Jack 1

“I hear you’re a jack,” said the man in his uptower accent as he squeezed himself against the table into the seat opposite me. He grunted, the table grunted, the taped-up seat grunted. His cheap pants grunted and creaked, but somehow survived the gyrations. 

His tag halo said he was broke so I didn’t look up from my recon eggs topped with tua duang. Instead, I squirted more of Mama Cahn’s homemade sauce across my plate.

“I said–” the man started, then stopped when I looked up at him.

“My time costs,” I said, as I swirled the fat split larva in the thick sauce. The eggs are for shit, thick blocks of gene-carved soy, but Mama’s home-farmed tua duang was to die for. I speared one, popped it my mouth, chewed, while I held his piggy black eyes with my yellow gaze. Sauce and grease made for a pleasant burn all the way down. 

He didn’t blink at the mods. Okay, points for him. A second later, two hundred in mixed high-end corporate and polity scrip hit my network. Immediately spendable, no expire date. Piggy Eyes’s tags were a better liar than he was. I paid my rent while I waited for him to catch up.

“For your time,” the man said. I chewed slower and he got the point. “I represent the–”

I tuned him out while I took pix and sent them on to my concierge about the time I felt the first feather-touches of Piggy’s digital fingers in my own pie. While he talked nonsense, he rifled around in my public data, then set his hounds on the few threads I had hanging out for people like him to track down, so they could report back to their masters that they’d actually done something resembling work. That made them happy, and happy people paid more. 

Piggy found the cop career and traced that back to the military career, both of which had cast me aside when the money train derailed and took everything down with it. That usually satisfied most people that I knew my way around town, and so it was with Piggy. 

Meanwhile, I was doing the same (But a little better, I like to think). My dogs came back with a cluster of rotating aliases leading to shell companies and double-blinds, some of which I’d run into often enough to recognize. Enough that I could say ‘forensic talent scout’. ‘George’, his current name of choice, blathered while I nodded. 

Both of us watched multiple reflections of the other, smeared across hundreds of devices. I was armed. So was he.