Location : Seoul Eco-Bubble

Iris couldn’t walk right, and it had nothing to do with the stupid heels that Silvy had forced her into. The replacement processor the cyber-surgeons had put in was still calibrating. Just pacing next to the pool threatened to dump her into it, but the only thing she could do was walk it off. Eventually all her weight would correct.

She sighed.

After it corrected, she’d have to re-correct it once she got a replacement arm installed. Control units were easy. Practically off the shelf plug and play, like any other computer component. A replica of a human arm at the level of a combat unit was a whole other beast.

“Can’t you pace inside where I’m not at risk of having to jump in and fish you out?” Silvy asked, staring at her from over the rim of her oversized sunglasses. The Overwatch girl was laid out on a lounge chair in a swimsuit, playing some kind of RPG video game. She grinned and added, “Though I was totally right that the maid outfit looks great on you.”

“You’re the one that won’t buy me normal clothes!” Iris snapped back at her. She looked like a french maid, but felt like she was wearing some kind of BDSM suit. It was all straps and laces and ties, cinching around a body that did not have any give to it. A human gut would crush a little. Hers may as well have been adamantine as far as the corset was concerned. But the suit coat had been burned to shreds, her fatigues had been sliced off by the surgeons, and the local government hadn’t bothered to follow through on delivering them anything after they got set up in a penthouse.

Silvy laughed. “You could go buy them yourself, you know.”

“And go out looking like this?”

“It looks good on you.”

Iris growled and stamped her foot. “Why don’t you go buy me something normal to wear?”

Silvy shrugged. “Can’t. I’m waiting on Commander Mendel’s call. You know, very busy,” she said, and adjusted the tanning mirror she had beside her.

“That’s not even a real sun.” Iris pointed her remaining hand up at the lamp above them, crawling over exposure dome that protected Seoul. “It’s literally nighttime right now.”

“But not back in the baltics, now is it? Boss could call us at any minute. Very important that we win the PR battle before UAAF decides we committed some kind of war crime and sends assassins after us.”

Iris groaned and flopped into another of the lounge chairs. All her data had been handed over to Blumhagen, who had reached out to the Korean government, which had brought them into protection, but it was another thing entirely to decide how much would be told to UAAF. Without knowing who was behind the operation, carelessly revealing something could cause another world war.

The moment she stopped moving, all she could think about was the fight. The body tingling tension of fear and excitement. That rush of life mixed with the frustration that she had lost. She had been saved by overwhelming firepower. All she had done was stall. With a sigh, she consoled herself that it had all be to save the people aboard and the bridge.

To put it out of mind, she considered trying to go to sleep, but she was still on european time. Not to mention, spending ten hours paralyzed had been enough to drive her crazy. Instead, she pulled up the news. Summer Lee was sitting across from Park Young bawling his eyes out over how close they had all been to dying. Then he said something that caught her attention, “--This senseless terrorist attack!”

“They’re blaming terrorists? Which?”

“Hell if I know,” Silvy responded.

Then the news began panning through various shots taken the night before, and Iris’ picture came up. It was from her playing Red Baron with Park Young and the other two. The camera had gotten a direct look at her face moments before the explosion. “Oh, shit.”

Commander Mendel called them before the news even moved on from that clip. Iris and Silvy jumped to their feet and hurried to the video phone to get in front of the camera. Commander Mendel opened his mouth to say something as the video feed buffered in, and paused. “Did I interrupt something between the two of you?”

“I wish,” Silvy said.

Iris shoved the girl out of frame and asked, “Are we screwed?”

Mendel raised an eyebrow. “Interesting choice of words.”

“You know what I mean.”

He shrugged. “Quite the opposite. UAAF is footing the bill to get you a new arm. They’re not even demanding it be one of their surgeons.”

Iris blinked, and grinned at the thought of just how nice a limb she could get if one of the world’s super powers was paying for it. “What’s the catch?”

“They catch is that the arm is advance pay. They’re hiring us to get the perpetrators they can’t reach. Them sending an attack team off the American Pacific coast is too dangerous for them, so they’re sending us to get this boat. The crew aboard are the ones who loaded the, shall we say, particularly hot merchandise onto the Jian Line. You’ve got three days to rest up. And uh, you might want to pack a swimsuit this time. I don’t think the maid outfit will do well at sea.”

Silvy shoved her face back into frame. “Wait, am I going too? I thought I was supposed to get some time off as compensation!”

“Like I said, you’ve got three days,” Mendel said, and killed the call.

“Stingy bastard!” she screamed, but the screen had already turned black.

Iris turned away and walked back over to the pool, and then beyond to the balcony that overlooked Seoul. The city looked like an enormous park. Little buildings dotting between the trees and hills, hinting at the enormous infrastructure beneath the surface where tens of millions of people lived. Allegedly one of the happiest places on Earth, if you didn’t mind they charged a fee to step outside, and their idea of outside was still inside a bigger structure. It just wasn’t irradiated.

A few hours later, a sales associate from Daedalus Labs showed up with a briefcase holo projector and a big smile. He thanked her profusely for the opportunity to sell her the very best. The sales pitch began and Iris listened with half-lidded eyes. Eventually, she asked, “What’s that disclaimer?”

Every feature had a little red dot in the bottom corner. The salesman laughed. “You don’t have to worry about that. That just means it can’t be sold to civilians. Should you retire from Blumhagen, I suppose technically you would have to return the limb, as it constitutes protected technology, but tracking down ex-mercenaries is a great deal of trouble.” He smiled all the while.

After she put in an order, for the Gawain Sub-Dermal Acoustic, the man scheduled her an appointment for surgery in two days and thanked her. “We will begin the fabrication within the hour and fly it over as fast as possible. We thank you for your patronage, Miss Haber.”

Afterwards, Iris walked over to Silvy, who had migrated to the hotel room’s couch to play her game. “Go buy me something nice to wear and let’s get a drink tonight.”

Silvy looked up at her. She didn’t even pause her game, nor flinch as her character got ripped apart by demons. “You serious?”

Iris held up the UAAF expense account card. “The Sprawl’s paying. Let’s get some sake.”

Silvy leapt from the couch and snatched the card from her. “Leave it to me.” Three hours later, she returned with outfits for both of them. “You have no idea how lucky you are that you have a cap instead of a stump, do you know that?” the girl asked as she dumped bags of clothes on the floor between them.

Iris looked at her remaining arm, then her missing one. “YYet another reason I left the shopping to your capable hands,” she said, though she half worried that Silvy had gotten her something strange. What the girl pulled out of the bags looked like some distant relative of a hanfu dress. Very distant. Quite modernized. Almost like a cocktail dress stylized to look like it was meant to be traditional. Still, it was a sleek thing of blue and black that didn’t rely on showing skin to look good.

As the artificial sun began to set, the two of them found seats at a refraction bar. The actual floorspace was enormous, seating hundreds of not thousands of people, but from any given seat, she would have never known. Sound cancellers cut off the din of conversations and wall-covering display screens replicated the cultivated jungle outside.

They started with a jug of sake, and Silvy asked, cup in hand, “You’ll at least act a little drunk, right?”

“I’ll try, but I was never a good actor,” Iris said, and they knocked back their drinks. She tried to remember the way alcohol burned when she drank it. The tingle it would put in the back of her nose. The bite in her tongue. It had all been reduced to a list of ingredients and concentrations because the HAB unit just wasn’t as real as tastebuds. Then the booze sat in her stomach and did nothing but await evacuation.

Silvy poured them more sake with a grin and snatched up her cup once more. “Now this is what I call a vacation,” the redhead declared as she dialed up a serving of spindip for herself.

“I can’t stop thinking about Leilani,” Iris said, looking at the drink in her hand.

Silvy sputtered. “Really? Like… did she say something that got to you? Wait, is that why we’re out tonight?”

Iris sighed and tossed the sake down her throat. She set the cup down and said, “I still remember when I turned twenty and got trashed with my older sister. It was Irish red ale mostly, with shots of vodka, then tequila, and I puked all night.”

“Hey, you know what they say. Liquor before–”

“Beer, you’re in the clear. Yeah, learned that the hard way. Not the point. The point is I still remember what it was like to get drunk. It was right after university finals week too, all the stress just melted away. A blissful tradeoff I paid for with the hangover next morning.”

Silvy leaned her elbow on the counter, ignoring the appetizer as it slid up from a delivery chute. “And now?”

Iris frowned and rubbed her finger around the rim of the sake cup. “I don’t even get sore muscles nowadays. I don’t have any to get sore. Which sounds like an upside but… like… where’s the relief of getting rid of mild discomfort?”

“You mean like when you’ve been holding it in and finally get to go to the bathroom?”

Iris laughed involuntarily. It snuck up on her and escaped her lips before she could turn away. Silvy smirked and attacked her chip dip. “You know, God damn it, they should be able to let me inject booze into my brain. Don’t you think? Like, maybe not whatever I happen to be drinking, but at least a laboratory controlled microdose of the stuff. They could stuff a synthetic liver in here to clean it up!”

Silvy wiped some cheese off her chin and said, “You should have asked the Daedalus Labs guys to hook you up with one while you could.”

“Fuck. I should have. They’d totally have that. Why isn’t something like that standard? That should totally be standard in a HAB unit! It’s part of being human.”

“Poisoning yourself?”

Iris grabbed the sake jug and poured Silvy another drink. She slammed it back down and said, “Yes.”

The girl laughed and took her shot of sake without complaining. Her cheeks flushed as she swayed in her seat. “You know, I fully agree. There are healthier ways to hurt yourself than getting in life-or-death sword fights with terrorists.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Iris agreed, and stole a bite of the spinach dip, trying to remember the raw flavor of the last time she had eaten something like it.

The memories were fading though. The adrenaline of the fight shined far brighter in her mind.