Everything sucked about this situation.
It was night. The simulated weather on this level had chosen to be blustery with a soaking drizzle. And I was high up on a maintenance gangway linking the roofs of a couple of skyscrapers. On top of that, I had nobody to blame for being in this situation but myself.
Well, I kinda had someone to blame, but they had me over a barrel. I had racked up a bit of a debt with some people on an evening out. They cut me off and pressed for payment. When I found out I couldn’t cover what I owed, they presented an ultimatum. It was either help with this job they were doing, or … a much worse alternative. The alternative wasn’t anything like being hurt or killed, but it would have put me in a worse situation for a longer period. I thought I could tough it through this brief bit of discomfort.
The job was to sniff and copy a very specific set of data packets. My role was to get myself to a relay point and disconnect it at just the right time and then reactivate it. Long enough to cause the data to route itself to where the runners wanted it to go, but short enough that it didn’t cause suspicion that there had been interference. Said relay point was embedded in a gangway that passed utilities between a pair of megacorp skyscrapers.
Normally, these kinds of places were difficult for the average crew to get to due to myriad security measures. The security wouldn’t have been impossible to breach, but it was generally deemed too high-risk to bother with unless the payout was high. However, for this particular corp, I had means of getting in and out without triggering any alarms. This skill had me in demand, as runners wanted access, and I could make that access easier.
This “in-demand” nature had normally kept me flush, so when I cut loose, I really cut loose, never really worrying about the bill. However, on this night, something was much more expensive than I had expected, and the proprietors were not willing to offer credit when they knew they could use me to get a huge haul for themselves.
So here I was, in the middle of a gangway, suspended high above street level, in some atrocious weather.
I had been in position for about 10 minutes, waiting for the signal. It felt a lot longer due to the weather. All the time fighting the wind to stay stable on what was already a rather unstable pathway, with only a couple of suspension cables as handrails. My communicator finally chirped through my earpiece.
I wasn’t like the rest of the crew. They all had biotech augmentations. The most basic of which was a small module at the base of the brainstem that performed comm functions. Given how integral comnet access was to daily life, it was estimated that 99% of the organic population had one. It was also so minor that it was ignored when determining a person’s Makeup for their MOSAIC score. I didn’t have even that minor modification, and instead used a physical pad and earpiece. I got some odd looks for it, but that was it. Everyone assumes that such actions or bucking of convention tends to have a good reason which was probably personal.
I pressed the button on the earpiece.
“It’s time. Folks, get ready” Avur’s synthesised voice was calm and quiet, as the leader of the op should be. He paused for a moment, then continued, “60 seconds to transmission. Everyone, sound off”.
“All set on the splice point, ready to jack in,” replied the crew’s main runner, her voice tone clinical.
“Lookout all clear, nobody in sight.” The runner’s guard piped in, his voice a little less quiet than the others. Not that volume mattered, as everyone else was using neural links to communicate on this channel, and weren’t actually speaking. Only my earpiece used actual sound, and the wind would have made it impossible to listen in.
Then it was my turn. I let go of the cables I was using to steady myself, knelt down carefully, and gripped the edge of the walkway with my left hand to keep me balanced. I opened the cabinet with my free right hand and examined the layout. Power, water and data were all in their separate lines. Data had a black box in the middle, with a power cable spliced into it. If I touched the data cables, the next relay would detect the intrusion. On the other hand, briefly removing all power would cause a full drop and not be suspicious. Those kinds of interruptions were normal in this weather. I must have been taking too long to report in as Avur piped up again.
“30 seconds,” Avur continued the countdown. “Toise, you good?”
“Relay exposed, power connection confirmed”, I reported. “The wind up here is nasty. Keeping my balance is proving hard.”
“Just make sure you do your bit, and we’re all square.” He replied, “15 seconds to transmission. Toise, you act on 5. It’ll not reconnect in time to relay and funnel it all towards us.”
The wind seemed to sense my compromised balance and gave a mighty blow to test it. The walkway shook, and my hand barely held on. However, the movement disoriented me from the cabinet. I scrambled to re-locate the connection and grabbed it with my right hand, getting ready to pull.
“Five”, Avur’s voice rang out as my signal.
I pulled on the power splice to dislodge the termination. It took a bit of force, but eventually it was enough, as I watched the lights on the relay box go dark, confirming my task was successful. All I needed to do now was push it back in to allow it to touch the termination “good enough” to re-power it. As if it had been waiting for me to shift my centre of gravity to pull, the wind gave another mighty blow. This time my left hand didn’t hold.
I overbalanced. The crosswinds blew me to my right, causing me to pull the power splice clean out of the relay, exposing the live ends. I was flailing to try and lean to the left to re-balance, and in my panic, I didn’t notice the cable ends. The live end missed the termination point and slid to the side, allowing my hand to touch it.
I only know what happened in the next few seconds from a mixture of what I’ve been told happened and filling in the blanks with context clues.
Electricity arced up my right arm, down my right flank, and down to my knee, where it grounded out through the gangway. Luckily for me, the building’s wiring was built to code. This meant that there were fuses on the line that blew in response to what it deemed a fault. So the electricity was isolated very quickly, preventing me from taking more damage than I already had. Unsurprisingly, I passed out from the injury I had received, despite the safety cutoff. The safety cutoff also took out a fair amount of the building’s power, so this was not going to go unnoticed.
The power loss pretty much screwed the entire operation, and the crew all bugged out. To them, I was expendable, so they had no motivation to come and rescue me, regardless of my status. Not that they would have been able to. The disconnected data relay and the fused line made it easy for the corp’s maintenance staff to find me. As I was unconscious, I was completely at the mercy of what their bosses decided to do to me.
I woke up 4 weeks later in a medical facility. A lot of my right side had been replaced with biotech, including my limbs. It had been done in a way that meant it was visible, not disguised under a flesh-toned soft casing. It was a message to me to say that I’d not get away with what I had been doing any longer. I was too visible now, and unable to blend in with the corp.
They meant this as a mark of shame. I took it as a mark of freedom.