Loose Ends

by J M Thomas

  LOOSE ENDS

  Jet and Blade Cybercops 1

  J. M. T H O M A S

  LOOSE ENDS

  COPYRIGHT © 2019 J. M. THOMAS

  FIRST EDITION SEPTEMBER 2019

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 9781690175360

  COVER DESIGN BY STARJEWEL COVERS

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED BY ANY MECHANICAL, PHOTOGRAPHIC, OR ELECTRONIC PROCESS OTHER THAN FOR “FAIR USE” AS DEFINED BY LAW, WITHOUT THE PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. NAMES, CHARACTERS, BUSINESSES, PLACES, EVENTS, LOCALES, AND INCIDENTS ARE EITHER THE PRODUCTS OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR USED IN A FICTITIOUS MANNER. ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL PERSONS, LIVING OR DEAD, OR ACTUAL EVENTS, IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL.

  Acknowledgements

  Gorgeous cover by Tessa Escalera at Starjewel Covers.

  A special thanks to everyone who contributed to getting this book out there. You guys are the best!

  To the readers who gave invaluable feedback: Andrew, Dee, and my lovely critique group, a hundred thank-yous!

  And, as always, to David for your support, love, and patience listening to these hair-brained ideas as they take form.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 – New

  Chapter 2 – Lizards

  Chapter 3 – Illusions

  Chapter 4 – Dissonance

  Chapter 5 – Synthpathy

  Chapter 6 – Mud

  Chapter 7 – Original

  Chapter 8 – Brick

  Chapter 9 – Bondage

  Chapter 10 – People

  Chapter 11 – Places

  Chapter 12 – Dumped

  Chapter 13 – Ghosted

  Chapter 14 – Party

  Chapter 15 – Memory

  Chapter 16 – Lila

  Chapter 17 – Busted

  Chapter 18 – Sorry

  Chapter 19 – Blood

  Chapter 20 – Stay

  Chapter 21 – Story

  Chapter 22 – Revenge

  Chapter 23 – State

  Chapter 24 – Robbers

  Chapter 25 – Offworld

  Chapter 26 – Bright

  Chapter 27 – Return

  Chapter 28 – Dismantling

  Chapter 29 – Loose

  Chapter 30 – Ends

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1 – New

  Tonight, on Cy-Fie, the weather controls on the Martian terraform are…

  “Please tell me this isn’t Sharkicane forty-seven, Jet. I need it to not be Sharkicane forty-seven.”

  “Shut up, Blade.” I shook my head, marvelling at how smoothly it rotated side to side on my command. “You’ve watched forty-six of them; this one can’t possibly be any worse than those.”

  “But I swore them off is the thing. I promised myself after forty-two that I was done putting myself through this torture.” He adjusted his position on the hospital bed with a creak, reaching for the remote.

  I swiped the controller, a grin crossing my brand-spanking-new synthetic features. “Then you watched forty-three, forty-four…”

  “Yes, dammit, and I regret every one of them,” he growled, taking a swing at my shoulder with his feisty new arm and missing just short.

  “Well, you’ll be regretting one more as soon as this show’s over. It’s got like ten minutes left, then I’m laughing at the onrush of stupidity, either with you or at you, depending on whether you’ll shut your damned trap or not.” I stashed the remote away from his grasp.

  Blade rolled his mahogany-brown eyes and pursed his lips. “Ya know, I liked you better as a cyborg. At least then your irritating little smart ass could leave my sight.”

  “Shh, it’s back.” I threw a stained, flat pillow at my partner.

  He caught it by the fluff and chucked it to the floor without even looking at me. Then Blade gestured toward the screen, which depicted an enormous concrete tower blocking the view of a mountainous cluster on some misty planet. “What is this shit?”

  I pushed imaginary glasses up my nose. “It’s one of them newfangled dystopian monoliths. Supposed to make you doubt the systems running the system. This here frogman…”

  “You know you can’t say that, Jet. You can’t fucking keep calling them that.”

  “Ok, fine. This amphibious individual of a bipedal stature is working very hard, and overcoming many obstacles, to hide its egg clutch away from the controls of its evil government. Have some respect, dammit.” It irritated the fire out of him when I waxed eloquent, mostly because that was his deal. Since I wasn’t ever sure quite what my deal was, I made sure to steal his as often as possible.

  “I’m going to die, I swear.” Blade whacked the back of his head against the bed, tapping to the beat of the intense action music rising as the show hit its climax. From my angle, the diffused sunlight from the cloudy day just outside our room’s window created a back-glare on the concave screen.

  “Like that’ll stop you. Tried it once; didn’t even break our stride.” I glanced at Blade, who was trying hard not to let on that he was watching the show. “Now what was her name again?”

  “Esmerelda… uh, at least I think they said that just now.”

  His know-it-all nature betrays him again. “I knew it. I fucking knew it. You like this shit, don’t you?”

  “Look, I have to admit there’s a certain… appeal… alright? The actress is hot.”

  My jaw dropped. “She’s a…”

  “I’m not prejudiced. You can tap what’s-her-name if she ever comes to our system, but you leave me Esmerelda. I’ll show her a real good time. Wine and dine kinda fine.”

  “I’m not listening to you right now. I’m not even. Next you’re going to tell me you wanna tap the forty-seventh sharklady.”

  “Shut up, they’re saying something important!”

  Yeah, right. I was on a roll, and I knew it. “And I’m not? What are you going to pick, the real person in front of you, or the set of pixels on the screen, hmm? Whose words matter?”

  “Ha!” A look of triumph lit up his face as he pointed his index finger at me. “There! You finally copped to it! Twenty years of prejudice, Jet, and you’ve finally shown some growth!”

  I snorted. “What the hell are you saying?”

  “You admitted synths are real people.”

  I had to admit he had me there, even if it was on an unconscious technicality. I wasn’t sure if this new body would show it or not, but seeing as how everything else seemed to be working just as well as it had when I was in my thirties, I had to assume I was turning bright red.

  Ignoring the rest of whatever bullshit was on the screen, I studied the back of my hand for the two hundredth time since waking up in this place. The back of your own hand is something you really should be able to pick out of a lineup.

  It’s not like your ass or the bottom of your feet. I could see why you might forget what those look like, unless you’re one of those weird folks who stare at themselves in a mirror all the time. But your hand shows up in front of your face day after day in all the little tasks and gestures that you ask of it.

  What’s more, if it’s soft, leathery, or scarred, those say something about what that hand’s found to do enough times over that your body had to change to keep up with your human will. Every callus or crease says something about who you are and what you apply your life-force’s might to accomplish.

  I didn’t recognize the back of my own hand anymore, and it left me with a terrible sense of wrongness. It wasn’t just de-aged twenty years like I looked to a casual observer. This skin might’ve been the same pale tone as my old hand, but it wasn’t my skin. This grip strength was more than I’d ever had, thoug
h I’d been beefy since the spinal implants I’d gotten in my teens. My scars were erased; that little mole wasn’t there anymore. This wasn’t me.

  “Get a room already.” Blade pulled a thin, loose-knit comforter up over his hospital clothes, not quite managing to stifle a shiver as he folded it over his bare toffee-brown arms. “If you stare any more longingly at that hand, I’m up and leaving.”

  “Ain’t longing for this thing.” I ran the hand through my hair before sitting bolt upright in bed. “Blade! My hair!”

  “Yeah, and I’m gonna be sore about it for all eternity, so you can just…”

  “They gave me back my thirty-year-old hairline and thickness, but you…”

  Blade turned up his nose. “Yes, I’m still bald. Thank you, whatever bastard who programmed me into their printing machine, I’m still as much of a lucky eight ball as I was before.”

  I chuckled and eyed my partner one more time. “You can be lucky with your chrome dome, and I’ll get lucky with my thick, luscious locks. Together, we’ll be quite the team.”

  “Aha, very funny.” Blade rolled his eyes and pretended to doze, his massive frame sinking into the meagre mattress as he stretched out on it. I took the opportunity to nod off myself, letting my mind wander a minute as sleep hovered on the edges of my periphery.

  Blade had the mightiest jaw I’d ever seen, on account of he never shut up. He looked like one of those towering, burly guys you see in films who are all brawn and no brains, except you’d be wrong. That man was keen, keen and an insufferable nerd, once you got to know him. If he knew something, or even thought he might know something, he was sure to share it with me first chance he got.

  That’s why I didn’t believe whatever figment of my imagination was telling me all the crap lines I was hearing. I had to disbelieve even the words emanating from a mouth that looked like Blade’s, minus the metal piecework I was accustomed to taking up half of his face. I couldn’t trust any of them but had to act like I trusted every damned one. This Blade was like a silent bird sanctuary. Too quiet, and every fiber of my being said it was wrong.

  The door creaked and soft footfalls pattered in increasing intensity just as I’d managed to settle into that downward spiral. When the man’s voice immediately began whispering to Blade, I let out a soft snore to feign that I’d drifted the rest of the way downward.

  Now I could listen and find out what he was really up to, as long as I could keep my breathing deep and even. From the tones wafting my way, I could tell our new interloper was male, young, and possessed a nervous disposition. I wished I could get away with sneaking a peek to get an eye for what the fellow looked like, but that would give away my wakeful state for sure.

  As I tuned into their conversation, my pounding heart threatened to drown out their soft whispers. Why is it pounding? I was laying down in bed with literally no reason I could think of for feeling like I’d caught a full-grown Galbrakian cannonball on my sternum.

  I couldn’t take a deep breath to calm the fuck down, so I just had to do my best to listen around it. This only made it much louder, pounding with an aggressive double-beat that escalated in intensity and frequency until my whole body jumped with its jolting.

  My ears rang. My head felt like it was going to explode. I wanted to push up for air, but I couldn’t lift my arms or legs.

  Cool hands on my chest shocked me out of the escalation of the attack for a few seconds. My eyes flew open, but I’d worked into such a state that I couldn’t focus on the figure I knew had to be somewhere in front of me. The loud hammering of my heart beat in time with the high-pitched beeping noise from the bed system. An alarm was going off, but I couldn’t think of how to turn it off or where it was coming from.

  I tried to focus on something, anything, to grab it and nail it down. I had to find a lifeline I could hold onto, something that wasn’t falling into this hole with me. The blur grew darker, then the crackling on the periphery of my vision heralded the time for the blackness to overcome again.

  There, at the last instant, on the edge of my fading awareness, was Blade. Pain shot through my face, clearing the vignette from the edges of my vision and returning clarity to my eyes. Did he just punch me in the face? Typical.

  “Come on back here, Jet. You ain’t goin’ nowhere. Where are we right now? I need you to tell me where we are.”

  “Hell if I know,” I managed through gasped breaths. My next words, “Some synth factory hospital somewhere,” caught in my throat and couldn’t quite make it past a fit of coughing, but I thought them. That had to count for something.

  Blade’s broad-shouldered form receded from my narrow field of vision to be replaced by an unfamiliar face, some synth nurse. The nurse immediately shined the business end of a bright LED hand torch into my eyes.

  I flinched away from the burn in my retinas. “Ow. Thanks for that, shit.” Something cold pressed against my temple as a faint recurring beep rang out close to my ear.

  The face before mine frowned and his dark eyebrows raised half an inch on his pale, sweating forehead. “I believe you hef hed a glitch,” he said matter-of-factly. “Eye will put it in your chart.”

  “That’s… mighty thoughtful of ya,” I managed, still panting for breath. Lying back down on my stack of pillows, I let my head roll over to where Blade sat on the edge of his own bed, his entire not-inconsequential body tensed and ready to jump into action. “See, what’d I tell you about this synth shit? They give you a bald head, and me a broke one.”

  “Yoor head iss not broken, Officer Jeet.” The man, who wore a white lab coat almost as pale as his skinny arms and two sizes too big, shook his head, displacing an unruly mop of thick, dark curls. He looked like a poodle had up and died on his scalp. “You are not yet in control of your faculties. When you get too excite, you can spiral still. It iss why you are still here, though your body works correctly.”

  “Works correctly?” I thundered my indignance, or at least tried to. My voice squeaked a little at the end, and I threw a glare at Blade for not even attempting to conceal his snicker.

  “Yes. You just hef to connect your mind to it. This takes surrender or release, you see.”

  “I do? I see that?” I rolled my eyes, catching sight of Blade clutching his sides, laughing so hard tears ran down his cheeks.

  Oh, we were going to go round and round on this one.

  Chapter 2 – Lizards

  The nurse slipped out as quietly as he’d come in, still muttering assurances that nothing was wrong with me, that the weird episode thing was because I “got excite.”

  I braced myself for the inevitable. There was no way in hell Blade wasn’t going to call me “Officer Jeet” in the accent the doctor had used, so I might as well prepare for the shade he was undoubtedly preparing to throw in my direction.

  To my surprise, he neither took advantage of the occasion nor seemed interested in doing so in the future. If anything, he sobered immediately after the man left as if he’d been hit in the face with cold water.

  “Jet, what the fuck was that? You freaked me out just then; that ain’t kosher.”

  “Aww, the funny man cares.” With considerable effort, I rolled my eyes. That bizarre episode slowed my muscles’ ability to obey my brain’s commands. “And how the hell should I know what that was?”

  He fell silent, rising from his bed to pace the floor, still wrapped in the rough, thin blanket the hospital provided us for their idea of comfort. I’d known Blade long enough to see he was covering something, and not with the blanket.

  He kept his head down, but his gaze systematically took in every aspect of the room as he strode from one end to the other. As he reached the window, stopping for a second to look out at the city below us, he spun on his heel and stepped to the other side of the room.

  As his even paces thudded in a steady rhythm, I turned my attention upward. The corners of the ceiling measured a slight rectangle—twelve feet by eleven. An idea burst into my head and I took Blade in once more
as his brooding form paced past me.

  He caught the look in my eye, then scratched his upper lip with his index fingertip in acknowledgement. One eye narrowed so slightly it was nearly a twitch. But it wasn’t a twitch. His new, perfect body wouldn’t have a twitch. No, this was a signal.

  His paces sent echoes up through the floor—metallic echoes where there should be concrete. The shape of the room was the entire square footage of a holographic projector set, minus space on the door side and the window side. Those would give six inches each of leeway in the projection, should we peek or attempt to reach outside.

  If we were in a projector room staged to appear like a hospital, watching reruns of Sharkicane Forty-Seven and The Clutch, there was no way our every word wasn’t monitored. Even worse, the fact that someone had come in, ready to watch and observe my actions under stress before the incident occurred, meant we weren’t just monitored with listening devices.

  They’d seen the attack coming on and were ready to subvert it.

  And, as if things just needed to get worse for no reason other than to piss me off, Blade had been part of it. He was out of sorts for sure—not acting like himself. He hadn’t been acting like himself since… I struggled to remember what had happened right before we’d woken up here. I knew it was there in my memory somewhere. I just had to focus long enough and it’d come back to me.

  You’d think this new body wouldn’t have the same memory hiccups the old organic one did. That didn’t sit well with me either. This body was either a flawless synthetic masterpiece or it wasn’t. More signs kept pointing to the fact that we’d been lied to. Not with words, per se, but this room, this scenario, even this body didn’t jive with what I knew to be true and real. Best I could tell, this whole place was an elaborate lie and Blade was doing the lying with the rest of them.

  But if Blade was on the take, why was he drawing my attention to the fact that our surroundings weren’t what we were being told to believe they were? I worked myself into a tizzy of doubts. Every time my mind wanted to settle on one particular line of doubting, I wondered if that was a misdirection. What should I be doubting? What was real? In the faintest distance of memory, I recalled that I’d felt this way before. If only I could put my finger on when.