Journal: West needs to meet

West sat in front of the old-fashioned monitor and keyboard on his desk. The screen glowed green with the infoscrib he’d pulled up about his latest case. To his right, the ventilation fan spun with low thrum, blowing warm air across the back of his neck. Beyond the well of light in which he sat, the apartment was mostly dark and quiet.

Over the years, he had found he could think better if he remained in his own direct sensorium, rather than jacking into the net directly. Thinking in virtual space somehow led his thoughts astray. Hence the quaint set-up in front of him. He leaned back in the old leather chair and sighed deeply.

“Fucking tech mage,” he growled as he exhaled, echoing the complaint he’d made to Talia earlier that day. His eyes scanned over the information he’d gathered so far, including the data drop that LifeSynth had provided when they commissioned him on this job. “Regis is not going to like it.” 

Regis – a skinny, middle-aged man in LifeSynth’s corp-sec division – was about as anti-magic a person as you could find in this day and age. LifeSynth itself was notoriously against magic and magical beings, and Regis had found his true home. He’d commissioned West to track down the person or persons behind a series of break-ins at LifeSynth research facilities across the city. The corp-sec department had kept drawing a blank and now West knew why. A tech mage was just about the ideal enemy for LifeSynth - the company’s own prejudice made it particularly vulnerable to magical attack because of its deliberate ignorance of the threats magical beings could pose. What Regis had refused to share was what the hell this mage was stealing.

West was at a dead end without more information. He stood up and made his way over to the kitchen. As he moved, the lights around him dimmed and brightened to light his path. He picked up the kettle and filled it at the sink, waited for it to boil, and then made a black tea before moving over to the couch to think. 

Sitting with the teacup in his flesh hand, he ran the fingers of his other, artificial limb across the stubble on his cheek. The short hairs made a pleasing rasping sound against the textured ferro-plastic of his artificial fingertips. More than the sound though, he found that the digitised tactile sensation reported by his fingers was soothing - like the hum of the fan; a sort of brown noise of touch.

“What I need,” he said out loud, addressing the small, white, artificial fox on the rug at his feet, “is an encounter. I need to meet this connie* without arousing suspicion.” He sipped on the black tea and brooded while the fox continued to twitch its tail and ears. Absently-mindedly watching it, West identified the loop point in the artificial animal’s repeated motion. You get what you pay for, he figured, and shrugged. Still, even a fake fox was better than no company at all.

He rested the tea cup on the smooth leather of the sofa next to him and pulled out his flexi. Once the screen had lit up and become rigid, he keyed in a name he hadn’t looked up in a long while. The system indicated that the person was unavailable for a call, so he tapped out a short message: Need to meet new friend. Facilitate? Up your alley. Call me.

“Things might be about to get interesting,” he commented as he put the flexi away again. The fox yawned and blinked its eyes at him. “Food?” it asked in a small robotic voice. It had a vocabulary of around 50 words and could articulate ten of those. Most often it indicated it wanted food. Just like a real dog. And just like a good corpo product. “Well at least some of your programming is realistic,” West said, standing up and moving to the kitchen again to pour the fox some robo-kibble. The megacorps certainly knew how to keep you paying even when you did splash out on one of their toys.

* slang for ‘consumer’ - a term synonymous with ‘citizen’ and ‘person’ in Nuwraith lexicon