Someone swore in a cubicle. A rancid smell of perspiration invaded my nostrils when its author hurried out to go to the toilet, a urinary catheter and his pierced plastic bag between his hands.

  “A Monsters & Mazes speedrun. Or some random thing like that,” Shame replied. “I’d rather see them struggle with a stupid game than organize dick-measuring contests by overheating spy satellites in Soviet Space. But I assume you ain’t here to talk ’bout videogames!”

  “Yes. And I do prefer the ‘satanic’ tabletop version when it comes to M&M.”

  I noticed the stern look that Shame threw at me. She grew impatient to know the real reason for my visit and making a cyber-Freak mad was never recommended. “Shouldn’t you be celebrating the fall of the old Emporium?” she growled as the Cognac’s brick in her hand was squeaking under the pressure of her frustration. “I heard you were involved in… the new urbanism plan in downtown Las Pallas.”

  Shame pointed her chin at the TV behind me. A reporter was covering the investigation on Pallas’s Chinatown. In Solaris, information traveled faster than my Swift. “It was a team effort.”

  Shame raised her eyebrow. Her mind forgot about the bottle. She spilled alcohol all around the two glasses that she had clumsily dusted off. “Tu es sérieux? Who fried half the Chinamen?” the Freak asked as her Pied-Noir’s accent resurged. “That kid you’re screwing?”

  Shame and her homework…

  I grabbed the cup that she handed me before putting it down. There was really nothing to celebrate about my excursion on Pallas. “Show a little respect. She’s a friend.”

  Odd coincidence. Ali’s face appeared on TV, followed by a quick interview where Lee spent half his eyewitness airtime rumbling in a parody of French about how Jimmy Carter shouldn’t have let the Emporium go unchecked. Then Jimmy Carter in general.

  “Her prolix feline’s a friend too?”

  “The Martian cat flies a United Nations Swallow. And very well.”

  Shame, then two shots ahead despite the morning hour, let out a laugh and a few drops of alcohol flowed on her chin. I placed my hand on her paw, still gripping the Cognac bottle, signaling that I needed her full attention and all her wits concerning my incoming request.

  “What?” she growled again, throwing the emptied brick down the end of the bar after brushing my hand aside. It loudly smashed against the collection of spirits which took the dust.

  “I’m looking for information…”

  “Bite me!” the Freak snarled. “The Guild and their bullshits already cost me both my legs and my pretty tail!” She then pointed at her pair of mechanical prostheses before turning around to show me her furry rump. “This fab butt has ten years of service in the Metal Rain and survived the Tet-68 Offensive. Bismuth-Ball can sink his stinky request deep into a cosmodon’s arse!”

  The former lieutenant of the Lunar special forces and veteran of the Guild lived off Mancéphalius’s radar for years. Rather fitting. “Personal job. Neither Oberon nor the others are involved.”

  Shamed opened her eyes wide. “Personnel? What a fry! Zéphyr goes rogue!” Shame turned around and handed the glasses to the small robot in charge of disinfecting them. I saw her laughing in the mirror. “Related to the Kitty, ain’t it? You don’t fully trust them…” she asked, her probing eyes filled with anger but covered with a veil of sadness. “Yet you like her. That bunny. She must ace your race, I suppose. She ain’t no damn Freak.”

  How deep did Shame had already conducted her own investigation? She had always been as clairvoyant as overly jealous. “Yes—no, I—”

  “Relax. I’m just an old broken mutant who loves messing with you!” she laughed although the quivering tone of her voice betrayed her feelings. “So? What do you want? I guess you haven’t found what you’re after yet.” Shame immediately started cleaning the dust from the mirror with her sleeves. Her fennec DNA kept her from being still for more than five seconds.

  “I stole some intel from the Chinese.”

  “You scooped during your job? Does the new General Secretary Linus Lao know? Bold. You—” She stopped as a young boy with a helmet on his forehead approached the bar to ask for a Capri Sun. She threw him an ice-covered aluminum pouch alongside several insults in French. Shame knew how to regard her clientele with love and care. “So?” she resumed like nothing happened.

  “The Emporium bought Monsutā tech from a single supply chain and underground organization.” Shame pouted. I sighed before adding: “I’m going after this organization.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “The data from Las Pallas is heavily encrypted. Can’t fully crack. The breadcrumbs do lead me here. To Jupiter. This is why I need Carole.” I never dealt with Shame’s sister. But I heard she was undoubtedly one of this generation’s most talented hackers. Yet as stable as uranium ore in a microwave.

  I saw Shame hesitate before scratching one of her golden earrings. The cloud of dust raised by her household made her cough before an implant flashed on her cheeks.

  “What is she at?” I insisted.

  “Carole ain’t the social type. She must be in her Batcave, binge-watching Wiseguy with her annoying cats.” I saw Shame’s reflection as her multicolored facial implants gleamed even harder. She pursued: “Could you do me a solid and promise me that nothing will happen to my little sister?”

  “I will never put her in direct danger. My word on that.”

  “Good.” But her family wasn’t Shame’s only concern: “And that girl from the Rings. Ali?”

  I hesitated. And fell in Shame’s obvious trap.

  “What’s the beef? Tell me,” she insisted.

  “She Monsutā.” Here came the truth, and my clairvoyant friend choked on her drink. “She has the mark. And she’s rather secretive about it.”

  “Merde…”

  “That’s why I also need Carole. I want to understand why a nineteen-year-old genomarked operative would be on the loose sowing scalps for the Alliance…”

  Shame scratched her ear. “Between her and the resellers… Monsutā’s loudly beeping on the radar again. That’s bad. How long before the Technos or another big player join the party—the Moon or the Soviets for instance. How long before they find out about what you’re after—Fuck, Zéphyr… I’m too old for that shit…”

  “We’re early. Let’s use this edge to close the Monsutā spin off—or whatever this mess is—once and for all.”

  “How does your holy crusade include your branded booty call from Saturn?” Shame snapped.

  Ali became Shame’s obsession.

  And mine. There was something about Ali—something magnetic, almost otherworldly. She was untamed, reckless and pitiless. Despite the darkness she carried, despite the blood staining her hands, there was an innocence to her.

  My awaited answer made the Freak-fennec snarl. All her implants turned red. She breathed. “I’ll buzz Carole right away.”

  What a relief. “Thanks, Shame. I owe you. Again.”

  She scoffed. “Just keep your wild Monsutā-crush under control.”

  “Don’t worry about her. She’s… not a problem…” I reassured her on the verge of leaving. “I think…”

  Shame finished her drink. Drunk as a skunk, she concluded: “That’s because she ignores why you took Lao’s job and cares so much about Monsutā’s post-mortem spasms. She doesn’t know how close you used to fly around the Dark Sun of M, my dear Icarus.”

  See you in Part 2! / パート2でお会いしましょう!

  PART 2: THE CHILDREN OF M

  パート2: Mの子供たち

  #09 THE NUN OF BEVERLY HILLS

  第09話 ビバリーヒルズの修道女

  When the USSR set foot on the Moon, its cosmonauts were instantly enshrined as paragons of national valor. Upon their return, they were feted with medals, celebrated in parades, and spun through opulent ballroom galas that stretched from Odessa to Vladivostok. Yet, conspicuously absent from the official commemorations was a name the kolkhoz peasants scarcely dared to utter: Wernher von Braun.

  It is a historical irony of the highest order that the Soviet lunar triumph owed much to von Braun himself. A pioneer of liquid-fueled rocketry and a former scientist of the Third Reich, von Braun was abducted by the NKVD in the closing days of the Second World War. Though compelled to work under coercion, archival accounts suggest he did so with an unsettling degree of enthusiasm. Nevertheless, his name was systematically expunged from Soviet records, his legacy erased from the textbooks. And yet, the very engines that still bore Soviet spacecrafts beyond Kuiper bore his unmistakable design—a silent testament to the paradox of his contribution.

  The Soviet Moon landing marked a decisive rupture in the post-war order, destabilized further by Stalin’s aggressive acceleration of space ambitions. The Western bloc, stunned by the reversal, responded with unprecedented urgency. Embodied in the Douvrin drives, French nuclear propulsion catapulted De Gaulle’s influence on Mars, while American ingenuity, harnessed through Baltimore-class thrusters, enabled the Main Belt’s rapid colonization in the tumultuous aftermath of World War III—an era referred to as the Hard Reset.

  What had once been an orderly expansion of civilization under the great traditional powers’ aegis soon unraveled into a chaotic technological frontier. Political institutions crumbled beneath the strain of mass exoduses and the vertiginous rise of fledgling megacorporations. From this new political landscape emerged a multitude of successor states and coalitions: the Technocracy, the Emporium, the United Colonies of the Belt, the Jovian Commonwealth, and countless pseudo-sovereign worlds. Corpo-settlements such as Lunapolis, the Kingdomlands, and various corporatist satellites formed an uneasy status quo. Meanwhile, the United Nations and the ethno-states of Earth-that-was faded into obsolescence, consigned to the annals of a bygone era.

  The Outer Worlds’s colonization progressed in tandem with the development of ever more potent and perilous propulsion technologies. Chief among these was the entropy drive, a controversial innovation originating from clandestine laboratories. Though proscribed, these engines were adopted by desperate colonists seeking passage to distant Edens. Tragically, many such convoys met their end in transit, disintegrated in bursts of untraceable energy—a grim reminder of the costs of progress.

  Anyone who reads and understands History knows this period marks the beginning of humanity’s decline, never has it been so scattered. Since then, it spread chaotically through the system, driven by greed and only following the law of violence. Like they say in the corpo-realms: It’s a dog-eat-dog world.

  I like the concept, though I do hate dogs.

  “You done with your boomer monologue? You sound like Dad…” My partner and sister Ali interrupted my musing. Her voice crackled through my helmet, distorted by the debris of old colony ships that fouled communications in orbit. “You almost there or what?”

  “Yes. You had the option to come along.”

  “And like, get out of bed at this hour? Dream on!” she snapped. “Good luck with the proc-loonies!” She hung up the receiver poorly, leaving me to suffer through some absurd beauty clinic info-ads.

  Ali actively partaking in cosmic immobilism, I had made my way alone to the rendezvous point for the Kitty’s next Alliance assignment and fresh start since participating in Lao’s clever putsch. My destination was a remote place, far from the solar ranches and void-surfer hotspots of the UCB: the Convent of the Crypto-Moirai.

  The Moirai were data-brokers, but of a peculiar kind. Their principal and official function was to manage the arduous inter-system digital transit, collecting massive troves of data as they passed through the Belt—the obligatory nexus between the Techno-web and the disordered servers of the Outer Worlds. The Moirai also sold the information on the sly, but only in a “tolerated” cryptic form—like oracles.

  As I stepped out and settled into my mobile visit-bubble, I quickly realized that the place was a convent in name only. The prayer halls held only server racks, the chapels more of the same—and the refectory? An actual refectory. For people lived here. The Moirai abbesses, hidden in the depths of their silicon temple, and the nunBytes. Most of the nuns were orphans, or heiresses from Mars’s great houses in search of digital spirituality. Their tasks were primarily server maintenance and housekeeping. For the data-sanctuary lay exposed to the stars, its skeletal frame drinking in the cosmic cold, using the breath of the void to soothe its weary servers and whisper through its tangle of fraying cables.

  This biting cold was reason enough for Ali’s refusal to accompany me. She just needed an excuse to binge-watch 21 Jump Street in our Las Pallas motel bed alongside her tacos-printer. Still, it was for the best. Introducing Ali to the Motherboard Superiors would likely have ended in a diplomatic incident. That’s assuming the Moirai weren’t already aware of our escapades with the Data Maiden. The brokers were indeed a guild, but a competitive one. Dogs-eat-dogs, remember?

  Still enclosed in my plastic bubble, I was escorted to the heart of the Convent by two nuns in rudimentary space suits to meet the three masters of the domain. The latter resembled a grade school science experiment that had gone wrong—something like a bedside alarm clock powered by a potato. Of their organic forms remained only a shriveled torso and head, fused as though necks had been an unaffordable luxury. Two antennas jutted from their scalps, sparking with arcs of electricity every time these floating nightmare matryoshkas drew a breath, their toothless mouths gaping like fish out of water.

  On Titan, they say the Crypto-Moirai eat children. If true, these three likely consumed them in smoothie form.

  “Greetings, O Abbesses,” I ventured before my austere hosts. “I am Lee, envoy of the Alliance of Auxiliaries of Justice.”

  The central Moira rotated towards her sister on the right, then the left. “A Maine Coon,” she declared matter-of-factly.

  “Farcical!” rasped the one on the left.

  “Winsome,” noted the one on the right. “The most riveting outcome.”

  “But the most treacherous!” warned the left.

  “The facts remain,” concluded the center.

  Their conversational protocol already gave me a headache. If this was foresight at work, it was a rather irritating gift.

  “Assentingly,” said Center.

  Oops! Mind-reading wretched wit—benevolent sorceress, I meant!

  “There’s no magic in probability,” Left amended. “It’s mathematics. Recondite mathematics.”

  “Recondite, sure. But simple enough to predict the future through data,” Right explained.

  “Trends only,” Center clarified.

  “I see…” I interjected, growing impatient. “Regarding the mission?”

  Center rolled her tongue over her bare gums, producing a most unpleasant sucking sound. “A nunByte has gone missing from the convent,” she said, her irritation made manifest by a twitch of electrical discharge.

  “Abducted!” Left cried.

  “Or perhaps she just ran away,” Right countered.

  Then Center got to the point: “Her disappearance threatens the integrity of the omphalos. We task you with finding her.”

  “The solar system is vast. Do you have any leads?”

  “Tens of thousands,” Center replied.

  “Most leading to shadows and silence,” whined Left.

  “Or right beneath us, here on 2 Pallas!” said Right brightly, spinning to activate a holographic projector. “Probabilities converge on an educational institution. That is most likely where the nun is.” The spectral projection coalesced into the familiar silhouette of a Belt schoolhouse.

  An easy Search and Rescue mission. “Are you certain?”

  “Verify the probability. After all, that’s what we’re paying you for,” concluded Center. “If the Alliance lives up to its reputation, we won’t need to deal with those Pinkerton bloodhounds. Godspeed!”

  I received further details upon returning to the Kitty. A nunRAM handed me a bundle of backup diskettes—with so many files it crashed the central computer repeatedly. In the flicker of a blue screen, I lit a cigarette. “Black and white photos. Grainy videos. Redacted LPPD reports. A receipt from the only White Castle in town…” This case made about as much sense as square hamburgers. Still, the Crypto-Moirai’s probabilistic decree was clear: the freshest lead pointed to a high school. Beverly Hills High.

  My wired brain began to hatch a plan. “Ali?” I called into the mic after asking the ground operator to connect me with my partner. A sound of gulping came through. “Turn off the TV and brush your teeth. You’re going back to school.”

  I heard her sigh. “I already finished school…”

  “You finished Elementary School.” We grew up on Titan, where back then, the pinnacle of education was about shooting moving rad-roaches. “But don’t worry, I’m not planning to make you apply to Duke!”

  Beverly Hills High School. A 60-acre campus. One hundred and twenty-two thousand students, among them forty-four thousand newcomers from Las Pallas and half the Belt, lining up to get their minds scrubbed by the Techno-Department of Education—the latest Martian handcuff tightening its grip on the United Colonies of the Belt. Finding a nunByte in a place like this was like hunting for a needle in a haystack. My plan needed a serious upgrade.

  I had set up base camp in the ventilation ducts—perfect for discreet, unhindered access to the main mega-building—and was conversing with Ali through the grates above the girls’ henhouse.

  “I’ve done a lot of thinking during this first week back,” I said.

  “First week?” she replied, fixing her perm with an aggressive cloud of hairspray. “We infiltrated this place like, half a semester ago…”

  “Already? Time flies. But I think I finally have a decent lay of the land. We need to operate like the Moirai.”

  “With antennas?” Ali was joined by one of her classmates—fortunately, still too preoccupied rummaging through her overly-kitsch backpack to pay us any attention.

  “No, with probability laws,” I whispered.