Power Contracts

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When Matt woke the next morning, something felt strange. It took him a while to put his finger on it. He felt fine. That was the strange part.

The morning after a sex binge was always a low experience, especially if copious alcohol was involved which, after the divorce, it tended to be. Along with a dull headache, he would be nauseous and fog-headed for the better part of a day. If nothing else, he should be feeling bone tired from having stayed up half the night, not to mention the soreness of his physical exertions. How then to explain this clear-headed feeling of wellness and positivity?

A bit of questing revealed the answer. Nanobiots had purged his system of the residual alcohol, and his default mind-state settings had kicked in, nullifying any discomfort. He could party all through the night and still wake up refreshed and ready to face the day. Good to know. Not that he felt inclined to party. He had work to do.

He felt a pang of guilt at the sight of the Venus orchid. Brushing the feeling aside (he and Ina weren't romantically involved, so how could it be cheating?), he polished off an extra-large breakfast and jumped straight into the Mesch. Having completed the training simulations, he was now at liberty to explore on his own. He had been at it for about an hour when a figure appeared at the field-wall boundary. Didn't anyone use the front door? It wasn't Logos this time but a middle-aged black man in twill coveralls. Matt waved him in.

The stranger virtually burst into the apartment. "Did you put these tracers here?" He flicked open a layer and marked them out.

Matt was taken aback. "I'm sorry, who are you?"

"Who am I, he asks. Well, allow me to formally introduce myself. I'm Bryon, the lead fucking electrician for the Mesch."

"Where's Logos?"

"Occupied elsewhere, I suppose. Probably sharded out."

"He can run out of shards?"

"Even MAGI don't possess unlimited computation. Also, there's a hard cap so they don't get too power grabby. So while his shards are off playing mini-golf or whatever, he sent me to check up on you and make sure you weren't fucking something up which, given these tracers here, is damn prophetic of him. These are yours, aren't they?"

"I think someone in sub-sector B-11 is running an illegal siphon-drip," Matt explained. Siphon-dripping was one of the countless ways to try to cheat the system. Clients were allowed to draw, or siphon, energy during periods of low demand then resell, or drip, it back into the Mesch when demand was high, netting a healthy discount. But the very act of siphoning and dripping affected supply and demand. Some of the shrewder clients would buy up energy from one side of the Mesch and sell it out the other at a slightly higher price. "Those tracers are collecting the evidence I need to prove it."

"Not anymore they're not. I already disabled them. They were making some of our clients nervous."

"How could they have even known about them? I set them to passive tracing."

"Did you now?" Bryon placed each splitter in its own layer, then fanned them out like a deck of cards. "Did you proxy the splitters before parallelizing the current?"

"Guess I forgot that part," Matt admitted, recalling his training.

Bryon touched two fingers to his lips, inhaled, and slowly withdrew them. The gesture was familiar. Smoking? Then where was the cigarette? The electrician appeared to relax. "Ordinarily, I would chalk it up to inexperience, but I checked your training record. You're a wiz at this shit. Something's off. Have you been hitting the booze?"

"I had a couple drinks last night," Matt confessed.

"There you have it. If you want to be an overseer, you should save the good times for your days off."

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