5 – What Operators Do

As they slipped out of the cab into the dark, neon-lit parking lot of the Mirror Box Motel, Addie held her pack open and carefully guided Humpty into it. The air smelled of chemsticks, and the sounds of murmured conversations mixed with laughter drifted from the dark corners of the lot. Groups lingered near the stairs leading to the second level, around cars blasting loud, thumping music, and under the awnings in front of the motel rooms.

“Lovely place,” Tony chuckled. “What room did they go into?”

“Seven.” Addie nodded toward the central part of the U-shaped structure. “Bottom floor.”

“Got it. Really nice work, Ads.” He tossed the compliment over his shoulder as he started toward the motel office, and Addie wished she could understand why those simple words made her stomach tumble as her neck heated up. She followed him into the office.

The clerk was behind a plastiglass barrier that was molded into the top of a faintly pink-colored desk. More red and pink neon signs on the walls declaring things like “Love,” “Seize the Moment,” and “Memories are What Matter” threw the room into uncomfortable, reddish tones.

The clerk’s unnatural flesh gave away the fact that she was an older-model synth. It looked like skin, but it had a plastic texture that was a hallmark of the early synth-flesh materials from a couple of decades ago. Her hair was similarly artificial, but her eyes were very lifelike—pretty with long lashes and irises that glittered like emeralds.

“Need a room?” she asked, her eyes narrowing in amusement as she regarded Tony and Addie. “Nineteen bits an hour.”

Tony cocked his head to the side. “Seriously? That’s pretty steep if we stay the night.”

“Oh, honey. People usually don’t stay more than an hour. We have to make a living, you know.”

“Fair enough. Seven’s my lucky number. I’ll take that one.”

“Sorry, doll face. That one’s occupied.”

“Ah, dammit.” Tony looked at Addie. “You got a preference, sweetie?” He grinned sideways, his eyes saying he knew he was treading in dangerous waters. He was wrong, though; Addie didn’t mind. In fact, she wanted to play along. She stepped up beside him and hung on his arm, nuzzling his shoulder.

“How about six or eight, baby? They’re close to lucky seven.”

“Again, I apologize, but those rooms are taken.” The synthetic woman shrugged. “If you wait a little while, I’m sure one of them will clear out.”

Addie sighed, tapping her chin with her index finger. She pictured the view of the motel from Humpty’s perspective as she’d zoomed in on the number to Fletcher Grames’s room. He was in seven, but the room above him was number twenty. Feigning disappointment, she made a dissatisfied humming sound and asked, “What about twenty?”

“That one is available. Would you like to purchase insurance for the—”

“Just flick me the payment address. We’re good without the extras,” Tony interrupted.

“Done. I’m setting the door to accept your bio imprint. Enjoy your stay.” The synth looked down, and Addie wondered what she was doing. Did synths entertain themselves? Was she watching movies or playing games on her AUI, or was she just…being?

She followed Tony out of the office, and he smiled at her. “Smart thinking. The room above?”

Addie grinned, pleased at earning more kudos so quickly. “Yep.”

Tony rubbed his chin. “Not sure what the floors are like, though. We need to go through the ceiling, too—hope the bit’s long enough.”

Addie nodded and shrugged. “It was the only thing I could think of. Do you wish you’d splurged for the laser cutter?” When they’d been at the hardware store, and the clerk showed them drills and “Forstner” bits, he’d made the offhand comment that a laser would solve Tony’s problem a lot more elegantly. Tony had been tempted but decided to avoid overkill while they were on a budget.

He grinned down at her, clicking his tongue as he threw his arm over her shoulders. “Oof, already calling me cheap on our honeymoon?”

Addie choked out a startled laugh. “You’re taking me here on our honeymoon?”

Tony cocked an eyebrow. “We’re on a budget, hon! I’m saving for our cottage in the country.”

Enjoying the roleplay, Addie slid out from under Tony’s arm but held onto his mechanical fingers, tugging him toward the exterior stairs on the corner. As they walked under the shadowy awnings and another waft of fruit-scented chem smoke came her way, Addie reflected on the bizarre fact that she was about to go into a motel room on Glitter Row at night

. The place might not be as dangerous as the area between her neighborhood and the NGT tower, but it was definitely nowhere she’d have been caught dead a few months ago.

She supposed the needler tucked under her new jacket, and the tall, certified killer walking beside her added some layers of comfort. Even so, as they came to the stairs, a few rowdy-looking banger types looked their way, mostly leering in her direction, and she felt her usual jitters begin to surface. Tony tugged her hand, pulling her to his other side and draping an arm over her shoulders again. He’d effectively put himself between her and the leering men. Part of her bristled, but another part got all warm and comfortable and…dumb.

“Yo, gonna have a party up there?” one of the men asked, stepping to block the concrete steps partially.

“Wanna flick us her tag, bro? We’ll wait ’til you’re—Ack!” Tony’s cybernetic hand lashed out like a snake, grabbing the guy by the collar of his synth-leather jacket and squeezing it tight as he pulled him close, his amber LED eye illuminating the loudmouth’s pale cheeks with a sulfuric glow.

“Check your mouth, kid.” Tony shook him once and let go, glaring at the other two, and that’s when the tone of the encounter took an unexpected twist.

A thin, wiry, dark-skinned guy sitting on the hood of a nearby street rod howled, “Shit, Jack! You got a death wish? That’s fuckin’ Shepherd!”

The guy Tony had shaken looked at the speaker and then back at Tony. “Wh-who?”

“I showed you the vid yesterday—the guy from the Boxer Day fights, dumbass!”

Another one of the youngsters howled, “Holy shit! It is him! This guy beat the kidneys out of the Grinder!”

“Oh, damn.” The guy Tony had been squeezing stumbled away from the stairs, nearly tripping over a concrete parking curb. “My bad, Shepherd. I didn’t know.”

Tony waved his hand dismissively and gently pushed Addie toward the steps. She started up, surprised but grinning about Tony’s sudden street cred. That was her doing! Well, she supposed it was possible these guys had been watching someone else’s vid, but she doubted it. Her’s had gotten a lot of views over the last few weeks.

On the second-level walkway, as she hurried toward room number twenty, she looked over her shoulder at Tony, offering an almost shy-sounding “Thanks.”

“What for?”

She raised an eyebrow, surprised at the question. “I dunno. Defending my honor or something.”

“Nah, if I didn’t shut ’em down, they would’ve escalated. They were testing me out with that stuff.”

“So, my honor was secondary?”

Tony chuckled and shrugged. “I mean, I didn’t say that.”

Addie snorted as she approached their door, passing a woman in a feathery pink crop top who stood outside room nineteen smoking a chemstick. The fumes stung Addie’s eyes as she passed through. At the door, she pressed her thumb to the bio-lock. It beeped, flashed a green LED, and clicked. She pulled it open, and Tony slipped in, somehow already holding his pistol. Did he expect an ambush or something?

Inside, she watched Tony go in and out of the bathroom, peer into the little closet, and then nod, smoothly holstering his gun under his coat. “All clear. You got the drill?”

Addie nodded, slipping her pack off her shoulders. She dug the drill out, already equipped with the weird drill bit with a circular tip just a bit wider than her spider’s body. As she handed it to Tony, she pointed to the little closet. “Do you think the layout is the same? If you drill in the closet, they’re less likely to see the bit coming through the ceiling.”

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Tony nodded. “Was thinking the same thing.” He knelt inside the flimsy, mirrored, sliding door, but he didn’t do anything. He seemed frozen in place.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just listening. You think that noise in the lot outside is enough?” He held the drill up and depressed the trigger. It whirred, but not particularly loudly.

Addie couldn’t keep her lips from spreading into a mischievous grin as she repeated his words from earlier. “Just drill slowly.”

“Heh, yeah, all right. Your spider ready?”

Addie nodded. “I’ll get her ready.”

While Tony used a box cutter he’d bought at the hardware store to cut a tiny square of carpeting out of the corner of the closet, Addie took the box containing her spider drone out of her pack. “You should name her,” he said as he positioned the drill and slowly depressed the trigger. The soft grind as it dug into the cheap wooden subfloor was hardly noticeable.

Addie lifted her little spider out of the box and onto her palm. “Yeah, I was thinking of that. What about Lacy?”

“Lacy?”

“You know, ’cause spiders make webs, and they kind of look like lace.” Addie shrugged. “I guess it’s not too creative.”

“Nah, it’s cool.” Tony seemed absorbed in his slow-drilling task, so Addie sat on the foot of the bed and waited, looking around the depressing little motel room. She supposed it would look a little better in dim lighting. With the overhead light on, you could see how the pink wallpaper was peeling at the corners. There were grimy stains all along the door jamb and near the light switch. The carpeting was worn thin in a path from the door to the bed to the bathroom.

True to the motel's name, there were too many mirrors—above the dresser, behind the bed, on the wall separating the bathroom from the main room. She saw herself in them and suddenly felt weird, like she was out of place, like this couldn’t be her sitting in an hourly motel room waiting for Tony to drill through the floor so she could spy on some people meeting for a tryst. “You wouldn’t really, would you?” she suddenly asked.

“Huh?”

“Bring me to a place like this?”

Tony chuckled. “Ads, if you’re ever with a guy who tries to bring you to a place like this, you better kick him where it counts and walk away. Don’t look back.”

The response made her smile, but before she could respond, he straightened up and shook his head. “This isn’t going to work. I had the whole bit in there, and all I hit was a bunch of damn insulation.” He stood and paced around the room while Addie tried to think of another solution. “I was thinking the air vents, but each of these rooms has its own mini-split.” He pointed to the AC unit on the back wall near the ceiling.

He walked into the bathroom, and Addie got up to follow him. Inside, he pointed to the air vent on the wall. “I could take the grill off this vent so your spider could get in, but even if you piloted it out and then back into the vent below—hopefully, room seven’s—you’d be stuck behind the grill. I guess you could spy on anything that happened in the bathroom, but that might not do it.”

Addie nodded, still cupping her spider in her hand. She let her eyes drift around the bathroom and nodded toward the tub. “Tony, have you ever seen a spider lurking around your bathtub drain?”

“Ah, I don’t—” Tony stopped short, holding up a finger. “Is your spider waterproof?”

“I was reading the online documentation when we got back from Dino’s and, yes, actually, she very much is waterproof. More importantly, the little nanomolecular setae—I just learned that word—on the tips of her legs can cling to almost anything. I think I can drive her through the pipes to the room beneath us. The drains should be connected, right?”

Tony nodded. “There’s no way each of these units has a separate drain stack.” He jerked his chin toward the bathroom. “You’re sure she can cling to the pipes? Even wet? ’Cause she’s going to have to go through a couple of P-traps.”

“I’m not sure how well she can cling to wet things, but I don’t think it will matter. We can try, right?”

Tony nodded and moved out of her way, leaning against the sink counter. “All yours.”

Addie sat on the tub's edge and placed her spider drone—Lacy, she supposed—near the drain. Then, she closed her eyes and sent her awareness out along the trails of dust in her matrix. Almost immediately, she felt the warm glow of Lacy’s Dust engine and stretched her consciousness toward it. The next thing she knew, she was seeing and hearing through Lacy’s cameras and microphones. She was aware of her clever little body and started her toward the dark gap between the drain stopper and the drain.

The spider’s legs clicked on the vinyl composite tub, and then she slipped through the gap, the tiny needle-like filaments at the tips of her legs gripping the tub's surface, the metal of the drain housing, and then the PVC of the pipes. The spider’s cameras were equipped with night vision. It projected a tiny infrared light, which allowed it to see clearly in the dark, and Addie shuddered when she saw the hair and moldy growths in the P-trap.

Luckily, the drone didn’t transmit any sense of touch or smell, and she could sort of disassociate as it crawled and nudged its way through the disgusting blockage. It helped to narrate what she was seeing and doing. “This drain is disgusting. There’s goopy stuff and hair and…” She shuddered, trailing off as the drone climbed its way out of the water and up out of the trap. “Do I just go straight down the bigger pipe? Oh, gosh, toilets don’t dump into this, do they? What if—”

“There’s no one above us, and I’m not gonna flush the toilet. Just go down and take the next pipe that’s the same size as the one you came out of. The toilet and sink drains will be on the side. I mean, relative to the tub drain.”

“This is so weird,” Addie whispered, and she meant it. It was like a whole other world in those pipes, seen through Lacy’s miniature perspective. She descended the drain, pleased by how sure the footing felt to her drone, and when she found another pipe just like the one she’d come out of, she entered it and, after just a few moments, found herself entering another P-trap. “I think I’m about to climb up into their tub.”

“Cool. That was fast.”

Addie pushed through another clump of moldy hair, and then her spider crawled up the drain into a dimly lit bathtub. Before she emerged from the drain, she studied the room and listened, ensuring nobody was there or imminently inbound. She needn’t have worried; sounds of amorous activity echoed through the doorway. “I think they’re, um, going at it.”

“Huh. Well, I know it feels dirty, but get your spider in a position to watch and listen. Hopefully, they’ll talk afterward.”

Addie nodded, driving Lacy up the side of the tub, then up the wall. She navigated the door lintel and climbed up to the shadowy crevice where the wall met the ceiling. Following that line, she was soon in the corner of the room, peering down at the bed where a woman was riding Fletcher Grames like he was a quarter horse going for a blue ribbon. “Oof, Tony!” Addie hissed, flicking most of her attention back to her body. Her spider could watch and record without her help until Fletcher and the woman finished.

“More than you wanted to see?” he asked, an amused twinkle in his eyes. At some point, he’d put the toilet seat down and sat on it.

Addie glared at him. “This feels pretty dirty.”

“You don’t have to keep any of that footage. We’re just here to see if Fletcher’s selling his employer out. Remember, that woman is supposedly some kind of agent from another corp. It’s just two corps messing with each other, and all we’re doing is exposing it.”

“Exposing him.”

“C’mon, Ads, look at this place. You think he’s some kind of innocent guy? You saw the car he was riding in. Guy’s a corpo lifer, and I don’t get the feeling he’s a nice one. I bet—”

Addie held up her finger. “Shh. I think they’re taking a break.” She flicked back to Lacy and stared down at the bed, illuminated in tones of red and pink by soft underglow lighting. The woman was lying beside Fletcher, her head propped up on one elbow as she faced him. She was pretty—too pretty to be meeting a random corpo exec in a place like the Mirror Box Motel. She traced shapes on Fletcher’s pale, sweaty chest with one carefully manicured nail.

“Tired already? Can’t you pop another one of your special pills?” she asked.

“Babe, I can’t keep taking those. They don’t let me sleep. I was a zombie all week.” Fletcher yawned, displaying a mouth full of perfect white teeth and a designer, gold-embossed lower grill.

“Poser,” Addie whispered.

“Huh?” Tony leaned closer. “What is it?”

“Shh.” Addie zoomed in with Lacy’s cams, getting an excellent close-up view of “Theresa X’s” face.

“Oh really?” the woman teased. “I bet you had a good time explaining to your little corpo buddies what was keeping you up all night.”

“Heh.” Fletcher blew out a breath and chuckled. “Gomez thinks I’m hooked, thinks I’ll be the next sucker to get married.” He cleared his throat noisily and reached for a water bottle on the nightstand.

Theresa giggled. “Don’t want to marry me, Fletchy? No ring coming my way?”

“Oh, I don’t know about a ring, but how does a little getaway sound? If I send you out ahead of me, I could meet you. The company has a cabin up north. I just have to schedule…”

“Fletchy,” Theresa sighed. “You know I can’t go anywhere until I get clear of my little problem. Have you made any progress?”

“Babe,” Fletcher whined, shaking his head. “I told you that file isn’t in my department. I’ve got to cash in some favors to get ahold of it, which means talking to the right people. My buddy from acquisitions has been on vacation, but when he gets back, I’ll do what I can.” He set the water bottle down and turned to face Theresa again, mirroring her by propping his head on his elbow.

They stared at each other for a long couple of seconds, and then Theresa giggled and pulled the sheet down. “I guess I can be patient!”

“Ack,” Addie refocused on what her eyes were seeing and shook her head. “They’re doing it again. I think I might have gotten what we need, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh.” Addie briefly described the conversation, and Tony nodded, slapping her knee encouragingly.

“You got a clear shot of Fletcher sleeping with a rival corp operative. You got him agreeing to help get her a file. Doesn’t matter what it is; I’d say we earned our bits.”

“That’s it?”

He laughed, nodding. “That’s it! Job well done.” He clapped his hands together like he was dusting them off. “Just get Lacy back, and we can set up a meeting with Torque.”

Addie nodded and sent the recall command to Lacy. She just had to watch, only partially paying attention, while the spider slipped out of the room, back into the tub, and down into the drain. It seemed almost too easy. “This is what operators do?”

“Oh, this and a million other things. In any case, it’s a good job for us to get started. Hopefully, Torque has some more like it.” Tony jostled her shoulder. “Cheer up, Ads. You made this job a walk in the park!”

Addie nodded, smiling. It felt a little forced, but she had to admit that, so far, this had been easy money. “Right. Do you think he can meet us tonight?”

“Oh, I’d be shocked if he didn’t. It’s still early.” As Lacy clambered through the drain, Addie watched Tony collect his drill and stuff it into her backpack. He brought the box for Lacy over to the tub and sat beside her. “I know what you’re feeling,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He chuckled. “Trust me, though, this kind of job might not be an adrenaline rush, but it’s what we want for now. Yeah, we aren’t going to make fifty grand spying on a small-time corpo data thief, but this is the sort of job that helps you learn what works and what doesn’t. It helps us build cred so that, eventually, we’ll get hired for those big-time ops. Cool?” He held out a fist, and Addie grinned, nodding as she bumped it with hers.

“Like ice!” Of course, she ruined the response by giggling, but Tony helped by laughing along with her.