I live alone as a stranger, keeping to myself and preferring the solace of this high place. The air is cool up here and the gravity doesn’t tug down on me the way it does a few hundred meters below. There’s a gray and white bundle of feathers in my hands. A dove, bioengineered and grown from a bona-fide egg. I have a few coveys up here on the roof. I keep the doves and they keep me company. They keep me sane.

It wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always like this. Alone, I mean.

I was riding high back in the older, better days. A member of a high-powered, high flow MRCZ called the Memejackers. We thought we were oh so fierce. We rented space in a bubble building in a trendy part of the zone, a honeycombed network of foamcrete and plastic suspended from a steel truss. Thick cables stretched from the superstructure and the bubble-like apartments hung down them, like barnacles clinging to wood pilings. Ours was a two-bubble job, one housed our office and the other held the lab. We made memories. That’s what we advertised on the Aggregate’s registry, anyway. What we said. Our public face. What we did, what everyone knew we did, well…that was another story.

A client would schedule an appointment through one of our members. At that point in the game we had about two dozen staff on hand. That’s what we called ourselves: staff. Like a real corporation, the kind they still have offmarket. Jakob was the founder and he always dressed the part of the killer CEO. He was a scummy immigrant from a lunar colony. Split after some bad stuff went down. He pooled, borrowed or stole what he could to make the trip across the stars to the ringed planet and took up residence on the station as a political fugitive. That was what they stamped on his immigration record. After that, he was like all of us: a new person, a self-made man.

In Richmond’s case, that was a literal statement. Richmond was a blank, a human printed up like a replacement organ. He was printed at six years old and was now twenty one apparent. We were planning to throw him a birthday party when an explosion ripped through the bubbles. We heard metal shearing and bubbles tearing free from their cabling. I remember smoke and a lot of blood. The whole place went crazy and within no time at all the sweeps started buzzing around, collecting data for the emergency bots now en-route.

I staggered through a tear in the side of the labs and stepped over an arm. It was Richmond’s. His barely conscious body was lying under a pile of shredded cables, their ends frayed like old shoelaces. Rich was in rough shape and his mouth was screaming. I realized that I couldn’t hear anything and the buzzing I heard wasn’t the sound of the sweeps. It was vibrations bumping up against my blown-out inner ear. I pinged Richmond’s biometrics and saw them failing fast. I had the bare minimum of medical training, nothing to prepare me for this kind of trauma so I just waited by his body. A silver and blue sweep clambered in and asked me something. I squirted him the answer as it was faster than talking. The sweep sprayed some kind of blue foam on Richmond’s shoulder, where the meat ended in blood and bones and exposed muscle fibers. He stopped screaming and squirming and with the sweep’s assistance we freed him from the cables.

I pinged the other members of my group. Richmond was critical but now stabilized thanks to the foam tourniquet. They’d pump some plasma back into him and he’d be fine while they printed up a new arm. Jakob was dead, caught in the epicenter of the blast. With luck, he’d be back within a week or two. I just worried about his last dub. Ramping him back up to speed would take awhile.

Gedde and Armando were somewhere else. I pinged them with a status report and we planned our next move while the bubbles were evacuated. The fire was out but the damage made the whole structure unstable.

“Who would do this?” I asked Gedde and he pinged back one word:

“Vulterror.”

“No way,” I said aloud. “Vulterror is just a face cult. They don’t really do this kind of stuff.”

Gedde gave me a look that said more than words. Armando’s voice came into the conversation. “I just got confirmation from Hani and Illysa. And they have it on video.”

He squirted the short clip to me. Two people, male and female apparent, all done up in the Vulterror colors. They were setting up some equipment in the bubble next to our offices.

“How did they get this?”

Armando shrugged virtually. “Hani had some ghost tech set up in the area. I guess he was more than a little paranoid. Maybe Jakob told him to do it? Anyway, there it is.”

Vulterror was a wetworks outfit. Merchant muscle. But they had a reputation as a face cult; a group that made themselves look scarier than they were. Granted, Vulterror were some gruesome freemers but this had the stink of a hit. Not their style at all. I checked out their members’ flow on the Aggregate’s registry and saw that many of them were edging baseline.

Whatever they’d been contracted to do, it had pushed them into the positives.

Or they weren’t done with the deal yet.

I pinged a transport drone and climbed aboard.

“The rumor mill says it was a hit on Jakob orchestrated by AP on behalf of some other flood/bleeder group.” Armando’s voice in my head as the drone weaved through crowds of freemers.

That was the thing. Another flood/bleeding group. On the outside, we presented a small but successful group of ephemerists and data brokers. But Jakob got too ambitious and now we were marked for extermination. It wasn’t easy to slice data and sift through it for good memories. Cheaper and easier (for us) to snatch people from the Hole and bleed them dry of interesting data. It was my job to fish the fresh meat. To put on a friendly face and offer a hand out to the newbies. It sounded like a great plan. Snatch the newbie, bleed the data (including the experience of being grabbed) and they’d wake up in bed with not a clue what happened. As long as we weren’t caught, there was no way to trace it.

Memejackers. I forget who came up with the name but we were learning to regret the choice. Jakob thought he was so clever. Now he was being swept up into a dustpan and converted into landfill or something.

“Pull over!” I yelled at the drone, forgetting to use my key. It obeyed the command and swerved to the side. Jakob was flagging me down. “Shove.” he said and he climbed on beside me. The drone sped off, bobbing under the weight of two passengers.

Jakob grinned at me. “Hey, I have a place just outside the stacks. There’s a friend of mine waiting for us.” His voice was muted, like hearing someone speak while underwater.

My jaw hung open, staring at my very real, very intact MRCZ-mate. I pointed to my ears and pinged him. “Can’t hear too well.”

His reply: “My switcher friend.”

The lights came on. Identity switching was a big deal on the station. Hacking into the station’s neural net and playing shell games with key ID’s was a strict no-no. I pinged Jakob and saw his status: alive, well and cruising along.

“Who got caught in the explosion?”

He shrugged. “You’d have to ask the switcher. She persuaded the target to stop by the office to pick up a gift just as the Vulterror goons showed. Things transpired the way you remember and here we are.” He pulled out a shiny green apple from his pocket and bit into it. I was still in a daze.

“Richmond’s on his way to medical.”

Jakob shrugged and took another bite from his apple. “Hmm.”

The trip didn’t last much longer than that. We exited the drone and went up to his friend’s apartment. Her name was Jun. She was pretty, but not in a bioengineered way – that kind of planned beauty a lot of freemers had. And she was incredibly rich with flow. Stepping into the apartment was strange. Housing in the stacks were comfortable but tiny. This stretched out across a third of the floor plan. Bigger than Memejackers’ entire complex.

“Anyone else here?” asked Jakob. Jun shook her head no and retrieved some drinks for us. I staggered in, dizzy at the turn of events. My ears were still ringing but I could hear a bit better. No aural interfaces in my immediate future.

Jun said no and went back to whatever she was doing before we got there. We stayed in the main room, a rich carpet and comfortable chairs spread out in a sunken area in the center. On the wall, a space reserved for widescreen video layering. Jakob poured himself another drink while I collapsed in a plush love seat.

“What now?”

Jakob gulped down the drink. “Well, we gather the troops and strike back.”

“And Richmond? The others?”

Jakob twirled the ice in his glass with a finger and sat down beside me. “Rich will be fine. The mobbers will print up an even better arm for him. And nobody else was there except you and…me.” His eyes widened a bit and he gave me a spooky grin and a thumb’s up.

“So, strike back.”

“Yeah. We’ll hire Vulterror to raid their offices and lay some serious harm on them. I’ve already set it up.”

I defriended him right then and there and quit the MRCZ. “I’ll see myself out.”

The flow hit wasn’t too serious. It would be worse once people found out what Jakob had pulled and what the ‘Jackers really did to earn flow. I got a few frownies from other Memejackers but I only replied to those I trusted. Hani and his clique defriended me, having sided with Jake. No doubt he had fished them his own side of the story. Richmond was still off in surgery. I left him a message on his key. He’d get it as soon as he was turned back on.

The video feed of the hit was a nice bit of data I gifted to Vulterror who (probably) expunged it. I used the proceeds to fish the relay’s datastream and seed the newsfeed with a rumor about Jakob and the Memejackers’ snatch n’ bleed operation. Now that the truth was out there, I waited for the offers to come in.

They never did. Those who fell in with Jake stopped dealing with me and everyone else lumped me in with him and the rest of the crew. Richmond was back with a shiny new replacement arm and a sleeve full of painkillers but never replied to my message. My friends list was down to the barest dregs, immigrants that still weren’t privy to the scam and didn’t know what I did to them in the past.

I have all this data on a chip now. Pulled out of my head and set on infinite loop on a view screen. I see it all unfold before my eyes but I don’t remember it happening to me. As far as I can tell, it didn’t. I won’t sell it, even though I could use the data to trade for a better life. As far as I can tell, this is the life I want. This is the life I deserve. I traded it all away, pushed the reset button and moved on.

I remember a sunrise off the coast of Maine in the middle of the worst blizzard since 1978. I think about that morning and I smile to myself as I stroke the neck of a cooing dove. It flutters up into the air and circles the rooftop a few times before it returns to the covey’s roof. I watch it for awhile and lay back, thinking of the past and wondering where it went.

The old adage is that you can’t buy happiness.

Not true. You can buy happiness. The problem is that you can’t sell off regret.