Then
The Sty
"Yo, Zo…," Jix began, the expressed hesitation in his ellipses louder than his actual words.
Zo La Kund looked back from where he had crouched, wiping off the residual make-up from his just-completed performance as Nero Zero.
"It ain't all like that, yknow," Jix looked up from his hands, offering a glancing eye-contact.
In this particular rendition, Zo portrayed Nero as a misguided young criminal, so hopelessly deluded into thinking himself somehow apart of a system of which he was wholly inside. Every thuggish act, one of desperation and self-destruction – and, ultimately, societal subservience, despite intended criminality. Nero was simply trading every last bit of his humanity and freedom for shiny objects made only valuable by the Man he intended to resist and resent. He was the same, if not worse, than a corpo – for, at least, the corpo wasn't a fool.
Anyway, as a member of the Zeros (or, at least, its local franchise), it hurt Jix's feelings (though he'd never admit it). This was his "being a man" and confronting the performer on it.
"Oh, it's not, huh?," Zo said facetiously, grinning his big, dumb familiar grin.
"Well, Jix 'Eight-Six', you'll just have to tell me what it is like, then." He was condescending; sarcastic. He often was. But it was still friendly. The entire neighborhood had seen the man verbally lash the occasional, out-of-bounds corpsec officer into a trembling, emasculated pile of nothing, but somehow, they knew he would never turn this ire inward on the community. The trusted him not to, anyway.
Jix looked up to him. He wanted him to like him.
"For some of us, it's a way out," Jix forced eye contact, his brow furrowing, replacing trepidation with anger to power through. He knew it was the wrong answer, but he said it anyway.
"It's our only way out of the Sty."
"And what's wrong with the Sty?," Zo La retorted; not with malice, nor intent to philosophically trap the 19 year old. The question was rhetorical.
The smile was sincere.
In fact, his smile was always sincere. Even in those nights when Jix was 16 and Zo La was coming over for dinner every evening, Jix's mother praying for his soul into the little hours, Zo's smile was always full and sincere. Jix couldn't believe what everyone said.
He couldn't believe that Zo would actually try and kill himself.
"Man, there ain't nothin' here!" Jix tried to give voice to this. He didn't have a real answer. Not a good one anyway. Jix often struggled to articulate the depth of his interior life.
Zo helped him fill in some of the blanks.
"Your family's here. Everyone who has ever known you and cared about you and shaped your world," Zo La slapped Jix's shoulder in that brotherly way.
"Don't let some tourism board weasel into your head and make you think there is a tribe out there somewhere that will understand you more than the one that made you."
"That's not even what it's about."
That's exactly what it was about. Jix wanted to be tested – to see if he could win the game of the big, bad world.
And Zo La knew it. Zo La and his big, stupid grin. So he spoke in that wise way he always did, that ensured that, even if Zo could not be there personally when the time of revelation came, he could still be there spiritually. Words that were secret SPOILERS; that worked their way back and revealed the second foundation. Jix was on a path and the Sty would be waiting for him at the end of it, cheering him on.
"Let Pharoah go."
Zo leaped onto a nearby structure, cupping his hands over his mouth and shouting to everyone in earshot,
"MY PEOPLE – LET PHAROAH GO."
Some people laughed, some drunkenly cheered.
"Let 'em go!"
But Jix just stared at him, not really understanding what he was saying.
But, Zo was always out here saying shit.
Now
Seven Corners
The old hoverbeater coasted slowly along the street, its lack of contact with the ground causing the thumping bass to pulse outwards from the sides like a daisy-cutter. The target in question sunk a little lower into his pockets, the music's heartbeat linked through pop culture to crime and thuggery.
And there was a reason for that.
"All these preppy bitches got too many tattoos," Mox reflected from the driver's seat, periodically glancing out the window. Kando was on app-duty in the passenger seat, holding up his screen periodically so the Augmented Reality could guide them to Slave Driver's appointed target.
'What is Slave Driver?', you ask? Well, it's what happens when the gig economy meets Craigslist, really. When you're a big timer with some cash, yeah, you go to a fixer, drop some fat stacks on a private arrangement with a real pro. And when you're a real pro, the fixers know your name – you're always plugged in. But what about if you're broke? Well, you save dollars by cutting out the fixer, hire a nobody – and one nobody is just as good as any other nobody.
Swipe Right if you'd like this guy to blackmail nudes out of your neighbor's daughter.
With the lack of government or even app creator oversight, it wasn't long before Slave Driver began to be populated with the more unsavory requests – theft, sex work, drugs, violence, heck, even human trafficking (of course, obscured under the guise of a pizza emoji). Our boys, here, were in the process of hunting down a guy who ran from a debt accrued in a back alley dice game for the purpose of beating his ass, for example. A Task Rabbit for Criminals.
"I like the tattoos, " Jix weighed-in, himself heavily inked. He was in the back seat, his hand on the door, ready to pop out and do the work. The Jump Man.
"Oh, we know you do," Mox scoffed, laughing lightly.
"Just sayin' – Imagine meeting a girl who actually likes the way she was born."
Radicalism as a return to primitive. More Zo La walking around in their heads.
"Yo, yo, yo…that's him!," Kando interrupted, pointing our previously-mentioned-nervous-looking-dude on the sidewalk. Jix leaned a little bit on the door, subtly popping it from its lock, ready to rip the poor man into the cab --
KABOOOOOOOOOM
The world shook, the sonic boom buckling everyone in half. A massive explosion, maybe two blocks away. One of them screamed, but they could not begin to guess who.
"What the kark?!," yelled Kando, scrunching down toward the center console as if trying in vain to hide in the cupholder.
"Karkin' dyejobs, probably," shouted from where he'd ducked into the footwell, his ears still ringing.
Chaos spilled into the streets, people running every which way…including their mark. He disappeared into the crowd – the crowd which now was sporadically dashing across the road, hindering their ability to follow.
"Kark, kark…," Mox squinted through the viewport, trying to rub some of the dust from the window from the wrong side. Upon failure, he engaged the wipers and tried again.
"…Motherkarker's gone."
"Guess it don't matter, anyway..." Kando began, raising his tablet to the others to signal them to do the same.
One of the curious functions of the Slave Driver app is that it would sometimes cancel contracts to usher "more important" ones to the forefront. Who decided what was more important was a mystery, but the new contracts were often A) at a nearer proximity and B) at a higher payout, so nobody really complained. Still, it cast a measure of doubt onto the decentralization of the app –
Was it as neutral as it pretended to be?
Some thought that Slave Driver was developed by a millionaire, nefariously executing clandestine schemes he could not be connected to, like Anonymous if it had been run by Elon Musk.
Others speculated it was an AI program creating a status-quo through deliberate replication of past crime history data – A sister to the Weather Control Machines as part of what was ultimately THE PROPERTY VALUE CONTROL MACHINE!
Still, though, there were some who did not need an order for everything, and they saw the ebbs and flows of Slave Driver as those of the universe – the cosmic chaos intersecting in moments of coincidence, peeling back the mask of eternity to reveal the intent of the Divine.
Whatever you believed,
Crime remained the same thing it always was:
Jix's eyes widened, watching all the requests ping on the app dashboard: "Save my cat! Raid my neighbor's comic collection!" "This was a drug dealer's apartment!"
"Oh, shit….Maaaaad ops…," he muttered, glancing up at the fire blooming from the shattered duraglass windows. Unconsciously, he'd popped his flick-comb and began to adjust his pompadour.
Opportunity.
They were going to loot a burning building.
