Piercing sirens wake me up as police light cycles whizz by my window. I open my eyes that feel like they were bolted shut. Then I notice I’m back in my apartment. 

 

Huh, that’s odd.

 

At least whoever rented me out had the courtesy of returning me home. My neural Heads Up Display (HUD) isn’t working, so I blink a few more times to try and restart it. They better not have jacked my neural implant. That shit cost me a year’s worth of rent.

 

After imitating a historical shutter-camera, my HUD comes back online, and I look to my top right to see what time it is: 7:00am. Not bad, but then I see the date:

 

Saturday, April 29th, 2367

 

That’s three months since I went under. I only signed up to be rented out for one night. 

 

I jump out of bed in a daze, but almost immediately fall back in it from the pain. I look down at my body, and a body that’s blueish purple looks back at me. What the hell happened to me while I was under? Every move I make, a new ache or sudden pain pops up. I gotta get answers, so I call up the very person who convinced me to sign up for the Body Rental Service in the first place.

 

“About damn time, choom! Where you been? Did you ride away into the sunset with the money you made?”

 

“Dom, what the fuck did you get me into?” I replied.

 

“Whaddya mean chromie? Did they have extra fun with your body or somethin’? Don’t tell me you didn’t see that coming.”

 

“Not that. I mean, I am pretty sore, but that’s not important. Listen, Dom. I was out for 3 months. I plugged into the system in January.”

 

Silence from the other line. Dom replied, this time without the laid back attitude, “That’s…that’s not supposed to happen. That’s not even allowed to happen. The rental machines have an internal timer of twenty-four hours that disconnects the user from the body.”

 

“Then tell me why I woke up today without memory of the last 90 days, Dom”.

 

“Look, Ed, I don’t know, okay? Just be glad whoever rented you out put you back in one piece and didn’t decide to dump you out in the Wastelands instead. Did you check your bank account?”

 

I think about my account, prompting my neural link to open it up on my HUD. I look down to my balance, and find a deposit of ten million dollars into my account, deposited yesterday. 

 

I freeze, “Yeah, yeah I got it here. It’s uh…it’s quite something”.

 

“How much we talkin? Fifty thousand, hundred thousand? It’s gotta be a lot if they had you for 3 months. Wait. don’t tell me you got scammed now”. 

 

I hesitate before telling him, “Yeah, around one hundred thousand dollars.”

 

“Holy shit, Ed! You did it. You can pay off your debt and start clean again! You should sound happier. Why don’t you sound happier?”

 

“Just…shocked, I guess. I’m sure it’ll hit me soon”. I quickly wrap up the conversation by telling Dom I need to decide how to celebrate tonight. 

 

What the hell was I doing during those three months? Who hired me? And how were they able to bypass the twenty-four hour timer in the implant? If they were good enough to hack a NueraDyne link without alerting the company, they must be worth their chrome. I have a feeling NeuraDyne wouldn’t take kindly to this, and I’m sure if they found out, I’d already be in prison. Or worse.

 

I carry on about the rest of my Saturday like nothing happened, which is a bit hard with my (probably) broken ribs and full-body bruising. I clean my apartment the best I can, and I make sure to make my loan payment for the month. I pay the minimum amount required, like I always do, so they don’t get suspicious. After all, I just got fired, so an increase in my monthly payments would probably raise a brow or two. 

 

Come night time, I’m tired of sitting in bed and licking my wounds. I feel cooped up, so I decide to get up and out into the streets and go for a walk. 

 

Someone deserves a visit.

 

***

 

A freaky looking cyborg that’s more chrome than man opens the door. His red mohawk blends in with the red lighting coming from inside. And he’s got sunglasses on in the middle of the night. This should be good.

 

“Can I help you?” He says to me.

 

“Uh…Yeah. Are you Bruno?” I say back.

 

“Think you’ve got the wrong place, pal.” He immediately turns around and starts to close the door. I stop it with my right hand – the good one. “The hell you think you’re doing, choom? I got half a mind to knock you upside your head right now.” He clenches his chrome hand into a fist.

 

“Look, bro. Little birdy told me I should come speak with Bruno. I’ve got some data I think he’d like to see. Surely you can understand.” I slip him a one-thousand credit bill that I withdrew earlier on my walk. 

 

He glances down at my offer through those dumb shades of his. Then he turns his head, looks down both ends of the alley, and swipes the money with his claw-for-an-arm. This guy either thinks I’m a mole or was followed by one. He turns his eyes back to me and motions his mostly chrome head toward the inside, “Nice to meet you. I’m Bruno.”

 

Bruno’s workshop looks as if a jungle stepped into a red light booth. I have to bob and weave through hanging vines of cables drooping from the ceiling, and I make sure to watch my step as I walk through scattered parts strewn over the floor. My God, is this what all broker places look like? He says to pardon the mess, as he wasn’t expecting guests, like he would’ve – or even could’ve – cleaned this shit up beforehand.

 

After a trek into the heart of the cyber-rainforest, we stop at this ominous ass chair next to his main workbench. It looks like some medieval torture device, and it probably has been used that way too.

 

He nods his head towards the chair, “Take a seat, kid”.

 

“This the first time you’ve asked someone to sit in that chair without using force?”

 

He chuckles, “Listen pup. I’m not sure what you’ve heard about me, but I guarantee you that half of it is just noise. Didn’t your momma ever tell ya not to believe everything you hear?”

 

“What about the other half of what I’ve heard?”

 

Bruno shrugs his shoulders and tilts his head, “Well, what can ya do? I gotta put credits in the account somehow. I’m good at getting info, so that’s what I do. I’m not the one who goes out and grabs the sorry punks”. He plugs a few things into his monitors at his workbench, and then turns to face me, “So, you wanna do this or not? Whatcha got in that shiny chrome-dome of yours?”

 

I hesitate a moment. What if he snitches on me after he finds out what I was hired to do? Cyborgs like this guy only care about one thing: credits. They sell their own heart and soul to get a quick check – he wouldn’t give a second thought about selling mine. I think it’s a risk I just have to take. There’s nowhere else I can go to extract the data from my implant – at least nowhere else where I’d have a chance at living. NeuraDyne doesn’t take lightly to tampering with their property, and Bruno is the most sought after data broker for a reason.

 

“Yeah, let’s do this. You’ll see soon enough.” I sit down in the chair, and Bruno rolls over on his little stool and hooks me up to some machine thing. He’s not the only one eager to see what’s in my chrome-dome. 

 

***

 

“Damn it! I still can’t get anything outta this fucking implant other than a few moments of memory. Since when did NeuraDyne up their cybersecurity?” No dice, I take it.

 

After two hours of being his lab rat, having my implant prodded and poked in my brain, Bruno takes his headset off and drops it in frustration. If I wasn’t actively looking at it, that headset would’ve blended in with the rest of the junk on the ground.

 

“How long does it usually take to extract data from implants?” I ask, laying more comfortably in the chair now that all his lab rat shit is off me. 

 

“Nothing’s ever taken me more than half an hour to extract, and I’ve never been given data I couldn’t extract in its entirety. This is above even my pay grade; I might have to charge you extra, chromie.”

 

“Well, how’s about we take a look at what you have so far?” I ask.

 

“Alright, let’s have us a look-see.” He rolls over to his bigger monitor and turns it on, then goes back to his main computer and starts to upload it to the monitor, “Okay, it’s not much, but it’s honest work.” 

 

Does he see the irony in that statement? Convincing yourself that honest work means doing highly dishonest things. Classic data broker. The monitor starts playing, and I sit up in the torture chair. 

 

I see a kid on the screen, he’s completely chromeless. He’s crying, and he’s being carried by arms coming from the camera, or in this case, the eyes. Looks like I’m the one carrying him. We’re running through some alley, and I hear screams and shouts coming from behind me in a low pitch telling me to “Stop right there!” and “Don’t you fucking move!”

 

I bust a left at the end of the alley, down a crowded side street. The field of view – my field of view – is bobbing up and down as I run faster. The kid starts to scream for help, and I hear myself say “Be quiet! Or else–”

 

The screen goes black.

 

Me and Bruno turn to look at each other.

 

“That…that was it? Surely that couldn’t have been the end of it, right?” I say to him. Suddenly this chair isn’t so comfortable anymore.

 

Bruno lets out a long whistle as he leans in his stool with his back on his desk, and puts his metal claws on his head, “Woowie, now wa’n’t that somethin’? You were right chromie, that is some juicy intel.”

 

“No,” I say frantically, “There’s gotta be some mistake. Those must be some other sleeper’s memories that got mixed in my chip or something.” 

 

“Did you not hear that voice? Sounded just like you.” Bruno says. “Whoever hired your ass was up to some real nefarious shit, huh? Abducting kids? Now that’s a new low, even for me.” 

 

I wasn’t ready for this. I didn’t realize I was gonna be used for childnapping. A freaky night with some horny weirdo? Sure, that was obvious. Smuggling some chrome or dust? That’s what most sleepers are hired to do. Low-level criminal stuff that their employers want to keep their own hands clean of, but that’s relatively harmless. I wasn’t prepared to be abducting children and book it from the cops. I still can’t help but wonder how – or maybe now it’s a question of who – fucked me up so badly before returning me home? My thoughts start to drift for the worse, and I try to reel them back.

 

Bruno sees my face scrunch as I’m trying to take it all in and probably decided to take advantage of this vulnerable moment, “Now, it would be just such a damn shame if this info were to get into the wrong hands. Or even perhaps the right hands. After all, you’re probably still wanted out there. Of course, I can be discreet about this whole shindig, given the right amou-” 

 

The lights shut off, and we’re thrown into almost complete darkness, with only light from the outside shining through the few windows in the building. The door is blown open. In the cloud of smoke that lingers, I see multiple silhouettes walk through. All four of them are practically robots. Their bodies probably contain little to no human parts anymore. They start to make their way through the jungle.

 

Bruno wipes that sly smirk off his face from just a second ago and jumps out of his stool, “Fuck! Chrome it all! Spent so much damn time hacking your implant, they must’ve caught my location.” He reaches into a drawer and pulls out a gun. “Those gotta be NeuraDyne cronies here to punish us for violating their terms of service.” 

 

He hands me the gun, then pulls another out from a different drawer. “I haven’t really used one of these before.” My voice is shaking as I say it.

 

“Well, you’re gonna have to learn on the job!” Bruno says as he rolls his workbench out into the middle of the room to use as cover.

 

The NeuraDyne goons start to make their way through the room and get closer, and they begin to pull out weapons of their own. Some of them are guns, others are built into their bodies. Bruno fires the first shot. A firefight quickly breaks out, with us huddled behind Bruno’s bench, and the mercenaries hiding behind Bruno’s hoarded shit on the opposite side of the room. 

 

I’m hugging the back of his workbench like my life depends on it, clutching this gun he handed to me like a lifeline as bullets whizz by. I finally get the courage – or the stupidity – to get up from cover and fire off a few shots of my own. They all miss. 

 

“What kinda lousy fuck are you?” Bruno yells in between shots of his own.

 

“I told you I haven’t used one of these before!” I yell back. What did he expect?

 

“Boy, all you gotta do is point and shoot.” He says as he fires off another round. I hear the clank and thunk of a mostly metal body hitting loose junk on the floor. Bruno looks down at me, admiring his shot, “See? Just like tha-” 

 

His head snaps back as a bullet exits his skull, and he slumps to the floor next to me.

Fuck. This isn’t good. I get up and fire off my gun until it starts clicking. Hopefully that’ll buy me some time. I kick the rolling work bench into those fuck-heads and turn around. I kick and stomp on Bruno’s computer that he used to hack my implant. I can’t leave any evidence for the police.

 

The remaining three mercenaries close in on me, so I run around a thick cluster of hanging cables. One of them tries to grab me through the wires with his sharp chrome arm, but he misses me. I take the rest of the wires and wrap it around his arm, trapping it. Then I yank towards myself as hard as I can, sending him flying forward to the floor, face first. The other two try to go around both sides of the cable cluster to cut me off, but I run through the hole their buddy just left. I guess NeruaDyne doesn’t hire the brightest hitmen.

 

They chase after me as I book it to the door. I’m kicking and knocking shit over in my path to try and slow them down. I turn my head backwards for a brief moment and see one of them slip and fall on some spare implant parts.

 

One left.

 

I make it to the doorway right as another goon steps into the doorway from the outside, blocking the door. I’m cornered. I brace myself to run right through him, that is until I see him raise his plasma pistol level with my eyes. 

 

I freeze and put my hands up, “Okay, okay, you got me. Let’s not make this any messier than it has to be with our employers, okay?” 

 

Then he pulls the trigger and his gun lets out a blast of plasma. I close my eyes, but when I open them, I’m not harmed. I turn around to find the lifeless body of the guy who was just chasing me laying with Bruno’s hoarded mess. Then I see another blast of plasma hit the other crony who tripped. Oh, thank God. 

 

I turn back to face my savior. His brown, bald head and face are still as a rock, and his gun remains pointed at someone who’s longer there. Then I look down to see an electrode stuck to my chest. 

 

That’s when I get electrocuted, and I can’t remember the rest. 

 

***

 

I wake up in a chair and see I’m hooked up to wires and cables similar to Bruno’s setup. Only this one has much nicer looking tech, and the room isn’t filthy. It’s a small room, almost all white, with a pale white-blue light shining down from above. It feels sterile like a hospital room. 

 

A place this nice has to be NeuraDyne’s labs. Guess I know who that was in the doorway. They’ve probably scanned my implant already and are going to dispose of me soon for violating their stupid “Terms of Service”. 

 

Someone walks into the room. They have a white hooded jacket on, with a mask covering their lower face and a shaded visor over their eyes, “Oh, good. You’re awake.” They walk up to the console I’m hooked up to and start pressing some buttons. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

 

I can’t think of what to say. Do I lie?

 

“Uh…” is all I can let out.

 

“Don’t even think about bolting. You’ll ruin my new setup.” The hooded figure says without taking their eyes off the console.

 

“I wasn’t going to.”

 

“Yes you were. I can tell by the look on your face. Your eyes were darting back and forth like crazy.”

 

“Fine. Maybe I was. But what do you expect me to do? Sit here and let you torture me to death for breaking the Terms of Service?”

 

“Terms of Servi– What? Look, I don’t know what you think is going on, but this isn’t NeuraDyne.”

 

“Then who the hell are you?”

 

“I’m a hacker. Just like your buddy back there at the shop, only I’m fortunate enough to not have pissed off NeuraDyne.” The hacker hits a final button on the console then turns toward me, “We extracted you from that shady situation – you’re welcome, by the way – to make sure old Bruno didn’t accidentally leak and expose all the data in your implant.” 

 

“You know Bruno?”

“Of course, he trained me. Ah, here we are. Your recovered memories. Just gotta play it out to make sure there’s no missing bits. I’m going to fast forward quite a bit. I don’t wanna be standing here for three months.”

 

Then it clicked. 

 

This wasn’t NeuraDyne. This was the person who rented me on that night. They must’ve bugged my implant to warn them if anyone tampered with my data. No wonder the security on it was so damn tough to crack. But why go through all the trouble bypassing the implant’s timer to rent me if they could just hack anything they wanted already? The masked hacker turned the monitor to where I could also see.

 

As my memories from the last three months race across the screen in a blur, the playback stops at one memory. One I’ve already seen.

 

It’s the only one Bruno was able to extract – the one where I’m abducting a screaming child. It must be glitching their system after having been extracted. 

 

They look back at the console, “Looks like old Bruno almost fully extracted this one. That geezer still got it, eh? Good thing NeuraDyne stopped you when they did, otherwise things could’ve gotten outta hand.” They say as they mess with the console some more, “No worries, nothing a bit of fiddling won’t fix. Let’s watch that back, shall we?”

They play the memory back at the same spot that Bruno did. I’m running through an alleyway while holding that stupid kid again. I hear those same shouts come from behind me, and I make that same turn at the end of the alley. The stupid kid yells for help again, to which I respond with, “Be quiet! Or else they’ll find and catch us, and I won’t be able to keep you safe!”. 

 

What?

 

The kid in the video-memory says “B-but, Mister Ed, I think we need more help.”

 

I slow down as we make our way from that side street and onto a busy thoroughfare. Then I turn around and see we’re no longer being followed. I let out a sigh of relief as I set the kid down and he walks alongside me, “Don’t worry, Leo. I know where we can get some help. We should be safe in this huge crowd. I don’t think they’ll be able to pick us out, even through street cameras.”

 

I hear piercing sirens from behind me as police lightcycles whizz by my field of view. I turn around to see where they’re going, then I hear honking coming from in front of me. I turn back around and see the blaring headlights of a lightcar heading straight my way. I reach for Leo’s hand, but look down and see he’s no longer next to me. I look to my left and see Leo trying to run away from the car, but it’s no use. He can’t outrun the thing. 

 

I dive for Leo and push him out of the way. I hear the sound of metal ramming into my body. And then the memory ends, and the screen goes black.

 

“Good. Looks like everything’s been safely recovered. You’re good to go, Ed.” The hacker says to me. 

 

“What the fuck was that?” 

 

“What, that?” They point back at the monitor, “That was your last memory before we had to return you. Y’know, what with the whole getting-hit-by-a-car and everything – couldn’t exactly continue to rent your body.”

 

“Who was that kid?” I ask.

 

“Come on,” They motion for me to stand up, and then motion me towards the door, “It’ll really be a lot easier if I just show you.”

 

I stand up, but I’m not dumb enough to walk first through an ominous door, “You go first.”

 

They mutter under their breath, “Alright, fine. Was just tryna be polite.”

 

They walk up to the door, which turns out to be motion sensored, and it splits in half for the hacker as they approach it. As I follow them out of the room, we enter the nicest looking foyer I’ve ever seen. It’s something straight from the holographs. I see that same kid from the video standing right outside the door, followed by a man dressed to the nines standing behind him – probably his pops. The kid’s got this wicked smile on him. What’s his deal?

 

“Mister Ed!” Leo yells and runs up to me and hugs me around my legs.

 

“Um, hey…Leo, was it?” I’m not sure what to do with my hands. Should I hug him back?

 

He looks up at me with a disappointed look, “You don’t remember me? Did Sutton not give you back your memories there?”

 

The hacker – Sutton, jumps in, “Leo, we didn’t have time to restore all two months of his memory. It would take us weeks to restore just one month’s worth of memories. I could only fast forward through them.”

 

“But I want Mister Ed back!” Leo pouts back.

 

“Wait,” I say, “Only two months worth of memories? I was out for three.”

 

Leo’s old man decides to chime in, “Yes. Well, that last month of yours was spent entirely in a medical induced coma while you were recovering from that car crash. As soon as you were able to be discharged, we returned you back to your apartment. Apologies if that’s not where you wanted to end back up.”

 

I struggle to wrap my mind around all this, “No, no, that’s fine. Though I guess you breached privacy rules and found where I live? Doesn’t matter right now. What the hell did you have me doing for two months, anyways?”

 

Leo’s dad replies, “Well, work at the company got really busy – it was only supposed to be one night of babysitting. But then he liked you so much, one day turned into one week, which turned into one month, then two. By that point, we couldn’t separate the two of you. We had to keep renting you out for Leo. We were planning on returning you and then offering you a formal role as his guardian once you woke back up from the rental service, but then that car screwed things up.”

 

“I’ll say.” I reach towards my still blue ribs.

 

“Sutton’s backdoor alarm went off when that other hacker tried extracting the data from your implant, so we sent someone to retrieve you right away. We were worried you had gotten abducted by a data broker, or by NeuraDyne themselves. By the sound of it, he got there just in time.” 

 

I think back to that moment in the doorway of Bruno’s shop. That bald man with his gun pointed right past my head.

 

“He sure did. You looking for payment or somethin'?"

 

“Quite the opposite. I’d still like to offer you the job as Leo’s guardian during the day. I’m afraid work isn’t letting up any time soon. I’ll pay you double the rate as before, as a thank you for saving Leo’s life that night.” 

 

Full time babysitter? For some rich corpo’s brat? No thanks. But that is a lot of fucking money, though.

 

And then I look back at the rotten kid. He’s got this silly look of hope in his eyes, with that same wide ass smile that won’t go away. And it’s pointed directly at me. 

 

How can I say no to that?

 

“Sure, I’m in.”

 

Leo jumps with joy, and his old man smiles, “Excellent. I’ll have Sutton make the necessary arrangements. Oh, and would you like Sutton to help you start your memory recovery?”

 

Do I want those fucking memories? Was that the real me during those two months, or was it a different person entirely?

 

“Nah. I prefer to make my own.”