Chapter 2: An Eye For Talent

Sean Glassman was a dead man walking. 

He slumped forward at the bar in Club Vertical’s rooftop neon-Tiki lounge, looking like a well dressed sack of defeated potatoes. He was more than a little drunk.

It all should be working better than this, he thought to himself. 

Thousands of credits were spent on bio-modifications to create the perfect look for him; chiseled jaw-line and cheekbones, synth-hair implants and eyes reset in his skull to the precise width that the algorithm deemed “optimal”. He was dressed in a slick white jacket, sleeves rolled up and collar popped in the 1980’s Fashion Resurgence.

Sean was like so many Corporates who washed out of their careers: desperate to get it all back - the prestige, the money, the luxuries and intrigues. 

Bodycount was the absolute worst person Sean had ever met, but he had paid for Sean’s reconstructive surgeries and promised that he could get him back into The Office -- he just had to use his new pretty face and bio-sculpted body to bring in the girls. He was to  lure them in with showbiz promises, drug them and then hand them off to Bodycount's traffickers. Additionally, Sean had paid off Club Vertical's bouncer to look the other way when checking the underage girls’ IDs.

Should be easy. 

The girls should be lining up for him but instead they seemed to avoid him like the plague. To Sean, it seemed like they could read his mind; sure, he was setting them up to be victimized in the most horrific ways but it’s not like they should be able to tell just by looking at him! To make matters worse, he was behind quota and Bodycount was not someone you wanted to be behind quota with. 

He needed a win tonight or he was dead by morning.

Club Vertical was a bar stretched upward in a narrow alleyway between two tall buildings in Cheapside; five stories of fire escapes faced each other, furnished with luxury seating and additional bars, with multi-colored lanterns strung between them. Two tiki lounge bars sat on the roofs of the two buildings like twin gross caricatures of Hawaiian Kings, linked with reinforced rope bridges.

Three young women walked up to the roof and took a table. With a mental command  he activated his neuroport’s scanner; nanites in his optic nerves connected to the processor grafted to his brain generated an Augmented Reality of Heads-Up-Displays overlaying his normal vision -- as the girls laughed and talked over their drinks, fields of data partially occluded his vision, revealing to him that the girls had corporate ICE [Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics] blocking his scans: rich girls probably here to be bad in Cheaptown. Best not tempt the fates, he thought. These girls would be missed.

Sean downed a shot of whiskey and got up to leave when he saw her.

She “ascended” to the rooftop, underlit by the tawdry pink and red  lights from the streets below; tall and powerful with a panther-like grace contained in the tiniest black dress he’d ever seen. To Sean, her tattoos, red eyes, and high-top fade made her look like some 80’s Street Witch. Too bad she was too old and Black.

She was walking right at him, heads turning as she passed. The trio of young women looked on, whispering with jealous contempt.

“You Sean?” she asked, sitting down at the bar next to him. 

“Heard that you had an eye for talent. So do I. I think we can work together. Name’s Gina,” she said with an easy smirk.

He motioned for the bartender. “What can I get ya?” he asked.

“Whiskey. Neat,” she replied.

He held up two fingers at the bartender, then turned back to her to scan her: tiny boxes of data reams scrolled to reveal to him that “Gina Bright” was indeed a person with a past; namely an ex-con who got an early release as part of OmniTek’s “Second Chance” initiative. Checking the corporation’s database further illuminated her more recent activities as a Processor in The Foundry; one of the Trade Gangers probably looking for a little extra side cash to get the hell out of here. 

“You work in the Foundry? What gang?”

“Commonworks,” she replied

“Then you know Han?”

"I mean, I just met him a few times. Not like I can write his biography or anything,” she shrugged.

The bartender set their drinks down next to them.

“What do you think I can do for you?”

“Word is that you can connect people to the entertainment biz. I represent some girls who are newly arrived to D13. Fresh off the Drop. They’re a bit young, but a lot of they have a lot of talent. Figured I could send them your way for a small fee…,” she reached into her tiny purse and pulled out her cellphone. “Here,” she said, showing him pictures of the girls - the oldest looked about thirteen or fourteen. 

“That one is Maddie. Premiere talent. Grew up in the church before running away. She’s a bit of a chip on her shoulder, though - got that fire, you know? Lot's to prove” Gina said, leaning in a bit. 

To Sean, Maddie was perfect. Exactly who his clients are looking for.

“If you need to take a closer look at her, I have three of the more photogenic girls at a motel near Maddox Towers,” she said. 

“I don’t know…are these girls ready? I mean, are they focused enough? Disciplined? Raw talent is all good n’ everything, but the last few girls I screened couldn’t even show up to the studio,” Sean replied, doing his best to not seem too eager. 

“Oh they’re ready to work hard. I only picked the girls who proved they had the talent and the discipline,” she assured him. “So what do you think?”

“Well, I think it best I take a closer look. You said they weren’t far?”

“Just around the corner,” she replied coolly.

“Cheers, then,” they clinked glasses and downed their drinks.

This was it! 

Jackpot! 

***** 

There were no girls when Sean and Vamp arrived to the motel. 

The red neon signs from the Cheapside streets below filtered through the crooked window blinds, casting hellish blades of light across the filthy motel room. Sean got a good look at the peeling wallpaper as Vamp pushed him up against the wall and lifting him off the ground by his jacket, her pointed index fingers poised at his throat. Her brown skin, covered in tattoos then flickered, now revealing her armored synth-skin and combat cyberware.

“This is on me. Shoulda' seen this comin',” he said flatly, his lips pursed like a school teacher disappointed in their pupil. “ Wallet's in my left breast pocket,” he said while looking down to indicate where she would find it. 

“Bodycount. Where is he?” Vamp’s voice was low and calm.  

“Don’t know him.”

She pressed her index fingers more into his neck.

“I meant to say I don’t know his location,” Sean replied, quickly.

Vamp’s finger pressed into his neck just a little more, drawing a tiny rivulet of blood. 

“I-I-I can’t help you,” a sense of urgency creeping into his voice.

“So you’re useless?” she asked as cold as the surface of a lake covered in thin ice. 

“Look, lady…these aren’t the kind of people who meet you in person. It’s all phone calls, proxies, drop points: super spy shit,” he pleaded. “Maybe…

The sound of a can being kicked in the hallway was the only warning before the wall and the top half of Sean exploded, showering Vamp in gore and plaster.

Three muted, staccato pops sounded, punching holes in the wall as Vamp rolled back hard on the motel floor, barely avoiding the blasts of a semi-automatic shotgun. The door kicked open revealing a large, dark male figure who filled the frame. He lowered his weapon toward her, and then…

Click.

Clickclick.

Gun jammed. 

Vamp smiled big, the red street lights glinting off her fangs as she lunged at the figure scrambling to clear the weapon’s chamber. She was on him, her hand on the gun, pushing the barrel away from her just as another muted blast opened another hole in the wall. The two circled each other, both struggling over the gun as it fired four more shots in a wild arc. The shadowy figure planted his foot into Vamp’s solar plexus and shoved her back through the door onto the floor of the motel room, but the gun stayed in her grasp. She raised the shotgun to fire…

Empty.

Emerging from the shadowy doorway, heavy boots crunching the splintered plaster on the floor, was a massive man in a bomber jacket over a full metallic chassis, the top half of his face occluded by harsh external cybernetics that revealed only the bottom part of his face and a brightly colored mohawk  jutting out of the top of his head.

Vamp scrambled to her feet but his clamp-like hands were around her throat, lifting her off the ground and squeezing, her armored skin absorbing industrial pressure. She kicked him a few times to no affect, then gripped his wrists and activated her internal cyberware: a melange of battle-stimulants released from their plastic sacs and coursed through her network of pneumatic pistons and synthetic muscles, pulling the assassin’s hands away from her neck.

Somewhere, she heard herself scream in the rush, her vision darkening to a dull red vignette centered around her attacker.

He twisted his wrists from her grip then his clamp-hands reformed themselves instantly into hammers that sent her crashing into the far wall, cratering the plaster. Before she could even fall to the ground he is charged into her like a battering ram, both crashing through the wall into the bathroom and completely trampling to death a filthy old tub.

His hands were around her throat again as she was pressed into the sink and shattered the mirror with her back, but in his charge, Vamp was able to get one of her folded legs between them, her  knee under his chin - this gave her enough purchase to get her other foot, now bare, next to her knee against his chest push him back enough to quickly plant both her feet flat on his chest. She then simultaneously pulled him toward her, their arms wide now, while her legs, like two pillars of corded steel, pushed him away.

Cables and metallic tendons began to whine and snap in the mercenaries’ arms as a spiderweb of cracks radiated in the concrete wall from where Vamp was being pressed into. His left arm popped free out of its socket, sending a spray of milky-white synthetic blood from ruptured tubing as he flew back into the living room, landing on his back.

“Fuckin’ bitch!” he snarled, as he shakily rose to his feet.

She ripped an exposed pipe from the ravaged portal they opened in the bathroom wall and charged him, feinted back as his wild swing carried him stumbling forward. He tried to correct with a panicked back-hand swing, leaving the exposed mechanisms of his left arm-socket facing towards Vamp, who then plunged the pipe into his socket, slipping it past all his internal workings, deep into a heart that was still very much organic.

Without a word he falls to the floor in a heavy jostle of metal.

With the adrenaline still coursing through her, her senses snapped to the sound of muted footfalls in the hallways outside the motel room. 

More mercs, she thought to herself. She quickly grabbed Sean's wallet, cellphone, her purse and her shoes.

Barefoot, she raced toward a window and crashed through as a hail of gun fire shredded the motel room to pieces; only because of the adrenaline was she able to not feel the full impact of her four-story fall onto the street below.

She ducked down a few more mazy, narrow alleyways as more hired guns pulled up in their cars and pursued her on foot, their shouts falling behind her.

She raced against the Crash she knew was coming, her legs pumping tirelessly as she blazed through the twisting, dark, neon lit streets of Cheapside, her feet slapping against the cold, wet ground. The adrenaline made her alert at first but she began to notice fewer and fewer details of her surroundings as the combat-stims began to wear off. She saw a Suit, two women under each of his arms as they stumbled drunkenly on to their hotel. Soft moans emanating from dark alleyways as shadowy beings gyrated in the dark. A woman’s shrill hard laugh. 

The Crash came when she was about half way towards the Foundry. Her limbs felt heavy, then felt numb, like she was running in a dream. 

She prayed it was safe to call Gonzo for help, then activated her neuroport - an emergency beacon sent to him  just as the doors to her vision began to close. 

****

This wasn’t the first time Gonzo had to rescue Vamp like this; beat up, barefoot, collapsed in some alleyway and only having barely escaped some calamity.

She rested now back in their hideout in the Foundry, tucked away in bed up in her loft overlooking his Perch. He checked her vitals using his neuroport, scanning her and reading the reams of bio-data that scrolled past his vision - the nano-machines in her body were already knitting together the trauma she suffered.

She’d tussled with some merc named “Fridge” back in that Cheapside Motel; one of those guns-for-hire from a mercenary bar called The Pick Up. The mercs bid on anonymous jobs displayed on a giant screen, then get a target and a location. Jobs are carried out immediately, no questions asked once the contract is accepted. Gonzo had guessed that Bodycount had divined her location from Glassman; word on the street was that Sean had some bio-sculpting procedures paid for by Bodycount, so it wouldn’t take much to guess that he had some surveillance tech surreptitiously installed. He probably watched Vamp maneuver Glassman into that motel then hired those other mercenaries to take them both out.

He cursed himself, promising to do a better job checking on these kinds of things before Vamp went out for blood.

Gonzo returned to his perch to check on Nina’s progress with Glassman’s cellphone.

Nina was an A.I. fashioned after his late wife.

That was a mistake.

It was a mistake because part of him knew he should reset the AI and make it look like anyone or anything else, but the other part of him could not let her go - the same part that refused to look too closely inward. He forced himself to keep his input to Nina cold and analytical so as to not sway her interpretation of data, or worse, she would begin to mirror his affectations, making her more human seeming.

Not “she”; it, he corrected to himself.

In a way, he was more controlled and honest than he was with this A.I. representation of Nina than he ever was with the real Nina.

Back then, he was barely above paparazzi, hounding sim-stim celebrities and hiding in bushes with his cameras. Then Nina got sick and the insurance company, a subsidiary of OmniTek, refused her coverage.

She died slowly and painfully. 

He started after OmniTek, telling the stories of hundreds of people denied insurance claims and their early, preventable deaths.

Then, one day, someone had sent him verifiable proof of a ring of predators that operated within the shadowy corners of the megacorporation: a black project consisting of high level executives, ex-military, political strategists all hired by the corporation to run a sex-torture ring targeting underage girls to set-up and blackmail executives from rival corporations and governments. When OmniTek acquired District 13, they found that the refugees were already here; both cheap labor to rebuild the Foundry’s manufacturing capabilities, and that their families, their children, could further be exploited. 

A company’s new venture often has many new holes and vulnerabilities, and Gonzo had bet that if he was going to unmask this ring of predators in OmniTek, District 13 was the best opportunity. 

He was going to expose them, no matter what it demanded of him. 

“Any price,” Vamp had often heard him mouth under his breath.

He jumped, startled from his reveries as an urgent beeping sounded from his array of monitors -- Nina had finished collating some data.

“Hey, got something for you,” she said in a too-familiar tone.

“Shoot,” he said, lighting a cigarette.

“Well, there wasn’t much left. You were right; all data on the phone was scrubbed remotely. Still, there was a partial imprint left. Some texts between Glassman and an unidentified number. Want to see it?”

“Yep.”

On the screen: “Yeah, they finished the alterations. I can pick up and get back in time. Just across the street.”

Gonzo leaned back in his chair, smoke curling around him as he exhaled a plume. “That number Glassman was texting; can you locate where it came from?”

“Can’t, sorry. I tried earlier to access tower data but OmniTek has deployed some new security measures. The old backdoors are closed,” it said.

“New security? How much we talkin’?”

“New ICE sub-routines and, from what I can tell from chatter on social media feeds, increased security presence in the streets in and around Top Shelf.”

Top Shelf; the corporate heart of District 13, where the executives and their families lived and played amongst the finest shops and designer boutiques.

The word “alteration” from Glassman’s text stood out in his mind. 

Gonzo scanned OmniTek intranet and found the business listings, looking for high end tailors in Topshelf. He found three. One of them was out of business and another was temporarily closed for repairs, leaving a store called “Luxe” as the only option. Top Shelf’s business map showed a main drag called “The Red Carpet” where Luxe was located, and across from the tailor’s shop was Club Nouveau.

The monitor bays behind him bleated out a panicked alert. He kicked off from his desk, rolling in his chair across the warehouse floor to placate the alarm, reading what was on the screen.

The cigarette fell out of Gonzo’s mouth.

OmniTek SecOps just sent out an APB on Vamp. This wasn’t a black market contract; this was an official warrant sent across all official corporate channels. OmniTek could now mobilize their full forces.

The photo they used of Vamp had to be from Glassman’s perspective while they were in that motel, shortly before he was killed. It was a clear picture of her face, “TERRORIST” written in all caps over her known alias. 

The Kitzinger Act of 2089 gave corporations carte blanche to label individuals as “Terrorists” at-will, allowing them to take extraordinary action in pursuit of anyone with that label, even accessing the intelligence databases of governments.

Gonzo's fingers were a blur across several keyboards. 

A few things happened at once; he was effectively shut out of Top Shelf and  verified reports indicated that the area was now locked down. He looked back up into the loft where she slept.  “Sorry, kid,” he muttered.

Gonzo was good at breaching some databases and getting around security, but he was no Netrunner. If he was going to get Vamp into Club Nouveau, he was going to need some heavy duty help. 

He called her ex.