The Body Electric ('Mark' entry)

[templeremus.livejournal.com]

Title: The Body Electric
Rating: PG for angst, mild body horror
Genre: Character Study/Prequel
Characters/Pairings: Psi (from Time Heist)
Author: templeremus
Word Count: 500
Summary: Fresh out of prison, Psi tries to recover what he lost. Set prior to the events of Time Heist.

On the morning he's released, Psi heads straight for the nearest charging station. It's a grimy spot at the edge of town, deserted apart from a few pallid teenagers. They sit or stand with their heads a little on one side, anchored by the cables that run from their bodies and into the ports in the wall. Their hands are outstretched and typing almost too fast to see. The hum of electricity is the loudest noise in the room.

The floor assistant glimpses the prison code on Psi's neck and demands hard currency upfront. A girl wired into a nearby port is staring at them, and Psi tugs at the collar of his jacket, pulling it as high as it will go. For some hackers a code is a mark of distinction, proof that you made a big enough splash to get noticed. For him, though, it feels almost a medieval punishment. Like daubing a plague cross on somebody's front door: this house is infected, keep clear.

His main batteries ran flat weeks ago. Charging them takes a little under an hour. For the rest of the afternoon he wanders through a forest of data: vast, anonymised, reassuringly chaotic. There's no sign that anyone might be looking for him, no alert put out or trail of digital breadcrumbs to follow. He left - hopes that he left - enough of his hard drive intact to know what such a trail might look like. Self-wipes can be hazardous: those performed under duress, even more so. In every big town you can find a handful of modders who botched it, doing irreparable damage to their core memory. The ones with friends or family are looked after at home, at least while their money holds out. The rest get dumped on street corners or in alleys, where they jerk and stutter until their power fails and someone tidies them away.

Intellectually, then, Psi knows how fortunate he is. On another level - in the meat of him, as his fellow hackers would put it - he can't shake the sense of loss.

The next morning he hijacks the on-board security of a delivery shuttle destined for the coast. There's a vague impression, somewhere in his longer-term storage, of the sea - of water, anyway, and of the moons' light dancing on it. It might be a glitch, a product of his flesh-brain's attempt to unscramble the corrupted data, but it feels as good a place to be as any.

"Intruder detected," says the shuttle computer, once, peevishly, before it goes quiet. Flat on his back and hemmed in by crates, Psi can touch the roof simply by extending an arm. Then the engines fire up and he's pinned, bones made lead, the roar of the exhaust tearing through him with such fury that he can't even open his mouth to scream.

When he blacks out, it's like a plug being wrenched from its socket. A single electric spark, and then a very long time of nothing at all.