“What two space daredevils like you are doing here?” Satori asked before turning down Pearl Jam. “In these interesting times, it isn’t very recommended farting around Saturn’s orbit!”

The jolts of the flying car made Ali turn green, white—then green again. Suddenly, she vomited for the second time. The fingers on her lips managed to filter out the bigger pieces before our friend handed her an empty XXL cup of instant noodles.

“We wandered towards Neptune,” I replied after sincere apologies for my partner’s behavior. “Ali wanted to come back here to see Félix.”

“Oh—alright. That explains why we found her drunk as a lord”, said Satori, my ultimate master in terms of sarcasm.

“The task is quite delicate,” I reported.

“Yeah—I guess,” Satori went on. “Family is sacred. Do you want us to drop you at T.G. before Bambi could manage to ruin my new carpet?”

“I’m f—fine! I f—feel better! Sorry…” Ali stuttered, raising her head to wipe off her clammy forehead. “What you guys up to tonight? I ain’t gonna leave while we haven’t seen each other in ages!”

A Police van brutally grazed our right wing as the high-speed airway started to snake its way between the mega-buildings. As explained by Satori, floating roadblocks were installed around the adjacent business center.

Flatline opened the mini fridge occupying the empty space between the two front seats. Her mechanical arm seized a Pocari Sweat and handed it to Ali as she started clarifying why they were around: “We were on our way to the Trump Business Tower, downtown. We have to pick up a small banker named Khelil. The mission is to keep him warm for the night until the guy he’s supposed to be managing the cash flows flee like a chicken to the other end of the system.”

“Easy and well paid!” Satori added. The gas engine valves purr. As the boulevard began to unclog itself, the engineer made his way, honking like a true Neo-Babylon’s driver. Aware of his talents, I knew he probably used his share of viruses to divert nearby vehicles after hacking the Navstar GPS. “Bankers aren’t famous for their pleasant company so, maybe you guys could tag along.”

We agreed and Satori led us to the foot of the decrepit Trump Tower. It was a sordid four-hundred-story office tower with exterior elevators and freshly installed anti-suicide windows. Even a ficus tree under stero-fertilizer wouldn’t survive in this hostile environment.

After Ada left to put on hand on Khelil, I joined the former computer scientist as copilot; leaving Ali to her collection of hangover pills. With the insulin shot hanging from her arm and the peroxide inhaler on her nose, she looked more like a low-cost station drug addicts than a bounty hunter.

Ten minutes passed and, the mechanical limb around the neck, a banker with a purple face followed our beloved mercenary on the way back. The engineer asked my partner to open the van’s doors and welcome our new guest. When the corpo could finally breathe, he flooded us with questions in Levantine Arabic—an old language still used by certain ethnic groups that formed Titan’s melting pot.

“We gotta delta,” Ada ordered despise staying as calm as a monk. “Our friend wasn’t the only one working cocaine-fueled overtime on a Saturday night.”

The Chrysler took off before slaloming between the buildings. As we went higher, several salarymen fell from the rooftops before being chopped off by safety nets. “One of these suckers will land on my roof. Let’s get down,” the computer scientist suggested. On our way, new police cars monitored the traffic. They were flying with deployed wings equipped with machine guns. “We need to be at our employer’s penthouse in Babel. We got half an hour to grab the cash before this moron takes the final shuttle to Shangri-La.”

Almost rendered inaudible by the flapping of the wipers, an alert emerged from the computer embedded in the counter block. One of Satori’s special programs reported a vehicle shadowing us for a few minutes.

“The red Skyline GTR?” Ada guessed. “I noticed it in front of the tower. What does the plate say?”

“No network,” I replied, seeing the terminal remaining silent at the command typed by Satori.

“Kuso!” he cursed. “The cops are pumping all the bandwidth!”

But the Nissan’s red frame blend in with the ground traffic just ahead of us before entering the Chinatown tunnel. Although suspicious, the two mercenaries decided to continue their journey.

“Can you check the ‘off-line emergency guidance system’?” Satori asked to Ada, while joining the aerial road again.

This one slowly took the old paper map that Ali held and helped Satori through the megablocks of the Babel labyrinthic residential district. Our childhood suburb had changed a lot. In its center, black skyscrapers resembling the fingers of a titan’s hand closed on a new GladiaTrucks stadium shaped like a globe. The insane complex overlooked the brown water river and the slums that separated the neighborhood from Tannhäuser Gate where my partner wanted to go a few hours earlier. Here was her father.

“Where are we flying?” the banker complained, for the first time in Solarian. “I assure you that you are mistaken!”

Flatline calmly shoved her rifle under his square-patterned tie. “Look at that. Gordon Geckko lost his desert accent. Be careful and stop complaining, though. Or my blond girlfriend could throw you out. You gonna plunge faster than yesterday’s stocks.”

“Why me?” Ali retorted after finishing her third soda brick, which had given her a second breath.

“For you would, you psycho!” Satori replied.

The minivan started a new climb after crossing the access road to the stadium. The fuel consumption indicator turned red when the vehicle passed the 230th floor above the gray clouds. The engine suffered but reach the sought-after apartment, a vast penthouse with a swimming pool and a personal tiki bar.

“Nice crib!” Ali commented.

“Indeed. Come with me, Lee,” asked Flatline. She jumped out of the car, leaving the door opened.

While the others were guarding the hostage, I accompanied Ada to meet the mysterious patron named Julio Marco Ruben Rubero. According to the solo, this sub-leader of the Janeiros gang had falsified the balance sheet of his shady traffic and feared that his Jefe would discover it thanks to Khelil, the banker and guest of honor.

“Señor Rubero!” Ada yelled, making her heart jump to 50 beats per minute—a new record for her. “Crap. This succhiacazzi had sworn to be there.” Smashing the patio’s window with her metal hand after Satori checked that the alarm was disconnected, she allowed us to enter the apartment.

“No one seems to be here tonight,” I said.

“Apparently,” my companion replied while bypassing the giant bed I jumped in. “But tell me, Lee... How is it going with Ali? She seemed different. I saw her smile. You managed to do something outta this wildling?”

“I did my best—Félix asked me to.”

“Are you sure? I followed your fierce ride through the media. You guys were busy for sure… But I don’t think that fame is what the old man wished for.”

I smiled shily. I expected this lecture. “He wanted us to live the way we want… free from everything—including the past.”

“You’re preaching to the choir…” Ada bantered. “Just be careful.”

“How about the others? Did you stay in touch with Doc’—or Tomy?”

“The little Omnibot works in a bar above the clouds of Mercury,” Ada went on while opening the door. “But I haven’t heard from Doc’ in years. I think he passed away.”

“Probably. His chronic pneumonia may have caught up on him.”

Facing the kitchen, the living room was as empty as it was flooded with light. The imposing CRT television had remained on. The static snow buzzed. Its millions of parasites were reflected on the cocktail glass placed on the coffee table in Formica and ceramic. Slouched on the tropical sofa, a brick of cachaça in hand, a shadow confronted the TV set.

“Señor Rubero?” Ada asked again before activating the lights, almost breaking the switch from anger. “You could—porca miseria.”

Flatline could witness an atomic blast that she wouldn’t even blink. But that wasn’t my case. The scene taking place in front of me really “barfed me out” as my partner would say, because Julio Marco Ruben Rubero had been skinned alive. There was blood everywhere, from the carpet to the fan.

“Arrivederci the dollar-credits…” Ada sighed, sitting on the table in front of Rubero’s corpse. She then picked up the few bills his murderers had been kind enough to shove into his sockets before leaving.

“What did they do to his eyes?” I asked, inspecting the trickling body for clues as Flatline informed by radio our friends in the van. Still talking to Satori, the solo shook the glass she picked up on the table, waving the two globes floating in the sugar cane alcohol. “Sickening…”

Satori’s voice emerged soon after from Ada’s helmet after she boosted the volume for me: “Let’s skip the fact that a blue Peugeot full of Janeiros just passed by. There’s a slight—tiny—tiny problem with Khelil, guys.”

Ada moaned loudly at this unspoken attempt at euphemisms: “Random guess. Bambi threw him out of the van.”

The techie laughed, but denied it. “We could be in more serious troubles,” he continued. “Because we didn’t catch the right banker!”

For the first time, Ada appeared to be annoyed. She sighed again before kicking the cachaça brick. It burst against the front door, which showed no signs of breaking in. Proof that Rubero knew his attackers or that the electronic security of his apartment required an update. “I don’t understand,” she said. “The FID has identified him.”

“It’s not your fault,” Ali reassured her. “There are at least ten Khelils working at the Trump Tower. And three A. Khelil…”

“I am Abdel Khelil! Not Aahad! Not Ahmed, you racist loons!” cried the banker. “I am a citizen of Titan… with rights! I will call 911! I will sue you! I will—”

“Oh,” reacted Ada as we left the bloody crime scene for good.

“Who could have killed that idiot of Rubero?” Satori asked once we were back.

“Only the cartels skin their victim alive,” calmly replied his partner. “The eyes thing is a Janeiro’s trick.”

“I’d bet that Rubero’s boss caught him red-handed,” I said. “And he had sent gangsters to watch the slightest gestures of the mercenaries hired to cover the tracks. They won’t let us get away with it…”

Meditative, Satori finally pointed an obvious idiom far too often ignored by the sapiens: “The cat’s right. We’re toast if these guys in the car have identified us.”

“Fuck! And what about Jordan Belfort?” Ali interjected by gesturing at the banker, curled up with the protoxide inhaler duct-taped on his face.

Ada believed it was clever to drop him off at the nearest metro station as the Chrysler had rejoined the wet asphalt of Chinatown. Looking for the metro line, we were on our way to the Bay, controlled by the Yakuza but maybe the safest place we could think of, when the red Nissan from Trump Business Tower was spotted again by Satori’s program.

“Again? Who are these guys? That’s not the Janeiros!” the techie noticed.

My partner proposed to immediately throw the banker through the back doors. Ada then evoked her regret for having allowed this idea to germinate in her friend’s deranged brain. A heated discussion ensued before Satori intervened.

Alas! The situation deteriorated violently. Arriving at an intersection, the other car—the Peugeot from Rubero’s apartment—resurfaced and hit us on the left wing. The minivan staggered under the impact, before overturning, the four wheels in the air.

“Santa Madonna. Why is all the city tailing us, tonight?” calmly asked Ada before taking Ali by the arm.

I managed to evacuate the crushed wreck by the broken windshield. Honking echoed from the perpendicular avenue. Six bearded men in black suits came out of a red Nissan.

“Oh. The Undzer Shtik,” Flatline commented before opening fire with her sniper rifle, forcing them to hide behind a taxicab in service.

“The what?” Ali asked.

“The Jewish Mob?” I reacted. “They’re in Babylon, now? This is a true gang epidemic!”

Other shots also came from the rear. The Peugeot had parked on the sidewalk, overturning the newspaper machines. Five mobsters with shaved heads and tattoos-covered bodies pushed the bystanders to make their way to us.

“The Janeiros have joined the game…” Ada pursued before, this time, pulling the banker out of the van as she would with a weed. Ali then grabbed him by the tie to put him under cover. But the two groups of thugs were getting dangerously close and Satori was still inside. “Save us time,” ordered Flatline with a firm voice while throwing a pair of incendiary grenades at us. “Big-Brain is stuck by the dashboard.”

Bullets ricocheted against the steel studs or sunk into the tires’ rubber. On the sidewalks, the crowd dispersed in the rain, opening a shooting window for both the Janeiros and the Undzer.

“Hurry up!” the techie whined. “I can’t feel my legs!”

“You never did, idiot!” Ali said, removing the grenades’ pins with her teeth. “You’re paraplegic!”