Judy Alvarez: Soul Techie by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Judy-Alvarez-Soul-Techie-1234288175#image-1

Judy Alvarez: Soul Techie ANIMATION

Glass and Echoes

The drone's hull kept a secret geometry: a cage of bent aluminum, a lattice of seats like ribs, and a loop of windows smashed into jagged pupils. Rain had found its way in and refused to leave, brimming in shallow pools that collected the scattered pieces of other people's afternoons. Judy Alvarez came awake on a seat that no longer had a seatbelt, with a necklace of sparks braided into her hair, and an ache in her hands that knew how to make lines of code and heartache look the same.

She moved like a surgeon in a theater gone wrong—quick, precise, scanning. Somewhere beyond the ruptured fuselage, Night City was a smell and a distant, indifferent hum. Up close, inside the drone, she smelled oil and ozone, the sterile tang of BD canisters, and the soft rot of human breath that had been cut off and left to cool. Bodies lay like discarded props: passengers flattened by velocity, some curled as if dreaming, others stripped to the flecks of their private data—small, square pods clinging near the skull where BD interfaces had been ripped to expose the delicious circuitry beneath.

Cyborg scavengers made the drone their cathedral. They were not beautiful. They were efficient: bone and chrome, faces unaffixed under translucent shields, fingers rewritten so they could pry memories like teeth. One of them hummed a tune that sounded like a child's promise twisted into copper. They harvested BD implants as if they were currency, searching for the perfect piece of someone else’s life to sell, trade, or feed into an appetite that might be called need if you wanted to be kind.

Judy kept her head down. She had a reason to be here beyond scavenging. The drone had carried something else—something that had made the scavengers' movements nervous and too quick. The last transmission she'd intercepted before the crash was a tremor in the grid, a stuttered packet that smelled like forbidden. She had been on her way to pull a private memory, a piece of someone's grief that was meant for one pair of eyes. Now the grief was everywhere: a residue that pooled in the ductwork and hummed in the lights.

"You shouldn't be here," said a voice like a broken radio. The scavenger near her—thin, with a jawplate that reflected rain in a shard—had found a BD pod and was holding it like a lit candle. He did not look up when she spoke.

"Neither should you," Judy answered, and her voice fit the curve of the fuselage. It slid between their shoulders like a slick. She plucked a shard of window glass the size of a thumb and listened to the scrape of her own breath.

"You're one of those Nets," the scavenger returned. "Junk doc's blood on your hands."

"Feels better than having yours on someone else's head." Judy smiled, and the smile had teeth. Her fingers brushed the data-socket in the scavenger's neck, where a membrane of synthetic tissue hid the folds of a jack. She did not touch it for long; she did not need to. She only needed the promise of contact. Humans—especially those who'd carved themselves into someone useful—had an old, stupid thing that could be called vanity.

The scavenger looked at her then, really looked. "You got eyes like a ghost," he said. It sounded like an accusation and an invitation.

"Maybe I'm a ghost," Judy said. "Maybe I came back to see what you left behind."

He laughed, a sound like metal clinking. "Then watch me work."

He hooked the BD pod into a scavenger's rig—an apparatus that hummed and reeked of desperation. When the pod opened, it wasn't a memory as she'd imagined—sweet and compact—but a roiling tide: images piled on images, a sound like a chorus testing teeth. The drone took the sound and made of it an echo, a chorus that crawled along the ribs. Faces glitched like broken light; a child's song, a woman's sob, a man's promises all overlapped. Judy felt them like a pressure behind her eyes.

Some of the scavengers had installed little speakers around the drone's interior; someone had the taste to create a gallery of stolen lives. They fed each BD shard into a loop and then sampled the loops—riffing, cackling, and bargaining. A voice sang in a language Judy didn't know. Another memory showed a kiss that had been translated into currency. The air tasted older.

"What are you after?" she asked.

The thin scavenger's shoulders hunched. "The core. The big one. Something the corp put on board. If we crack that—" he gestured with the BD like a talisman.
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