One Year Ago​

I slammed my open palm against the entrance a dozen times in a row, each hit making the heavy metal door rattle and clang.

My breath was leaving a trail of thin white fog in the air and I couldn’t help but shiver under the buzzing neon light above.

The street the orphanage was on wasn’t actually much of a street. More an alleyway on the third floor of a pair of mega buildings. A fucking great name for what was basically two dozen tennaments all linked together and added onto by architects and engineers that were high off their asses.

Some of the kids had videos on their media feeds of buildings just like this one collapsing under their own weight. They tended to have a hard time sleeping, but they couldn’t help watching them over and over again. Weird little shits. I usually got past my problems by pretending they didn’t exist.

“Open up, for fuck’s sake!” I called out as I banged a fist against the door again.

My shoulder was killing me from the sack hanging off it, and my stump was all itchy from the coarse simu-wool sweater I had on.

I couldn’t complain though. Lucy had forced me to wear it before leaving, and I didn’t regret it. The weather had turned cold. Colder than my media feeds had said it would go. But then, those were always calibrated for the people living near the top of all the nicer buildings around. Closer to the ground, shit got a lot colder.

I shifted, trying to find a way to get the bag hanging off my side to be more comfortable. “Come on,” I muttered before stepping back.

My shoes--a set of runners we stole from a bin in front of a used clothing store before they set up some cameras in front of the place. I was pretty proud of them--slid a bit across something wet and oily and I scrunched my nose against the smell.

I looked at the panel next to the door and blinked a few times to get my augs to connect to it. The interface sputtered to life in the middle of my vision, then froze up.

I force quit, then tried again. Then again. The third time I was actually able to connect.

WELCOME TO THE FUCKING SHITTIEST PLCE EVR!!

Our hours of operation a

The rest of the screen was entirely empty, but I knew better. I twitched my eye to activate my cursor and aimed it down a ways to where the button used to be to accept. A few hundred bored kids with nothing to do, half of them with five generation old-gear, wasn’t great for the local software infrastructure. I blinked over where the button used to be.

The screen shifted.

Please enter your login information:

NAME:

PASS:

Complete the following puzzle:

I sighed and hugged my arm across my chest and started rubbing my hand up and down over my jacket for warmth as I manually entered everything. The damned puzzle was some damned Voight Kampff rip-off with intuitive questions based on poorly rendered images. It hadn’t worked to stop any decent bot in a decade, but it did work at slowing me down.

The moment everything was done the screen flashed green. And then it crashed.

“Fuck!”

I kicked the door.

Someone moved behind it, the little hole in its middle darkening as someone looked out. Then the door opened at last and I found myself face-to-face with one of the older matrons. “What are you doing out at this hour?” she asked.

“Freezing my tits off,” I said. “Let me in.”

She crossed her arms. One of those gig-workers that came in to replace what little real staff was left, getting paid half of minimum wage for a shit job. They only really did their job when it allowed them to look tough while treating the kids they were meant to care for like shit.

I could hardly blame them, it was the only time they probably felt alive.

“What were you out doing? Whoring yourself out?” she asked.

I rolled my eye. “Like you? How much are you making an hour again?”

“That’s not of your business,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah. Look, it’s cold. Let me in.”

She huffed, then nodded to my bag. “What’s in that?”

“That’s none of your business,” I said.

“Drugs? Weapons? All sorts of things could be dangerous to the kids.” She grinned.

I turned the bag over, hard to do with just the one arm, then opened it up to reveal a dozen boxes inside, all covered in shitty 5-Dollar store wrappings. “Gifts. Gifts for the kittens. Do you want to open them all up? Maybe while the kids are watching?”

She eyed the boxes, then sighed and stepped back.

I nodded and moved on past.

The orphanage wasn’t built to be an orphanage at all. It was actually about half an apartment level, with a few walls torn down and some of the rooms pushed open a little. The marks of where the walls had been were still left as bumps under the carpet, especially visible where it had worn through.

There was a little lounge area at the front, with some nice toys and a few sofas. A spot that we were absolutely forbidden from entering except in the rare instance that someone came to see about adopting one of the brats.

Deeper in was the dining room, a spot with three mismatched tables and a dozen chairs picked up from here and there, and then the orphanage split in two, one corridor led oof to the right, towards the nicer rooms, the kitchen, and the playrooms. That was where all the adoptable kids were.

I went left.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out why things were the way they were. The corporation running the place, with their off-brand caretaker androids and gig-working staff wanted to make a profit. That meant that they had to use their limited resources wisely.

One of the older guys, one that had left a few months back actually, had explained it all to me. The kittens, the cripples, we were only so sellable. Damaged goods, basically. So trying to sell us was tough. The normal kids on the other hand? Yeah, clean them up, give them some last-gen augs, maybe let them take some online classes to catch up with the normies outside, and a prospective parent wouldn’t hesitate as much to pick them up.

We got used to the idea, after a bit.

Still hard to explain it to the new kids.

I knocked twice on the door to our communal area. “Yo,” I said.

The door swung open and I was tugged in by a grinning Lucy. “Cat!”

A few of the others cheered too, but they were shushed by the wiser kids. Didn’t need the staff pulling the breaker on our room’s lights. “I got presents for you little shits,” I said as I swung the bag around with my hip.

The door shut, and I grinned at the kittens as they got up and rushed over.

Lucy pecked my cheek before stealing the bag. She puppy-dog-eyed everyone into line, then started handing things out while leaning on one crutch.

The gifts were a bit lame. A toy car here, some three generation -old handheld console with an emulator there. But the kittens were laughing and whispering and looked happy for it.

“Nose, don’t ruin your shit so soon,” I warned as I noticed the brat shoving a hand in his nose. “And Smog, cough on your own stuff, not other’s.”

Lucy finished handing out the last thing, then made a show of turning the bag upside down. I grinned when she clacked her way back to me. “I’ve got a present for you too, you know,” she whispered.

“Oh?” I asked.

She tucked her head into my neck. “You’ll need to unwrap me first though.”

“That sounds like my kind of gift,” I said.

She snorted then leaned off of me to look at the kids. “Thanks for getting everything.”

I shrugged. Lucy was the one that planned it all. She’d made a big fuss of shopping for stuff for everyone on our non-existent budget. I was just the one that went around fetching things. “No problem,” I said.

She smiled up at me, then grabbed my hand. “Admit it, you like being all soft and caring.”

“Fuck no,” I said.

She laughed and tugged me after her. “Liar!”

“I’m not!” I said with a laugh of my own.

For that night, at least, our little corner of the world, as much as it smelled like mold and had too many of us cramped in together, was a happy place.