The very next day, Izzy sat in her dressing room again, staring at the soft orange pot plant on the counter ahead of her in a zoned-out daze as she awaited her turn for placements. The dinner with the DRF was rather unimportant, and they were conducting rounds with each team to ensure they’re ready for next season's ruleset and engineering specifications. There was no real need for Izzy to be there, but as usual, her parents wanted her to attend for the sake of bolstering their image.
Today, she felt immensely anxious in comparison to what she’d usually felt during qualifying rounds. After what she’d said to the press yesterday, it would be a bad look if she placed in fourth position or worse for the third time in a row. There was an uncontrollable jitter in her hand when she looked down at it, her usual breathing exercise wasn’t working and that made her nerves even worse. She felt as though she had no grip on herself, and she’d never felt this way before– clarifying the impending sense of doom she hadn’t realised she’d been feeling over the last few weeks.
Strangely, when she thought about the issue, it wasn’t a fear of failure that bothered her the most, but a fear that she wouldn’t care as much as she thinks she should if or when it occurred. She still wanted to care about Drop racing and her career, but she wasn’t so sure if she still did. No, she interrupted her thinking. Of course, I care.
Drop racing was her whole life, why wouldn’t she care? It was everything she’d dreamed of since she was a child, and the desire to explore the galaxy was her lack of gratitude for the life she’d accrued up until this point. All of the effort her Mother and Father had undergone to build the company and a racing team that she could pilot for. All the training she endured with Coach Abram and all the engineers who spent countless hours creating one of the most advanced vehicles ever developed… All for her… Wanting anything else was worse than a lack of gratitude, it was a disgrace to everyone around her.
“Are you ready?” Pearl asked as she entered the room with her eyes fixed on the air, swiping through invisible screens.
“Uh, yeah,”
Pearl took a beat and actually looked at Izzy. She squinted her eyes, trying to read Izzy’s mood, but whatever she concluded didn’t concern her much. She turned her attention back to her BCI. “Try getting into the top two today, alright?”
“Right,”
“And don’t worry too much about another fourth-place start. It won’t look good to the press, but the race result is what really matters.”
“Last thing I want to do is face them tomorrow with another bad position.” Izzy sighed.
“You won’t have to worry about that.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve cancelled your press conferences until the end of the season.”
“What? Why?” That twitch in Izzy’s hand stopped, and the thought of what she’d said yesterday frustrated her further.
“It’s your parents' orders, Izzy,” Pearl responded, uninterested, “Do I really need to explain?”
“Ugh,” Izzy mumbled. Pearl was the last person who could help Izzy regulate her emotions.
“Focus on getting a good placement,”
“If you wanted me to focus, you’d have kept that fucking information for after the drop.” Izzy snapped.
“Izzy Montoya, please attend your line-up for your qualifying lap.”
“Sure,” Pearl said as she turned around without passing Izzy a single look and left the dressing room.
///// /// /////
Mei lifted her super-cropped hoodie over her head to conceal her acid pink hair from the Atlas soldiers that lurked in the area; their red uniforms stood out among the sea of people in the cramped, perpetually rainy city of Silic. High-rise buildings towered over the streets, so high that there was no skyline in sight, no view of the horizon or the night sky beyond the perpetual dark grey layer of clouds that spat polluted rain, staining her outfit.
Fuck sake, she muttered as she walked into the enclosed alleyway of a high-rise. She liked the pastel violet and cool grey sportswear she had on; it was comfortable and concealed the right parts of her body to make her appear like a regular person, while also concealing her more enhanced areas.
The grey neck gaiter she wore did the heavy lifting, hiding her mechanical mandible, and an arm warmer hid her robotic left arm. It would be quicker to list the parts of her that weren’t augmented, considering she was from ILLIUM. A star system that was once home to a race of human-technology hybrids. Borgs, many people slur when they discover one's identity.
“Praise be,” A homeless man with a tin cup waved in the air with his good arm, “Any spare units?” His augmented eye whirred as it zoomed in on Mei when she noticed his other arm was torn from its socket.
“Sure,” She mumbled, transferring five units.
“The collapse of our people was fate,” He added.
“So they say,” She muttered, frustrated at the sight of a homeless hybrid. They could identify each other beyond visual appearances, but through the backend system they were once a part of. Their IDs were visible there, but it was more the connection to the overarching system that made them aware of each other. “What do you know about it?” She asked.
“What I know is what is known for what is unknown is unknown,” He chuckled.
“Hmph,” She grunted, with a small smile at the corner of her lips, “Sounds about right,” She gave him another five units with the swipe of her hand.
“With kindness like yours, we will rise again,” He waved the tin in the air religiously.
She turned to see the Atlas guards and their red suits eyeing her and the homeless hybrid, prompting her to get a move on.
“It’s not kindness we need,” She replied.
It was uncommon for a reg to humour a hybrid, let alone indulge one's fantasies about Illium, so it was best she got a move on to avoid drawing any attention to herself. She hated seeing her own kind in such disarray. At least Rims had the decency of being treated like people– Hybrids were freely dismembered or killed in public.
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They had no rights, and after the collapse of Illium, they were hated by the entire galaxy. The Atlas imposed a law that both identified and ensured that Hybrids were a dying breed. That law stipulated that no person may have a body augmented by more than forty percent of its original biology. The law that reduced hybrids to the bottom of the food chain.
Their culture was predicated on the full integration of technology to the point where the primary discernible feature of their original humanity was their human brain. Their skin, skeleton or anything that may appear of original human development was also a technological recreation, but one could hardly tell the difference if they weren’t a hybrid themself. This was how Hybrids like Mei managed to keep a low profile, but the choice of augmentations she’d made all those years ago still needed to be concealed, and her techniques for masking her augmentations from scanners were what kept her hidden from the Atlas or any bigots that would be looking for hybrids to pick on.
As Mei entered an apartment block down the street, she took the dingy, seemingly unreliable elevator up to the thirtieth floor, where graffiti and flickering lights gave her welcome. Making her way to room three hundred and fourteen, the dim, purple lighting of the seductive atmosphere was accompanied by the muffled moans and groans of a young man who was tied to a chair in front of a large window that overlooked the nearby skyscrapers.
“You hungry?” She asked as she removed two takeout containers from her backpack and grabbed two forks from the kitchen on her way.
“Mmmm,” The man mumbled through his gag.
“Not you,” She rolled her eyes as she turned to the young woman sitting on the bed.
The woman with bright blue eyes and grey hair sat in her underwear and bra, nodding her head in discomfort as Mei handed her the second container. She was a hooker, no older than twenty and was attending to her wealthy, also young, client when Mei stormed in and interrupted the affair. Having tied him up for questioning, she then stepped out to get a few supplies and something to eat before returning.
“Don’t worry, I won’t be long,” Mei added calmly.
She walked over to the man in the chair, eating out of the container in her hand and removed the gag from the man's mouth.
“Do you know who the fuck I am?” He bit his teeth. “I can have you killed, you worthless piece of shit,”
Mei said nothing and continued eating as she towered over him with an uninterested glare.
“And you,” He looked at the young woman, “You set me up, you whore!”
Mei took the steel fork from her takeout and swiftly impaled the man's thigh, causing a sharp scream to escape his mouth. She then slowly walked to the kitchen to grab herself another fork and returned to where she was standing as he continued to cry aloud in pain.
“I know exactly who you are,” She said sternly, ignoring his whining.
“Then you’d know you're making a mistake!” He tried maintaining his posture despite his aching leg.
“Pretty sure you’re the one making a mistake.” Mei shrugged, “All that power and wealth… You should be careful threatening someone when your life is in their hands.”
“Is that what you want? Money?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what is it? What do you want?!” He grew agitated.
Mei looked over at the girl on the bed, who was staring at the container of food in her hands. She hadn’t yet taken a bite and seemed frazzled by the entire situation.
“Did he hurt you?” Mei asked.
The girl slowly looked up at Mei and shook her head, “No,”
“Was he going to?”
The girl looked back down at her food, taking a moment before nodding her head.
“I paid her,” The man argued, “I didn’t force her to do a thing!”
“Is that true?” Mei asked the young woman.
She nodded, “I needed the money.”
“See! I didn’t do shi-”
Before he finished his sentence, Mei removed the fork from his leg, causing him to writhe and scream in pain yet again.
“You bitch!” He hunched over, unable to attend to his wound due to the restraints.
“What do you know about project FEN?” Mei asked him as she took another bite of food.
“FEN?” He muttered. “I don’t- argh” He paused, still fussing about the wound in his leg. “I don’t know anything about it,”
“Answer truthfully, or I will hurt you.”
The man paused, taking a moment to think, “If I tell you anything about FEN they’ll kill me,”
“Who?”
“I can’t say,”
“You better, or I might just kill you,”
“If you kill me, you wouldn’t get the information you’re looking for,”
“I have a plan B,” She added, approaching him with the bloodied fork in hand.
“Okay, wait-” He took a moment to think, “I can’t tell you much, because I don’t have clearance, but the old heads at the corporation, they’re the ones you’re looking for,”
“The Kythera executives?”
The young man nodded, “They’re the ones that would have me killed for telling you shit,”
“What can you tell me?”
“FEN is a secret research project, Foundational Environment Network. It’s the core system for a new technology they’re developing.”
“What technology?”
“I don’t know, I only handle logistical protocols for FEN. It has nothing to do with the research itself.”
“Then tell me about FEN,”
“I don’t know much, as I said, I handle logistics.”
“You better say something useful, or I’ll stick this fork up your ass,”
He gave her a worried look, believing her threat, “It’s a logistics network between a list of clientele and the company. The division I’m a part of was negotiating the development of trade routes with Inter-sol.”
“The transportation company?”
“Yeah, we need custom solutions.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, my assignment was just to negotiate within a provided budget.”
Mei took a moment, putting the container of food on the kitchen counter. “Who’s in charge of the project?”
“I don’t know, the execs?”
“Are you asking me?”
“Like I said, they’re secretive.”
“Then who’s your superior?”
“I respond to an operations manager that’s in direct contact with the C.O.O.”
“What’s his name?”
“The C.O.O?” He asked.
“The Operations manager,” She stepped at him, annoyed.
“Right, uhh. His name’s Alex Shuriwa.”
Mei immediately looked his name up on her chip and found a business and employment profile that confirmed the information as true. She glanced over at the young woman on the bed, who had been eating the food albeit rather slowly, and she drew a blaster at the man's head.
“Oh god, please– I promise I won’t tell anyone about this, I swear,”
“Close your eyes,” Mei said to the woman, who’d paused her eating.
She followed suit and closed her eyes as instructed.
“No, no, please! I can pay you, I swear, I jus-”
A loud crash echoed from Mei’s hands, and the blaster shot sent a large splatter of blood onto the window. His lifeless body was hunched over in the seat, and the young woman on the bed started breathing erratically.
“You need to leave,” Mei said, holstering her weapon behind her back, “The Atlas will be here soon.”
The girl opened her eyes and nearly screamed at what she saw, but fought the urge when she saw Mei’s impatient expression. She grabbed her bag from the floor, slid her high heels on and paced out the door with the container of food in hand. Mei lifted her index finger, and it split into four quadrants with a centre piece that extended outward. She plugged her finger into the terminal on the side of his hunched-over head to download the data on his chip before packing her backpack and leaving the room.
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Should Izzy be grateful to her parents?
