Going Under

Chapter 1 — Going Under

Lawrence Ysir ate like a man who had never once been watched.

Atticus watched him from across the room, over a glass of ouzo he was making last. The pigheaded man slurped at a plate of pasta, totally unaware. Atticus knew how to keep a low profile, but shit — Ysir wouldn’t have noticed him if he’d jumped onto the table and started singing while doing the Cossack dance.

He’d been under cover for a couple of months now, pretending to be a tenser named Cary Grant. The Syndicate had sent him to the Planc to infiltrate the local black market, figure out who kept feeding the streets with illegal biotech. Military grade augmentations, illegal cord vials, things like that. He’d been on the trail of a group known as Engel until just recently.

A cord vial he’d scored off another tenser in the lower levels had been coded to a Fedlab. His contact had reached out, said he’d found something great. It was just the lead Atticus had been looking for — something with a traceable origin point.

The director of the lab the vial came from had regular large deposits of cryptocoins in his public account. That director was Ysir. Atticus suspected he’d been pinching tech from the Fedlabs for some time, selling it to make a profit.

Ysir tipped his head back, his heavy neck pressing into his collar. He took a bite of bread that dripped with olive oil, then licked his fingers.

Atticus had seen the type before. On the Planc, carrying that kind of weight was a choice — GLP regulators were cheap enough that even strats could afford them, and the cirrus class practically issued them at birth. Which meant Ysir’s bulk wasn’t neglect or poverty. It was theater. A man with enough money and enough status to eat whatever he wanted, take whatever he wanted, and make sure everyone in the room understood that the rules governing everyone else’s body didn’t apply to him.

It was, in its way, a very alto thing to do.

Two tables over, a tenser sat alone nursing what looked like sparkling water. Military build, jaw slightly too symmetrical, the subcutaneous ridge along the forearm that meant hardened bone structure underneath. The tells were subtle — you had to know what to look for. Atticus knew. He’d been living inside those same tells for years.

For a moment, watching the man, he felt something he couldn’t name. Not really recognition — more like reaching for a word that wouldn’t come. He let it go. Ysir was heading back to his table from the bathroom, wiping his hands on his jacket.

The assistant sitting across from Ysir looked to be in her early twenties, mixed race, just like Atticus. She looked familiar. Back in Detroit, where Atticus came from, most everyone was mixed. But here on the Planc, that meant she probably came from Midtown.

The Planc had a rigid social structure that Atticus hadn’t encountered in a Confederacy state before. Altos were mostly white and overwhelmingly fundamentalist, like throwbacks to an era most of the world had agreed to be embarrassed by. They preached purity of body and soul, which Atticus found incredibly annoying. Anyone darker than a cup of milk they saw as a potential terrorist. Unless, of course, you were cirrus — one of the highest echelons on the social ladder, above even the altos in all the ways that actually mattered.

The cirrus were mostly old Indian money — families who’d arrived during the dust storms of the thirties with exactly the degrees a city under construction couldn’t afford to turn away, and had been collecting interest on that welcome ever since. The only brown-skinned people the altos actually respected.

A flick of his eye brought up the girl’s public record. Neeshea Kontaro. Administrative assistant at the same Fedlab that Ysir ran. A strat — one of the lucky few who’d managed to claw her way out of the faceless rabble of the street people and onto the social ladder. She’d done it the hard way, which meant she’d done it at a cost that didn’t show up in any record.

Ysir guffawed at something he’d said and the girl faked a giggle, right on cue. She laughed when he laughed and never once looked at her food. She was managing him, and she was good at it.

For some reason, his thoughts drifted back to his partners. He winced as he briefly thought about Jeni’s emaciated face, still beautiful even when ravaged by the rads, just days before she finally died. Erik vomiting blood, shitting himself, his once magnificently muscular gymnast’s body reduced to a skeleton wrapped in paper. The damn grief — it loved to rear its head at the most random times.

He knew perfectly well this assignment had been meant as a vacation. Nobody had ever intended him to actually discover anything. They’d forgotten about his drive. The Syndicate psych had said something about repressed emotions, that he needed time to recover from Jeni and Erik, but what he needed was to work. He’d insisted on it, and so his handler had thrown him this job — something quiet, something dead-end, something that would keep him occupied without putting him anywhere near anything real.

They’d underestimated him. They usually did.

Burying himself in his work had always been how he dealt with the emotional wreckage. His specialty, some might say. He’d done the exact same thing after the accident, back in forty-two — after he’d woken from the coma to find half his life forgotten and both his parents dead. The WC Army had saved him by turning him into some kind of cybernetic Frankenstein project.

The psych back then had said the same thing too. He’d told her to stuff it and blazed his way through therapy. Most amputees took months to learn how to use synth limbs. Atticus had been walking in four weeks and using his hands without breaking things not long after. A miracle, the docs had said. He’d opted back into active duty as soon as they would let him.

He took another swallow of the ouzo to burn those thoughts away and looked back down at the menu. Better order something soon to avoid — oh, too late. Rather than one of the automated wait staff, a man strode toward him, chin raised to convince the world he was important.

“Excuse me, sir.”

Atticus raised his head from the menu. “Yes?”

The man had jet black hair slicked back into a short, oily ponytail. A long beard, waxed and brushed, spread like a disease from his chin down his neck. “I’m sorry, but you are making some of our customers uncomfortable.”

“How so?”

“This isn’t really your kind of establishment.”

Atticus barely listened. Across the room, Ysir was pushing back his chair, dabbing his mouth with a cloth napkin the size of a small tablecloth.

“We don’t serve tensers here.”

Atticus looked the manager up and down, taking his time about it. He pulled out his Syndicate badge and held it just long enough. “I’m here on official business. Are you aware that you’re interfering with an active investigation?”

The color left the man’s face. Sweat beaded at his hairline.

“Forget it.” Atticus stood quickly, the man flinching backward. He had what he needed from Ysir anyway — or as much as he was going to get sitting in this room.

A few flicks of his eye paid the tab in cryptocoins. The digital currency was largely untraceable and would hopefully irritate the manager into tomorrow. Any respectable person would have used physical currency — rupees or rens, even pounds. He had a small stack of rens in his wallet and used the cryptos purely out of spite.

Ysir figured to be at the restaurant a while yet. Atticus decided to use the time.

The high-tech lock on Ysir’s apartment was meant to provide better security. It made things easier — a handshake protocol instead of a pick. He was inside in under a minute.

What he wanted to find was biotech ready for street distribution — cord vials, augmentation components, anything with a Fedlab signature he could trace back. He found nothing. The apartment was clean in the way that deliberate people kept things clean.

The only thing of interest was a terminal on the desk. In this day and age, actual cubes were uncommon. Most people wore their devices — wrist units, ocular implants, subdermal tabs. But Ysir had a physical terminal, matte black, older model. Either he was old-fashioned, which seemed unlikely given the gold cufflinks, or the cube gave him something his wearables couldn’t — real security. An encrypted tunnel to somewhere he didn’t want logged.

Atticus unrolled a screen from his pocket and subconnected. The box had a private channel to the undernet, completely off the main grid. He hit the mailbox first. One new message. He skimmed it.

Ysir,

Denied. You are looking at a courier and calling it a prize. The subject has an assignment; he will complete it — and if you interfere you will cost us the thing we have spent eight years failing to reach. Poseidon is not your concern. Crack Titan One. Get us the Reviah code. That is the job you were given, or we will find someone who can.

— Thetis

Message quoted below:

Charon 3 still tailing me. The code this subject is running is wasted on surveillance work — I want a proper look at it. I’m going to dinner tonight and I’m sure he will be there watching me. I can lead him out and call in a strike team to grab him. Permission to capture?

— Ysir

Atticus frowned. He hadn’t noticed anyone else watching Ysir at the restaurant. But the email raised too many questions to sit with. He started working through them.

Titan One first. If that was Ysir’s actual assignment, maybe it connected to his illegal activities. He dug through what Ysir’s clearance gave him access to, which wasn’t much. Titan appeared to be a classified program, military origin, something to do with autonomous combat units. Not drones — something more sophisticated. Ysir had been tasked with cracking the encryption on a unit they’d come into possession of, trying to reverse-engineer whatever was running inside it.

AI research had been outlawed in the early thirties — dead-end technology, the official position held, nothing more than elaborate automation that people had mistaken for something more. The robots they’d used to build the Planc had been the most sophisticated machines ever constructed, and all they could do was execute their programming. No one had ever gotten further than that.

Ysir’s task seemed straightforward enough on paper. Crack the encryption, see what you find. He moved on.

Charon. That was the word that mattered.

It turned out to be a WC project, classified and earmarked to a Syndicate division he’d never encountered in six years of service. He’d never heard of department 19-GN. He skipped through most of the file, looking for Charon 3. The bottom section listed three subject entries. He opened subject three.

Charon: Subject 3

Project Directors: Harris, R. & Chan, S.

Viability: High.

Summary: Based on R3 Vi-4H platform devised by Phillips, Harris and Chan. Charon frame. Biological integration stable. Most successful subject within the Charon project — no detectable mental deterioration.

Status: Alive. Charon 3 currently operating within WC Syndicate CATS division under pseudonym Atticus Morin. As per request, subject has been assigned to Planctae to infiltrate Engel and acquire priority target designated Keystone — identity restricted — for integration into Poseidon.

The shock of seeing his own name on the screen made his guardian system react as though he’d been attacked. Hormones flooded his arteries, blood pressure spiking, hands tightening without instruction. His eyes moved across the entry three times before the words stopped rearranging themselves.

A lot of the record was blocked — Ysir apparently didn’t have the clearance to see most of it. But one line from the psych profile was visible in the redacted summary, isolated like something left out by accident.

Subject believes himself the only survivor of a car crash.

For a moment he couldn’t breathe.

Then a flash of memory — not his usual memories, which were clean and retrievable on demand. This one came from somewhere deeper. Headlights through a windshield. The crunch of metal folding. Hands closing around his shoulders, dragging him across wet asphalt.

Blue eyes, close and urgent.

Stay with me, Daniel. Hold on.

A hand wrapping around his, squeezing.

Dad.

He’d never heard his father’s voice before. He knew this. He’d told doctors that, told psych evaluators, told himself. He had no memory of either of his parents beyond photographs he’d been shown to help him reconstruct what he’d lost.

But some voice inside him said: that’s who it was.

Then he felt something else — a flicker, sourceless, gone almost before it registered. The sensation of a weight that wasn’t his. A body that didn’t match the one in the memory. Not pain. Not quite wrongness. More like the feeling of reading a sentence in your own handwriting and not recognizing it.

It vanished.

The door to the apartment closed with a click.

“Now you’ve got nowhere to run.”

The voice belonged to Ysir.

---

From Chapter 3 — The Detective

Chan Zhao stood over the body.

The other officers didn’t see it that way.

“It’s just a bot, Zhao,” Benson said. He’d arrived the same time Chan had and spent most of the intervening twenty minutes checking his messages. “Basically vandalism. I don’t see you getting all serious when someone throws a rock through a window.”

Chan turned to look at him. “Another Synthoid killed in the same fashion as the others. The only reason you are not calling this a serial killer is because the victims are Synthoids.”

“Yeah. And nobody’s going to file a report on it, either.” Benson shook his head. “You’re hopeless, Zhao. See you back at the precinct.”

Chan watched the car pull away. Turned back to the body.

The other uniforms were milling around, checking things without much urgency. Nobody was taking measurements. Nobody had secured the full perimeter. A patrol officer leaned against the alley wall looking at his wrist unit, waiting to be somewhere else.

Chan crouched beside the body.

The Synthoid had been male-presenting. Construction-grade frame. The kind the city used for infrastructure work in lower-level sections where human workers didn’t go. One clean stroke from above the clavicle all the way through. The blade had gone through the titanium-alloy skull like it wasn’t there.

The precision was the part that bothered him. Not the violence. He had seen worse. The same angle, the same depth, the same clinical absence of hesitation he had seen on the last four bodies and the four before that. Whoever was doing this had done it enough times that it had become routine.

Each time, when he got the body to Katrina, part of the head was missing. Not from the wound. Removed. Deliberately.

He stood up and looked at the alley. No footprints. No trace evidence. Nothing that would give him a direction, a description, a reason. Another Synthoid the city had already decided didn’t matter.