’ wetting the upper lip with the tongue. She felt like a spring wound to breaking. Her drunken brain was overstimulated. Allison had taken both pills, and she did not know if it was to rescue her or to spite her. Allison had kissed her, and did not seem disgusted by it. She was coming to the conclusion that the Allison she knew at work was a carefully crafted façade, and the stranger across from her in the car was capable of anything. Part of her drunken brain, whichever part of her brain governed matters pertaining to mentsu, told her that a person capable of anything was very much capable of stealing away a very important promotion from her.

The car pulled in to the luxury apartment complex, and the gate shut behind it. She glanced at the fence. It was probably electrically wired and monitored. She tried to think of ways she could escape if she needed to, but all she could think of was the kiss.

“Home sweet home,” said Millowner, as the car slid soundlessly into a space in the underground parking garage. “Hope you kids are ready for dessert.”

---

The apartment was huge. Stately. Tacky. The walls were lined with samurai swords, japanese artifacts, and flags. There was a book shelf full of books, and a weight training set full of weights. Both looked untouched. All of the furniture looked uncomfortable and heavy. The floors of the living area were covered in what she understood to be called tatami mats, and in the middle there was a straw dummy which was covered all about in cuts, presumably from a sword.

On a black marble-topped kitchen island that was bigger than her actual kitchenette were three bowls of melting rocky road ice cream. The pretense of dessert had been abandoned swiftly. They had been ushered into Millowner’s bedroom, which was bigger than her entire apartment. The décor continued as normal: more swords, a flag of imperial japan, a few posters depicting cartoon characters that looked eerily similar to ‘Jen’. Out of place in one corner was a machine plugged into the wall. It had an industrial gunmetal finish, and it gurgled like a refrigerator from hell. Allison looked ill staring at it.

Millowner tapped the screen of his phone, and the machine whirred to life, a lens mounted on the front projected the image of the artificial girl onto the wall across from the foot of the bed. “Good evening, master!” said ‘Jen’. “And honored guests. Please, have a seat.”

Allison sat heavily on the bed, looking sweaty and glassy-eyed. The pills seemed to have finally defeated Allison’s absurd tolerance. She followed, perching herself as close to Allison as comfort allowed. She wanted to ask if Allison was okay, but was interrupted by the plexus. “You may have been able to infer that this evening has been a secondary evaluation on your worthiness to replace Onie-sama as Criminal Evaluations Floor Manager at Argus Security Enterprise,” ‘Jen’ said. The simulacrum was presented nude in a way that only the deranged could find titillating: hairless, static, not sweating, not breathing. Corpse-like and stark in its uniform paleness, a motion sickness-inducing parallax trick to make the uncannily two-dimensional appear to have depth. She looked around for Millowner but he wasn’t there. She was alone with Allison and the terrible projection on the wall. “There is but one last test: to judge your suitability, we must also know you, body and soul.”

Allison laughed deliriously, laying all the way back onto the mattress. “Every time,” Allison said in a voice so low that she could barely hear. Millowner appeared from the adjoined bathroom, wearing a kimono.

“I think Allison might be ill,” she said. Instinct made her reach for her lapel knife, but she realized belatedly that she had left her jacket at the sushi restaurant.

“That’s okay, I wanted to start with you, Jack.” Millowner said. His voice was low and breathy. “It’s the forbidden love that gets me most excited.”

He pushed her down onto the duvet cover. The animal part of her brain demanded that she resist. The mentsu-governed brain pleaded that she see where it went. She froze, and Millowner began opening her shirt from the bottom, before getting impatient and pushing his hands beneath the hem, his soft palms uncomfortably warm against her belly. “Fuck, I love femboys. You know how hard it is to watch your tight little ass from my office every day? Jack,” Millowner reeked of saké. “Jack, you could get so much from me.”

Millowner’s hands stopped when they reached her bandeau. He looked slightly puzzled, like he had been asked very suddenly to solve a trigonometry question during an algebra quiz. His hands were feeding him an equation his brain was not prepared to solve. He pushed his fingers under her bandeau with one hand. His other hand found her crotch. She saw the math play out on his face as he added one and one and came to a very confused two. His expression darkened. “Fucking invert…”

She struck like a cobra. She grabbed the left collar of his kimono with her supinated left hand, and the right collar with her pronated right, pulling him in to a cross choke. The mentsu-governed part of her brain, for some reason, recalled the japanese name for it: juji-jime. The sudden case of esprit de l’escalier was useless to her now; it seemed one only ever remembered their limited japanese after they started choking out the person they were supposed to impress with it. Jen’s voice cried out from the plexus, but she couldn’t hear anything over the blood rushing in her ears.

Her animal brain flooded her body with endorphins, rewarding her, telling her KILL! KILL! KILL! Her mentsu-brain mourned the promotion she was definitely not going to get. Then, a rarely-utilized part of her brain, the sweetly pedagogical critic, indicated to her that if she killed him with a blood choke, it would probably leave a ligature mark, so she sluggishly released him, her drunken body responding slowly to her nervous system’s commands.

Millowner gasped raggedly, stumbling away. He went for one of the samurai swords mounted on the wall, dragging it off the display, tossing the scabbard aside and swinging wildly for her. He was just as drunk as she was, and did not have her practice, or her willingness to kill.

She stepped aside as he thrusted at her, grabbed his wrist and turned it in a painful angle, pointing the sword tip down before she stripped the weapon from his hand with her forearm.

She pushed him onto the bed, straddled his torso, grabbed a pillow, and pushed it onto his face, careful not to break his nose. Practice had made considerations for blood and struggle automatic to her. He struggled weakly, punching bruises into her thighs and stomach, but found no purchase. She held the pillow there for at least three minutes after he stopped moving. She had survived longer without oxygen. She had to be sure. No one could know.

Someone touched her shoulder. She cocked a punch, ready to melt Jen’s face if the plexus somehow managed to create some solid projection or animate some brain-dead doll body. It was Allison, wild-eyed, shouting, “It’s me!”

She slumped to the corpse’s side. The endorphins were already crashing. Allison was right: she was old. She was still for nearly a minute, before standing up and walking around the bed.

“Wait! Wait! Wait!” ‘Jen’ screamed, the speaker on the plexus machine crackling with the desperation of the pleas. “I didn’t see anything! Please!”

She ignored it, and unplugged the plexus. A warning light blared on the display. A readout indicating brain activity began to plummet. The machine was silent.

“You just killed two people,” Allison said, not sounding too worried about it.

“One and a half, at most.”

“You’ve killed people before,” Allison ventured.

She did not reply.

“Is that why you were in prison?”

She looked up. “How did you know I was in prison?”

Allison was stony-faced as ever. “Don’t insult my intelligence, Jack. Nobody as perpetually out of the loop as you could have come from anywhere else. So, did you bust out?”

She did not answer, instead asking, “How the fuck are you still on your feet?”

“Bloodstream scrubbers,” Allison said. “I told you not to try to keep up with me.”

She had not considered the possibility that Allison was augmented. “What now?”

Allison shrugged. “Well I assume that you’re better at dealing with dead bodies than I am.”

“Don’t insult my intelligence, Allison. This isn’t your first time around a dead body either.”

“Alright,” Allison said, “Maybe we both have our secrets. But you seem to be the expert, killer, so let’s both keep them to ourselves and figure out what we’re going to do.”

She nodded. She was swaying slightly and was going to be sick, but a willing accomplice made what would come next easier. She really didn’t want to kill Allison, especially after finding out that Allison was interesting. She walked around the bed to Millowner’s body, and pulled her gloves from her back pocket. “Help me get him to the bathroom.”

---

Allison apparently did not have any musculoskeletal augments, so she did most of the heavy lifting, stripping the body nude and dragging it into the bathroom. She placed the corpse feet-first in the spacious shower, and laid it half-exited the shower, on the floor of the bathroom. She then turned the water on, full heat, full pressure. “Hopefully, half the body being warm will widen the timeline for algor mortis.”

“That’s…body temperature, right?” Allison asked with a feigned curiosity.

She nodded, grabbing an inhaler off the counter and running the sink. She sprayed the inhaler into the sink until it ran empty. “The story we want them to see is he was rejected by his guests, went into the shower for a cry and a jerk, and had an asthma attack.” She carefully wrapped the fingers of the outstretched hand around the empty inhaler. “Bad luck.” She rose and shut the sink off, and looked at Allison. “Does this story seem plausible? You’re the only one sober.”

Allison was nervously chewing a fingernail, but nodded, before adding: “What about the unplugged plexus? Jen?”

“Once we’re sure the brain is dead and the short-term’s corrupted, we plug it back in. Before we leave I’m going to trip the breaker box. Power outages hit these apartment complexes all the time.”

“Before we leave?” Allison looked incredulous. “Sorry but I’m getting the fuck out of here as soon as possible.” Pausing a moment, Allison said, “Wait, how are we getting out of here?”

“The fence is wired, so hopping it is out. I was thinking of hiding in the utility closet until morning and hiding under one of the laundry trucks.”

“Is that how you busted out of prison?” Allison asked sarcastically. “They have an in-house laundry service in places like this.”

She was quiet for a time. All of the solutions her brain presented to her were cartoonish or foolhardy. Her critical brain had fled her for the time being, and she couldn’t get any good ideas out of animal-brain or mentsu-brain.

“You know, these places usually have service tunnels.” Allison said slowly, as if unsure of how much information was wise to divulge. “They all got built up after the Blackout Riots so that the upper-crusters could escape us dirty EFZ proles if we ever got stupid enough to rise up. Now they’re mostly for staff to leave so that the tenants don’t have to see them.”

“Oh yeah? You know a lot about getting out of ritzy apartment complexes?”

“Like I said, we both have secrets, Jack,” Allison said. “Let’s get out of here before the humidity ruins my hair. I’ll take care of that ice cream, you stay in the bedroom and clean up there. Make sure Jen can’t talk.”

She saw no reason to argue, and so she obeyed, carefully wiping any prints from the samurai sword (wakizashi, her brain helpfully remembered) and placing it on the display rack where it belonged. She smoothed the sheets, and changed the pillowcase that was still drenched in Millowner’s saliva. She knelt by the plexus, and discreetly disconnected the emergency battery on the bottom, just enough that it could be assumed to have not fully contacted by mistake. She double-checked the readout. Brain activity was minimal, but not zero, so she left it unplugged.

She left the bedroom to check on Allison, but the apartment was empty. Only one bowl of ice cream was left on the kitchen island. She felt the same crushing loneliness as she did in the restaurant. She distracted herself by sweeping the apartment, retracing her steps and searching for any evidence she might have left. Satisfied, she returned to the bedroom.

The plexus was quiet. The brain inside was dead. She plugged the machine back in. The lens sparked to life, and she shielded her eyes from the projection. She turned away from the machine, and looked at the wall. The pink frilly room that the simulated girl had been displayed in was beamed across the wall, now empty of its silicon occupant.

The speaker crackled and her heart jumped as she heard “Ari…to,” from it like a fading signal. A moment later, the projection faded, and the machine did not gurgle or whirr, but only hummed like a computer in standby. The words were probably something lost in the buffer. The machine was once again a machine, its LPU disconnected, forever.

She stared at it as she backed out of the room, though, as if it could spring to life, accusatory, at any second. She snuck down to the basement, clinging to the blind spots of security cameras, almost comforted by the dumb technology and the familiarity of its weaknesses. The breaker box was easily lock-picked, and she shut the power off, waiting for a whole minute before flipping it on again. Someone was probably on their way to check, but she would be gone by then.

She was sober by the time she crept towards the service tunnels. Jack Meunier would only exist until she got through the checkpoint. The sun was rising when she returned to the EFZ. She took the familiar alleyways south, to see a man about a name.