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windtempos · 4 months

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Biting The Hand

“We-- aren’t anything,” says Caelius with a finger pointing back and forth over the table. “We are going to be brief. Do you understand? I don’t care that you 'get it', whatever the fuck it is, I don’t care what you know, and I don’t care what you can offer me. Every minute I’m not down there making money, I’m losing it. Someone with deep pockets and a body count is picking up my buy-in.” “Someone like you?” asks Nora.

Caelius maintains a reputation as one of the best mercenaries in town, but when she's a major piece in a massive exposé for the American Cybernetics Association, she keeps her involvement to herself. But those who know where to look-- know how to look-- have the unique ability to uncover anything and everything. Those like Nora Luan, who has been looking into cybernetics corruption since long before Caelius was even born.

Ashlyn Mercy.

There is something especially poisonous about the way Nora says Caelius’s real name. Something unlike the blackmail of those who came before her. Nora’s reputation leads Caelius to believe that she doesn’t want to hurt her-- she just wants an audience. The habitual shotgun fear subsides. While her captor pours herself a drink in the kitchen, Caelius eyes the exits-- even the one that requires a leap onto the terrace, over the balcony, and a 150-foot plummet to the road below. She could survive it. The servos in her hips and knees would give out and the programmed pain would cause a sixteen-second delay, but only after about four minutes on foot maintaining a pace of seven miles an hour would she would blow the damaged motors in her legs entirely. But again, Nora only wants an audience-- not a mess, and certainly not a police pursuit. If these two women were anything, it was expensive and calculated.

Neither of them were an unusual sight here. Caelius spent plenty of time on the casino floor, several stories below, but seldom got acquainted enough with anybody to be invited up to a suite. Everyone she played with had one booked. She knew this. If they had a hundred extra dollars in their pocket for the entry fee of a semiprivate game room, then they had an extra thousand for a stocked bar and a top-floor view of Hollywood. It seemed that, unbeknown to her, Nora was one of them. More than that, Nora Luan was alive-- she’d rather start there.

The poster girl of American science, a celebrity gone silent since 1990, mixing a cocktail thirty-something years later looking no different than she did when she was on the ‘84 cover of Machines Monthly. Her fame was passed off as a broken glass ceiling for every girl who wanted to be a scientist. A feat of modern science and a step forward for feminism. An idol. She played the part like she was born for it, refusing for years to return to the girl she was. The girl living on borrowed time, removed from the modern world by government hands she could not control. Longevity was not the CIA’s goal when they took apart her organic body and rebuilt it with metal and wires during Project Gossamer-- it was simply a test of how far they could push the human body until it would break. So were the Mind Transfer procedures that uploaded human brains to bionic systems. Compared to Caelius’s military-built, top-of-the-line cybernetic body, Nora was an iron lung. There was a silence over the room that suggested both of them knew this.

Where Nora had gotten justice and reparations for the experimental procedures done on her, Charlotte Caelius received nothing but an APB from the American Cybernetics Association, an empty grave, and a past she could never return to. Nothing had changed in the 30 years since Project Gossamer-- the ACA was an extension of it, for many. This, too, they both knew. Nora wouldn’t be here, otherwise. This was something more than the acknowledgement of a truth decades old, though-- each has something the other wants.

“You gonna ask me if I want one, too?” Caelius asks when Nora returns to the coffee table, drink in hand. A Cosmopolitan, by the looks of it. The rim of the glass meets red lips when she raises it up to her face. “You forced me to come with you. It’s the least I’m owed.”

“I didn’t force you to. You came willingly,” she mentions. “You weren’t gonna win, anyway.”

Caelius keeps her sourness to herself. She had never been any good at roulette, or any similar game of chance. Games of skill provided a sense of authority; the outcome on the table belongs to the player, not the other way around. And she, as far as she’d learned, could outplay anyone and outluck no one.

“Didn’t get much of a choice.”

Nora breathes out a half-laugh into her half-empty glass. “We’d know plenty about that, wouldn’t we? You’ll get your money back. I promise.”

“We-- aren’t anything,” says Caelius with a finger pointing back and forth over the table. “We are going to be brief. Do you understand? I don’t care that you get it, whatever the fuck it is, I don’t care what you know, and I don’t care what you can offer me. Every minute I’m not down there making money, I’m losing it. Someone with deep pockets and a body count is picking up my buy-in.”

“Someone like you?”

Caelius twitches and bottles her rage, sitting back in the lounge chair.

“I need that money,” she admits with a bite beneath her tongue.

Another laugh from Nora, but a fuller, realer one this time. “But you don’t. You play because it’s fun. Because you can control it.” When her opponent fails to respond, she opens her placating palm and adds, “I don’t blame you. I did it, too. Pool was my drug of choice. Took me a while to get good at it, but what’s a while for people like us?

“I traveled a lot after-- you know. Played mostly in tap rooms and shitty dives. It was not a good idea, believe me. Drunks don’t like to be hustled. I am unwelcome in a lot of backwater bars under a lot of different names. Of course, you’d probably be a lot quicker on your feet than I was.” She taps her right temple a couple of times. “Automated learning and all. Self-defense, too. I didn’t know how to really throw a punch until I was in my forties.”

Caelius affords a scoff that almost sounds like she’s humored. Age was a far off, foggy idea for both of them, but only one of them had the privilege of cybernetic cosmetics that could make her look older. Project Gossamer drug cocktails meant Nora was frozen in time. Twenty-four, forever. At least she looked old enough to drink.

She downs the final sip of her Cosmo. “I do get it, even if that’s not what you want to hear. I was still living off of government residuals when I left, but that made me feel like I owed them something. A game of pool was the one thing I felt like I could control. I earned that money.”

“I’m not in the government’s pocket,” Caelius says.

“Oh, I know you’re not. I’ve seen it. I’m talking about the bounty hunting. That’s better money, anyway, right? Twenty thousand, just for some guy running a Ponzi scheme down in Long Beach? I read about that the other day. Wish I had that when I was your age.”

Caelius curls a fist into her satin dress. There was seldom a bluff she could not call, but there wasn’t one she could even begin looking for. Nora was a mystery, but not a liar. She knew exactly what people like us meant when she said it. A snap judgment, a bullet fired or a punch thrown, would be the easiest way out. Project Gossamer had made her strong, but not lethal. Not compared to Caelius. High-profile bounties take months, and yet, this one fell into her lap. Baby curls and gaudy skin seams and all. Still, she finds it within herself to want an answer before a fight. She regains her composure, even offering a cold smile. “This won’t work on me.”

Nora leans forward, arms folded over her lap. “I don’t need it to. I just needed you to know it could if I wanted it to,” she says. There’s a beautiful, haunting chill latched onto her tongue, with every word off of it perfect. So quiet and matter-of-fact, but poisonous. “We can get started now, if you’d like.”

Finding herself beyond blackmail, she says. “I don’t believe that for a fucking second. I’m just like you. What the CIA did to you, the ACA did to me. You wouldn’t feed me to the same hand you already bit off.”

“Is that right? What happened to ‘we aren’t anything’?”

Nora slips out of her chair and returns her glass to the bar, heels clicking on the oak floors. Despite the decades of history to her name, Caelius cannot figure her out like most clients she spends this much time alone with at the casino. Nothing is out of place. A purple gown with a sweetheart neckline, embroidered with florals and trimmed with tulle at the bottom. A short, boyish head of black hair and a maroon lip. She holds all the cards. Nora belongs; Caelius only believes she does. Pulling a short, clean glass from below the counter with one hand and a tablet with the other, she pours a rum and coke and turns on the device to a screen full of text and schematics. Her two fingers beckon Caelius to the bar.

“You were like me,” corrects Nora. “I came first, and I didn’t deal with my problems like you did.”

“Right. Because you let the press kiss your ass for ten years and then you fucked off and did nothing to help people like me for the next twenty. I could’ve used you! Maybe then, I wouldn’t’ve had anything to deal with!”

Nora rests her palms on the slick surface and leans into Caelius. “What does nothing look like to you, huh? Is it--” she gestures broadly, servos whirring in her arm-- “this? The Project Gossamer Exposé. The Skylight Programs. Mind Transfer law. The ACA Suspension.”

Everything is noise except for the last one. It was a word waiting to be spoken, a tooth waiting to be pulled. Her pupils go in and out of focus. These were rooms that she was in. She watched it happen-- she watches it again, now, in her mind’s eye. It was her employer who needed four nosy insubordinates out of the picture. It was her targets who ran their lips raw convincing Caelius to aid their cause. You, of all people, should know what it means to be wronged by the ACA. To have no control over who you are, one of them said. The taste of agreeing with an agent wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t worse than knowing she’d otherwise be sending a girl to the slaughter. She had killed before; it was resting on her to determine whether or not this was going to be something infinitely worse.

The plan to extract files and information disinterested Caelius. But it was, in part or in full at times, her idea to incite a spectacle that the agents across Los Angeles could not avoid. Scattered bees leave behind an empty hive, and all they needed was one opening wide enough for a data transfer. The discussion of the after started early in this process. Whoever they decided to give the files to-- they ultimately decided on a number of publications and a few irreproachable senators-- would move forward with it as they wished, and they had little say in it. The only conclusive thought was that the ACA was spineless. If they’d let killers and megalomaniacs climb through their ranks since its birth after Nora’s experiments, how could anyone possibly expect accountability when they’re faced with an ugly truth? A suspension was an admission of defeat. They would never yield to the findings of a few over the six-figure paychecks of many.

Caelius refuses. “They haven’t even--”

Nora slides the tablet across the counter and says, “They will.”

A brief view of the document is more than sufficient. Two seals, at the top and bottom respectively, dripping in decorum and the typical courtesies that come off of Capitol Hill. Mentions of thorough investigations conducted by unbiased, third-party contractors and incriminating documents uncovered by ACA employees and, effective immediately, a complete suspension of all field operatives and first responders employed beneath an American Cybernetics Association agency are printed in crisp, black ink. The time at the top is five days from the current date.

“This is on the DoD’s desk right now.”

“There’s no signature line.”

“It’s not a request.” Nora leans over the bar, elbows and forearms resting on either side of the tablet. If she were any closer, she could kiss Caelius, who isn’t entirely sure she won’t. Nora softens when she asks, “I didn’t just watch all of this happen.”

Caelius looks up. “And you think I did? I was there when--”

“The whistle blew about Exoware? So was I. Two years earlier. Picking through files that had anything to do with Project Gossamer. People who never moved on. Projects that got picked back up. It was always going to happen.” There’s a complete and utter coolness to her as she lifts her head up slightly. Nora knows Caelius wants an argument. She sees the unhinged jaw in front of her, but refuses to even bare a single tooth.

“So you know about all the fucked up things the ACA and the government doing and you just sat on it? And waited for someone else to fix what’s wrong with the world?”

A laugh slugs itself out of Nora’s throat, coming out as more of a distant, bleak sound. “What does that matter to you? You live in a bubble. Fix what’s wrong with the world? Are you serious? You bust petty crime in LA by committing even pettier crime. You want people to hurt the way you were.” A brief silence warrants raised eyebrows from Nora. “But I know you’re not so sure about that, now.”

Caelius bites her lip. She pushes the tablet over the and onto the floor with feline precision. The chair falls flat beside it when she launches her body out of the seat. Her hands reach across the bar-- one for the back of Nora’s neck, the other for her head. Caelius shoves downward until her nose is inches from the slick surface.

“Go ahead,” whispers Nora. She tilts her chin up against Caelius’s iron grip. “Do this your way. Hit me. Break me. Make it hurt. That’s what you do, right? You get things done. No matter who it’s for. So get me over with.”

Caelius presses her palms down and Nora’s nose pounds against the bar. Certainly not as bad as what a number of angry dive bar drunks have probably wanted to do to her, but enough to hear a hearty grunt of pain and see its aftermath spill down her lips. Caelius has done her research; this wound will heal overnight, just as the last thirty years of Nora’s wounds have. This assault is not a want, but a need. The same defense she has always used against those who know something about her: adrenaline and programming.

Nora swipes the back of her hand across her face. Her body bleeds in a dark shade beyond crimson. Beyond even the maroon on her lips. Beyond human. Caelius grimaces and releases her. “I bit the hand off, but you picked it up and just started doing the work for them,” Nora mutters. She spreads her arms wide and adds, “I bet this is a sting, right? I bet you are in their pocket. When it’s all said and done, anyway.”

“What?”

“No wonder they fucked it up so many times. No wonder they’d loan it out to someone like you. Make it look like a hit for a bounty. God! I’m so fucking stupid! You want me dead?” Nora snakes past the lounge chairs and the coffee table, past the curtains and out onto the terrace where the railing meets the concrete floor at its closest edge. She steps up onto an ottoman and turns around with arms outstretched. “Scrape your reward off the fucking pavement!”

Caelius leaps forward in as few steps as she can manage. Her hands reach out and yank her body back onto the terrace without a second to spare. “I’m not with the fucking feds!” She screams, grabbing Nora by the straps of her dress. “What the fuck are you talking about? What’s wrong with you? Have they been trying to kill you? How many times? Do they know what you’ve been taking from them?”

But she knows the answer. If Nora knows what she claims to know, the CIA would have no doubt over who is bleeding their information out to people with other ideas on what to do with it. They paid her off to be quiet. This was not quiet. It was revenge, in a way. And second to collecting high-profile information was finding someone who understood that she was right to break her peace. Someone equally motivated by revenge. To the government, the only thing better than a quiet victim is a dead one. Yet another notion they both knew well.

“You’re a cunt. You set me up.”

Vicious as she sounds, she couldn’t hide the admiration if she tried. Nora smiles. Blood still trickles from her nose and down her chin.

“Are you ready to start yet?” she asks, heaving through breaths of adrenaline.

Caelius admires her work and nods.

#the operatives #writing #fiction #ocs #caelius #nora #caenora #??? sorta

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