Eden & Echo - A Gritty Cyberpunk Noir Thriller

I waited at the base of the mountain where Aunt Nemeria lived, holding a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a towel to the side of my face. The swelling was so bad that I could barely open my right eye.

Purple, blue, green and red bruises covered my body from head to toe. I was pretty sure if I went to a hospital they would tell me that I had more fractures than a faberge egg that had been stuck in a sock and used to beat someone to death.

Everything hurt. Places I hadn't even heard of hurt. When I coughed it was like an extra large party pack of firecrackers going off inside of me all at once. Little explosions of pain rippled from my ribs to my asshole every time I so much as breathed.

I was six months into my training and once again she had beaten the ever loving shit out of me. That woman could punch through concrete. Fucking concrete! I would say she punched like a jackhammer but she moved faster and hit a lot harder than any jackhammer I had ever heard of.

She could also kick, which was so much worse. This time I had gotten the bright idea to dodge behind a tree. Now I had splinters in unspeakable places and knew what it was like to have a tree land on me. It hadn't been a small one either.

Nemeria kicked so hard that I couldn't sneeze because I was afraid if I did, a tooth would come shooting out of my nose. That and it hurt to sneeze. Everything fucking hurt!

Apparently Simon was even nastier in a fight. But I couldn't begin to imagine how he could be worse than that red haired bitch of a siege weapon. She was short too, which made the weekly ass whoopings sting that extra bit.

It was one thing to get my ass handed to me by someone who was taller and bigger like Rook. But being bounced off the walls by a fucking hobbit in yoga pants was humbling. Some might even say it was humiliating.

When I finally managed to get a punch or kick in I would be rewarded with the awful sound of breaking bone. Not her bones of course, my bones. Apparently demi-humans got tougher as we aged and more of our body was upgraded.

“Try it again in a few hundred years.” Nemeria had told me as I cradled my broken leg. “Maybe you will be ready then.” She said the same thing next week when I broke the other leg.

I healed extraordinarily fast, even for a demi-human. Unfortunately that meant she could kick the shit out of me more often and hit me even harder. What killed me the most was I knew she was holding back. This was her being nice.

A blacked out SUV rolled up and I got a message from Rook via wetware confirming that it was him inside. Vika was driving today, thank God. Usually my driver was some hund from Möhi named Lisa Bones. Apparently she was related to Sally Bones but she didn't talk much about her family.

Lisa was just over two meters tall and rocked a synthetic chassis with black ceramic plates instead of fur. Her brain was fully cybernetic and she ran on electricity instead of food. In a pinch she could, and would, drink diesel. Winter blend was her favorite because it tasted “fruity”.

Technically she was a non-organic life form that had more in common with the car she drove than her passengers. Yet somehow nobody from the government had been brave enough to raise that particular point with her. They tried revoking her license but decided better of it when she turned up in person to discuss the matter.

Lisa believed that speed limits should be multiplied by the number of occupants inside the vehicle and having all four wheels on the ground at the same time was a frivolous luxury. Two was usually good enough, three if she was feeling generous.

The one and only time a police officer pulled us over Lisa had gotten out of the vehicle as instructed, returned to the vehicle as instructed, then left as instructed. It was a very short traffic stop.

No cop in their right mind was going to fuck around with a two meter tall bipedal tank drinking jet fuel through a crazy straw. Not over a little thing like going one hundred and sixty kilometers per hour in an eighty zone. We would have been going faster, but it was just the two of us in the car that day.

Rook rolled down the passenger side window of the SUV. “What did she hit you with this time?” He asked, sniffing the air. “You smell like a cough drop.”

“She hit me with a tree. Eucalyptus, if you are wondering.” I replied as I gingerly opened the back door and took a seat. Stepping up into the vehicle after visiting my aunt was not a pleasant experience. I was almost sure I felt something rip but the pain from my other injuries made it hard to tell.

Rook handed over a liter sized cup filled with nasty thin gray sludge and a straw. “So a whole tree or just a branch?” He asked.

“A whole one.” I said, taking a sip of the disgusting chemical mixture. My post beat down beverage was a mix of BCAAs, complex proteins, vitamins, minerals, precious metals, ground up nanomachines, fats, and sugar. Much debate had been had over whether we should try and flavor it. But in the end we had decided not to.

Part of that was because it was impossible. You couldn't flavor the bastard offspring of a lithium battery and a protein shake. I also didn't want to associate this cup of sludge with real food. It was easier to think of it as slightly runny cement.

If I had to describe the flavor it was a mix of peanut butter, gravel, and the sensation of being eaten alive by the digestive compounds in pineapple.

I drank down the first cup and handed it back. Rook mixed up a second batch in a portable blender and refilled the cup. “Round two.” He said.

We had to be careful with the blender because the mix was flammable and hard to put out once it started burning. I took the cup full of sludge and slammed it back.

“You know, I'm happy I only have to drink two of these. It would be really mean to make me drink a third one. You know, after all I've been through.” I told him as I handed the cup back.

Rook did not break eye contact as he fired up the blender a third time. “Round three.” He said.

***

The next step of my recovery was, when you got right down to it, essentially a mix of water aerobics and electroplating. Nanomachines were made of metal. I could only take in so much metal orally and I didn't want to try the other route of absorption so when I got back to King Aerospace into the tank I went.

A very apologetic tech wired me up to a mild electric current, put on my oxygen mask, and lowered me into a gold lined tank filled with an electrolyte solution. They would monitor my vitals and inject a series of different metallic compounds into the tank depending on what my body needed.

The pain of having raw and open wounds dipped into warm salt water was invigorating. That was to say it felt like being lit on fire and dipped in battery acid. But only for a few moments.

Almost instantly wounds would begin to heal and close up as my body greedily accepted the new building materials. Aften an hour in the tank slowly stretching and flexing my muscles to promote circulation it was time for a quick rinse then a scan.

The scanning was fun. They did a before and after comparison to show how effective the process was. It had become a rite of passage for new techs to deliver the results. I wasn't the only one who got to use the tank but I was definitely the most frequent visitor to this particular healing spa.

Today's tech was a large middle aged hund from Möhi, more mastiff-like than the slim Döbians I was used to. Lisa the driver was originally from Möhi, but she was also technically a tank so I wasn't sure if her place of birth was important or not.

“Hello.” He said in Hund-Katzen. “I'm Arthur and I will be going over your chart. Of course all records are confidential so I don't know your name. It looks like when you arrived… no that can't be right…”

He tapped at the tablet a few times. “Sorry, it looks like they have the charts mixed up. This other person has obviously been in some kind of major accident.”

“Oh, did the before scan show a cracked skull and recently broken ribs?” I asked sweetly.

“Yeah, how did you know?” He continued tapping away at the tablet with frustration.

“Because today someone kicked me in the face and dropped a tree on me.” I replied.