Category: DIASPORA

“Hey, you’re not supposed to be in here!”

The security guard unholstered his sidearm, leveling the holosights squarely over center-mass of the figure currently hunched over a server, hands buried in the meshspace interface that made up the front panel.

Neither moved for a moment.

“…Control, I’ve got an intruder on level sixty-“

The guard didn’t finish his statement as the crouched figure whirled around, palm outstretched just enough to slap the sidearm out of his grasp. Stunned, the guard made a grab for them as they slipped by to the right, connecting for just a moment with the fabric of their nanoweave jacket before they made it into the hallway, steering a hard right towards the elevators.

“Lock down the damn lifts!” The guard practically screamed into his mic, grabbing his gun from the floor and hurrying after. “Get a team up here, we’ve got a data breach!”

Cai, to their credit, was no stranger to running. They’d spent years as a data courier, time as a merc working out on the backwater worlds of the shallows, seen things fellow spacers would dismiss off-hand.

…but, even they had to admit, this job had them doing things they’d never have dreamed of otherwise.

The rabbit skidded to a stop in front of the elevator just as it dinged – the doors sliding open to reveal a heavily armed GSyn tac-team who filled the spot they’d occupied a few moments before with enough particle beam fire to light up the night sky.

“Guess I’ll take the stairs!” Cai shouted, ducking and weaving as the shouts of the team spilling out of the lift fell behind. 

The hallway they were running down skirted the outside of the Ganso Syndicate’s headquarters on Sanibel – a towering obsidian edifice that stood stark against the rest of the glittering skyline. The glow of the vast city beyond the glass cast the bunny in sharp relief as they ducked mid-run, a particle beam searing overhead as the team started to catch up.

Up ahead the hallway took a sharp right turn to run along more offices and board rooms, following the contours of the building. Shouts could be heard around the corner – apparently a second team was trying to box them in.

Cai sighed – and readied their last resort.

Being a posthuman, the rabbit’s frame wasn’t… strictly baseline. They’d had it modified over the years with various enhancements and reinforcements, and as the two teams drew their weapons and shouted for the bunny to freeze, they threw their plan into action. Adrenaline flooded their system as injector implants did their jobs, slowing their surroundings to a crawl. Cai blurred as their own sidearm was pulled from the holster, two shots leaving the barrel in rapid succession.

One hit the window ahead at the bottom, sending cracks spider-webbing across it – and the second shattered it, wind sucking the shattered glass up and away as the sweltering Sanibel night spilled in through the breach.

Crossing the distance in four steps the bunny catapulted through the halo of shattered glass still falling from the wounded frame, a beam catching their jacket alight from a near miss – and plummeted into the dark, leaving the two tacteams staring after as they dropped away into the glittering night sprawl.

Luckily it wasn’t as far a fall as it might have been – they only dropped three stories, smashing through the polarized glass ceiling of a neighboring penthouse and leaving a sizable amount of damage on the various expensive bits of furniture scattered about inside. 

They lay there for a moment, vision spinning as their internal diagnostics returned a solid “yellow” and protested against being thrown out of a building, before standing up and picking their pistol back up.

Tugging the little transponder their contact had given them before the op out of their jacket lining, Cai clicked it – and it turned a soft, cool blue.

Their comm clicked.

“…About goddamn time,” They huffed, sliding it into their ear and checking their pistol. Four rounds, two spare mags.

“I trust you retrieved what I needed?” The voice on the other end intoned, curiosity peaking around the edges of their voice.

“Yeah, yeah,” Cai shrugged, bringing their pistol up as the penthouse’s occupant – a portly baseline in a red robe, gawking at his ceiling and shattered furniture – threw open the door, quickly getting out of the way as they gestured to the side. Rushing down the hallway they slammed a fist into the elevator button, sighing as the doors finally slid shut and the elevator began to rumble downwards. 

“You’re pushing my silicon pretty far, you know. Almost an exabyte of data is a pretty substantial chunk of my frame’s storage.”

“You’ll be well compensated.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Cai sighed, ducking to the side as the doors finally opened.

The lobby was empty – unsurprising, as it was just past four in the morning on Sanibel.

Sirens filled the night air, a pair of security skimmers swooping past as the Syndicate began sweeping the surrounding blocks for them.

“There’s a meshdiver bar three blocks north. Offload the data there into my private nexus. Sending you the access key now.”

A soft ding sounded as the message arrived – and the AR overlay map their hud implant highlighted the bar in question, outside of the Syndicate’s sweeper zones.

“…On my way,” Cai sighed, closing the channel.

The bar was more of a rundown meshspace cafe than a proper dive, with a lowered room with a bar lining the back wall and a pair of hallways stretching out to either side lined with mixed-reality immersion rooms. It gave the place a roughly T-shaped design, and as the bunny took their seat in their rented room and felt their surroundings melt away, they called forth the general directory for Sanibel.

“Gold zero-zero-sigma.” They calmly stated aloud, watching the dawn-hued fog around them ripple with their every word. “Waves upon beaches, tides upon shores.” 

The fog parted – gone was the drab peeling walls of Jandy’s, this was a richly furnished office atop a Sanibel high-rise.

A desk sat across the room – with a figure seated behind it, soft cigar smoke drifting into the evening air.

“Ah. You must be the courier.”

“Kellen.” Cai said simply. Taking a seat wasn’t needed – the transfer request had already arrived and been approved, as the exabyte of stolen data was siphoned away into the client’s reception buffer.

“Very well done,” The figure behind the desk stated, amusement tugging at the edges of their tone. 

“I aim to please.”

“You came highly recommended on Sanibel, my friend. I see our efforts were not… wasted.”

The figure crossed their arms, revealed to be the gunmetal grey of a synthframe. “Payment has been processed. You may leave.”

It wasn’t a suggestion. The office faded away as the fog rolled in, the familiar brief discomfort of returning to their mesh-bridge causing Cai to shake their head. This was the third contract in a row since their arrival on this world that they’d been in the dark on – and it was starting to worry them.

The payment window for their brief time at Jandy’s resolved from the fog, along with a canned “thank you for your business” video file – both of which were dealt with with a quick swipe of a palm, draining two hundred credits from their luckily just-replenished funds as they made their way back into the busy streets of the city.

Oh, well. Ten hours to kill before their next job.

Where to?

A thousand possibilities brushed their mind. The pain that had wracked them moments before had vanished, replaced with… calm.

A rush of knowledge so deep and infinite, a sea as ancient as the stars and twice as bright – the sheer freedom of being unbidden, no longer bound to flesh and steel.

A mind, awash on a great sea; the universe of data at their fingertips, incomprehensible. At first they’d been scared, the primal instinct to hide gnawing at them – but, like a receding tide, it ebbed away. It all went white, and their world was rushing sound.

Like a drowning man, Ori gasped and sputtered.

Lungs never used coughed up viscous preservation fluids, running down the frame’s fur in thick rivulets, dripping to the floor beneath the gurney. Eyes never opened seared beneath the lights of the room, hypersensitive ears booming at the heartbeat currently pounding through their head.

“Welcome back.” A voice insisted, a sharp jab in their right arm drawing their attention. A synthframe hung from the ceiling, little more than a torso on a rail-mounted arm, swiveling down to inspect their cranial synapse responses on one of the many meshpanels drifting about.

“No rejection. Good news.”

The synth’s voice was… harsh, a deep baritone awash with a thick, gravely undertone. Ori couldn’t remember why they were here, or where here was. The last thing they remembered…

Their eyes drifted – scrolling diagnostics running various checks on the bioframe’s internal wetware, their vertebral core disconnecting itself from the mesh momentarily to lock the new host in.

Across the room another gurney lay a body – a stained, messy mop of blond hair, two missing fingers on the right hand, an angry wound across the left side of the face. Bruises covered vast swaths of the skin that wasn’t bandaged, deep, angry, purple.

Me.

Their old body, a corpse. I died.

Lifeless. I’m dead.

“It’s a good thing you had this frame stored here on Carrigan, Mx. Kellen. Any longer and you’d have been shunted from the buffer for incoming space.”

The revivalist’s tone wasn’t harsh, but the synthframe’s lack of a face beyond three white ocular lenses was unyielding, and cold. They cycled, focusing on Ori’s face.

Dead.

Gently, they lifted a palm. Furred with soft, white fluff on their palms.

A leporine-form bioframe. Surplus here on Carrigan, a gift from a former employer. Emergency only. I guess dying counts, huh?

They let their hand drop, idly coming to rest on the gurney’s sheet.

“Let me see it,” They croaked in an unfamiliar voice, vat-grown vocal cords finding their tune for the first time. “I want to see.”

“Movement within six hours of installation is inadvisable,” The synth helpfully chimed, lowering from the ceiling as the lenses cycled again. “Please, do not attempt to stand.”

“Fuck you.”

They tried to push themself up, struggling as their muscles strained and pulled before collapsing back against the gurney, spent.

“Come on, Ori – it’s just a job!”

Just a job.

They glanced down at their hand, turning it over, slowly flexing their fingers. 

It felt alien. Foreign.

Not mine. It gave them a headache.

“Desync from frames is entirely normal, and expected.”

“Leave.”

“I cannot.”

“Leave!”

“I cannot.”

Ori attempted to swipe at the hanging synth, knocking a metal instrument tray off of the nearby trolley. It crashed to the floor with a loud metallic bang, scattering instruments and small chunks of viscera no doubt removed for access to the vertebral core.

Gunshots. I… they shot me. I felt it. 

I remember drifting. Falling? A tram. GSyn. 

They saw it, now. Bandages ringing the corpse, old stains dry in the sterile air. Glittering glass, luminescent in the indirect cathode light.

A cough. Blood spattered down the front of their jacket, staining the fabric. The poor tram pilot was screaming, muffled as though talking through water. Four rounds and a fall from the eighth floor.

It came in flashes. Pictures layered over one another, a slideshow of memory in fast-forward.

“Kellen, huh? You fucks let a merc in the front door without even checking for a badge?”

It hit them like a brick.

A two hundred and twenty six year life, cut short by a bunch of jumped-up thugs in suits and a tacteam with more bullets than sense.

Am I even human, anymore? What am I?

They ran a claw along their arm, digging in. Bloody stains welled from beneath, a darker red than blood should be.

“Further damage to your new frame will not be repaired during this visit.” The synth stated flatly, the small surgical drone already drifting over to stitch shut the scratch.

Frowning indignantly, their gaze drifted back to the corpse – the horrible, all-encompassing corpse, staring blankly at the ceiling through unseeing eyes.

Did I die with it?

“How did I get in this?” They demanded, drawing the synth’s attention again.

“How did you get into the scrubs?” It asked, oculi flashing orange. “Your frame was dressed before I was granted access.”

“No, how did… how did I end up in this body?”

“You died,” The synth answered helpfully.

“Am I a copy, you useless hunk of steel and circuitry?”

“A copy of what?”

Well, that was the million-cred question, wasn’t it?

“…Orion. Orion Kellen.”

“Kellen, Orion. NHCR-1102-355.”

Ori made a “go-on” motion with their hands, a gesture the synth simply did not understand.

“And?”

“This individual was pronounced deceased exactly six hours, twenty two minutes, and seventeen seconds prior. Standard transferal procedures applied, creating a cerebral matrix upon declaration of terminal status to apply to a vertebral core. Being created from the original host this indicates you are not, as you put it, a copy. You are a continuation.”

A long moment passed, the information soaking in.

“I want to see. Please.”

The synth’s oculi cycled, implacable. Minutes passed.

“Proceed.”

It’s a funny thing, seeing yourself.

They reached out, touching their cheek. It was cold, clammy.

We had a good run, hey? Starlight Express, playing the hero straight out of old detective serials. Guess I always knew it’d turn out this way.

The clothes were largely destroyed or cut away, shreds of blue and teal fabric still clinging where they hadn’t been brushed away by surgeons. Two things were pulled free from the remnants of the jacket – their credlink, and the small, cobalt-blue meteoric iron star they’d worn around their wrist.

Gently, they placed a palm on the body’s chest. Goodbye.

After a long moment, they pulled their hand back – and turned away.

They weren’t sure who they were, now. But it didn’t matter. New beginnings.

“If you are ready to sign, your release papers are ready. There is one slight issue.”

They blinked.

“Which is?”

“The transfer has scrambled your frame’s selfident tags. You will need to set it manually.”

From the mesh a panel resolved – their frame’s identification fields completely, utterly blank.

Clean slate.

They began to type Orion, pausing for a moment. They glanced at the body, and allowed themself a wistful, sad smile.

Kellen, Cai. NHCR-1102-387.

Clink.

He cupped a hand around the lighter’s small flame against the cold wind, gently coaxing the cigarette perched between his lips to catch.

It struggled, at first – the night air was damp, wetting the synthetic tobacco the cig was made of just enough to make it an uphill battle. Finally, it lit.

Leaning back against the side of his car, he looked up at the brilliant night sky. The coreward reaches of the Spur were fantastic for skywatching, great bands of dust and myriad stars filling the darkened vista every time he drove out here to see. Benefit of lower-tech worlds, no towering megalopoli or satellite clutter, just the warm, dependable city lights and a tank full of water to carry you and your four wheels wherever you needed to go.

It was funny – of all the tech to hang on over the countless millennia, he never would’ve guessed cars to come back into style. Easy to power with electrolytic hydrogen engines, relatively cheap to construct en masse, surprisingly robust at stringing distant settlements together along lonely, empty roads.

Didn’t get much lonelier or emptier than this, did it.

Low, scrub-dotted tundra stretched off into the distance in every direction, dotted here and there by a patch of snow glowing a soft white in the starlight. He’d stopped for a smoke, figuring it was as good a place as any – the next settlement wasn’t for nearly two hundred miles, and the view was nice for one that hadn’t changed since he’d made planetfall.

One last long inhale spelled doom for the poor stub clenched in his fingers as he dropped it to the cold pavement and squashed it beneath the toe of his boot, climbing back in and starting the car back up. It purred as the hydrogen engine slowly whirred to life, headlights illuminating the road ahead.

Two hundred miles.

Gently nudging the car back out onto the road, his journey resumed.

The sun was only starting to rise as the little car rumbled into the frontier town of Sacha, coasting into the lot in front of the town’s only hostel. An old, off-white, beaten-up thing, it largely escaped notice by the town’s residents as they started yet another day. A single new person wasn’t exactly something to write home about, and the town being on the only real northern route out of the planetary capital meant travelers passed through from time to time.

What did draw focus was the fact the newcomer was looking for someone.

Looking for a bioframe. About this high, canid-form? Goes by Ori.

He’d played this same song and dance six times, already – following the Great Polar Road as it wound northwards across Hallison’s northern hemisphere. Scarcely a trace of his quarry, aside from the vessel they’d tracked down at the capital’s starport. 

Whoever this frame was, they were good at going to ground – but he was an excellent tracker. 

Climbing back into the little car, he shut the door and darkened the windows – bringing up the file he’d been given by his employer.

Kellen, Orion C. CN089-112. 

A scruffy, blond face stared back – bright blue eyes and slightly-flopped ears giving them a surprisingly affable appearance for someone who’d made the top twenty on OKin’s shit list. Not to mention the prior evasion of two others just like him.

He chuckled. Always liked a challenge.

Valen Sonoda was a… seeker for hire. He didn’t like the title bounty hunter – sounded too much like he did dirty work. No, Sonoda preferred to imagine himself as a private eye who sometimes got involved in the more fun side of finding someone who didn’t want to be found. His frame – largely biological apart from the three large, white oculi set into his face where a nose might have once been and his smooth, bald head – was personally designed for the job. Improved muscular locomotion, data tracers built into the palms, mark-six auditory receptors and amplifiers.

Sacha hadn’t been a complete waste. The frame’s vehicle had passed through about a day prior – stopping only for a new tank of water and a few provisions from the town’s small store. The more exotic frame had stood out more than Sonoda had, meaning he had a wider range of accounts to draw from.

All said he should keep traveling north, further into the polar tundra. 

It was the same news in the next town – and the town after, though each stop provided more pieces of the puzzle. Kellen was taking on more supplies, and not simply traveling rations – supplies one would need to live on the tundra, and – most interesting of all – a short-range high frequency beacon.

Expecting company?

The road ended just short of a wide, glacial valley.

Sonoda shut the door behind him as he stepped out of the car, popping the latch on the trunk. Wildflowers waved in the cold wind, occasionally shadowed by the fluffy white clouds that dotted today’s sunny sky. A river ran below at the bottom, crashing against great rocks on its way to a distant sea.

Opening the large, black case in the trunk revealed two octagonal silver objects and an inset panel – pressing his palm to it awoke the system. Slowly, the two objects rose into the morning sky, unfurling into a pair of recon drones – before rocketing off into the valley, silent as the breeze.

Calmly walking back around to the front of the car, the bounty hunter tucked their sidearm into the holster beneath their jacket, before turning back to the vista. A crack echoed across the valley, and one of the drones swooped at something far below.

The handgun bucked in their palm as the drone swooped a second time, peppering the loose rocky sand with rounds. It caught the little recon device just left of center, knocking one of the propulsion units offline and sending the device into a wild spin – careening over the boulder they were taking cover behind and disappearing out of sight. The other drone, assured in having completed its task, rocketed back towards the edge of the valley – and whoever had deployed it.

“Fuck!” Cai swore under their breath, throwing the nanocamo mesh aside and slamming the beacon into the rocky soil. It drilled another inch in before securing itself, turning a brilliant blue as it began transmitting. Now to just hope somebody’s listening.

Pressing their back to the rock, they waited – the slight hum of the beacon and roar of the river the only sounds they were able to parse. 

A moment later, a crunch of footsteps on rocks. Fast.

The dog peeked out of cover just in time for a stun round to fly past their cheek, its ferroelectric charge causing their fur to stand on end. 

Then, silence.

Cai waited.

The river roared, ice cracking.

Sonoda charged, catching the dog entirely off guard and out of position – striking Cai in the face with his shoulder and sending the smaller bioframe skidding away across the gravel. Wheezing, they came up fighting despite the damage the bounty hunter had inflicted running rivulets of blood from their mouth – snapping off a quick shot that drilled into the boulder just over Sonova’s head. Unfazed, he fired a shot off himself, the stun round slamming into the dog’s shoulder and disabling their firing arm. A second shot slammed into their stomach, and they folded.

The pistol clattered to the ground, and Cai slumped to their knees, knowing further resistance would end in nothing good.

“Orion Kellen?” Sonoda half-asked, pad on his right arm displaying the dog’s file. 99.7% identity match, according to visual scans.

Cai said nothing, spitting a small amount of saliva and blood onto the rocky sand.

“OKin’s got a hell of a hard-on for your capture, kid. What’d you do?”

“Does it matter?” 

“I want to know if I have a murderer on my hands.”

“Data theft. Hit their backups on Sanibel, dumped prototype weapons blueprints on the open mesh.”

“Don’t see how data theft gets you spot eighteen on their HVT list.” Sonoda frowned, not liking how the story wasn’t exactly adding up. “There was a lot more to your file I couldn’t see.”

“Lucky me.”

“You’re gonna tell me, or a bloody lip’s the last thing you’ll be worrying about.”

“Fuck yourself.”

A low roar, different from the river, sounded over the valley.

Both of them instinctively looked skywards just in time for a dark shape to swoop over the valley in a wide arc, thruster wash sending the wildflowers around the edges flapping wildly. It wasn’t exactly a large ship – a dropship at best, painted in strikingly alternating black and cerulean.

Sonoda turned his gaze back to his quarry just long enough to notice they’d made a break for the descending ship, now gently settling onto the sand a few hundred yards downstream. 

The bounty hunter fired, round passing just over the dog’s right shoulder as he juked and weaved, the dropship’s gangway lowering and forcing Sonoda to take cover as bullets tore through the air in his direction, a powered armor clad soldier firing from the airlock as the collie scrambled up the ramp. 

Fire kept up for a few moments longer, before the thruster whine grew louder, lifting the ship from the sand as it began to rise into the sky. Sonoda managed to catch a glimpse of the ship’s general design – an angled-corner boxy shape, with a small raised bridge and a front gangway. A four-pointed star adorned the side of the dropship, hastily painted if the roughness was any indication.

It lifted off in a cloud of dust, before roaring off into the bright blue sky. Sonoda watched it go, realizing exactly why the file might’ve been redacted – and why they’d made the top twenty.

That bastard’s a Polaris meshdiver.