The Sour Taste 1 - (Mouthwashing, Jimmy!SI)
AN: Risky play with a risky character at a time where the game is still trending - yeah, this is going to be a fun writing situation.
Space! The once-last frontier and the one place where humanity gambled its survival with. In an ideal world, this would have led to prosperity for all and a raise of Earth's overall life tendency.
Tragically so, that wasn't the case in a rather cynical world.
The governments were the ones I had placed much of the blame onto, it made sense they owed part of the burden in letting privates handle space-faring technology. When colonization came to be, it was through a private endeavor. The major planets were quickly claimed by the richest, then the less richer, then the rich, then the middle class and then what was left, barren or deadly planets (or both) were granted to those reaching the threshold to make it out of Earth.
Even living on Earth was a nightmare. I thought that trying to make it work back 'home' could have been a nice way to stand out compared to my childhood friend in this troubled era, but it all came to bite me in the ass.
A legitimate job was hard to find on the 'Old Planet', especially when mechanization had rendered highly-paid jobs unattainable. No matter the area on Earth, corpos have found a way to take over the job market and make it a nightmare. So, legitimate businesses were a big no for me...
And I had to tackle the matters of illegal businesses. In a rather unusual turn of events, rich folks loved illegal 'solos' helping them up. Something about the prices being so fucking high that it made them need to cut back and use shady dealers to handle their chores. Especially shipping shit. Turns out that Amazon (or whatever it is called in this world) was a massive asshole and made shipping price insanely huge due to the 'expensive costs' of bringing stuff between planets. Considering how that is diluted by the fact these ships are huge, carry around millions of stuff around and get stuff back through tax credits, I am quite sure that they are just inflating shit like they used to do in my previous life.
Yeah, shocker, I am a reincarnated guy who is struggling with existence. No magic, no super-tech, just soulless corpos minus the cyberpunk shite about it.
...
Oh well, let's just get back to the narration, right? Let me ask you this? How long can a low-life thug get around in a realm where security is so tight that it takes some expensive and sometimes rare technology to hide from this last for? The answer may surprise you: six years.
Six years I have been doing it, about when I was nineteen, and six years before I got stabbed in the back, sent to jail for roughly a decade and then got my CE (both legit and illegit) get tainted.
Prison should have been the end of it. After all, this is what some old folks say - more than five years is a stain on the soul, even more if you get in for some serious crimes. I was arrested for 'aggravated smuggling', which corpos-worshiping politicians had been raising as a major offense. Only reason I got spared was because the way I was caught was shady as fuck and the international lawyer fumbled this shit hard enough to not give me thirty years. That and the judge had been done with this sort of shit that he gave me the slip to just ten.
Ten years of Prison...
I kind of learned to love the place. Sounds insane, prison shouldn't be a place to look fondly to. Especially if it was a place where you don't get raped and 'subdued' by the system in there. Still, I guess there is a deep irony in jailing so many fucking people for shipping-related crimes.
Rapists and other monsters were kept away from the rest since we outnumbered them, thus creating a very 'familiar' environment to spend years into. Sure, you were stuck to the place, but the grub wasn't bad and the company was even better. The guards were just cozy brats that hardly used violence (and that was reserved for the worst offenders), leaving us to enjoy some liberties I didn't expect prisoners to have.
In particular, I found it entertaining how some of the older smugglers had set up 'classes' to coach those rookies that got caught lacking. I joined a few, and holy fuck did I learned some interesting shit when it came to piloting some big ships. I had manned some small ones, but there were some legit pirates in the facility who were quite proud of their careers and even happier of being 'retired'.
Ten years, lots of learning, lots of accepting the situation: once outside, the best option was to get back on the business. It was. There was no good company that would invest on scum like me. Hence why I spend a good amount of the last two years of my sentence planning my next stops. I couldn't just get back to crime. I had to find a starting capital, maybe a crew, some backup plans, a way out from backstabs, maybe an alibi and definitely a nice retirement home.
Fuck what the old men in jail say: I wanted to die in a fucking ranch, not in government-owned facility.
With that in mind, I felt giddy and pumped up to just do that - be back to be the best smuggler possible, kill whoever became my loose end and...
There is a familiar face waiting for me as I get released. I was ready to go, no possessions on me as everything got claimed by the government, and I had to stop as I saw a man with blonde hair giving me a happy grin.
"Jimmy!"
I blinked as I remembered that voice, if not because I heard it once it was done cracking for puberty.
"Curly?"
"Took you long enough to be out. How about we get some coffee?"
So, do you all remember all those plans I had about getting out of jail and become a pirate? Well, those plans kind of got ruined because this lovely friend of mine, a homie to the heart and soul, and my brother from another family decided to, and I quote, fabricate my signature and list me up for a job in his shipping company.
...What the hell even is Pony Express?
AN
Get your mouthwash out, it's time to get involved close and personal as SImmy actually is not a bastard (maybe a bit rough on the edges) and yet ends up losing his shit in the metallic hellhole known as the Tulpar.