Running Dark
Session 14 - Iced Tea
The crew were already deep into their patrol, and the sniper was still out there. Marlo Petrak walked Six past every building with a clean line of sight, pointing out the rooftops and upper windows a shooter could use, while Shackleton Magellan’s nanobots kept their quiet tail on the assassin, The Hotel Sniper. Then Paul Harrelson called Shack away on some other errand, and Shack handed the swarm to Six on his way out. Six had no way to steer them. The nanobots fell back on their default programming and came back, and the assassin, now in a change of clothes, slipped down into the underground and was gone. Harrelson’s answer was to order Six back onto regular patrol and keep him off the bridge into the civilian sector, which belonged to the regular police. Six started a second report of his own, a list of every time Harrelson had stood between him and what Six considered good security protocol.
Meanwhile Rock Lavey and Marlo walked straight into the real Channel 7 News reporter in the middle of a field report, which meant the “reporters” who had been working the area were fakes. Six, Marlo and Shack drew up extra checks on everything the fake crew had done, including a review of all of Ronin Sanchez’s footage, since Ronin had dealt with them more than anyone, and took it to Harrelson. As the patrol wound down, Shack asked Six whether he could destroy the sniper rifle, or simply take it. Six said yes. Marlo advised against it, and the idea died there. The shift ended with the schedule for the next two days: a 5 PM start tomorrow, and on concert day a 2 PM start with three hours of overtime. The crew filed their reports. Six handed Shack his extra one, the full record of Harrelson blocking the group at every turn, and Marlo advised Shack to redact most of it, in case Harrelson ever read it and fired the lot of them.
That evening Rock, Marlo and Six went down into the city to find the Wrinkles in Time Tours pensioners from the jellyfish tour and party with them. Under a bridge on the way, a security scan pinged their robotaxi for weapons. Six flashed his security badge, made the police catalogue his exact armament (a single stun pistol), and argued that his axe was a tool. The police wrote the axe up as a weapon anyway. Meanwhile Shack and Ronin went back to the noodle place Ronin had found the night before, and spotted a white van with men inside whom Shack recognised.
The crew found themselves at a crossroads, debating the legal and personal risks of investigating a suspicious news van while off the clock. Rock carefully laid out the implications of their security contract, warning that any incident they were involved in — even tangentially — could expose the group to serious legal liability. He suggested that the safest move was to report the suspicious activity to Harrelson, their security supervisor, to at least put the information on record and protect themselves from blowback. Shack listened to Rock’s reasoning, acknowledged it, and then promptly declared he didn’t care — unless someone told him to do something, he was going to enjoy his evening.
While the others made their social plans, Shack had something far more calculated in mind. He coordinated with Ronin to deploy an electromagnetic pulse device near Davis Electronics, a multi-story second-hand electronics shop that had drawn the crew’s suspicion. Ronin placed the device close to the building and retreated before it detonated. What followed was not the surgical strike Shack had intended — the EMP struck a major neighborhood transformer, and the entire Motel District 7 plunged into darkness. Communications went dead, the hotel’s electronic locks failed, and Shack found himself cut off from the rest of the crew as sirens began wailing in the distance.
With the building dark and its occupants scrambling in confusion, Shack seized the opportunity and sent his nanobots inside. The tiny swarm navigated the blackened interior using their onboard sensors, mapping the building with remarkable precision. The first floor revealed a repair bay stocked with an unusually large quantity of automaton and android parts — far more than a modest second-hand shop would typically need. The upper floors contained modest living quarters housing three individuals who were frantically pressing buttons and peering out windows, trying to make sense of the outage. Most tellingly, the living area held stacks of freshly printed P.E.T.A. pamphlets, handwritten placards, and a large equipment case that bore a striking resemblance to one previously seen in the possession of a Channel 7 news crew.
Shack redirected the nanobots to the garage, where the suspicious van sat waiting. A thorough scan revealed cleaning supplies, mops, and a large automated floor-cleaning device — all branded with the Apex Bio Cleaning Corporation logo. But a closer look revealed something telling: the logo on the van’s exterior was not painted on. It was an LED virtual display, capable of being changed at will to show any corporate branding. Shack processed this quietly and made a decision. He hid the nanobots deep within the van in passive mode, programming them to reactivate only upon receiving a signal from him — and to melt themselves into slag if they were ever discovered. It was a calculated gamble, and one he was willing to make.
Meanwhile, Rock, Six, and Marlo arrived outside the Ritz-Carlton, where the Wrinkles in Time tour group was preparing for their evening out. Six wasted no time making introductions, presenting Rock to the silver-haired, curvaceous Sylvie with the announcement that she had been looking for a young man to rock her world — and here was Rock. He then proceeded to introduce Frederick, Milang, Flora, and Viola to the group with the same cheerful, oblivious energy, laying out Frederick’s complicated love triangle for everyone to hear. The couples in the group were visibly unamused, as tonight was supposed to be date night, and Six had arrived like a wrecking ball into their carefully arranged evening.
Rock quietly assessed the situation and recognized that Six was about to become the world’s most enthusiastic third wheel. He gently redirected Six toward the group of uncoupled widowers — Frederick, Paul, and a few others — who were heading out for cocktails and were willing enough to let Six tag along. With Six safely handed off, Rock turned his attention to Sylvie, who had made her interest in him abundantly clear. A bit of charm was all it took. Sylvie’s eyes lit up, she said “let’s go,” and Rock climbed into her cab without a second thought, leaving the others to their own devices.
Sylvie took Rock to a semi-upscale restaurant where a table had already been reserved in her name — she had, it seemed, canceled other plans to make room for him. Throughout dinner, she was aggressively flirtatious, running her hand up his leg and making her intentions unmistakably clear. Rock’s read of the situation was sharp: this was not romance. This was a transaction, and he was the commodity. He rolled with it entirely. After a nightcap, Sylvie took him back to her room, where she proceeded to thoroughly exhaust him. Early the next morning, she woke him up, pressed cab fare into his hand, and showed him the door.
Six’s evening took a very different turn. Frederick and Paul introduced him to the world of fine whiskey and exotic cigars made from Giga-Stalk plant leaves — a plant whose heavy-gravity origins gave its fibers an iridescent quality and whose leaves, apparently, produced a warm, tingly sensation well beyond standard tobacco. Six coughed his lungs out on the first attempt, was patiently coached by the two older men, and eventually settled into the experience with the wonder of someone encountering fire for the first time. The drinks kept coming — cocktails the pensioners cheerfully called “iced tea” — and Six, who had never been drunk before, had absolutely no idea what was happening to him.
As the evening wore on, Six became increasingly emotional and increasingly loose-lipped. He drunkenly intervened in the long-simmering tension between Frederick and Milang, swaying on his feet with a cigar in one hand and a glass in the other, tearfully explaining to Milang why she and Frederick were destined to be together. It worked. The two reconciled and slipped away together, and Six — utterly baffled by the warm sensation spreading through his chest — turned to Marlo and announced that he was leaking. He was broken. He had sprung a leak. Marlo gently explained that what Six was experiencing was called “the feels,” and that it meant he had done something right.
What Marlo did not explain, and what Six would not remember the next morning, was that somewhere between the cigars and the iced tea, Six had told Marlo far more than he should have. In his unguarded state, Six had let slip that he had been frozen — and that he had been rescued by P.E.T.A. It was not the whole story, but it was enough. Marlo filed the information away quietly, deciding that discretion was very much the better part of valor. The safest place in the universe, he had come to believe, was directly behind Six — and he had no intention of doing anything that might change that arrangement.
The morning after was unkind. Six woke up convinced he had been poisoned, certain that someone had slipped something into his beverages, because all he had drunk was iced tea. He was found leaning against Rock’s hotel room door, covered in cigar ash, with at least two phone numbers written on him in lipstick and a long bar receipt tucked into the collar of his armor. Rock arrived moments later, disheveled and wearing yesterday’s clothes, his hair a mess and his pants not quite properly fastened. He took one look at Six, performed a quick assessment, and delivered the diagnosis: Six had a hangover. The iced tea had been alcoholic. Six processed this information with the gravity of a man learning a fundamental truth about the universe.
Rock and Six made their way to a nearby corner drugstore to find a remedy, stepping over broken glass from a smashed front window. The owner was outside, angrily sweeping up the aftermath of the previous night’s looting, her store’s payment terminal destroyed by someone who had tried to hot-wire it for credits. Rock overpaid significantly — twenty credits for a three-credit purchase — and the woman’s anger softened. She disappeared back inside and returned with an additional remedy, pressing it into his hands before going back to her sweeping. The crew reconvened for breakfast at the hotel buffet, where Six commandeered an entire tray of bacon while a small automated machine endlessly dumped more into the void he had created.
The second day of work brought the crew back to the festival cordon, where the Zenith Day preparations had shifted into high gear. Vendors were flooding in with food, drinks, and merchandise. Multiple stages were alive with sound checks, and the plaza buzzed with the controlled chaos of a major event taking shape. The crew performed their duties — scanning credentials, checking vehicles, maintaining their patrol routes — while keeping their eyes open. Rock noticed something that gave him pause: the security personnel flanking Adelina Feliciano, the headline act, during her sound check were dressed in a manner eerily similar to a suspicious figure the crew had previously observed. More than that, their complexions marked them as people from Wu in the Hipral System — a detail that felt like it meant something, even if Rock couldn’t yet say what.
Shack, meanwhile, kept his eyes on the ground level. Apex Bio Cleaning Corporation personnel were everywhere — workers in overalls, branded vehicles, automated cleaning machines — all moving through the festival grounds with the quiet efficiency of a company preparing for a major event. None of the faces matched anyone from Davis Electronics or the news crew, but the sheer volume of their presence was impossible to ignore. The day passed without incident, and when the shift ended, Six announced that he was treating everyone to dinner.
The venue Six selected was a club in the more rundown part of the neighborhood — a place featuring a sushi buffet, grouse wings, and both human and android dancers. Six tipped everyone generously and indiscriminately: the bouncers, the waitstaff, the performers, and at least one janitor. The bouncers, well-compensated and unbothered, turned a blind eye to the crew’s equipment. It was a fine evening, right up until a commotion erupted behind a curtain at the back of the club. Two bouncers rushed in and emerged dragging a struggling man by the arms, P.E.T.A. pamphlets scattering from his hands as he was hauled toward the exit. Shack and Rock recognized him immediately. He was one of the men from Davis Electronics — and whatever P.E.T.A. was planning for Zenith Day, it was becoming increasingly clear that the crew was already far more entangled in it than any of them had intended.