Wired Neon Cities - Session 27

3rd July 2021

It's a Saturday evening and we're all logged into video chat for episode 27 of Matakishi's Wired Neon Cities campaign.

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Location: Neon City

An hour ago, Electric Nights of Our Lives; Neon City’s longest running trashy vid-opera had been playing on the wall-slab while I had been slumped on the futon cradling a bottle of Dindanha.
Ridiculous plots played out as bad overacting was writ large. Images of impossibly beautiful actresses with sculpted proportions and smoothed, ageless skin swam seemingly larger-than-life across the wall-slab’s razor thin screen, accompanied by buffed up actors with bio-chiseled muscle implants and enhanced square jaws. Flirting eyes fluttered at each other with ice-blue replacement irises while pearl-white ceramic grins split perfect faces that delivered repetitive, cliched dialogue.

All of this was interrupted by Captain Ocano; the fiery Shinjuku precinct cop had pinged us a gig.
Sixty rumbling minutes clattered by riding the underserviced elevated tram network, rush hour had gone but it was still standing room only in grime caked, overfilled carriages as vacant dead-enders day-tripped while the lucky few consumers drifted from mall to complex, cred-slab in hand. The sprawling grey-white Shinjuku Station had rolled into view, it sat in the hub spiral of the municipal transit web that fed commuters all across the city districts, prefectures and beyond.
The reinforced, ferroconcrete bunker which was the Shinjuku precinct would be found further south.

Like every regular Neon City rentacop precinct, Shinjuku was under-resourced by its corporate backer. A noisy, undersized beige-decorated work space too small for its staff, filled with thin, glass-walled cubicles and neutral grey office dividers.
The constant murmur of busy chatter that usually re-verbed throughout the room stopped for a moment when we strode in. Sidelong glances told us something was up.
Across the bustling room we could see Ocano, the captain, in his usual awkwardly mis-sized chocolate coloured polyblend Kuabha two-piece suit was sitting on a bench outside his office. Despite the overcrowding, there was clean air around Ocano, looked like everyone was avoiding him? He was, in his usual loud voiced manner berating some old woman, telling her to sit down.

He noticed us as we began walking over, instantly ignoring the woman and beckoning with a sharp gesture. Crossing the room I couldn’t help but notice there was clean air around us too.
Ocano pulled us into one of the glass walled offices, the babbling murmur outside was cut off as the door closed.
“Too many ears out there,” he remarked.
Gesticulating wildly and punching the air in front of us rhythmically as he shouted, Ocano explained the situation.

Police Commissioner Jareth Sabine had paid Ocano a not-so-friendly visit a couple of days ago and had given him a real off-the-books directive.
Told Ocano to put heat on a mark called Doctor Gwen Armiger, wanted her scapegoated for handling narcotics by planting evidence in her apartment.
But Ocano was a rare thing in Neon City, a rentacop too straight-laced to frame some working stiff, so he’d done some digging.

Doctor Armiger was a typical corp-financed med-specialist, no outstandings, no irregularities, nothing noteworthy, Ocano kept digging. Then something came up.
City justice records showed that a week ago Armiger had taken a restraining order out against Jareth Sabine. Records showed he’d made multiple advances on the doctor and had been rejected every time, until she’d gotten sick of it and took action.
It wasn’t a good optics for the commissioner, looked like he’d taken it badly, wanted some payback and was leaning on Ocano for it.

Ocano went on, he didn’t know how to play it, wasn’t going to frame anyone but Sabine had a lot of juice to go against and couldn’t trust his associates beyond these office walls.
Needed outsiders to deal with it.
Finally, he told us that the raid was only a few hours away, had to move quick.

Hunkering down on a beige upholstered chair in a corner, I jacked into the GLOWNET.
Glass landscape, beige decorations and background office droning receded. 
Angular lines settled into polygonal shapes, a familiar geometrical architecture emerged; Neon City’s endlessly evolving chromatic info-vista
I was already zeroed at the precinct’s utilitarian concrete-coloured data-image, rentacop’s encryption algorithms had been cracked months ago and security protocols provided no barrier to immediately getting to the data-vault.

Had to be careful, rentacop directories in the vault could be busy, especially on a active operation. Launched an adaptive chameleon algorithm that would intermittently clone and reclone the bio-image of a random local vault user, then skin it over my Nonohiki’s activity transponder. Good enough to spoof them for a while.
Ran a hunter/searcher keyed to Gwen Armiger on the directories, got two hits behind a locked wall. Couldn’t risk using the normal rentacop key-string, might hit unique encryption and risked getting flagged if it didn’t match. Needed to run an entire cracking protocol, luckily corporate underinvestment for internal security meant that I got through quick.

It was a blatant frame-up job, no one cared to provide oversight on rentacaop, made them lazy, slack. Which meant it was clear what they were up to.
Rentacop were scheduled to pay Armiger’s address a visit soon and a warrant to search the same address was scheduled to be approved two hours later.
First visit was the stitch-up and the second, the bust.
Finding Jareth Sabine’s home address on rentacop’s own vault was easy. After that, I just updated both entries to that address.

Jacked out and lurched back into material reality while fighting the urge to vomit. Disorientation cleared after a few seconds and I was back in a glass walled, beige coloured world.
Soon rentacop would be planting the evidence in Jareth Sabine’s residence, then they’d be hitting the address with a warrant.
Pinged D4VID, gave the botcaster a tip on the ‘case’ and waited.

A few hours and D4VID’s exclusive started piping down the newsvines. Rentacop had hit Jareth Sabine’s home, storming the residence and finding forty seven Ks of the chem-engineered benzoylecgonine derivative. The vid showed his wife being dragged out to a Korazna sky-wagon  while handcuffed with a hood over her head. They flew off in the Korazna with the sirens wailing just for effect!
A later report would state that the commissioner had been picked up at the Sky Tree Golf Club.

---

​Didn’t get far on the ride back to Hikage; media-slabs pinged again.

Katsuko Nakamura was a corporate wage-monkey, a low-level exec on the Chou-Nata public relations payroll. We’d been involved with him a while back, looked like something else was about to drop in our laps.
Plain in his voice that something had Nakamura nervous, was talking about strange occurrences, going on about ‘manifestations’? Wanted us to check it out at his home.
Didn’t take much effort to divert.

Rokkaku Dai Heights was primarily a residential district, wasn’t quite the low-rate social housing neighbourhood that was Hikage Street and targeted the city’s wage-monkeys, the kind of place Katsuko Nakamura fitted right in.
Like Hikage though, the district contained small clusters and strips of retail units that served the residents but was mostly given over to highrises that looked just a little cleaner and more upmarket in The Heights.
Afternoon heat was beating down as we arrived at Nakamura’s alabaster white housing block and headed up.

The door to Nakamura’s apartment opened, both stress and relief were apparent across his clammy face, the heavy set man wore a salmon coloured Duuner polo shirt and a pair of Breach branded beige slacks; classic corporate exec casual wear.
We were immediately ushered in and sat down in a moderately sized but blandly decorated living room filled with Euro-styled faux-mahogany Talordu furniture, one cream coloured wall was dominated by a swathe of family photo-slabs. Dozens of semi-familiar faces grinned inanely at us from behind poly-digital displays.
Nakamura came balancing some imitation Benson Easterbridge crockery on a tray and fed us cups of tea from a gently steaming teapot. Explained that weird events were manifesting in his apartment on an almost routine basis. His wife had left because of the ‘disturbances’, he also explained his work and meetings were also being disrupted by these regular occurrences. We couldn’t make sense of what he was telling us, he told us to wait and that’s all we could do…

Thirty minutes passed, then it happened.
Inexplicably, a green-blue light engulfed the room.
Translucent, incandescent and also green-blue; a figure, a person - somehow a ghost materialised.
“You killed all of us,” accused the figure before vanishing.

Took us a moment, couldn’t be a ghost, had to be something else.

Got to searching. Didn’t take too long. Found a couple of Luoithan branded nano-emitters that could pump out holo-vids embedded in the skirting board, they were all wired into a hidden tiny junction box, someone had put some serious effort into getting at Nakamura.
The box had a compatible port so I wired my Nokohiki into it. The Data-slab’s display filled with code that showed the junction box contained some kind of A.I. protocol manager which controlled the projection of the holograph’s image, it also controlled all outgoing and incoming instructions, there were even some logs on the directory. Ran them through a decrypter and got a point of origin from the metal.
It was listed as a Chou-Nata server-vault.

Asked Nakamura about it, why would Chou-Nata want to target one of their own with this?
It was beyond Nakamura, he could only shrug, although he did say that he’d heard other Cou-Nata employees complain of encountering ghosts and had put it down to hallucinations, that or substance abuse.

Wasn’t much to go on with, one of Koko’s drones had taken a clear recording of our own encounter with the hologram and pushed the data to my slab. Something about the apparition’s face was off? Ran it through facial recognition; zero hits.
Ran an analytical algorithm on the remainder of the hologram with unexpected results..
Proportions across the body, the clothing were too mathematically predictable, meaning they’d been created by another algorithm to simulate a person. It was artificial, a 3D model, kind of explained why the recog had got nothing, it was a face that belonged to no one - a ghost - of sorts?

Material reality dimmed while primary coloured neon polystruts grew in luminosity as I jacked into the GLOWNET. Angular structures coalesced into the city’s info-vista, churning info-motes settled into surging, endlessly morphing data-flows.
Now we knew that the figure had been a 3D model, there was something to go on, I coded the model parameters into a hunter/searcher protocol and let it loose. It quickly came back with a solid hit. The model had come from a game called Vonheim.

Vonheim was a massively multiplayer online game that pulled countless Neon City residents into its virtual skinner box, detaching them from the daily inanity they mostly lived in.
This kind of thing was not our forte, meant it was time to contact Mister Peepers.

Mister Peepers was an uplifted chimpanzee, the result of illicit experimentation in a black-book Sensoji med-facility. Escaping his captors, he’d become a GLOWNET mirage, living under-the-grid, becoming a champion gamer and streaming celeb, it made him serious bank.

Pinged him the info on Vonheim models and he got back to us, they were part of the most recent update, listed as ’Indian peasant’ skins and available for purchase in-game. Standard cosmetic add-ons purchasable by any players Mister Peepers told us.

Not much to go on, Vonheim’s data-image was some kind of focus-group driven bombastic corporate logo. It had an extensive security protocol, whoever was bankrolling this outfit had put the dollar into it.
I launched a cracking algorithm but it got nowhere, looked like some kind of self-writing subroutine kept changing the encryption strings quicker than I could keep up. No way in.
Instead I probed the data-image.
A commercial GLOWNET presence meant it had to have multiple directory layers; the public facing directory would be the most vulnerable. Found a submission node for users to put in GLOWNET addresses into their mailing list.
The cracking algorithm got me into the mailing directory, wasn’t a lot to find there though. Ran a search of the mailing list and realised someone on the project had got lazy and merged its user list with its mailing list, gave me a list of all the players; not much but something to go on.
Dropped an image of the list into the Nonohiki’s storage and pinged it to Mister Peepers and waited. He might be able to get something out of the list.
Illegal augmentations that’d been wired into Mister Peepers meant his enhanced skills extended beyond gaming and streaming, allowed him to interact with data in ways I couldn’t even comprehend, providing him the skills to get ahold of the information we were looking for.
Didn’t take long for Mister Peepers to ping us.

Boyd Blackwood was an alias Mister Peepers messages informed us, a Vonheim in game tag; no surprise there.
Put it through the mailing list and got a real name; Monty Jangles.
The follow up was easy, used my backdoor into Neon City’s civic records to pull data on him.

Monty Jangles; sixteen years old, listed as living in the Mejiro Housing Complex with his parents. They in turn, ran what ostensibly was a family business called ‘Dangle Jangles’, that provided an exotic genital piercing service.
‘Put some ding in your swing’ was their motto.

Didn’t look like there was any link between what seemed like a teenage gaming-monkey and Chou-Nata, so I launched a hunter/seeker algorithm onto the GLOWNET with some specific criteria for deep dives and got some strange hits.

Out-of-town newsvine streams reported mass layoffs at Chou-Nata, seemed confined to mid-level execs from Japanese divisions, other subsidiaries were unaffected.

Got some hits for Monty Jangles too.
Bank accounts showed a lot of activity, he’d been busy buying Pohaden Xyrrig sneakers, a lot of them, Jovistock gaming hardware too - pricey stuff. The list went on, Segtendo consoles, Senonable FunDepot gaming slabs and so on.
There was more though.
Cash had been transferred into his account, routing code showed it had come from Mumbai, no further details though.

While the lurch from exiting the GLOWNET was always familiar, it never stopped the jolt of nausea from rippling through my body.
Back in Katsuko Nakamura’s apartment, I fought the urge to vomit.
Time to pay Monty Jangles a visit.

Getting to Mejiro was a mission, central tram network didn’t reach that far out, got us as far as Sunshine City.
Needed to transfer to the Neon City’s exclusive upmarket corporate monorail into Ikebukuro using our access cards and from there, a final ride on the local transit to Mejiro.
It was cramped, standing room only on the Toshima-cho prefecture tram network as we’d hit the late rush hour getting into the housing complex.
Fused out, dead-eyed wage-monkeys with their cheap two-pieces and Vijeso suitcases dominated all the available space as under-specced aircon struggled to keep the internal temperature to a barely manageable level.
Once the tram had grinded to a halt at the Mejiro station, doors slid open and a tidal wave of humanity drained out, dragging us in its wake.

The Mejiro Housing Complex that stretched out around us was primarily a residential district and clusters of tower blocks clad in neutral shades of concrete dominated the region while smatterings of small retail units were sporadically dotted throughout.

Day had turned to night during the trip, the sun receding behind a rolling eastern skyline. While we watched dusk’s reddening sky darken to black, rows of streetlamps dutifully winked into life as grids of urban building lights followed suit. Blustery winds, brought on by acute air pressure changes preceded the routine downpours.
The rush hour fallout has left Mejiro’s streets a busy place; returning wage-monkeys, undeterred as ever by the nightly rains, were heading home or out for a good time and filled the already packed streets.

A side alley on the edge of a housing block was where we located Dangle Jangles despite having to navigate the clamorous, broiling crowds, it was easy to find.
We found ourselves eyeing a half-and-half retailer space, a three storey affair that mixed a residential unit with a retail ground floor. Numerous examples genetal implants and attachments were arranged in a window display while a garishly coloured, neon-lit shop frontage stated its presence through glimmering precipitation.
‘Dangle Jangles - Put some ding into your swing’ blinked a buzzing red fluorescent sign. 
Trigger ran a thermal sweep, got a strange indecipherable heat source from below ground floor but zero hits elsewhere, looked empty otherwise; wasn’t unusual for a mom’n’pop to be closed after dark.
The lock did not hinder Koko, we were in without a hitch. A red fluorescent glow intermittently bathed the interior but looked a pretty normal set up inside for a low spec body augmenting chop shop.

Trigger told us that the heat source was likely someone in a basement, didn’t take long to find the way down
A muffled voice was projecting somewhere from beyond the bottom of the faux wooden steps, a soft, pencil-thin line of light was emanating from out of view.

We crept down, the landing opened into a largish, mostly undecorated basement, exposed floor and bare walls were lit starkly by a fluorescent strip hanging from the ceiling.
Unopened boxes of trainers were piled up brickwork-style along two of those walls.
A HSS QLQ255 wall-slab had been screwed into another wall, hooked up beneath was the latest Segtendo gaming slab, along with four custom hand-rigs.
Finally against the last wall, a Senonable ‘FunDepot’ gaming slab was sitting on a bespoke gaming table.
The slab was hooked up to a high-end Jovistock custom VR rig; a suspended full body harness specced with the latest omni-pressure, multi-haptic feedback servos and topped off with a top of the line glossy white Kuaijing Youdeji headset.

Suited up in the harness was a skinny, pallid teenage boy wearing nothing but dull, faded and slightly soiled Henry Champ branded underwear. Dried Kaia cola drip stains mingled with streaked fingerprints of cheesy flavoured Huanp chip flavouring to create work of modern art on his once-white vest.
Had to be Monty Jangles.
The headset meant he was oblivious to us, game data readout on the FunDepot told us he was playing Vonheim.
“More dots,” he said into his mic. “More dots, more dots, LESS DOTS”!
We weren’t going to wait around for this.

Trigger hefted him out of the harness and yanked the headset off. Monty Jangles blinked at us confusedly while sprawled on the concrete floor, struggled to prop himself up while his slightly podgy faced gawped from one to another of us.
He assumed we were here to shake him down, didn’t blame him to be honest.
“My parent’s stuff is upstairs,” he immediately blurted.
“We’re here for you,” admonished Koko.
Monty gave a yelp and flinched when he realised Koko was a girl!

Monty was belligerent when we told him to explain why he had scraped 3D data from a game and how it ended up in a holo-projector in Katsuko Nakamura’s apartment and refused to answer anything.
A threat to report his Boyd Blackwood account for irregular behaviour got him to change his tune. Told us that a GLOWNET phantom account had pinged him, offered to drop two hundred large for a full scrape of the new Indian peasant 3D models from Vonheim, textures, anims, skeletons, the works.
Monty admitted that he had the skills to get the files.
The phantom told him to edit the textures and make them look like Indian call-centre workers from Mumbai.
The phantom had also provided him with some server-vault’s GLOWNET geo-node coordinates to push the 3D models out to.

It was a lead but it would go nowhere. No GLOWNET operator worth their weight would leave such blatant footprints to a server-vault unless they meant to burn it. Didn’t need to go there to figure that one out.
We left Monty Jangles to his game went back out into the rain-swelled streets of Mejiro

---

​It was late when we dragged Katsuko Nakamura out of bed after we’d gotten back to his apartment. With a dishevelled red-wine coloured Eilbon robe half pulled over his crumpled pyjamas bottoms and T-shirt, he yawned and scratched his unkempt head as he logged on to his Chou-Nata terminal with bio-credentials..
The terminal was a custom piece of made-to-order Chou-Nata technology, a sturdily manufactured dumb-slab, hard-wired, geo-logged and tagged to Katsuko Nakamura personally, provided near undecryptable direct and exclusive access to the hive of Chou-Nata secured servers via proprietary isolated, non-indexed comms protocols under the GLOWNET.
Hit the Chou-Nata primary databases, ran a search for a Mumbai call centre, got nothing. No facilities in Mumbai or offices, staff or assets, nothing.
No other way of checking the databases, hacking the terminal wasn’t going to work, its functionality only operated in direct, live connection to a checksum driven security algorithm somewhere in the Chou-Nata data-vault hub which would pick up any anomalies within seconds.
Trying to get into Chou-Nata through the GLOWNET data-flows would also be practically impossible, its corporate network was essentially invisible, couldn’t clone or crack what couldn’t be seen.
Nakamura didn’t know of another way of getting Chou-Nata records.
Needed to go sideways. Put a bunch of keywords related to Mumbai through a GLOWNET hunter/seeker algorithm and ran a search, got some hits.

One hit caught our attention. Two years ago, some out-of-date newsvines suggested that what looked like a cholera outbreak in Mumbai had been reported in the local press but info was scant.

A GLOWNET dive was needed: Newsvines were vast, radiant poly-nodal constructs of intertwined spiralling threads of current affairs, finance, gossip, entertainment and more that created algorithmically procedural connections between noteworthy events.
They recorded colossal amounts of news reports, journalistic stories, videos and so on as well as related data movements. To avoid going out of control due to the enormous quantities logged data, old and under-accessed vines were auto-archived by compression protocols.
No way two year old data would not be archived.

Data stored in those archives was immense in size and searching required a focussed algorithm to prevent too much coming through. Scripted some custom instructions and programmed them into a hunter/seeker and let it loose. It got some hits that lead nowhere?

Had to take a look.
The algorithm had taken me to several newsvines but I didn’t see any data or reports on Mumbai, something was wrong. Choosing a vine, I went to the metal, something was missing without being missing?
Gaps existed in the vine’s nodal timestamps, something from those specific dates was gone? Segments of numerous vines did not seem to exist. It shouldn't be possible.
Deleting newsvine data was not something that was easily done, links between nodes would also be deleted and that had a high risk of corrupting related data and more; that hadn’t happened here, no corruption. The data had to be somewhere. Realising what had happened meant I had to go even deeper.

Indexing on the affected nodes had been removed, consequently, it would simply not appear on the GLOWNET. The data we wanted hadn’t been deleted, it was inaccessible by usual avenues without its indexing. Just to find a way to get to it.

Each vine had massive numbers of data-holding nodes, each node also had a timestamp which used unique encrypted identifier codes - incredibly long text scripts which were generated using an encryption key. Copying a code, I ran a cracking algorithm on it, reverse engineered it to get the key.
Now it was theoretically possible to predict what other identifier codes would look like.

The key was punched into another hunter/seeker algorithm that would auto generate potential codes and search for them and their related timestamps.The algorithm would then ping me positive returns.
It was throwing shit at the wall and seeing what stuck - but it worked.
A stack of positive node codes started crawling up my data-slab’s external display; these missing newsvine data nodes could now be directly accessed.

They had archived records of numerous reports from local Indian press about Mumbai. Ran the hidden records through a translator and got some good results.

Several reports mentioned a burgeoning ‘controlled’ slum that had appeared in an un-regenerated brownfield site on the outskirts of Mumbai several years ago and consisted of high density cheap prefab housing with minimal amenities and office blocks for the slum’s sole commercial enterprise - a Chou-Nata call centre. The reports continued, postulating that the slum was a creation of Chou-Nata and was populated by thousands of essentially indentured servants employed in the call centre to work off corporate debt.

There was more; two years ago a cholera epidemic had swept through the slum, a biological conflagration that had ravaged the population. Reports suggested that residents, perhaps out of anger or desperation had resorted to violence and rioting had broken out, hampering emergency medical response services and leading to further casualties.
Reports stated that, in the end zero survivors had been found by the time the medical responders got into the slum.
It didn’t sit right with us, continued digging.

Despite the reports, there were no official municipal, city or government records relating to a slum, call centre or Chou-Nata operations in Mumbai.
The only evidence encountered was a photo that purported to show the medical responders entering the devastated slum following the aftermath of the outbreak.
The responders shown in the photo were packing Konseye K4 9mm short barrelled SMGs or Bariah Arms Talfiq K684 12 gauge room-sweepers that were gripped tightly in their hands. The military grade urban grey coloured Verskeit Haanut smart armour they were specced out in displayed a little ‘star of life’ icon which had been hastily sprayed on the armour unconvincingly, we knew a mil-spec murder-squad when we saw one.

Jacking out the GLOWNET, I showed the photo to Nakamura, told him that it was from Mumbai and a brief flicker of recognition crossed his corpulent face, he seemed to go pale. Nakamura shifted over to his terminal, punched in some instructions and the slab returned a fairly anonymous looking text document. Under a Chou-Nata header was what it described as a strategic risk assessment. 
The text discussed what it called the ‘Foreign Worker Order’, reading on it discussed the strategic viability of eliminating indentured employees in case of a security incident..

Nakamura told us he had received documentation by accident; a mistyped address on it by his brother who worked in Chou-Nata’s internal Security office meant that Nakamura had received it.
Nakamura also admitted that he hadn’t known what to do with the document.
Even acknowledging that he had seen it would make him a security risk to Chou-Nata, so he kept all evidence of it secret.
Nakamura said he’d look into it now that there was a connection between the document and Mumbai.

Before leaving, Koko and I reconfigured Nakamura’s personal home systems, dropped in some enhanced reactive security protocols and countermeasures and disconnected the holo-projector. Whoever was actually launching these attacks wouldn’t be able to get to Nakamura so easily anymore.

---

​Rain was still splattering noisily against the polymer tarp in my one-bed by the time I got back to Hikagi. Across the city’s angular eastern skyline a barely perceptible band of rosy light was growing upwards. Soon, hot night would give way to even hotter day.
Before that though, I threw my Harbief boots in a corner and without changing clothes slumped on the futon. Sleep seemed to fitfully and reluctantly eventually come.

Later, Hikage had somehow become quiet. Hazy city night lights shone along the walls creating long indistinct shadows and casting a faint yellow hue on the pallid, smooth and grey coloured hairless craniums of large headed creatures who had materialised out of miasmic dimness to loomed over me
I was held unmoving in a soporific state, my wrist was pinned by a hard-edged grip while a biting sting flared from my arm. Unable to move my head, I could barely see in the unfocused peripheral of my vision some apparatus attached. I could do nothing.
A harsh shrieking yowl erupted into the silence and Captain Noodles was here, hackles up, snarling and springing at the creatures. With a sudden panicked spasm of movement they were then gone.
Only Captain Noodles remained; who sat on my chest and stared at me.

Morning came, black clouds receded, rain thinned away, rhythmic drumming replaced by an increasingly insistent droning as Neon City’s population roused itself, heat began to rise as a baleful sun climbed into the blue-white sky.
There was no sign of Captain Noodles and any evidence of the blood and skin samples taken from my arms had vanished.
My memories of the event had begun to fade away, grabbing my media-slab, I launched a dictation protocol and verbally recorded what I remembered, not knowing what else to do.

---

Morning went and I stayed on my futon, trying to keep cool and ignore the clamour outside, slipping in and out of lucidity until my media-slab chirped sharply. 
DJ Doctor A, master of ceremonies for Get Set Radio and conspiracy theory true-believer was pinging us. Told us a buyer for the autopsy footage had emerged, someone called Georgina Eveski was interested.
Contact details were provided and a meet was arranged at her home in Jorenji Temple, she wanted to personally meet us.

---

​Located in the Itabashi-cho prefecture, Jorenji Temple was situated at the furthest north of the city, one stop over on the crammed, overheated tram network and a ride on the climate controlled corporate monorail got us there. We walked the rest of the way.

Georgina Eveski’s apartment could be found in a small residential quarter on the periphery of the district, in sight of the vast city wall that separated the megalopolis from the wilderness beyond. With not so much thoroughfare, the neighbourhood suffered a little less of Neon City’s crushing population density, lending it an almost calm quality. Arriving at the door, we knocked and waited.
It was answered by Georgina Eveski; a middle-aged and overweight woman who tried to hide it by wearing a voluminous and flowing Fassus dress patterned with a green, red and yellow floral print. A wide, equally flowery yellow hair band held back shoulder length wavy hair. She also wore an excessive amount of Poratier, Emant, Vaisny jewellery and more. She was decorated with layers of glinting necklaces, bracelets and bulbous rings; her arms chinked when waved and fingers clicked when waggled.

She was pleased to see us, our auras were positive, she declared dramatically while expansively waving a jangling arm over us and said our chakras were open. 
Georgina went on, saying she loved the footage, it would confirm what she already was aware of, that extraterrestrials were amongst us.
The Golden Tibetan Temple of Transdimensional Travellers was her organisation for making contact and Georgina urged us to join it - for a small fee.
Captain Noodles had meanwhile subtly scrutinised her and quietly told us she had never been close to an alien.

Regardless of this, Georgina offered us forty large for the footage plus access to the GTTTT membership client database. They were, she told us, like minded individuals, who had seen or encountered aliens.
The price was good enough and significantly, gave us access to her database and those who claimed to have had extraterrestrial interactions.

Turned out Georgina Eveski’s organisation only had fifteen people; scanning the list we saw two immediate candidates for interview.
Tohi Mari was born on Ganymede and was a crew member aboard the ‘Lost Wisdom of the Ancients’ the ill-fated shuttle that suffered catastrophic failure enroute between The Moon and Earth. The shuttle’s fate was recorded with ‘all hands lost’, Tohi Mari must’ve been from an earlier crew rotation?
Wyatt Vanlith was a registered ‘space-pilot’.

First though, we decided to contact Nursery Bob and Jacky Boxes, the pair of Neon City transients who both had served with the Planetary Guardian Defence Force and claimed to have had alien contact.
Usually they could be found protesting outside the Rokkau Tower, we headed over to Rokkaku Expo Stadium.

---

While navigating Jorengi’s midday crowds and enduring the harsh heat on route to the corporate monorail, it all went south.
Roderick’s weapon systems suddenly activated as he began reconfiguring, covert gun ports on his frame clicked open and various weapons popped out.
‘Threat detected’, growled his harsh robotic voice.
The Emergency Response Pacifier combat mode came online and he unloaded all his firepower on a nearby alleyway.
Pedestrians screamed and scrambled over each other, fleeing the gunfire like a parting of the waves.
Roderick’s auto-reloaders kicked in and he continued firing into the alleyway, with the area cleared we could see it was empty?

Once Roderick’s primary ammo reserves were depleted, his guns were cooling and the dust had settled, we went into the alleyway.
One wall was a comprehensive polka dot pattern of various calibres from Roderick’s gunfire. Amongst the bullet holes and blackened scorch marks, at a low level were several splatters of a thick, shining black liquid.
Had the viscosity of blood, had Roderick hit something; nothing was here, some kind of reactive camouflage tech might’ve been employed? Feeling around for anything invisible, nothing was found.
A sample of the black liquid was collected for later analysis. Had to leave, Rentacop would arrive soon, wasn’t a good idea to let them question us.

Got the feeling I was being watched as we pressed on to the monorail, were we being tailed? Was I?
Asked Captain Noodles about it, he seemed unsure of something as his ears uncharacteristically wagged but finally admitted to knowing a way to spot aliens. Told us to be careful, told us the aliens could transition ‘gaps’ in spacetime.
Without slowing down and watching carefully, we reached the corporate monorail without encountering trouble.

From Jorengi Temple it was a direct route to Rokkaku Expo Stadium on the monorail. No problem getting through station security and boarding. The city’s urgent bustle mercifully became an almost forgotten murmur on the insulated, sparsely populated carriages as we sunk into the deep luxurious seating.
On time; the monorail smoothly accelerated out of Jorengi Temple district

We sat in silence during the quiet ride, processing what Captain Noodles had told us of the existence of extraterrestrials.

Rolling into Rokkaku Expo Stadium’s station, its urban vista was dominated by the enormous stadium viewed through the monorails' reactive poly-tinted windows.
Once the doors had hissed open, we were greeted by the city’s clamour washing over us again and welcomed back into the rippling waves of hustling pedestrians.

Crowds thinned out as we neared the Rokkaku Tower which sat in the centre of a broad featureless concrete plaza, patrolled and kept clear by Rokkau rentaguard. It was obvious Bob and Jacky weren’t here.
Bill approached a rentaguard and got him to tell us that the pair had been ‘moved on’ this morning.

It was usual for the local PGDF Vets Association to run a soup kitchen and support centre in Rokkaku Expo Stadium which the pair had previously made use of; it was a solid bet that Bob and Jacky would be there.
It was a good call. The Vets Association had a branch at the end of a small strip mall that inhabited some of Rokkaku Expo Stadium’s sun-starved narrow back streets. Nursery Bob and Jacky Boxes were there, sitting among other vets at some shaded tables and chairs put out in a temporary facility set up by PGDF volunteers.

Bob and Jacky were happy to speak with us. 
Told them about the encounter earlier, neither of them were surprised or impressed by our experience.
Captain Noodles checked them out, told us that they’d both had encounters but it was long ago, maybe ten-fifteen years long ago.
Got them to tell us more about their encounters and they answered best they could but nothing they gave us was anything new.
The pair went on to tell us they had both - in their own ways ‘disappeared’ after seeing signs ‘something’

While we were talking to Jacky and Bob, down the street, movement in the nearby alleyway caught our attention. Not quite shrouded by shadows was a short, blue haired woman with almost circular eyes staring at us.
She had been made, she realised and before we could react, was engulfed in a strange wavering light distortion and abruptly vanished.
Captain Noodles padded over and sniffed around, what appeared to be a look of confusion played across his feline visage.
“They’re here,” he said after a few seconds as his hackles raised and ran.

Simultaneously, Roderick’s combat protocols kicked again; immediately, he went weapons-hot and lit up the alleyway with his remaining ammo as Captain Noodles streaked out.
This time it was different though.
Murky shapes seemingly swirled in the murky alleyway’ and considerable firepower erupted out the darkness in a blossoming of muzzle flare.
Bullets ricocheted around us. Seconds crawled into hours as we lurched into cover, pulled weapons, flicked off safeties, brought them to bear and opened fire.
The exchange was brief, hard to tell if our shots were hitting the mark? No discernible effect? Worse still, Koko collapsed, having taken a heavy hit from whatever their weapons were.
This was a fight we were going to lose, Koko groaned under her breath as we pulled her to her feet and retreated.
Fortunately, whoever was attacking, did not follow.

The panic of the gunfight was left behind as we stumbled from back alley to side road while dragging a lolling Koko with us and merging into the foot traffic. No one in Neon City paid much attention to the blood covered wrench-monkey.
Situation did not look good, had to act quick.
Locating a street-doc wasn’t hard, a small out of the way business park that offered a range of med-tech services which included a hospital facility was closeby.
We found ourselves in a narrow cul-de-sac that ended in a concrete courtyard ringed by white-clad and frost-windowed retail fronts labelled with various health industry brands and professional sounding business names.
In the clinic it didn’t take long to get Koko into treatment, a receptionist decked out in medical whites was unphased by our dramatic entry, something she’d probably seen frequently and knew better than to ask questions, admitted Koko. As she was wheeled off on a gurney that bristled with med-tools, Roderick got sent out to get reloads while the rest of us camped out on the curved plastic reception chairs. One eye on the courtyard and one hand on our guns.

Fully loaded, Roderick had returned before Koko came out of treatment. She was blissfully topped up with painkillers, wounds had been stitched and patched with Jlayjig Tasmi derma-pads which dissolved into predetermined meds over time and were delivered by osmosis.
Once her head was clear enough, she reconfigured Kevin’s sensors as per Captain Noodles instructions to detect aliens.
We needed an edge over whatever was attacking us.