Chapter Two - Like a Raccoon to a Trashbag

“The population distribution in modern cities means that something like forty percent of all inhabitants of a city live in a ‘megabuilding.’ These are not to be confused with more traditional apartment buildings or megacondos (wherein each housing unit and the building as a whole is owned in part by its tenants).

Megabuildings are micro-cities, semi-enclosed environments with their own cultures, beliefs, companies, and sometimes even currencies. There have been recordings of megabuilding inhabitants going to war with other nearby structures, and of massive cultural clashes.

Most of all, however, megabuildings are profitable for those who own them.”

--The Mega, An Exploration of Megabuilding Culture in New York, Detroit, California, and elsewhere in the NA Region, 2046

***

I stretched my back as I walked into the bedroom, hands on my hips and spine twisted backwards until something popped into place and I let out a long sigh. Showers were nice.

“Right, so where’s Rac now?” I asked.

New Montreal Centre. She just got off the public transportation network.

Damn, and last time I checked was nearly an hour ago. I’d almost forgotten how incredibly shit the public network was. But it was also cheap as hell and could get someone nearly anywhere within the lower city.

I picked up some underwear from the floor and started getting dressed. “So, if I’m gonna go pay her a visit, think I should go in casual?”

“I wouldn’t,” Lucy said as she walked in after me. She was dressed already, with a big towel wrapped around her head. “But maybe you don’t need to go in with power armour either.”

“Yeah, that might be overkill,” I agreed. So I found my skintight armoured suit and slipped it on. Fortunately, it was bullshit alien tech, and the material could expand and contract a little, so I wasn’t caught bouncing on the spot trying to get it to fit like too-tight jeans.

The suit was supposed to be able to absorb a fair bit of damage, so it would do for a little walk around town. Plus I had my jacket laying around, which was a bit better armoured.

“Where’s my helmet?” I muttered as I looked around.

Lucy snorted, but she bent down and used her foot to kick my helmet out from under the bed. It didn’t roll far, what with the catears atop it, making it a bit too unshapely to roll.

“Thanks,” I said as I scooped it up. I started to tie my hair up in a quick one-handed bun while I moved towards the door, helmet under my arm. The blue tint on the tips of my hair was fading. I’d have to reapply that stuff soon. “See you in a bit!” I called back.

“Love you!” Lucy sing-songed. “And remember, half days!”

Considering how it was already past noon, I imagined that meant that I could only ‘work’ for the next few hours. But checking up on Rac would hardly, I imagined, count as work. How much trouble could one kid possibly get herself into?

I slipped my helmet on and moved through the museum, only stopping when Nose and Tim ran past me screaming at each other. Which actually reminded me, I wasn’t armed!

I took a slight detour to the armoury, which was... actually, kind of pitiful. I had like, four guns and an entire room to store them in. I picked up my handy old Trenchmaker, mostly because it was a gun I was fairly comfortable with, and tucked it into a thigh-holster. Then I hesitated over whether to grab anything else.

In the end, I decided that I’d probably be okay with just the handcannon. If anything needed a bigger gun than that to deal with, then I’d just buy it on the spot.

My bike had, at some point, parked itself in the garage below the museum, because it was just handy that way. So I headed down while checking my map to see where Rac was at now. “Any idea where she’s heading to?” I asked.

She has visited a specific club three times in the last weeks. Though I haven’t broken into their security to see why, who she might be meeting, or what she’s up to.

“Yeah, best not to,” I said. “If she was one of the kittens, then I’d want to know, in case she was being misled or something, but she's not my responsibility.”

Which is why you’re currently riding on a course to intercept her?

I didn’t dignify that with an answer. Rac might not have been my responsibility, and I had no right to tell her what to do or anything of the sort, but... well, the brat was a friend, and I did feel like I had to take care of her a little.

Fuck, maybe Lucy was right and I did need therapy or something.

But instead of doing that, I kicked on my hoverbike and took off out of the parking garage (which was surprisingly empty, I supposed that the lower floors of the building weren’t quite in a state to be used yet, but still).

The aerial traffic was as bad as usual, but I skirted below it, shooting across the city in an almost straight line. New Montreal was a steel skeleton of jutting metal bones. Neon glows marked the start and end of buildings hidden in perpetual smog. Sure, the city had been hit by two incursions in as many weeks, but that didn’t stop it from glowing.

If there was one thing that would mark the end of New Montreal, it would be the disappearance of its billion and one ads. But they held strong for now, filling the air with thunderous jingles and swaying Gifs of tantalising flesh and mouth-watering meals.

I hated the holographic ads most of all. Maybe it was because they had only started to appear in bigger numbers as I was growing up, so they weren’t as common when I was a kid, but it felt unnatural to see a massive dancing woman rendered by a thousand drones using a skyscraper as a pole while text hovered around her.

Rac wasn’t on the upper levels, so I soon had to dive, and as I did so, the ads changed. They were less... tantalising? I didn’t know much about the psychology of neon, but the ads meant for those living in the penthouses and travelling in hovercars were loud and yet subtle. You might see a flash of thighs or some high-end augs, but the company logos were small, the product hinted at.

Here, on the lower, ground levels, the ads were more straightforward. I parked on the same level Rac was on, letting my bike land on the sidewalk of a multi-levelled highway next to a repeating Gif of an animated woman giving a man head. The text Want Fuck? glowed bright next to me.

Parking there was probably some sort of violation. Actually, it was definitely some sort of violation, but I was pretty much certain I wasn’t gonna get in trouble, so I decided not to give a shit.

Myalis updated my map, turning it into a more three-dimensional representation of the area, which was needed. Rac was currently riding an elevator up a building called HOUSE-FOUR-THREE, a massive brick of a building, with the exterior painted in dull greys except for the billboards covering its surface and the thousands of air conditioning vents poking out of its sides. It was the kind of place that I might have expected to live in, once.

Ten thousand miniature apartments, all jam-packed together, with a few floors in the middle connecting to the maze of buildings around it and a few stores and shops tucked within so that anyone living in one of these never had to leave the building.

I’d heard stories of people being born, raised, and dying in a single megabuilding without ever stepping foot outside.

The doorway into the building pinged my augs, asked me for my age, date of birth, official name, gender(s), marital status, and credit card information, then its rudimentary software bumped into Myalis and it shrivelled up and slammed the doors open.

The interior was nothing but beige walls and graffiti. Judging by the scrawl, there were at least two gangs in this building competing for turf. Paint was caked onto paint, one gang gleefully defacing the mark of the other only for the same to happen to them in turn.

My ability to read street signs was a bit rusty, but it looked like one gang was made up for Karens, and the other was a younger group of native French, at least judging by all the ‘tabarnacs’ I was passing.

What kind of shithole was Rac spending time in?

“Which floor is she heading to?” I asked.

She’s heading to floor 14. But she will then need to take another elevator down to B2 in order to reach the club. That elevator leads up to the floor you’re on. I can override it with ease.

I nodded. “Yeah, that seems nice,” I said.

I pushed deeper into the building, past a few tweakers and some folk shuffling along until I came to an elevator bank some ways in.

I stood there, arms crossed and legs set while the tiny icon representing Rac rose and rose until, finally, the doors opened before me and I came face-to-face with the girl herself.

She was standing in the back of the elevator, eyes glazed over for a moment before she blinked her augs off and took me in.

“Heya, Rac!” I said.

***