⚠️ SPOILER ALERT! ⚠️
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Kurtz led her to a booth on the balcony, raised up on a dais to provide a view of the rest of the club. Gauzy red curtains offered some semblance of privacy. There were no bodyguards in sight, but Kurtz didn’t give off the impression of someone who needed guards. “I need to find someone,” Shiv said.
“You’ll be wanting to talk to Odie, then.” Odie, the panoptispex. Kurtz’s pet info mage.
“It’s gonna cost you. Its time is my money.”
“I can pay.” She made the sign of the bird under the table, silently thanking Ornarch for his help.
“The usual rate is one thousand credits a minute. Does that work for you?” Fucking hells.
“Alright. Do you have an ID chip?”
“Yep. Untraceable.” Ornarch had taken her old one the day she met him, leaving a new one in its place. Whatever he’d done, it hadn’t even left a scar.
Kurtz smiled. There was something perfunctory about it, about all of her actions, really. She moved and talked and smiled to get to the next thing, always to the next thing. She held a small tablet out to Shiv. “Transfer the money, and I’ll send you in to see Odie.”
Shiv tapped her card against the screen and transferred more money than she’d had at any one point in years, all to talk to someone for a minute.
“Basement. Second to last door on the left. Your minute starts when the door opens.”
Shiv wove her way through the dance floor, dodging elbows and flailing bodies as an electric guitar wailed with almost as much passion as the woman playing it. Now that Shiv was closer, the keyboardist, bassist, and drummer had the hazy, smoky look of holograms. Good holograms, sure, but it was undoubtedly a solo act. She absentmindedly wondered if anyone else had noticed.
The door to the basement was right of the stage, presided over by a woman cut from the same cloth as Headset and Scanner out front, who opened it as she approached. “Right this way, miss.”
Shiv smiled as she descended. The halls of the basement stretched off to both sides, all pristine and utilitarian, equally devoid of decoration and dust. Shiv turned left, and walked until she reached the door. It was obviously her destination. There were many rooms with many doors, but the rest were all sliding panels of white plastic, and this one was built like a vault door. The winking red light of a camera stared down at her, and a buzzer sounded as the door swung open, revealing a second door. An airlock.
Shiv stepped inside, and the huge door closed behind her. A voice came over a speaker as a portion of the wall opened up to reveal a shallow tray. “Turnoffyourphoneandputitalongwithanyweaponsinthetray,” it said, the audio remarkably clear in quality but the words were spoken too quickly to parse easily.
The voice, with tremendous deliberateness and only slightly less haste, repeated the phrase, inserting each tiny pause between words as if it hurt. “TurnOffYourPhoneAndPutIt,AlongWithAnyWeapons,InTheTray.”
Shiv complied. “Does this count against my minute?”
“NoWorries.YourMinuteWillBeginWhenTheSecondDoorOpens.ThankYou.” The interior door swung open. “YourMinuteBeginsNow.”
The room was dark. Its only illumination came from dozens–no, hundreds–of screens that covered every surface. Each showed a different scene, each one cycling a few times every second: snippets of security footage, market metrics, news articles, primetime TV, and bird’s eye views of the streets of the Diluvian District.
In the middle of the room sat Odie. It was facing her, cross-legged on a mat on the floor, wearing a helmet which appeared to be composed of a single, shining obsidian surface. IV lines trailed from its arms and back to hidden reservoirs in the ceiling. Besides the helmet, it was naked, its body emaciated and pale from gods-knew-how-long spent without seeing the outside world. At a second glance, the helmet was neither helmet nor uniform in its composition: Odie had a thousand cameras set into its skull, a thousand unblinking eyes all fixated forever on the screens that surrounded it. It was a panoptispex, all-seeing and all-knowing.
“You’reLookingForSomeone,ShivGodschild.”
There is no time for an "it's complicated." Which word springs to Shiv's lips?
Voting ended onDec 16, 2023
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