Chapter Sixty-Two - Attempting Common Sense

“The average hover vehicle isn’t that much more expensive than what you would have paid for a new car in 2025, accounting for inflation.

The difficulty lies in all the fees, taxes, and hidden costs that come after the vehicle has been locked into a payment plan. The driver needs a license, needs to enter the gacha with the Ministry of Transportation for permission to use the airroads, and needs to pay for the three different insurances necessary to use a vehicle. That doesn’t include refueling cost, either for fossil-fuel powered vehicles, or the KW/H rate for electric vehicles. Nor does it take into account the cost of things such as parking spaces and obligatory maintenance, or the cost of the subscription services that allow the driver to use their mirrors or anti-collisions assistance.”

--The True Costs: An Analysis of the Roads of Today, 2041

***

My grip on the handles tightened and I grit my teeth as I narrowly avoided braining myself on the overhang over the hotel’s entrance hangar.

I shot out over the city and through a lane of busy traffic. Automatic proximity horns blared in warning as I cut in between two vans, then turned so that I just barely managed to slip in between two skyscrapers.

I threw my weight to the side and slowed down to a hovering stop over the city. “Oh, shit,” I breathed.

You might want to consider letting the hovercycle’s autopilot take care of any future flying.

“Yeah?” I asked as my heart started to calm down. I glanced down and felt a bit of vertigo tugging at my stomach as I saw the ground far, far below. I was over a few skyscrapers, the lights pouring out of their layered windows acted like an arrow to the street below, only broken up by sky bridges that lead from one building to another.

A lane of traffic some fifty metres down created a blurry mess of cars in every shade of monochrome in the foreground.

I swallowed past the wriggling in my chest and took a few more breaths while focusing on the horizon, instead of the drop. It helped a bit. “I didn’t think I had a fear of heights, you know,” I said.

Perhaps the different circumstances are what’s causing your vertigo?

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. I’d never seen the city from this high up without being in a hovercar, or atop a nice, stable building. This was different. I was basically straddling a piece of high-tech machinery that was between me and a very long fall. “I think I wanna learn how to fly this thing, a little.”

Certainly. I’ll turn on the flight-assist mode. It will correct any major mistakes you make and give you some hints. It isn’t as capable as actual learning software, but it should assist.

A few images appeared over my vision, especially as I looked down. A superimposed image of the handles being twisted back and forth to tell me how to give the hovercycle fuel, and instructions on how to use the pedals to aim the cycle up and down. “Neat,” I said. “We’ll go slow, I think. Ah, can you point me towards our destination?”

Do you intend to arrive there the standard way, or did you intend to arrive in a more violent fashion?

“Let’s go in through the front door,” I said.

Understood. Mapping your trajectory now.

I blinked as a second overlay appeared before me, an opaque line that cut across the city, then down in between the maze of skyscrapers. “Simple enough,” I said.

I did start off slow. Even the mom-vans below me were zipping by as I worked to angle the front of my hovercycle along the line I saw, then gave it a bit of gas. I overshot the first turn a little, but there was more than enough room to realign myself, and on the second I turned a little more aggressively, some of the little jets at the front of the cycle burping out little lines of flame that helped the bike turn. There were levers near the handles that controlled those, but for now the bike was controlling them automatically.

The line leading me on veered off and around one of those more artsy skyscrapers, the sort that didn’t want to be just another large rectangle covered in neon ads, and instead turned into some modernism mish-mash of vague shapes squished together and covered in neon ads.

I hugged the walls of the skyscrapers to slip around a row of hovercars, then levelled off next to an entrance in the bottom quarter of a building.

My bike dipped down, the rear wheel touching the pavement with a lurch just as I came up to an automatic toll-booth.

Do you want to hack into that booth?

“Eh, I guess? Wait, what would set off fewer alarms?” I asked. The parking garage was... a parking garage. A lot of lifts designed to hold cars on multiple floors, and tight roads that probably made it a bitch to find a place to stash someone’s car.

Are you genuinely concerned about stealth?

“Well, it’s my gimmick, isn’t it?”

I thought your gimmick was more trying to be stealthy and failing, but I’m always eager to see you try new things.

I grumbled as I rolled my hovercycle closer to the toll booth, then let the booth scan the bike. I was about to tell Myalis that I’d pay normally, to avoid setting off any anti-hack alarms, when the cost of the parking flashed up on screen. “Oh fuck no, we’re not paying that,” I said.

You’re quick to change your mind.

“It’s called common sense,” I said as I squinted at the screen, then used my cyberwarfare augs to break into the system and give myself a free pass. Then I deleted a zero from the price they were charging, because it was nonsense.

There were berths specifically for smaller vehicles, but I rolled right past those and parked my bike onto the sidewalk next to the elevator banks. “Does this thing have a way to tell people not to fuck with it?” I asked.

Not in an inconspicuous way, no.

I shrugged. “Can you set it to drive in circles then? Stay warmed up and close to the exit for when I have to go?”

I swung my leg over the hovercycle, then tugged my coat on straighter while the bike leaned back upright and took off on its own with just a slight whine.

The elevators opened as I approached, and I slid in next to an older lady whose eyes were glazed over while she looked into a pair of those old aug-glasses with the holographic screens that were all the rage for like, a month before I was born.

I switched off the exterior sound on my helmet. “Which floor are we heading to?” I asked.

I’ll take care of that. The group you’re looking for is called the Hitman Cooperative. They’re ostensibly a non-profit middleman organization that ties hired killers to potential contracts.

I nodded. Made sense. “So I bet their entire gimmick is that they pretend to be all discrete and the like?”

Essentially. We will need to see if they actually do as their advertising suggests.

The elevator stopped, and I walked out right into what was obviously a killbox. It wasn’t as fancy as the killbox back at the gala. The explosives on the walls weren’t hidden here, and the large turrets at the far end of the passage pointed all the way down the marble floor and right into the elevator.

“Uh,” I said.

Perhaps a stealthy entrance would have been preferable after all.

I didn’t get shot full of holes, so I stepped up and out of the elevator, the old lady behind me never even noticing that she was downrange of a lot of firepower. The door closed with a whisper.

I started across the corridor while eyeing the guns and cameras, then finally the desk behind that. There was a generic android behind the counter, plastic smile locked in place even as its eyes tracked my progress across the room.

Smooth jazz played in the background, only interrupted by the slight whine of the servos in the guns moving to follow me.

“Greetings, Samurai Stray Cat, and welcome to the Hitman Cooperative. How may we assist you?”

“Hey,” I said. “I’m looking for, uh, information on a hit that was taken out?”

“You understand that we keep all information entirely confidential here? It’s part of the Hitman Code of Honour!”

I raised an eyebrow. “You have a code of honour?”

“Of course. Do you wish for an ePamphlet of the code?”

“No thanks,” I said while waving the offer off. “Look, I really do need to find out who took out this one, specific hit. The gunman failed already, and I don’t feel like causing trouble here.”

“I understand your frustration,” the android said with canned sincerity. “Do you wish to speak with a manager?”

I felt dirty. “I... guess?”

“One moment please. I will fetch the nearest Hitman Cooperative manager now. In the meantime, please take a seat. How do you like your coffee? Or perhaps you would prefer tea, or an energizing soda drink? All free--asterix--as part of the Hitman Cooperative’s Operation: Killing the Bad Press.”

“I think I’ll just wait,” I said.

***