Chapter 1

Aurora was just getting to the point of thinking that was about as much hanky-panky a girl could cope with for one night when her synapses sparked alive. On an average day it took rather more investment than merited by the meagre return to get Smithy going in the bedroom department so she hadn’t wanted to waste any assistance in getting him into the mood. He was young and eager and not bad eye candy with tantalising muscle aplenty all in rapid action, including a very nicely formed muscle that had seen plenty of working out you don’t do in a gym (although she’d heard stories) to keep her appetite whetted; the man in the captograph^[1] they were watching that is, not Smithy. Smithy was a lower score on all of those counts.

Smithy was a vendor of carriographs and also Aurora’s boyfriend, more or less. He was a boy, mentally no more on Aurora’s assessment, he was her friend and every now and then she got his attention long enough to encourage him to perform duties she had a right to expect from a boyfriend. In the absence of other candidates that made him her boyfriend by default, whose fault was up for debate. It did not make him her dreamboat lover. Love had little to say on the relationship, had given a cursory glance and sidled off with a smirk. Of her frequent fantasies his was not the face or the body strutting around in them - there were one or two big movie stars plying their ways in her imagination on that front and a Slumffyball^[2] star on standby when she was feeling more adventurous. Not that he was gromff-like^[3]. He was presentable enough in that forgettable way. Brown hair, generally brushed and the washed variety, no major warts and the right number of ears and nose on the right part of his face, which might not be the latest fashion but was alright with her. There were trimmer men but there were fatter also. He was the sort of item you’d pick in the hyperstore after hunting unsuccessfully for whatever you’d come to buy, give a look over and think it would have to do because your feet were saying just get on with it.

Much like Aurora really. Her best days had up and left her with precious little glitter to illuminate them. She wasn’t one to dwell on the past as it had been fairly abstemious in giving much to dwell on. She was yet to concede those days had done a runner, still trying to catch where they were hiding. Gone they were though and what remained was Smithy. Reliable, comfortable, last domino standing from her college days Smithy. All a little dull really.

So when Smithy got excited about something it was a day to hang out the bunting and do a jig. If it meant she might get a bit of adult action then it was an uppercase ITEM to go into the dayscribble^[4] she rarely kept - so a big day indeed. It usually took cajoling and nagging and more nagging or ingenuity to get that sort of attention. Today though he had hovered over on his floataped with a mischievous glint in his eye.

‘Bet you’ll never guess what I’ve just found.’

He was right of course, she would never guess so he had better just tell her. It was however a show rather than tell although he was disgorging plenty of tell while plugging into her displaygraph^[5] to upload his little treasure.

‘So there was this girl..’

‘missed out once upon a time, sorry carry on’

‘she came into our store for a new carriograph

‘well, duh’

‘young, pretty, nice hair, long legs, nice’

‘go on, I get the picture’

‘So anyway dad had trashed her last one, dropped it in the bubbly, stupid fuck. So anyways she needs a new one and can I set it all up for her ‘cos she’s too bloody stupid or lazy to do it herself. So I tell her it will take a day to transfer her ID connection to the new one but she can pick it up tomorrow, cost bit extra for the time, normal stuff right’

(yawn),

‘no wait it gets better. So no problem with the money, must be loaded, she leaves me the old cardio so I can make sure it is the same model, hates working out how to use different model and she’d gone, right, so look at her old capto, totally trashed but the SiM is all fine. She’s clearly not the brightest. Just needed to put it in her new one and hey presto, all up and running, easiest 50 yokes I’ve made. No that wasn’t it, this is the good bit. So I’m just checking, making sure all her memberships are logged OK. Check her settings. Autoset to save all her images and capto to her MESS^[6] which, get this, had No Security Settings (Smithy had a penchant for capitalising), I mean who’s that dumb. So then I think maybe I should check there is nothing in there. Make sure nothing for any nosey parker to find if they were running a Ethertrawl^[7] before I set up the retina security when she comes in tomorrow. Wanna see what I found?’

‘So to stop someone stealing her personal files you stole her personal files’.

‘Didn’t steal, secured, copied maybe. Come on, I’ve put on a temporary lock down on her account so it’s all nice a secure, you’ll see why in a minute. It’s only us, it’s just a bit of fun. Do you want to watch or not? Just watched the start so far, made me think of you, raunchy stuff, right up your street. Might give you some ideas.’

How sweet.

“Me!!!’

‘Well?’

Well what was a girl to do when her boyfriend is offering a little bit of sexy action that might give HIM some risqué impetus. The pictures started to roll across her bedroom wall. Watching whoever that young man was certainly was giving her ideas. Presumably this girl who owned the phone was the starring floozie. She certainly wasn’t short of ideas and she was making sure the camera on her carriograph didn’t miss any of them.

The man’s face was eluding her, either out of shot or the back of his head which was all very frustrating in adding to her list of fantasy lovers. Was he aware he was being filmed or was he obliviously performing a porno masterclass? She didn’t know and didn’t really care.

They were in a large room, some dining room or large salon, not a bedroom. Quite grand, Smithy hadn’t been kidding about the money, ‘quite’ in this context been a begrudged euphemism for excessively. It oozed an educated style that had eluded the interior design of her apartment tower. There was evidence of artefacts from the old world and she didn’t get the impression these were Frangian imitations but had been carefully curated from Frangi^[8] itself and imported to this planet at great expense. She could make out a picture of swirling stars over a rustic ancient style village and another of two semi clad figures, one draped in blue, one in pink playing some sort of airball game on some wooded hillside with swarthy naked, slightly weird looking men on one side and some bemused looking animals (mostly extinct) wandering around, probably wondering who these weirdo creatures were. The pictures themselves must be worth a small country and the frames not much less. There were what she could only assume to be priceless statutes scattered around the high polished surfaces. Her sense of economy gave her concern for their longevity with the frantic action that was taking place in their midst.

She felt rather naughty for watching the capto. She did not make a habit of watching people’s personal captos. As far as she was concerned if they recorded their personal goings on in private then she respected that privacy, even when they chose to broadcast them to all and sundry. That was getting all too common in her opinion and it was all a bit tawdry. She was happy to leave all that alone. Excepting in her professional capacity of course. As a SPINE AL^[9] she was tasked with listening in on and watching lots of would be private exchanges. That was however only for genuine cases of bad hombres. Authorisation had to be obtained. It was her patriotic duty for good old GUF.

This however was properly private prying for nobody’s benefit but her own amusement. It was all Smithy’s fault from bringing her down to this but it was having the affected of bringing something up in Smithy. There were time for scruples and times to hitch herself to the wagon and enjoy the ride. This was the latter. They both had eyes for the acrobatic figures dancing on the wall but that hardly leant itself to the most propitious position so she surrendered the exposed young flesh on screen to Smithy’s goggle eyes, calculating that to be greater odds for a sustained Smithy performance.

She should have quit earlier but you know how it is. Keeping Smithy aroused could sometimes be a battle and she was congratulating herself on her prowess in seduction only to be deflated by his deflation which she had barely noticed. Titivation had waned and she’d just been about to hit the off switch when she realised the situation being broadcast had changed markedly.

The young lovebirds were nowhere to be seen and the room was full of suited old duffers.. That wasn’t a great recommendation however you painted it and did justify the lessened ardour.

What hadn’t diminished was Smithy’s interest for the next part of the saga. She followed his attention and switch her focus to the new players on display.

It was what was happening now was that had brought her senses back on to full alert.

’10%! We have no chance of pulling that off’

‘You misunderstand. It is not whether 10% is too high but whether it is too low, Aire’s been keeping up pushing out the polling data to match.’

‘Don’t know how he does it? Genius that man.’

‘Select your polling group carefully, then add a few weighting corrections in our favour. Come on you know how. We’ve been doing it since they started questioning election results rather than pollster methods.’

‘Genius or not his real polling data says 10% isn’t going to hack it.’

The next voice she couldn’t see the speaker. The voice however was recognisable if the name was yet to come to mind.

‘Twice now, twice, lost out because we were too chicken, I’m not having another four sunrevs^[10] wasted with another balls up this time. Fuck caution’

‘But it can’t be done surely’

‘It already has. Our Varangians^[11] friends had a go at it last year. Did you miss the Emeraldia^[12] vote. Did you really imagine that happened without a little help. That was without half the tools we will have available at our disposal here. You underestimate us LESS^[13].’

‘Don’t be a meanie Crapulous, the LESS is an integral part of our inner team now, are you not Commissar?’

‘Most certainly, High Senator^[14].’

Aurora needed to stop the tape and took a deep breath. Suddenly the stakes had taken a definite turn for the tricky. She had just seen her boss in a meeting with the High Senator. That wasn’t of itself necessarily untoward. It would be natural for the SPINE LESS to have meetings with leading government officials but there was something decidedly unofficial about this one. She just couldn’t put her finger on it. She was so far down the pecking order at SPINE that this was as close as she was likely to get to involvement with Mr W. Kerr who was right up there at the very summit. Could she latch onto something that would give her a little leverage to finally move on to some more exciting project? She had been at the agency for years now and only ever got the dead end assignments, ones where everyone already knew the answer but due to crap political expediency had to show they were doing due diligence with their investigation, blah, blah, blah. If she could get the inside line on something big though maybe she would final get some recognition of not being entirely a diversity quota wannabe and allowed to flex her wings on some genuine issue of national importance.

She was desperate to run the recording on further to unravel what was happening. What made things tricky right at this moment was that of course Smithy didn’t know and couldn’t learn that she worked for SPINE. Or who these people were. She also had a duty to protect any revelations from leaking out of the agency to the general public, which in this instance meant Smithy. So how did she get to hear more from this recording, and even if there were others of use, without letting Smithy be party to any of it?

The other buzzing question was why was Smithy still so interested. She was hoping it wasn’t evidence of a new kinky side she’d missed before, old men in suits. His flaccid fascination however reassured her somewhat. Did he know more than she had realised? She was going to have to dig a little.

‘So what’s so fascinating?’ She tried to sound miffed at her rebuff.

‘The couple.’

‘Yeah, how come they disappeared and we ended up with those duffers.’

‘Behind the curtain or something. Didn’t you see? Must had heard people coming, no way out, scarpered for cover. Still there. Going to be awesome if they get caught.’

So that was some relief. Pity the poor bastards but a least Smithy had no idea who the people were and what was going on so she wasn’t going to have to garrotte him on the spot or anything. They were in her bedroom and the blood would make one hell of a mess. And she didn’t have a piano from which to pluck a suitable wire either^[15].

‘Though what the fuck SPINE LESS Kerr, the High Senator, Reale Crapulous, Backs Tabber, Rake Itin and the leader of the SHMUCC^[16]s are all plotting is what I’d like to know.’

Oh bugger.

She really didn’t want to kill Smithy. She liked Smithy, he was one of her best friends and she didn’t have too many to be cavalier in reducing the number. She did also desperately need to know what they hell they were plotting and Smithy was the one already ahead in identifying everyone in that room (apart from their original two love birds and he knew the girl so it was just the rather succulent looking man). She took the momentous decision that Smithy was to be spared from death but there was a forfeit. He was now involved. To what extent she would have to play by ear.