Tela quickly finds the address for me as I hop into Baller. She appears back in her chibi form on my dashboard, dressed in an adorable little flight attendant costume and holding a big left arrow to start helping me navigate. I will admit, she’s a much cuter sight up there than Veronica. “Hah, why thank you, madame. Be a dear and pull up some badass driving music, won’t you? You know my playlist.”
Tela nods and in moments the pounding bass in the background of You Spin Me Round by Dead or Alive fills the cabin and makes my sexmobile of a hot-ass car bounce more than the time Cassandra and I had our first in-car post-mission rendezvous, and our last one before she died because her limiter was hacked to turn her into a violent killing machine and before I called Chad who killed her–Fuck, now I’m sad again.
“Don’t be sad, Blake-chan. If Tela had a body, Tela would make Blake feel better.”
“Tela could make Blake feel better by telling Blake which turn to take at this fork.”
“If Tela had a body, Tela could both tell Blake to turn right at the fork, and then give Blake road head.”
“Tela, I never thought I’d ever say this, but I don’t think Blake wants any hot chicks putting his dick in their mouths for a while.”
“Did Kilroy switch bodies with Blake-chan?!”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” I mumble, getting sadder and now angry as I think about that fucking cunt–but I can’t get too caught up in thinking about that fucking cunt because, at that very moment, I get a call from a different cunt.
“Blake-chan has an incoming call from... Ballfondler McHitler…? Is Blake friends with a Red Flag--”
“The fuck do you want, Chad,” I mumble, cutting her off as his vaguely asshole-shaped face appears holographically on the dash next to Tela, who quickly draws a holographic penis on his holographic buttcheek of a forehead. I’m so proud.
“Good to hear from you as well, old buddy, old pal,” he mumbles. “I am just calling to tell you I have uncovered some interesting shit on Kilroy.”
“Wow, Chad! That’d be impressive if I hadn’t just spent an hour with the man in person.”
“Whoah, really, Blake!? What happened!?” He’s not sarcastic; it sounds like he’s honestly curious. Time to rub in how cool I am.
“Well, I did some drugs and drank some blood and got my face cut open and then I went to Kilroy’s crib to chill with him and I got an amazing blowjob but it was so amazing that I died.” Like a BOSS. I do the cool-guy finger guns thing at Chad, but he doesn’t seem impressed, I guess the jealousy is just too great. Or he saw that I almost ran off the road to do it. Either way.
“Oh real fucking funny, Blake! I am being serious here! Lawrence managed to tap into a server on the Undernet being used for Bloody Tears storage and communication, and--”
“Hold up. Hold the FUCK up. Who the fuck is Lawrence?”
“Lawrence Obliterate the Third. He teaches white-hat hacking at the local community college and offered his help to us, it was all in the briefing email?” Oh fuck. No way, I remember that name–that’s the cunt from the grocery store.
“Oh, uh, yeah, I haven’t checked that. I took the day off expecting my, uh, date to run late but–it didn’t.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that, Charles.”
“Me too. You need to stop working with Lawrence, by the way. I met him at Food Sphinx, he’s kind of a shithead.”
“Food what?! Blake, Lawrence got us into Bloody Tears’ internal network, stop allowing your jealousy to consume you and be thankful things are going well for us in this case finally. Can you please just come meet with us to go over it?”
“Can you give me the rundown over the phone? Because I wasn’t joking, I did meet Kilroy and I did get a blowjob that killed me but he brought me back to life and told me to go to a record store so I’m kind of on my way there right now.”
“...whatever you say, Charles. Long story short, according to the document Lawrence found, Kilroy is a veteran of the Artificial War like himself. He was an ART, led the ARTs and artificial humans into battle on many occasions, was considered directly responsible for the Limiter Clause [ed. how legally any being with an artificial/generated brain image without a limiter is considered a full human]… but now he and his cult want to extend that to include removing limiters from all brain images, even Telas, and they’re planning an attack in the Teleworld to get started--”
“That’s great, Chad. You have fun writing that biography for Lawrence, meanwhile I’m gonna try to find Kilroy since I’ve actually met the cunt.”
I hang up on him, then process what he said--none of that really fits with what Kilroy told me, or what little info I’d gotten from him about his plans, but I had already mostly deduced with his size that he had to be an ART and not a human in a Pneumat-like exoskeleton so I guess that could be the case. Either Kilroy was holding out on me or Chad’s onto a red herring, and the former honestly seems more likely, though I hate to admit it.
My pondering is rudely and horrifically interrupted as I look up and see glowing eyes in the car in front of me, reflecting from the driver in his rearview mirror. I look closer and HOLY SHIT, IT’S KILROY, in a fucking DeLorean. Huh, I feel like I’ve seen one of those recently. This is my lucky day–unless he has any weaponry, in which case it’s the opposite.
I turn on Baller’s super hackin’ hidden undercover police lights/siren for the first time in so many years and floor the gas as Kilroy processes what’s happening and zooms ahead, bouncing the Drivepods in front of him harmlessly out of the way like pachinko balls. You Spin Me Right Round isn’t a great car chase song, so I have Tela flip my playlist over to Rebel Yell by Billy Idol and crank it to max. I ready my Guntlets and lean out the window as I dodge the Drivepods bouncing back at me, weaving through the hail of spherical automatic taxis and shooting my finger gun through the occasional opening like I’m in the original Spy Hunter arcade game.
“Tela,” I shout, as I land a good shot finally and shatter the glass on the back windshield, causing his car to waver a bit. “I need your help. If we get out of this alive, I’ll get you a fucking body, if I can figure out how, okay?”
“OH, BLAKE-CHAN--”
“Can it. I need you to scan for ZPE compatible devices. There’s no way he hasn’t upgraded the console in that antique to interface with a NeurOS.”
“Tela is already connected to your stereo, and your various tools, but there’s one thing Tela doesn’t recognize--”
“Yeah, a stereo.”
“Uh… yes, it looks like a navigation console slash stereo. Tela thinks it’s from the car in front of us.”
“Well, I need you to hijack it and stop that car.”
“Blake-chan, if that was something Tela could have done, Tela would have already done it. It's also a double manual. That won’t work.”
“FUCK! There’s like FIVE of these damn cars left in the whole fucking district and he has one, too!?”
“You two are very similar, Blake-chan! Tela will be eagerly waiting for the inevitable fanfiction~!”
“Fuck you, Tela!” Oh shit. Now someone’s leaning out of the window of that car--it’s a masked man in black--aaaand he’s jumping onto my hood. He starts punching my windshield, causing the glass to splinter and crack as his Rapture-Roided fist pounds down like a sledgehammer. He must be on Green. I point my Guntlet at him to shoot but I’m out of bullets, other Guntlet--same. Fucking hell. “Tela, any ideas?”
“One last passionate tryst before Blake-chan gets his head pounded in?”
“I told you, I'm not in the mood right now, Tela. Give me at least until, like, the sun comes back up, because who am I kidding, I can’t be out of the game for long.” I glance ahead and inspiration hits–or rather, I’m going to hit it. “Tela, hold onto your projected particles, this might hurt.” I swerve into the oncoming lane where a Drivepod is coming at me also going 70mph. Detecting the impact, it quickly goes into safety mode, the wheels pulling in and leaving only the Flexiglass exterior. It’ll be like hitting styrofoam for Baller given the material it’s made of--but it should be enough of a surprise to shock the masked Kilroy crony off the windshield.
I brace for impact as--BAM!!--the Drivepod slams into the masked man, knocking him off balance. He slams his head into the windshield as the Drivepod harmlessly bounces away, but my entire windshield explodes in a brilliant shower of glass shards that slices my already cut face to shreds as I blindly swerve back into my lane. Great idea Blake, leave the car ‘original,’ don’t replace the glass with Flexiglass–and that was a sober decision! I wipe the glass and blood from my eyes just in time to watch the masked man getting maimed under an oncoming automatic semi, his insides being violently squelched up and out like an overpacked sausage casing. Yeesh.
Something else hard slams me in the face, leaving a nice swollen and bloodied patch on my right cheek and slicing the inside of my cheek too. This is the most blood I’ve tasted since–well, I guess since I drank a cup of cultist blood an hour ago. What a day. I look up and narrowly dodge another one flying in at me, looking at it whizz by in my rearview mirror to see--
GI Joe figures? He’s throwing fucking GI Joes at me!?
I swerve as I approach to try to dodge the oncoming onslaught of priceless vintage collectibles--he must be as desperate as me at this point to use something like them as ammo. I try to rationally process the situation, but there’s not much I can do. I can’t throw things at him when he’s in front of me, I’m out of Guntlet bullets–but there’s no way I’m letting him get away. Another one hits me in the face, this time giving me a bloody nose and whiplash, and I recoil for a good five seconds trying to regain my composure... but now I’ve got him…
In my sights…
Taking the exit on the right while I continue along at lightspeed…
Fuck.
“On the plus side, Blake-chan, the record store is at the next right!” Tela cheerfully informs me.
Well, record store it is.