Titama liked the time after Neo Francisco’s frequent rain showers. Neon gleamed off wet asphalt. Grime was washed off of buildings, trash hosed off sidewalks and into gutters, down drains, making everything look clean. Standing under a red and yellow awning, she avoided the last of the drizzle.

Squawking seagulls made the most of artificial daylight provided by the signage and holoscreens covering buildings as the rain passed. Some, the mutants, bristled with extra wings, legs and eyes. Swooping into gutters and alleys, they went rooting through trash for soggy morsels. Vehicles and pedestrians started filling the street and sidewalks again. Little Kiwitown, as one of Neo Francisco’s seedier entertainment districts, was filled with bars and nightclubs, love hotels, restaurants, VR dens, and brothels both sexbot and the traditional alternative for cheaper, less discerning customers, tattooists and bodymodders, and the local crack dispensary. Floating in front of one nearby building, a holo of a giant purple sexbot turned stiffly in place, hip cocked, gesturing as it blew kisses. A gaggle of bots poured out of the building below, their skins smooth, unable to feel that their skimpy clothing was impractical for the chill of the night. They began catcalling passersby. In letters five metres tall, the word ‘CONSUME’ was projected from a holoscreen on a building across the street. A VR junkie stumbled along the sidewalk, arms windmilling, with a black band covering their eyes.

Tall, broad and heavily muscled, Titama’s biceps filled the sleeves of a leather coat that reached halfway down her thighs. A dark shirt and dark pants were worn under the coat. Knotted behind her head, thick, brown hair exploded into a ball of frizz. Her complexion dark, the left side of Titama’s face was covered by a complex moko tattoo that looked like a series of overlapping thorns. The tattoos extended down her left side, covering her left arm. Stabbing a plastic fork into a white cardboard box, Titama withdrew a chunk of quivering meat and ate it.

Directly above Titama, over the awning, a red skull with ‘X’s for eyes and tongue sticking from its mouth buzzed and crackled constantly. A blue knife and fork crisscrossed behind the skull like crossbones, snapping on and off. The neon, holograms and flashing lights in Little Kiwitown almost drowned out the glow of the rest of Neo Francisco. The huge spires and art deco towers. The city was hilly, even more so after The Big One, and sloped down to the Neo Francisco bay.

“Titama, I need you.” Titama’s partner, Jojo, appeared in the doorway of the restaurant. “I need you, can you come here?”

Titama moved back inside with the box of food. Small and warmly lit, the restaurant was more takeout than eat-in but a few plastic tables and chairs were squeezed into the available space, currently unoccupied. Titama, Jojo and the restaurant’s owner, Keith Kahura, were the only ones in the shop. Seeing Titama, Kahura backed up until he hit the cooking equipment behind him. Both of the men were New Zealand native, Maori, like Titama, both also taller than her but with leaner builds. Jojo dressed like he was one step above homeless, in baggy jeans ending in filthy boots and an olive military jacket.

“G’day, Keithy,” Titama said. “I like this, spicey, new recipe?”

“Y-yeah, new recipe, new spices,” Kahura said.

“It’s good, it’s so good in fact it’s almost worth us continuing to supply you pro bono,” Titama said. “Almost.”

Titama tossed the white box onto the counter, fork sticking out of it. The half-eaten contents looked like jambalaya. Bits of meat, grains of rice and spice sprayed across the clean countertop.

Kahura’s takeout store was called ‘Cannibal Chow’, although there was no sign on the roof except the neon skull. Legally, the restaurant chain ‘Long Pig’ was the only outlet licensed to serve cloned human meat in the New United States. That didn’t stop places like Kahura’s from advertising and selling freely, however. It just required payouts to the right police and health inspection officers, and a paperthin claim that what he served was actually a vat-grown artificial human flesh substitute, which was more like tofu and tasted like ass, metaphorically not literally. An illegal trade needed an illegal supplier though, and that was where outfits like Titama and Jojo’s crew came in.

“What’s the problem here then, brother?” Titama said.

“He won’t pay! He’s got to pay but he won’t pay!” Jojo said. “I said he’s got to pay, he said he won’t pay but he’s got to pay!”

“Alright, alright, I got the picture, Jojo,” Titama said.

Jojo was pointing one long finger at Kahura as he spoke. He was older than Titama, in her early twenties, by a couple of decades, but he sounded like a child. Titama liked Jojo as a partner, he was loyal and stronger than he looked. However, he’d been in the military in the time before New Zealand sank below the waters of the Pacific Ocean and he’d taken a bullet to the skull in some Polynesian border skirmish. A metallic band wrapped around the left side of his skull. Now half a kilo of government plastic and circuitry supplied by the lowest bidder did a little too much of Jojo’s thinking for him.

“Keithy, this isn’t hard, you demand, we supply, you pay us,” Titama said. “You’re late on last month’s bill.”

“You can’t keep raising the prices on me like this!” Kahura said. “I pass those kind of increases onto my customers, nobody will buy!”

“Nobody is forcing you to buy, Keithy,” Titama said. “You agreed to the new price when you took last month’s delivery, you think my heart’s going to break for you? You can always switch to the artificial vat-shit, most of your customers are late night drunks with rumbly tummies, looking for some nom after getting their dicks wet. Maybe they won’t be able to tell the difference?”

“You know that’s bullshit,” Kahura said.

“You remember when you were opening up this shop?” Titama said. “Muturangi invested money in you then, you weren’t quick to pay back that either. You remember what happened?”

Titama nodded at Kahura’s right hand, resting on the countertop between them. Veins of metal ran through Kahura’s fingers. Rings were looped around the joints, the knuckles metal and protruding through the skin, and more struts ran across the back of his hand. The metal all formed a kind of brace that knitted Kahura’s hand together. Kahura yanked his hand away from the counter. Titama moved the lip of her coat aside. The handle of a small mallet with a rubber head was pushed through a loop in Titama’s belt.

“You want the left hand to match?” Titama said.

“No, no no, I don’t want anything like that again, Titama,” Kahura said.

Titama moved past Jojo, circling the counter. She took Kahura by the shoulder and steered him toward the back of the store. Although he was taller, Titama was considerably stronger and Kahura didn’t want to resist and risk a worse punishment. Behind the kitchen was storage and a walk-in freezer. Titama pushed the freezer open and forced Kahura inside.

“I want you to take a little timeout to think about your debts,” Titama said.

In the freezer, hanging from their ankles, were two human corpses in different stages of dismemberment. Their skin was pale, decorated with frost. Barcodes on their necks proved they were clones, illegal or not. Kahura was forced to stand between them.

“At least you haven’t resorted to street meat yet, Keithy, good on you,” Titama said. “You want to keep paying back your loan to Muturangi, you keep this business afloat. You want to keep this business afloat, you keep paying what we tell you for these bits of meat.”

Titama pushed the freezer closed again. Removing the hammer from the loop in her belt, she brought it down on the handle for the door. Bent pieces of metal were knocked off the handle and clattered on the floor. It wouldn’t keep Kahura in there forever but he’d be stuck for a little while at least, long enough to think about his options.

“It’s cold in there, cold, he’ll be cold and-,” Jojo said.

“He’ll be fine, Jojo, calm down,” Titama said.

Titama picked up the half-eaten box of food on their way out, stirring it with the fork. Somehow, however, she had lost her appetite. Her mind lingered on the pathetic, frozen creatures locked in Kahura’s freezer. Sighing, she dropped the food in a trashcan as they left.

“Never see how the sausage gets made, Jojo,” Titama said.

====

Titama is a standalone story but operates as a prequel to characters and events seen in Kill Switch: Serial Escalation by Sean E. Britten.

If you’re enjoying Titama so far, please feel free to share, watch out for Part Two next Monday, and check out the Kill Switch series on Amazon, available in ebook and paperback:

Kill Switch

Kill Switch: Serial Escalation

Kill Switch: Final Season

Sean E. Britten is an author, radio presenter and podcast host from Sydney, Australia. His favourite book of all time is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, so that might give you some idea of where he’s coming from. Check out his website here, find him tweeting stuff here or sometimes posting things on the increasingly dead medium that is Facebook here.