It's a week until rent day, and it's been a slow month.
"We could do a sewer ticket," New Guy says halfheartedly. (He's been New Guy for ten months by now. Even Gao would probably not be an asshole about it if he asserted himself about having an actual name; but New Guy doesn't like asserting himself, which sentences him to being New Guy forever, probably even if they pick up an even newer guy some day.)
"We don't do sewer tickets," Gao says. "We are above doing sewer tickets," which is a great statement of principles, very ambitious, but doesn't pay rent.
They're in Gao's preferred Workcentre, one of the classy ones that's not just a waiting room over a laundromat or somewhere with just a hotspot and a ticket dispenser. No, this one has a hotspot and a ticket dispenser and pretensions, and it has a couple of little coffee tables and little low couches (that are really fucking uncomfortable, to discourage Operatives from sitting there all day) and they have little booklets make of videopaper, with the day's ticket backlog downloaded to them.
Of course, it's late in the day; the sun's low enough to have dipped back into view below the rim of the atmospheric processor's giant disc, on its way to the horizon. Since being rebooted for opening time, the booklets have been accumulating drive-by malware attacks, crashing to static or error dialogs or overwritten with cartoon dong graffiti and bootleg ads. And nobody uses them anyway, except for foreigners and aliens and pretentious assholes who think it makes them classier than just using the perfectly good computer in their brain.
The mandatory implanted-at-birth PineaLink is one of those dynamic marketplace innovations that make Rainworld better than the socialist horrors of the galaxy outside, after all.
But Gao's parents were middle managers with a delusionally singular focus on upward mobility, and scratched together the resources to have a designer baby: a decidedly midrange package of enhancements, by the standards of the truly rich, but superior to the herd. He has a dramatic sweep of silky hair, he's luminously pretty, he metabolically synthesises his own vitamin C; he has reflexes and recall and information processing in the top standard-issue-human decile, he is poised and adaptable. None of it matters a damn, of course — he might be a Perfect, but not from old money, not one of the families that have been squeezing Rainworld's plebs to death for profit for literally the planet's entire settled history, he'll still never count as people. His parents' aspirations for him ultimately ruined them; that's how he ended up in the Operative program alongside all the pleb kids whose families couldn't afford to feed them, either.
Even S4G Operative training couldn't knock the airs out of him. He acts like all he has to do is float through life insisting he's too good for all this, and the world will reward him with a life where he doesn't have to. Really annoyingly, enough systems of privilege are keyed to that kind of behaviour that it works slightly better than placebo pretensions.
"Well, what else is there?" New Guy says in a not-quite-defiant way, because fucksake, they all have rent to pay.
Gao fastidiously flicks through one of the last mostly-working leaflets. "We could," he starts.
"Bullshit," says Gigantron, who is an eight-foot-tall bioengineered riot control appliance of few but emphatic words. The Typhon-model homunculoid is the backbone of Peepl Biocorp's business; a flexible multirole killing machine of human-level smarts but programmable obedience.
There are certain Interstellar Commonweal subsidies that a planetary government can qualify for by meeting metrics relating to, for example, diversity and economic mobility; gaming those metrics is a major domestic industry. Homunculoids are nonhuman sapients; Rainworld's government (which is extremely-not-secretly several corporations in a trenchcoat, one of which is Peepl) buys a percentage of their annual production, grants them legal personhood, and dumps them onto the street, where their existence not only shifts crucial demographic percentages, but also serves to drive unemployment, undermining wages, labour conditions, and working-class solidarity. Win-win-win.
There's a pause. "It's not a great job," Gao concedes with what passes, in Gao, for patience; "but there will be fresh tickets tomorrow, and there's three or four here we can pick up that aren't much work."
"They pay shit," Gigantron says. "Maybe not much work."
"Three or — do not tell me you're eyeing the Smartract job," Roo chimes in, ears flattened along her white-furred skull. She sneers, lip peeling back from a needle-point incisor. The Urow — Manx, if you're racist; most of Rainworld is — aren't from any Earth-derived biology. "Felinoid" is an even less meaningful category than "fish"; but humans are inseparable from the toddler point-and-blurt idea of cat. The whiskers; the paws; the sprint-predator bloodlust that makes actually uttering the C-word inadvisable. "If that goes sideways on us, we'll probably spend more in ammo than we make on all these fucking piss jobs combined."
Gao sneers back. "You could do nothing," he says. "Or quit the squad and wade in sewage."
Nobody actually wants to do a sewer job. It's just that they're always there, and they pay a miserable but predictable amount of money. Nobody wants to quit the squad, either; squads mean you're technically a corporation, and that potentially unlocks the full gamut of human rights, unlike — for example — simply being a human. And definitely unlike being any other kind of person.
Gao turns his head, and manages to snap "Maz?" at exactly the same time Roo also hollers at her for backup.
Maz is balled up in a chair near the door, dark goggles yanked down over her eyes. Gangly; head shaven; dressed in a black vat-leather catsuit; so many knives strapped to her. "I'm dissociating and I don't know what we're fighting about now," she says, muffled, face hidden behind her knees.
Gao jabs an unseen middle finger up in her direction, and Roo bares teeth at him.
Ultimately, the balance of power is this: the squad is called Gao's Giants because the Perfect prick managed to grab one of the limited number of graduate squad registrations offered when their class finished Operative training. Outside of then, there's a fee and a waiting list — not a large fee, in the grand scheme, just one sufficient to tell poor people to fuck off. Operatives, for example. The rest of them outnumber Gao, but they're infuriatingly stuck with him and his little whims.
"Well?" Gao says.
New Guy looks between Gigantron and Roo, like he's searching for some fragile, contextual solidarity. "Regroup tomorrow for new tickets?" he says.
"These are bullshit," Gigantron affirms, and Roo snorts, tail flicking irritably; but if nothing else, getting to dunk on Gao is an occasional bitter pleasure.
"Sure," she says.
Gao huffs out.
"If I don't make rent by the end of the month," Roo starts, glowering at New Guy as she starts off to peel Maz out of the chair, but her cuts her off.
"There's a guy," he says. "I know a guy, he knows this guy, okay? And the guy has a warehouse in the south Beltway, and there's — he says it's got a feral biotech problem."
They look at him.
"Is this a ticket?" Roo says suspiciously.
"It would be, but the guy wants it done quickly. If he can get it done quicker by giving cash to some rando, then he pays the same, but the company don't take a cut out of what we get. And," New Guy twitches a shoulder, "we don't have to cut in Gao."
"This sounds like we get fucked over," Roo says.
"Not like corp tickets." Gigantron may be of few words, but can do sarcasm perfectly well.
"Maz!" Roo yells.
"Still dissociating." Maz shifts a little. "We get to screw Gao? Do I have that right?"
"Okay, yeah, fuck it," the Urow concedes.
So they hit up the guy, who pings them a location south of the Beltway, way out near the edge of the city, and they pile into Gigantron's panel van and turn up outside one of a dingy matrix of big box storage units that some landlord creep investing in fabbing. You can see where the fabCAD tried to place fire exits and they edited them back out, because hey, it rains all the time, right? plus wall sections with doors cost marginally more to print.
"This looks like we get fucked over," Roo says.
"Not a ticket," Gigantron says.
"Well, yeah, I guess we can back out," New Guy says unhappily.
"Nah," Gigantron deadpans. "Not a ticket: guy fucks us, we shoot his knees."
It's possibly a joke, but it cheers Roo right up.
"Right, how are we doing this? Anyone got a recon drone?" Nobody has a recon drone, because replaceable batteries are for socialists, the entire drone costs slightly too damn much to keep replacing, and the squad weren't expecting to do this. "Usual shit, then—"
"Usual shit" is homunc goes first, because them's the breaks when your internal organs regrow if you take a gunshot to them. The marching order after that depends on the day, the job, whether Maz is functioning. Gao — and you can't fault him for this, at least — Gao would normally be close up behind Gigantron, ready with his shotgun.
New Guy uneasily files himself into the first-behind-the-meatwall slot. He doesn't usually carry anything heavier than a Zippy, but ten-mil handgun rounds are better than nothing, and this was his idea. Maz and Roo collectively form some glutinous ball of responsibility for bringing up the rear.
The guy's door code works; the lights don't. Maybe the rain got into them; maybe the fabCAD glitched on routing the wiring, and nobody checked the build warnings. The place is the usual kind of deafening, the roof like a drumskin under the pattering drops. It certainly smells like something's been shitting in the dark recesses of the building; but that could just be a collapsed drain under the block, or locals whose slumlord cheaped out on hooking up the drains.
They look at the pitch-black cave of it.
"Is there a floorplan?" New Guy says dismally, prodding at his goggles, trying to dismiss the popup trying to sell him fake night vision DLC.
"Haha," Roo says, dripping sarcasm. The warehouse's systems obligingly serve a floorplan, which is an unmodified fabCAD one; if it's accurate, they'll be able to sell tickets to see a miracle. All that floor space, wasted to socialist health'n'safety! "This'll go quicker if we split up," she suggests maliciously.
"What, the TPK?" Maz surfaces from her own head enough to snipe.