Priss

Mackie shows up early to the danger room. He's wearing one of my band T-shirts under his jacket, one of the first concerts I ever did, back before I even had the wig. Celia had just found me, just inducted me into the Sabers, I'd barely managed to put a band together. I know all that wasn't more than two years ago, maybe eighteen months, but it feels like it's been longer. Time works weird when every week you're in a hardsuit blowing shit up around midnight. Longer work days, I guess.

"Heya, Priss," he says. "Where's Sylvie?"

I shrug. "Some kind of physical. Celia's idea. Something to do with Sexaroid… body stuff?"

"Huh." He seems to think, then grins. "Oh, yeah! It's nothing perverted, don't worry. I think it's just a once-over vitals check for the suit. Anyway…"

"I already changed into my calibration suit. I'm sure you can pull footage off the cameras later, though."

He snickers at that. "Eh. Nah. Have to keep girls like you on their toes."

"And also, I've been outclassed by my girlfriend?"

A full laugh this time. "Ha! Well, uh, you're not wrong. Only, she'd tell you , and then I'd have hell to pay."

"Fair enough." I slap the switch for the danger room open-

And then I hear a scream.

Her scream.

Shit.

I whirl around and start running. Mackie yells something like "hey, wait-" but I'm fucking gone before he can do anything drastic. Out of the prep room, back to that stupid little waiting room, out down the hallway I saw those two go by, down down down down down — she's still screaming, still hurting — shit, I should have grabbed my gun-

It's stopped, but I'm close enough that I can see the light on in one of the rooms, and I'm there.

"Alright, what the hell is going-"

Stemjack cables running down from the ceiling right next to a surgical arm that looks like it could lase you in two without trying very hard. Sylvie in some fucked-up dentist's chair, cuffed to it, breathing loud. And Celia looking — pissed. Face tensed up.

Well, yeah.

"You've got some motherfuckin' explaining to do," I say. Consider appending it with, 'you psychotic cunt'. No, that wouldn't even rattle Celia.

"Sylvie's fine," she says. Face barely moves. That's how I know she's angry, but honestly I passed the point of giving a shit right when I barged into what feels like a goddamn dentist bondage dungeon. "Go back to calibration, Priss."

"She doesn't look fine, now does she?" I turn to her. She's still just breathing. She looks up with me at those golden eyes the same way she did when I pulled her out of the Nosferatu. Unfocused. She was shivering. She told me later she thought I was going to hurt her for betraying me, because that was what Master Kaufmann always did. Even though she was barely alive after how badly we mangled that goddamn mech.

I move to unlatch the cuffs- "Go back to calibration, Priss."

"Give me one good reason why I should do that," I spit.

She takes a step towards me. "Sylvie is in no physical danger. I am not raping her, I am not dissecting her, I am not doing any of the things your fecund imagination is dreaming up as we speak."

"Really."

"She isn't…" Sylvie whispers. "I'm sorry. I messed up. It's not what you think it is."

I don't know what I think it is right now, but I can't say that, can I? Otherwise I'll never hear the end of it from Celia. "Did she hurt you?"

"No, no, no, no."

"You're sure?"

"I know what pain is, Priss. I was hurt. But she didn't hurt me. Please don't get angry. Please ."

"I-"

Goddammit. I knew something like this would happen. She shouldn't have had to do this. "Sylvie…"

"Priss…" She trails off. "Please don't get angry."

"I'm not angry."

Celia taps me on the shoulder. I don't turn to face her. "I wonder," she says, "if I should just explain the whole thing to you now. I'd hoped to have her wetware straightened out before I broke the news to you, but evidently there are some problems we'll have to iron out first."

Wait. What? "Wetware?" I look at Sylvie. "Like — Sexaroid parts?"

Sylvie fidgets, as best as she can in the chair. "It's more like — not really. Not — ero-ero things? Celia called it a pseudocortex."

I don't know what that is, and I think it shows, because then Celia pounces. She gets what she wants.

"Look," she says. "Lena and Nene will be here soon enough. We'll put calibration on hold until we discuss this — issue. Together. All of us."

"You're delaying."

"I am. We all need to purge ourselves of vitriol to discuss a somewhat sensitive issue, don't you think?"

"You can't just tell me. How like you, Celia."

"Um-" Sylvie pipes up again. "I agree with Celia here. I just want to get out of this chair. And not have to fight."

"I-" I cave. How can I refuse her? "Alright. Back to the training room. We'll just sit and wait."

"We shall!" Celia straightens up. "That is exactly what we shall do."

No, I'm not happy with this outcome. Sylvie's safe, but nothing's right.

But — I don't know. Even as I undo Sylvie's cuffs, I don't know.

I pulled her out of the Nosferatu, refused to gut her even as she begged for me to do it, because I loved her, and I nearly fucked that up. Maybe I did fuck up, because I didn't figure out the vampire thing until it was too late. Then I went toe-to-toe with Largo because I wanted to bring her sisters home, because I loved her, but I fucked that up bad.

And now — now — even though I love her, I know I'm going to fuck up again.

Nene

The part of town Celia hid the calibration rooms and machine shop in is all non-GENOM light industry, 3D-printing-centric factories for doohickeys that fifty years ago would have all been made in similarly oppressive factories in Guangzhou or Shenzhen, before Cold War 2 took off. I asked her why, and she said because it was easy to smuggle in the incredibly elaborate fabrication equipment and expensive feedstock the Hardsuits and Motoslaves need for full-body construction. Spare parts and repairs she can do back at the LADYS633, but real nanomechanical stuff… best not to attract attention.

I get it. I'm more a software person than a hardware person in, like, every sense of the word. But I understand that hiding in plain sight is important.

On the other hand, that means I have to sit in Lena's ultracompact minivan as we drive along highways that are uncomfortably close to The Fault. You know, the giant tectonic scar that GENOM's never bothered to fill. The part of town where you can just disappear and no one will find you, everyone will forget you, for better or worse. Mostly, if the stories Leon tells me about the ops he's done there in the dead of night hunting last-gen Boomeroids are true, for the worst.

"Ugh," Lena says, her eyes aglow with a light holofeed, text zipping out from the corner of her cornea into the center. "Celia says hurry up."

"Tell her you are, then."

"Well," Lena says, turning a corner and burning juuuust a smidge more rubber than usual, "I'm doing my best here. It's not my fault this part of town is so car-hostile. Or walking hostile. Or hostile in general."

"Mm."

She taps the steering wheel idly. "You're thinking about something. Your corneal feed's blank, that almost never happens with Little Miss Cyberpunk. So you're not trying to distract yourself."

Another turn. Not a lot of cars out here. Plenty of big automated cargo haulers, though, the kind that don't always look where they're going. You have to be careful driving around those. Leon tells me he almost got his Interceptor mangled by one of them while he was chasing a 55C.

"What's there to say?" If I sound like I'm moping, well, that's 'cause I am at this point.

"Ahhhh," Lena says, that subtle little smile playing across her face. "You're anxious about the hardsuit fitting."

"Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like, how could I not be? You don't have anything to be worried about, but I do." The last thing I want to see on Celia's face is that motherly look, the oh-goodness-Nene-you-really-are-so-helpless-and-terrible-at-live-fire-combat look.

"Well, you've been training, right? I can only help you so much there." She wags a finger. "You've got to take the time, every day, to get combat-ready and stay there."

Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh. "I can't do that every day, Lena. You might be a – what's the word-"

"Comprehensive Lifestyle and Wellness Coach," she says. I can just hear the capitalizing there. Or the use of kanji over kana, I guess. Either way.

"Yeah, that, but I have to work a desk job where I'm either patching the ADP security system or writing backdoors to get around those patches for later, or helping the civil service whitehats deal with the latest batch of automated ransomware trying to brick the pension system, or -"

"Well," Lena huffs, "That's an excuse, but it's not a justification, now is it?"

"Gimme a break here!" I whine. "Besides, I contribute to the Knight Sabers-"

"With your good looks and your amazing brain?"

Okay, that I had coming. But still! "You can't just steal my line!"

"Don't you mean your catchphrase?"

"Hmph! Now you're picking on me again!"

She grins. "Sorry. But you walked right into that one and you know it." She makes another turn, then stops. "Shit, I think I was supposed to turn left there."

"GPS not working?"

"More like JMaps hasn't bothered to scan this part of the city properly. Ah, but for the days when all the satellites still worked…"

"Ha! You're totally just blaming machines on the fact that you have the navigational sense of a gnat!"

"That's… fair," Lena says. "In which case, kindly shut up so I can stop going in circles and find that damn garage, alright."

" Haiiii ."

I flick up my corneal feed, check to see if Mackie's pinged me recently. He has. Oh, wow:

Priss and sis had a fight get here NOW we need to talk about some weird stuff

That's… vague. Mackie's not usually that vague. I text him back, a little keyboard popping into existence around my palm:

Weird stuff?

He texts back immediately.

It's about Sylvie

Hard to explain

Huh. Sylvie? What about? I know Priss and her are joined at the hip now. Did Celia make a move on Sylvie or something? Bummer. I was totally rooting for Priss to finally get hitched, she never stopped talking about the Sexaroid even before we all knew she was one, and then when I met her it was like wow , you know? I'm stuck being cute , but she was hot , just mouthwateringly sexy. Maybe that was pheromones or some other hemorrhaging-edge bioware making me feel that way, but who cares? Even Lena, who's like the straightest woman in Megatokyo, felt something there. Let's find out if Celia felt that way, too…

Your sis hit on Sylvie?

Ten seconds of the little 'typing' bubble.

Oh

Wow

Haha no I wish it was that simple

"Ah," Lena says, " there it is! I swear I drive by this garage like three times every time we come here, it's ridiculous! You'd think Celia would put up a louder sign or something, maybe try to attract real business for Doc Raven…"

Ah hey you're here

Just come inside

We need to all talk before calibration

Oh boy.

That's bad, isn't it? You can hear Celia's influence. Mackie's a talker, his big sister's the opposite. All secrets and subtleties and shady stuff. She'll delay, delay, delay until she has to explain something. I'm not sure if it's force of habit or what.

Lena parks, and I hop out of her van as soon as possible, just as the garage door is starting to close. Whatever's going on down there, whatever Celia did (and isn't that the strangest thought? Celia being the irresponsible one for once?), I want to be there for it.

Maybe this is selfish, but I want front row seats.

Celia's pacing. Oh, that's not a good sign.

For context, Celia only paces like that when she's very, very stressed. I mean, the woman runs an international fashion chain, develops cutting-edge superhero hardware that puts the military to shame, maintains a web of contacts that she has to make sure don't turn on her for GENOM money, takes jobs that either pay too much for horrible things or don't pay at all, has to… you get the idea, and then she has to deal with us . She doesn't drink, she doesn't smoke, the only drug she takes on the regular is an anti-sleeping miracle called modafinil that you can bioprint for cheap, and yet she keeps it all together. She's incredible.

Except – she was pacing like this when Priss threatened to quit because Celia wasn't sure what to do with Sylvie. Same when there was news of the impostor Sabers flying fast and furious across the noosphere. Or when Priss got the shit kicked out of her and we weren't sure if she was going to make it or – actually, most of the times I've seen her like this have been within the span of the past two months.

Largo rattled her more than he rattled even the rest of us, and we all almost got killed by the fakes, I could barely maintain my ECM because they figured out I was the source of any given jamming, so Lena and Celia had to play defense before our entire chain of operations fell apart, our Motoslaves playing air support got trashed – it was bad enough Celia broke out an entire fucking gunship to extract us.

She stops. Turns. "Ah, good, you're here. Excellent. If we can all just sit down, I'll start to explain what's going on."

Lena looks around. "I mean, there isn't really anyplace to sit…"

"The floor, Lena, if you please."

Lena's right. The whole facility here always struck me as a rush job, automated non-Boomer construction pushed to its flimsy limits without alerting anyone to its presence. So no, there's not a folding chair in sight. Nothing to be done about that, I guess. I sit down. Lena doesn't. Priss just leans up against the wall. Sylvie's in a corner in a ball, her gaze sweeping the room. She's waiting for us to say something. Oh boy, okay, so something really went down. Sylvie's usually this sexy ray of sunshine, you know? She's very – curious. Almost childish in her love of this thing she calls freedom. For her to be rattled like that…

"Now then!" Celia claps her hands like a preschool teacher. "Largo. We fought him, we fought those doppelganger Boomers he threw together using SPDC fabrication equipment, we all nearly died. Compounding that, we were unable to stop him from using orbital weapons to level half a dozen different cities' GENOM Towers, their outlying areas, and even blow a few holes in Megatokyo proper."

"Did more damage to GENOM in seconds than we could in years," Priss sulks.

"He also killed well over three million people, Priss," Celia snaps. "Civilians who had nothing to do with the megacorporation but were simply in the way of his cyber-jihad. Those aren't our methods."

"All I'm saying is-"

"I know what you're saying. You've said it several times to me before. That you want us to engage in more active moves against the company without regard for PR. And I'm starting to come around to your position, but as I have also said to you several times previously, no opportunities for clean decapitation strikes or anything like that have presented themselves to us. I'm working on it."

"Are you now?"

"Priss?" Sylvie pipes up. "I think that's not so important right now…"

"You're right, you're right, I'm sorry." Priss seems to sink into herself just a little. "That wasn't fair."

"So?" I say. "We killed Largo. Sylvie's autocannon work with that super-cool VTOL you pulled out of nowhere, followed by me altering his orbital killsat command signal, followed by Priss blowing his head open with a railgun, followed by you lasing him down to a charred mess – he didn't look like he was coming back from that. Or that even GENOM would have the resources to salvage him. Or the inclination."

Celia looks at me with that motherly look she spares only for me and Mackie. "What?"

"I have this intuition," she says, "that he was just the beginning of something."

Oh. Oh shit . "So he's not dead?" Priss says in a surprisingly soft voice. "He better be dead. Not just jumping around the noosphere like a ghost. We went through too much for that to happen."

Celia smiles. Or tries to. It doesn't last. "I'm not certain if he's dead or not. Regardless, even if he's dead, we more than likely will be going up against technology that advanced regularly in the future as GENOM continues their own work — or if other sentient Boomers like him decide to continue his work. That's the point I'm trying to make. Right now, even with a prospective fifth member, we're behind the curve."

"And the thing with Sylvie-" Lena's really focused, now, eyes narrowed. She and Celia are old friends, so when Celia gets like this, all one big monologue, Lena's really good at just getting to the point. It's amazing — for all her turbo-bougie vibes, she's got this — I think Mama would call it emotional intelligence?

"-Is our ace in the hole. A device embedded in Sylvie's cyberware, a supplementary motor cortex that I can use to assist in hardsuit operation. No, not assist. Accelerate. Drive reaction times over normal human limits, make the chain from sense-enemy-determine-response-fire-weapon hyperintuitive . Effortless."

"So," Priss says, and here her voice is just a little louder, a little more Priss, "you want to take the human element out of it. Might as well just build Boomers, then."

Celia sighs. Paces faster. "I figured you would say that, Priss. But it wouldn't be like that. Your brain would still be in control."

"Would it now. Didn't you tell us that you couldn't boost reflex times the regular way because it would feel all phantom-limb and uncanny-valley? How is 'driving reaction times over normal human limits'" - here she air-quotes - "any different?"

"It just is , Priss. That's what the pseudocortex is for , doing that and making it feel hyperintuitive. How is this not clear ?" And now she's stopped, turned to Priss.

Lena nods. "So this cortex thing is implanted and linked up with the stemjack?"

"Yes. I'd replicate it with our own neurosnyth fabricators and have you all under the knife within the week. From there we'd build the second-generation hardsuits based on testing benchmarks using those augmentations."

"Got it."

Priss swivels to Lena. I keep quiet. "You're okay with Celia jamming an alien object into your brain? I thought you kept clean , Lena."

If Lena's annoyed by that, she doesn't show it. Instead she just looks at Priss, frowning. "I have no intention of letting another turbo-Boomer monster like that beat me in a fight just because I wanted to keep prosthetics out of my system. It's as simple is that." She cocks an eyebrow. "How is it any different for you? I remember you saying your band was bitching up a storm because you were incapacitated again . You need to take better care of yourself, Priss, and that starts with having a better combat sense."

Priss's eyes widen. "Wait, you're on her side? The one girl here who's all about optimizing the body to its limits? The only one here who knows jiujitsu, judo, and PanzerKunst? The Lena Yamazaki? Shit, why don't we just all train harder? Get better naturally?"

Celia cuts in. "Because being only human isn't enough anymore."

Oh. Lena nods. Priss looks hurt. I'm not saying anything, of course. She doesn't need someone else cornering her. And, uh, Sylvie's not looking so good. What does she think about all this? She already has an implanted pseudocortex, so whatever storm Priss stirs up she's going to get a hardsuit synched to that piece of hardware anyway. That's how Celia would do it. That's how I would do it.

Screw it, she needs some help.

"Um," I say, "So if Sylvie already has this thing, why was there a big fight in the first place? No offense. Just really confused."

"Yes, Celia ," Priss says. "What drove her to scream so loud I could hear it through the walls?"

Wait. What? Oh. Oh boy. Celia sighs.

"It was a mistake. A fixable mistake. I attempted to activate the pseudocortex without examining what exactly it was connected to, and it was connected to certain traumatic distortions in Sylvie's brain tied to her experiences in the Nosferatu."

"She had a flashback?" Okay, now Priss's voice is starting to rise. Now she's mad. "Because you didn't think to check your own work?"

"Priss, it's fixable."

"HOW?!"

Celia stops. "Selective re-triggering of traumatic experiences while suppressing the amygdala using antiduregenic medicine has been a technique used to cure phobias and mitigate PTSD for decades, Priss. It was around even before noninvasive brain surgery. I should be able to rewire her pseudocortex to do something like that even without rooting around in her head at all."

"That's fucked up," Priss says, but doesn't go further.

"How?" Celia takes a step forward. She's got Priss now and she knows it. "Trauma like that is a terrible break with normal human life experience. If I don't do something to mitigate the neurological damage Largo inflicted on her, the experience of the Nosferatu will keep coming back not as normal memories, as guilt or shame, but as paralyzing, all-consuming fear. I'm not erasing the memory, either way, I'm simply removing a toxic connection to allow her to live life without such a thing destroying her from the inside out."

Priss hangs her head. Looks at Sylvie. "You really want this."

Sylvie looks up. There's something in her eyes I've never seen before — a hardness. "I want this."

"You want — to let Celia root around in your brain and — okay, so you won't forget what happened, but you'll-"

"I want it. And you know why."

A pause. Wait for it…

"Because I want to be a Knight Saber."