Free Escapology by Ren Warom Page A

like an aquatic puffball mushroom studded with connection inlets. He has enough nano-wires for each, can have as many as he wants down here, it’s all a matter of extracting data from around him and reshaping it.
    It’s not magic, though some of what he does down here feels magical. This whole place is code, and only various applications of Virtual Armament can keep any of that code hidden from him or locked to his use. A newcomer to Tech is always shocked by the level of VA in the system, but old hands like Shock know why it’s there. If it weren’t, he’d be a god down here. Fucking Superman.
    Working at the hub it takes sixteen sweat-soaked minutes to get past mid-level VA to office personnel files. Not exactly a personal record, but not too shabby either, considering the gently over-toasted wreckage he’s been of late. Now to find a suitable candidate. Her shadow for years, he can quote Mim’s vital stats chapter and verse; all he has to do is cook up a fit from these office fauna non-entities.
    That takes another thirty-three minutes exactly, by which time he’s a gibbering wreck. Considering he took four minutes to get here in the first place he’s got exactly seven minutes before the plug’s pulled whether he’s ready or not. Suppressing an odd pang in his stomach, he DL’s the details to his flash, retracts his nano-wires, and pulses back to the gully.
    He gets out with two minutes to spare and, weaving between the cells, exits the shop with a jaunty wave at the Gothster who, quite rightly, blanks him flat. Foot to street takes half the time street to Slip shop took now he knows the way, and he’s shivering at the mono station before long, feeling unusually dirty.
    He’s done this a dozen and more times before, even for a job of this extent where Mim is essentially going to become this poor, hapless office drone for several days, thereby replacing her, this… who is it again? Realizing he didn’t have time to clock her name, he accesses the stats he stole. Unity Jo-Charbonneau. Interesting name.
    There’s that pang again. Is it guilt? Shock pushes trembling hands into his gut, feeling the slippery material of his jacket slide away under questing fingers.
    “Hungry,” he decides. Because guilt is too scary by half.
    A bowl of noodles later, the pang remains, sat uncomfortable as gas behind a full belly, and the name Unity Jo-Charbonneau spins in his head like a fairground ride, fast and nausea-inducing. He tells himself she’ll only feel invisible for a few days, only a few days of wondering what the hell’s happened to her life and who that stranger everyone thinks is her might be. Then she’ll have it all back. Office mediocrity, small apartment somewhere cheap, all the bland trappings she’s thus far taken for granted. And all she’ll feel, whoever she is, is relief that everyone once again knows she’s herself, and whoever was pretending to be her is long gone and won’t be back.
    Or she won’t. Because she won’t make three days. Maybe she’ll drown herself at Port, or swan-dive from a mono platform to become a small, spread-out stain on the ground below. Or run into Streeks and end up a crumpled rag of skin in an alley or a dumpster, nothing left to identify the person she isn’t any more. But he can’t think about that.
    Can’t think either about the possibility that she’s brighter than office material and crowbarred into a less than interesting life through the whim of her Pyschs. Can’t entertain anything like that, even if he knows it could be true. Shock survives like this: focus on Sendai; forget everything else.
    If he tries hard enough, he can make anything fade to background noise.

Amiga and the Shit Mountain
    Temper held in a death grip, Amiga pounds stairs three at a time, cursing out of order shoot shafts, the heady apex of a vertigo-inducing shit mountain of a day. Normally she’d plant a flag and own that shit, but her stress-management skills have gone AWOL,