Nothing Of Substance

Instantly he regrets it, leaning over to vomit onto the wet pavement beside him. Then he glances at his fingertips. They’re covered in blood.

Chan doubles over again, clutching his temples. His head feels like it’s about to split in two. What the fuck happened to him? He rocks in place until the pressure subsides enough that he can open his eyes again, at which point he examines himself. His shirt’s torn and splattered with red splotches. There are cuts and scratches all over his arms, and his knuckles are scraped to hell. He wipes grit from the concrete off his face and pats down his pockets. Empty. 

Was he in a fight? Maybe he was robbed. That would explain why he doesn’t have anything on him. Did someone beat him for whatever he had? If only he could remember, but he can’t… he can’t…

He can’t remember anything. Pulse spiking, Chan leans against the dumpster, forcing himself to breathe slowly. He needs to calm down and assess the situation. Figure out where he is and if he’s safe there before he tries to recall what happened to him. If he’s too exposed here, or too trapped, he needs to move. 

Wait. Why is that his first instinct?

He squeezes his eyes shut, blocking out the rain, the buzzing light, quickly focusing his mind on what he is absolutely sure he knows, without a trace of doubt. His name is Lee Chan. He’s from New Seoul. Is that where he is now? 

SYSTEM REBOOT

“Augh!” Chan yells, grabbing his head again. “What the fuck?!”

SYSTEM ACTIVE. WARNING: CRITICAL DAMAGE SUSTAINED. 

His stomach heaves again. He spits to clear the taste of bile from his mouth. The CARAT interface in his brain has rebooted. Reflexively, he attempts to access his memories, stored on the implant, but when he reaches out, he hears a message in his head from the same synthetic voice as before.

REQUEST DENIED. SYSTEM DIAGNOSIS IN PROCESS. 

He’ll have to figure out the system later - he’s still hunched behind a dumpster with a wall to his back. If he stays here much longer, he’s a sitting duck. For whom, he doesn’t quite know, but he feels compelled to follow his instincts. They’re probably why he’s still alive. 

He staggers to his feet, only takes one step forward before cursing. “Fuck!” He hadn’t noticed the wound in his left leg earlier, too distracted by the pain in his head. There’s a gash in his thigh, visible beneath a giant tear in his pants, like someone swiped at him with a blade. It doesn’t look like the work of a cyblade, thank fuck, but it still hurts like a motherfucker. 

Bing!

A gentle chime sounds in his head.

SYSTEM DIAGNOSIS COMPLETE. ERROR INCURRED DURING MEMORY CORE COMMAND SEQUENCE EXECUTED AT 13:27 PM TODAY. DAMAGE SUSTAINED.

“What command sequence?” Chan queries inside his head.

UNABLE TO DETERMINE. 

Chan furrows his brows. That shouldn’t be possible - the implant’s diagnostics should be able to recall every command he’s ever given to the system. He’s 100% sure of that.

“How much damage?” He braces himself for the answer.

58% OF MEMORY CORE CORRUPTED. UNABLE TO ACCESS CORRUPTED CONTENTS. 

The memory core in his implant stores his entire life’s worth of memories - everything he can remember prior to implantation and everything he’s ever done since. Right now, he’s got literal holes in his memory. No wonder his brain feels like swiss cheese. 

Unfortunately, whatever happened at 1:27 today to leave him badly beaten and sleeping in the rain happens to be one of those holes.

BANG!

The slamming of the door to the bar closing ricochets off the walls in the alley like a bullet. Chan jolts, shrinking into the shadows as best he can, sharp gaze narrowing in on a drunken patron swaying their way towards the street. Chan needs to find a better place to hide, where he can tend to his wounds while he figures out what to do about his interface. He tests his leg, finding out how much weight it can bear before it begins to buckle, and then he creeps towards the end of the alleyway. 

He’s relieved to recognize the neighborhood he’s in, though most in his position would likely be alarmed to find themselves here - especially without any sort of protection. He’s in one of the many slums of old New Seoul, where dilapidated, nearly crumbling buildings from the previous century line the streets, and the airspace is crammed full of fluttering ad drones flashing obnoxiously bright advertisements, bathing the sky in an eternal neon glow day all night long. This isn’t a place where most people would want to conduct business, let alone live. 

Unless they had no other choice.

It must be sometime in the early hours of the morning, because many of the stores are shuttered, their heavy metal shields covered in electric shock warnings, meant to deter transients and thieves alike. There are multiple sirens going off in different directions around him, heralding the arrival of the armed forces that patrol this area - not to protect the residents, but to protect the corporations that have stakes here from the syndicates that run the slums. 

But he’s familiar with this particular section of town, enough to know to turn left out onto the street. There’s a place he’s been to before, about three blocks from here. A place that’s safe. He tries to recall why he knows that, and a face floats into his mind as his memory interface engages. He pauses for a second, ducking into the doorway of an abandoned business to get out of the rain, and leans against the rusted solid metal door there, buried under layers of graffiti, but thankfully not electrified.

“YN,” he whispers. That’s your name. It’s your place that he’s stumbling towards. And then he visualizes it, perfectly recreating the path in his mind. He thinks again of your face. Your eyes. But when he tries to recall more about you, he can’t. Another gap in his memory. But something stirs in his chest when he pictures your face, and again he feels that unshakable certainty. 

He follows the feeling. It leads him down streets that are mostly deserted, only a few electric motos zooming by as he slowly progresses down the sidewalk. The people he passes are mostly inebriated, either drunk or high on something, and in their own little worlds. A few of them appear to be surfers, riding along on a designer drug called Wave, and Chan knows innately to keep his distance. Surfers can be dangerous to be around in their altered states. He avoids attracting attention to himself, a skill that he knows he’s taken care to develop, even if he isn’t sure why. 

At the next block, he waits on the corner for a moment, shivering as the rain soaks into his tattered clothes. Across the street sits a row of old tenements, each apartment building leaning on the others around it like brothers-in-arms, preventing one another from collapse. He heads towards one of the buildings in the center, for a familiar-looking door. The door is locked, of course. He doesn’t have a key, nor does he have any tools to help him open it. But he has adrenaline, and a very persistent desire to survive, so he grits his teeth and kicks the door in. 

He stumbles, then kind of falls into a heap inside the doorway, and curses up a storm from the pain. He’d give his useless leg for some painkillers right now, or a bottle of liquor - any kind, he’s not feeling particularly picky at the moment. He hopes you have something strong that he can take before he starts dressing his wounds. 

Who are you to him, that he assumes you’re going to help him? 

He drags his fingers along the wall as he walks into the darkness in front of him, searching for a switch, but as soon as he’s far enough away from the light of the city behind him, his ocular implants activate night mode. There’s a long hallway in front of him, with boarded up doors on either side, and the stairwell heading upstairs is barricaded. He knows the place he’s seeking isn’t here - this is just a shortcut. He walks down the hallway, the floor sloping downward for a while before it rises towards a door at the other end, lit by a small band of light through the cracks. He rams this door too when he reaches it, until it spits him out into a little courtyard. 

He’s relieved to find there’s no one else in the courtyard this time of night. It’s an open-air courtyard, surrounded on the other three sides by the walls of other old buildings. Someone’s turned it into a greenspace - a few square feet of some ferns and other leafy plants, and in the very center, a Korean red pine growing tall. Trees are so rare in old New Seoul that he can’t help but divert his mission to approach the pine, and run his hand over the twisted trunk. Huh. The roughness of the bark is familiar under his touch. Something happened to him here. The memory is missing, but his fingertips remember for him. 

Suddenly, he sways, and has to let the tree hold him up for a moment. His leg’s been bleeding while he’s been walking - how much blood has he lost by now? He’s gotta get inside before he passes out. He continues on his way, a little slower than before, to the corner on the right, where two of the buildings meet. He doesn’t have to force the door here, a fire exit with a blinking blue light above the frame. 

Inside the tenement is another hallway, this one lit so brightly by floating ads that he has to shield his eyes for a few seconds until his night mode disengages automatically. These old buildings aren’t on the same grid as the tenements in the newer sections of the city and don't have ad screens built into the walls like those places do. Ad drones are programmed to follow tenets into the buildings, but they are notorious for getting stuck inside, buzzing around the overhead fluorescents like electric moths. Chan swats at an annoying soju ad that keeps strafing his left ear, and it careens into the wall, smashing into tiny pieces. 

The elevator doesn’t want to take him anywhere without a keycode, but it uses an old electrical system that’s mostly wires, and he’s always been good with wires. He rests against the panel of the elevator as it rises, and glances at his reflection in the filthy cracked mirror on the back wall. 

His face is coated in red splatters to match his shirt. He steps closer, touching his face, searching for cuts. Other than the incredibly sore spot behind his ear, he doesn’t appear to have any other wounds on his head. He’s covered in someone else’s blood. 

Shouldn’t that alarm him?

The elevator lets him out on a dimly lit floor that is somehow free from the ad drones. There are a few transients in here, lying on the ground in different relaxed positions. Surfers, coming down from their highs. He gives them their space, heading directly for the door at the end of the hall. There’s nothing on the door to distinguish it from the others, but Chan’s certain this is the one he wants. 

He raises his hand to knock, and his head suddenly spins. He loses his balance, falling forward into the door. Before he can regain his balance, it opens. 

He collapses in the doorway, barely able to crane his neck enough to look up into the beautiful face of an angel, lit by a soft blue neon glow. Wait, is he dying? 

The angel speaks. 

“What the fuck are you doing here?” 

READER’s POV: 

As days go, today’s been a little… off. 

It starts as usual. Around 4:00 pm, you wake. Afternoon is your morning. Your lifestyle is more suited for the nighttime. Good thing you were born a night person, preferring the dark to the light.

You feel refreshed from sleep, but are reminded by a tender ache on your cheek that you’re not quite healed yet. Your last assignment lingers in the bruises on your body, unfortunate reminders that you’ll be happy to see fade. It wasn’t your best work, but you got the job done in the end. And you’d love to move on, except your liaison has been awfully quiet lately. You consider checking in with him while in the shower, rubbing yourself down with soap before turning the lever for a fifteen-second rinse. Why not pamper yourself a little today with a long shower? 

Unfortunately, the shower timer glitches, and you only get the usual ten seconds. You throw on a tank top, then a stretched-out long-sleeved shirt cropped below your chest over that, and a pair of leggings. At least making your breakfast goes better, and you carry your cup of instant noodles and a chunk of cheese outside. 

One of the perks of living in one of the oldest tenements in old New Seoul is that your apartment comes with an attached outdoor space in the form of a tiny patio. You’ve got a flimsy metal chair in the corner, where you sit and soak up some vitamin D before the sun sets - as long as the smog warnings don’t force you back inside first. 

This evening, there’s a blue cat waiting for you by the chair. You hold out your hand for her to sniff, and she lowers her head, allowing you to lightly scritch her ears. 

“Morning, Ash.” 

Ash meows, and waits for you to sit before bumping her head against your leg. You break up the chunk of cheese and toss it onto the ground for your favorite stray to nibble on, then turn your attention to the view around you. 

Your tenement is buried in a maze of buildings in the heart of old New Seoul. There are more windows than you can count surrounding you. More neighbors than you could possibly ever hope to meet, if you were the type of person to meet your neighbors. The city is loud, the voices of all these neighbors rising into the air to join the drones, and the birds, flocks of pigeons who land on your railing, uninterested in anything but picking at your crumbs. Ash chases them away while you listen to the chaotic call of your city.

You love it here. New Seoul’s been pretty good to you, considering you do not do good things. Not that you see anything wrong with taking lives in order to keep living yours. Everyone makes their choices, and everyone has to deal with the consequences. 

You are simply a consequence that they never see coming. 

After breakfast, you do your workout, a combination of stretches and cardio intended to limber you up and increase your stamina. It’s important that you keep in shape, because you never know when you’ll need to fight - or run. It starts to rain as you’re finishing up, and keeps coming down steadily for hours. 

While you listen to the raindrops hitting your window, you connect to your console, and access Nyx, a private online channel where people with your particular skills can find work. To your frustration, you’ve no new messages from Joshua. What is the point of using a liaison if he’s not going to connect you to any job offers?

You’ve only started using him in the last few months as a connection for work because things have been so quiet lately. It’s not that the market is drying up, necessarily - if anything, your industry is bustling as society continues to crumble around you and people are willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. But competition’s been picking up as more people turn to murder-for-hire as a way to make a few credits, willing in their desperation to bend their morals to the breaking point. If Joshua’s not going to help you get your name out there, then maybe you need to find someone else who can. 

You’re scrolling through profiles of other liaisons when your hall monitor sends you an alert. A techhead friend of yours, Junhui, set you up with a system to track any unusual movement on your floor. It’s an impressive array of old-school tech, consisting of motion sensors in strategic spots, along with CCTV cameras aimed at your door. It works without the grid, and it keeps you safe. 

There are always surfers in your hallway, since your next-door neighbor Mingyu deals. He’d been the one to explain the term to you - that “surfing” was a sport where people used oval-shaped boards to ride ocean waves. It’s a sport that’s been lost to time, swallowed by the rising tides that have claimed most of the beaches on the planet. These surfers tend not to move so much, but your motion sensors have been calibrated to account for them anyway. A glance at your camera’s feed confirms that it’s not one of them, but rather your best friend Minghao making his way to your door. He’s dressed in a black leather jacket, cycle helmet in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. 

You greet him with a warm smile. Minghao’s eyes zero in on the purple splotch beneath your right eye, and he sighs. 

“Thought I did a better job of teaching you how to duck than that.” 

“I did duck. That’s when they kneed me in the face,” you inform him, locking your door behind him. You have multiple physical and electronic locks, so the process takes a few seconds. Can’t be too careful in your line of work. “So shut up.” 

Minghao shakes his head. “No. C’mere.” 

He sets his things down on your kitchen unit counter, and opens his arms. You make a face at him, but step into his embrace. He wraps his arms around you, squeezing tight, and you hug him back, resting your head on his shoulder. 

Minghao’s the closest thing you have to family. The two of you found each other when you were both way too young to be living on your own. You taught him how to steal. He taught you how to fight. Together, you survived. 

“I’m glad you’re here,” he tells you, and you hum in reply. He says that every time he sees you again after you’ve completed a job. “I brought gimbap and soju.” 

“Green grape?” you ask, in a playfully hopeful way, and he nods. He always spoils you by bringing your favorites. You’d asked him about it once, and he said he liked taking care of you, in that quietly serious way of his. 

You think about that a lot. 

Your apartment is a little bigger than the modern tenements’ living units, but it’s still not very large, consisting of two small rooms and an even smaller bathroom with a single stall shower and toilet. The front room contains a kitchen unit, two-chair table, and couch, facing a projection wall that you keep turned off except for mandatory viewings. The other room is your bedroom. You have a full-sized bed and a tall clothing unit in there. It’s the bed that keeps you from moving to a more modern building. You can’t stand the tightness of sleeping pods, don’t understand how anyone could sleep while being compressed like that. You need your space. 

Minghao hangs his jacket on the back of a chair, and the two of you sit to eat. You share the details of your last hit between shots of soju. This talk of hunting down a target is nothing new to him. After all, Minghao’s the one who introduced you to this line of work. He thought you’d flourish. He was right, as usual. 

As you finish your tale, he shakes his head again, pouring you another round of shots. “I guess that could’ve gone worse. Remember the last time you went to Greater Tokyo?" 

He raises his shot glass, and you clink yours against his before you toss yours back. He tilts his head, exposing his elegant neck as he drinks. 

You wipe your mouth, nodding. “Yeah. I remember. But that was before I got these.” You raise your free hand, curling your fingers slightly. Tiny, razor-sharp blades extend from beneath your fingernails, then retract with the twitch of your muscles. “They helped.” 

“I’m sure they did, Sable,” Minghao laughs, calling you by the nickname you picked up when you got your blades. Everyone finds you cute and unassuming when you’re not on a job, like a fluffy little sable. Everyone always underestimates the sharpness of your claws. “So what’s next?” 

“I don’t know,” you sigh, rising from the table to flop dramatically onto your couch. “No offers at the moment. Or leads.” 

Minghao hums in sympathy, joining you. He crosses his legs, one boot over the other, and lies back against the saggy cushions. “Have you given any thought to my idea?” 

You don’t answer, watching your friend as he sighs, relaxing into your couch. He closes his eyes, and you take the opportunity to observe him unnoticed. He looks tired, forehead creased beneath his blue hair, like waiting for your response is stressing him out. Maybe it is. Maybe you should just talk to him about it. After all, he’s family. If anyone would understand, wouldn’t it be him? 

“I have been thinking about it,” you finally begin, slowly, “but I haven’t really come to any decision yet.” 

Minghao opens his eyes. “How much longer do you need?” You shrug, and he sighs. “Look, I don’t want to lay out all the reasons I think we should leave New Seoul again. I’m really tired today, and I don’t feel like making my case one more time. But you cannot deny that things seem to be drying up around here.” 

Again you shrug, not wanting to agree. If you admit that he’s right, then it will be harder to defend your desire to stay. Because you’re pretty sure that’s what you want.

He lets his head fall back against the back of your couch. He says your name, the real one, in a soft tone of voice. “Please. Think about it, okay? I know you don’t like the idea of starting over, but we’d be doing it together.” 

There was a time when you thought you didn’t need anything else in the world, as long as you had Minghao. Things have changed. 

BEEDOBEEDOBEEDO 

At that moment, your hall monitor begins going insane, letting out a shrill, siren-like alert. Minghao sits up as you grab your console and pull up the camera feeds. That’s a very special alarm that’s going off right now, set up to monitor for very specific individuals. 

“Who’s out there?” Minghao asks, leaning over your shoulder to view your screen. 

The figure is still halfway down the hall, so you tap on another camera, and gasp. “Oh, fuck me!” 

Minghao tugs on the console, trying to see better. “Is that - “

“The Neon Viper,” you nod, mouth set in a firm line. A rival assassin. What the fuck is Lee Chan doing on your floor? Is he here for you? 

“Oh fuck,” Minghao agrees. “Get ready.” 

You hand him the console, so you can run into your other room, and smash your hand on a tiny panel set into the wall. Part of the wall suddenly sinks in, retracting panels sliding opening to reveal a small array of weaponry. Another favor from Junhui. You grab your weapon of choice and smash the panel again to close the wall.

Minghao’s already waiting by the door, one hand on his hip, where his gun is holstered. He silently hands you the console, so you can check the cameras. Your rival, one of the deadliest assassins in all of New Seoul, is only a few feet from your door now. When he’s within knocking distance, he starts to lift his arm, then he suddenly lurches forward, barely catching himself on your door just in time. 

“What the fuck - he can barely stand!” you whisper to Minghao. “He’s bleeding out on my door.” 

“It could be a trick,” he warns, but you’ve already lit your cyblade, the electrified dagger humming to life as you nod to the door. 

“Open it.” 

Minghao sighs, but does as you say. There’s a weak shout from the other side as the wounded man falls over the threshold. The Neon Viper, so named for his ability to strike fast, like a fearsome serpent, lays in a trembling, wet heap at your feet, staining your carpet with his blood. What happened to him? More importantly, why is he here?

Chan weakly raises his head, and you point your cyblade at him. “What the fuck are you doing here?” you hiss. 

“H-help m-me, please,” he manages to stammer out, before his eyes roll back in his head, and he passes out. 

The hallway is quiet as you and Minghao stare at the unconscious man. When you finally glance at your friend, he looks as confused as you feel. 

“Did he ask you to help him?” Minghao asks. You nod. “What the fuck.” 

Yeah, today’s been off. And your night is only starting. 

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