Anyone who’s at least somewhat socially aware and who’s had a multi-paragraph conversation with me will be able to intuit rather quickly that I’m paranoid. I won’t deny it, even though it’s not the whole truth. First, paranoia only applies when people are experiencing “delusions of persecution”. I know that I’m being persecuted. If people, more specifically any clergy or government-types knew about the walking crime to humanity, spirituality, morality, divinity, etc. that I am, I probably wouldn’t even get through all six syllables of “capital punishment” before being snatched up by surprise super-soldiers and given a fast track to “Execution Plus, Deluxe Edition”. Not only would my final moments then be broadcasted live to the city and planet at large as mandatory viewing for citizens, but they’d also make it painful and I’d get to take any family and friends with me—not that I had those.

Of course, I wasn’t blind—or deaf—to the consequences. People talked behind my back. People thought my OpSec guidelines were extraneous and born of my deluded psyche. People rolled their eyes and grumbled every time I mandated them to update their various digital keys and passwords. Still, usually, my brothers-and-sisters in crime put up with it, probably due to my interesting position in the gang’s hierarchy: I wasn’t a lieutenant—I didn’t have any underlings—but I only had one overling: the boss. The boss, Smiling Wallace, was the leader of the Emerald Ones: a middling-sized gang in a medium-sized city which controlled an average amount of territory and demanded the average amount of respect from other gangs and street-smart citizens alike.

Wallace, at a glance, looked like quite the stereotypical brute: a massive muscular frame with clearly extensive ‘ware augmentations under the skin including fashionably arranged scars and wounds that hadn’t healed properly to show off the glittering pattern of subdermal armor weave underneath. Then, there were the teeth. When he smiled, the serrated silvery sharks’ teeth were revealed. I knew his secrets though, because in Wallace’s case, appearances were somewhat deceiving. His iconic teeth for example: only I and maybe three other lieutenants knew they were actually (functional) cosmetics that he snapped into place when he woke up and took out when he went to bed, resting lovingly on his nightstand. The second big secret was that Wallace wasn’t the musclebound idiot that he portrayed himself as, although this should be quite obvious to anyone who’d spent even a lick of thought thinking about it. You don’t rise to the top of a competitive gang without at least some intelligence or cunning.

Now, don’t get me wrong; Wallace isn’t a social schemer or a conniving chess-master. Hell, he’s not even particularly intelligent in a traditional sense, but his cunning, skill at finding talent, and skill at delegation made him formidable. In fact, it’s how he found me. Five years ago, when I was but a 15-year-old street child and Wallace was only an up-and-coming low-level gangbanger with barely 5 goons to his name, he’d been struck by a flash of brilliance. He’d looked at the gang he served—then called the “Seventh Corner Breakers”—and started seeing their pattern of failure. Yes, they were good at beating people up. Yes, they could intimidate shop owners like nobody’s business. Yes, the drug-peddling and contraband were bringing in money. The problem was, they weren’t bringing in profit. Bribes were too expensive, and when they’d skimped on them, the Breakers started getting caught with contraband and thrown into the slammer with alarming frequency. Even worse, those that got caught often spilled secrets, further compromising safehouses and smuggling routes and thus inflating the cost of bribes wildly.

That’s where Wallace and I had had a meeting of minds so to speak. I’d—inadvisably—mocked his gang’s failures in the way that only misguided street kids who think they’re hot shit do, and, surprisingly, I hadn’t been beaten to a pulp but rather recruited. I, still wary of becoming uncomfortably and unexpectedly two-dimensional, started to help his little squad. First, it was a secure comms channel for Wallace’s little group—something that couldn’t be hacked by a dedicated eight-year-old script dabbler. Surprise, surprise, Wallace’s group avoided capture and grew in number while the other members of the Seventh Corner Breakers ended up getting picked off one-by-one. Now, I wasn’t a genius or anything, but 15-y/o me had consumed her share of the free (and advertiser supported) espionage-focused entertainment programs in her downtime, so I continued serving as Wallace’s technical advisor. I instilled principles of information compartmentalization in Wallace. I showed the gang members how to use black-market cryptocurrency to avoid common financial traps. I developed passphrases and codewords. Under my technical ministrations, the gang flourished.

Eventually, as these things go, Wallace grew too big for the leadership of the Seventh Corner. A struggle for power occurred, and a bloody and beaten Wallace came out on top and rebranded with his signature smile and a new name, taking me along as—not his second in command—but rather as his CTO-equivalent. I didn’t command any enforcers or extort shop owners, but Wallace knew I was vital to his operation. As I grew older and the Emerald Ones grew bigger, my responsibilities grew too. I laundered money, managed finances, authorized bribes, planned smuggling routes, administrated internal communications, and more. While it is a bit of a boast, saying that without me the Emerald Ones would’ve collapsed within a month or two probably isn’t too far from the truth.

That’s what brings me to my current, no-good-very-shitty situation. Wallace was out of town for a couple days. Specifically, Wallace had taken two of his top lieutenants along with him for some under-the-table alliance brokering shenanigans and left Aleksander along with Nesbit to hold down the fort. Aleksander was fine. He and I had a cordial relationship and he often served in the schemer role for Wallace. He knew what I did for the Emerald Ones and respected me for it. Nesbit on the other hand—and there’s no polite way to put this—was a raging bitch. At a surface level, she appeared to be the female equivalent of Wallace: a sinuous tower of fast-twitch muscle with modded eyes to give her “a real predator’s gaze” and enough strength ‘ware to deadlift unarmored enforcement vehicles. Along with that, she often tried (and failed) to affect a “femme fatale” attitude. Looking deeper though, Nesbit lacked that which made Wallace the boss of the Emerald Ones: leadership and interpersonal skills along with his subtle talents.

Of course, Nesbit also hated me for the completely non-stereotypical reason that I was close to Wallace. Not that I’d ever slept with him—our relationship wasn’t like that—but my presence still filled her with occasional bursts of apoplectic rage. That’s why, on day two of Wallace’s absence, Nesbit usurped Aleksander’s throne. Not in a violent way really: technically they were on the same level in the gang’s command structure, but by sheer force of personality. Yes, Aleksander wasn’t a pushover, but he’d gotten to where he was by utilizing his mind and only occasionally stabbing people when they weren’t prepared to stab back. Nesbit wasn’t like that. She’d made her way to the top almost exclusively by stabbing, kneecapping, and shooting the right (and sometimes wrong) people, so when Nesbit threatened to put her blunt soup spoon through Aleksander’s left pectoral at dinner, he reluctantly folded greenlit her op.

The op, as it turned out, was just Nesbit acting out a sadistic punishment fantasy with me at the focus. Here I was, crouched and shivering in a dank and dirty alley clutching a cheapo spitgun on a fucking stakeout in the fucking rain. Of course, Nesbit rationalized my complaints away by deploying some truly phenomenal arguments like: “Issa, you’re lacking field experience, this op will help you make up for your deficit” or “Issa, I don’t feel like you’re pulling your weight and the others don’t either, so this is your chance make it up to them” or, my personal favorite, “Issa, if you don’t learn your fucking place I am going to lever open your skull with this spoon in your sleep and dig out your interface.” Needless to say, her superb rhetorical skill and accompanying brandished eating utensils were convincing. I figured, I’d go on the op, help out getting protection money or whateverthefuck from some recalcitrant merchant, and then re-ensconce myself in my lair and spend some quality hours writing complaints about Nesbit and sending them to Wallace or hacking into Nesbit’s ‘ware to make her eyes twitch randomly or something.

Originally, it had looked like a quick thing. Nesbit had pressed the spitgun into my hands and conscripted some of the layabouts who’d been sheltering from the poor weather in the gang’s main safehouse. Then our little group had been named “Lazy squad”, Sam was anointed to the lofty post of squad leader, and we were pushed out of the door after a quick briefing. Apparently, some poor schmuck had “forgotten” to pay his protection fees for two weeks now and we were supposed to “send a message”—whatever that meant. I, luckily, wasn’t leading this band of third-rate gangbangers, I was merely one of them. My role in this slapdash operation shouldn’t have been anything more than waving my gun around in a threatening manner and providing moral support—or something. Despite that, I was nervous, but not really about the imminent potential extortion and kneecapping.

No, I was nervous about my daily deadline—that time when my agents would come back from university. What had originally been sold as a 30-minute op with plenty of time for me to get back to base had stretched to five hours. Now, I only had around 10 minutes left until my agents would be deleted according to their expiry-code programming. I mean, missing a day of lectures and lessons wouldn’t be good for my academic career, although it wouldn’t be insurmountable. Nevertheless, I was faced with a dilemma: I could reintegrate my mind with the collected memories and experiences of the agents who’d attended university in my stead in this shitty alleyway, but it would put me out of commission for a couple minutes while my brain performed the merge operation. Passing out for a couple minutes in an alleyway when an unlikely—yet potential—gunfight was imminent was not clever.

Gritting my teeth, I cursed under my breath. Looks like I’ll be missing a couple of lectures after all. I didn’t want to risk it. Typically, I could do the merge in the reasonably safe environs of my lair in the gang’s safehouse. When I was plugged into the feed, it wasn’t as if anyone would notice me dipping out for a couple minutes. Even if they did notice, excuses were easy to come up with—since I ran the entirety of the gang’s cyberoperations and computer equipment. Normally, I’d just mumble something along the lines of “critical server maintenance” or more abstract technobabble to get people off my back if they asked. Everyone—except Nesbit apparently—respected the fact that good cybersecurity was critical in keeping a gang out of the clutches of law enforcement, and more importantly, profits in the black.

My feelings on my two agents were mixed. Of course, copying one’s consciousness is highly illegal. This is the aspect of me that slated me for “Execution Plus, Deluxe Edition” should I ever get caught. Furthermore, not only was it highly illegal, but it was also ascribed to be ludicrously dangerous and heretical. “Evil clones” or “Soulless ones” were a popular fixture of entertainment, and only my complete lack of faith in the church and the government protected my afterlife from eternal damnation. The only mitigating factor—not that it would hold up in court—was that I only used my agents to attend university and get my degree; I wasn’t building evil-clone armies or using them for some twisted body-snatching scheme.

Nevertheless, the agents made me uncomfortable, and I preferred not to think about them too much. I simply sent them off to virtual university at the beginning of the day and reintegrated with them twelve hours later. Other than experiencing days which consisted of 36 subjective hours of daylight and suddenly remembering attending lectures during 24 of those hours, there wasn’t too much unusual about my life. Still, I wasn’t an idiot. I only kept the agents out in the world for 12 hours at a time, so they didn’t diverge from my main consciousness too much and they were set to expire—to delete themselves—after 12 hours. I didn’t want any of my digital ghosts spooking around my networks.

I wasn’t completely free of the consequences of using my agents though. When all was said and done, I had memories from both sides of reintegration. Each day, I remembered attending university with the knowledge that I was just a copy—a digital consciousness. Having that latent undercurrent of unease just rattling around in my head was unnerving, and even more so was the realization that if measuring by elapsed time, my current, in-body-“prime” consciousness felt like it had spent more time outside of my body than inside it in the past couple years.

Sitting in the musty alley and watching the timer run lower on my agents made me shiver. If I really wanted to wax philosophically, denying reintegration because I couldn’t afford to pass out in this alley was at a perplexing intersection of double homicide, deleting a file, and suicide. Worst of all, I thought, there’s no way to—my thoughts came to a halt as I realized what I was contemplating: I could just ask. That was something I’d—surprisingly—never done before. With an almost ironic amount of religious zeal, I’d always avoided contact with my agents outside of reintegration and it had been mutual. Now that I thought about it though, I wasn’t quite sure why I’d avoided it outside of a vague paranoia instilled by too many “evil-clone” entertainments.

Before I could talk myself out of it—and there were only five minutes before my agents expired—I backburnered the gang’s comm channels and put in a group call to the two agents I had running on the hidden server back at the gang’s hideout. A beat later, they picked up almost simultaneously and two new virtual avatars appeared in my mind’s eye. Somewhat disconcertingly, they both looked exactly like me. For a moment, we were all silent in a shared bout of awkwardness that I could intimately empathize with. Then, seeing as none of me were seemingly taking the initiative, and since I had initiated the call after all, I spoke up, turning to the first agent:

“Um… Hello Issa?” I said tentatively.

This tipped off a cascade of entirely useless introductions, and after two variations on “Hello Issa” our strange conference once again fell into silence. It didn’t last though, because almost simultaneously, we all cracked up and started laughing in sync. Apparently, the absurd humor in the surrealistic elements of the situation had gotten to the other me’s too. A couple seconds later, the laugher died down and I had to admit, really meeting myself for the first time went far differently than I’d been primed to expect by the entertainments. Kind of obvious in retrospect, but of every citizen on the planet, there was only one person that I knew and understood at an intimate level: why would meeting myself feel alien? Still, I called this meeting for a reason:

“Alright ladies” I said, speaking up, “do you know why I called you?”

The two agents—the two Issas—looked at each other to confirm before nodding.

“Yeah… well it looks like we—I? —won’t be able to reintegrate today.”

The Issa on the left spoke up, “Well, I think I speak for all of us when I say that this sucks, but really—” she was cut off when the gang’s comm channel suddenly pinged me and I refocused my attention away from the freaky group-call I was in.

Heads up @lazy_squad, we’ve got Dominik inbound on the feed

Shit, spot those guys behind him [image attached]

Fuuuuuck, I think they’re Snapbacks

Snapbacks weren’t good news. Technically, we were still a block or three away from the edge of our territory and where the contested zone began, but with Dominik showing up with our rivals in close pursuit, I figured we might’ve just gotten caught up in some subtle push for territory.

You sure?

I think I’ve seen the guy on the right before

Well, they’re peeling off anyways

Eyes up people. @Badmarc4 and @crims0n with me for the knock

@Jan_the_man and @megHit cover out front

Oh, and @issadmin, I don’t think he’s gonna pull a runner, but keep the back covered

@megHit and I are good

I bit my lip. It was time to “pull my weight”. Levering myself up from the crouch behind the crate, I spotted the backdoor to Dominik’s little shop that I’d been ostensibly guarding in case he tried to sneak in. Acting all casual-like, I leaned up against one of the somewhat grimy walls and crossed my arms: concealing the spitgun but holding it in such a way that its barrel lined up with the door. I didn’t like shooting people—nobody sane does—but I learned long ago that when I’m in a kill-or-be-killed situation, I would choose kill every time. I’d rather have troubled sleep than be dead after all.

Good to go

Alright, switching this channel to synthvoice, no chatter

With a muted ding, our comm channel switched over to synthvoice, to cut down on visual HUD distractions if it came to complications. Then, Sam, aka Sharkbite213, spoke up in a synthesized voice, “Alright, we’re going in.”

Nervously, I looked around. I was not made for this type of stuff, but that didn’t mean I was gonna half-ass it. Expanding my mind’s eye, I started taking in local feeds: A door camera from above the back door I was guarding, an unsecured security camera from a bit further down the alley, and the basic bio-feeds from the other members of “lazy_squad”. This was, admittedly, me flexing my administrative muscles—normal users in our network wouldn’t have the permissions to remotely fetch biodata without explicit consent—but seeing the data flow through my mind gave me a bit of reassurance. On those feeds, I saw what I expected: The three who were mid-confrontation with Dominik-the-merchant inside showed slight signs of stress. Of the two out front, Jan was borderline Zen according to his readouts—hopefully, he wasn’t sleeping—and Megan’s readout read as generally attentive and aware.

Then, without any warning, Jan’s life signs winked out, I heard the signature salvo of a spitgun being rapidly unloaded, and a combat alert started screeching over the squad’s comm channel. Half a second later, Megan was on the comm, “Shit, shit, shit, shit!” and the loud sounds of cheap firearms unloading their burden of ammunition as fast as possible increased in magnitude. I decided the time for subtlety was over and unhid my cheap firearm, pointing it fixedly at the door while keeping a camera’s eye out on the alley behind me. With the crate between the door and me, I figured I’d have at least some cover if, no, when, someone came barreling out the back exit. I hoped that the spitgun would be effective.

Standing there in the alley, gun raised, I berated myself. Why hadn’t I brought a better gun? I’d left my rather slick Nex-10a in my lair where I kept it as a holdout weapon, but with my rank, I could’ve easily requisitioned something better than the piddly spitgun. Why did it have to come to a shootout!? Sure, the spitgun would work, but it was a quintessential gangbanger’s weapon that was designed to optimize to a low price and a high fire rate. Spitguns are dirt cheap to make, almost entirely polymer, and when the trigger is pressed, start supersonically dispensing hardened plastic BBs at a ripping 25 rounds per second. Not particularly accurate or dangerous to armored targets, but just fine for your average thug with unenhanced aim shooting at other unarmored thugs or for dispensing a ludicrous amount of suppressive fire.

Background gunfire noises only increased in volume, and judging by the biodata feeds, everyone was currently under a lot of stress, but mostly uninjured except for Jan who was likely dead or who’d somehow managed to disable his interface. Then—as if the situation hadn’t already escalated out of control—something with a heavy caliber started going off inside Dominik’s shop. No longer the rapid-fire, continuous snap-crackle sound of spitguns, but the low-cadence bang of a semiautomatic heavy slug-thrower. Once again, I cursed my misfortune. I knew that all of lazy squad was only carrying spitguns—we hadn’t been expecting a firefight, only a terrified shop owner—so whoever was unloading the heavy ordinance wasn’t on our side. Furthermore, my measly alleyway-crate wasn’t guaranteed to hold up against anything with armor-piercing capabilities.

Then, it happened. Behind me, down the alleyway and around a corner, one of the visual feeds that I’d hijacked showed two Snapbacks with their signature headwear lead by a fucking combat drone. What!? They were armed, chasing their done, and about to come around the corner where they’d get a clear shot on my sorry ass. This situation showed why I wasn’t built for this type of combat: my mind was fast—blazingly, ridiculously, ludicrously fast—but everything else in my body moved at a comparatively glacial pace. I’d spotted the two gangbangers on the feed within milliseconds of them entering the frame, calculated how much time I had and what angle I’d need to shoot at, but now I had to physically spin around and level my gun before they leveled me. This wasn’t what I was made for; unlike fighters such as Wallace or Nesbit I didn’t have synthetic fast-twitch muscles under my skin or subdermal armor to block whatever they or their drone could bring to bear on me.

I started to turn, pulling my semi-outstretched gun-wielding arm towards me to reduce my moment of inertia and increase the speed at which I could spin. Then, turning my gun to be sideways, I mentally pressed the trigger and started pre-firing to use the miniscule muzzle rise from each shot to give my arm a little extra boost in horizontal speed. I could feel the strain. Every single muscle fiber, joint, and ligament pulled with all their might, yet the virtual indicator of the gun’s line of fire swept across the alleyway at a perceived inexorable pace. Degree by degree, the lightweight gun spat pellets which pitted the far wall and their trajectories slowly crept towards the angle I needed.

Once again, I felt the woe of being a fast mind trapped in a slow body when I ran the numbers: pessimistically, the quick drone would come around the corner and get a lock on me in 400-ish milliseconds. It was unusually fast as it had come into my field of surveillance at speed. My gun’s simulated projectile trajectory vector would line up with the drone in 410-ish milliseconds. Mentally, I cursed. Getting shot really wouldn’t be pleasant, but what else can I do?

Jolting me out of my resigned mood, I heard someone raise their voice, “Hey Issa Prime?” What? None of my fellows in lazy squad should’ve been able to coherently communicate with me while I was running at a couple thousand times mental acceleration. Then I remembered. I was still in a group call with my two Issa-agents, who, being me and running on a dedicated server wouldn’t have any difficulty keeping up with my speed of thought.

“Issa Prime?” I asked with curiosity.

The left agent spoke up, “Yeah, while you were chatting with the squad, we decided that it’d be best to give ourselves names for scenarios like this—otherwise we’d spend far too much time getting bogged down bickering about appropriate pronoun usage.”

“Makes sense” I said, and why wouldn’t it? They are technically my arguments.

“So,” she continued, “we’ve decided that whoever is currently hosted in our body will be ‘Issa Prime’ or just ‘Prime’ and the rest of us will take designative-letter names. I’ll be ‘Issa Alpha’ or just ‘Alpha’ and she—” she gestured towards my other agent, “—will be ‘Issa Beta’ or simply ‘Beta’ going by who’s older by order of branch date/time.”

Beta spoke up, “In this case, there’s not much of a difference though because Alpha’s only a couple milliseconds older due to how we set up the agent script.”

“And there’s no way we can…” I trailed off when both Alpha and Beta smirked sadly.

“Yeah, we were really paranoid when we wrote that agent time-termination script, weren’t we?” Beta asked rhetorically.

Taking a calming (mental) breath, I refocused. Now wasn’t the time for a small-scale existential crisis or whatever this was; I’d deal with it when I wasn’t about to be shot. Running over my assets and rechecking the calculations on my still-firing and slowly turning spitgun, I realize that I’d missed two advantages that I had; advantages who’d just christened themselves Alpha and Beta.

“Hey Issa,” I addressed both of them, “I realize that it’s asking a lot—”

Alpha cut me off, “Yeah sure, we—or I specifically—can do it. It’ll buy you a few seconds but that’ll probably be enough… also the lectures I went to today weren’t that important anyways” she said with a virtual shrug and a small, sad smile.

I was experiencing…complex feelings…but I realized now wasn’t the time nor place for them, no matter my capability of perceptual acceleration. I looked to Beta, who simply shrugged in acquiescence, and then turned my mental gaze back to Alpha. She gave me a grin and a sloppy salute before fading out of the group call. A couple cycles later, I felt my cyberwarfare suite start transmitting, aimed directly at the drone.

Normally, of course, hacking a drone mid-combat wasn’t feasible. Combat drones, even cheap-o ones like the Snapbacks were currently (apparently) fielding aren’t much, but they aren’t toys either. A flight system, a gun, and a low-end level-two AI with full authorization to kill made them plenty dangerous. If I’d been warned exactly what model of drone I’d be facing along with which exact software and firmware bundles it had loaded into its core a day or so in advance, I probably would’ve been able to figure out an instant-kill or remote-takeover exploit for that specific drone that worked fast enough for this situation, but on-the-fly-hacking with a deadline measurable in milliseconds? Not possible unless I—or I guess Alpha—cheated.

Honestly though, what’s committing one more capital offense? The public execution that I’d face if I was ever caught was already at the ‘Ultimate-Deluxe-Premium-Gold Edition’ or whatever, and adding a couple charges revolving around the ‘possession’ and ‘deployment’ of ‘sapient malware’ and ‘level four AI’—or even ‘Unsanctioned Cyberwarfare’ if the judges wanted to set new records in the category of ‘Most crimes for a single person’ for their in-office betting pools—weren’t going to end up making me more dead. I watched and fervently hoped that I—Alpha—was skilled enough to pull it off.

Ironically, in this case, the simplicity of the drone worked against us. The anemic size of its communication buffer and processor core wouldn’t be able to hold the entirety of my mind or memories by many orders of magnitude. Alpha must’ve really trimmed herself down—I shuddered mentally—to be able to jam some semblance of intelligence into such a small space. Even if it did work, the drone’s subverted computational core would be burned out in matter of seconds by the computational requirements that even crippled husk of human consciousness needed.

Hope was the only option left for me. I watched the drone zip towards a firing solution in slow motion while my spitgun’s bullet-stream crept ever closer to destroying it and pondered about what I—or Alpha—had just done. Not the hypothetical legal ramifications; the ethical ones. Alpha had just decided to not only to lay down her life for me, but also to perform digital self-lobotomy so that it wouldn’t be in vain. Since she was—excepting a 12-hour memory difference—me, that shone light on some strange truths about my psyche. I’d never seen myself as the self-sacrificing type. Sure, I wouldn’t want to see my fellow Emerald Ones die, but even for my closest and longest acquaintance, Wallace, I couldn’t imagine jumping in front of the proverbial bullet for him. Apparently though, I’m perfectly willing to lay down my own life to save myself? Existential eschatological self-examination aside, I was still in a combat situation. I needed to focus, so I compartmentalized the confusing thoughts and turned my mental attention back to the fight.

The drone was quick, and as soon as its sensors got a line of sight past the corner, it would IFF me and then shoot me in less than a dozen milliseconds, assuming Alpha hadn’t gotten a hack to work. The good news was that if I—or Alpha—were able to get the drone before it shot me, the Snapbacks would be easy targets. They were running quickly enough that by the time I shot the drone or it shot me, they’d be going too fast to avoid running into my line of fire. I double checked, tweaked the muscles in my upper arm a bit, and waited. There was nothing I could do anymore to improve my odds in this situation.

As the drone came around the corner, I saw its miniature gun turret twitch to align squarely with my forehead. My line of fire was still around a meter away, so if the drone were still fully operational, it would fire. A beat passed, and it didn’t. Mentally, I heartily thanked Alpha for her sacrifice, heard Beta cheer, and watched with satisfaction as the drone and my spitgun’s munitions-stream intersected sending chunks of metal, polymer, and other materials scattering through the alleyway as the cheap construct disintegrated.

Now, the gangers most definitely didn’t think as fast as I did. They were probably hooped on some sort of combat stim, sure, but they wouldn’t be fast enough to come to a stop before rushing out of cover and straight into my field of fire. In fact, I could see realization slowly seeping into their faces as they saw the drone being blasted apart in front of them and they figured out that they’d just committed a lethal tactical screwup by assuming the rear entrance was unguarded. Still, the stockier of the two seemed to have some decent instincts and threw himself into a slide, hoping to avoid my initial volley. He didn’t know that I had eyes on the alleyway and could see him sliding over the slick street surface.

I adjusted my firing solution accordingly, and when they came around the corner a body length apart, I shot them.

It wasn’t fair, but then again, playing fair in a gunfight is a great strategy if you’re planning on only ever attending one. My spitgun’s pellets easily went through unarmored heads and necks. These two didn’t have subdermal weave. I’d berate them for not wearing helmets, but then again, being a hypocrite didn’t suit me. That’s a lesson for the future, Issa. I would survive a spitgun pellet to the skull and probably even low-grade slug-thrower rounds, but that was only because my skull had an unusual amount of sensor baffling and armoring compared to the rest of me. I didn’t know why, it was just another mystery on the great big pile of “Dear parents, what were you thinking when you designed me this way?” questions that I’d probably never get proper answers to.

My body type generally followed spacer-templates. Tall and lanky, with an emphasis on dexterity and survivability in hostile environs but without more than baseline strength and toughness mods. The only real special thing was that—as far as my internal diagnostics revealed—there wasn’t any actual grey matter in my cranium, just equally gray nanomachine computer soup and it hadn’t always been like that.

Puberty was a strange time for me. After the standard-fare changes, I also had to deal with my biological wetware brain slowly transmuting itself to the computational cluster it is now, and boy, that freaked me out at the time. Even worse, I didn’t have anyone to tell nor talk to. At the time, I’d just transitioned from “homeless street urchin” to “gang-affiliated street teen” and who would I have confided in? I can imagine it now: street-brat Issa approaching Wallace and saying something like “Hey boss, my brain is slowly turning into metal like the zombies in Cyber-Zombiepocalypse III: Rise of the Executioner. What do you think I should do?” Needless to say, it probably wouldn’t have gone well.

The fight wasn’t over though. The two snapbacks bleeding out in the alleyway sure looked dead, but I wasn’t going to risk it, so I let a couple quick bursts into their prone forms before reorienting on the door. The heavy thumps from the slug thrower had abruptly cut out, but there was still sporadic spitgun fire audible.

Suddenly, Sam’s synthesized voice yelled into the comm, “Issa, he’s coming your way, non-lethal!”

I cursed. Knowing my luck, Dominik was the man with the slug-thrower and as the proprietor of his establishment, he had access to the feed cameras I’d hijacked. If he were smart—which is always wise to assume—he’d simply check the camera feed above the back door, see the bodies, deduce I was behind the crate, and open up on my flimsy cover without exposing himself. Then again, this guy probably wasn’t a tactical genius. If he checked the feed and saw an empty alley, maybe with even an enticing getaway vehicle laying around or something, he might throw caution to the wind and risk it.

Plan in place, I reached further into the camera’s rather anemic security interface and started fiddling with the video and sensor data storage. The camera was the first thing I’d suborned: with multiple hours in the rain there hadn’t been anything better to do. Working quickly and scrubbing through the camera’s local memory, I found a clip from earlier where it was raining but there weren’t two dead snapbacks and a soggy Issa in the alleyway. Selecting it so it was long enough not to make the loop obvious, I replaced the past couple hours and the current feed with the looping clip. A hack job, yes, but hopefully effective enough. I was lucky this trick worked in the first place, most cameras have redundancy and security systems that prevent this sort of tampering, but Dominik didn’t have these.

Twenty seconds later, a bald man burst through the door, clutching a bleeding arm to his side. Then he saw me and his interesting relief/indignation mixture expression on his face quickly shifted to a shock/horror combo. Then, of course, I shot him. Many times, through the legs and knees.

Dominik—or so I presumed—lay in the wet alleyway his blood mixing with the water and flowing into a nearby drain. Unfortunately for him, it didn’t seem like he had any pain blockers, and he was moaning quite loudly. I kept my spitgun centered on him. He was still very much alive, and I wasn’t taking any chances. A couple dozen seconds later, a bedraggled and bloodied Sam, Marc, Red, and Megan came out the same door and surrounded Dominik.

Jan was conspicuously absent.

Then, my internal alarm went off. It was 18:00 and Beta was unceremoniously deleted.

I sighed audibly. Personal revelations aside, it had been a thoroughly shitty day.