MINDLYFT (COMPLETE)

CHAPTER 11

I'm dry. Spent. Emptied. Laying upside on a makeshift bed in the closet of Dad's cavernous flat. Put away like a given-up hobby. An outcast among outcasts. Disowned, disavowed, and cowed into nothingness.

He hadn't even been happy to see me. The little brother never told of me, and he not told about to me, by that other HIM. Dad. I'm his first child. His only real child. Illegitimate or something of the kind. Born out of wedlock. Born out of binary sexual reproduction for that matter. Born in an artificial womb.

Maybe he's disappointed that I ended up like HIM. Or for some other reason. But here I am. Come home but not welcomed. He carries on in his laboratory working on that brain Ollie. And I have nothing here.

So I left. In the middle of the night and without a word, I left. Renounced and so I renounce him. He never should have had a child in the first place. What he'd really wanted all along was a clone. Someone to emulate him and be a replacement but not a real person with real thoughts and an independent will of their own. All someone like that could do was make him look bad. Make him regret not being this or that. Make him feel guilty for all he hadn't done. I'm only a reminder of all those bad feelings. Mostly bad feelings about himself. So I walked back to the center of GutterVille without saying goodbye. Knowing I never would say goodbye to him. Or anything else, ever again. The self-centered bastard didn't deserve a goodbye.

I tarped a sheet from a RobePrinter vending in a covered alley before stepping into the acidic drizzle coming from implosion clouds overhead. I didn't know where I was going. Maybe I'd find a VendorShelter along the way. Crash there for a few hours. Then onto somewhere else. I had nothing but time. My Bitties were plenty for the basics in GutterVille. There wasn't much to buy here other than crappy beds at the shelters, street food, and drugs. Everything else was barter. That was how my Dad had cashed in. Mainly by trading what was between his ears. He could still think, and in this world that was a commodity. Lucky for me it was something I could still do too.

Maybe I carried that superpower too well. Too out in the open. Because when the LobePirates saw me they knew there was a prize on two legs just waiting for the taking. Maybe cause I walked straight and balanced, at a speedy pace, with a look of direction and intention. Or maybe it was the focus of my eyes, concentrated, as if calculating, remembering or imagining something. Or maybe they saw me leave Dad's house. They knew what he was up to but couldn't get past his well-thought-out security, but still knew enough to know, anyone coming out of there had to have something of value upstairs. Possibly even one of Dad's concoctions.

Either way I was surrounded by five of the pirates about half a mile from the FarStreet Shelter. Clouds were thickening and it was dark as dusk even though the sun was somewhere by noon. 

They all wore make-shift ThinkingCaps. PirateCaps really. They held one out for me to wear too. To imprison my mind. Enslave it and then sell it to some networked CyberOrg for criminal purposes. One of them approached me with it like a man might approach a horse trying to put a bit and bridle over her nose. Trying to tame it.

"Easy," he said. "Just stay calm."

He was smiling so I smiled back. He came closer. He put his hands up, the cap between his fingers, just inches away, calmly, confidently, like he'd done this before. I continued to smile. Looked him in the eyes and then kicked him in the balls.

I grabbed the cap out of his hands and flung it into the face of the man approaching from my left. Flung my right hand palm up into the nose of a different man coming straight on. A roundhouse kick flung my right foot into the man behind me. Into his throat, crushing his windpipe. A series of KungFu lunges, counter moves, and evasive ducks followed. It had been five years since I interfaced all those fighting applications through my Cap, but the instincts were still there as if I'd been practicing daily.