Silver Hands

By Daphne Moore and D. Fischer

What will you do to protect those you love?

Sage lived like a pampered doll; her destiny an arranged marriage to a suitable mate to please her family and preserve their business and position in society.

In a single life-shattering night, she accepted exile and sacrificed her hands to save her family from ruin.

Cast out in the depths of Lowtown, she found the will to survive.

Can she forge a bridge to reach for the love she was forced to abandon?

Silver Hands is a fairy tale retelling of The Handless Maiden, set in a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vaughn Publishing LLC
• Release date: Jun 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781951512156

Book preview

1

An upcoming amputation put everyone’s nerves on edge.

Within the airy meeting room, the walls and flooring were all done in light wood that shimmered slightly with gloss. Viny plants trailed from their pots near the ceiling, and full-spectrum lights shone from above them. The plants and people needed the lights since the space was situated at the heart of the family quarters of Rayne tower. There were no windows here – no natural lighting. Without the special lighting, people and plants would wither and die over time.

Like the plants needed light, Sage needed something more than the careful existence she was offered, or she, too, would wither away.

The wall screen glowed, waiting for a presentation to begin. Plush but elegant chairs stood carefully arranged through the rest of the meticulously designed space.

In metered defiance, Sage slouched just a hair in one of these chairs while her sister, Mallory, sat with perfect posture in one of the others. Sage bowed her head, enduring her parents’ lecture. Their carefully considered but chastising words flowed into her ears, as inevitable as the spring floods driving into the ruins of Old Houston. Inwardly, she sighed. She was used to it. They’d gone through this argument so many times in the past few years, always reaching the same conclusion. Sage often wondered why they felt the need for these meetings when the result didn’t vary.

Mr. Abe brought another internal incursion to our attention. The chill in Mama’s even voice indicated real irritation. She paced on the other side of the long wooden table. "His analysis indicates that it was you, Sage. Would you be so kind as to explain why you continue this behavior?"

Normally, Sage’s mother would not have been so edgy, but a full quorum had been called to witness a punishment for corporate theft. It was the first public punishment in a decade and one they could not skip. Even if the event would be barbaric and hideous, the Rayne family had to function within the corporate code and obey the Council’s decisions.

Sage knew she had left no evidence of her own runs against other networks, proving she had the needed skill to take the credit from other companies if Rayne International needed it. Mr. Abe, the head of Lattice security, had manufactured that evidence after receiving her message. But she couldn’t win this argument. More so because she was a terrible liar and Papa was exceptionally good at detecting any and all lies.

Sage smoothed the rich fabric of her wide trousers. The security on the research division is substandard. I was checking it, and I gave Mr. Abe a list of the holes I found. Since he hadn’t found them himself. She couldn’t resist muttering that last even though she knew it wouldn’t help her argument. Straightening her shoulders, she peered up at her parents. I think I’d do better in Security. Remember what happened when we were hacked?

Papa’s frown blackened. It sat oddly on his round, cheerful face. He covered his reader with a large hand, staring straight at Sage. My girl, have you forgotten what happened when you went up against corporate security in the Lattice? How long it took you to recover use of your arm? His finger tapped against the reader’s screen. Mr. Abe took on the job after all that and tightened up the security to prevent another raid on our finances.

I remember I got our desperately needed credit back from the company that raided us. That comment didn’t make it to her lips. She worked part-time for Accounting, and she was also aware of the fact that finances continued to be precarious. The release of the new uplink chips had been delayed again due to issues with supply of materials, specifically the growth media needed to implant the uplinks correctly.

Sage spent the rest of her time in Design, working on the next generation design for the uplink. While the version Rayne offered was groundbreaking work, she had found– and gotten approved– some tweaks in the design to make the uplinks integrate into the user’s nervous system even more smoothly.

Rayne International had altered the original design from Sage’s parents for safety reasons, but Sage wanted to continue her parents’ work. She hoped to someday be given access to the schematics for the prototype, which she and Mallory had in their brains.

No exterior agency has gotten through the defenses. Security is too risky for a family member to work in. Your time would be better spent working in your assigned divisions, preferably in accounting, Mama finished the old argument. A tiny but unreadable smile curved her lips, and Sage knew that the next thing her mother was going to say would rattle her. Or attracting a good husband to the company. You’re a Rayne; we’ve had offers for Mallory and you already even if you’re not ‘out’ yet.

Blindsided, Sage gaped at her. Offers? To be married? She’d only just turned eighteen! What about their brother Gideon? He was twenty-four and still not engaged!

Her sister Mallory, ash blonde and perfectly groomed, looked up from her reader in the corner chair. She met Sage’s stunned glance with a smile full of dry amusement and then turned her attention to their parents. From whom? I thought it went against custom to offer before we turn twenty.

She had deflected attention from Sage to her effortlessly. Sage breathed a silent Thank you and exited the room as Mama called a suitor’s dossier up on the wall screen for Mallory to peruse. Of the two of them, everyone thought that Mallory would make a better wife.

Mama and Papa knew she had left, but Mallory had given everyone an opportunity to distract themselves from the rising tension. She could almost follow the logic– let Sage get used to the idea to avoid the protests pouring out uncensored.

She hurried to her room, down halls decorated with Mama’s delicate touch. The public areas of Rayne Tower spoke of Rayne’s power: white marble floors, expensive carpet the shade of champagne, and gold gilding everywhere. These were all signs of wealth and success. Here, where the family lived, the décor was simple, plain, light gray walls and iron-colored floors, comfortable but bland furnishings, and open spaces where possible. Here, they could wear casual clothing rather than the fashionable and expensive outfits required for public view.

Sometimes, Sage wished they could live like that all the time, but then their competitors would assume Rayne International was having cash-flow problems and attack their holdings, either in the Lattice – the biotechnological network – or in the physical world. Any deviation from expectations attracted assaults, and a second-tier company like Rayne couldn’t take multiple strikes in a short time. They’d fall like the countries of the past – the ones Mallory liked to read about. She enjoyed history, unlike Sage, who embraced the future.

Safely in her room, Sage sat on her bed and exhaled a deep sigh. The cool color scheme of her room, all blues and greens shining in the natural light from one of the few windows in Rayne tower, helped calm her.

The fact her parents had finally yielded to her pleading and let her have the room, despite the danger of the window, proved they loved her as much as the new glass in the window, certified safe against guided missiles.

It gave her a view of sun and sky and bay, what she could see unobscured by the other corporate towers rising to kiss the clouds, and the ramshackle man-made islands of settlements that huddled at the towers’ bases. The settlements interconnected with bridges and boats, forming Lowtown, the population pool where agricultural and low-skill workers came from. Rayne International’s tower was close enough to the edge of the bay that only a few towers stood nearby. It wasn’t close to the center of the city where the huge towers of first-tier companies blotted out the sky.

Further north, the mounds where the ruins of old Houston poked up out of the rice paddies and marshes, and the great walls, built to keep the Infected out, were at the edges of the fields that fed the city.

She wasn’t entirely sure if the Infected were even still a threat; it was a convenient fear to keep Lowtowners focused away from their living conditions.

A variant of the rabies virus dubbed RY7 had ravaged the planet. Most of those infected died from nerve degeneration, but those who survived suffered brain damage, often in the impulse control centers. They became creatures of appetite and intelligence, and because of that, they were seen as a threat and driven from populated areas.

No one was sure how the infection began.

There was a vaccine, but it was not given out in the wilds. Children born from Infected parents were infected themselves. It made travel on land terribly dangerous.

Sage had been working on ideas to improve the conditions of the Infected, but she hadn’t been able to get any funding. Mallory had promised that she’d help put together the grant request as soon as she finished up the project she was working on, but time was running out.

She curled her fingers around the edge of her mattress. If they married, there would no longer be options of aiding those in need. Sage didn’t want to leave her family. She had no desire to be married yet. But if Mama hadn’t turned down the offers unread, that meant that the family needed to consider options. Marriages were a tried and true capital generating strategy.

Sometimes, Sage wondered if they hoped it would stop her from agitating to work security by giving her a child to bring up. Mama had once mentioned that having children caused her to cut way back at her job in Rayne International until they were old enough to manage without immediate supervision for a few hours.

Mallory must have known that other options needed to be considered. Otherwise, she would have reacted more. How had she found out before Sage?

Across the room, the formal white robes for the Council meeting, already laid out for her to wear, sent a chill over Sage’s skin. She didn’t want to think about any of this– punishment or marriage.

She closed her eyes, switching to perception through her uplink. The device in her brain accessed the Lattice at the speed of thought, the virtual world rising up around her. It was an environment of data flow and facts that made sense to Sage in a way the physical world often didn’t.

The Lattice held all the digitally stored information in the world. Unlimited storage and processing power were enabled by the nanite population that existed in every living cell of every creature on Earth, largest to smallest. Some small paranoid sites used physical storage made from unliving materials to keep it isolated from the Lattice, but the lack of memory volume made that rare.

Sage and her sister had the fastest uplinks in existence; they’d been the human test subjects for Rayne’s new product. Sage had been adopted because of it, keeping all the revenues within the family from the patent. Normally, human test subjects were given a percentage of gross profits in exchange for the risk. Didn’t need to do that for family.

Some said she came from lesser blood. Her parents, the Liús, had been the designers of her uplink, but when they died saving Papa from an assassination attempt, they had left Sage an orphaned toddler. The Raynes adopted her.

Rayne had made successor models slower to preserve the family’s advantage. Sage accepted that, but certain portions of the Rayne family did not. Lab rat, her Aunt Emma called her. Her aunt would never say that to Mallory – or about her – though Sage’s sister had the same version of the uplink implanted in her brain.

As a tiny parakeet, her imago, the form her consciousness took in the Lattice, fluttered within the blazing tunnels of Rayne’s firewalls. Sage smiled as Smoke, her friend, materialized close by. The AI enveloped her puny feathered body as it sensed her emotions.

Rumor had it that wild AIs roamed the Lattice, and Smoke confirmed those rumors as did Star, who was Mallory’s friend. Shy and difficult to communicate with on a verbal level, Smoke and she made do with images and emotions. Sage thought the problem was that the AI’s thoughts were just too fast for her to parse whereas emotions worked differently. She’d often been curious how Smoke perceived the emotions, too; perhaps as electrical patterns in Sage’s brain? The idea fascinated her.

As they traveled through the Lattice together, Sage had discovered that within her friend's embrace, she was – by all intents and purposes—invisible. A shadow. One with the spaces between all the bright, living, broadcasting life lights of the Lattice. She was completely unnoticed...and unnoticeable. It made hacking runs, among other interests, that much more attractive; though she’d been careful after the first one.

Today, she just wanted to fly and roam the Lattice. She needed to be away from all of the physical things in the world she didn’t want to do. Maybe Felix would be out in the fields. She hadn’t seen her friend in a week, and he wouldn’t come into New Houston without her.

She flew through Rayne’s firewall and out into the city proper. The geography she perceived generally matched the real world’s, open space this high in the air and water moving far below. She headed for the rolling hills beyond the shoreline. Her wings blurred as she sped past the other firewalls of House towers, soaring over Lowtown full of the flickering glow of the people who lived there.

Later, she might poke around in the towers to find interesting information. Browsing through their departments was like visiting the library Mallory had discovered when they went to DeeCee to visit their distant cousins. Mallory had fallen in love with the books’ physicality. Sage enjoyed the analogy though physical data storage seemed woefully bulky. She didn’t understand why Mallory found the weight and feel of paper pleasant.

With the unlimited storage and processing power enabled by the nanites, Sage didn’t see the point of physical storage, but she humored her sister anyway. Felix had told her he knew someone who traded in physical books, and an idea sparked within her. Mallory’s birthday was coming soon, another reason to try to find him.

Not that she needed an incentive. He was fun to be with.

2

As she flew past the sketched-in outlines of rice paddies and then fields of grain and vegetables, full of constellations of data that indicated laborers in the physical world, she spotted the waveform that was Felix’s imago. It shifted area and form constantly, an interesting take on chaos theory. He waited near AquaDLite’s firewalls.