Cyberpunk

flowed from my fingertips in the ink. Spanning her entire back, it crossed shoulder to shoulder.
    I leaned back to check my handiwork.
    “How does it look?” she said.
    “Like a big double spiral.” The maze of ink rolled across her dark olive skin’s surface. A series of skin cancers marked the swell of one buttock, the squamous patches sliding under her baggy cargo pants. She sat almost shivering on a pile of pallets. We were at the recycling yard’s edge. This section, out of the wind between two warehouses, was rarely visited and made a good place to sit and smoke or fuck or upgrade.
    I uncoiled a strand of memory and set to work, pressing it on the skin. I could see her shudder as the cold bond with her flesh took place. The wire glinted gold and purple, its surface set with an oily sheen. Here and there sections had gone bad and dulled to concrete gray, tinting the surrounding skin yellow.
    She shrugged her shirt back over her skinny torso. Her breasts gleamed in the early spring’s evening light before disappearing under the slick white fabric. Reaching for her jacket, she wiggled her arms snakelike down the sleeves, flipping her shoulders underneath.
    “Is it hooked in okay?” I asked.
    She shrugged. “Won’t know until I try to download something.”
    “Got plans for it?”
    “I can think of things,” she said. “Shall I do you now, Jonny?”
    “Yeah.” I discarded my jacket and T-shirt, and leaned forward over the pallet while she applied the alcohol in cool swipes. The wind hit the liquid as it touched my skin and reduced it to chill nothingness. She drew a long swoop across my back.
    “What pattern are you making?”
    “Trying to do the same thing you did on mine.” The slow circles grew like one wing, then another, on my shoulder blades. She paused before she began laying in the memory.
    I don’t know that you could call it pain but it’s close. At the moment a biobit makes its way into your own system, it’s as though the point of impact was exquisitely sensitive, and somewhere micrometers away, someone was doing something inconceivable to it.
    “Tomorrow are the Exams,” she said. “Could see what I could download for that.”
    I started to turn my head to look at her, but just then she laid down a curve of ice with a single motion. My jaw clenched.
    “And?” was all I managed.
    “One of us placed in a decent job would be a good thing.”
    She laid more memory before she said “Two of us placed in one would be better.”
    “Might end up separated.”
    “Would it matter, a six-month, maybe a year or two, before we could work out a transfer?”
    I would have shrugged but instead sat still. “So you want to take that memory and jack in facts so you can pass the Exams and become an upstanding citizen?”
    She ignored my tone. “Even a little edge would help. Mainly executables, some sorting routines. Maybe a couple high power searches so I can extrapolate answers I can’t find.”
    The last of the memory felt like fire and ice as it seeped into my skin. She’d never mentioned the Exams in the two years we’d been together.
    You’re not supposed to be able to emancipate until you’re 16, but Grizz and I both left a few years early. My family had too many kids as it was and ended up getting caught in a squatter sweep. I came home and found the place packed up and vacant. The deli owner downstairs let me sleep in his back room for the first few months, sort of like an extra burglar alarm, but then he caught me stealing food and gave me the boot. After that, I made enough to eat by running errands for the block, and alternated between three or four sleeping spots I’d discovered on rooftops; while they’re less sheltered, fewer punks or crazies make the effort to come up there and mess with you.
    Once I hooked up with Grizz, life got a little easier—I had someone to watch my back without it costing me a favor.
    We went around to Ajah’s, hoping to catch him in one of his moods when he gets drunk on homemade booze and cooks enormous meals. Luck was with us—he was just finishing a curried mushroom omelet. It smelled like heaven.
    Three other people sat around his battered kitchen table, watching him work at the stove. Two I didn’t know; the third was Lorelei. She gave me a long, slow, sleepy smile, and Grizz and I nodded back at her.
    Ajah turned at our entrance and waved us in with his spatula. His jowls surged with a grin.
    “Jonny and Grizz, sit down, sit