Impulse Control

"I just might," Alenia said, turning her head to look out of the window at the lights of San Francisco whizzing by. "If I live through this."

= = =

Lone Star and sergeant Sokoth handled the mean streets of San Fran. They were paid to respond to active violence and nominally to investigate crimes against ostensibly legal businesses, but their resources were limited. If a crime was going to take more than two cups of soykaf and a box of donuts to solve, they outsourced it to people like Dawson quickly. A special situation warranted a specialist's expertise. It was profitable to resolve the problem quickly.

But in Silicon Valley, Knight Errant patrolled the avenues and hallways itself. Lone Star had no jurisdiction within 15 miles of the Orchard, and it didn't want any. If a trash can lacked the proper identification a KE enforcer would turn it into a kite with their baton. Dawson's apartment was situated within this zone, heavily patrolled by both personnel and by drones. Everything was EM shielded, even the sinks. There were no investigations here, because there were no crimes, because there was no profit in attempting them.

"Are you sure I can be here?" Alenia asked under her breath. With the green A emblazoned on her threadbare top, her slightly-too-big pants and her half-shaved head, she looked like the kind of people that KE enforcers were paid to make sure didn't wander their way into these pristine high-tech residential buildings. Her visible skin was greasy with dried sweat and her face was haggard from her five-hour brush with death. She looked beyond shabby, even more so next to the well-dressed and well-armed Dawson.

"You shouldn't be here," Dawson told her, "Which is why no one will look for you here and no one will find you." She looked to her right at the elven decker while the smooth and quiet elevator ride took them up to the fifth floor. "You're far from the worst looking specimen I've hidden for a case."

Slowly Alenia returned Dawson's gaze, with slightly more reproach and more wandering of her eyes. "You've hidden other people in your apartment before?"

"A few times," Dawson confirmed. "For a few hours, when Lone Star was looking for them to use as a scapegoat, I wanted to get the truth. You'll be safe here."

The doors let them out onto a hallway twice as wide as those of the building next to _Applied Reactions,_ and far more extravagantly furnished. Padded seats for waiting, real plants for a touch of color, even a soykaf machine right here on the floor--one didn't even need to travel to the lobby for a cup. Dawson led the way to a door in the middle region and pressed her bare palm to the scanner beside the handle. After a few seconds the readout turned green and a soft series of sliding noises signalled that all the cross-bars had retracted and she was able to open it.

The interior was, to Alenia's obvious surprise, a more spartan affair than the lead-up had been suggesting. A well-used kitchen was densely populated with cooking utensils and ripening fruit while a central area had a couch, a spare armchair and a table with a few datapads on it. An expansive window of reinforced glass gave one a decent view of the Ares Macrotechnology California Free State HQ plaza down below and it was easy to imagine Dawson staring at it while piecing together the clues of some case she was working on... Or perhaps just remembering what had been sacrificed to keep it unsullied by the occupation all those years ago.

A wide, lazy spiral staircase led up to an overlook where the view of the street was not as good but a more intimate living area could be found. The bed looked big enough for three people but it was obvious Dawson only used a third of it judging by how the majority of the bedding was undisturbed. Beyond the sleeping space a bathroom the size of the entire apartment Dawson had found Alenia in was virtually spotless. It had a tub big enough for three people who could then go on to share the bed.

"All this is yours?" Alenia asked with slight incredulity. "What did you do to get this?"

Taking off her coat and hanging it on a rack near the door, Dawson's profile was much slimmer as she stopped in apparent thought. When Alenia looked at her to push her question the detective looked back and smiled in a small, sheepish way.

"Saved Silicon Valley, I suppose." She gestured wide. "Make yourself at home."

The elf grinned in response. "You're gonna wish you hadn't offered that, human."

The first thing she did was pull off her shoes; her feet had sweat as much as her body and were wrinkled from the moisture that had been trapped inside. With an enormous sigh of relief she crashed onto the couch and spread her legs in a stretch, sore from staying in what was more or less the exact same position for so long... And of course relieved her head didn't have any new holes in it.

Dawson sat in the chair across the table and pulled out her commpad, beginning to scroll through things. Alenia slowly opened her eyes and regarded the black-haired detective critically.

"Why are you using that?" the elf asked.

Raising an eyebrow, Dawson replied "Because carrier spirits are expensive."

Alenia scoffed. "No, I mean why are you using that? You could afford a commlink implant, couldn't you?"

"I could," Dawson said, "But I don't want one."

The decker's brows drew low. "Why not?"

Dawson's hand hesitated on the pad for a moment. "Getting augmented always felt like cheating," she said carefully.

"Cheating?" Alenia said with clear disbelief. "How's it cheating if everyone else has tech and you don't?"

As Dawson talked, it became clear this was a subject that she considered touchy and Alenia decided she'd better tread carefully. "Not cheating against anyone else," the detective said, "Cheating against myself. Admitting somehow that I wasn't good enough on my own to do whatever I was doing."

Gesturing to the gun still holstered on Dawson's hip, Alenia asked "Well isn't that cheating then? Shouldn't you be using your fists or a club fashioned from a dinosaur bone?"

Despite her obvious discomfort with the subject, Dawson laughed softly. Even though she'd meant it to be scathing, Alenia felt herself smile as well.

"I've got to compete somehow," Dawson admitted. "And I can change guns if I decide I don't like it. If I get an artificial lung or a cybernetic leg, what do I do if I decide I don't like that?"

"Get a new one?" Alenia proposed.

"And there are other reasons," Dawson went on, pointedly ignoring the elf's flippant suggestion. "A few times during the occupation the protectorates used EM emitters that caused implants to stop functioning. This never affected me. I'll admit there were some circumstances where being able to punch through a wall or call for backup without having to use my fingers to touch a console would have been useful... But a lot of people around me had those things and they aren't here today."

"But you are," Alenia said. "You could always get some now. Help you keep up with augmented criminals?"

Dawson sat back in her chair and let out a slow breath. She was clearly unveiling her final, true reason for her policy. "I'm attached to my essence," she said quietly.

"So is everyone," Alenia said, the words coming out more consoling than she'd imagined they would be. "You can get a commlink implant and a prosthetic without a noticeable change in demeanor. The tech they had back in '61 isn't the tech that's sold now."

"My intuition is what makes me good at my job," Dawson claimed. "If I lose any of it, I lose my ability to solve cases. Not just my ability to make money but my capacity to uncover the truth."

Alenia looked at her skeptically. "And... find justice?"

Reaching again for the commpad, Dawson inclined her head slightly. "Well, justice is not a popular product these days."

A moment of silence stretched out as Dawson read something and Alenia started to feel fatigue setting in. Her whole body was sore and filthy in a way that would require more than a few stretches to recover from.

"So what now?" the decker asked.

"Now Lone Star gives me the meager scraps of information it can procure about our victim and you tell me everything you know. When you're up for it."

"When I'm up for it?" Alenia asked with a suspicious look. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"I'm going to torture you," Dawson said. "First with a bath. Going to clean behind your ears real good. Then I'm going to fatten you up so you can't escape. You'll be too big to fit through the door. After that I'll put you down for a nap so you're too comfortable to think about running."

The detective said all of these things with a level, deadpan voice and a blank expression as she read whatever was on her commpad. After several seconds she looked up from the pad at Alenia's confused and slightly alarmed expression and offered her a small smile.

"How about it? Feel like talking yet?"

"You are," the elf said slowly, "The weirdest human I've ever met."

"I'm sure you'll live long enough to meet someone stranger," Dawson conjectured. She tapped the commpad.

"The accountant--that's the person who was murdered--used to work for Pyrmaid Operations."

Still feeling off-balance, Alenia scratched one side of her neck. "Who are they?"

"A subsidiary of Aztechnology," Dawson informed. "He worked in their accounting department for a few years before leaving to pursue an offer at the Applied Reactions lab."

"That's suspicious?" the elf asked.

"It's suspicious that they would pay him more than a bigger firm would, but Applied Reactions was also under the Aztechnology umbrella."

Alenia squinted. "What does that mean?"

"It means someone wanted him to be in that lab tonight."

The elf ran a hand through the hair on one side of her head. "They told me the place was empty. That they wouldn't be hurting anyone except the corp itself."

"Don't feel bad," Dawson comforted her. "Being lied to is common in operations like this. Especially if they plan to kill you when it's over."

"My head is still a little sore," Alenia confided.

"There's some bio-medical gel in the mirror cabinet in the bathroom upstairs," Dawson said. "I can get it."

Alenia's eyes lit up at the thought of administered relief and then her guarded expression returned. She didn't want to look like a charity case. "I think I'll be fine," she said moodily. But Dawson saw right through her, setting down the pad and going upstairs. She was only gone a minute and a half before she came back with wet hands and a tube of high-grade medgel.

Part of Alenia expected to be all but slapped with the tube but to palpable anxiety Dawson sat on the couch with her knees next to her. "Try not to move or this stuff will be on your eyebrows."

"I really don't need--" Alenia's protest melted into a shuddering sigh as Dawson's palm spread the cool, thick gel across the shaved part of her scalp. The relief on her inflamed and irritated tissue was immediate, and only became more completed as Dawson's hands--lightly calloused but clearly well-practiced in the motions--rubbed it into her flesh. With the temperature in her skin going down, her cranial web could also start to cool as well.

"Smart investment, that heat sink web in your skull," Dawson said softly. Alenia couldn't keep from shutting her eyes and parting her lips in sensory elation as her bare skin was massaged. Meat space could be so intoxicating sometimes.

"You like what you do but you know you have to be on guard," the detective went on. Her praise was something that Alenia found to her liking. Recognition from an elder was a young elf's most craved experience.

"You saved yourself as much as I saved you," Dawson told her, gently tapping her fingernail to the skin beside Alenia's datajack. "When you invested in a sword and a shield."

"Yeah," Alenia mumbled. To her disorientation, Dawson got up from the couch and went to the kitchen's sink to wash her hands.

"Better?" she called out without turning.

The elf's breath came slow and heavy, eyes feeling bleary after the beneficial sensory assault. "Yeah," she repeated, with more volume but no more conviction.

"Good," Dawson said, coming back to the chair and affecting a stare so scrutinizing it made Alenia feel guilty despite her belief that she'd done nothing particularly wrong.

"Can you point me to the person who recruited you?" she asked. Alenia groped around in her head for an answer that would satisfy without devolving into word vomit trying to tell everything to an authority figure, and a human one at that.

"I need a new deck," she put forth. That was true, for a few reasons. The old one had melted after all and nearly taken her with it.

"I can get you a new deck," Dawson said without hesitation. Despite her numbed, exhausted state Alenia felt the tickle of opportunity in her stomach upon hearing those words. She forced her mouth to form coherent words before the conversation could move on and this technophobe could stick her with a piece of trash.

"And not something out of a dumpster! Something good, something... newer."

Dawson made an expression of contemplation and Alenia realized she probably had no idea what made one deck different from another. And then she said exactly the words the elf had been hoping to hear next.

"What would you suggest?"

"For the best shot at what you're asking for," Alenia said matter-of-factly, "I'll need a Fairlight Excalibur. At least."

The detective didn't change her expression. "Alright. What else?" Alenia's mind raced with the possibilities. "Uh, and.. Uh... A Cyclops XS visor by Renraku! Yeah, that should do it..."

"I'll see what I can do. In the meantime you should get some sleep. You can take a pillow from the bed upstairs if the couch isn't comfortable enough on its own. I've got some leftover take-out in the fridge you're welcome to, if you like sweet-and-sour soy-chicken."

"I think I will," Alenia asked as Dawson started walking towards the door to retrieve her coat. She felt a little overwhelmed, having gone from dying a slow heat feedback death in a vertical coffin to kicking back in a Knight Errant VIP's apartment.

"The windows are tinted on the outside," Dawson told her, "So no one can see you from the street, but don't answer the door for anyone. If they're legitimate, they'll know to call me directly."

"Right," Alenia said, running her hand through her hair again. The gelled side of her skull was comfortably relaxed and tingling, but she could hardly wait to go exploring around the apartment.

"And I know your gang-mates are probably worried about you," Dawson said, reappearing with her trench coat and hat on, "But don't contact them yet. Whoever tried to kill you will be watching for you to go back to them on the off-chance you survived. Make sense?"

"Yeah," the elf agreed, though with some clear reluctance. "Until then I'll just... make myself at home!"

"Feel free," the detective told her. Dawson would come to regret having said so.

= = =

"A Fairlight Excalibur?" Rossman asked, rubbing the top of his bald head. "Why do you need one of those?"

"It's for a case," Dawson told him. His shop was thankfully empty of any other customers at this time of night, though that of course didn't mean there wasn't still someone trying to listen in.

"But you don't even have a datajack," Rossman pointed out. "Why would you spend so much money on something you can't use?"

"I have a witness who does, and they say they need it to recover some data."

Rossman scratched his chin. "I think they're taking you for a ride, detective. You could do data recovery with a Sony CTY-360 at a fraction of the cost."

"I need more than that. Something called a Cyclops XS Visor." At this, Rossman's eyebrows went up and his mouth fell open.

"That showpiece? The one that does exactly what a normal matrix visor does but at three times the cost and has no gimmick other than that it turns transparent when you drop out of cyberspace so you don't immediately have to flip it up?"

"And one more thing," Dawson said, looking over her shoulder and leaning closer. "I need some kind of safety mechanism. A spring-loaded cable connector with a thermostat on it that'll eject it from someone's datajack if it starts getting feedback."

The color drained from Rossman's face upon hearing this. "Are you... is this something to do with shadowrunning? Are you a runner now, Dawson? I thought you were consulting for Lone Star!"

"I am," Dawson said furtively, "I told you, this is for a case. Can you sell me these things?"

Rubbing his throat nervously, Rossman repeated her gesture of looking around to make sure no one was actively spying on them. "I don't keep the Excalibur in stock, they're too expensive for my normal clientele. But I do have something I got from Fairlight about six days ago they sent me as a promotional thing. It's even more expensive but the specs are even better."

"That's fine," Dawson said. "I appreciate it, Louis." In truth, transactions like this made her miss Templeton. He had always responded to Dawson's odd requests with a conspiratorial eagerness that helped assure her she was doing the right thing. Rossman's apprehension might fade in time, but seeing it never failed to make Dawson feel her age as well as the absence of people she used to know and had outlived.

= = =

Dawson ended up being gone for several hours and when she got back, she found her apartment in such a state of disarray that she initially thought someone had managed to break in, despite there being no indication of it from the outside. It was only after several seconds of staring at the mess that had been made of the kitchen that she began to piece together the reality.

She judged that the fridge had been opened up and the take-out box retrieved from within, and then stuck into the microwave though not before first being tried cold, if the smeared sauce on the handle of the microwave door was any indication. Then someone had gotten a glass of water from the tap and drank about half of it (if the mouth-marks on the rim of the glass and the remaining contents were to be believed). That same someone had gotten bored with the premise of hydration and gone looking for something more interesting to quench their thirst.

Much to her chagrin, they had found the champagne she'd been keeping in the cabinet below the silverware, which they'd left open. They'd drunk one entire bottle before even leaving the kitchen, dropping it in the sink for lack of either ability or lack of willingness to locate the trash bin.

The trail continued back into the central living area where a second empty bottle had been discarded at the foot of the spiral staircase. Dawson's weariness grew in weight as she ascended the steps and her worst fears were confirmed upon reaching the upper area. The third bottle was lying at the side of the bed, almost entirely empty.

Alenia was lying in the bed, snoring loudly, and of course completely naked. Her hairless twenty-something body had crashed right into Dawson's side of the bed, twisted halfway around to wrap herself partway in the blanket, pulled Dawson's pillow up to her face and then started drooling into it.

Judging by her ratty clothing being flung in the general direction of the bathroom, it was probable that Alenia had intended to bathe herself before sleeping but the champagne--a gift from Gaines at last year's annual regional executive party--had ensured that the lightweight elf never made it past the bed. Now her greasy, sweaty and admittedly nubile form was tangled in Dawson's bedding as if it had been Alenia's sleeping mound all along and Dawson was the visitor.

It was while Dawson was surveying the scene, hands still in her coat pockets, that Alenia stirred, snorting spittle out of her mouth onto the place Dawson normally rested her head. "Huhhnn!" she groaned. "Whoosz there?"