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  "You just got expensive, Feed" Cass said, her smile suddenly gone. She nodded and someone cut the zip ties loose. He scrambled to his feet, almost fell as he noticed the universally unhappy faces which surrounded him. All the rainbow boys wore matching petulant expressions, brows knit and arms folded. Cass said something to them and Fed's bag landed in front of him with a crunch. Slowly, bits and pieces of his things were tossed on the pile. "Okay?" asked Cass to Fed, her hips canted, eyes twisted narrowly.

  Fede rummaged through the pile, failed to find his backup. "My H.D." he said "my backup's gone."

  "What's it look like?" she asked, slowly.

  "Black. About this long. Three ports and a v.2 PCMCIA slot on… "

  "Good enough" she interrupted, turning to Skinny. He looked like he'd swallowed something spiny and distasteful and was studiously ignoring them. Cass shouted a word at him, and when he jumped she followed it with a long string of invectives. He waited until she was done and inhaled sharply, shouted back a similarly unintelligible range of tonal adjectives Fede couldn't follow but certainly understood. He paused to inhale again and hurled a final word at her. A silence the size of Montana dropped onto the street. One of the Samoans to one side of Cass blew out his cheeks and turned red, glancing to his huge partner is shocked embarrassment. Fede didn't know what that word meant, but he tried hard not to remember it.

  Cass's eyebrows had flown to the delicate arch of her forehead when he'd finished, and now her lips slowly twisted into a vicious snarl. She paused, reached into her jacket. Everybody's eyes followed her hand as it slipped inside the pocket there, slowly retracted holding a gunmetal grey, square object the size of two packs of gum.

  She flicked her wrist and the voice comm snapped open, a hyperkinetic techno tune exploding into the air in fully rendered midi. Everyone jumped. Skinny grimaced, mashed his teeth together, the tendons in his neck pulling taut. Cass hit a speed-dial number and held the phone to her ear. Skinny leapt forward, his hands flailing and an unstoppable stream of begging demands flowing from his throat. He danced around as Cass kept the phone firmly in place. Suddenly he leapt to Fed's right to grab his backup drive from behind the back of one of his minions. He pressed the drive into Fed's shaking hands and pleaded to Cass, crouching in front of her as though he was about to cry, actually getting onto his knees as she regarded him. Fede clutched the drive to his chest and she snapped the phone shut, smiled sweetly at Skinny.

  "You can fuck off now, okay?" she asked in jilted English, a perfect impression of a cartoon anime girl. The rainbow boys disappeared, funneling through an alley at a trot. Cass unfolded her arms and turned to Fed. "You're more of a pain in the ass than your brother is." She adjusted her jacket and the phone disappeared.

  "How'd you do that?" he asked.

  "I know his mom" said Cass. "Now you want to tell me what the fuck you were thinking?"

  "I wasn't paying attention" he said. He was shaking, his stomach a cold fist. "I was coding."

  "You were coding" said Cass flatly. "Of course." She laughed, shook her head. "My percentage just raised, I'm telling you that. Dumb shit motherfucker… " she strode over to a garishly bright biodiesel scooter. It was the same one he'd seen pushed down the street the day before.

  "Hey, didn't those guys have that scooter yesterday?" he asked, pulling his bag back onto his shoulders. She folded her long legs gently around the creaking vinyl of the seat, palmed the lock off. "Yeah" she said. "So what?"

  "Never mind" said Fed. His wrists ached and his lungs hurt. "What are you doing here?"

  "Saving your stupid ass, mostly. I was delivering. Hop on and I'll take you back."

  Fede straddled the tiny scooter's seat behind her, its steeply angled plastic driving his crotch into his brother's girlfriend's lower back. Her arms stretched out in front of him, the tiny hairs on the back of her neck tickling his nose as he tried to hold on to the seat. She smelled fantastic, musky and fresh, and his groin sprang to life as he slipped once, twice into the seat and against her.

  "You trying to kill me with that thing?" she asked with a smile, her breath sweet on his face. Fede blushed furiously, his mouth stammering. "Don't worry honey, I know that size isn't everything."

  She laughed at her own joke and pressed the ignition. The scooter shuddered to life, hydraulics lifting it up off the street. The smell of burnt toast exploded through the air.

  "Smells funny" shouted Fede over the buzzing roar of the engine. The scooter was excruciatingly loud, far louder than an engine that size should be.

  "Modded like hell" she shouted back at him. "Like everything else."

  She pulled a shiny black helmet over her head, reached back and grabbed his arms and wrapped them around her. The rubber of the tires snatched hold of the concrete and they rocketed up the street, the hydraulics in the scooter tilting sharply to keep their weight distributed over the center of balance. The engine noise crept to a high-pitched whine as Cass banked right and they cannoned into an alley, flying over cobblestones and out into an empty marketplace. She flipped their weight the other direction and wove through the shiny metal posts used to hold tarps over tables when the market was in use, turned again towards a short hill. She was practically sitting on him by the time they flew off the top of the hill, the bike snapping its wheels back under them from the distorted configuration it had used to push them up the slope. They landed with a thump and she swerved around a broken-down VW bug, its battered carcass perforated with tiny bullet holes. The bike downshifted as they slowed, then sped up going down a long hill past boarded-up windows before turning into another alley. Cass let the bike coast out, the angry squeal stuttering out into a slow guttural growl. Eventually she stopped in front of a three-story brownstone with two floorless metal decks curving out from the top floors. The windows were dark behind sheets of grime, the bottom floor windows hidden behind black plastic spray boarding. Cass got off the bike and switched it off, peeled the helmet back to reveal a blazing, idiot smile.

  "Goddamn, that shit's hot!" she said. She tossed the helmet to Fede and told him not to move, turned and waltzed into the apartment like she was going to powder her nose. He was breathing heavily.

  Two minutes passed. Five. Fifteen. Fede was seriously considering contacting his brother when Cass appeared again, chatting sweetly with someone as she crossed the threshold and out onto the street. Behind her followed the most horrifically modified person Fed had ever seen.

  Most of the online fights these days were between mods, people who'd had their bodies augmented to minimize the damage they received and maximized the damage they could dish out. The giant who followed Cass made her look like a child, was a caricature of what a man could imagine being. Muscles the size of Fed's thighs wrapped around his arms, snaked up to where his neck should be, but wasn't. He had had his ears removed, tiny holes ridged with chemically induced calluses. His nose was also gone, replaced by tiny slits that made him look snakelike, and his eyes peered from within heavily muscled tissue implants. His brow had been grown out, probably using coral bone grafts, and when he spoke Fede saw that his lips had been reduced and his teeth uniformly replaced with titanium incisors. The metal plates under the skin wrapping the top of his head gave him an animal look, made his head appear to be growing straight out of his torso, and as he gently raised Cass's hand to his face in a parody of a gentlemanly kiss Fede could see his hand had also been modified. He only had three thick fingers on each hand, burn-treatments and bone-replacement surgery turning delicate body mass into hammers mounted on the end of the man's wrists. For the second time that day Fede felt like pissing himself, and then the man turned and looked over Cass's head to stare at him.

  Cass skipped lightly over to the scooter, followed in two heavy steps by the monstrosity. Fede was sure the street shuddered as he walked.

  "Fed, this is Marcus. Marcus was winner of the Australian Triples last year. He's a good friend of your brother's."

  Fede nodded dumbly. Marcus smiled, the tigh
t hole where his mouth was splitting like a tear in a steak to spread over sharp metallic teeth.

  "Marcus was wondering if you could help him. He's having trouble with his computer." said Cass. "I was told you were good with computers."

  Chapter 10

  "Have you tried rebooting?" asked Fed. He couldn't imagine what this beast would use a computer for.

  "I don't want to lose my data" explained Marcus. His voice was deep, but not unusually so, and the slight lisp his lack of lips gave him was hardly noticeable. "I'm running a metabolic simulation over some new work I'd like your brother to do, and I think I may be suffering from insufficient RAM."

  Fede stared upwards at Marcus. Something in the back of his head reminded him that time was passing. "You what?" he asked, dumbly.

  Marcus glanced at Cass, then back at Fed. "A metabolic simulation. Most of my mods involve increased mass, and the metabolism required to support it requires some pretty tricky calculations. If I put on too much weight I could overload my heart. It's Swiss, but it's still just a heart."

  Fede realized he was acting like an idiot. "Can I see your machine?" he asked.

  "Sure" said Marcus. "Come on in. Park your bike on the sidewalk and we'll secure it from inside."

  They walked into the house through the doorway, Marcus stepping sideways to get through the frame. Inside was a large living room lined with couches, a series of colorful throw rugs giving the place the feel of an Afghani restaurant. Marcus yelled upstairs to someone, and a man's voice called back that the bike was taken care of. Marcus led them through the living room past a dining room whose walls were covered in posters of transhumanists and bodmodders of all stripes. One of the posters prominently placed at the head of the table was of Marcus, his arms held aloft in the middle of a huge metal cage. His head and upper body were coated in blood. The picture was foreshortened and Fede couldn't make out what was lying on the mat behind him. "I still say I owe that one to you guys" Marcus said to Cass, seeing the poster catch Fed's eye.

  "Don't be silly" replied Cass. "You trained hard for that and you deserved it. I'm just glad we got to take part."

  "Your brother designed the tetrahydroxide combines which allowed me to survive that fight" said Marcus to Fed. He led them into a cozy kitchen and gestured at the oversized bar stools which surrounded the raised table.

  "Please excuse the furniture" he said. "Tea or coffee?"

  Fede began to get the feeling that he should be asking about a rabbit hole. "What's tetrahedroxide?" he asked.

  "Tea please, Marcus" said Cass as she looked demurely at the wallpaper.

  "Tetrahedroxide is an amine that can only be processed in combination with an over-oxygenated blood supply. My particular physiology allows me to metabolize a large amount of it quickly without having to worry about toxic shock." He thumped his oversized chest and leaned his head conspiratorially towards Fed. "Oversized lungs. More of your brother's work."

  He leaned back. "Cassandra here authored the theory and worked with your brother to create an implant that would allow me to ingest it in a fight without having to worry about my liver falling out. They designed it to respond to the anaerobic wastes accumulated when fatigue sets in. Most fighters' mixers aren't so clever by half, and end up wasted mid-way through the second round. Because of them I was able to stage a massive comeback in the third round and tear Tichowsky apart!"

  Fede had no doubt. Marcus turned and began to pull tiny teacups from the cupboard and place them on a battered black wooden tray.

  "Cassandra?" he whispered at Cass across the table.

  "Say it again and I'll pull your guts out your navel" she whispered back sweetly.

  He was about to say more when Marcus placed the tray on the table. He followed it with milk and sugar in slightly chipped cups before going back to the stove. Instead he turned to Cass and asked, "Why'd you call me Feed?"

  "That's what Mil calls you" said Cass "and I think it's cute."

  "That doesn't make any sense" Fede said. "My name sounds more like 'fed' than 'feed.' It's stupid."

  She shrugged, unconcerned.

  "How is Mil?" asked Marcus as he returned to the table. He cradled a steaming teapot in one hand and carefully enfolded the top of the stool with the other as he squeezed into the remaining seat.

  "Still asking when you're going to come back and play" Cass said with a smile. Marcus laughed loudly, his chest creaking loudly.

  "Not a chance, my dear. Mil is too far my superior for me to want such a lesson again any time soon." Marcus raised his giant paws and pointed his palms at them both. "These were expensive, and I'll thank him not to break them."

  "You fought Mil?" gaped Fede as Marcus poured him his tea with one thick digit carefully plastered over the teapot's lid. Marcus smiled broadly.

  "I wouldn't call it a fight" he said. "I put a few holes in the wall and made a lot of noise, and he danced around and gave me two sprained wrists." He chuckled again, leaning back in his chair, remembering.

  "Funny thing was he kept telling me what he was going do before he did it. 'Marcus, you needs to be calming down now or I'm going to pop your other wrist. You won't fight again for a long time, its a big shame'"

  Marcus's imitation of Mil was spot-on perfect, and both Fede and Cass were snortling tea and giggling as Marcus continued, his trunk-like arms swaying gently in imitation of the skinny little man's fluid movements.

  "'There, see, I told you that was a bad idea. Now how longs you will be healing? Marcus, you are making a scene. You're embarrassing yourself Marcus.'"

  Cass covered her mouth with one palm, her shoulders shaking with laughter as they imagined Mil casually breaking down the giant mod fighter. Marcus chuckled and sipped his tea. "Mil is a gentleman, don't get me wrong, but he most certainly does not fight fair."

  Fede laughed again in disbelief at the thought of the no-holds barred mod fighter asking for a fair fight, but decided against asking any more about it. Marcus finished his tea, and eventually they got around to examining his computer. The interface was a six-foot square whiteboard with thick stubby pens Marcus could easily manipulate with his oversized hands. Fede found the problem almost immediately. A memory leak in one of the programs used in the simulations was accumulating in RAM and choking the system on memory swaps. Fede didn't want to mess with the program's code, so he ran a cleanup program, making a few performance tweaks to Marcus's system and generally cleaning house a little. Marcus politely asked questions along the way so Fede showed him a few ways to keep memory fragmentation down as well as running him through how to clean up after his simulation programs so the leak wouldn't get out of control.

  "With a little luck that ought to solve your problem and keep things running more smoothly. I would get more RAM though, especially if you're going to be running complex models like that on a regular basis."

  "Thank you, Feed. I appreciate the help" said Marcus politely. "I'd ask my brother to help, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease." He followed them to the entranceway and helped Cass with her coat. Outside the scooter was surrounded by a laser-painted red circle slowly pulsing clockwise around the perimeter of the bike. Looking up, Fede saw the black muzzle of something duct-taped to a bright yellow plastic Sony waldo. The thing had to have been designed for children, its joints encased in cheery pink plastic ducting.

  "Cessus!" shouted Marcus into the doorway. The laser light blinked out. "I apologize for my roommate's lack of manners. He's deeply involved in something, I'm sure." said Marcus. "You should be able to mount your bike now."

  They saddled up on the bike and waved goodbye to Marcus. This time Cass drove off slowly.

  Chapter 11

  They drove a few dozen blocks back into Chinatown and pulled up to the back of the garage next to Greener Pastures. Cass leaned on the horn until the door next to the corrugated pull-down opened and a tiny little Asian man leaned out. He was wearing a filthy baseball cap on backwards, but his smile when he saw Cass on the bike w
as big and genuine. She revved the engine a few times before stabbing a thumb at the doorway. The little man nodded and disappeared, reappearing a moment later as the garage door pulled upwards. He was wearing filthy blue service overalls, and was shortly joined by three other, identical little men. Cass pushed the bike inside and shut it off, stepping back to admire it with the rest of them. Cass started swapping notes with them in language Fede didn't understand, but he could tell by the tone of their voices and the low soft whistles that they were impressed. After several rounds of laughing and pointing grimy fingers at various parts of the bike she grabbed a socket wrench and a screwdriver. With a few deft twists of her wrist she pulled open a side panel and started popping screws. Her fingers flew over the polished metal housing, sculpted pieces of aluminum-bonded carbon fiber panels neatly lining themselves up to reveal the bare metal skeleton of the bike. Cass suddenly stood up, her hands on her hips. Even Fede was impressed - revealed, the bike was a pure racing machine. He could see wield marks where extra struts had been put in to support additional stress, and at least two extra shock plates. The Japanese men whistled again, loud and low. Cass nodded.

  "Who did that?" asked Fed. The men ignored him, pointing and murmuring among themselves.

  "I did" said Cass. "Come on." She tossed the first guy the keys and gestured for Fede to follow her. They exited via the front door past the big plastic dragons and crossed over to enter Greener Pastures. Mil was working in the front room, this time setting up some muscle boxes. The square red plastic cases contained all the ingredients needed to shock muscle groups into sudden growth, and Mil was busily strapping them to a rangy redheaded man. The guy had a split tongue he was sucking on through his teeth as the muscle box stabbed and massaged the hormones into his chest. Having something cut into your muscle a thousand times a second wasn't fun, but Fede understood that the pain was part of the procedure. It was a rite of passage.