Roughly a half hour before dawn the next morning, a silent alarm went off in Thia's cybernetics, sending impulses into her optical and auditory nerves. The alarm ignited a struggle for control in her mind. On one side, a part of her felt sleepy and warm and safe and had a vague understanding that all of this would go away when she woke up. Ultimately, however, it was the other side, her sense of duty and desire to be paid, that won.
When Thia was awake enough to click her jaw, silencing her alarm, she found that although she was wrapped in blankets and the warm breathing body of at least one other person, her world was full of pain that radiated up her leg from her ankle. She took a deep breath and accepted that it was about to get worse. As carefully as she could, she extracted herself from the nest they had formed atop the enormous bed. Once she reached its edge, she took a deep breath before she pulled herself upright, putting all of her weight on her good ankle.
The room around her wore a veil of darkness, but she just switched her cybernetic eye over to low-light mode. She bit down softly on her forearm in case she lost her balance and put weight on her ankle, then half-hopped and half-limped out into the living room. By the time she reached the small table by the front door that had a datapad, dawn was just starting to light up the sky outside, and she switched back to regular-light mode. She pulled a cable out from behind her ear and jacked in, uploading her video feed to a simple video editor where she cut out the footage of the giant mech stomping around Ternifac. This she uploaded to an auction service where she hoped that someone, perhaps a news agency, might pay for it. She also made a second cut of her footage, including everything from the moment she stepped into the bar to the moment she left with Pidole and the rest. She uploaded this second cut to a secure endpoint over an encrypted connection.
Breathing a sigh of relief, she unjacked herself and started the long journey back to warmth.
Almost half the world away, on the roof of a skyscraper looking out over Kyoto, there sat a modest house surrounded by a garden that looked like it belonged in a different time and place. Snow blanketed everything, except for a koi pond from which a gentle mist rose. A piece of bamboo filled with water, tipped over on its hinge, dumped its contents, then tipped upright again with a hollow thunk.
Inside the house, a man in a robe sat at a table and watched a video feed. When it ended, he sat quietly for some time, then started sending a memo to his assistant.
"When the market settles after the morning rush, start buying everything," he stated in a slow, measured voice. "I'm expecting a rally."
