Discarded Metal by Jay
Part 1:
“When the cat’s not home, the mice burn the house down.”
The bass of HellsBells’ techno music vibrates in Pulse’s bones, low, thrumming, like the hum of a cyberdeck mid-hack.
He’s perched on a high stool in the back loading area, the spot where Gloria and him were taking jobs. The memories of the heist against Psysoft flood him.
His neural implant glowing faintly blue as he scrolls through crew comms: Jax’s arm infection is getting worse, We’re down to three painkillers, Any sign of G?
He closes the feed with a mental flick, jaw tight.
Gloria’s old leather jacket hangs over the stool next to him, scuffed at the cuffs, lined with faint bullet holes from a run-in with The Scorched last year.
He reaches out, brushes the fabric. It still carries her perfume, faint, but recognizable, like a ghost in his implant.
She’d sit here with him, laughing as she out-negotiated fixers with confidence.
Now he’s here, the sofa empty, the bar area silent like a tomb. Every corner of the room feels like a reminder of what he’s missing.
A presence appears in the door’s opening, quiet, deliberate.
Pulse’s hand flicks to the gun at his hip.
“Easy,” the woman says.
She slides onto the stool next to him, her cybernetic fingers tapping a rhythm on the bar.
Her left eye is a Meditech M-700 optic, scavenged, Pulse can tell, by the scratch across the lens, and her hoodie bears a faded BinaryGhosts tag, stitched so tight it’s frayed at the edges.
“Name’s Vex. I’m not here to fight.”
Pulse relaxes, but only a little.
“Commons fixer?”
Vex smirks, her optic whirring as it focuses on him.
“Born and raised. You think a corpo would wear a Ghosts tag? Gloria gave me this, back when she was just stealing cyberdecks from warehouse vents.”
That stops Pulse.
“You knew her.”
“Before the crew. Before the popularity.” Vex’s tone softens, just for a second.
She taps her neural implant, and a holographic shard materializes between them: a photo of a kid, 12 maybe, with a gap-toothed smile.
“My brother, Kael. Took PharmaCorp’s ‘budget painkillers’ for a broken leg. Died three days later. Liver failure—they cut corners on the formula.”
Pulse’s throat tightens.
He thinks of Lila, her voice cracking last week as she talked about her sister: She was 10. The meds made her stop breathing. This isn’t just a job. It’s blood.
Vex flicks the hologram away, her optic hardening.
“I need a file from Veyra Solvex, PharmaCorp’s head of ‘Commons Distribution.’ It’s on her home server, proof she’s been covering up the faulty batches. Pay’s 200k Eurodollars. Half up front, neural transfer. Non-negotiable.”
Pulse’s implant pings: a transfer notification.
100k Eurodollars transaction, waiting for recipient’s approval. He blinks, fast, too fast.
“Why us? There are other crews.”
“Other crews rat. Or die. Gloria taught you better.” Vex leans in, her voice dropping to a growl.
“And I need this clean. No alarms. Solvex has a netrunner, some corpo kid, fresh out of Psysoft’s training. She’ll trigger a lockdown if she spots you.”
She taps her optic again, and a floor plan of Solvex’s home blooms in the air: Basement server closet. Biometric lock. Netrunner station on the first floor.
“You’ve got 48 hours. Meet me here, at the same time, with the file.”
She stands to leave, then pauses.
“For what it’s worth… I’m sorry about Gloria. She was the only one who ever cared about the Commons. Not just for the jobs, for the people.”
Pulse watches her go, Gloria’s jacket still warm against his arm.
He takes a sip of beer, bitter, flat, and pulls up the crew comms.
Job’s on. Lila, Jax, meet me at HQ in 30 minutes.
His implant flickers, and for a second, he swears he sees Gloria’s face in the static.
Don’t mess this up, she seems to say.
Pulse grits his teeth. “Where the hell are you?” he mutters.
Part 2:
24 hours later, the Commons’ stink gives way to synthetic jasmine scent and something close to fear.
No neon, no street vendors, no kids chasing each other through alleys, just white houses with holographic hedges, security drones buzzing overhead, and neural scanners embedded in every sidewalk.
Pulse’s bike idles behind a grove of artificial palm trees; Lila and Jax huddle next to him, their implants glowing blue as they sync to the crew’s secure channel.
Lila’s got an old-fashioned crowbar strapped to her back and her cybernetic leg hums as she shifts her weight.
“Solvex’s place is two blocks down. Jax, you hack the scanners. Pulse?”
Pulse just nods, his gaze slightly fuzzy as his thoughts keep drifting toward Gloria.
Jax nods, his cyberdeck screen flickering faster as he locks onto the district’s scanners. His infected arm in a cybernetic sling, Meditech surplus, borrowed from the corp’s warehouse. His cyberdeck rests on his knee, its screen flickering with code.
“Scanners hacked. Drones are blind for 10 minutes. Move fast.”
They slip through the district like shadows.
Lila’s leg lets her move silent, no creaks, no clicks, and Pulse’s neural implant pings with proximity alerts: Security camera: 10 feet. Netrunner station: 20 feet.
He holds up a hand, signals to stop and take cover against the wall.
Through Solvex’s kitchen window, they see her: the netrunner, a kid with pink glowing hair, sitting at a desk.
Her neural implant is a Psysoft X-900, shiny, new, corpo-fresh, and she’s scrolling through a network feed, laughing at something displaying directly on her cybernetic retinas.
“Distraction,” Pulse mouths to Lila.
She nods, pulls a small EMP grenade from her pocket, homemade, from old corpo parts, and flicks the switch.
She lobs it at the front yard.
It goes off with a soft pop.
The netrunner’s head snaps up. She jumps from her chair, grabbing her cyberdeck, and sprints out the front door.
“Now!” Pulse hisses.
Lila slams her crowbar into the back window lock.
It gives with a crunch. She slips inside, Pulse right behind her.
The house is sterile, white walls, holographic art of fake oceans, a kitchen counter so clean it shines.
Solvex’s neural pad sits on the island, its screen glowing with a PharmaCorp spreadsheet:
Batch #47 – Meditech Partnership: Approved.
Pulse freezes.
Meditech.
Mark’s Meditech. The same corp that built his synthetic brain.
He taps his implant, snaps a photo of the spreadsheet, and sends it to the crew’s secure storage.
“Lila, basement. Now.”
They find Jax at the server closet, his cyberdeck plugged into the lock.
His face is pale, his implant flashing red.
“Biometrics are locked to Solvex’s neural signature. I can’t crack it… Need brute force.”
Pulse pushes him aside. He pulls his cyberdeck from his bag, an old Meditech model, scavenged from a dump, modified by Gloria.
He plugs it in.
His neural implant syncs to the deck, and code floods his vision: green, red, blue, the familiar chaos of a brute-force hack.
“Gloria taught me this, I got this...” he mutters.
He focuses. The code slows. He finds the weak spot, the same flaws Gloria always weaponized in corpo servers, and cracks it open.
Access granted. The server beeps. A shard ejects, glowing blue.
Pulse grabs it, slips it into his implant’s storage slot.
A scream from upstairs.
The netrunner.
She bursts into the basement, her cybernetic eyes glowing red.
“You think you can steal from PharmaCorp?” she snarls.
She raises her hand, and Pulse’s implant malfunctions for a moment, static floods his vision, pain lancing through his skull.
“I’ll trigger the lockdown. You’ll all rot in a corpo cell.”
Lila moves first.
She launches herself at the netrunner, her crowbar swinging. It slams onto her skull, sparks flying from her Psysoft implant as she crumples down, out cold.
Lila stands over them, her chest heaving.
“Let’s go.”
They run up the stairs, out the back window, onto their bikes.
The district’s alarms wail behind them, but they’re already gone.
Jax whoops as they ride, his arm forgotten. Lila laughs, her leg humming as she accelerates. Pulse’s implant still stings, but he grins.
For a second, it feels like Gloria’s right there with them. Then he remembers the spreadsheet.
Meditech.
He pulls over, his implant glowing as he pulls up the photo. Lila and Jax stop too, their smiles fading.
“Meditech’s partnering with PharmaCorp,” Pulse says, quietly.
“On the faulty batches. Why?”
Jax’s implant pings. He blinks, his face going pale.
“The file confirms it, Meditech’s been supplying the faulty meds to PharmaCorp, using them to ‘test’ brain synapses reactions. They use the commons’ kids as lab rats.”
Pulse jaws tightens and he stops his bike.
He taps his implant, pulls up Vex’s contact. Meet me at HellsBells. Now.
Part 3:
HellsBells is quieter after midnight. Most of the crowd has left, the cage fights done for the night.
Pulse sits in the regular back room of the loading bays area, the server shard glowing on the table.
Lila and Jax flank him, their guns hidden under their jackets.
Vex arrives 10 minutes later, her optic whirring.
She enters the room, her cybernetic hand snapping the shard off the table.
“You got it. Good.”
Pulse slams a small holoscreen onto the table, the PharmaCorp-Meditech spreadsheet glowing in the dim light.
“Explain.”
Vex’s face hardens.
“What is that?”
“PharmaCorp and Meditech are partners. On the faulty meds. My crew found out Meditech’s using the commons’ kids as lab rats.”
Pulse leans in, his voice sharp.
“You knew. Didn’t you?”
Vex’s optic flickers. She looks away, then back, her jaw tight.
“I knew Meditech was involved. Not the details. In Kael's autopsy, his neural implant had Meditech’s signature. They were tracking who took the meds.” She pauses, her cyber-hand clicking.
“I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d back out. I needed Solvex’s file. I needed to take them down.”
Pulse stares at her.
He thinks of Gloria, of Mark, of Kael and Lila’s sister.
All of them, pawns in corpo games.
“You should’ve told me,” he says.
Vex nods.
“I know. But here’s the thing, you have the file. You have the Meditech proof. You can burn both of them. For Kael. For Lila’s sister.”
She transfers the other 100k to him, the transfer notification pinging and waiting for approval.
“Use it. Buy meds for the crew. Buy weapons. Do what Gloria would do.”
She stands to leave, then pauses.
“The commons need Gloria… Wherever the hell she is, Pulse.” She says and vanishes into the crowd of the club.
Pulse holds his head with his hands as he watches the holoscreen, the Meditech proof flickering like a ghost.
The spreadsheet’s words:
Batch #47 – Meditech Partnership: Approved, blur together.
Kids as lab rats. Gloria, gone. Him, sitting in an empty room, pretending he can lead.
“Damn, G. Where are you?” he mutters, voice tight.
Lila and Jax exit the room, their footsteps soft as they go.
The back loading bay of HellsBells falls silent, so quiet he can hear the hum of his neural implant, the faint creak of the stool where Gloria used to sit.
He reaches for her jacket, pulls it onto his shoulders. It’s too small, her shoulders are narrower than his, but it smells like her: motor oil, rain, the cheap citrus perfume she always wore.
For a second, he closes his eyes. He imagines her here, leaning against the bar, grinning as she teases him:
“You’re overthinking it, Pulse. We get in, we finish the job, we win.”
But when he opens his eyes, the bar is empty.
The jacket is just fabric. And Gloria is still gone.
He stands, shoving the shard into his pocket, proof of Meditech’s crimes, useless if he can’t find her.
The holoscreen glows empty behind him, a reminder of how big the fight is:
Meditech, PharmaCorp, corpos with shiny implants.
He’s just a hacker from the Commons. No Syntex. No Gloria. No plan.
But then he thinks of Jax’s infected arm. Of Lila’s quiet rage when she talked about her sister. Of Gloria, years ago, pulling him out of an alley after a gang beat him up, saying
“BinaryGhosts don’t leave their own.”
He can’t leave her.
His implant pings, another crew comm: “We need more meds. We’re out of ammo.”
He scowls and sends back:
“Lila, take the crew to Marcus. Get meds. Get ammo. I’m going to find G.”
The reply is instant: “You don’t even know where to look.”
He pauses. It’s true. He has no lead. No signal. No idea if she’s hurt, or hiding, or worse. But he replies anyway:
“I’ll start with the old spots. The warehouse where we first hacked together. The spots we hid in during The Scorched raid. She’ll be somewhere she thinks is safe. I’ll find her.”
“Don’t get yourself killed, Pulse. We need you both” Lila answers through the comm.
Pulse disconnects without adding more, he walks out of the loading bay, leaving Gloria’s jacket in the room.
The night air hits his face, cold, sharp, smelling of rain.
The Commons stretch out in front of him: neon signs, street vendors, homeless kids playing in alleys while they should be sleeping. He was them, long ago, before BinaryGhosts, before Gloria.
The silence is thick as he mounts his bike, the ghost of his old self, cold, hungry, alone, clinging to him. He disappears into the neon night, determined not to let Gloria become another ghost.