Pt. 1, Chapter. 1 - "Pulse"

“Please confirm your delivery.”

The courier drone at Wes’s front door chimed its automated response and awaited a reaction.

“Please confirm your delivery,” the contraption repeated a moment later, its voice devoid of any human cadence or tone. Loose wiring dangled from the gaping holes where its arms had once been attached to the rest of its simple, bipedal frame. The mesh netting that would have held a package was completely missing from the back of the machine, seemingly cut from the drone’s torso entirely. Wes pulled his stylus from the front pocket of his smock, using it to scratch at his head as he looked over the dismembered machine, puzzled.

Courier drones were designed with theft in mind, of course. Built of a fairly modern carbon fiber material—engineered to be both sturdy and light-weight—the drones’ arms were designed to interlock behind the torso, forming a sort of protective cage around the delivery parcel that would only unlock upon arrival at the delivery’s intended recipient. In theory, this ensured the safe delivery of every order. As Wes had just discovered, however, the drone’s design did little to prevent someone from simply removing the protective cage of the machine all together, disconnecting the courier’s arms at the shoulder joint to access the ordered goods. It was certainly a creative bypass, and Wes nodded at the work in a quiet acknowledgement of cleverness. Tech dealers and swappers were smart. Courier drones, on the other hand, not so much.

Wes glanced down the dirt path that connected his front porch to the main road. A sparse trail of mechanical odds and ends every few feet seemed to suggest that the amputee robot standing before him had continued to shuffle along without hesitation, even as its arms were plucked free of its precisely engineered frame.

“You didn’t detect when your arms were removed? Don’t you guys have sensors for that?” Wes chided.

“Please confirm your delivery,” the drone retorted automatically.

Wes shook his head in a mixture of amusement and mild exasperation. Instinctually, he pulsed along with the emotion as he spoke at the drone. As he did so, a low, buzzing energy began vibrating the air directly around him, suffusing his words with a layer of annoyance in the form of an electric frequency. Wes felt the familiar energy prickle along his skin as it created a looping electrical field stretching from the current-producing organ in his gut—called an amp—to the electroreceptors in his face and along the back of his neck. The indented dark spots under Wes’s eyes and across the bridge of his nose hungrily sucked in the static flowing from his amp, creating a circuit of bioelectricity. Everywhere he looked, a ghostly afterimage burned overtop his view of the world, and fuzzy, white static bled into view from wherever electricity buzzed nearby. Under this new layer of sight, Wes could see other energy fields. Well, it was more than simply seeing them. Wes could feel the bounds of their energy. Based on the pull and push of his own electrical field, he could feel the passive, humming presence of anything conductive nearby, as well as anything actively producing a current.

The drone standing on Wes’s porch immediately became laced in a complex lattice of flickering trails that highlighted the pathways where electricity flowed throughout the machine. Live wires became glowing, white rivers under Wes’s electrosense, coursing from the drone’s cheap, internal battery down through the simple motors that controlled the machine’s legs. Wes gave the armless drone another once-over.

Most shipping companies delivered through these standard model drones. The simple walking machines were cheap to manufacture, easily modified to accommodate various delivery routes, and plenty capable of following an internally calculated path towards a designated set of coordinates. Of course, that’s what made drones equally unreliable at times— internal calculation. Sometimes those calculated paths took the machine right through the center of swapper territory. Unlike bots, drones didn’t house any on-board AI for reasoning or situational awareness. Without it, a drone could lose both arms and keep chugging along towards its delivery point, perfectly unaware of its missing appendages or packages. Wes assumed that the delivery company wasn’t exactly monitoring where the various tech-dealers were setting up shop. And judging by the double-amputee standing on his porch, the drones themselves certainly weren’t capable of monitoring it either.

“I’m guessing there isn’t a preset message for, ‘your order was stolen on the way here,’” Wes mused, mocking the courier’s digital tone with a higher-pitched pulse underlining his voice to indicate sarcasm.

“Please confirm your delivery,” the drone chimed in response.

“Yeah, that would be too easy, huh? How else would I experience the absolute joy of filing a digital refund request with the company?”

The drone wobbled for a moment, shifting to maintain its balance on the simple, metallic struts that formed its legs. When its footing was determined to be stable, the drone bent its knee-joints to center itself, bobbing in a short, smooth crouching motion that made its actuators whir with electricity. The legs of the machine fuzzed with static under Wes’s electrosensory sight. He watched the drone’s movements, an idea beginning to form in his mind.

Wes’s order would take at least a week to refund if he processed the request through the usual avenues. Drones were generally pretty reliable, which meant that faulty-deliveries didn’t happen too often. Moreover, the company he had ordered from was large enough that, frankly, it could afford to ignore every displeased customer with zero consequence.

Wes fiddled with the stylus in his hand, pressing the nib into his fingertips one-by-one as he further distilled his inspiration.

The drone wouldn’t make it out of the city. Without arms, the courier could barely balance. It shifted every now and then on its metallic struts, desperate to maintain some semblance of mechanical composure. Moreover, the drone wouldn’t have the weight necessary to push its way through a crowded segment of the city, let alone climb the dirt incline leading from Wes’s front porch back up to the main street. Thinking about it now, Wes wasn’t even sure how the drone had managed to get to his door without falling over in the first place.

Even if it did manage to hobble its way back to the nearest deployment station, they’d likely recycle the drone for what little of it remained salvageable, assuming the swappers hadn’t plucked anything remotely useful from the drone’s frame already. If the drone had been reduced to simply a pair of legs and an automated speaker, as Wes suspected it had, the company would likely just trash the whole thing and order themselves a replacement from one of the factories manufacturing thousands of courier drones every day.

Wes ran a quick cost analysis in his head, computing the average price of the drone’s components and comparing it to the cost of his own order, which had been a series of time-controlled switches that were precise to the nanosecond. He had been planning on using them to automate his greenhouse’s water usage to perfectly maintain the specific watering needs of each plant in his care. Wes had spent the better part of last month planning it all out, calculating the timer delay and accounting for each and every drop of water.

The switches were easily worth twice the value of what remained of the dis-armed drone, even if Wes calculated generously in favor of the drone’s total worth. Wes thought about it for a moment, looking the drone over with a meticulous gaze that quickly and almost subconsciously summed up the working condition of the drone’s remaining pieces. Then he blinked, and shrugged, pulsing to the steady, middling frequency of reluctant acceptance.

I mean, it’s better than nothing, he thought.

“Please confirm your delivery,” the robot suggested.

“Well, alright then.”

Shouldn’t be too difficult to hook this thing up to a hose.

Wes popped the magnetic clasp on his smock’s front pocket, replacing the stylus in its sheath before rooting around for his transaction chip. A moment later, he pulled it from the pocket, held between his pointer finger and this thumb. Pulsing allowed him to channel his electrical field through the chip at a unique frequency, creating a signal tied to his personal funds account. Well, it was his parents account, really. Wes didn’t have any money to his own name just yet, other than the few physical coins he kept in his pockets. He liked the way the smooth edges of the coins felt along his fingertips. Playing with them helped him think.

These days, most people paid with complex etchings—beautiful designs placed under the skin and layered with advanced micro-circuitry that would allow the bearer to effectively broadcast their personal transaction code by simply pulsing at the right frequency. Wes would have done the same—not so much for the aesthetics as much as the convenience—but etchings had never seemed to settle with him. He had tried getting one a few years back, right after moving to the city. Wes had been rather proud of himself for coming up with the design—it was simple line art, depicting a potted plant with a lightbulb sprouting from where the flower should be. Getting an etching was going to be his first big decision since moving out by himself, and the idea of it made him feel bold and proudly independent. He had done the research, braced for the pain of the etching’s subdermal implant, and made sure to scout out the most reputable-looking etching parlor in all of city central before booking his appointment.

The initial pain had actually been significantly less than his preliminary calculations suggested it might be. The aftermath of the process, however, had him doubled over and clutching at his arm where it felt like someone had set fire to his bloodstream. Something about his amp’s particular frequencies had almost immediately fried the etching’s delicate circuitry and spoiled the design, causing the ferro-ink to bleed back out through his skin in an excruciatingly painful fashion. The unexpected error had shaken Wes a fair amount. He still bore a series of dotted scars on his wrist where the fried micro-circuitry lingered just under his skin. It would have only caused more damage to remove, the man at the etching parlor had assured him. Thinking about it now made him pulse the deep, rattling frequency of anxiety. Wes didn’t like the thought of some foreign, dead tech stuck inside of him, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Ever since then, Wes had defaulted to making payments via transaction chip. No more fancy, subdermal amp-tech for him. That was fine, of course. After all, there was another crucial aspect of amp-tech that bothered him, but he never dwelt on it longer than he had to.

Wes pulsed briefly, pushing his electric field through the transaction chip. It hummed along to the proper frequency, glowing for a moment with white static under Wes’s electrosense. Then he slipped it back into the smock’s front pocket. A moment later, the drone chimed that it had received the chip’s signal.

“Delivery confirmed. Payment: two-zero-zero point five-two-zero.”

Wes winced, pulsing for a moment in the frustration frequency as the drone’s digital voice reminded him exactly how much he had spent on an order that had never arrived.

This is still recoverable, Wes thought, taking a breath. I’ve haven’t got the timers, but I have got this, uh….this…

Wes refocused, shifting his attention back to the drone standing on his porch. The display screen on its chest was flickering, seemingly unsure if it should be presenting a list of greetings in various languages or a troubleshooting program’s start-up menu. A moment passed, the display switching rapidly between the two screens as Wes watched, slightly mesmerized by the flashing light. Then, the whole display fluttered in one final, electric hurrah before blacking out entirely.

I’ve got this mess, Wes finished the thought in his head.

“Uh, you alright there, drone?”

“Please wait for assistance. Your delivery is on its way,” the mechanical voice said in its unwavering tone.

“Somehow I seriously doubt that,” Wes raised an eyebrow, underlining his words with a high-pitch pulse.

The drone remained silent. Wes waited. Nothing. So he pulsed at it in a questioning frequency.

The drone’s legs wavered for a moment, as if preparing to hobble away, then froze in place. Something internal whirred and clicked angrily, like two mechanisms grinding against one another.

Well that can’t be good, Wes thought. He could hear something in the robot’s torso trying unsuccessfully to push against the rest of the drone’s internal mechanisms. It buzzed endlessly, going nowhere.

Then it all stopped abruptly.

In his electrosense, Wes could feel electricity beginning to pool together where the arm motors should have been connected. It was trying to move its missing arms, Wes realized. The drone probably thought that it still had his package to deliver, safely tucked away beneath its now removed arm-shield. White static fuzzed into view around the machine’s speakers.

“Have a good—” Wes held on for a moment, expecting the automated response to conclude properly, but the phrase was left hanging. A moment passed again. Then, from the speakers once more, the drone’s voice chimed:

“Good—good—good—g—” and shut down once more. The words were distinct, but oddly syncopated and mangled in pitch.

“I really don’t think you are, bud,” Wes grimaced.

“Have—have—have—have delivery!” This time the audio was sped up and high pitched. Wes was barely able to make out words through the growing distortion in the drone’s digital tone.

The courier lurched backwards in an attempted step away from the door. The awful sound of machinery crunching against the carbon-fiber frame returned, and Wes winced, pulsing instinctually to unpleasant surprise. The drone shuddered, its motors sputtering in one last, futile attempt at moving properly. Then the entire contraption crashed to the ground with a sharp cuh-CHUNK. Wes winced again, pulsing to pain. For a moment, he simply watched the pitiful courier drone where it lay in a heap outside his door, wires leaking onto the porch from its arm-holes.

“Uh, why don’t you come inside and let me take a look at you?”

Wes waited. The courier drone’s display screen flickered to life for only a moment.

“Please—” The digital tone pleaded before cutting-off its own sentence.

Wes gathered the fallen drone and pulled it inside.

Sitting on the edge of the transport bridge with her legs dangling over the side, EJ gazed down fondly at the city streets, which extended out below her and stretched endlessly into the horizon. This high up, she could hear the sounds of street chatter and bustle only as a whisper in the breeze. It rose into the air alongside the smoke and steam, and she breathed it in readily like it was the very lifeforce of the city that sustained her. After a week of scouting around city sector 8 with a group of swappers who smelled like melted wiring fermenting in a puddle of rusty sewage, she cherished the familiar stench of city central’s acrid air. Even the worst smog here was still preferable to the trash heap that was sector 8.

Damn, it’s good to be home again, EJ thought, pulsing to the steady frequency of comfort.

EJ stood up and wiped her grimy hands on her jacket. Then she took a deep breath in and pulsed outwards on the exhale. It was a low frequency, the kind that wasn’t strong enough to register on even the simplest of transaction chips. It was a frequency that she had somewhat invented—or at least that’s what she told herself. She knew, of course, that it didn’t really work like that, but EJ had never heard of anyone using their amp in the same way she did. For most people, pulsing was like having an extra arm. It provided a tool that made interacting with the world a lot easier. Pulsing let you hand money to the cashier, it pushed open your front door, and it made gestures alongside your words to indicate how you were feeling. People don’t think about using their arms. They just do so. The same was largely true for pulsing.

But EJ’s electrosense wasn’t like an additional arm. No, it was something else entirely, like having a fully-functioning, second brain in her gut. Pulsing informed every second of her life. It told her how many people were around at any given second—how far away they were. It told her who had a gun stashed in their belt and who had a knife in their boot. Just by pulsing, EJ could tell where the incoming blow would land, and how confident her assailant was—how quickly their heart was beating, how fast their brain was firing, how much power their mechanical implants were running on. Even as she pulsed now, standing atop the bridge, she could feel the world around her pouring sensory information into her mind. She could feel the rails running beside her along the bridge, the internal mechanisms housed within the frame of the immense structure, and the half-dismantled bots that hung from both sides of the bridge, banging and scraping against one another in the light breeze.

Ah, the discarded robot corpses.

They were EJ’s favorite part of the transport bridge. They hung from both sides, strung up by their own mechanical intestines. Lengthy reams of multi-colored wires suspended the bots in the air like the grotesque, spliced-together puppets of some swapper technophile. In places, some of the bots dangled low enough that you could shake their mechanically-jointed hands from the city street below. EJ loved the grim, mechanical aesthetic of it all. In an odd way, it made her feel powerful. She liked to imagine each decaying bot that hung from the bridge had once been some foe of hers. Perhaps the one with no lower half was that tech broker with the fake eye, back in sector 10. He had been particularly creepy. And maybe the bot dangling by whatever wiring remained in its ankle joint was the faction leader in sector 8 whose portable sonic cannon she had just stolen. But of course, the specifics of the scene didn’t really matter. None of them did anymore, not from where she stood now. They were all so impossibly below her, hanging from the various nets she had gotten them all tangled in before slipping far, far away. And she was finally out of their reach, standing atop the transport bridge, breathing in the city she had always called home. From here, she could see everything—the old drone deployment station, the college in the distance, the whole city itself. It was like a living, breathing being, stretching out in all directions.

And I’m its soul, she thought to herself, feeling the waves of her own pulse pitch slightly upwards towards the frequency for joy.

In this bridge-fantasy, she was finally free. Without anyone left chasing her, it was all hers. She could go wherever she’d like, be whoever she wanted to be. Anyone who would stand in her way, anyone who would chain her to this anxious, cautious life was hanging from a bridge—defeated, trapped, or simply too tied-up in other, more immediate threats.

EJ blinked suddenly, shutting down her imagination and finding herself back atop the city central transport bridge. Her pulse faltered for a moment before she managed to catch it and return to the blank frequency she had “invented” to scan large areas. It was probably best to leave the foe-slaying fantasies safely tucked away in her daydreams where they wouldn’t immediately get her killed on the streets.

EJ sighed, letting the impossible scene seep out of her with the exhale.

It was a musing she entertained more than she cared to admit these days. Perhaps that was because she knew it was far from anything she would ever truly achieve.

Freedom? Not a chance in static.

Part of her knew that she could only really run for so long. The city only had so many nooks and crannies to duck into, and sooner or later she’d exhaust her remaining hiding places. Then what? Who would catch up to her first?

In all her years of running with the various tech-dealer factions, EJ had always found a way to avoid the larger, dangerous conflicts by being quick and clever. Sure, she was plenty capable of throwing a punch or aiming a shot, but that didn’t mean it was the smart thing to do if you wanted to keep breathing. More than a few factions wanted her head now, and trying to fight back on the frontline was a surefire way to give them exactly that. After a few years of jumping from group to group, she’d become quite skilled at avoiding the muscley, soldier-type assignments, bargaining or manipulating her way into a more specialized role that kept her safely distanced from the street skirmishes. Then, when a job pay-out was enough to refund her monthly expenses, she’d bail. Yes, skimming wealth from off the top of the money pile and disappearing into the night: that was how she lived. That was how she had managed to scrape by for so long. How much longer could she make that work?

EJ returned her attention to the low, buzzing frequency that hummed softly in her core, taking a second to collect herself. She just needed to remind herself that she was almost done. Just one last job, and she’d be set. Hopefully. Assuming the plan went off without a hitch and she had prepared well and countless other little details that could immediately leave her high-and-dry, surrounded by enemies on all sides.

Oh wonderful.

With some effort and some deep breaths, she pushed down the anxiety and crammed it back into the little box of ignored problems that sat in the corner of her brain. Then she shifted her focus back to the real reason she had climbed to the top of the bridge: a battery. A very large battery, actually. She had spent a good chunk of time lugging it up the bridge’s central maintenance shaft to get it all hooked up. Even with a mag-grav module cutting the weight of the box in-half via magne-gravitic suspension, the thing was stupid heavy.

The black box was easily as tall as she was. Two cables, about as thick as her wrists, protruded from the side of the battery box. Each cable ended in a forked prong that EJ had pinned over the rails before pulling herself up onto the part of the bridge that formed a bit of a barrier, fencing in the transport bot’s path down across the bridge. Under her electrosense, she could see that the battery flickered with only a few fading sparks of electrical charge humming within it. That wouldn’t be the case for long.

Everyone living in city central’s streets syphoned power from the bridge. It was part of the reason why no one removed the hanging bots—they indicated where power could be tapped from the rails. When power reserves began to run low, you’d simply bring your fuel cells to the bridge and hook them up to the rail for a day or two. When the next transport bot crossed overhead, powering the rails, electricity would flow down and give you a free recharge, courtesy of the college’s central powergrid. Normally, EJ would stick to smaller, more portable power cells, or even disposable charges. But today she was doing a favor for some friends, and that called for a bulky battery.

As she double checked the battery box cables, EJ felt her wide-cast pulse beginning to tremble. Instinctually, she hauled herself back up onto the raised side-barrier of the bridge and braced herself against nothing more than her own, crouched stance. Half a second later, the small tremors became large vibrations that physically shook the metal struts of the bridge. A thousand volts of raw, electrical current poured into the rails as a buzzing white-noise filled the air. EJ felt the sudden force of energy slam against her own frequency as a strong electric field expanded outwards rapidly from the charged rails. Through her electrosensory view of the world, the bridge thrummed with a powerful, all-consuming light that highlighted the entire metal structure and made the electro-receptive spots on EJ’s face prickle. Through the dense field of energy that permeated the air around her, she closed her eyes and kept pulsing her “invented,” wide-spread frequency.

She was grinning like an idiot. She couldn’t help it. All around her, across the bridge and down its long metal legs, she felt the very world itself come to life. Her heart leapt with a mixture of anticipation and adrenaline and her frequency rose instinctually towards excitement.

Mechanical arms and legs began to flail, surging in desperation to perform whatever task they had once been in the middle of completing before shutting down and being hung from a bridge. Eroded voice files played through blown-out speakers, and long-dead display screens flickered tentatively to life, shining light through shattered glass and distorted digital menus.

As the transport bot hurtled down the tracks towards the bridge, suspended overtop a powerful magnetic field, EJ cackled in delight. Any sound she could possibly produce was almost immediately swallowed in the cacophony of heavy machinery produced by the transport bot thundering over the bridge, lugging dense, metal shipping crates behind it. Through tightly shut eyelids, EJ could feel the heavy gust that issued forth from the sheer speed and weight of the moving transport. The wind threw her short, shaggy hair in every direction and thrashed her jacket against her sides. It threatened to blow her off the bridge completely. EJ fought to maintain her balance, viewing the world entirely through the fuzzy, grayscale lens of her electrosenses. The transport bot and the magnetic rails beneath it appeared as a nearly solid white line that blurred at the edges, waves of a strong electrical field emanating out from around it. She could feel the individual, twitching digits of each robot hand below, and she could see the power flowing into their rusting central processors through the wires suspending them. She knew that if she swayed forward even a hair she’d be struck but the full speed of the transport and likely torn to shreds by the velocity it commanded. If she leaned back even half a step she’d be thrown off balance, and likely fall from the bridge to the street below.

EJ cackled once more. It was a wild, uncontrollable reaction that poured from her body freely, as if the electricity in the rails was shooting through her chest, causing her lungs to expel the laugh in violent, involuntary gasps. Her fingers clutched and whipped in quick, frenetic twitches and her neck jerked about, locking at odd angles before buckling and locking again in quick succession. She felt each of the bots hanging from the bridge shudder and tremble alongside her, she felt their brains flicker to life and their hearts pound out the electrical rhythm of their decaying, mechanical existence. To the beat of the rumbling transport, to the rhythm of robots trapped in an endless un-death, she cried out the agonizing notes of her own organic life.

And then it passed.

The transport shot along the tracks and into the distance beyond the bridge. The coursing wave of pure energy that had flowed through the rails only moments ago dissipated in an instant. The hanged bots returned to their silent gallows, clanging against each other as they swayed gently in the breeze. All at once, the electric symphony vanished into static.

EJ’s lungs rasped against her ribcaged. She sputtered for a moment, blinking through blurred snapshots of the world swimming around her as she pried her eyes back open. She was lying on the warm metal structure, in the space between the rails themselves and the raised side of the bridge where she had been standing when the transport crossed. She didn’t remember how she had gotten down off the ledge and into the transport bot’s path. Had she fallen, or simply laid down and drifted off for a moment? It didn’t matter, really.

Despite the self-inflicted coughing fit and the brief moment spent lying down, EJ felt energized as she pulled herself to her feet. She felt alive again. She disconnected the cables from the rail and draped them overtop the black, metal battery box. She didn’t need her electrosense to feel the power cells inside brimming with a fresh charge.

EJ grinned, pulsing to contentment.

This was her little revitalization ritual. Each month, as the regularly scheduled transport rolled across the bridge, she’d breath in the fresh energy it brought with it, and vent all the anxiety, uncertainty, and stress. Sure, that manifested in the form of a mad, uncontrollable cackle that was frankly a little concerning, but the din of the transport kept the noise muffled and that little box of ignored problems in the corner of her brain repressed the red-alerts of a dwindling sanity. She’d leave with a full battery and a re-energized spirit.

“Well, mission success I guess,” EJ remarked to herself.

As she prepared her mag-grav module to safely take the battery back down the maintenance shaft, the peace of mind granted by her little stress-relief excursion to the bridge began to wear off. As she descended the bridge and headed back into the city, the cold gravity of her situation began to weigh on her mind once more.

I’ve only got one shot at this, she reminded herself. One shot, and then I’m either free forever, or six feet under.

She needed to get the battery back to the others pretty quickly, no more time for stress relief and stupid stunts. After all, she was going to need the rest of the day to plan for her meeting later tonight.

In all her dealings with him thus far, EJ had come to understand that the leader of city central’s largest swapper faction wasn’t a very patient man. He was dangerous, well-informed, and he always got what he wanted one way or another. One week ago, she had promised him access to advanced, pulse-responsive weaponry worth over half a million bits.

In a matter of hours, she was supposed to deliver on that promise.

EJ pulsed the low, whining frequency of anxiety.