TygerTyger's Electric Dreams Contest #11 | Triskelion, Part 1: Awakening

What Do You Feel?, Lucas Leger | Source

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01.X.AR9041

What I really wanted was a piece of cherry pie.

A shiver went all the way up through my spine to wake me up, followed by a piercing sound that made me remember the hit that knocked me out of my conscience. I was on my way to the bakery across the street, near the luxury apartment where I was staying at ‘Frisco. My girlfriend told me to call the bakery and ask for a delivery service right to our place, but I didn’t trust that the attendant would pick the right piece o’ pie for me. I have always thought that if you want something to be done, then do it yourself.

I should have listened to my girlfriend.

Just when I was about to enter the bakery, I felt a smack right to my nape. As my vision blurred and I started to fall to the sidewalk, I felt two pairs of arms holding me, one from each side, probably taking me somewhere else. I mumbled, trying to ask for help… but it was all in vain. Either whoever kidnapped me was helluva strong, or I had spent 200K in a cybody that was useless as crap. My cheeks ended up kissing the bottom of a van, which went from 0 to 60 in a blink.

I don’t remember anything since.

After I opened my eyes, I found myself in a poorly lit room, where the buzz of a fluorescent lamp that barely worked was the only sound I could hear now. I was naked from the waist up, and barefoot as well; the only remaining piece of clothing in me was some expensive chinos I bought on Raga’s three months ago, with every kind of button or metallic piece conveniently extracted. I tried to move my arms, but someone had cuffed me to the ground so tightly that I couldn’t move them more than a few inches.

My captors did one hell of a job.

I blinked rapidly, two times, to check if my HUD was online. White, blurry lines drew themselves in my field of view, trying to analyze anything in my surroundings that could be useful, but it was a total failure. The red light located in the roof of the room made it useless to detail a single thing on it; for all purposes, I was practically in total darkness.

But, as I slowly started to come to my senses again, I could hear someone breathing, here, in the same room.

And whoever it was, it wasn’t alone.

The piercing sound invaded my ears again.

02.X.AR9041

‘You know who’s going to get bent over on that Shinagawa-Rancor deal, don’t you?’

And to think that, just three days ago, I was having breakfast with Roger Cranston and Warren Hayter, my partners in crime at Arisaka Insurance Ltd since four years ago. Roger was having his usual American breakfast, while Warren was having a more exotic meal. I always thought that someone who had sushi for breakfast was kind of a yuppie, and Warren wasn’t exactly proving me wrong.

But, as I was eating just a roast beef sandwich with French fries, I wasn’t going to start a fight with Warren that morning.

‘Whatever, Warren. You know what kind of a bastard Bernard Rancor is.’

I almost made Warren swallow his nigiri whole.

‘Excuse me, Alan? Rancor might be a prick-in-a-stick, but he should have declared bankruptcy. Merging whatever’s left of Rancor Holdings with the most powerful zaibatsu this side of the Pacific Ocean, well… You do know Shinagawa will end up having a monopoly on the neural circuitry trade, don’t you?’

Roger took a piece of bacon out of his plate and put it above Warren’s only nigiri left.

‘You’re making a tantrum out of the usual stuff, Warren. The only thing that Rancor cares is his money. He doesn’t care for the rest of the market, and if that means that Shinagawa Medical will have the whole West Coast for them, let it be. Get used to reading your HUD in Japanese, rosebud.’

Warren glanced at Roger with a mischievous expression in his face.

‘Not if I can help it…’

As Roger shrugged his shoulders, we looked helplessly at Warren.

‘And what are you going to do about that, Mr. Hayter?’

‘Hey, hey. I’m not going to reveal my secrets of the trade that easily, Alan… That being said, do you remember that guy we met at Tripod Neural’s end of the year party back in ’39?’

‘Hardly. I’m not a dolphin, Warren.’

Bullshit. Of course, I remembered him. Eugene Harvey, the old Head of IT at Tripod. The guy was drunk as fuck and tripped himself all over the main table at the reception. Strangely enough, the results of his shenanigans were quite positive to the company: not only he made friends with the employees of four Silicon Valley companies who went right to aid him, but Tripod’s income in Q1 ’40 nearly tripled itself. We ended up calling Harvey the Triple Tripper.

‘Well… What if I said to you that he’s in pretty good terms with Adonis Sarkas?’

Oh, Warren. You naughty boy.

Roger nearly spat his meal out of amazement.

‘You… You mean you’re going to offer Rancor’s corpse to Sarkas Industries?’

‘I already did, baby. We’re going to meet Sarkas and Rancor on Friday.’

Warren won himself the most expensive Roger and I could pay that morning.

Provided he carried his plan successfully, Warren Hayter was on its way to become the hottest trade fixer in California. If Sarkas Industries was really going to snap Rancor Corp out of Shinagawa Medical’s clutches, by design, the resulting merger would make Sarkas Industries – and the whole Silicon Valley neural tech industry by extension – the greatest tech conglomerate of the States, and a very troublesome competitor against Shinagawa Medical’s monopolistic pretensions.

Back then, those seemed to be pretty awesome news.

Now… I wasn’t so sure.

03.X.9041

The red light on the roof started to titillate violently, like the buzz of a bee.

The room lit up with the most intense white light ever, shortly afterward.

When I overcame the dazzle that the room’s lights made in my eyes, I opened them to the most surreal, horrifying thing I had seen in a long time.

I was locked up in what seemed to be a doll’s room. Various cybody parts were standing or left in the ground all over the place, stacked in a storage-like fashion. Three large tubes, filled with the amniotic fluid that was commonplace in every cybody farm, stood up in various parts of the place, eerily reflecting the light and projecting its contents’ shadow in the floor. One of the tubes had been emptied recently, but the other ones were still growing bodily parts…

… and, against each one of them, two unconscious bodies that looked suspiciously similar to my own were cuffed to the ground.

Was this some kind of sick joke?

The steely chirp of a very loud speaker system invaded the whole room. Not only was cringe-inducing enough to intensify my headache; it ended waking up the other guys as well.

‘What the…’ said one of them.

The other one spat a healthy dose of amniotic fluid all over his chest…

… which meant that someone had just cultivated them while I was asleep.

Suddenly, the speaker splurted a very artificial voice, heavily edited and tuned to disguise its owner.

‘Rise and shine, motherfuckers. About time you woke up.’

‘Quite fluent French, you asshole!’

… I have heard that phrase before.

‘… Warren?’

The cybody I pictured like my first clone turned his head to see me, astonished.

‘… Alan? The fuck is this, man? Are you OK?’

It wasn’t so far-fetched to fathom that the other guy, who was still vomiting amniotic fluid as if he had a prolapse, was Roger. That meant someone took the job of kidnapping all three of us…

… but why were Roger and Warren put in cybodies that were just the same as my own model?

‘Can’t say I am.’

Warren turned to face the remaining version of me that was left.

‘Roger? Is… Is that…’

The awkward voice started to speak again.

‘Mr. Hayter, as cunning and qualified as you are to set very convenient business affairs, you seem very inclined to state the obvious. Of course, Mr. Cranston is currently indisposed, feeling the side effects of waking up in a different body. Something that we all would have wished that happened to yourself, given your ability to pester.’

‘Oh, come on. Give me a fucking break! What the hell is this?’

‘This is just the natural consequence of your sins, gentlemen. We all have to pay for our wrongdoings. Suffice to say, we had to borrow Mr. Ramirez’s current genome to produce new cybodies for the rest of yourselves, given that your… particular ways of resisting extraction resulted in our crew having to… damage your old cybodies beyond repair. Neither we feel sorry for that… nor we will be if you don’t comply with our demands.’

Fuck. Whoever these guys were, they were playing hard. To think I was lucky for having just received a blackjack’s hit to my neck wasn’t giving me any relief at all.

For my sanity’s sake, I had to step forward.

‘And… What demands are those?’

The laughter that followed was almost manic enough to be considered in a villain-of-the-week casting.

‘Oh, Mr. Ramirez. Always the peacemaker, don’t you?’

The central part of the roof opened itself, revealing a hidden holoprojector. As the white lights slowly receded and created enough darkness for the projector to work, various images and documents rapidly manifested themselves out of thin air, flowing too fast to be able to distinguish a single thing out of it…

… until the projector stopped in a group selfie.

It was an old photo. All three of us were pictured in it.

Our captor’s voice resumed through the speakers.

‘Warren Hayter, Roger Cranston, and Alan Ramirez. A most promising trio of students, directly out of SoCal’s Business Faculty on ’34. Back then, you swore to each other that you would act like musketeers, with jolly cooperation and a sense of honor taking you to the top of a very fledging and promising medical tech industry. Now, in ’41, you have been able to reap the fruits of your knowledge and your fellowship quite healthily, being not only the top analysts of Arisaka’s Field Research division but having astonishing solo careers as advisors to quite a few of Fortune’s 100 companies. However, we’re not here to talk about your jobs…’

As the voice spoke, our faces slowly started to melt in the picture. It wasn’t a nice touch at all.

‘… but about your friendship. Or, hopefully, of how little will remain of it when this day ends.’

Roger slowly started to recover out of his amniotic fluid-induced drowsiness, clumsily trying to mumble some words.

‘Wah fis yer idea uf un aferparty, Wahfen?’

Our captor continued, showing us a slideshow of what seemed to be our CVs and our job achievements. The number of photos and evidence they had was enough to think they had been hacking and compiling our personal records since months ago. There was not a single hacker in the whole state of California who could run such a specific search in one or two days.

These guys had been tracking us for some time.

‘You see, in order to maintain your façade of camaraderie, you have been hiding enough treachery and deceit between yourselves to make a senator blush. Whether you’re stupid or oblivious to the truth, my associates and I can’t say for sure… But let’s start by reviewing what I feel is a most representative case of your unwavering loyalties, the Edmund Janus case.’

A full profile of Edmund Janus appeared between us.

It was strange to see a dead man brought to life again, even if it was holographically. Janus was the CEO of Avalon Pharma, one of our first jobs as a team. Hell, we could even say that Janus was our mentor. And these guys had full knowledge of every meeting we had, every e-mail we sent to him… They had even access to encrypted files we designed to destroy themselves after a certain number of uses.

Warren-Me opened his mouth in a mix of rage and astonishment.

‘What… What the hell do you think that you’re going to accomplish by showing this to us, you bastard?’

‘Oh, Mr. Hayter, don’t be so rude. I think your buddies here deserve to know how you deliberately faked Avalon Pharma’s ’37 income reports in its second quarter as to politely making them decline an offer that you weren’t so inclined as to let pass by.’

As unbelievable as it seemed, there was enough evidence to not only demonstrate that Warren had altered Avalon Pharma’s financial reports in our system: he had even paid a hacker that went by the name of Q-Tip to implant a bug in our personal browsers that produced fake news regarding Avalon Pharma’s crumbling income figures.

‘Warren… Did you…?’

Warren-Me started to sweat profusely, punching the ground as he could through its cuffs.

‘Of course I didn’t, Alan! For God’s sake, what kind of man do you think I am?’

The projector quickly played a video of a security camera in Havana, one of Warren’s favorite establishments. It depicted Warren in his preferred table of the place – he was quite the order freak when it came to places to sit and eat – speaking with a suspiciously inconspicuous man, paying him in cash. I desperately tried to think that it had been a setup and that someone was framing Warren in order to put him jeopardy with Roger and me.

I quickly lost all hope of that when I saw Warren-Me’s jaw dropping to the floor. A fact that the voice through the speakers seemed to rejoice well over it.

‘Warren, for God’s sake… Why the hell did you do that? There was no need…’

‘Alan, Alan, look… Just let me explain…’

Our captor’s voice interrupted us.

‘Surprised, Mr. Ramirez? Because we’re not. Suffice to say, as your little investing advisory firm decided to back out from Avalon Pharma’s, Mr. Hayter himself was landing a fine job as Edmund Janus’ top man in his Board of Directors two weeks later. Something that, evidently, he hid from yourselves very well after the old man’s death.’

A file depicting the structure of Avalon Pharma’s Board of Directors clearly showed Warren Hayter as Assistant Advisor on it. He was sworn in on July 29th, ‘38… Exactly thirteen days after we ended up our service to Avalon. He worked there until the company’s buyout by Tripod Medical in the next year, three months after a cardiac arrest ended the life of Janus.

If I hadn’t been cuffed to the floor as I was, I would have broken Warren-Me’s face right there.

Delighted, our captor started to speak in a more playful tone.

‘And to think your girlfriend Jane was the receptionist in Avalon Pharma’s HQ, Mr. Ramirez… You could have asked her.’

04.X.AR9041

‘So… How do I look?’

Jane was kind of a geek. And I loved her because of it.

She had been expecting a delivery from Japan, something that she kind of handle like if it was a top-secret affair. When the box finally arrived at our home, she ran like a madman to receive it, clumsily signing the receipt and taking the box out of the messenger’s hands. I ended up paying an additional tip to the delivery guy for his troubles.

Now, I was watching her from our bed, exiting our bathroom… scantily dressed in a Pikachu onesie. As a true fan of Japanese memorabilia, Jane wasn’t exactly immune to spending over five thousand bucks to buy a pajama of a long-dead video game and animation franchise. Fortunately, my job could provide her well enough to let her indulge in her hobbies.

‘I think you look… kind of electrifying.’

Jane’s eyebrow lifted because of my pun.

‘Alan James Ramirez, from the depth of my heart… Fuck you.’

As she came into our bed, removing the electric mouse-shaped hood out of her head and cuddling with me under the sheets, I hugged her as I watched the news.

Curiously, Avalon Pharma’s stock prices seemed to be on the rise. Reports that I thought to be greatly exaggerated, or probably a ruse by the old Janus to attract investors that could save his company of the unfortunate destiny that Warren had predicted.

‘Those are… quite good numbers, huh?’

‘Hell, yeah. You should have seen Mr. Janus this morning.’

‘Do the other employees believe it?’

Jane looked at me with a strange expression on her face.

‘Why shouldn’t they, sweetie?’

Why shouldn’t they… Why shouldn’t I?

I had clearly been a fool.

Jane hugged me, rubbing my thighs with her right leg.

'Dinner was pretty awesome, by the way... But you blew it with the dessert, Alan.'

'Why do you say that, darling?'

Jane chuckled as she closed her eyes.

'What I really wanted was a piece of cherry pie.'

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This short story is participating in the Electric Dreams contest by @tygertyger featured here!