Chapter 1: Grey Synaptic Requiem

It was Wednesday, late Wednesday.
As Cylea made her way through the airport terminal, people surged past on either side of her, pushing and shouldering, hefting bags and coats like weapons against the cold and the light drizzle of rain that played along the sidewalks outside. Her black leather boots padded silent across dull grey carpet worn smooth by the footsteps of thousands of passengers over the last century and a few spare decades beyond that, stepping lightly past clusters of obese, stereotypical tourists that clung to the walls in noisy knots. Most of them were Chinese, men and women from the East chattering happily or descending upon the gift shops and restaurants that lined the walls in tight clumps, sweaty fingers eagerly pressing cash cards into those glorified vending machines. In a way, it was almost entertaining to watch them, wealthy and oblivious– nothing like Hok and his family, her family, the family that had taken her in and treated her as one of their own, working to secure her sanctuary with the stark, no-nonsense Triads... She swallowed quickly, pushing the thoughts away, trying not to think about the sacrifices they had made, the sacrifices that had gotten her as far as they had, allowed her to be here, now, on the edge of an almost phantom-like safety that waited for her somewhere in Hong Kong with the Golden Koi. Thinking about all the terrible twists and turns she’d endured that day, about all the brushes with death and hot cacophonic explosions of lead and fire and the outright shattering of a way of life she’d finally grown accustomed to brought a bad taste to her mouth, a bad taste that had the nasty tendency to linger.
Sighing, she ran one lithe hand absently through her short, wild blond hair, then let it drift back to the top of a worn, olive-drab commuter bag slung loosely over her shoulder. Her vibrant, clear blue eyes drifted absently ahead of her, distant and aloof over her distinctively Germanic nose and gently curving, painfully pink lips. At her neck, a small silver chain stretched down her chest to a single Japanese character, kanji for “Tsuki,” –she’d long since forgotten the translation– that rested between her breasts, just over the top of a white, stylized eye of the Egyptian god Ra emblazoned across the front of her loose, black tanktop.
With the quiet clink of metal on metal, the kanji bounced lightly against something that was an even bigger mystery to her– a small brass key marked with a single word: “Gramercy.” She knew both were important, significant in some hidden way, each keys to mysteries in their own right– but how she knew was another story, one she still had yet to discover, an elusive thread that she kept grabbing at and that kept unraveling more mysteries than answers with each desperate attempt. It was like deja vu, but stranger, much stranger, almost like sifting through someone else’s memories.
Pulling her free hand from the pockets of her worn out and stained blue jeans, she gently touched the kanji and the key, almost superstitiously, as if she were the last priestess of some long forgotten faith touching the last sacred talismans in the last short hour before the end of everything– there was still a lot she didn’t know about herself, a lot of strange, dark potential she felt buried somewhere within her, potential that scared her, though she couldn’t say exactly why. More of those strange feelings. Shivering against the memories, against the images of her bloodied fists and the edge of Walt’s neural matrix sticking out of the crushed and beaten caricature of a smiling butler that had served as his face, she forced her eyes forward, to the tourists and the sprawling, windowed waiting area. It was all in the past now, she told herself– everything that had happened in Los Angeles was behind her now, everything except that damned bounty.
Closing her eyes briefly and breathing a sigh, she glanced absently to the left, watching as an elderly man, body merged into a roughly chair-like, motorized amalgam of cybertechnology that was more life-support hardware than flesh, shakily conversed with a tall Korean woman whose bold figure was all sleek, hard lines encased in the stiff folds of some kind of dark green running suit. Her dark, jade-green eyes, as wary and severe as any snake’s, met Cylea’s gaze instantly, silently and solidly urging her to look away and mind her own business. Not that it mattered– the old man reminded her too much of Smash, the hacker-turned-government tool from her not-so-distant past and  the woman was a vague echo of the Golden Koi Triad rep she’d known as Shang, both of those thoughts bringing on a whole new wave of painful memories she had to struggle to repress. Again, her eyes darted back to the happy, chattering flood of tourists, and again she breathed a tired sigh.
As the concourse dropped away on either side of her, replaced by huge plate-glass windows that looked out over a seemingly endless sea of light-spotted tarmac, she glanced once at her ticket –an aisle seat on flight thirty-eight forty, service to Hong Kong through gate B fourty-four– and stepped onto the angled gridmesh of the gravway. Based on the same suspensor technology that made hoversedans possible, gravways were expensive strips that served as a more modern version of the movable walkway, using an artificially-generated gravity field to push passengers along at a speed roughly equivalent to walking.
She looked up slowly, forcing a smile as her eyes followed a huge liner pulling out of a gate at the far end of the airfield. It looked like one of the newer extraorbital products of some legacy manufacturer like Boeing or Ellison Conway, a craft that could circumnavigate the earth in four hours pushing the redline with a full complement of close to five hundred passengers plus baggage. It had been all over the news when a new law had come across in the re-envisioning of the old FAA codes requiring every older, petrol-based liner to be retrofitted with the newest engines and fuel systems, but the impact on the huge extraorbital liners had been the most talked about– running only a pair of underwing nacelles that wasted so little fuel they could run for weeks without needing to be replenished with EX-2 –a highly concentrated and compact form of atomically altered water– the largest and fastest liners had suddenly become almost dirt-cheap to run– not that it had driven down the price of seats any. If anything, the prices had actually risen. Now considered the transportation of the elite, every seat aboard these liners was first class– the upper lounge, complete with a full-service bar, a pair of synthskin lovebots for every seat, and wireless access to every Neuroline channel available on the planet was simply upgraded to the “Penthouse.”
As she watched the plane taxi off into the darkness, another absent sigh escaped her lips and she looked away. Her destination was getting close now– just beyond a comparatively new desk of some sort of dull grey plastic manned by the same kind of legless servedroid that filled almost every niche and alcove where any kind of business was conducted, half a dozen people were already seated in the waiting area outside the gate for her flight. Forcing another smile, she stepped off the gravway and pushed forward, quickening her pace in a desperate attempt to shake the past from her heels, to think about something pleasant for a change. Not that the idea of flying “Penthouse” wasn’t pleasant, but she doubted she’d ever get the chance to do so, and even then the lovebots would probably get old before too long. Neuroline still sounded interesting... she’d always wanted to see Neoclassic Electrorock goddess Arizona Alhambra perform in Neuroline.
Taking a seat three chairs down from an elderly woman in some sort of teal, flower-print dress with a little boy, maybe two or three years old sitting on her lap, Cylea glanced around the waiting area. Across from her, a man in a disheveled, stained suit skimmed through a handheld newsfeed and absently sipped his coffee next to an emaciated, butch-looking young man absorbed in some sort of meditation. A tiny holographic Jesus rested in his hands, whispering something monotonous she couldn’t hear, but after a moment he looked up, smiled, and gave her a slow, silent nod which she absently returned.
But it wasn’t the other passengers that drew her attention in the end. Glancing around briefly, looking past the scattered, groggy masses and the Chinese tourists, her suspicions were quickly confirmed– the airport was almost completely automated, but the security was still human, though even they showed signs of some kind of heavy cybernetic augmentation or another. The older, grizzled veterans with patches of worn chrome and hard grey plastic showing on sagging, age-tanned skin seemed to stand out more than the sleeker new recruits, but it was still easiest to spot the long-term personnel who actually lived at the airport, kept in an endless cycle of half-consciousness by bulky EverWary systems and breaking only for coffee or some cheap airport food every few hours to keep their bodies from indulging in outright rebellion.
Half a century ago, when seemingly half the world’s security personnel had jumped at the chance to test out the first EverWary systems put out by Duke Industries’ highly controversial neural restructuring division, the units had been large and clunky to say the least, sacrificing nearly the entire back of the skull for a thick, direct-interface band of chrome that effectively eliminated the need to sleep. Unfortunately, it also had the nasty tendency to keep its owner in a permanent state of groggy grumpiness that only got worse with age, and often shaved years off a person’s life expectancy to boot. Even the latest models weren’t pretty– the hardware itself was hard to compress into something even half-sized, especially after the whole project was shelved and research had gone completely underground following a series of spectacular lawsuits. These days, new EverWary systems were a quasi-legal black market commodity that left a thumb-thick, plastic wraparound stretching across the back of the skull, one that stood out even under some of the most expensive nanocosmetic hairstyle jobs. Still, considering the consequences of having your brain rewired to avoid the need to sleep, or at least, to keep your whole brain from slipping into unconsciousness at once, it was one hell of a sacrifice to make just for a bigger paycheck.
A peal of squealing laughter caught her ear and she looked over, smiling softly as the toddler and the older woman met her gaze with happy grins. Silently, she grinned back, waving. It was refreshing to see something that didn’t remind her of anything unpleasant, but such things rarely lasted, and this was no exception. The Korean woman she’d seen earlier took a seat at the end of the row, her face as cold and emotionless as a rock, with the old man wheeling up beside her, wheezing unhealthily.
Turning away, Cylea let her eyes drift to the windows. Overhead in the cold, starless night sky, clouds roiled fitfully like boiling mercury under the light of the full moon. The tarmac glowed a faint blue under the quilt-like sea of cloud cover, brightening slightly at the base of the plane that waited at the gate like a silent ferryman for someone’s last journey– one she hoped wouldn’t turn out to be hers. Inside, people skittered past the windows, walking briskly along the aisle, making sure everything was prepared and clean, ready to receive the next load of passengers.
On the whole, the plane itself wasn’t anything spectacular, just a small jet liner, a cheap Mexican knock off of something the Pakistani had reverse-engineered from a design the Chinese had based on god only knew what, plastered with cheap, peeling decals of the Chinese flag and the logo for GKI air wherever the paint had worn off. Its engines were obvious retrofits, something shoddily done that looked like a couple of archaic turbo-boosted hydrogen systems had been jammed haphazardly into housings that had been intended for something far smaller– originally, they’d probably housed an even older set of turbine engines, but now they were forced and stretched over what was probably a technician’s nightmare held together with duct tape and more of those already overused decals.
When the call to begin boarding finally came and the gate doors were opened, Cylea stood with the rest of the tourists. The old woman let the toddler stumble and run near her feet, and the Korean woman turned stonily toward the gate, the chair-bound old man watching her with a soft smile. Ten minutes later put Cylea on the plane, ten rows down from the front and on the left side of the aisle, sitting in the outermost of the two seats next to a teenage girl with dark hair that flared out at odd angles just past her collar, brushing against her shoulders when she moved. She’d been only too happy to show Cylea that the image spread out across the front of her shirt was a full-motion capture of some popular band, the “Screaming Scarlet Dundlemen,” complete with a touch-activated thirty-second soundbite from one of their latest songs, a jumpy number and a top-ten hit titled  “Sweden.” It wasn’t bad music, something like a cross between downtempo darkwave and ambient salsa with all the keening bagpipes of traditional Celtic mingled with the same overused beat she’d heard on countless pop songs in the past, but hearing the same condensed thirty second strip over and over again got old fast.
Smiling politely and pulling a silicon magazine out of the seat in front of her, Cylea shifted toward the aisle and thumbed the dull grey strip of metal and fabric to life, soft silicon lighting up with the brilliant cover and all the glossy, full color pictures of GKI air’s shopping catalog. As the soundbite started again, she flicked the language preference settings from Chinese to German and triggered the activation for the first page, giving the girl another polite smile and nodding absently before burying her eyes in pages of shiny, kitschy useless junk with price tags only a corporate suit might find reasonable.