Home

Astrid stepped through the hatch, swung the heavy door back into place, and spun the wheel to seal it. "Home, sweet, home," she thought as she sighed deeply, leaning against the heavy door catching her breath from the effort.
 
Having recovered, she looked about the room in the beam of her tiny high-output flashlight, found the old marine generator she had salvaged, and flipped it on. With a groan, it turned over and dozens of strings of holiday lights flared into life. The space was oddly tilted, lightly furnished, but cozy and quiet.
 
The quiet is what she liked the most. A year ago, she would come home to her corporate micro-apartment, and her agent would cheerfully chime and provide a run-down of the state of the house: the temperature of the climate control, hours since she was last home, recommended purchases, suggestions for dinner, what was showing on the vid, and the daily update from Rushlight Biomedical’s communications officer. She had been meaning to figure out how to opt-out of the smart-home blitz, but she spent so little time at home she never got around to it.
 
The chryon in her cybereye would show a days’ worth of mini-format verts, and she’d ignore them as she woofed down an MRE she grabbed on her way out the door at work. There were perks for working double-shifts like a steady supply of food and Surge boosters, and she was on the fast-track for promotion, so really all she did at the place was get a few precious hours of sleep. Like her mother, she had thrown herself into work, ignoring the gnawing sense that the corporate life didn’t really fit her and the guilt she had for leaving the streets in the first place.
 
Life back then had been endless, deeply engrossing work. She spent shifts out with the rapid response teams, treating customers in the clinic, stints assisting in surgery, and worked in the synthetics lab assisting with pharmaceuticals runs. When there weren’t shifts open, she’d hang out with Takai down in maintenance talking tech and cyberware, even letting Edgar ramble on about Manga crap for hours just to avoid long stretches of time alone. She had gone out with Iran Solari, one of the suits, to kill whatever free time she had, although like all those eager wanna-be execs he really didn’t do much beyond scheme, fuck, and sleep.
 
The chyron didn’t show any verts these days. Mostly it complained about poor signal, flashing a little icon which if she wanted to select would have been happy to suggest some satellite-based solutions she could purchase. With the generator on, her home router was booting so it would get some limited data service soon anyhow.
 
Having grown up in a dozen different squats not too different than this one, she moved easily across the room, set down her bags, unholstered her pistol to place it on it’s shelf, and tossed some instant coffee into the little microwave mounted to what was once a little shipboard galley. Nothing matters more to a Netrunner than physical security, so her mother always liked her bolt-holes to be a sanctum, safe from the dangerous world just outside. A century ago, this had been a sea-going fishing vessel, probably a trawler, but only the front half was accessible so it was hard to know for sure. Half of it was buried in the soggy muck of the Duwamish mire.
 
Home for Astrid had always been more of a flurry of comfortable sensations than a place anyhow. She remembered the warm air blowing off racks of servers, the acrid whiff of ozone and soldering flux, the soft humming of security turrets trained on the door, and her mother’s scent that permeated the cushion on the interface chair from countless hours of life plugged into her cyberdeck. Astrid would spend her time attending VR classes, reading, or out on the streets with the neighborhood kids trying to keep them from getting themselves killed. As long as she was there when mom jacked out, that’s all that really mattered.
 
Of course, all of it was gone. That bitch Kletskova saw to that. Metro PD had already planned to confiscate all the gear when they realized her mom—no doubt lying dead on the floor—had tens of thousands of eddies worth of illegal hacking gear. Kara quoted some long-forgotten regulatory statute claiming Rushlight had the rights to it all to pay for the unreimbursed response, and had the place cleaned out with a half-hour. At least with Metro PD, Astrid might have been able to take a few personal items from the impound instead of them being liquidated immediately. "Probably made Tara in accounting happy for a month, the…"
 
The otherwise blank chryon flared up with a bio-monitor warning interrupting her internal tirade. Her pulse and bp had risen suddenly, and the agent wanted to ask if everything was ok. Astrid pushed the anger back down, taking a few deep breaths and calming herself. At this point, it might as well be ancient history, but damn it still hurt like hell.
 
When she had arrived that night, the place was nearly empty. The clean-up crew had least done a decent job of getting all the biologicals out, so she didn’t have to clean it up herself. Lying among the piles of junk that they didn’t deem worth resale, she had found a single old-school photograph hardprint of her mother. That’s all she had left, other than a lot of damn questions. That night she decided she was done with Rushlight and the whole damn rat-race. Iran was pissed no doubt, but she’d always had the nagging feeling that he hadn’t fit either.
 
D-town had not been her childhood home, but it was surprising familiar. She even ran into a few of the old street kids who through some weird twist of fate also ended up in the shadow of the highway. Mom had prepaid the rent on the place for a year, but time was running out and soon Astrid would have to put her mourning on hold to find a paying gig…