We had left the two Freaks and the two humans the next morning. Without plans, we had let ourselves drift for a few days around Jupiter, which illuminated the night that never ended. After a few months billeted on the Interceptor, taking command of the Kitty felt like a move back.

“Mancéphalius!” I exclaimed one morning, discovering the short missive announcing the arrival of our friend’s herald.

Still wrapped in her crinkled bed sheet, Ali unbolted the airlock—which jammed midpoint, but allowed Titania to enter anyway. She was surrounded by a halo of condensation caused by the Swallow’s confined atmosphere.

“It’s been a while, Bismuth Ball! Why this silence of several months?” inquired my partner, changing some bandages on her chest.

“I had to change my orbit and send Titania to configure a secure connection,” the AI answered through the Kitty’s speakers after the maiden plugged a curious little tetrahedron of chrome into one of the hold’s diamond-shaped jack outlets. “Oberon wasn’t safe. Taranis and the Awen stirred up the data forest to track you and purge the DIA. The whole Guild is in shambles.” Mancéphalius paused while the 4-faced polygon buzzed. Once the device stood still, he continued in his artificial voice: “The information I am about to provide you should not be heard on any highly unsecured frequency. That is also why I preferred to send Titania.” The maiden had just gently brought her hand to her heart, and vapor began to form around her metallic epidermis. “We worked together for almost a year. I risked everything to find Nora.”

“Appreciated,” Ali’s sister commented as my partner laid her arm on her shoulder only to receive a small surge from the cyborg.

Meanwhile, Titania has continued her gesture. Her metal fingers dug deeper into her inorganic flesh, up to the wrist, causing ripples along her chest. The delicate waves faded as the android pulled a thin cartridge from her own body.

“What is this?” I asked. “A memory card?”

“A flash drive,” the AI corrected me, “and your last assignment.”

“Are you for real?” Ali complained before taking the device handed by the silent servant. “Are you aware that we have a massive bounty on our heads?”

“A recent conversation between a certain Arch-Princess Sirona—and a renowned webrunner called ‘The Druid’—Lucas Chow being his actual name—was partially intercepted by Carole Selena on Io, the semi-terraformed moon,” Mancéphalius cut-her off.

“Interesting,” I said. “This webrunner’s name sounds familiar.”

“What do you know about Chow?” Nora asked.

“Lucas Chow is a free agent data-broker but also an arms dealer,” Mancéphalius explained. “A vile scum with backdoors and daemons gangrening the Moon, the Techno-Marine and even the Alliance.”

“Nice resume,” Ali joked. “What do you want from him?”

“I want him dead,” Mancéphalius dropped. “But before, the Guild wants all his hard-drives. He archived more about Lunapolis and their mischief than anyone in the solar system, and we need a copy on the drive I’m providing you. Are you still on a crusade against the Awen?”

“Not really…” I answered before Ali could. “But the others could use that.”

“Yes. I’ll do it,” Nora stepped up.

“We’re coming with you!” my partner intervened.

“Ali… we’re not—”

“Be clever, Lee!” she cut me off. “This guy’s linked to the Alliance, right? Maybe we can work on something with that too! Bargain our bounty or monitor the hunters’ whereabouts for instance.”

My brain rebooted. My sapiens came up with a plan that could slightly make sense. But it still resembled a weak excuse to stay around her sister.

“I ain’t gonna spend another week watching X-Files while Nora’s taking our job as data-thieves and the Techno-fascists are tailing Yossef across Kuiper!” Ali insisted. “This data could be crucial! And save a lot of lives!”

“Alright,” I conceded as she decided to throw Braun into the equation. “Any objection, Nora?”

Cleaning a Blue stain from her metallic fingers, her sister shrugged. “That’s a bad idea.”

“No grievance from the problematic child!” I said, turning to Titania. “We’re in!”

“Excellent. Take care, Children of the Genome. As you may know, the Awen chrome fleet is roaming the Outer Worlds and the discourse mentioned that Taranis is leading them. Come back directly to me once it is done. I will send you my next coordinates once the situation settles.”

“Perfect,” Nora concluded.

I sat down in my pilot’s seat when Titania finally left the Kitty. The Baltimore started its cycle at the end of the onboard computer calculations, just as my partner joined me.

“Ready to go?” I asked. “According to Selena and the not-so-secured Io’s Ranger Office, Chow is in witness protection and hiding over a Plastic-Hippie commune in the capital’s outskirts.”

“Io’s capital is called Cochise, right?” Nora inquired before taking place in her fold-up seat next to the ladder.

“Correct!” I exclaimed. It was time to brush up on my Diné bizaad. Because the Navajos didn’t speak Solarian.

 

I was waiting for my humans at a resort’s bar. Around me, everyone was smoking huge cigars and I had to concentrate on my drink so as not to succumb to the temptation to light myself a Lucky. With my cool milk on the counter, I chewed on the special straw. Without knowing it, I had started singing the verse of one of those awful hits barked out by some new boy band featured on MTV. Real music was being thrown in the void. At least, a last rerun of Cyber Macho was broadcast right after.

I can’t believe they canceled that awesome show.

“How do I look?” Ali asked through her Bazooka bubblegum.

My partner surprised me by emerging from behind a decorative Styrofoam cactus. She wore a denim miniskirt and a far too large tie-and-dye shirt. On her chest and arms, she had glued metallic engravings on her scars. The colors would have been classified as a terror attack at Neso’s Epileptic Convention but without a closer glance, she appeared to be a flawless cyber-beatnik. “I see you’ve even considered patchouli,” I remarked, sniffing her. “You’re the perfect cliché with those friendship bangles!” The multicolored bracelets completed her outfit with orange flowers on her waffles.

“Thank you. Nora’s already a ‘borg but I hope she dresses well too.” Yet, a second later, her sister appeared from the elevator corridor only wearing her everyday white suit and straight black hair. Ali sighed. “You suck, Nora.”

“Can we go?” this one retorted, cracking her neck as her engraving sparkled.

Following the question, I pointed with my chin to the waiter, a tall smooth-faced man with an olive complexion who came to bring me the bill. “Thanks to Goyathlay here, I learned that these badly shorn peace lovers shop on Tekoomsē Avenue. Let’s bounce!”

“Easy peasy! Don’t forget Mancéphalius’s weird floppy disk!”

“You troglodyte! It’s called a NAND type flash drive and it can hold hundreds of diskettes!”

Ali rolled her eyes. “Nerd alert…”

We left the air-conditioned cafeteria while I explained to my human the continuation of my infiltration plan. Outside, we had to get used to the overwhelming heat that pinned us down. Without the water misters installed every thirty meters, our three carcasses would have been transformed into beef jerky on the spot.

Cochise appeared, however, as an exceptional city. Capital of Io’s southern hemisphere, its architecture was a patchwork of arts and cultures that had everything and nothing in common. Towers of red concrete painted with geometric figures, residential districts of veils and real wood as well as shopping malls of polished glass welcomed a myriad of people. But the most incredible thing? The genuine grass sidewalks. A pads paradise.

“It’s relaxing to saunter down the streets without police drones overhead,” Ali remarked as she removed her sandals in front of a walk-in theater. “Groundhog Day?” she noticed, glancing at the screen. “Still disappointed that you couldn’t pass the casting for the fat beaver, Lee?”

I grunted a timid affirmation when, along a new avenue, an electric minibus stopped at our level, squealing its tires. Out of the side door emerged a bearded man with endless black hair that almost reached the braided waistband of his holey cargo shorts. Through the many gaps in his clothes, I saw that only an organic trunk and face remained of the sapiens; the rest being pastel-colored cybernetic prosthesis. Slowly dragging his clogs on the white asphalt, he finally welcomed us. “Aloha, brother and sisters! My name is Jesus. You’re new around here?” he inquired before delicately hugging my partner.

“Yep!” she answered before stepping back and introducing us by our aliases: “My name’s Kelly. Here’s Andrea, my… sister. And the baby lion’s Heathcliff.”

The plastic-hippie smiled, somewhat bewildered as he heard our truer-than-life fake nouns. Bending, he scratched my chin. “Got a place to crash?”

Without expecting a reply, Jesus and his comrades welcomed us into the Volkswagen van bathed with a strong herbal smell. Io’s half-world was also the moon of natural drugs.

Taking a last breath of fresh air, we entered the vehicle and laid against one of the geometrically patterned blankets hanging on the inside walls before the van set off.

“We should arrive at the pueblo in a few hours,” said the driver, a tall brunette with a flat screen for a mouth. A slim rosy line jumper each time she talked. “If you want to enjoy the scenery, you can ride up front when we get to the drugstore.”

Our Mystery Machine rallied the desert highway in the early afternoon, once the purchases were made and the passenger compartment filled with tools and crates. With her bare feet resting on one of the dashboard vents, Ali slept soundly.

Between her arms, I was the only one to admire the vast expanse stretching to immense mountains on the horizon. These red chains, among the highest of the system, were home to a lot of movie sets like the incoming Tombstone. I decided not to wake up my copilot as she would probably hold a seminar about how “righteous” Val Kilmer was.

The chains also protected the southern hemisphere that humans had managed to make partially habitable. Behind the mounts liquefied by corrosive vapors stretched several million square kilometers of volcanic swamp of molten sulfur. The star of Zeus, occupying the entire sky, transformed the rest of the moon into a veritable telluric hell thanks to its gravitational attraction.

“Is there nothing else but desert as far as the eye can see?” Nora complained. She was bored counting the flowering saguaro.

“There are several burgs east of Cochise,” Jesus informed us, having just taken the fuzzy wheel without putting his hands on it. “But the community preferred to reside as far west as possible—behind Lake Gichi-Gami.”

“Whose idea was it to settle there?” I asked.

“The second e-Son of Turing, the title given to the community leader,” Jesus answered as Ali snored even louder. “Now we’re on the fifth.”

“Do you know his real name?” I whispered.

“The ‘e-Son of Turing’ is his real name as yours is Heathcliff,” Jesus softly replied, not grasping the irony of his words.