I don't remember what started the war. All I remember is one day, a loaf of bread cost less than 10 GSaC and the next it cost over 50. I was too young to grasp what it meant but one day we were at peace, then suddenly we weren't. I never heard of one big thing that boiled over and exploded into conflict. No one got assassinated. No borders were crossed in force. It was just an event of the day, like storm clouds on the horizon or a cold snap in the wind. The war just became another constant of life and faded into the background in no time at all.

  I stared up at the hydroponics towers hoping for something new, but the skyscraper-sized banner ads flicked between their usual topics. The cycles started with several images of foreign soldiers wearing the green fatigues of AISF doing heinous things paired with text I'd never bothered to read. Then after a few dozen products and services, the loops closed with workers in grey coveralls looking forcefully happy with their jobs in addition to pages of corporate vacancies. I didn't need to read the lists to know where all those jobs would be. The Stacks always needed farmers.

  If my parents and teachers had their way I'd already be a stack grower, just another glassy-eyed zombie shambling under UV bulbs. Maybe if I wasn't allergic to the happy pills that came with basic provision, I would have fit the mold and been just fine with my lot in life but that wasn't me. I didn't want to fit the mold. I didn't want to end up like my parents and spend my entire life working in hydroponics doing pointless jobs so menial and repetitive that any drugged-up idiot could do them with their eyes closed.

  I'd turned fifteen at the start of spring just last month, and now that I was done with all five years of minimal education, everyone seemed to agree that I had my whole life ahead of me… so long as that life was either spent working the Stacks, or getting an agricultural trade so I could maintain the Stacks, or going to a factory to make parts for the Stacks. I'd rather throw myself from the Stacks than work them for the next seventy years— at least then I'd get to be outside and feel the smog-laden wind in the seconds before the end.

  The banners finished their cycle of ads and started anew; even the screens were stuck in the same old patterns, repeating an endless loop until someone made something new for them. Nothing ever changed here. The whole city was filled with farmers who couldn't even rotate the produce they grew unless some bureaucrat in his ivory tower changed the production quotas. Every day was the same, and every single day in this grey city was spent waiting for food to grow.

  I took a bite of the not-quite-ripe onion I'd snatched on my way out the door. Why John insisted we eat them instead of a better tasting, more nutritious fruit was beyond me. Most of his choices were. The 'calorically-adequate' produce of the Stacks was the only thing I ever seemed to eat growing up— just another dull constant in my stagnant life.

  I walked nowhere in particular, hoping for a change and knowing I'd be disappointed. I wished I had real food, but real food was too expensive. If I stayed in the Stacks, I'd only get to eat the least of what I grew since the best was always shipped off-world for sale. I still had a growing week (ten whole days) to decide what I wanted to do for the next seventy years.

  How was anyone supposed to know what they wanted to do for the rest of their life by the time they were fifteen?

  "One day, I'll get off this rock." I said aloud.

  Fat chance of that, I was more likely to be psychic. I wasn't born into money which meant I had to settle for the bottom rung of society and live off the scraps. That's what they really meant when they said to be grateful for what you had. My mom liked to use all sorts of stupid expressions like that when she was stone on happy pills, but she never thought about what they actually meant. At least when she was high, she wasn't whining and wheedling and crying like she did the rest of time. And John… I tried not to remember what the bastard who called me his son was like when he wasn't drunk.

  Shift change had caught up to me, the empty city streets flooded with rush-hour commuters. The multi-layered walkways of Primgrofaine were suddenly packed and everyone had somewhere to be except for me. The mag rails zoomed by underfoot and overhead while I loitered among those who couldn't afford rail passes, a ghost in the crowd. Most wore the standard grey coveralls of the Urban Cultivation of Horticulture Solutions Corporation; after all, the UCHS owned the Stacks and damn near everything else in this miserable grey city. If there was a single job on the entire planet that wasn't for the Corporation I'd never heard of it, and the Corporation certainly wasn't advertising for rival corporate arcologies.

  Through the press of bodies, I saw something out of place. He was a thin man in a black three-piece suit with an overarched back walking fast and talking faster into a glossy handheld that reflected black light. I almost missed the augmented attendant in an equally sharp grey suit who kept pace behind him in the throng of humanity, but something glossy and metallic covering one of their hands caught the neon light from a banner ad.

  I followed after them pushing against the flood of my fellow man. The bionics alone had to be worth more than I would see in a lifetime of working the Stacks, no matter what job I got. Whoever the thin man was, his stature put him above someone who could afford them. He wasn't just another corporate pawn, another one of the million farmers. He was a company man.

  If I could work for him I might be able to get off this shitehole of a planet— or at least make enough money to eat some real bloody food every now and again. I tailed the atypical pair for most of the morning, catching snippets of his one-sided conversations. There was something about tariffs and taxes and trade, which all went over my head, but there was another thing he kept repeating.

  "…We need more than malnourished farmhands. We need soldiers…" That caught my attention.

  Whoever this thin man was, he was a somebody and where he walked people noticed. He was a tree of importance amidst the uniform fields of monotonous no ones. As he went from building to building, I waited outside, lurking with the dregs of humanity. He never stayed in any of them for too long. After the third repetition, I noticed that his attendant had acquired a rigid case. After several more visits, the attendant walked out with a second case in her other hand, and they both headed toward the magway.

  I jumped the ticket regulator (making sure to keep my CIN-chipped left hand clear of the transaction sensor rather than pay the 15 GSaC for a seat) and crammed into the rail car after the thin man. I tried not to betray my interest in the pair while getting my first good look at them up close. Everything about them was a world apart from me, from their well-pressed suits to their polished black shoes and even the handheld the thin man constantly spoke into. They had more than I ever could if I didn't get out of the Stacks. The only thing I shared with the slender man were the dark bags under both of our eyes. In all other regards, I could have been comparing rhubarb to carrots.

  The attendant sitting beside him adopted a vacant stare that seemed fixed at some point in the distance only she could see. Now that she was sitting nearby I could tell she was definitely a girl— more of a young woman really. Despite her genderless clothing her face was softly feminine. Her cybernetics showed on the outer side of her left hand and up the back of her neck. The metal stylized to look like a flat set of exoskeletal bones. If the movies I'd snuck into were to be believed, it was probably some kind of feedback or data transfer piece of tech. The tech on her head was more subtle and complex, anything that close to the brain had to be, if the movies were true. It looked like a bundle of wires running over and plugging into her spine. The bundle got thinner the further up I looked until the remaining wires splayed apart like veins in a leaf and lodged into her skull.

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  As she turned to exchange words with her counterpart, I saw a blocky chunk of metal poke up from her loose collar. As her pixie-cut black hair moved under the light, I caught more flashes of her cybernetics while her gaze shifted my way. Her lightly-tanned skin was only a shade darker than my own and her rich brown eyes could have been those of any other girl on planet.

  I was lost in those eyes for a few seconds before she gave a small smile from full lips and waved at me. The shifting light caught on the otherwise unseen ridges decorating the plates of her hand. I waved back dumbly before I could stop to think.

  I'd never even talked to a girl my own age before, let alone a grown company woman. What was I supposed to do now? She was so far out of my league I wanted to curl in on myself and disappear as her eyes panned over me. She followed my gaze, looked at her augmented hand then patted the seat next to her. Since dying on the spot wasn't an option, I crossed the train and sat beside her awkwardly.

  Compared to the two of them in their suits I was nothing but a dirty, malnourished street rat. Being this close to her made me conscious of everything I didn't like about myself, like my slim build aside from bloated pockets of baby fat I couldn't seem to get rid of. My greasy hair was longer than hers, and I could never keep it clean for more than a day. I could smell my breath and regretted that the only thing I'd ate today was an onion. I wanted to move further away from her and hope she had an extremely weak sense of smell, but I'd already sat down and the way she was looking at me held me prisoner.

  "I've seen you following us all day. Normally people aren't so curious about my augments. Do you like what you see?" Her voice had a rich, husky tone that made me think of a singer's paired with an air of command. She was definitely used to people listening to her and from her first word, I was enthralled.

  She held up her hand, letting the chrome dazzle me. I wasn't an expert, but even I could tell the craftsmanship was exceptional. Every thin plate mimicked the underlying bones of her hand and there was a myriad of engravings that mimicked the natural shapes found in plants, each one flowing naturally from one plate to the next. I'd never seen something so high-tech and so ornately practical, the art bringing the entire piece together more so than the mass of circuitry and electronics underneath. It was beautiful. My eyes worked themselves up her arm, taking in the not-so-subtle curves of her well-fed body in profile, ending on her face.

  She was beautiful.

  "I-It's amazing," I stammered, "where did you get it?"

  "My department provided it to optimize my workflow some time back. Now that I've had it for several years, I can't imagine living without it. I wish everyone could upgrade."

  "Me too."

  "Is that so…" She searched my face as she spoke. "It would seem we're kindred spirits then, a rare delight. Most people have become quite technophobic this past decade. The Synthetic Revolution hardly did any favors for the transhumanist crowd. Small-minded thinking like that will make recapturing the golden age an impossible dream, but I digress. How old are you, young man?"

  "Fifteen. I actually wanted to ask your friend about his work once he finished his call. That's why I was following you today. Do you know if his division is hiring? I haven't settled on what I want to do for a career yet."

  "So that's it then… Travis's department is actually being downsized."

  "Oh, that's too bad." I said deflated.

  The electric hum of our traincar filled the air between us. I looked for anything I could say that would let me keep talking to this woman and failed. I opened my mouth dumbly but no words came out. She raised an eyebrow at me, then seized the initiative— saving me from my own social ineptitude.

  "Aren't you going to ask me?" She said with a smile that would have struck me dumb if I wasn't already.

  "Ask you about what?"

  "Any number of things would be fine I suppose. I find young men are often so full of questions. But if you're just going to sit there like a daft mute, it would seem I've read you wrong." Her voice shifted to a faintly jaded tone. I knew what was coming, but I forced the question regardless.

  "Do you have a boyfriend?" I blurted out.

  For a second, she didn't react. The first hints of dread sank into my limbs while I waited for her to reject me. How could she not? Compared to her I was nothing, just another no one with nothing headed nowhere. Her lips curled, and I thought she was about to burst out laughing at me. That would be a first, yet no less than I deserved for chasing someone so far out of my league. A moment more and her smile flattened, though it didn't entirely disappear.

  "By the strictest definitions, no. I am single but you could say I'm married to my work, and it doesn't leave me much time for romance— much time for anything like a personal life, really. I'm a victim of my own competence." She turned to gaze longingly out the window as we neared a rail junction. "These little escapades of mine every harvest moon are the closest thing to a day off I can manage."

  "I never realized company life was so busy." I offered, hoping she'd keep talking.

  "For most, it isn't. My own competence is to blame. There's simply no one else I can trust my work to. I foolishly made myself indispensable early in my career and now I'm reaping what I've sown."

  "That sounds lonely. It must be difficult." I said sympathetically. "Maybe you could use an understudy or an aide?"

  Her lush lips curled again. I hoped she was about to laugh at my naive suggestion instead of laughing at me.

  "Are you volunteering your services, young man?" She asked without turning her gaze from the window.

  "I'm not sure I'd be any good as a secretary, but I'd do it if I could work with you."

  The hint of a smile she was wearing vanished instantly, and she stared at me intently. The hard shift had me expecting a slap in the face and silently praying she wouldn't use her metal hand when she did.

  "What about for me? Not as a secretary but as a soldier? Or perhaps a spy? A bodyguard? An assassin? At the risk of sounding banal, would you be willing to die for me?"

  Our traincar was slowing down and her counterpart, the thin man, was already standing. This sounded like something straight out of a movie but I tried to take her seriously. Being a bodyguard might be nice if I could work with her or people like her. I was physically built more like a spy with my plain features and unassuming stature. If I slapped on some coveralls, I could have been any of the faceless millions working in the city. I didn't think I could be an assassin, but it was better than being a farmer. All of them sounded like they'd get me out of the Stacks at least. If I had to work for her, then maybe one day I could work with her. Maybe one day, I could be her equal.

  "I'm not really sure… Either way, with you or under you, I'd do my best." I said resolutely.

  Our car jerked to a halt in a hard braking action. Her counterpart held an overhead bar to steady himself but she was made of steel and never swayed. Her eyes pierced into me, the force of her scrutiny held me firm, like a rodent pinned for dissection. Before she'd been searching my face but now it felt like she was looking into my brain or maybe something deeper still.

  "I quite think you would." She concluded. "I'll have someone send you an email within the week. Impress me, and maybe one day you will be under me. What was your name young man?"

  "Reginald Reid, Ma'am."

  "A good name, any relation to Patrick Reid? No, you wouldn't be. Shame, he was an excellent soldier." She effortlessly took up her cases, the metal floor buckling under her polished shoes as she stood.

  "Can I get your name? Miss…" She briefly smiled like there was something dreadfully funny about my question.

  "Mallory Brennan, and yes I'm that Mallory."

  She gave me a playful wink as if that should mean something to me before departing. The doors slid shut and the traincar was moving eastbound on its circuit, leaving me to wonder just who that Mallory Brennan was.