signal four

A hollow bang on my van door startled me awake.

The camera feed on the monitor overhead showed a mega-big man, cut up with metal work. Lunchbox. Sunlight kept reflecting off him and glaring the feed.

“Open up pretty lady.”

I pressed a palm to my eyeball and breathed hard. “One sec.” I slipped on pants and prepped a pistol Gum had given me a few months earlier, it chimed like a kid’s toy when my prints were authorized. Gum’s words about “the idiot twins” still rattled around in my head like bullet casings.

I forced a zen moment, which was not the point of zen moments, and slid the door open.

Lunchbox towered over me, a veritable skyscraper of a man in a derelict building sort of way; the lights were on but I didn’t think there was much commerce.

He said, “You were asleep?”

“Long night.”

“But you got the thing you said?”

I nodded, reached back into the van and handed Lunchbox the lunchbox. He removed the kidney and let the tin fall to the ground.

“But my joke,” I said, and dusted off the lunchbox.

The man Lunchbox held the kidney in his hand for approximately zero seconds before he squished it between his fingers. His actual human hand and not the metal-work, which made me sort of gag a little. I swallowed hard.

Lunchbox flicked kidney bits on the parking lot pavement until he found what he wanted: a small piece of black plastic. He held it up to his optical implants for inspection.

“All that for a data chip?” I said.

Lunchbox delicately slipped the chip into a small plastic bag labeled CHIP. “It’s important.”

“Why not just use a blood runner? That’s closer to my lane.”

At this, Lunchbox barked the most insane laugh I’d ever heard. Bent over hands on knees howling laughter with prerecorded dog barks blasting out of a speaker in his shoulder.

He straightened up and wiped his implants, an old habit because cameras don’t have tear ducts.

“That was my joke,” he said.

I narrowed her eyes at him. “Funny.”

“We thought so, too. Me and Dreamboat.”

“Does Mr. Dreamboat have my dollar-bucks?”

Lunchbox’s head jerked back, a muscular contraction from hasty implants when a user accesses the NeuralNet. His optical implants illuminated to show indicate data processing. “This meat is tainted.”

“How do you mean?”

Lunchbox put the chip away and focused on the kidney. “Strange code in the tissue, a virus?” He looked to me, “You want me sick, Lo? Bring me down?”

I grabbed the tablet from my mattress, nerves making me a little jittery. The last thing I needed was big, dumb, and strong-as-fuck thinking I jobbed him. “Here, pass me the sequence.”

Lunchbox fidgeted a little bit, twitched, and the file showed up on my screen. I ran an isolation protocol and examined the file. “I mean, it’s weird, for sure, but this is a botched job from a shitty printer, Boxty.” I tossed the tablet aside. “If I slab you, who pays me? And I want to get paid for that fucking mess.”

Lunchbox wiped the remaining kidney bits on his pant leg. “A good point.” His optical implants illuminated again, and my bank app dinged.

I validated the currency. “Good doing business with you.”

“We have another job, if you’re interested?”

I hesitated, wondered vaguely about what a Russian doll was, and said, “Details?”

“Tonight. A OneTech AI is getting moved.”

“Can’t tonight. I have a thing.”

Lunchbox brought his huge melon close enough for me to see the gaps between his skin a metal. “What sort of thing?”

“A dive. Been on the books for while. Sorry.”

The apertures of Lunchbox’s optics clicked, sorted something about my vitals. I froze, tried to keep my heartbeat in check, and whatever other spectrum those optics might measure. It felt gross.

“Fine,” he said after a moment, “The next one then.”

“Yeah, nos vemos.”

Lunchbox turned to leave, but my curiosity tugged at the base of my skull. “What do you y’all need with an AI?”

“Dreamboat has big plans for the UZ, pretty lady.”

“Why would a courier have it? OneTech is big enough to have its own army, doesn’t have to contract out like the other states.”

The mega-big man shrugged. He climbed onto his equally mega-big e-cycle and turned back to me. “I’m a doer, Lo, not an asker.”

I watched Lunchbox vanish beneath the platforms of concrete. I felt confused and sort of icky, like after every convo with that metal head.

I crawled back into my van and shut the door, curiosity creeping. “Not even a reason for an outside AI to be in the UZ.”