We Pour — Chapter 3

A Cyberpunk Story in the Fifth Element Universe

by Chris & Eli

The street hits me like a wall. Steam and noise and the churning river of foot traffic that parts slightly around me the way it always does, because people see 6’8” coming and step aside without thinking about it. I walk. I don’t flag a cab. I need the movement.

Mox.

His real name is Maxwell Huang and he was four foot nothing until he was sixteen and then he was five foot four and that was it, that was all he was ever going to get. On the commune, the two of us were a sight — the beanpole and the bean, mom called us. Stuck together because nobody else would have either of us.

The other kids threw rocks at the cows and called it fun. Mox built a radio out of combine parts and pulled in signals from orbit. I sat next to him in the barn loft and listened to cargo ship chatter from the outer stations and he’d say “Dunk, there’s a whole world up there that doesn’t give a shit how tall either of us are” and I believed him because Mox never lied to me.

I stop walking. I’m in the middle of the sky bridge between Sectors 7 and 9, a hundred floors up, wind pulling at my jacket. Below me the city falls away into blue haze and blinking lights. A police cruiser drifts past at eye level, close enough to see the officer’s coffee cup on the dash.

I know what Mox would say. He’d say it was just a job. He’d say he didn’t know it was Ellie. He’d say that David came to him cold, through a cutout, and he never asked who the target was because you don’t ask, that’s the rule, that’s how it works in this business.

And maybe that’s even true.

But he took the job. And he’s good enough that he would have seen the name in the access logs. Ellie Covacs. Same last name as the best friend he’s had since he was nine years old. Same girl who he never quite was able to outgrow.

And he did the job anyway.

My phone buzzes. It’s Mox.

[mox] hey. noodles later? im buying. got something to tell you

I stare at the screen. The wind picks up. A cab honks somewhere below.

yeah man lets do noodles later

Later was as soon as I could do it. I needed time to think. I took another turn and then a turn and then I was back at my place, sitting on a dusty old couch of suspicious origins and looking out into the world as the traffic went by. As soon as I sat, I automatically pulled up my phone.

[mox] sure thing big man. the job today ends 5ish. usual spot also ur cats here again

I type back.

keep him

The couch smells like the couch has always smelled, which is like whoever owned it before me and that no amount of enzyme cleaner will ever fully kill. The ceiling is close enough that I could touch it if I reached for it. I don’t reach. I just lie there and watch the traffic paint light across the plaster. Red. White. Blue. Red. White.

The cat’s with Mox. Mox is three floors down and two units over and we’ve been in each other’s lives for twenty-three years and he might have…

Wait.

I pull up the phone. Thumb past Mox, past Ellie’s ALL-CAPS flare, past the junk, and there it is again. The job ping. Routed through three anonymizers, which means whoever sent it knows enough to not want to be found but also knows enough to find me, which narrows the field more than they’d probably like.

No name. No company. No brief. Just:

[unknown]
RETRIEVAL -- DIGITAL ASSET
TIMELINE: COB FRIDAY
COMPENSATION: 15,000 CR
ACCEPT / DECLINE / QUERY

Fifteen thousand credits. That’s five months of rent. That’s Ellie’s lawyer if things go bad. That’s breathing room I haven’t had since the last corp job dried up in November.

Close of business on Friday. Same as Ellie’s deadline. Stated the same way.

My thumb hovers over QUERY. The part of my brain that keeps me alive — the pattern-matching, paranoid, hacker part — is already whispering. Anonymous job, big money, fast timeline, lands in my inbox the same morning my sister tells me she’s being squeezed by a guy who hired my best friend to build the frame.

Some people believe in coincidences. I believe in patterns.

The traffic light cycles. Red. White. Blue.

Eventually I pressed the QUERY button.

The screen refreshes. Whoever’s on the other end was waiting.

[unknown]
ASSET: Personnel file. Encrypted.
LOCATION: Zorg Industries internal network
DIVISION: Applied Human Resources

TARGET FILE: ZI-AHR-00891

Retrieve and deliver. File must be intact
and uncopied. Original extraction only.
You keep nothing.

Dead drop coordinates on acceptance.

ACCEPT / DECLINE / QUERY

Zorg Industries.

I sit up on the couch. The springs groan.

Zorg is not a noodle shop. Zorg is the third largest defense contractor on Earth, supplier of weapons systems to half the governments in the Federated Territories and most of the ones that aren’t. Their network security isn’t a wall — it’s an ecosystem. Adaptive ICE, behavioral analytics, honeypot architectures so deep that slicers have gone in for a soda pop and come out hours later to find federal agents sitting in their apartment.

I know this because two years ago I did a white hat audit for a Zorg subsidiary. They paid for it. Third-tier, nothing classified, but I saw enough of the outer architecture to know the inner layers would be a different animal entirely. I still have my notes from that job somewhere on my terminal.

“Applied Human Resources.” I’ve never heard of that division. HR is HR. You don’t put “Applied” in front unless it’s doing something that isn’t human resources.

And the stipulation — original extraction, no copies, keep nothing. That’s not a corporate espionage play. If
someone wanted to steal Zorg secrets they’d want to leave behind the original to cover their tracks. This is someone who wants a file to disappear. Or someone who wants to know what’s in their own file and can’t get to it through normal channels.

Fifteen thousand credits. COB tomorrow. And a target that would take most slicers a month to plan.

But most slicers didn’t spend three months inside Zorg’s outer ring with a badge and a smile.

My thumb hovers.

The light through the slats shifted from gray to gold to amber to the deep bruised purple that passes for sunset when you’re ninety-seven floors up and the smog catches it just right. None of it registers.

The job ping is still unanswered. Three tabs running — Zorg subsidiary architecture from my
old audit notes, a Sector 12 corporate registry search that’s half-loaded, and Ellie’s doctored records that I’ve stared at for so long the numbers have stopped meaning anything. I drop my phone and rub both fists into my eyes, trying to push back the headache forming at the base of my skull.

My brain is hot swap thrashing. Ellie. Mox. Zorg. Fifteen thousand. Friday. Twenty-four hours. Mox’s hands built those forgeries.

Then, Mox’s notification buzzing on the cushion next to me.

[mox] dunk?? its 520 u coming or what? i ordered for u. the good stuff not cheapo

5:20. Shit.

I’m off the couch and out the door and I haven’t decided anything. The elevator drops and my stomach drops with it and the whole way down I’m rehashing conversations that haven’t happened yet. I’ll look at him across the table. He’ll be Mox — same grin, same fast hands pulling apart chopsticks, same guy who built a radio in a barn. And I’ll know what he did and he won’t know I know and I’ll have to eat
noodles and act like everything is…

He said he had something to tell me.