Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 1.9

1.9

+++

I was not bothered for the rest of my walk.

Not directly, at least. People watched me the entire time, of course, but it seemed that nobody was as stupid as the mugger.

That was good. It made the rest of the walk nearly tolerable. All I had to do was follow the gently curving road for a while, passing by industrial destruction the entire time.

The transition from the Old Combat Zone to the Glen was both immediate and obvious. There was a line on a map somewhere, and on one side of that map, it was destruction, chaos, and death, while on the opposite side of the line, a fully functional city with nice buildings and clean streets.

You could see exactly where that line was marked in the real world by the sudden transition between the two.

Literally. On one side of a street were bombed out wrecks, and on the other side was tall, well-lit buildings with people constantly streaming into and out of them. There seemed to be an NCPD car at every other corner, with NCPD drones and robots between them, going back and forth in a constant patrol.

The cops here were on alert, heavily armed and armored, just like the ones back at the Morro Bay Bridge, but even more on edge. The moment I came into view, no less than three drones had started tracking me, while tension started to line the officers.

Just as before, I didn’t let it bother me, and I just kept walking.

More than a few heads turned as I came closer, and not all of them were police, either. Corporate security was also present, squads of people in nearly-identical uniforms that were plastered in logos, well-equipped on top of that. There were also normal civilians, as well as people who looked like normal civilians but had far too much blood in their aura to actually be mere civilians.

Just like before, I walked right past the line of cops, and the tension deflated like a balloon.

The inside of the Glen was... pretty much exactly like the corporate section of the docks, but more. The buildings were taller, the streets cleaner, and the greed was stronger. The parasites were long established, here, and had since warped this section of the city nearly entirely to their own purposes.

Only their competition with each other had provided space and friction for the chaos of true life, for things to not go completely to plan, but even so, there wasn’t much freedom here.

One of the more immediate shifts was that it only took a block or two before the heavily armed and armoured cops and corporate security shifted to just the ‘regulars’, cops in typical, day-to-day uniforms rather than their doughboy armour. The corporate security shifted from heavy-combat expectations to something that was clearly intended for much more responsive use. Thinner armour left Linear Frames visible, logos bigger and brighter, colours more saturated. Walking advertisements to their parent corporations, but still functional on top of that.

I ignored them, of course.

Getting to the bank from there was simply a matter of time. I took a turn off of Skyline South when it was appropriate, and then simply followed the street for a bit.

The new bank building itself was... honestly not that impressive, to be honest. It was surrounded by high-rise buildings that kept it in shadow for most of the day, with only a few hours of sunlight reaching it at most. The only thing it had going for it was horizontal space, as the building was quite wide.

There were a plethora of guards in the vicinity, but they were obviously the sort to whom nothing had ever happened. Nervous, though their Cyberware didn’t let them show it. They didn’t try to bar my way, and so I promptly ignored them as I walked straight towards the entrance.

It was a simple, sliding door, fortunately. Relatively tall, like most of the doors for government buildings in this city, which again meant that I only needed to bend to two thirds of my height to fit through the entrance.

The inside of the building was clearly intended as old-school, a lobby with a white marble floor, red velvet queue lines and friendly-seeming tellers standing at thick, polished mahogany desks.

It was ironically the desks themselves that were the greatest display of wealth here.

The only break in the old-school style was the holographic line that cut off the queue, a faintly shimmering red line emitted from the entrance to it. A pair of green holograms were right next to it, indicating an open, much shorter queue, with only a few people already lined up.

One of them was staring at me with wide eyes, and they only widened further as I walked into the queue. The person behind the gawker eventually turned to follow her gaze, and so nearly jumped out of his skin when I stopped behind him.

The man turned around rapidly, not quite able to hide his fear.

The line moved. The woman kept gawking. A bell sound from a teller broke her fixation, and she hastily moved forwards in the queue, nearly running into the person in front of her.

You’d think they’d never seen a giant bird-person before. Truly, how strange.

The customers weren’t the only ones with eyes on me, though. The bank staff also did, though most of them quickly ended up focusing on their own work again. The cameras in the corner of the room gave away the attention that was actually being paid to me, one of them staying where it was to watch the entire lobby, but the other had turned towards me and hadn’t turned away. I could see the lenses shifting in the corner of my eye, but... Well, I didn’t really care. It was a camera, this was a public area.

That changed the instant that they started going further than that. My eyes were better than the best optics on the market, and so I saw, literally, what would otherwise pass completely unnoticed by the unaugmented. Beams of infrared and ultraviolet light raked across my body, and though I couldn’t see it, I could still feel the electromagnetic energies that were even further below or beyond that. From as low as radio waves, to microwaves, skirting the edges of the visible spectrum, before going into X-rays, and even running right under the edge of gamma rays.

My head turned to the camera, and I fixed the lens with an unblinking gaze. The system analysed my response, and the scan shut off prematurely.

I turned away- And the scan restarted.

This time, my head turned so fast that a Full Body Conversion would have had a difficult time keeping up. I set my face in an expression that the primitive algorithm that controlled the security system would read in the way that I wanted it to read, and the scan stopped again.

A lot of the bank staff suddenly became very nervous.

After a few seconds, the camera turned away. The line moved forwards, and I went back to staring straight forwards at nothing.

It didn’t try again.

The line went forwards, again, and again, and again. Someone walked in, saw me, and immediately walked right back out. Someone else walked in, saw me, and very reluctantly took up a space behind me.

Inevitably, it came to be my turn, and I finally walked up when the clerk’s desk flashed in an indicating green.

“I require an account.” I said, coming to a stop.

The woman’s face contorted, lips stretching into something that looked like a smile, her body moving into a just-imperfect-enough standing position. Before she even managed to say anything, even the minor humour I’d gained at the reactions everybody had to myself died a sudden, ignoble death.

“Of course.” Said the Cyberware using the woman’s mouth. “We shall be happy to assist you.”

One single word of difference.

Cogs in a machine, truly...

+++

She had called over another member of staff, who’d led me to a private room. There, I once again exploited the same blindspot that I’d exploited last time, their clear belief that I was someone who was rich, powerful, and eccentric.

I wasn’t rich, not in money, anyway, but the other two were something that I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, argue.

Their belief gave me slack, room to not go along with their typical power plays. In ignoring their typical power plays, however, I only further cemented their image of me in their minds; the absolute confidence that I projected was easily mistaken for a familiarity with power, and the idea that someone was unused to not being obeyed, both of which marked me as a rich person in this world.

They ignored that I was opening a new account. They knew I was rich and powerful, after all, and a bit of eccentricity excused whatever I was doing as something that didn’t matter enough to them to try and find out, and possibly get caught up in it.

They ignored that I paid cash for the fees, because I’d paid in very exact change, and because I’d delivered that cash with flair, precision, and unstated dramatics. The fact that I went into the bank with a deeper knowledge of their procedures than any civilian would have only cemented it even further. In simply telling them exactly what I required, right down to the specific forms, I cut off both their advertisements and any possibility that they would believe I wasn’t what they thought I was.

I paid their fees without blinking, but that was definitely part of the act. In truth, it was still practically highway robbery. After all the extra fees that came from using non-digital currency, I ended up paying in the vicinity of two and a half thousand dollars, which was enough money to rent a two bedroom apartment for a month, or get yourself a pair of Cyberarms that were decently tricked out.

Institutions robbed more people of more money than any number of thieves.

My desire to burn the city down grew by the second, and I was glad that I didn’t spend more than half an hour in the building.

I had intended to pick up an Agent of my own after acquiring my account, but at this point, if I had to interact with anything even vaguely corporate, chances were I’d end up painting a wall red, so I elected instead to simply start returning back to base.

Leaving the Glen behind somehow felt freeing, despite the fact that I was walking directly into a bombed out Combat zone.

Once again, I simply started walking, keeping a steady, consistent pace down the road, and utterly ignoring anybody around me.

I didn’t even make it a hundred metres into the Old Combat Zone when a sudden spike of hostility caught my attention. Even so, it might have gone unacknowledged, if not for the immediate screeching of tires and the roaring of an engine that followed it.

I turned around.

A car was accelerating directly towards me. It looked old, ill-maintained, and had enough holes in it that it had probably been used as cover in several gunfights.

Even so, it was the driver who caught my attention. I’d seen that face barely an hour ago, after all.

The mugger.

Evidently, not just an idiot. Still dumb, though.

His face was caught in a rictus of rage, pupils dilated and focused directly on me. Behind him, NCPD sirens suddenly flicked on, alerted to the maniac who was charging away from them. I didn’t need my Chozo brain to know that they wouldn’t make it in time.

I stepped forwards, my foot catching the gutter and bracing me. As the car charged me, I waited for the right moment.

Barely a second before he would have run into me, I raised my other leg and drove my foot forwards.

The front of the car collided with my sole.

The car lost.

The frame collapsed inwards, crumpling as it met me. The bonnet folded like a paper fan, shrieking all the while. The engine flattened upon itself, unable to handle the force. Glass shattered and popped, the twisting frame demanding too much of it. The driver rocked forwards, and no airbags deployed to take the hit. His head smashed into the steel steering wheel, and he went unconscious immediately.

I withdrew my foot, and kicked the car away for good measure. It spun sideways a dozen metres, leaking a trail of oil, off of the road but still towards the NCPD cops who stood still and quiet, dumbstruck.

Then I turned around and went right back to walking.

They could handle things from there.