Higgs & Soap: Galaxy Delivery

Chapter 3

(Shortly after the train incident)

"Jerry Phablet! Oh my goodness, how are you?"

"Higgs! Buddy! I haven't seen you since the double eclipse bar-be-cue man. I'm good, how's things?"

"Pretty great, considering I've just been thrown from a train and now I'm strapped to a table with my implant nodes exposed, about to have you torture me."

Jerry put his backpack on the counter top next to the table and unzipped it. He pulled out a fistful of hardware and curly wires and dropped them on Higgs' chest.

"Ah, it's just the way things go sometimes, yeah?" he shrugged.

"Oh goodness, nothing personal Jerry. I mean a job's a job, especially in this tough economic climate."

Jerry dropped an oblong metal object onto Higgs' chest. "You're not wrong man. We all gotta eat."

They were in the kitchen of a small, stripped bare apartment. Higgs was laid out on a metal table in the centre of the room, chest exposed and strapped down by thick plastic bands. There were over a dozen cuts around his head, neck and chest. Small circular metal discs on wires poked out from the wounds.

"How are Vanessa and Kata?"

"Good man. You know Kata gets her data access 3 next month?"

Higgs gaped. "No way? She's that old already?"

Jerry tugged at the clump of curly wires, separating them. The wires had small connectors on both ends that Jerry started plugging into the exposed nodes behind Higgs' ears.

"Yep, just turned four. She's the light of my life."

"Wow. I remember my data access 3. That's when you get the Earth history data dump. Fascinated by space travel ever since."

"Vanessa wants her to be an engineer, like your partner Soap. I want her to go into gene mods." He leaned in closer. "That's where the money is nowadays, yeah? Aw man, they got blood in this one..."

"What?" Higgs tilted his head back as much as he could in his restraints and tried to look at the four grey gentlemen at the back of the room. "Bunch of amateurs!"

Jerry swabbed the node clean and plugged in the connector. When all of Higgs' exposed nodes were connected, he inserted the other ends into openings along the edge of the metal oblong. With a swipe of his hand a holoscreen appeared above it and he started typing in the air.

"But you can't force these things on kids you know? You can tell them what you'd like to see them do, but ultimately they've got to choose for themselves. Well, depending on what genes you picked for them in the first place. If you didn't pay for High Level Physical they're never going to be a Sportsball player, however much they want to."

"You can't play unless you pay!" said Higgs, reciting a famous line from a sports film.

"Exactly dude. The only person you should be angry at for your life choices is yourself, otherwise you just gotta spend some cash and upgrade."

Higgs could only see Jerry's holoscreen at an angle, but he recognised the process.

"So you're doing a 'hot access'?"

"Yup, heat up your implants so hot that the neural software bindings glitch. When that happens, I use my patented 'Jerry Hammer' tool to hack past your bio-encryption and get access to your data ghosts, specifically the data card you accessed about half an hour ago or so. They weren't very specific on the details."

"Meanwhile my implants get so hot they start to cook the tissue around them, damaging the synchronicity of the data..."

"...which means I have to do it quick, and keep you alive for as long as I can. Sorry about that pal."