Street-Scum Shona Saves the World
Street-scum Shona was going to save the world for free, and there was nothing she could do about it.
She’d be dead soon. Big holes in her gut from the hypervelocity screamer rounds. Burned like a bitch at first, but now the pain was gone and she felt the numbness. Her legs were nulled, switched off at the wall.
She knew she shouldn’t have agreed to Dionisio’s plan from the start. She’d told herself that he was another jumped-up Zone kid with a diamond-bright dream and a hankering for the ‘phetamines. Street-wise Shona could pick a dead man’s hand from a kilometre away, even if that hand was attached to a very, very handsome bravo.
As a rule. Street-wise Shona did not follow fools’ crusades into the gaping jaws of death.
And yet here she was, bleeding like a stuck pig, deep in the bowels of H’berg Archival Complex Three, holding a metal box that she didn’t understand.
Fish-on device.
She didn’t know the word. She wasn’t listening to Dio as he talked in hushed tones to Oli and the gang, all wild gesticulations and fiery eyes. How could she listen when he had such a perfect, razor-sharp jaw and those shoulders?
Of course, he was dead now. They were all dead now.
Even big dumb Oli and his big dumb shotgun.
The cops had worn standard gear, light armour and helmets over belts bristling with the ominous tools of their trade: stunstaves, restraint tape, chemdialer, pistols, snapcuffs. Each also carried a hypervelocity assault rifle slung over the shoulder.
It was more than a match for a few kids with a handful of tetra-D ‘splosives and two antique scatterguns.
Fucking Dio…
She’d run jobs for him in the past. Little drops and raids and stuff, enough to know that Dio was hardtail. The money had tasted good then.
Shakers like Dio needed reliable streetkids who hadn’t fried their brains on ‘phets or meta-9 or whatever other chemstim they sold for cheap out in New Melbourne, by the dried-up banks of the Yarra, amongst the graffiti and flashburn scars.
Folk claimed he used to be from uptown, part of the skylife, son of a public servant or something. They said he’d done something real bad, got his arse kicked down to the Zone. Whatever it was, Shona didn’t want to know. Knowing too much could get you nulled.
That’s how Dio got them the registered hovercar—with real leather seats—to drive them from the Zone out to the metroburbs, out where the big movers made the big money.
The plan was simple—get into the Archive, crack the terminal code and set the device in place, and get back out. Dio said it would make the world a better place. Zone kids wouldn’t need fake identicards if no one had identicards, he said. The corps wouldn’t be able to tell Shona or little Sammi that they couldn’t afford a place to live. They wouldn’t be able to call in her debts and leave them as broken ‘phet addicts, living for their next hit.
No gods, no kings, no masters.
It wasn’t about the money, Dio’d said. It was about the principle.
Principle was a funny word in Shona’s mouth. It tasted like blood.
On second thought, that was her actual blood she was tasting now, all sharp and iron.
She pushed a white-blond lock back off her slick forehead and made herself breathe slowly.
The cops would be climbing down the stairs now. She’d cut through the elevator service code with the first dataworms, fusing the binary into unusable gunk. At least this way they’d be earning their corpo paycheck, hauling arse down the stairwell.
Already, the slicer code she had loaded onto the datadisk was wiping through the active registered accounts. Property deeds, inheritances, accrued capital and gigacash deposits—all of it, burning away in zeroes and ones.
The backups downstairs were kept in null-entropy storage, and there was no way that Shona could crack those. That’s what the fish-on device was for—Dio had said to set the timer and then run like hell.
Shona looked down at her useless legs.
No way out now. Not for Street-scum Shona.
The holo-vids never showed this part. The scrappy heroes always escaped at the end. And the heroine always got laid.
She chuckled weakly at the thought. Coughed up a little more blood. Swallowed it back down.
The Zone streets would be busy tonight. Shona could picture the staccato beat of headsmack pulsing from tuneboxes perched on cars and in windows. Pleasure girls flashing their pretty, tattooed legs and smiling under the watchful eyes of their bravos. Illegal proteins frying up on the grills, so far out from the patrol routes they didn’t even need to hide it. The flickering neon and the petrofume flames.
She missed little Sammi.
Focus. The code hovered like incandescent fireflies above her console. Just a little more to go.
They weren’t far away now. She could hear them, boots thumping down the metal stairs in double-time.
It seemed odd to Shona that the law only ever seemed to matter when she was the one breaking it.
Not anymore, though. All the bigwigs and corpo lapdogs would wake up to find their world had changed. Dio had thought it would be a change for the better.
Maybe he was right. Maybe this would mean something, to someone.
Maybe Sammi would grow up without a yoke around her neck.
Shona could smell the acrid heat of burning metal. The cops were using a laser torch on the seal, and she could see through greying vision the sharp, stinging brightness of superheated metaplas running up and down the maglock door.
The console readout stopped. The virus had run its course, and now the entry terminal sat empty, blinking.
As she jammed the jailbroken datadisk into the fish-on device, all she could think of was how anticlimactic the whole thing felt. She was still musing about it when the world went diamond-bright.
Street-scum Shona had saved the world for free…and she didn’t mind one bit.
Born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, Arden Baker is a lapsed translator and emerging writer of short science fiction and fantasy. After spending time living in China, he returned to his home city where he now works as a consultant and a language teacher. In his spare time he brews mead, plays tabletop RPGs, and runs a small speculative fiction writing collective – Meridian Australis. He has previously been published in Escape Pod, Heartlines and Aurealis.