Chapter One - Your Daily Allowance of Unsaid Things

  "The idea of thought-crime is foolhardy. One cannot regulate a person's thoughts, it is simply impossible. You can, by curating a target's media and cultural influences, direct and predispose them to certain outcomes, but a person's thoughts remain their own.

  Their words, however, are not so easily hidden, and while it is true that a person's actions weigh more than their words, that isn't to say that there is no value in what someone says."

  --Advanced Marketing 101, Sixth edition, 2039

  ***

  "Okay, so this is going to be an immense pain in the ass," I said.

  I was on the couch, feet up on the coffee table and one of Lucy's tablets on my lap. The Kittens were being brats, but they were being brats elsewhere after I threatened to hold them by their ankles out of the nearest window until they learned the art of being quiet.

  It was an empty threat, but it still worked.

  Anyway, the tablet was one of Lucy's school tablet things. I was pretty sure it didn't technically belong to her. She'd still gotten it jailbroken before ever bringing it home, and now I was using it.

  Sure, it was oldschool, but there was just something about having a touch-screen in hand that felt oddly nostalgic.

  Like, old-movie nostalgic, I meant. I'd gotten my first augs when I was a kid. I'd never had to handle a smart phone or a tablet like this. Still, I figured it was a bit like smoking or something. Most people nowadays vaped, or sucked on an e-cig, but there was still some cultural nostalgia for smoking those old paper-wrapped cigarettes.

  I was enjoying the tablet for the moment. It kept everything I saw stuck to one, convenient, somewhat-ignorable space.

  I had the news pulled up and was trying to temper my pessimism.

  If I was going to pop over to Quebec in a day or two--and I hadn't yet decided that I would, there was a very real chance that I'd just tell Deus Ex to suck eggs--then I'd want to have a good idea of how things were going in the city.

  So far, the news was... weird?

  I was expecting grim, horrible, awful news. That's what sold. Sensationalized grimness made for good headlines and sold subscriptions faster than anything else. News companies weren't above making shit up for that.

  But usually they did report some degree of truth, and there was usually a decent way of seeing between the lines. Not that I was a big news watcher.

  What I saw online was confusingly... bland?

  There was some stuff about a carnival, some celebrity gossip. The funeral of a samurai was being held later in the week, but there wasn't much about how they died except to say that it was 'while saving others.'

  There were a few pictures taken over a wall, of a landscape covered in craters, but I was expecting lots of aliens, not a fat load of nothing.

  Things didn't look that bad.

  That had me worried.

  "This is all bullshit, right?" I asked. Fortunately, I was mostly alone in the room, so I didn't look insane talking to myself.

  It's certainly biased. Though not necessarily untruthful.

  "Yeah, feels like the news is saying a lot without saying anything." I reached over and scratched at my knee. I was wearing some of those old-school dolphin shorts, not because I particularly liked them, but because Lucy did. Left my legs cold. I was mentally debating spending points on a warm blanket or calling over one of the Kittens to go fetch me one from somewhere. Ah, well, whatever. "So, if Deus wants me to poke my nose in there, that means that shit's worse than New Montreal. But this all looks... fine? Some financial crime, some corps selling things, a few minor political scandals, lots of celebrity drama. There's nothing here that's ringing any alarm bells."

  Which means?

  Myalis didn't just ask things like that. I bet she knew everything already. So that question was more of a leading question type of thing. "It means that either the news doesn't know how bad things are, or they're not reporting it?"

  I looked over the different news companies. A few of them were bigger, national companies, and some were like, big names, the sort that covered news across the continent and internationally, but most of the stories were from smaller agencies and blogs and the like.

  I rubbed at my chin, then backed out of the news and went to a social media aggregator instead. There were some that were divided by subject and there was almost always a 'city' subject for every big city. It wasn't hard to find the one for Quebec.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  And it was all more of the same.

  "Okay, now I know this is bullshit," I said.

  People weren't positive on these. These were places that were designed, specifically, for people to group up on and bitch about stuff. Seeing nothing but gossip and minor complaints was off.

  "City to invest $45M Cr in downtown flood walls ahead of next winter"

  "New study: Quebec retirees moving back sooner than planned"

  "Local hospital reports record wait times despite staffing increase"

  "Broadband in my area sucks. wtf?"

  "Tourism board launches interactive drone tour of Old Québec"

  "Quebec City area - Can't afford a place"

  "Coffee chain opens flagship 'maple lab' in Saint-Roch this week"

  I tabbed over to the same for New Montreal. The difference was subtle, but it was there. New Montreal whined a lot more. There were also posts about Antithesis sightings and samurai spotting stuff. I was a little annoyed when I saw a short video of myself on stage next to Nya from a couple of nights ago.

  I couldn't say anything for certain, but... "There's like a weird censorship thing going on, right?"

  I've noticed as much myself. Not that it was difficult to notice. It's rather obvious at a glance that reporting coming from the city is incorrect, biased, or obscuring certain details. More so than usual, in any case.

  "Yeah," I said. "Wait, more so than usual?"

  Every news and reporting organization self-censors to some degree. This situation is just more obvious than most.

  "Huh, alright. So, if I'm gonna go there, for real, then I need to know what's actually going down. Deus didn't mention too much. Who's in charge over there? What's going on? If the news is still coming out, then the city's probably not on fire, right?"

  Is this the part where you expect me to just give you all of the answers?

  "I'd be nice?" I tried.

  She was suspiciously quiet after that, so I groaned and continued my research. If the news wasn't reliable, then I could at least probably rely on the local samurai. In my experience, they weren't always easy to work with, but they were consistently reliable.

  Sure, there were some that were pains in the ass, but they were on humanity's side, and even those were mostly just eccentric. The only one that I was actively antagonistic with was Deus Ex, and I think she might have tripped and fallen on her head. It probably wasn't a very long fall.

  I chuckled to myself until I started to find info on the samurai that lived in Quebec.

  One was a higher tier sort. Like, a Tier four or five or something. Fleur de Lys. Pretty name. Also, dead. She'd gone out to Mars to help against the planet-wide hive and hasn't survived.

  More recently, there were five samurai reported in and around Quebec, which was a pretty low number, all said. New Montreal had like, five times as many just in the city. Then again, Quebec wasn't quite a mega city, its population was probably five times smaller, so maybe that tracked?

  Anyway, I could see... five active samurai, but at least two of them had announcements out that they'd passed away in the last two weeks.

  What the hell was going on?

  One samurai dying around Mars was... not good, but pretty normal. It was a huge clusterfuck, from what I understood. I hadn't looked into it too deeply, but I think it was a lot closer of a fight than most people realized or wanted to discover.

  Losing two more in a week was wild. We'd probably lost about that many in most big cities, with the global incursion, but it was still a lot.

  "The more I look into this, the more worried I'm getting."

  You might not be the only one who is worried. And if others are, then their response might be to send in someone who can help.

  "Yeah," I agreed. Then I immediately dis-agreed when I realized that I'd just stepped into a trap. "Wait, no, I don't want to be the one sent in to help. I want to stay home and not wear pants."

  Poor little Catherine.

  "Oh fuck off," I muttered.

  No way was I going to head out there on my own, then.

  Which, naturally, begged the question; which one of my friends and acquaintances could I drag into the fire next to me?

  ***