Infinity Upgrade

Chapter 1

Anyone who’s worked in a battery plant for more than five minutes knows one rule: if a fifty-five-gallon drum of industrial-strength acid starts to tip, you don’t try to catch it. You let it fall and take the ding to the paycheck.

Evidently, New Guy never got the memo.

Nolan and I had been working the drum-sealing line for ten years at the Powerworks battery plant.

In that time, we’d seen three marriages fail, fourteen and a half fingers lost, more scar tissue than anyone cared to track, and forty-one New Guys.

Last week’s New Guy had walked off the job after only two shifts.

He’d said he was going to find something safer so his kids could grow up with a father. He wasn’t wrong.

Acid sloshed in open drums as the old line lurched and swayed.

As each drum went by, our job was to add airtight lids.

There’s a rhythm to the belt that tells you when the line’s going to stop a little too hard.

Today’s New Guy hadn’t been with us long enough to find that rhythm yet.

When the line jerked to a stop and the drums pitched, he followed his instincts.

He had quick reflexes—I’ll give him that.

“Don’t!” I yelled, but he was already lunging to keep the nearest drum from falling.

I was six feet away when the barrel toppled, sloshing clear acid all over him.

His scream was high and raw, and cut short as the barrel—still half-full—landed on top of him.

His scream, abruptly silenced, was replaced by the familiar sizzle of acid devouring everything it touched before draining through the heavy floor grates.

I’d seen—and received—plenty of burns through the years, but not like this. Not since corporate upgraded the formula. The old acid gave you scars. This new acid turned your flesh to gelatin within seconds.

“Cal!” Nolan yelled.

I twisted as the second drum fell off the line. I vaulted for a chain hanging down just as a wave of acid hit the floor, sending splatter out in all directions. Some landed on my arm, sizzling through cloth and skin. I hissed through a clenched jaw.

The good news about the new acid was that it evaporated quickly.

But the bad news was that by the time the fumes dissipated, my lungs were on fire.

I fell to the now-dry floor, trying to cough out poison and phlegm.

When I could somewhat breathe again, I dragged myself up and trudged over to New Guy—who was now Dead Guy, I guess.

I rolled the barrel off his body since it seemed wrong to leave him lying there in that way.

His neck was at an odd angle. The drum must’ve hit him just right as it came off the line. One small mercy for him at least.

And of course, that’s when Franklin showed up. Our shift manager.

“You’re holding up the line,” he grumbled before noticing the situation. “Oh,” he said flatly. “Is that the new guy?”

You’d think that would be obvious, since Nolan and I were standing right there in front of him. He also had ten years at Powerworks. If he still couldn’t tell us apart from a guy who’s worked at the company for a whole six hours, it wasn’t a fact worth pointing out.

I nodded.

He sighed in relief. “Good. Less than a month on payroll. No severance.”

Nolan and I had joked more than once about him being a walking miracle: a man born without a heart.

“Good for you,” I said. “Not so good for—” I glanced at Nolan. “What was his name again?”

“Bob? Joe, maybe?” Nolan shrugged.

I mimicked his shrug and casually gestured toward the body. “Right. Not so good for the guy’s family.”

But Franklin was already glassy-eyed, his pupils flicking with pink as he communicated with the AI amp inside his head. When he finally looked at us again, he seemed overly pleased for himself. “Seventy-two minutes behind quota. That’s nothing. Stay a little late, and we’ll catch up easy.”

I shot Nolan a sideways glance. Franklin had a project management amp. It was great at helping him meet the factory’s daily quota… it was also fantastic at making our jobs even more miserable.

“Only another seventy-two minutes, huh,” I said dryly.

He squinted. “How’d you—never mind, you heard me talking to Betty.”

“Betty?” Nolan couldn’t help himself. “You named your amp Betty?”

Franklin bristled. “Betty’s a great name.

There’s been a Betty amp in my family for four generations.

And you should respect her. She keeps this factory producing.

Unlike some people.” He shot us both a disapproving look before turning and almost stepping on a mangled hand.

He squeaked and jumped clear. “After your shift, get that to the morgue,” he said as if he’d just told us to haul garbage to the bins rather than transport a body across town.

Nolan snapped off a mock salute. “Yes, sir. One corpse, logged under ‘quota.’”

After Franklin left, I muttered, “Between the overtime and hauling our buddy here to the morgue, we’ll be lucky to make it to the market before it closes.”

“He’s a small guy—what’s left of him, anyway. I bet we can shave morgue duty down to an hour,” Nolan said, then dipped his chin in my direction. “You’re leaking.”

I glanced at the blood oozing from several holes in my forearm—soon to be new scars in my collection. “It’s nothing. Just a couple of drops hit me.”

Behind us, the line clanked back online as if a man hadn’t just died. Franklin didn’t even give us the time to cover New Guy with a plastic sheet.

“Seventy-two minutes,” Nolan grumbled. “You ever wonder how much better life would be without amps?”

“How much better?” I asked, snapping a lid on the next drum and fastening it with the pneumatic sealer.

“It was a rhetorical question, Cal. But the answer’s ‘a lot.’”

“Preaching to the choir. But try telling that to Franklin and his precious Betty.”

And so we kept sealing barrels for another seventy-two minutes beyond our twelve-hour shift just to satisfy Betty’s algorithm. When the belt finally stopped, I turned to what was left of New Guy.

Flies had swarmed in and were buzzing around the body. Even a mouse had boldly ventured out in the daylight to nibble at his neck.

I hated this next part.

Nolan caught my expression, “You know, we could leave him for the cleanup crew.”

“And you know they won’t touch it,” I said. “Which means tomorrow, we come in to an extra-ripe gooey mess on the floor that will be harder to clean up than glue.”

“Or we could just put him in an empty barrel and have the next New Guy roll him to the morgue.”

I grimaced at him. “C’mon, we’re not complete assholes.”

He sighed. “I know, I know. For the record, I don’t like it when you’re right.”

I smirked. “You must be miserable all the time.” I squatted beside the body that was now little more than a skeleton covered in fleshy goo.

We were supposed to wear full-body rubber suits when working around acids, but the factory was way too hot.

If we wore suits, we’d die from heatstroke halfway through our shift.

The downside to not wearing suits was that when an accident happened, it was a lot messier.

“All right, I’m starving, so let’s get this over with. You want the head or the feet?”

“You know I don’t do feet.” Nolan grabbed the wrists, which were still covered in long rubber gloves. New Guy’s old boots had holes in them from long before today. Those holes now oozed melted flesh that resembled pink tapioca. I tried to find a grip that didn’t make me gag.

“You suck, Nolan,” I muttered.

He laughed.

Nolan had said an hour. It took us ninety minutes to scrape up what was left of New Guy and roll it to the morgue truck to send to the terraforming station west of town.

Nolan had always been the optimist.

By the time we reached the fish market, the sun was already setting over Dreswick.

Pollution gave us the most beautiful sunsets …

as long as you ignored the smell of the fishing docks.

The nightly rain would be here soon, and it would wash away the day’s filth and decay, cutting down the stink for at least a few hours.

It was almost long enough to pretend the city wasn’t rotting away.

The market was packed, shoulder to shoulder, with food vendors, greasy smoke, and hundreds of sweaty bodies. Crowds annoyed me—with people bumping into you every few seconds—but strangely, it was my favorite time of day to come. All the busyness reminded me that Dreswick was still alive.

Nolan and I took our regular seats at Miho’s noodle bar. I dropped a metal chip on the counter. “Evening, Miho.”

The hunchbacked old man didn’t even look away from the grill. “The usual?”

“Yep. Rats-a-Roni, the Dreswick special treat.”

He eyed me then. “I’ve told you a hundred times. I serve chicken. I don’t serve rat. That’s Jenga’s racket.” He cut a well-aimed stink-eye at the rival stall across the aisle.

I hadn’t seen a real chicken in Dreswick in years. “Sure, Miho. And two whiskeys. Make them doubles.”

His brow crept up. “Doubles? Bad day at the plant?”

“We lost another new guy,” Nolan replied. “Kids these days—they’re not getting brighter.”

Miho grunted. “I remember when you two were dumb enough to take slingshots to the drones. You were very lucky you never got caught.” He set down our drinks.

I held up the glass. “One less barrel.”

“One more whiskey,” Nolan countered, finishing our nightly toast.

We clinked the dented metal cups and drank down Miho’s homebrewed motor oil. The first swallow always blurred my vision, and the second kicked my lungs. Tonight, it set off a coughing fit that doubled me over.

“Lungers shouldn’t drink,” Miho snapped, setting steaming bowls of noodles in front of us. “How many times do I have to tell you, you’ll put yourself in an early grave.”

“I can only hope,” I rasped, finishing the drink anyway.

The whiskey burned through the phlegm in my throat, though there was still plenty more in my lungs where that came from.

It was a side effect of working for a company that pumped out toxic pollutants all day every day and was too cheap to install air filters.

Nolan and I ate in silence, like we always did. Since this was our one and only meal of the day, we were always famished. As I shoveled in the noodles and bits of rat meat, I caught sight of a familiar dark-skinned woman walking down the row just beyond ours.

Grandmother.

She’d raised me—well, her mother had raised me, like she had so many orphans left to rot in an alley.

She wasn’t my real grandmother. None of them were.

But she knew me because her journaling amp—a relic from the earliest days of amps—carried the memories of the women before her.

Her illegal, non-networked amp records everything the host experiences, so when it’s passed down to the next host, the new Grandmother has access to generations of knowledge.

We don’t have libraries down here in Dreswick—we’ve got Grandmother.

And this one might be fifteen years my junior, but she still recognizes me as if she’d raised me herself.

I gave her a tilt of my head, and she smiled. The smile was exactly how I remembered it from the Grandmother who raised me.

The moment was shattered when shouting erupted in the square. From the corner of my eye, I caught the brown masks of the resistance, yelling about the inequities between Aberdeen and Dreswick, no doubt. A riot would erupt soon. Riots were as common as food poisoning here.

Surveillance drones were already moving in like bloodthirsty mosquitoes. Enforcers would follow—five minutes at most.

People rushed to leave the market. Miho pulled down a rusted grate that desperately needed lubrication.

“Hey, what about that second drink?” I asked.

“Tomorrow,” Miho said, locking the grate.

Nolan was too busy inhaling his noodles to complain. He slurped the last of his broth and stood. “See you in the morning, Cal.”

I waved him off as I hurriedly slurped the last few bites of my own meal.

It was never a good idea to hang around when enforcers were inbound.

Still chewing my last bite (rat meat is tough), I began weaving through the crowd.

I’d just exited the market when enforcers pulled up in their big gray Autonomous Vehicle, AV for short.

A dozen officers poured out—all wearing black riot gear and armed with stun sticks and blasters.

They didn’t outnumber the rioters, but they didn’t need to—not with their firepower.

With how many bystanders were still in the market, it was going to be a bloody night. Not everyone was going to make it home.

I turned down a side street, keeping my head low.

Streetlights flickered weak yellow light as if even they wanted to give up.

The rain began, big, fat drops that became a downpour, soaking through my clothes.

The acidic water burned like sandpaper along my skin and felt like spears into my fresh wounds, but it scrubbed the day’s grime off me.

Up ahead, something moved in the alley’s shadows. I first thought it was rats—it was always rats.

Then a woman cried out.

I should’ve kept walking. I should’ve minded my own damn business.

But no. Tonight, it was my turn to follow my instincts and get myself killed.