35 hours in, and Kollen can feel her logic circuits corroding. This is the second rotation through the third fabrication contract she’s held this lunar, this time cutting anodized steel plates destined for… some mining rig offworld? Somewhere in the near belt? The details weren’t included in her onboarding, because the details didn’t matter. She didn’t matter.
Kollen has lived many claustraphobias, but there is a certain bitter flavor to the claustraphobia of manufacturing — she submits to the foreman server, and her arms stop being her arms. Her precision effectors, each specially fitted with a diamond-coated buzzsaw component, travel the same path hour in, hour out, tracing the lines her HUD dutifuly projects over the raw steel according to the rig blueprint. How many bolt threading fabcons had she worked before she could afford those saws, that HUD? Was it worth the 10 extra yan an hour she now could get for a steelcutting contract?
Kollen didn’t shake her head — client-side actuator control is disabled during fabrication to optimize the factory energy usage — but she thought about shaking it. The steelcutting fabcon was NOT why she had saved up for these buzzsaw effectors and military-grade oculars. No… these upgrades were hardwon for a deeper purpose. She could almost feel it now. The impact of steel on steel, the heat of the arena’s blinding spotlights, the splintering of carbon fiber as her saw slices deep into the —
<< Unauthorized cognitive thread detected during manufacturing cycle, destroyed by host. Steelcutting position 4, this is your <first> warning, subsequent unauthorized use of system resources will incur a fine of 5 yan per gigawatt hour. >>
13 hours later, Kollen leaves the factory depot. It’s midrotation, but the sky is dark, any hint of the sun obscured by the purple-grey clouds that Kollen has known for most of her life, dark and roiling, like a refuse pyre saturated with used oil.
She pauses at the charge kiosk at the depot gate—with a pop and slight hiss, the spent lithium ion canister ejects from her abdominal, and she summons a fresh one from the console. 4 yan — robbery! But though it burns her to give any money back to the depot, the sky is too overcast for solar, and there’s no way she’s going back home to charge up now — no, now is time for living.
Two clicks downsector from the depot, past three blocks of residential stacks and the massive coolant basin, Kollen stops in front of a low two-story building, aging quikcrete walls pocked by wind and acid. The coiled iron curtain still covered the entrance, rust traced down its length in languid streaks, so Kollen ducks through a propped side door, and into the gym.
“Kay!”
Kollen looks around, oculars adjusting to the dramatic change in ambient light. The gym is a hive of activity —- several bipeds spar in the corner, two floaters seem to test the integrity of their armor plating, repeatedly slamming into one another, a swarm of meter-long hexapods systematically but brutally disassemble an impact dummy in the center of the room, stuffing forming a brief cloud in the air above the bots before coating the floor in a fine dusting. And in the back, in a circle of LED fixtures and an iron barricade, the fighting ring.
The voice, heavily overdriven, downpitched, and resampled, comes from Palronk, the matte black, four legged 10-series cleaning the long bar with a rag in an extended effector. He turns upon an axis as Kollen walks in. The manager — the one who books the fights… and the one who sells the stims. “Kay, you dropping by to slice up all my regular paying customers again?”
Kollen’s head tilts slightly on its roll axis, and she lets out a short low buzz from her cranial speaker. “Palronk, if I don’t count as a regular paying customer at this point… the fabbies should set my deposit straight to your account and cut out the fragged middleman.”
Palronk’s three oculars glow orange and he lets loose something like a quick, detuned snort. “Not a bad idea, Kay! Keep ideas like that coming and I might feel better about replacing my ring floor every other rotation. Totally shredded.”
Kollen sidles up to the bar, hovers her right forearm over the RFC, which happily withdraws 3 of her yan with an anodyne chirp. Palronk obligingly passes her a short, cylindrical stim capsule.
“Who’s on the list tonight, boss?”
Palronk, already a meter down the bar, starts an uninvested quarter turn back in her direction, as if disinterested. “Usual suspects. Krack and Kayton are in, Sal… the Tark twins from Far Setting are in town…” He pauses, and comes back towards Kollen before continuing in a lower volume.
“Big Brasi came by this morning. He wants Bolt to fight tonight.”
Kollen slams the stimcap down, the bar tolling like a bell with the weight of the strike. “In indoor welterweight? Ronk, that’s broken! Bolt Sager will slag me in seconds — that ashtrap has nukes!”
Palronk shifts his torso’s center of gravity, passing the weight back and forth over the four legs. “You think too little of yourself, Kollen. I think you’ll give him something to worry about. But you aren’t wrong, he’s OP for welter and he shouldn’t be in here. Which is why there’s something I need to discuss with you.”
He extends a proboscis-like auxiliary speaker from his cranial, stretching towards Kollen’s binaurals.
“Kay, I want you to fight Bolt, but I need you to go down in the third.”
Kollen stands up slowly from the barstool, her oculars locked on Palronk’s. “I don’t do that.”
“I know you don’t. But Kay, Brasi promised no radioactives, no corrosives. We just have to -“
“- You don’t have to do anything. I’m the one in the ring.”
Palronk pauses for a beat, the clockwork whirr of his facial actuators quiet for just a moment, and returns to wiping the bar in steady perfect circles. “Kollen… you probably know you’ve become quite the favorite at this gym. Current books have you taking it all tonight, 14:1. Now Big Brasi, he’s betting against the line. He’s got 50k saying you go down in the third round. Big Brasi thinks he can see the future, you see, Big Brasi has a history of being right about the future.”
The dark bartender leans in closer to Kollen, his proximity speaker snaking around her shoulder gasket and up the side of her neck. “We’ve known each other for a long time, Kay, you know this is my gym, you know you’ll get a piece of the action. You go down in the third against Bolt Sager, you get 20%. 140,000 yan. And if you don’t?” Palronk retracts the speaker all at once, whipping back into his cranial with a snap. “Well, I understand Big Brasi doesn’t much appreciate being wrong about the future.”