It started like it usually did, with Gabriel way in over his head before Miguel heard a whiff of it. In this case, it was Gabriel bringing a heap of trouble with him, like a trojan on a flashdrive.
“Miguel, we need help?” was just about the second thing out of Gabriel’s mouth, after a brief greeting. At least the door was closed and Miguel didn’t have other guests. Miguel never had other guests. He liked his place the way it was, his.
Miguel stood up from where he'd flopped on the window seat. Lyla flickered into presentation. “We? Who’s we?””
Gabriel’s lips flattened and he looked off to the side; Miguel definitely didn’t like that. Gabriel wasn’t any good at hiding when he’d fucked up, not from Miguel.
“Ay,” Lyla said. “Does this have anything to do with Ms Nash and the empty garage?” Lyla asked.
Gabriel paled “How did you know about that!?”
“What’s this, Lyla?” Miguel looked at his AI. She looked as smug as her emotional emulator could make her.
“Ms. Nash and her associates have been visiting an empty, unrented garage space in downtown; it’s outside of their usual pattern. I posit it’s a moonlight pharmacy,” Lyla said. She turned to smile at Miguel, “I do keep an algorithm going for your brother’s associates, you know.”
Gabriel made a strangled little whine. Miguel didn’t, but his talons flicked out. A moonlight pharmacy, without licensing, regulation, or protection paid to a security corp, was highly illegal, and Lyla had picked it out.
“Oh, don’t worry. No human has noticed. I’ve managed to overwrite Public Eye’s tracking algorithm. Because they are cheap and overly confident, so their AI is very dumb. Miguel, however, allows me to be very smart indeed.”
Well, that was… good. Probably. Miguel had a smart, smug AI, but at least she was looking out for Gabriel. And his dumb, downtowner activist friends. Why couldn’t Gabriel take up with flighty nudists and air-headed Thorites again? Miguel kind of missed Gabriel’s romantic disasters; they’d only ever hurt his brother’s feelings. Kasey Nash’s staying power in Gabriel’s affections meant Gabriel kept getting involved in corporate business, which a freelance holo designer had no power to leverage.
“Also, this!” Lyla said, and flourished her hands as virtual screens popped up around her. The projections were full of bureaucratic documentation for some system Miguel didn’t know and couldn’t parse. “Public Eye work orders; most of the cameras along downtown Noho are glitched and not making accurate records. Some are completely nonfunctional!” The AI sounded vindictively cheerful.
Gabriel looked to the side. “I got an error text with a hidden message in it.”
Miguel raised his eyebrows.
“From Zero”
Miguel knew that name. Gabriel had mooned about the person often enough back in his intense hacker days. “...Zero Cochrane.”
“Yep.” Gabriel was a little wide-eyed.
“Zero Cochrane, who is dead,” Miguel confirmed
“Yep.”
“Who uploaded a brain print into a prototype war rig and ran away with it.”
“That’s the one.”
Miguel growled in frustration, rubbed his eyes, and stared at the ceiling.
“What did the shocking Ghost Rider say?”
“He dropped a schedule for the pharma disposal route; a truck full of meds that no one in downtown can afford but everyone needs.”
Miguel could see where this was going. “Tell me you aren’t involved in a hijacking, Gabriel.”
Gabriel stared at the ceiling
“The insurance claim has already been filed,” Lyla chirped. “Approximately 22 million in pharmaceuticals, stolen. The insurance company is arguing that because they were scheduled for the destroyer they were worth nothing and they shouldn’t have to pay out”
Miguel groaned. He was going to regret this
“What do you need me to do, Gabriel?”
His brother perked up, and opened his mouth.
The garage was dingy, late twencen and used hard since then. It was the kind of cinderblock space that should have been torn down and replaced before Miguel was born, but hadn’t because downtown was downtown and unless you needed to lay new foundations, no one from upside wanted to come down into the shadowy levels.
The inside was clean, at least, little roombots scrubbing the floor in their dumb, rheostatic way, bumbling into walls and shelving units as they swept. They were the kind of models that didn’t even have wifi, which meant someone had a modicum of sense.
Kasey Nash, Gabriel’s girlfriend and occasional half-cock corporate vigilante, stared at him amidst the wire shelving, heavy with little boxes, still shrink-wrapped into cases.
Miguel shook his head again, and tapped his claws against the flats of coziziem doses, desperately needed downtown and ruinously expensive to people without a corporate job with corporate benefits. And even that would make it iffy – you needed at least silver benefits for a maintenance coziziem regime not to bankrupt you.
“You can’t distribute these,” he repeated, flat and unhappy
“Why not?” Kasey hadn’t been happy when he said that the first time, she wasn’t happy now.
You can’t distribute these,” Miguel repeated a third time. “Look at the dates.”
Kasey glared at him. “They’re good. They don’t expire for five years.”
Miguel hissed. She wasn’t getting it. She wasn’t taking the data and extrapolating to the right conclusion.
“What?!” Kasey snapped.
“They’re new; made this year. Why would they be on a disposal truck?”
She frowned, her eyes flicking back and forth.Then her eyes widened with a sharp inhale. “There’s something wrong with them.”
Miguel nodded. These drugs had probably failed testing somewhere, after they were labeled but before they were shipped out. The downtowners couldn’t risk using them, because if the problem was bad enough that the drugs had been sent to disposal, the odds were they weren’t just ineffective but actively dangerous
Kasey cursed, a long string of English, Spanish, and Japanese.
She slumped against the wall. “All for nothing; this run was such a gamble and all for nothing.”
Miguel snorted. “It’s not all the same batch, or even the same drug.” He slipped up the wall to look at the boxes on the higher shelves. “This is expired, but probably still safe.” He gestured at the batch he’d looked at. It wasn’t coziziem, but anything that could make it to the downtown docs-in-a-box would be useful.
Kasey tilted her head, “the coziziem was the big score; I don’t know what that is.”
“Still useful,” Miguel said. The box said it was an antiviral, not one he knew by name, but downtown was short on those too, and housing and working conditions meant there were a lot more viral load in the population. Things were always mutating into variants that escaped treatment and vaccination. The big corps didn’t care, because there were always downtowners to do the scrub jobs anyway..
Kasey got up and trudged over to the shelving below Miguel.
“How do we get rid of the bad batch? I can’t keep it if we can’t use it; space is tight enough.”
In a moonlight pharmacy? Yeah, it would be. Stuff had to be shifted fast and the space abandoned or Public Eye would notice it and raid. Even if Lyla had tweaked the algorithm to be dumber than usual, that didn’t mean that safety would last. Some corporate drone doing data hygiene or just a version update could mean notice at any moment.
“Give it to your docs.” Miguel said
Kasey frowned and folded her arms. It probably looked more impressive when she was wearing the Payback armor. Miguel certainly looked more intimidating now, when he was wearing his Spider suit “You just said it was bad.”
“They can throw it in their medical waste. A little bit in the trash everywhere won’t be spotted. They just can’t use it. You trust them?”
She nodded.
Miguel jumped up, and went towards the high windows. He’d come in that way, he’d leave that way, avoiding street cameras.
“That’s it?” Kasey asked before he got through.
Miguel swiveled to look at her.
“You’re just going to come, tell me to destroy stuff, and take off.”
“Yes.”
She made a disgusted sound.
“I used to think you were what we needed, a champion but–”
“Don’t care,” Miguel said.
“You bitflip!” she snapped. “I’m doing what I can to help, and you just swing in and–”
“I am a webswinger.” Miguel wondered where she was going with this.
“Why don’t you actually work with us?! With me?! We could do so much more against the corps–”
“Because you’re sloppy, and careless. You’ve gotten away, but people who followed you? They got snatched and then they got the needle.” Miguel said. Gabriel had almost been one of those people, injected and aged to an early death.
Kasey blanched. Miguel watched her for a moment, but she didn’t muster up any words.
Miguel nodded, and slipped out into the downtown night.
The first thing Gabriel said when he came by later was “What the shock did you do, Miguel?
Miguel rolled his eyes. He’d thrown his suit into the laundry machine first thing after coming back, and was lounging in his favorite robe and loose pants. Of course, Gabriel had barged in and started throwing a fit about how Miguel wasn’t kind enough when he’d gone out of his way
“I told her she had to get rid of half the drugs she’d hijacked because they weren’t just expired, they were faulty.”
Gabriel narrowed his eyes, and came around the kitchen assembly to stand at the other end of the window-seat. Miguel watched him, how he stood, fist clenched and shoulders up. It made him look too much like Da, and Miguel’s stomach curdled at the thought.
“Kasey was nearly in tears! What is your problem with her?“
“I don’t like her because she’s careless with YOU!”
Gabriel stopped. Stared at Miguel.
“...Miggy, I get to make my own choices.”
Miguel’s snarl wrinkled into a frown, his shoulders up and his chin up. He felt like a child again, about to be screamed at. He didn’t like it.
“She’s careless with you. Hijacking a drug shipment like that, without anyone on call who actually knows what they’re doing–”
“You know what you’re doing.”
Miguel rolled his eyes. “I am a researcher! And not involved. Not as me, and it’s risky to do it as Spider-Man. But I’m going to keep doing it, because you keep getting involved!”
Gabriel stepped back, his hands slowly unclenching. “I’m not trying to get you into–”
“I make my own choices, too, Gabriel, and I choose to protect you.”
Gabriel smiled, soft and small. “Yeah, I love you too, you shocking glitch.”