The Ghosts of Blight Row

[Ash Dervishi]

Manaus Building, ConsolCorp
City of Lux

As one of the major megacorps of Lux, much of the city’s downtown core was dominated by its buildings, dedicated to its various interests in pharmaceuticals, personal care products, and inter-realm logistics. Some were rather eccentric in design, like the quartet of four-story steel-and-glass spheres filled with employee lounges and gardens sourced from various biomes across the multiverse. Others hewed to traditional skyscraper design, tall and rectangular and threatening to pierce the clouds themselves. ConsolCorp’s Manaus Building split the difference between the two architectural philosophies. Dedicated to the company’s over-the-counter medicinal concerns, Manaus consisted primarily of a 37 story rectangular tower rising out of an L-shaped base that curved slightly on the eastern side. Attached to that main tower, seemingly hanging over thin air, was what almost appeared to be another, shorter structure, though it was clearly part of the Manaus building. The attached portion of the building alternated glass windows with brown and white paneling, while the bulk of the skyscraper was glass and steel, with horizontal copper dividers breaking up panes of windows at seemingly random intervals. During the day, the whole structure’s surface functioned like a mirror, reflecting back the rest of the nearby ConsolCorp campus. At night, it functioned like a black hole, sucking up all streetlight and emitted none of its own, save for sporadic midnight oil burners on the upper floors. The cool exterior, the banks of security cameras at every conceivable entrance, and the squads of blue-clad security in exosuits that patrolled the perimeter sent a clear message to those that walked by Manaus: look, but don’t touch.

Inside, they were no less protective of their secrets. Oh, they had the usual lobby security post, with locked doors, metal detectors, mana detectors, and psy scanners. These all led into an airy lobby with several white crystal chandeliers hanging two stories above the pink marble floors, leading up to another slab of marble, backlit by gold light, that functioned as the security desk. The usual guard there during the day was an older gentleman, wearing a suit with only a faux police badge on his chest to indicate his position, and his job was mainly to call up to the C-suite and confirm wanted visitors had arrived. At night, they would swap in a slightly younger, but still gray-haired man to man that spot. His presence there was mostly symbolic.

Evening security really happened in the control room, four stories beneath the ground floor, behind what appeared to be an unassuming door on one of the parking garage floors. Inside, the usual walls had been replaced with ultra-thin monitors that showed all the camera feeds connected to Manaus, along with a trio of trideo desks to monitor the skyscraper’s cybersecurity. Two men and a woman manned the stations. All three dressed in crisp blue short-sleeved collared polos and black trousers. The woman, seated on the right when entering the room, had pulled her brown hair up in a bun, and the man at the center desk had shaved his head, but the other guard on the left had grown his black hair out right to the length limits in their contract’s uniform code.

“Ash,” the bald guard looked over his shoulder at the other man. “When you gonna cut your verdammt hair?”

Ash just rolled his eyes and blinked a few times, adjusting the VisCon lenses in his eyes.

“Lay off him, Luuk,” she said, swiveling in her chair to scowl at him. “His hair could be down to his ass, for all I care. Least he watches the melting screen!”

Their bickering stopped when they heard the familiar soothing voice of the building’s AI from the other side of the door, and the whirring sound of the biometric scanners at work. After a few seconds, the magnetic lock popped open, and in stepped their boss, a boulder of a man with a bushy white moustache and ever-present cup of NeuBreu coffee in his hands. He put his empty hand on his hip and glared at the guards.

“Hey, hey, hey! Less chatting, more scanning.” He waited a beat or two for them to react, but when they did little more than turn their attention back to their screens, he visibly sagged. “Guys, it’s a joke.”

“We know, sir,” Ash said, not even looking up from his trideo display.

“Well, you’re all no fun. Shift’s over, by the way. Anders, Morozov, and Janssen are clocking in right now.” Right on cue, the AI’s muffled voice and the biometrics’ droning kicked in, and the door opened again, bringing in a tall blonde woman with high cheekbones and a small scar bisecting her top lip.

“Morozov, you’re on Dervishi’s desk. Yilmaz, Orlovski, Anders and Janssen should be here shortly. Take OT if they’re late, and let me know. Anders really should know better by now. Ash, can I talk to you for a second?”

“Sure, sir.” Ash got up from his desk, leaving the other two guards still seated, and Morozov took over. He lifted a hand to wave in departure, and then the two exiting men began walking through the empty garage, illuminated by orange light. They went up a floor in silence, then, after walking past several more empty spaces, came across a shiny black autocar. The older man pulled a fob out of his pocket, clicked a few buttons on it, and the doors unlocked with soft *thunks*.

“Sir, you know this is a dead zone, right? No cams, no nanolisteners, no-”

“There’s a reason for that, Ash. Get in.” He opened the passenger’s side door, and Ash dutifully followed directions, finding himself nearly swallowed by the plush leather cushion of the seat. His boss followed, a moment later, on the driver’s side, though he made no move to start the vehicle. Instead, he locked the doors again, checked to make sure the windows were rolled up, and then continued. “Have you ever worked as a ghost?”

“What?”

“Oh, Christ, you are a boy scout.” He looked up at the roof of the car while Ash scratched his head. “Are all the corp soldiers at Baird-Sandefur this goody-two-shoes?”

“I just kept my head down, s-”

“Please, you can call me Alec.”

“Alec, sir.” Ash watched as the man pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing.

“It’s a start. Ash, you do know what haunted houses are, right?”

“Yeah. We got called to do EOD, neutralizations, sweeps of them a few times. Some corps like to keep their dirty business off the books.”

“All corps. So what might you call someone who works at a haunted house?”

“A ghost?” Alec pointed and grinned when Ash answered the question with his own.

“Correct! Chief of security thinks you’re ghost material. You don’t lube -- I’m not even sure you’d know how to find an oil factory -- hell, you barely even drink. No red flags in your jacket from Baird-Sandefur. And honestly, you’re the best screener we got. You don’t get distracted, you catch things almost as soon as the cams do, your incident reports demonstrate basic understanding of Common…”

“Okay…” Ash pulled a cheap plastic pen from his shirt pocket and began spinning it with his fingers.

“...And you’ve got added incentive to make some off-the-books creds.”

“Kaya.”

“Or maybe not.” Alec shrugged. “But this way, it’s up to you what you do with that money. Send it to her family, work off what you owe, or keep it to yourself.” He reached across the center console to pat Ash on his right arm. “Go find yourself a better schweißer than whatever lubed-up mad stuck that chrome on you.” He paused and exhaled a deep sigh. “Look, kid, before we get into details, I gotta know if you are a boy scout. I know you’re not shades, but I also need to know if you’re gonna rabbit when shit gets real. We all know you follow Lux’s rules and your contract, but where you’d be going there’s basically two rules: get our job done discreetly, and don’t get yourself killed.”

“Where’s that?” Ash stopped the pen mid-spin, turning his brown eyes on Alec.

“Blight Row.”