Par and Jun, scratchpad

Jun opened her eyes, a sliver of moonlight cutting through the gloom of the gently swaying cabin. For a brief moment she had expected to be in her old house, that little ten by fifteen space she and Par called home for so many years; then she remembered.

She groaned and sat up, hit her head on the low ceiling, spat out a quick expletive in Catalan, and thumped back on the bed. "Par?" she asked, her voice hoarse, dry throat and parched lips. "You... damnit."

No response, from anyone or anything, just the swaying of the boat and the sound of the sea on the sides. Gingerly, gently, she rolled out of bed, slipped up the stairs, and emerged in the cloudy night air. The chill breeze raised goosebumps on her skin, and she became suddenly very aware that she was all-but nude, wearing only the briefs and bra she had on when they stole the boat the night before. Shivering, she went back down below deck, ransacked the drawers beneath and above the bed, and came back up in a pair of sweatpants and a lime-green shirt, serendipitously only one size bigger than her svelt frame.

She leaned out on the rail of the boat and watched the night sky for long enough that she forgot why she had gotten up in the first place, just the sea, the stars, the moon, the boat, herself, and Par, standing beside her, holding a cup of water, his beard jutting out at a funny angle, his mirror-chrome eyes smudged with skin oil and grime.

Jun swore, jumped back, and nearly fell over the rail.

Par nearly dropped the cup in laughter.

"You sunuvabitch piece of shit, Paraskevas!"

"Water?"

Jun took the offered cup, emptied it in one long draw, and glared at Par. "How much longer?"









"Not really sure," Par replied, staring up at the moon. "GPS signal's really weak out here. We're still going the right way, but I can't nail down our exact position."

Jun sighed and leaned out over the rail again. "You think we'll ever see home again?"

Par was already walking back down below deck. "Home's gone, Junjie. Burnt down. Not like it was much of a home to begin with."

Jun watched him walk away. The bitter retort died in her throat; he was right. Their home had been a storage unit in a pre-gentrification shanty town on a wharf, a ten by fifteen box that mostly existed for them to keep their few possessions, their clothes, and themselves when they weren't working or doing what they could to try and enjoy life. Now everything except themselves and the essentials they could carry when the raid happened was gone, probably torched by the Hong Vong for being unclean. Par had managed to gather up his deck, she had scooped up the box of chips she had been working on. That was it.

She sighed. A demented Greek cyberdeck engineer cyborg, a Chinese-Spanish cyberchip programmer, a deck, some chips. And a boat.

At least they had the boat. It had belonged to some nutjob AI programmer called Cael, who always said he had a decommissioned oil rig somewhere off the coast he called home. But he would sail in every couple weeks to get supplies and offload a box of chips for Jun to use as raw media in exchange for very exactly-described code written to harddisk. Barter system.

And now that was their destination, or at least that was the theory: somewhere, out there, was the oil rig, and at least a place to call home for a little while. Par had found Cael's security protocols, cracked them, convinced the boat they were friends, and then convinced it to take them home.