Bad Beat - Chapter 32 - Jitter (Patreon)

The pub was filled with even more old cathode-ray TVs, all of them silently playing loops of spliced footage from some of the oddest commercials Gabriel had ever seen.

A smiling family enthusiastically advertised canned meat before the footage abruptly cut to a man in a business suit trying to sell life insurance while standing knee-deep in a swamp. Another screen showed a cartoon mascot dancing across the screen with visible film grain and warped colors, only for the image to distort into static a moment later before the loop restarted again.

The glow of dozens of CRTs painted the entire bar in shifting shades of blue, green, and pale white. Their low electrical hum blended together into a constant background buzz that set his teeth on edge.

It was practically mesmerizing.

The music itself was some kind of alt-punk-rock-jazz mix that sounded as if somebody had smashed together three entirely incompatible genres and somehow made it work. Distorted guitars screeched in the background while a trumpet blared somewhere beneath the noise, all tied together by a heavy bassline that Gabriel could feel through the floor beneath his boots.

The place smelled of stale beer, cigarette smoke soaked into old wood, cheap cleaning products, and microwaved food. Every now and then, the front door opened, letting in a gust of stifling night air mixed with the distant sounds of traffic and the sound of many people on the street enjoying the warm night.

The three of them managed to find a small table tucked away in one of the corners, placing their drinks onto the eternally sticky surface. The table wobbled slightly whenever someone leaned against it, and its surface was covered in layers upon layers of old band stickers and carved initials.

Nate was practically vibrating in place, while Mia looked like she wanted to take out her gun and shoot him just on principle.

Gabriel mostly just felt out of place.

Not because the pub was dangerous – if anything, it felt oddly relaxed despite the rough-looking clientele – but because everybody else looked like they belonged there. People laughed loudly at neighboring tables, several patrons argued over a game of pool near the back, and someone with bright pink hair was dancing alone near one of the CRTs blaring an electronic remix of an old commercial without a shred of self-consciousness.

Meanwhile, Gabriel sat there with his soda, feeling as if he had accidentally wandered into somebody else’s life.

For a long moment, all of them sipped their drinks – Gabriel his soda, the other two some kind of beer – and stared at each other in awkward silence.

The ice in Gabriel’s drink clinked softly whenever he moved the glass. Condensation rolled down the side and pooled onto the table, disappearing into the already questionable sticky layer coating the surface.

Finally, Gabriel had had enough of it.

He put the chilled, overly iced drink down with a clink and looked at them.

“Everything worked out?” he asked.

Nate nodded, while Mia frowned.

“Indeed, my good Gabe-man!” Nate declared proudly. “Her Gothicness and I worked together with exquisite precision! That company didn’t even know what hit them.”

As he spoke, one of the nearby CRTs flickered violently, briefly bathing all of them in harsh white light before settling back into a grainy commercial for discount furniture.

Gabriel eyed the other man.

“And none of it is going to be led back to us?”

Nate shook his head. “They’re in the middle of transitioning between leaders. The order is going to get lost in the… chaos.”

“Well, at least there is that…” Gabriel said with a sigh.

Nate just sent him a wounded look. “My, my… you don’t seem to have much confidence in me.”

“I don’t,” Gabriel replied flatly.

Nate opened his mouth to answer, but Mia slapped her hand down on the table, her black-painted nails reflecting the flickering CRT lights.

“Enough,” she spoke softly. “You can do this dick-waving contest later.”

A few nearby patrons glanced over at the sound her hand made before immediately deciding they wanted absolutely nothing to do with whatever was happening at their table.

Mia stared at both of them, her eyes promising violence if they continued.

Gabriel wisely kept his mouth shut and took a sip of his drink, while Nate inclined his head.

“If Her Highness wishes it,” he said, a small grin tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Mia scowled, but otherwise ignored the comment. She looked directly at Gabriel.

“The question now is, since we managed to get what you wanted, what’s the next step?”

Gabriel nodded. “Simple enough. We have fun tonight, then I go home and prepare for tomorrow. Then, at the perfect window, we begin the infiltration.”

He eyed the precog.

“If Nate can tell us that…”

Nate scrunched up his face and stared off into the distance for a few moments.

The noise of the pub continued around them, uninterrupted. Somebody laughed loudly near the bar. Glass shattered somewhere in the distance, immediately followed by cheering.

Gabriel had the urge to summon his deck and disrupt the vision, but in the end, he stayed his hand. There would be more opportunities to fuck with the guy.

After a few seconds, Nate shuddered and returned his attention to the table.

“We need to start around three in the afternoon. Any earlier and they’ll notice us as they’re leaving. Any later and Bombshell finds out.”

“Why the hell is Bombshell so interested in the Jackals?” Mia asked, flabbergasted.

Gabriel had to agree.

It sounded rather weird that a superhero famous all over the world would be interested in a small gang in one of the worst districts of Los Angeles Megacity.

Nate wiggled his nose. “It’s hard to see.”

He sent Gabriel an accusing look.

“The future is rather fractured with Gabe-o-Matic over there, so I can’t really tell you anything concrete.”

“Okay. If you can’t tell us anything concrete, how about something vague?” Mia asked with a glare. “Give us at least something…”

Nate frowned and took another gulp of his beer.

“There is something that triggers her,” he finally stated, almost whispering, his eyes looking far away. “I don’t know if it’s something the Jackals do or something we do. But if the timing is not right, she gets triggered, and it gets ugly very fast.”

As he spoke, the atmosphere around the table seemed to dim despite the flickering televisions and the music. Even the neon signs hanging behind the bar suddenly felt colder.

Mia looked at him with worry and a slight trace of disbelief.

“Do we survive?” Gabriel asked.

Nate let out a hollow chuckle.

“More often than not. However, the times when you survive are worse.”

“How so?”

Nate looked directly into Gabriel’s eyes.

“Because, my mysterious friend, you somehow manage to kill Bombshell.”

The words hung over the table heavily.

That was an interesting little piece of information, sending Gabriel’s brain racing.

‘How would I do that?’

Nate, heedless of Gabriel’s inner turmoil, continued.

“I have no idea how you do it, but it pisses off Helix something fierce,” Nate stated over the rim of his half-empty glass. “Elite soldiers out the wazoo, several villains crashing onto your head within minutes – that level of crashing out.”

He took a deep breath.

“That’s the most I ever saw. If I survive Bombshell, I get taken out by a sniper almost instantly.”

He looked rather subdued after that declaration.

Mia looked between the depressed-looking Nate and Gabriel, who was still ruminating on a possible way to neutralize Bombshell, and let out a dry chuckle.

She raised her glass.

“Come on, guys. Stop with the depressive talk. Nobody is going to die. As long as we keep to the perfect time window, nothing is going to happen.”

She saluted them with the glass.

“In and out. Five minutes, tops.”

Gabriel exchanged a look with Nate. Despite their differences, both of them were immediately on the same page after that declaration.

Nate let out a sigh and began using his power once again, while Gabriel sent Mia a glare.

“What?” she asked, taken aback.

“Why did you have to jinx it?”

They returned to the apartment building after a few hours of ‘relaxation’ at the Dead Signal.

The three of them talked about all sorts of things, mostly inconsequential topics – terrible movies, weird people they had met, conspiracy theories Nate absolutely believed in, and an increasingly heated argument about whether pineapple belonged on pizza.

After Nate’s earlier declaration, none of them really felt like returning to the topic of Bombshell.

Plus, they had been sitting in public.

Even talking about it as much as they already had felt dangerous.

By the time they returned, the building had quieted somewhat compared to earlier in the evening.

Gabriel exited the elevator after Mia, the doors closing shut behind them with surprising silence.

Nate had already left them earlier, wandering off in another direction with dramatic finger guns and a salute before disappearing into the night. According to a message from Sparky, he was apparently heading back to his motel.

When Gabriel and Mia entered the atrium earlier, a few Jackals had eyed them from their usual lounging spots around the ground floor. Some sat on a few plastic chairs dragged in from who-knew-where, others leaned against railings smoking while music played from somebody’s phone speaker.

Surprisingly, nobody approached the two of them.

He had expected at least a minor skirmish with some gang member overly full of himself, trying to hit on Mia or puff up his chest at Gabriel.

But nothing happened.

It was very weird.

The two stopped in front of Gabriel’s apartment door and faced each other.

If this were some kind of romantic story or rom-com movie, this would probably be the moment where Gabriel awkwardly attempted to kiss Mia before getting either slapped or miraculously succeeding.

Instead, she broke the silence first.

“Do you need any help?” she asked quietly, glancing down both ends of the corridor.

Gabriel shook his head.

“Don’t worry. I’m just putting together a small drone. If you really got everything on the list, then I should be done around midnight.”

She sent him a long, searching look.

Gabriel didn’t know what she was looking for, feeling oddly self-conscious at the inspection.

Eventually, she nodded.

“Fine. But if you die, I’m killing you…” she muttered before turning around and heading toward her own apartment.

Gabriel watched her walk away, slightly wobbly from the beers she had consumed earlier. The tight jeans certainly provided an excellent view.

A moment later, she fumbled her keys slightly, cursed under her breath, and finally disappeared into her apartment.

As her door closed, Gabriel snorted quietly and opened his own.

He immediately walked into the bedroom and dragged Sparky’s device back into the living room before placing it beside the television.

Then he began reorganizing the room to make space for the pallets of equipment Mia and Nate had ‘acquired.’

Sparky’s projected screen appeared above the device, the young AI, as always, inquisitive.

And sassy.

Always sassy.

[Welcome back, parental unit.]

[Did you consume ludicrous quantities of social lubricants?]

“You know I don’t drink,” Gabriel replied, giving the projection a gimlet-eyed stare as he began summoning the pallets one by one into the middle of the room.

[Social ineptitude noted.]

[Would you like recommendations for party tricks?]

“Har-har…”

[He.He.He.He.]

Ignoring the mouthy AI, Gabriel finally turned his attention toward the loot itself.

The list he had given Mia was mostly made up of components from drone and electronics suppliers. Individually, none of the parts were especially impressive.

Together, however…

The pallets held enough material to build an absurd number of consumer-level drones.

No doubt, there was someone out there wondering who was building industrial quantities of small drones.

Small electric motors packed into foam containers. Onboard control boards stacked in anti-static bags. Hundreds of compact lithium batteries sorted into plastic cases. Tiny cameras, transceivers, transmitters, folding landing gear, GPS modules, gyroscopes, speed controllers, and enough polymer propellers to fill several trash bags.

Wires everywhere.

The smell of fresh plastic, machine oil, cardboard, and electronics slowly filled the apartment as Gabriel unpacked everything.

Because drones were relatively small, most of the individual components were also compact, allowing massive quantities to fit inside each box.

Still, the sheer amount of material spread across the room was almost comical.

The couch was no longer usable.

Half the floor disappeared beneath opened boxes and scattered packaging foam.

One wrong step would probably result in him crushing several thousand dollars’ worth of hardware.

Gabriel slowly looked over the mountain of equipment.

Then he rolled up his sleeves and let out a long sigh.

Time to get to work.

He began with the batteries, the topic already familiar to him by now.

One after another, Gabriel fed them into the deck’s fusion process, carefully combining the compact lithium cells into increasingly denser and more efficient power sources.

By the end, he was left with only three finished super-batteries resting carefully on the table beside him.

They were deceptively small – matte black blocks no larger than those old phone batteries – yet each one contained enough stored energy to make him vaguely nervous about keeping them indoors.

After that came the truly annoying part.

The miscellaneous drone components.

Thankfully, the drone industry was still relatively young in this world, even if it was somewhat ahead of where it had been in his old life at the same point in time. The designs were still modular, understandable, and most importantly, human-readable.

That meant Gabriel could still follow the logic behind them.

One of his old friends back on Earth had gotten really into drones at one point. Back then, Gabriel had listened to endless excited rambling about flight stabilizers, custom firmware, motor torque, battery efficiency, and aerodynamic frame design while pretending to understand it.

Toward the end, though, some of the blueprints and schematics his friend showed him had looked completely alien.

The next hour passed in a blur of repetitive work.

Motors fused together into superior variants.

Circuit boards merged into sleeker and more compact configurations.

Camera modules improved step by step.

The sheer number of tiny parts spread throughout the apartment slowly dwindled as Gabriel worked through the piles with grim determination.

Meanwhile, from the bedroom came the constant mechanical whirring of the 3D printer.

The machine chugged along tirelessly, layer by painstaking layer, constructing the drone chassis Sparky had designed.

They spent most of the time talking.

Most of it consisted of Sparky asking increasingly bizarre questions about human behavior before immediately mocking Gabriel for failing to provide satisfying answers.

Naturally, the moment Gabriel suggested that they play their usual game without internet access, Sparky abruptly declared that she got bored with the game.

“Alright,” he said as he reached for more components. “What do you want to talk about?”

There was a brief pause.

Then Sparky’s projected screen filled with text.

[This unit has a question about the upcoming operation.]

Gabriel continued sorting components while nodding slightly.

“I’m listening…”

[What would the parental unit do if information about Mia’s sister is found?]

[Revenge?]

[Complete eradication of the Electric Jackal gang?]

[Would the parental unit give the information to Mia and leave?]

Gabriel slowed slightly.

“I have no idea, Sparky,” he admitted after a few moments.

He leaned back slightly in his chair, rubbing at one eye before returning to work.

“Even if we find information about her sister, that doesn’t mean it’ll actually be useful.”

Another component vanished into a card, before it was merged with another card, the component reappearing in his hand, which placed it in a pile with practiced motion.

“And even if it’s actionable…” he continued slowly, “well, it’s up to Mia what she wants to do.”

“I promised to help. That’s all.”

The projected screen remained empty for several seconds.

Then, new text abruptly appeared.

[Hah!]

[This unit knew it!]

[Parental unit has no direction in life.]

[Boo.]

[Lame.]

Gabriel stared at the text for a long second before letting out a tired sigh.

And continued working deep into the night.

**

**

A/N: Who would visit Dead Signal? I kinda love the concept I came up with. Though the inspiration were those janky screens from the Back to the Future screens when Marty arrives in the future. Always found them fascinating. :)