Sing'n in Binary: 39

Getting to the restaurant early, Solei scouts out a choice table and has time to consider the strange paradox of success while she waits for everyone else to show up.

Because the more eddies you make, the less time there is to spend them, which means as her chooms have all gotten more successful in their separate fields they’ve spent less and less time together.

In fact this is the first time they’re actually meeting meat side in months.

But right on time Rayo comes into view, dressed in his signature dress sense of ‘corpo, but badly trying to hide it’ chic. He gives a bombastic wave as he sees Solei, but shows his corpo core by not making conversation until everyone’s arrived for the ‘meeting.’

A few minutes later Davis enters, his almost entirely ‘ganic body appearing modded in some way by size alone. But he swears up and down to not doing anything to enhance what’s naturally there.

Solei’s still not sure if she believes him.

Arriving fashionably late is essentially Davis’s polar opposite, a short unkempt man with long hair and a slouched posture. Funnily enough AK looks average enough that he stands out, as if the near total lack of identifiable traits becomes a trait on its own; like a dead pixel on a screen.

Sitting down and taking a bite of the appetizer they’d ordered, AK seems like he’s the one most irritated by the meeting starting late, despite being the cause of the delay.

“RIght fine, we're all here, happy?” He asks, waving a synthetic calamari Solei’s direction. “Now will you stop being so damn cagey?”

Looking around it seems that everyone else shares AK’s sentiment, so she nods.

She had been perhaps a bit overcautious in what she told them over the net. But in her defense Netwatch is specifically designed to make sure what they’re about to do doesn't work. So caution feels like a good idea.

Still, they’re all here and as disconnected as they can be from anything that wants to listen in to what she needs to say, so she takes a deep breath.

“Alright. But we need a bit of context…”

With that, she launches into the events of a few days ago, starting with her phone call to their choom, pushing past the questions and interjections at the fight with the scavs, and giving repeated reminders to be quiet as she reveals their friend’s true nature.

She nearly lost control of the booth, only the near constant reminders for everyone to keep their voices down allowed Solei to finish with her leaving Aria in Jinx’s apartment.

As her story concludes she looks around at each of their faces to gauge the mood of the room. Unfortunately aside from AK –who looks terrified– the other twos expressions are too complicated to parse.

Davis is the first to speak up.

“I thought you said she’s dead? Why are we talking about getting her back?” He asks, giving a slightly emphatic pause on the idea that Aria might have gotten zeroed.

Solei shakes her head.

“Fried. Not dead. Jinx says she just needs repairs, and that means eddies.”

Ray perks up at the mention of money, something he can easily understand in this mess.

“How much are we talking here? AI cores don't come cheap.”

Solei smiles, as always she can trust Ray to cut to the part that actually matters.

It doesn't hurt that he’s been ‘pinging for an open socket’ with Aria for a little while. Attempts that became only more focused after she didn't respond to them.

Which apparently was because she didn't notice it was happening.

But just before she can tell him to ask Jinx for a price tag, AK interrupts.

“The fuck is wrong with you people!” He shouts, standing up from the table. “You’re just sitting there like any of this makes any goddamn sense!”

Solei stands as well, reaching over to put a hand on his shoulder and guide him back to be sitting down.

“Yo! You need to chill-”

He slaps her hand away.

“Chill? I’ll tell you what I need to do! We need to fucking smash those d-!”

He’s cut off as Solei hits him in the jaw with her opposite hand, sending him to the ground.

She looks around at her surroundings and the warning glare from one of the employees with a more fancy uniform then, after a moment, sits down herself and allows the fucking traitor to recover.

As he does, Davis leans over from his spot and looks down at AK with a friendly expression, reaching down to help him back up.

“You’re sounding a bit futzy here choom. Maybe if you ex-

AK gives a slightly unhinged laugh as he gets up without assistance, looking around at each of them in turn with an increasingly manic expression.

“You- You’re believing this scop. How-?” He freezes, already pale face losing its remaining color and taking a step back, then another. Before Solei even realizes what’s going on he’s turned heel and delta’d out the exit, giving a single glance back before disappearing into the world outside.

Solei makes to follow, seeing Davis mirroring her out the corner of her eye, but both stop at Rayo grabbing her shoulder, not having left his seat.

“Peace! Peace! Relax...” He says, gesturing for Davis to sit as well.

Solei looks at him like he’s lost his mind.

“Hell no! We’ve got to get him before he-”

Ray snorts.

“Tells Netwach? Edd? He’d literally rather derez himself.” He says, gently guiding Solei to sit down. “And what if he did? He already had more than enough time even if you ran after him.”

He raises his fingers and snaps for a waiter, producing a paper dollar in his raised hand as if by magic.

“But he didn't, and I’ll talk to him after he’s had a chance to cool off. Preem?” He says, looking between the two of them.

After another moment Solei takes a deep breath and nods, mirrored by Davis easing back in his seat.

A waiter arrives, pocketing the paper bill, and Ray quickly points at a few items on the menu before handing it over to the employee.

“Honestly, you’d all be at each other’s throats constantly if it weren't for me.” He says magnanimously, and Solei has the good sense to ignore the slight waver in his voice.

He claps them both on the shoulder.

“So! I should have known it was a bad idea to talk about serious business before a meal, how about we table this until we’ve got some grease covered scop in us.”

Davis chuckles at the act, deliberately playing up his corporate side, and the sound eases the majority of the tension.

On her part, Solei feels the problem is more urgent than how her choom’s making it out to be, but recognises nothing good will come of pushing the issue, –especially with AK.

So she obliges, allowing herself to be drawn into a slightly forced casual atmosphere.

–_–

Jinx stares down at the half disassembled computer on her workstation, its faint smell of burnt plastic a constant reminder every moment it remains in her apartment.

Therefore, just to deal with the smell, she’s begun to triage the damage and start the repair process, removing pieces too far gone to be salvaged or repaired. In the process building a mental list of parts and estimating what it would take to get the computer functional.

A decision she still hasn't made.

Because the longer she looks into herself and sees no reason not to, the deeper she suspects the sanctity of her own mind.

But that doubt doesn't go away either.

Because even if she’s right and Aria- the AI is manipulating her, the correct decision would be to destroy the drives without giving the program a vector to manipulate anyone.

Jinx isn't sure she’d be able to live with herself if there’s even a fraction of a percent chance she’s wrong.

Huffing, she throws her hobby knife lightly so it embeds herself into the table's plastic surface and opens the bottom drawer.

She can't trust her own thoughts with what she currently knows, especially considering all the unshielded reactions with an AI, but right now the only people who can make any decisions are compromised in some way or another.

At least Jinx has managed to keep her skepticism.

Picking up a solid steel lockbox, she pulls out her link cable and plugs it into the open port. Sending a cryptographic passkey and hearing a click, she removes the two hard drives from inside next to other important items and documents.

As it stands she needs more data, both about the actual structure of the AI and even the most basic context to her situation.

Stuff like how the hell she managed to get herself inside some scrapper’s abandoned apartment and what she’s actually been doing when no one’s looking.

Placing the important drive on the table she plugs it into power again and, after taking a second to create an isolated sandbox just in case this inert drive can somehow do the impossible and trigger a program, Jinx plugs her link cable into the inert drive.

She’ll get to the bottom of this.

And when the time comes to make a decision she’ll be able to look at herself in the mirror without either disgust or horror.

–_–

Miguel “Rayo” Alvarez is a businessman first and foremost, and as he sits in his small but lavish manager's office in a RushRite distribution warehouse. The second most popular vending machine for legal variants of very illegal drugs.

Not a day goes by that Ray doesnt think about the only difference between him and a drug mule is a few triple bonded methyl groups and a fancy suit. A similarity that certainly includes the dangers that his competition on the other side of the law has to deal with.

Working here is a high risk job, it's how a street rat like him managed to land it.

Normally he’d be dead by one gang or another raiding and ransacking the warehouse, or –in the case of his predecessor– terminated by the higher ups for giving out company property to avoid getting killed and the warehouse ransacked.

Thankfully, Miguel Alvarez is a businessman.

A pretty sizable personal loan to install near military grade security systems and a few bits of sold info on shipments of raw ingredients he wasn't supposed to have to bring down the interest payments to something manageable. Suddenly the near monthly rotation of dead managers ends with a lot of dead sixers and a new company requesting a meeting with scarred men with buzzcuts and poorly fitting suits.

Now his vending machines are finding a market no one even knew existed, with a service lifespan twice as long as his co-workers.

And if the records from those machines show clear signs of tampering, or if there is an almost negligible discrepancy between how much product is being sent and how much is sold –indicating someone else is stocking his machines with non-corporate product?–

Well…

Rayo finds the expected discrepancy between product sold and gross profit, pocketing the difference and using an old trick to cover up the money that’s not supposed to be there in the first place.

As long as the money keeps flowing, his boss doesn't really need to know, now does he?

But as the less than legitimate part of his work concludes, Ray finds his mind drifting back to the earlier meetup with the old squad, and the reveal about the true nature of their newest member.

Aria has always been… confounding. Always eager to go along with whatever anyone’s doing or talking about, but just as quickly spiraling away into nonsense as something happens that only she sees the importance in.

In all honesty the AI reveal makes a lot more sense, though admittedly he doesn't have much of a frame of reference for the situation he finds himself in. Ray knows he's not the smartest in a lot of ways. People? He can break them down to a science.

His chooms have made fun of him for being an old man for his skill and opinions on technology, and he really can't blame them for it.

But aside from some very unrealistic ‘manga’ from his teenage years, Ray’s flying blind.

He coughs at the memory.

Regardless it seems like his choom is in some medical debt, and he’s paid off everyone else's tab’s one time or another.

Unfortunately, despite all his luxuries Rayo’s not actually swimming in liquidity, having to spend a great deal of it on all the pomp and pageantry or corpo life. To weave a spell of wealth and power like a peacock for his co-workers. To convince them that trying to kill and replace him with someone more loyal to them would be a bad decision for both their financial and bodily safety.

So it’ll take a few weeks to pull the money together, assuming he has to do it alone.

Getting back to work, he has to keep pulling himself back to his job as some small part of him keeps replaying a memory of a few pages of a ‘manga’ he’d once read.

It’s a scene as generic as they come, the high school boy getting punched in the face –then through a wall– by an overheating female android, after having accidentally upset her by plugging a drive into her socket without warning.

He coughs harder, wrenching his attention back to the spreadsheets.

---

A/N: One thing to note. Patreon doesnt allow me to keep my italics formatted and it's shown me exactly how much I use it sometimes. Which I've slowly been cutting back on.

Anywho this chapter huh? Clear delineation between people who know AI and people who dont! Hope that doesnt lead to anything terrible!

Ta-ta All!