Street Web Zero

Coredawn is a universe I've been building for over 20 years, and it's about to have its anthology debut. You may remember Coredawn as the backdrop setting for my first sci-fi novella Loa's Secret. The first piece in the anthology will feature an unpublished, favorite character of mine, finally getting her own story: Bruenna Daven is an unappreciated sanitation tech, working in the bowels of a colossal urban city on the planet Rinlon. The overpass street webs stretch high over her head, and she's never seen the sky. Brue is set in her ways, leading a humble sedentary life with her besties, but she has spent her whole life high-tech hacking for a hobby, building up comprehensive skills that allow her to penetrate nearly any system in the city's network. When her casual viewing turns up a murder about to take place, she uses the tools she has to intervene. Then comes the question—does she cover her tracks? Or does she see how deep this rabbit hole goes, and take on a criminal conspiracy. I'm posting the first few pages here, just to get you into it. This story combines two of my favorite devices—the underdog hero's origin, and the cozy HQ. Street Web Zero

Niova, Coreworld Rinlon, Coredate 3641

Bruenna Daven’s desk was a mess. Chocoloo cream rolls dwindling in the sticky box by her keyboard arc, eight monitors and two data-pads humming with code, and soft electric music blaring. The apartment was a long studio, green tinted by waves of cellular light, its luminous angles contrasting the monochrome dim outside her windows, four stories over street web zero—the foot, the roots, the foundational level of Rinlon’s grandest city—Niova. Brue’s building, like those around her, was immense—towering 1800 stories from the ground, puncturing through street web strata like layers of ice, each seventy-five floors above the last. The topmost level, sw12, or Swelve, was the most open to the sky, and the most well maintained. It wasn’t just roads at the top—Swelve connected premium shopping, housing, entertainment, and everything else worth seeing by people worth seeing it. That was 900 floors above her, and Brue had never seen it.

It was Tuesday, a remote workday like any other, except it was twenty-four hours from the Urban Planning Board Expo, and this year Brue was invited. She sat heavily at her desk, hunched and locked in, stoutly perched in her hover chair, tapping virtual and physical keyboards with the precision of a musical prodigy.

“Agent, one more sim, gray and black water test,” she said. “I want these bio-valves to last 100 years.”

The AI presence in her workstation blipped on screen with a small orange face, unobtrusively blinking in the corner. “On it. Annnnnd we’re golden.”

“Boom,” Brue said quietly, lifting heavy data goggles off her face to rest them on her head. “Dhascon Urban Substrate Management . . . We keep the city humming.” It was a job well done, worth another Chocoloo, at any rate.         

That company slogan was truer than people knew. At only four levels up, Brue’s apartment was practically sitting on the colossal sanitation machines buried in tunnels under the paneled roads. In shifting darkness that audibly hummed, they processed, sorted, stripped and disposed—an endless cycle of industrial breathing. This far down, beneath twelve levels of overpass, even blinding clear daylight would be reduced to flickering wet on pavements, rainbows on oily puddles—and on top of it all today was cloudy.

“Any minute now,” Brue said, thinking of lunch. Behind her was a vast gray couch, serving as both bed and living room, filling the west half of the apartment. On the other side of her desk was work—heaps of parts including limbs, chassis, boards and wiring from innumerable bots she’d refabbed or retired. From this station she could fix company droids, run checks and traces across Dhascon systems, schedule tasks and deliver those metrics critical to the reputation of her notoriously image-conscious boss—Ms. Hallison Greer.

“Are you excited, for tomorrow?” Brue’s skinny friend Jemmi asked, sitting behind her on the couch, or couch-room, as Brue called it, next to her other friend, Nindo. Those two were a fixture here—Jemmi the honorary little sister, being four years younger than Nindo at twenty, and ten years younger than Brue, and Nindo—the jaded freelance tinker, into imperial hardware systems, but without quite Brue’s discipline to master them. The three of them had met in line a few years ago, at the local holo-market, when its owner refused to pay out 200 credits for the mini-lotto Jemmi had won. Nindo, just a lanky kid back then—tall and with wiry short hair and almond eyes—had argued in Jemmi’s defense, but the shop owner blew him off, pleading lotto expiration, until Brue hacked his till from her data-pad, proving him a fraud. Jemmi got her winnings, treated them to orb tea, and they all had a good laugh about it.

“For the Expo?” Brue clarified. “Yeah, I guess. It’s weird. I’ve planned so long, and now I’m actually going . . . isn’t Spiral sending kitchen staff?”

“Yep, we’ll be there, retained for catering the whole thing,” Jemmi said, brushing wavy hair from her face. Jemmi was a sub-associate at Spiral, one of the largest gambling towers in the city. Basement level efficiency bots were expensive to maintain, and so the bosses had taken to hiring root kids—those like Jemmi, born on the under-streets—to cut costs. Sure enough, the money was terrible, but Jemmi got to eat free returns, which happened on the regular, when guests a mile above them scrunched their faces and sent the food back.

“The Expo is like big big,” Nindo said, lying on his back with his feet on the wall, round data goggles glued to his face as per usual, perusing legal journals in the digital space above him, for fun. “Maybe someone will finally order that Yaddish Diamond chicken, or whatever it is,” he said, “and they’ll hate it, and you can try some.”

“It’s swan, not chicken,” Jemmi corrected, flouncing to the edge of the couch closest to Brue. “And it’s like 900 a plate. We never see it.”

Brue was sucking her lips, slipping through data points on a failed stress test for actuator-arms in BX9—one of many concrete canal branches used by the city waterworks for sorting wastewater. The new valves were absolutely killing it. “All the big tech will be there,” she said, “I mean, Magnacorp, Tetragon, Cryote, Synthion . . .”

“Will you learn anything, like that you don’t already know?” Jemmi asked, scratching her arm.

“About sanitation?” Brue chuckled as she flitted through seek-cam ground-level views streaming to her screens: mechanical arms and bots working tirelessly, drab TCVs—Terrain Contact Vehicles—like rumbling loader trucks and heavy service cars, and slouching figures in the walk lanes, mostly sheltered from the dark wet of the streets.

“No, not about sanitation. Will you learn anything new?”

“I don’t know, I mean, I hope so,” said Brue. “I’ve got a whole list of spec talk I’d love to get into. By the way, there’s a hospitality sector at the Expo; lots of symborn upgrades—they’ll have some serious models.”

“Great.” Jemmi snorted with disdain. “I can’t wait to hear the latest on my industry.”

Brue turned the chair to face her, running fingers through short unkempt hair. “Your job is safe, Jemmi—they can’t afford symborn down here, not the kind that would be worth it to have.”

“Yep, I know my place,” Jemmi said, mock cheerfully. “Bio-natural labor is cheaper! Anyway, I mostly wash dishes and run fetch, so . . .”

“Hey, bionate labor isn’t just cheaper, it’s better, just in general,” Nindo said, adjusting his data-goggles. “Bionate beats symborn every time. Syms can’t even top my Progo score.”

“Hey, don’t be a genesist,” Brue said, unlocking her data-pad. “Symborn can suffer just like we do; and Progo is a game is for humans . . .”

“Yeah well, since I can’t afford a symborn of my own, I’m better,” Nindo said, swiping through the journal.

The women laughed, and Brue looked at the little screen, scanning fondly over her list—technical questions she’d labored over. “But yeah, there will be some serious engineers, some big movers. I can’t wait to pick their brains.”

“And you are sure you’re going?” Jemmi said cautiously. “Hallison is letting you go? She always dangles it in front you.”

Brue was disassembling another Chocoloo to savor the shell and unwrap the creamy center. “She sent me the invitation herself, Jemmi. I’m going.”

There was a door chime, and Brue checked it on screen. “Food’s here.”

The little hallway door slid into the ceiling, and from the cramped tube-lift on the other side a weather-worn looking teenager, in a gray Chuck’s Chuck uniform stepped into the apartment with a bag of zip-wrapped sandwiches and sides. He was ambushed by Nindo before his foot touched the carpet.

“Thanks!” Brue called as the kid disappeared back into the lift. Her sandwich was always the same, because it was perfect. Honey crusted ham, extra pickles, on salt rye.

The door closed again and hissed locked.

“Wait, oops. I paid with points,” Brue said, retrieving her data-pad.

“Too late,” Jemmi said thickly, talking through a mouthful of purple salad. “No tip for you, boy, get hence!”

The lift was almost to the street, but Brue spliced into the permissions, grunting amusedly at the primitive encryption, and sent it back up. The doors opened and the kid blinked at them, looking confused.

“Here, sorry,” Brue said quickly, and after a succulent bite she flung a digital pay packet at him from the corner of her monitor. The kid took out his data-pad and checked the screen.

“Oh,” he said. “Thanks!”

The device on her desk was blinking now.

“Your data-pad is ringing,” said Jemmi.

The blink escalated to an insistent beep. But Brue was scowling at one of her screens. In a corner window the seek-cam feed showed men pulling a woman out of a bulky black TCV—she had some kind of garment over her head, hiding her as they walked.

“Your dape is ringing,” Jemmi repeated. “You going to answer that?”

Brue groaned, licking her fingers. “Answer, audio.”

“Bruenna? Why is the screen black?” came a woman’s voice.

“Mom, a lot happening right now, tech refresh.”

“I thought tech refresh was last week?”

“What in the crut?” Brue blurted, watching the men roughly escort the woman across the dark street. “No, Mom, refresh this week is vent tubes south. Last week was north.”

“Honey, you’re thirty years old—I wish you wouldn’t say crut every third phrase.”

“It’s not bad,” Brue said, staring at the screen. “It just means Criminal under Terms.” The men were walking the woman to a dark storefront.

There was a huff from the call. “No, Brue, it hasn’t meant that for years. They’re Excarcerated Imperial Debtors now. It’s more humane.”

“I know that.”

“Listen, your dad is here too. We just want to hear that you’ve tried the band-suit. It wasn’t cheap.”

“Mom, no, I told you, it chafes and it makes my hands swell, it’s not comfortable.”

“It’s not supposed to be comfortable, Bruenna, but you wear it for an hour and you stop noticing. You’re sedentary, you lead a sedentary lifestyle.”

“I think you lead a life, you have a lifestyle. Anyway, I’m not going to static shock the weight off.”

“Well, we just want . . . I hear you eating, what are you eating right now?”

Brue chewed and swallowed, glancing from her hearty sandwich to the chocolate rolls. “Vine salad, with grapes.”

“Can I see?”

“No, Mom, we are actually testing. That is a big part of my job—I’m the only one who can find these hairline seams—”

There was another call—Hallison Greer.

“Honey, we know it’s not always easy down there. But you’re focusing your talents in a productive way, and we’re so proud—"

“That’s my boss, Mom, I have to take this.”

Audio-only was not an option this time. Miss Greer appeared on the central monitor, in her large office chair before grand vista windows displaying broadcast images of the sparkling city sky-line.

“Hi, Bruenna.” The boss wore her classic white pantsuit, strict to the throat. She was pretty in that angular over-manicured way, with short asymmetrical hair and bronzy skin. “We have a problem, two problems, actually.”

Brue swallowed. “Okay . . .”

“The sorting arms in bay 21-6, they were due for inspection—faulty servos? The inspectors from corporate got there this morning—that’s a massive expense, you understand—”

“The servos? Or getting corporate to actually look at it?”

“Both, Brue. But here’s the thing, everything is in working order.”

Brue smiled, sparkling with pride. “Yes, I re-tasked the main-droid, using sub-techs from welding and paneling, and we figured it out. So now we don’t have to buy new servos.”

“You understand the inspectors work on commission, correct?”

“Do they?” Brue’s smile faltered. “What does that mean?”

“It means this looks bad for us—we wasted their time; they have nothing to inspect. They get no points for infrastructure, can’t file requisition, if nothing is broken. It’s really not your business, to repair old machines—that’s Brem.”

“Then why didn’t he repair them?”

Hallison Greer squinted her eyes shut, smiling tightly. “Oh my Core, Brue, all right. Let’s move on. So I was just looking at the schema you sent over, for the bio-valves, and I’m not sure I understand. You can’t be finished already.”

“Oh,” Brue said. “I mean, you sent me all the packets, right? I just finished the matrix—those valves will save Dhascon a lot of money.”

Miss Greer snatched up her data-pad, crisply swiping to screen-share a document, floating it in hologram just off the desk. “No, Brue, I sent you the packets yesterday. I promise you, it’s harder than this.”

Brue scowled at the document, wanting a Chocoloo but thinking it was not a good time. “Well, I mean, I was going to flush the old valves and start running tests, but I saw the scrubbers were still down there—they had seven hours on their work-lease, so I just modded them, for a full valve scan.”

“No, you can’t—scrubber droids don’t have scanner-grade ocular.”

“They do, actually, you just have to amp resolution. It’s prepaid, isn’t it? I figured the extra work wouldn’t matter, in this case.”

“Tell her you two-job service bots all the time,” grunted Nindo from the couch, who was just finishing his sandwich, staring at the ceiling.

Miss Greer was blinking rapidly, her face fixed and polite. “Brue, no one asked you to put a rush on this, or cast spells on a pair of low-grade scrubbers. I wasn’t expecting the bio-valve schematics for a week. And why would you copy the engineers? What if it had been wrong?”

“Wrong?” Brue puzzled at her. “Well, it’s not wrong, I can promise you that much.”

“And now the ball is back in my court. And it’s only Tuesday, Brue. It’s Tuesday.”

“So you wanted me . . . to not send it back. To wait? I guess I don’t under—”

“Okay, great!” Greer interrupted, tightening up her posture. “I guess we’re just rolling with this. But now, I’m thinking Davis Brem may be a better fit, for the expo. So I’m going to need you to go ahead and re-pool your invitation.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, it really looks like you went over my head, and that’s not a good look. This isn’t the first time, Brue,” Greer smiled sweetly. “And it’s just not the kind of culture we can encourage.”

“But, I’m sorry,” Brue stammered. “I wasn’t trying to go over your head . . .”

“I’ll need your ticket by opening tomorrow.”

Brue’s face was hot. “Okay.”

The screen winked out, call ended.

“Are you serious? She can’t do that to you!” Jemmi cried, jumping off the couch to approach. “When are you going to stand up to her?”

“That is BULLscud,” Nindo said emphatically, still chewing.

“Wow, so that just happened. I guess I’m out.” There was tightness in her throat, and Brue frowned, picking key dust from her fingernail.

“Hallison Greer is petrified of competence,” Nindo declared, sitting up.

Jemmi’s hands were on her shoulders, but her touch was irritating. “So I’ll be home tomorrow, working, like always,” Brue said. It wasn’t just the call, it was the conversations that would no longer be, the connections that wouldn’t happen. She was going to grill some of the best deep tech hardware designers in the city.

“Can’t you pay to stream a question?” Nindo asked.

“Too expensive,” Brue answered. Everything hurt. “Jemmi, stop.” She shrugged off her friend’s hands.

“Sorry,” Jemmi said, bouncing back onto the couch. “Listen, like you said, Spiral staff are catering the whole event. You should come by; there will be some really good stuff sent down.”

“I don’t want food,” Brue said, moving the Chocoloos to make room for elbows. She leaned her face in her hands, scratching her head, and quickly looked up. “Agent,” she said, “can you show me that group—the men with the woman, who they covered and pulled her across the street. Do you still have them?”

“I’ve got them,” the AI reported. “They brought her through an old techware dispensary, on the corner of Aught and Unway. They’re moving along the alley now, behind the store. On screen now—”

And there they were. The coat was off her, and the woman was clear: tall, brunette, hair tied up tightly, wearing a drab gray bodysuit. Her fists were clenched as two men, their heads shaved in angular patterns of dark hair, dragged her between them. The steep alley walls stretched up and out of view—the alley was dark, wet, and lit by narrow pod lights the length of it.

Brue could feel the beat of her heart. “Details?” she asked. “Is she bionate, symborn?”

“The back of her neck appears to be bleeding and scabbed,” the agent replied. “It’s conjecture, but that favors symborn—could be the mark of her identity codes, cut out of her neck to prevent visual tracking.”

“Oh, wow,” Brue said. “Can they do that? Could she be a deviant model, detained?”

“Down here? Unlikely. Imperial Office for Deviant Systems is 500 stories above us. And those men are certainly not presenting as IODS agents.”

“They definitely aren’t,” Brue muttered, her face close to the screen.

“So . . . what are they doing?” Nindo asked. He and Jemmi were right behind her now, at the very edge of the couch.

“There’s no money in it,” Brue said. “Abducting a symborn is too risky, isn’t it?”

“Look!” Jemmi said, pointing.

The group had reached a shallow black descending stair that seemed to end at a vertically closed pair of heavy doors, shut like steel jaws. One of the men released the woman, who had been resisting their grasp but feebly.

Brue dragged the video frame to a different monitor, taking only the logistic data and leaving the picture where it was. She exploded it with her fingertips, searching the stream. “I want audio, but there’s a node,” she said, tapping the glass. “Fix the sound while I tunnel it.”

“Will do,” the AI chirped.

A few code clips later the watchful eye of a security nodule embedded in the alley monitors was dealt with.

“Look,” Nindo said, addressing Jemmi. “She refactored the node so all it’s doing is reporting back clone data.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Jemmi said, still watching the feed.

“It means the eye is looking back at whoever sent it,” Brue said, “and lying to them. I just want to hear the alley, I don’t want anyone to know I’m peeking.”

“Oh right, of course,” Jemmi said.

Audio clicked on. “Signal up,” the AI said.

One of the two shadowy men was working a data-pad, while the other held the symborn woman by the arms.

Her head was down, swaying as though drunk. “Wait, please,” she kept saying.

“When the doors open,” the first man said, “she’ll fight. We have to get her in undamaged, or they dock us.”

“Undamaged?” the second said. “That’s a long damn fall.”

“The chute will compress, it will catch her.”

“She’ll scream.”

“Yeah, but no sentient alarms. Not here.”

The symborn moaned.

With a twitch Brue silenced the audio. Her heart was hammering. “It’s an expendery,” she breathed. “They’re going to mill her for parts.”

“They’re what? She’s alive though!” Nindo said quickly.

“What the crut!” Jemmi gasped. “That’s illegal right? Right?”

“Yes, definitely,” Brue said, frozen but unable to look away.

“Abuse of Imperial Sentients,” Nindo said. “That’s a class 2—serious terms if you get caught.”

The man in the alley with the data-pad appeared to be taking a while.

“He’s got to backdate the breach, before opening the doors,” Brue said. “Agent, how long has that expendery been offline?”

“Eleven years, five months, thirteen days,” the AI responded.

“How did you know it’s offline?” Jemmi asked.

“Temperature,” Brue said, tapping one of the data windows. “Adjacent sub-systems that cold—it’s been dead a long time.”

The expendery doors began to open, splitting at the center with a gasp of steam. The men grabbed her, and the symborn became suddenly animated, thrashing with a silent scream.

Brue’s fingers were tingling. “Are we really going to watch this? Maybe I should turn it off; it’s not our business.”

Jemmi’s hand caught her shoulder, tightly. “No, Brue, you have to fix it.”

“What?”

“You’re the only one who can do something,” Nindo said.

“Me?” A thrill of terror lit through her, and Brue coughed. “I’m just an observer, same as you—what am I supposed to do about it?”

“You know those alleys,” Nindo said. “That’s all cold network. No one else will know this is even happening.”

“Right, and we shouldn’t either,” Brue said, reaching to close the feed. “We don’t want to be anywhere near this.” Her finger hovered over DISMISS . . . but then, disobeying her, it paused— The story continues in Coredawn, Vol. 1...