Cyrillic alphanumerics trailed across the darkness and then faded, leaving only a blinking prompt. This boot-up screen was all Borislav knew as he slowly regained consciousness. A moment later and the darkness gave way to a grainy, greyscale field of indistinct shadows, swimming nauseatingly in and out of focus.
“Just give it a minute, mate. Your optics need to calibrate. I'll try to optimise the interface code for you.”
The voice was unfamiliar to him but the accent reminded him of an old ex-SAS operative he had once worked with. Borislav could smell tobacco smoke on the air and something else, faint and fading: perfume, perhaps? His vision dropped away and the nonsense strings of his mother tongue returned, glowing amber in an infinite sea of black.
Borislav centred his attention on the sounds around him, picking out the click and whir of computer machinery and the reedy hum of a bio-regulator. Yes, someone was trying to repair him. Somehow, he had survived.
“Wankers,” complained the voice.
“Pardon?” Borislav was relieved to find his speech intact.
“Oh... sorry, mate. Whoever wired your optics. Wankers. Proper cowboys.”
“I... I do not understand.”
“Me either, mate. The things these people get away with...”
Borislav realised that the man had stopped typing.
“Right. Should be sorted now. Let's fire 'em up again.”
A vision of an angel hovering over Borislav swam into focus as his sight returned. An ethereal light radiated from behind her and refracted through the translucent jade strands of her hair as she gazed down upon him. Her bee-stung silver lips parted and she made an oddly modulated, yet soothing sound. Borislav began to wonder if perhaps he had died after all.
He heard servomotors working and his perspective shifted as whatever he was lying on moved beneath him, first rotating him, then angling his body so he was almost perpendicular to the floor. Borislav's angel disappeared beyond his peripheral vision as he was brought, quite literally, face to face with a ruffled looking middle aged man wearing an odd pair of goggles.
“How's that?” the stranger asked him.
“Better. I can see fine now, thank you.”
“My pleasure, mate. Your old control module was fucked up good and proper so I slapped in a newer model for you. Bloody good job I had some old Russian surplus hanging around. Just don't ask me how I got my hands on it. Stolen goods at stolen prices, and all that.”
As the stranger stepped away to continue working, Borislav gingerly touched the back of his neck, expecting pain from a wound there. Nothing. He remembered the fight at The Venus Lounge and recalled vividly the resignation he felt as the small Japanese girl had moved in for the finishing blow. He should be dead.
Although strapped onto the gurney, he found he was able to glance around a little and so he took stock of his surroundings. Stark strip lighting illuminated a confusion of esoteric equipment: tubes feeding into sinister vats, cables running from banks of monitors awash with technical readouts, trays of surgical tools lying alongside much heavier, slightly rusted implements.
Borislav's angel moved across his field of view again, somewhere behind the dishevelled med-tech. He saw now that she was no angel; she had been designed to exacting specifications, a custom made synthetic. She was almost aggressively stylised, with an elfin cast to her face and an otherworldly sheen to her skin. Horizontal strips of silver gauze pulled tight across her body seemed to be her only clothing and served to further enhance her almost celestial appearance.
He turned back to face the man wearing the goggles and cleared his throat.
“I am sorry but where am I, exactly? And who are you?”
“Things a little foggy for you eh, mate? Wondering how it is you're still among the living and all that?”
Borislav nodded, still trying to sift through his memories.
“Well... no worries. They call me Suture. This here's Serene, my faithful assistant. And you're bloody lucky I got to you when I did. Between that nasty case of acid damage to your face and that number Domino pulled on your control unit you were a right bloody mess. Good thing Angel called me when she did.”
“Domino... Angel... I do not know these people,” Borislav murmured in confusion.
“No, I don't suppose you do. Here...”
Suture turned Borislav's gurney, slowly revealing an enclosed room which housed a huge transparent cylinder containing the Japanese girl from the club. Her naked, broken body was suspended in some sort of viscous fluid, a convoluted system of tubes connecting her cylinder to various machines and monitors. Domino's raven hair flowed around features at rest, her lithe body undulating almost imperceptibly as bubbles danced over her skin.
“That,” said Suture, pointing to the young woman in the tube, “is Domino. And next to her, that's Angel.”
Borislav looked at the girl slumped knock-kneed in the chair next to what he presumed to be some sort of healing chamber. She could easily have been Domino's sister, long glossy black hair framing attractive features beneath the fur lined hood of her military style parka. Her translucent pink boots and mini skirt seemed at odds with the oversized coat and she seemed to Borislav like she belonged on the dance floor of a nightclub.
“I'd let you in for a chat but Angel's been awake for two days straight, watching over her mate. Bloody stubborn, that one. At any rate, she needs some kip. Come on, mate. You'll have questions, I don't doubt. Get up and I'll make you a brew, explain everything. Fancy a fag?”
Borislav pushed himself slowly into a seated position and waved away the Dunhills Suture was offering.
“No thank you. I do not smoke.”
“Right you are. How d'you want your tea?”
“However you have it will be fine.” Borislav was starting to feel impatient. “Please... what is going on here? I remember fighting the one you call Domino. It was a contest for money. Why are you helping me?”
Suture flashed a grin around his cigarette and patted the air between them.
“Alright, alright. Steady on. I'm helping you on their say-so. I didn't get it myself to start with but then Angel filled me in on your daughter. She -”
“My daughter?! But how could she know...?”
“She's a netrunner, mate. A hacker. And a bloody good one at that. She ran your number while you were fighting for that cow Capricia. Now Angel, she's always been a soft touch so I'm not surprised she took a shine to you. Seems the girls decided to try and keep you alive in there so Angel came up with the daft idea of trying a kinetic over-ride on your control unit.”
Borislav returned his gaze to the isolation room as Suture talked. He saw Domino floating there, unconscious, appearing somehow serene despite faint scar lines criss-crossing her pale skin and the wound exposing the intricate mechanisms of her cybernetic hand. He wondered how much of her body was prosthetic and his thoughts turned again to his daughter Karina. Had this Domino endured the same sickness at some stage in her life?
“The nice bit of her plan was,” Suture continued, “it looked for all the world like you were dead once Domino did her bit on you. So Capricia's lot just tossed you out back for the body-part scavengers, like they do with all the losers.”
Although he felt slightly ashamed for staring at the two young women while they were in such a vulnerable state, Borislav found he could not stop himself from studying them. He needed to understand this, somehow. His memories of the fight and Suture's ongoing commentary told him that Angel and Domino were highly proficient and, he suspected, a true force to be reckoned with when operating as a unit. Why then, had they taken an obvious risk to help him so?
“Anyway, to cut a long story short, me and Angel there brought you and Domino back here and patched you up. It'll take a bit more to get our girl back on her feet though. I ain't seen her this banged up in quite a while.”
“What happened to her?”
“Buggered if I know,” Suture shrugged. “I'd hate to see the other fella, though. Know what I mean? Here's your tea.”
Borislav nursed the hot mug between his palms and sipped the treacle-sweet liquid. He nodded his head toward Domino.
“She is so young. How is it she is...” he searched for the right words, “...the way she is?”
Suture pulled his goggles up onto his forehead, revealing icy blue eyes which danced with a fierce intellect. His lips tightened in a wry smile.
“Now that... that's the really interesting question, isn't it? Those two girls in there have more secrets than your government and mine put together. I know 'em better than most and I haven't the foggiest, mate. I can tell you this much though: you've made some right handy friends in that pair. Anyway, I've run out of cigs so I'm off to the shop. Help yourself to what's in the fridge if you get hungry. Anything else you need, just ask Serene. She'll be knocking around somewhere.”
Borislav sat in quiet contemplation of his situation long after Suture had pulled on a grimy trench coat and ducked out into the rain. He thought about these two girls, his saviours, and wondered why they had been at the Venus Lounge. Had he seen Angel there? How had she found out about Karina and her illness? How had they known about his implants and augmentations? Such information was classified, even for old, ex-soldiers.
The figure of Domino floating there before him, watched over by her unassuming partner, filled his vision as all these questions swirled in his mind. He found himself entranced by the play of diffuse blue light from the med-tank across their soft features. Borislav felt compelled to form a lasting image of the pair, a mental snapshot he could carry with him. He sensed an impermanence to their existence, a notion that perhaps he was stealing a glimpse behind the curtain, seeing the two girls as no-one else had. For some reason he could not explain, he felt intensely protective of them in that moment.
At length, Borislav blinked and sipped the last of his saccharine tea. As he set the mug down, he made himself a promise. He would find a way to repay this debt of kindness. If he could help either girl at any time, he would.
Copyright © A. Flood 2010
Copyright © A. Flood 2010
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