Ben Chaney - Son of Sedonia

“How?” blurted Matteo. Corey stopped and grinned at him.

“You want answers, buddy? They’re all in your head. You’ve been set to record since the day you got that chip.”

MATTEO FELT RIDICULOUS in the new clothes they’d given to him. The long-sleeve, shiny, mesh shirt-thing shrink wrapped his upper body and chafed his joints pretty badly. Over that, they stuffed him in a thick, puffy vest with an equally puffy collar that almost buried his head. Probably a good thing he had trouble seeing his legs over the collar. Whatever kind of boots they’d strapped him into made him feel like he’d jumped calf-deep into wet concrete. Sitting in the backseat of Corey’s bulky hover-van, he scratched at the bunched fabric in his arm pits and retreated back into his mind.

Matteo was still trying to make sense of what Corey had said. He knew you had to have a chip to get into the City, but the rest had been a mystery.

“They’re like little computers,” Corey explained simply for Matteo to understand, “and everyone has a color based on their class. Mine and Liani’s are blue because we’re from Inner Ring, a few levels out from the Mesa. Yours is gold. Either the chip or you, or both are from the Mesa itself. Some call it Center Ring, and it’s the tippee-top. Home to the richest, most powerful bastards in Sedonia City… no offense. Anyway, that chip combined with the top-shelf nanotech you were injected with at birth made you just a little more than human. You’re sharper, more observant, quicker to react, and you have a memory like a steel trap, all thanks to these microscopic gadgets hooked onto your neurons.” He saw Matteo’s blank stare. “The building blocks of your brain. Now, we all have the same kind of memory storage in us, but it’s illegal to access it directly without a court order… it’s not exactly productive for society if everyone can live in the past for real , right? But if you commit a crime, out comes the memory to convict you. If you’re killed, your memory is your witness.”Corey’s friend, Illyk, was the man to see about ‘getting access.’

Matteo blinked and shook his head. He realized all of it was true. The entire conversation had just played back in his head. In detail. He’d always been able to do that. Jo would frown at him when he’d recite the exact words of a broken promise Utu would give him shopping lists without writing them down, and laugh deeply when Matteo came back with every last item. And in the Pits he’d had a mental catalog of which objects were valuable, which were useful, and which were dangerous. There had to be thousands.

Growing up, it had been just one more thing to get him called a freak.

Sweat poured from his forehead as heat radiated up from inside the vest. He tugged at the collar. Illyk can get ‘access.’ The thought of digging up every fucked up detail of his life for all to see made him ache. Liani turned and faced him from the passenger seat.

“Nervous?” she asked. Her feline-green eyes glistened at him as she smiled. Matteo’s pulse raced. The mop of shiny red curls draped over her shoulders, just hiding the curves of her chest.

“Nah…” he said, shaking his head, “Nah.”

“Good, good. New outfit’s cute on you! Cuter than it was on my ex anyway… you like it?” Matteo wiped his forehead then rubbed the sweat on his mesh pant leg. Nodded.

“Yeah, it’s great,” he said, puffing his chest, “Great outfit.”

“He looks like a marshmallow in combat boots,” Corey scoffed. Liani punched his arm.

“Ahh! Shit, Liani, I’m driving!” said Corey. Matteo smiled, escaping the quicksand of his thoughts. He pulled the vest collar down further to get a better look out of the half-canopy window.

The buildings had gotten shorter. Blockier. Where the downtown ones were sleek and beautiful, these wore their guts on the outside. Complex networks of pipes and bits of worn machinery seemed to both decorate and entangle the neighborhood. Not so much flying traffic out this way either. There were a few transports and freighters humming in their aerial lanes, but most of the movement happened on the hanging train system. The Superway . There had been a blurb about it in one of Utu’s magazines. The tracks wove through the City like veins and arteries in a massive body. Train cars slipped along the rails at ridiculous speeds, stopped for passengers, then took off again like a gunshot. Matteo instantly wanted to ride one. Yet the further they went, even the train stops seemed fewer and further between.

“Jesus, Corey,” said Liani, “How deep in the sticks are we going?”

“These guys live as far on the edge of the grid as they can, Li. They don’t exactly want to be found,” said Corey.

“And you have found them before… right?”

“I… um… not exactly.”

“Oh this should be good,” said Liani, leveling a stare at him.

“I managed to trace my contact’s IP back through a couple dummy servers he’d set up. Rather badass of me considering these guys don’t fuck around with security,” he grinned at Liani as she rolled her eyes. “Naturally, the signal dead-ended before a specific location came up, so all I could get was a district tag.”

“Meaning?”

“We’ve gotta stop in the neighborhood and ask around.”

“Perfect,” Liani said.

The squat apartments and dingy storefronts finally gave way to the Outer Ring, a skeletal, tangled landscape of power plants, towering steam vents, loading docks, shipyards, and warehouses. As a kid he’d assumed the smoke rising from just beyond the Border was some sort of curtain, meant to stop him and his kind from looking in. Maybe the City kept monsters there.

Corey flew the van over the belly of the beast and dipped down into one of its gaping mouths. They landed on a round, concrete clearing amidst all kinds of other parked vehicles. Most had wheels though. Cars, trucks, vans, even bikes. Matteo fiddled with his harness, excited for a closer look but more eager to get the hell out of the van. Flying had been more fun when he wasn’t hungover.

“Okay, here we go,” Corey said as he popped the seal on the van doors. “We’ll start in that power station over there. My guess is they use the interference given off by the transformers to help block incoming Wi-Fi.”

“We’re guessing now. Awesome,” said Liani.

The complex felt unfriendly right away. Workers with tattered jumpsuits, dirt-streaked skin, and suspicious eyes kept their distance. They milled through the maze-like facility with exhausted, silent purpose. Grating metallic sounds of sparks and heavy tools rang out, underscored by a low electric hum. Matteo’s palms started sweating. For a moment he thought himself back in the twisted stomach of some wrecked sky-freighter in the Pits.

Corey had a hard time approaching the workers, let alone talking to one. Either they ignored him completely or pretended not to hear him over the noise. After half an hour of this, he finally dropped the excuse-me’s.

“We’re looking for Illyk!” Corey shouted above the din. Several men stopped what they were doing and glared. Liani grabbed Corey’s arm and clung tight. A stocky, brick house of a worker stepped toward them. Seemed like out of nowhere.

“We don’t know who that is, bud. You guys ain’t safe in here without gear. You should leave before some kind of accident happens.” The man nodded to the way they came in, then turned his back on them.

“We, uh—” Corey coughed, “We have something he’d be interested in. Worth his while.”

“You?” the worker asked, laughing the question.

“Yeah, me. He used to help me run a blog back in the day,” Corey gulped and glanced at Liani, “‘Engine of Vengeance?’” The worker squinted at him.