Incorporated with DeepSeek
The rain over Barking tasted of ozone and old chip fat, a chemical film that clung to the back of your throat and never quite washed out of your clothes. I was wiping down the stainless-steel counter of my shop, the Barking Cod, when she blew in off the street like a stray cat looking for a fight. Chrome glinted at her temples, and the smart-links in her forearms buzzed faintly, the kind of buzz that said military-grade and please don’t ask where she got them. Her eyes, one natural hazel and one a cheap cyber-replacement that glowed red in the dark, scanned the empty café before locking onto me.
“You the American,” she said. Not a question.
“That’s what the sign says.” I nodded toward the hand-painted board above the till: *Ray’s – Fish, Chips, Decks, Scooter Repair. Yank-owned, Dagenham-born now.*
“My brother’s missing. Kai. Ork kid, seventeen, rides a yellow BMX with handlebar tassels you sold him six months ago.” She placed a crumpled ten-nuyen note on the counter like it was the down payment on my soul. “They say you used to find people.”
I didn’t touch the money. In the back, the dull hum of my house AI, Boudica, cycled through the evening’s terminal logs—kids playing Matrix chess, a troll mechanic looking up torque specs, a couple of gangers on probation keeping their hands clean for the free soykaf. This place had started as a chippy with a flat above it, a broke ex-CAS Ranger’s retirement plan in a borough the corps had forgotten. Then I’d picked up a job lot of skateboard decks from a container auction in Tilbury. BMX frames followed, then inline skates, futsal balls, even squash racquets because I got a deal on a pallet of them and the old squash courts behind the old Ford stamping plant were just sitting there. I started selling them at cost-plus-a-prayer. Scooters for the delivery riders. Motorcycles for the ones who wanted to learn a trade. Low-cost cyberdecks built from salvaged corporate terminals, because every kid deserved a shot at the Matrix without selling a kidney to Shiawase. Boudica—a salvaged personality fragment I’d liberated from a crashed Proteus mainframe and raised like a digital pit bull—ran the terminals, kept the firewalls hot, and made sure the only buzz you got in here came from the VR games and the neon sign that read SOBER SPOT. No booze, no BTLs, no trouble.
It had worked. The Barking Cod became the thing the corps couldn’t replicate: a chunk of community not yet priced into the sprawl. And now trouble had walked in wearing a razor-girl’s face.
“Name’s Vex,” she said. “Kai went out three nights ago to do tricks at the old gasworks half-pipe. Never came home.”
I knew the place. The half-pipe I’d welded together from scrap girders and set into the cracked tarmac of an abandoned gasworks. A lot of kids practised there, the ones who’d rather sweat than jack into BTL stupor. “Talk to the locals?”
“They clammed up. Someone’s scared them. I thought you might be able to lean a little.”
I let out a breath. My war had ended years ago, but that itch under the skin never really goes. I tossed my dishrag into the sink. “Let me grab my jacket.”
---
Boudica patched into my commlink as I walked, her voice a soothing, synthetic murmur. *Ray, I’ve cross-referenced Kai’s SINless biometric traces. His commlink went dark near the Docklands light-rail spur, but I’ve captured fragmented data packets from a local grid: repeated mentions of “the reaper’s garden” in low-level encrypted chat. I’m cross-referencing now.*
Barking and Dagenham sprawled out around me, a tangle of old brick council estates, corrugated-iron workshops, and the occasional blast shadow from the last goblinisation riots. The streetlights flickered, half of them still running on municipal power from a grid the London Assembly had given up on. Orks huddled around a burning oil drum outside a shuttered bookmaker’s. A troll in a hi-vis vest was loading scrap metal into a van with the kind of care that suggested he wasn’t being paid enough to ask questions. I’d been a stranger here once, an American merc who’d walked away from his unit and his citizenship when the CAS decided to back the wrong atrocity. Barking had taken me in, or maybe I’d just burrowed deep enough that the sprawl couldn’t spit me out.
The gasworks half-pipe loomed out of the mist, its metal surface slick with rain and spray-paint sigils. A handful of kids were still there, huddled under the one working floodlight I’d rigged to a solar battery. They scattered when they saw me, all except for a dwarf girl with bright pink hair and a skateboard clutched like a shield.
“Easy, Stitch,” I said. She ran the unofficial skate crew. “I’m looking for Kai.”
She glanced behind her, then back. “He’s gone, Mister Ray. The Reapers got him.”
The Reapers were a gang that had been moving in from the east, pushing cheap hallucinogens and black-market ’ware. I’d run them off the Cod’s doorstep twice already. “What do they want with a BMX rider?”
“They don’t want him. They want what he can do.” Stitch’s voice dropped. “There’s a place, an old chippy on River Road. Same as yours used to be. But they don’t fry fish there. They’re fitting kids with something. Saw a guy go in, came out with his eyes all silver and his hands shaking. Said he felt like a god.” She shivered. “Kai wouldn’t take their junk, so they took him.”
My jaw tightened. BTL chip fabrication. You needed fresh nervous systems for the best simsense loops, and desperate kids were a renewable resource in this part of London. I pressed a fifty-nuyen note into Stitch’s hand. “Go to the Cod. Tell Boudica to lock down, no one in or out until I call.”
---
Back in my flat above the shop, I opened the reinforced trunk that still smelled of gun oil and bad memories. My old Ares Predator V sat in its holster, smartlink synced to my right eye’s targeting implant. I checked the clip, snicked the slide, and felt the familiar weight settle my pulse. Grum, the troll who ran the motorcycle repair bay out back, was already loading shells into a drum-fed shotgun. His tusks had been filed down for a helmet, and the scars across his arms told the story of a doorman who’d refused one too many bribes.
“You sure about this, chief?” Grum rumbled. “We go in loud, they might burn the place. And the kids.”
“We’re not going in loud. We’re going in precise. Boudica?”
*I have infiltrated the Reapers’ building management system. The old fish-and-chip shop on River Road is a front. The basement has been expanded into a low-grade chip lab, shielded from casual matrix scans. I count twelve heat signatures, four of them child-sized. One awakened signature, rating indeterminate.*
“Define ‘indeterminate’.”
*Either a very strong mage or something already on the astral. I recommend caution, Raymond.*
Caution had never been my strong suit. I pulled on my armoured jacket and dropped a spare clip into my pocket. Vex was waiting by the door, a compact SMG materialising from the folds of her coat. “I’m coming,” she said.
“Figured. Keep behind me and don’t start what you can’t finish.”
---
River Road was a canyon of boarded-up shops and shattered streetlamps. The Reapers’ chippy glowed with a sickly blue light from the basement windows, and the smell of burnt neural pathways mixed with the river stench. Boudica cut the external cameras and unlocked the service door with a whisper of old code. We moved in like shadows, Grum’s boots surprisingly quiet for a quarter-ton of troll.
Downstairs was a charnel house of chip production. Workstations lined with head-cradles, tangles of fibre-optic cable, and a centrifuge that spun cerebrospinal fluid from something I didn’t want to think about. In a row of stained bunks, kids lay wired to monitors, their eyes fluttering in induced simsense comas. Kai was near the end, his yellow BMX propped against the wall like a cruel joke, his face slack under the chip-web.
A voice slithered from the dark. “You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you, Ray?” A man stepped out, but he wasn’t just a man. His skin shimmered with astral overlay, and a spirit of pollution coiled around him like a wreath of industrial fog. A toxic shaman. “This borough is a wound. I’m just draining the pus.”
I raised the Predator. “Let them go.”
He laughed, and the spirit lunged. Vex opened up with the SMG, the rounds tearing through its ephemeral form but not stopping it. Grum’s shotgun roared, the heavy slugs punching through the shaman’s barrier spell. I dived sideways, firing in three-round bursts, while Boudica screamed into my commlink: *Astral signature destabilising! He’s using the children’s pain as a power source! Sever the connections!*
I rolled to the monitors and started ripping cables. The spirit shrieked as each child’s lifeline snapped, and the shaman staggered, his power bleeding out into the astral. Vex put three rounds through his chest before he could conjure another monstrosity. He fell in a heap of bad robes and worse intentions, the pollution spirit dissolving into a greasy stain on the concrete.
Grum gathered the kids, hefting two under each arm, while Vex cradled Kai. The lab started to burn—triggered, no doubt, by a dead-man’s switch—and we scrambled up the stairs as the basement filled with chemical fire. Behind us, the Reapers’ legacy went up in a plume of black smoke that would hang over the Thames for days.
---
Dawn bled grey over the Cod’s corrugated roof. The kids were safe, most of them already recovering in the back room with mugs of soykaf and the blank stares of the recently unplugged. Kai sat with Vex, their hands entwined, his BMX back by the door. I stood behind the counter, scrubbing chip-factory soot from my knuckles, and watched the street.
The Reapers would come for revenge. Or maybe another gang, or a corp security team angry that their BTL supply had been interrupted. It didn’t matter. Outside, Grum was welding armour plates onto the shop’s window frames. Stitch and her skate crew were patrolling the block with crowbars and the kind of fierce loyalty you can’t buy with nuyen. Boudica had tripled the perimeter sensors and linked every terminal in the Cod into an early-warning network. In the back, the scooter repair bay now doubled as a small arms workshop, and the motorcycle garage had become a motor pool for couriers who doubled as scouts.
We weren’t just a chippy anymore, and we weren’t just a community centre. We were a hardpoint. The sober kids who came for the skate ramps and the cheap cyberdecks now carried more than deck tools. They carried commcodes for every watcher on the block, and some of them were learning the difference between cover and concealment. I wasn’t building an army—just a neighbourhood that refused to be prey.
Vex met my eyes from across the room. “You do this often?”
“First time,” I lied.
She almost smiled. “They’ll come again.”
“Yeah,” I said, watching the rain-slicked asphalt outside my door, the glint of a BMX spoke spinning in the cold light. “But we hold our place now by more than hope. We hold it by iron, by the AI’s sleepless eye, and by every kid who’s willing to bleed for a place that actually gave a damn.”
The neon SOBER SPOT sign buzzed overhead. In the back, a dwarf girl was teaching an ork how to inline skate. Grum rumbled a sea shanty while he torqued a cylinder head. And somewhere in the depths of the Matrix, Boudica was already picking the next threat out of the static, one keystroke ahead of damnation.
It wasn’t paradise. But in this drowned corner of London, it was home, and that was enough. More than enough.
