Silver Sahara

Chapter 7: Contracts and deadlines

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*Uploading life signs*

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*Recieved*

*BP: 48/92mm

Respiration: 9bpm...*

*Uploading...*

Alex stares absently at the ceiling, the data flowing from her skull. Every microbyte pumped through the wire jacked into her head in a rhythm akin to her heartbeat that stubbornly pressed on despite the blood loss.

A man stood in her peripheral. He tapped upon a thin computer monitor. His long black coat alienated him from the sunlit amber walls. A blue band wraps around his left arm with a prominent bar code imprinted upon it. She fixes her gaze on the band.

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*Complete*

The information conjured from a database several hundreds of miles away displays as a vibrant hallucination. That, despite its vivid digital impression upon her vision appears distinctly real. As if there were floating caricatures composed of words and coded engrams that her mind quickly unraveled with ease.

*David Rabin, Kranos—Zelus division number LL-2408z...

Records: 23 years of service, compliance—benevolent...

Contract: 83 years, 2nd born claim for 48 years: of 83 years of service. Remaining time: 12 years...*

Alex averts her eyes before reading further. Slow, careful blink alerts David of her awareness. His voice is heard but not registered, the tapping upon the computer keys echo in the cold room but invokes no response. Alex ignores David and carefully glances around the room, the orange staining the walls calls her back to the cold corporate coffins she lived in as a child. The smell of hot artificial coffee manufactured in Hungary mixed with the striking sting of Spanish cigars. Upon the TV within the suffocating coffin played an obscure cartoon that she can only faintly remember—"some mind-numbing toon by Westroad," she thought. Sitting in a chair illuminated only by the shifting color emitted by the television was her father. Slowly smoking a cigar, drinking his whiskey mixed coffee, and rolling a tablet of neo-fentanyl in between his fingers.

"The time... What was the time?" Alex suddenly tries to remember. "Why am I thinking about this? Why do I care?"

Her brief moment of lucidity ends when she finally recalls the time. Like a match within an O2 silo, the memories erupted with full clarity. It was 3:02, the air consisted of a stale cloud permeating from her father's cigar and the noise almost absent. Her mother was gone. "Zeroed in some worthless skirmish somewhere in Kuwait." The news delivered by a careless pigeon. Alex felt nothing. Her entire body watched the tablet in her father's hand. She heard the grinding of the drug between his calloused battered fingers. He didn't say another word to her, nor did he take another drink. Not even a gesture of apology or farewell. He calmly positioned the entirety of the pink tablet beneath his tongue. Despite being no older than eight, she knew.

She was speechless. It wasn't shock or surprise that caught her voice and ensnared her muscles from moving but rather confusion. "Why?" she asked herself. "Why if you were so disinterested and apathetic to the happenings of the world... Why would you not fight against it?" He was not a hopeless man with a dead wife, but instead was a bored being hammering a nail deeper into his tireless tedium. His wife was an associate and his daughter an investment into his retirement with Kranos. A pathetic man, once a war hero, is now... only a bloodstained borg with addictions that amassed upon his debt. No stress or sorrow, simply detachment from the world. Call it the beginning of cyberpsychosis or depression. Nevertheless, he didn't care about the scars he left upon his contracts, himself, or even his family. It was impulsive and routine.