Tiresias

By Josh K

I wasted nearly twenty years on this street or ones like it.  For years I lived by chance alone.  In the end, my life was just one toss of the dice or flip of a coin after another.  I guess part of it was because of those neo-hippies I called Mom and Dad.  We were always drifting from one commune to another, They were constantly spouting anti-authoritarian rhetoric that sounded as non-scensical as any cult leaders pitch.  Don't get me wrong, I was never a fan of the government, but I wasn't so blind as not to see their purpose.  I never got a formal education until I was thirteen when the state declared my parents unfit to raise me.  I barely drifted through school, not really learning anything to prepare me for the world ahead of me.  When I grew up, I started gambling.

I started as a street hustler, you know "Pick the Ace and win five creds,"  One night, I won over sixty bucks off this one chump, they usually wise up after losing ten. When he got to his last bill I turned him away; he had lost enough money for one night.  Begging for another try, he told me about a place where I could make far more money than working the rubes on the streets.  I caved in and let him play again.

The address the man gave me was an old, abandoned hotel.  Inside were tables set up everywhere with people gambling away their day's earnings.  Something about it seemed to draw me in, like there was a siren's call beckoning me to stay.  Despite myself, I went to one of the tables and placed a bet.  Here I was, letting myself get taken advantage of by hustlers like me.  After some consistent wins, I left for home a four hundred creds richer.

The next night I returned to the building and found it empty.  I spent the whole night looking for the man who had originally told me about it.  I found him wasted in a back alley, bloodied by a broken bottle of wine next to him.  With all the advances made on the neural interface and virtual drugs, people still liked to get drunk the old fashioned way.  I could appreciate that, it's good for business, makes them duller than using VDrugs.  When I asked him about the house, he told me that they moved it every few days to keep ahead of the feds.  After buying him some rum and helping him clean up the bloody gash on his forehead, he told me how to find out where the houses moved to.

I arrived at the new house and felt the same welcoming aura.  Within a few hours, I became rich, lost it all, and then broke even.  For couple of years I went to those houses, supplementing my living on pure, blind luck.  There were some shaky times where I lost almost everything, but in the end I seemed to always come out on top.  I even had enough money to get a top of the line neural interface installed in the back of my head.  The interface was prime for accelerated learning.  I used it to upload a bunch of advanced statistics into my cortex, giving me a leg up by knowing the best time to cut my losses and maximize my returns.  Despite it all, my luck couldn't last forever, and it was just two months after the installation that it finally ran out.  I lost everything to a guy who called himself The Snake.  Thankfully, he had a sense of humor; he allowed me one more game. 

"There, there," he said, "I've ran houses like this all over the city and never seen anyone win as much as you.  You should feel lucky that I've let you run this long without shutting you down, but your winnings have always been a magnet for washouts.  If your luck has truly run out, I have more than enough reason to send you to the fucking sharks."

He started to set up another game, and two big guys in suits silently positioned themselves behind me.  I began to look around the room to figure out the best way to make a break for it.

"If you win, I'll give you back half of your losses and let you come back to these establishments," The Snake paused for a moment and looked me over with a faint smile, "If you lose, you get a full genetic sex change and clear the debt by working the streets for a friend of mine.  We'll make you a true blue working gal, and you'll never be allowed in here again."

You can guess which one happened.

The sex change was the most painful experience of my life.  The black market docs used gene therapy to clone my X chromosome and eliminate the Y.  Then I was given a specialized cytotoxin that caused me to redevelop all of my cells.  Some supplementary plastic surgery smoothed out the rough edges, I was completely a woman.

The seven years that followed were something of a blur.  I worked the streets as a hooker for The Snake's pimp.  Sometimes the sadist would hire me for himself just to deepen the humiliation.  Things only got worse when I got hooked on the Virtual Drugs, or VDrugs as everyone called it.  They were little chrome spheres with a plug in one end that fit into a standard neural interface.  Loaded with a program that screwed up the way signals were interpreted in your brain, they could simulate just about any drug around, and a few that weren’t.  To keep the junkies coming around for more, they had a timer that could only be reset by the dealer that originally sold it to you. 

In my case, my dealer was my pimp.  The arrangement was not entirely uncommon.  In this day and age, science gave way to new perversions, and I became a hot commodity.  I was thankful for the VDrug's ability to wash away those years.  They melted in the haze of my favorite program, Black Dahlia, and I repaid my debt to The Snake.  With time I raised the money to get the sex change reversed.

About a year later, Mark Feldman, president of Olympus Defense Systems, had some sort of argument with his wife Hera.  She caught him sleeping with one of his secretaries again and he tried to play down the whole deal by saying that the secretary enjoyed it more than he did.  Well she wouldn't have it, and this lead to a ridiculous argument about women supposedly enjoying sex more than men.  She was insulted by this and would not accept it for one minute.  Now I fit into this stupid argument because The Snake was Mark's link into the less savory business interests of Olympus Defense Systems, he had told him about me.

He sent one of his interns out to summon me.  When I was brought to his office, I was immediately struck by the beauty of his wife.  She was wearing the dress with a peacock feather pattern that she often wore at public occasions.  Mark sat behind his desk with the  Olympus logo shaped like a lightning bolt, framing the scene.  As he explained the situation to me, I looked around the office, it was filled with alternating black and white marble pillars.  On the walls were prototype designs of many of Olympus's successes.  The company made it's fortune by selling its weapons and countermeasures to many governments and megacorps.  This building probably had more defenses than the Whitehorse, but my safety was far from assured.  I felt like I was being inquisitioned by a couple of giggling school girls before Mark finally asked the question.  I told him the truth, the way they had my brain wired when I was a woman was much better oriented to the more physical nature.

Hera's face contorted in childish anger and she pulled a strange pistol from out of her dress.  She shot it dead into me.  A thick glue like gel burned as it covered my face, at first I thought it was my own blood.  I went completely blind and could only hear footsteps and Mark ranting at his wife as she stormed out of the room.

He informed me that she shot me with a prototype weapon.  It was not designed to kill, but rather cripple.  "Think of it as the new pepper spray for those who want to maim," he said like it was a sales pitch.  The news only got worse, it contained a carcinogen that bound to the DNA in my face, causing my body to reject any new eye grafts that were available at the time.  The effect was so ingrained that simple genetic reconstruction couldn't effectively clean out the contamination.  He gave me all the apologies that he possibly could, and had me fitted with a set of electronic eyes that plugged into my existing neural infrastructure.  He offered me a job, but I really wasn't in the mood to accept.

That was two years ago.  I snuck back to the gambling houses for awhile.  The electronic eyes gave me an unfair advantage, I could read people's heat signatures and tell when they were bluffing.  Somehow the place just didn't do it for me the way it used to.  The Snake repealed his life-long ban against me now that I wasn't on my winning streak.  In a drunken state, he confided in me that Olympus provided a special mixture of pheromones and other compounds that were pumped into the houses to keep people coming around.  I always did like the effect alcohol had on people, I may have lost a big chunk of change that night, but I got something more valuable.  I found that my operation affected some of the pheromones receptors in my brain.  I thought back to how the compounds affected the life of the poor dupe that first lead me here.  I guess that gave me some sort of sense of duty, a desire to change things.  To prevent people from being the victims of their own fate in a society that has been so pampered by technology that the natural instincts of survival are dulled.

Those houses were just one of many ways that Olympus and other megacorps used their power and technology to make people subservient.  One day I was walking down the street near one of the local police stations.  Police work had gotten so dirty that they had recruiter stations that tried to offer you the world for joining the force.  A high tech suit of urban armor and a gun with neural jacks for targeting were sold as glamourous.  They were the new soldiers, ready to do battle with the forces of evil in our own backyard; or so they try to convince you.  None of that mattered all that much, I had my own vendetta, so I went into fast track training for six months and got a badge. 

I got to work in the Technological Abuse Department, amongst other things we shut down houses like the ones The Snake ran.  No matter how many times we shut them down they kept popping up and soon enough I was recognizing the people from previous busts.  I shouldn't have been surprised, the states couldn't really support their own prison systems anymore.  This wasn't just the usual revolving door problem seen in the generations before me.  I learned not to see the criminals slip a cut back to an officer, and I started taking them myself.  It was not difficult to arrange for someone who was destined for hard time to simply sit at the station for a day or two.  One night, we busted one of The Snake's houses and we found patrons strewn across the floors either dead or dying.  The compounds pumped into the air had reacted with a new pheromone they were testing.  That is when I finally put my foot down.  I contacted the right channels and got transferred to the Internal Affairs Department.  I was called many things by my former colleagues, but most of them have been cut loose or are under investigation.  I may not be directly working against the forces that be, but at least now maybe those who do will do it right.  Boy would my parents laugh at that one.