Loose Ends

by J M Thomas

  All I could do was test it all, from the ground up. Push all the buttons, and see which lights up. “Flying lizards.” I muttered, and Blade looked at me like I’d grown a second head.

  “What are you on about now?”

  One side of my mouth twitched its path upward. Gotcha. “It’s an old thought experiment from some dude who smoked something he shouldn’t have. If the universe is really being run by flying lizards who just want us to think things work this way, they can decide to create the world however they like, and project any image of themselves on us they want, and we’d never know any better.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing! It’s an absurdist argument. If we can’t trust our five senses, our metas, our own minds, our own bodies… the cosmos might as well be run by flying lizards.

  “You need more oxygen.”

  “No, man, I’m serious. Flying lizards is the key. Whatever bullshit everything out there is throwing at you, all you have is your trust and where you choose to place it. Pick the right object for your trust, and it’ll hold you up. Pick the wrong object, and you fall and learn.”

  “No, I’m serious. You need air. You’re talking like you’re the one smoking something.”

  “Alright then, test that theory. Science it up.” I stood slowly, testing out my new legs and feet with a few practice steps. Sluggish, but operational.

  “What, like you’re doing right now?”

  “Yup. Just like I’m doing every second of every day, whether I know it or not. I’m staring the flying lizards in the face and daring them to make their move.”

  Blade snorted. “Remind me to never let you get religion.”

  “Hey, Blade,” I said with a grin. “Never let me get religion.”

  “Thanks for the reminder, you cranky old nut. So, what lizards are we poking next?”

  “The four walls.” I gave a sage nod as my partner rolled his eyes. “Let’s break one.”

  Blade appeared reluctant. “Alright…”

  “What?”

  “You’re holding out on me.”

  I gave a single, grave nod. “Damn straight. And your problem is?”

  “Keep your cards to your chest all you want. I don’t see what good it’ll do.” He stretched the muscles in his back, preparing for whatever shenanigans I was getting us up to. “You don’t even trust yourself anymore, so why should you trust me?”

  I grinned. “Now you’re talking.”

  Blade crossed his arms. “So, why don’t you trust yourself? You have the best instincts of any cop I’ve ever worked with. Despite your personal shortcomings, there’s no one I’d trust more. So, if you can’t trust you, I’m left hanging.”

  I nodded my understanding. “I don’t trust synth.”

  “Ha! You’re a synth.”

  I gave him a look. “And I don’t trust me.”

  “This is bigger than that. You trust your legs—you’re standing on them.” Blade pointed as if I needed his gesture to know where my own body parts were situated. “You trust your eyes; you’re walking around without your hands in front of you. Either that, or you don’t trust your eyes or your hands, in which case, you’d have stayed in bed.”

  “Okay, so I have a modicum of trust in my faculties. That ain’t it.”

  “Right. So, what is it? Name one thing about your new body that isn’t just as good as the old one, or even better.”

  I couldn’t think of anything. Dammit, despite all the wracking of my brain I could do, I couldn’t think of one thing to bitch about. This body must suck at thinking just as bad as the old one did.

  Blade was still talking, still sermonizing me about trusting myself, but I wasn’t listening. It bugged me to no end that I couldn’t come up with one damned reason to keep hating this body I’d been treated with. I felt like I’d been offered a perfect filet mignon then looked for a reason to ask for a refund. What if I was wrong? What if I’d been wrong back then?

  As if his voice was continuing my inner thoughts, Blade’s words echoed my ideas. “You realize you were wrong. You failed yourself. You couldn’t trust yourself.”

  “It’s not about the prejudice; don’t you get it, Blade?” I shook my head with a vehemence that belied the strength of emotion welling up in my new chest. “I failed us both.”

  Exasperation drove Blade to pacing. “We were supposed to die on that mission. We did. We sprung the trap, and we took our shots. We knew from the outset. How could you have managed to fail, if things went exactly how they were supposed to?” He held my gaze with his infernal doggedness.

  There was no getting out of this simulation without a confession, so I took a deep breath. “My job, my role if you will, was to balance your gung-ho enthusiasm with my caution and discernment. You’re the hunting dog and I’m the hunter. When we were standing in front of that mainframe, you volunteered to stick your big nose into the trouble lurking within. I should’ve yanked the leash. The whole rest of that mission was just trying to recover for the fact that I let my pup stick his face into a rat hole that got him bit by these rabid vermin.”

  Blade’s eyes narrowed. “That is the stupidest, and at least third most offensive, metaphor you’ve ever come up with, Jet. I’m impressed. You’re a special piece of work to sink low enough to call me your pet terrier to my face.”

  “Oh, stop. You feel honored, and you know it.”

  “Sorry, I can’t understand. Try speaking in bark.” Despite his best efforts, a slow grin overtook his face. Blade’s tongue lolled over the side of his lip as he pantomimed a perky mutt’s excited panting.

  “Sermon over yet? Mind if we get on with the science?” I gestured toward the window locks. “I got lizards that don’t wanna be kept waiting.”

  Blade discarded his blanket on the bed. “Well, you’re the one with the big idea, so lead on.”

  My lip twitched upward as I reached for the lock on the window. “Heel, boy.”

  His hand came across the back of my head in a swat. With a chuckle, we slid the windows open and were gone. I hoped I’d convinced him that what was bothering me was all my issues with myself…

  Not my issues with him.

  Because, see, the fucked-up philosophy shit was his shtick. The Flying Lizard Theory was a Blade original, and I’d copied it as best I could remember. This Blade not only didn’t remember it, he didn’t get mad at me for copying his thang. He’d worked hard, the kind of hard I’d never worked in my entire life, to go to college, and he was damned proud of his philosophy degree.

  My Blade would never shut up. My Blade would never let me get by with a new nickname opportunity. And my Blade would never let me steal his Flying Lizard Theory. This newfangled Blade was some weird combination of the real deal and my own mental projections of him.

  He was altogether too symmetrical, too obliging, and too nice to be the cranky old bastard I knew. He walked like me, talked like me, and thought like me.

  My Blade would never.

  Chapter 3 – Illusions

  Holoroom projections are fickle things. The image you perceive and the image it creates depend very much upon what caliber the programmer was who put in the data, but also how fancy the equipment is that’s generating the pre-designed program.

  Yeah, I don’t really wanna go into it, either. How they do that shit is beyond my pay grade—you gotta talk to IT to get the rundown on how all that happens. All I’ve been trained to do is spot when I’m in one and when I’m not. Just enough information to get myself in trouble, really.

  And this one… this was something else entirely.

  Our hospital room, or what I was supposed to believe was a hospital room, was simple in concept. The furnishings were lean and sparse, only a few tubes and weird-looking devices to give it that required feeling of dread that somebody will stick a foreign object somewhere it don’t belong at the slightest provocation. Once you’ve generated the desired emotion, your body will have a hard time remembering a hospital roo
m that wasn’t exactly like the one in front of your face.

  There were a few ways the minimalist approach to illusion design worked well. The first was that it captured the imagination and got the subject’s brain working for the designer—reaching across the gap to become a projector itself. I’d picked up that little nugget from Blade’s sermons, too.

  The other juicy tidbit in an otherwise boring rant about something I didn’t care about was that it was hard to find a lie if the only info nuggets presented were a few well-known truths. That seemed practical enough for me to hold onto for later—an evocation of the original thing.

  Whoever had designed this hospital room knew just what notes to hit to get those five senses believing in where they were. The faint scent of a DNA-destroying cleanser, not freshly-applied, lingered faintly in the air. The neutral, out-of-style taupe sticky paper on the walls, cheap-looking chrome-plated ports for unknown medical devices that could be wheeled in and wielded at any time, and beds. That was all they had room for, and all they really needed, apart from the almost-working, slightly-too-small entertainment screen.

  I had to admit, my mind accepted the hospital room at first. It fit with my preconceived notion of what it took to be a place of inexpensive healing: sparse, streamlined, with cookie-cutter service and mass-produced items. My mind took comfort in the fact that I’d get treatment in line with the service guidelines of that particular institution—a lot of checks and tests I didn’t need, all to manage certain public risk factors and outdated notions of what belonged in human care.

  If they’d gone for a top-of-the-line medical facility, one with the bustle and latest and greatest, I’d have disbelieved it immediately. Cops and soldiers don’t get five-star medical service. We get patched up and back on the line of fire to get banged up again. On and on the cycle goes. But I digress; the point here is that the programmers in charge of this particular illusion were masters at their craft.

  It would have worked, too, if I didn’t have the glaring notion that this wasn’t an Earth or even Sol system hospital. It shouldn’t have been so familiar. It shouldn’t have operated by those same underlying principles and idiosyncrasies. I’d seen enough action on a dozen worlds to have firsthand experience of medical care in other places. The cultural backgrounds impacted every element, from where they put the beds in relation to doors and windows, to the age and types of equipment you’d expect to find.

  For example, one hospital I’d had the misfortune of visiting was situated on a world where the average height of a full grown adult was about three-foot-six. You can imagine when the doctor told me to lay down so he could get a look at my calf and the wedge of shrapnel sticking out of it. My leg didn’t even make it onto the same bed as the rest of me.

  Synth hospitals weren’t places for people to stick around and heal because synthetic bodies don’t heal themselves—they’re repaired. Humans couldn’t even receive care in synth hospitals. So why, if we were synthetic now, were we still here?

  Once the Good Knight Sir Question and his faithful companion, Sir Inkling of Doubt, settled into ye olde castle, the whole mirage became glaringly evident. Why were there no infusion bags, no trays, no climate control? These beds had no appearance of age or use—they still had that hot-off-the-printer smell from plastic that had been heated and was off-gassing.

  By contrast, whoever designed the program for “outside in the fresh air,” had gone out of their way to create a sensory overload. As soon as Blade opened the window, the hot sun beat down upon my face, the wind whipped and howled, threatening to throw me off the ledge at any given second. Gingerly, I stepped down from the one-meter precipice onto the roof of the building below us. It took a great deal of effort to convince my sensory-processing mind that there was no real danger should I slip.

  This, too, was a test of whoever the flying lizard behind the invisible curtain was. If my suspicions were correct, this fake Blade would start up a conversation as if we’d escaped the prying of listening ears.

  As soon as whoever was listening had determined we were no longer dishing out the proper level of intelligence, something would happen to force us to return to our little prison of healing. The synth watchers would be satisfied that I’d spilled my guts about what was really going on in the ol’ noggin. That was the order of operations, so to speak, the reason they didn’t lock the windows, but put locks on the windows.

  Blade working with me in the mirage gave me plenty of reason to believe I was disobeying what was expected of me, that I’d strayed outside the expected parameters. Comfortable in my own rebellion, in my little victory, I’d play into the hands of the watchers.

  Unfortunately for them, this wasn’t my first rodeo. I just wasn’t sure what fake lines I wanted to feed these guys through Blade, since I didn’t know them or what they were hoping to learn from me. Whatever baseline I spun was the anchor for whatever other lies I’d have to weave on this web of deception. I’d planted the seed with the whole “I failed you, Blade” shit. I’d have to keep it in that vein and play the part of the guilt-ridden superior officer if I was to convince anyone.

  The last few moments of my real life replayed in my head like a stuck record. Walking into a SynthCorp “abandoned warehouse” (yeah, right, could they be any more obvious with this trap?) in search of evidence to copy and take back to Galactic Patrol headquarters. Suspicion of conspiracy to commit some shit—I don’t even know how we managed to get the warrant.

  Blade had to connect his brain directly to the computer to operate it. Bonus of synth systems—they don’t work on a reprintable fingerprint or forgeable optic scanner. Gotta be the mind of the person to get in. Whoever had built the mainframe had a malware prepared to copy his Testament—his mind, memories, and basic self. When I pulled Blade’s datachip from the system and put it into the port in my spinal implant, the malware got me, too.

  I know what they wanted me to believe happened next, but I cannot trust that memory anymore. The event in my mind says I killed myself and him, relying on Testament file backups we kept in the central library like most everyone else. With viral brain diseases, cybernetic augmentation misfires, and plain ol’ fact of life decapitations, you couldn’t be too careful. Back up what’s important to you, or lose it.

  Or, in the case of this rogue branch of multi-system conglomerate SynthCorp—copy what you can, but cybernetically-augmented Galactic Patrol cops are going to have some system files encrypted. There is no way we’re risking police procedurals being open to the general public by means of a DypThink helmet or uplink hack. It’d put officers at unnecessary risk.

  That’s why this copied Blade wasn’t quite the same as mine. He had foibles borne of memories he’d buried in encrypted files. It was why whoever had our files was now prying mine to open up a channel to concealed words. The thoughts should be safe… I hoped.

  Now fake Blade circled the roof like a buzzard, keeping himself well within the twelve-foot range of me. This gave me an idea, which I stowed away for later. Instead, I took the lead, not waiting for him to approach me with a question.

  “Can they hear my thoughts, Blade?”

  Blade snorted. “If they could, I’d feel sorry for the bastards.”

  “I’m serious. When I stuck that chip in my head, your voice came straight through to me.”

  “You heard my thoughts?”

  I paused, turning to look out over where the city skyline melted into the gently rolling hills and cloudless blue sky as far as my eyes could see. “No. Just what you said to me.”

  “There you have it.” One nostril always turned up when he got all smug. I wanted to flick it.

  “But what if you were holding back? What if that half-cooked Blade had no thoughts of his own, and that’s the only reason I couldn’t hear him?”

  “Here’s a better question, what are they going to find that you’re so worried about? That you actually like synths, and you’ve been keeping a delectable sampling in your bedroom?”

  “
Nah, it ain’t that.” Here it is. Time to anchor the web. You listening, flying lizards? You listening, Blade? “It’s that the boss told me what this thing is really about. Why we were assigned to this, why the job wanted us to go in and get ourselves killed and resurrected again as synths. If they find that out, the whole mission is compromised.”

  Now I just have to come up with whatever that thing is we were supposed to do once we became synthetic. Tease out some surveillance like this was part of “the plan” all along.

  “Well, your secret is safe. They can’t hear your thoughts, and if they could, they’d know already, so it wouldn’t even matter.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” He’s taking it, hook, line, sinker, all of it. My Blade wasn’t this stupid. God, I hope he did get resurrected for real. I hope he isn’t really gone and I have to deal with Blade minus the brainpower. Blade negative two-point-oh would get old real fast.

  “So, why didn’t the boss let me in on this little nugget? Seems like it’d be a good idea to have both people realizing why they’re there.”

  I leveled my gaze at my partner, allowing a third of the disgust I felt into my voice. “Because he knew you were on the take.”

  To my surprise, Blade’s eyebrows knit themselves together in confusion, rather than shooting up in mock surprise or any attempt at denying it. “Well, of course he knew; he’s the one who put me onto the double-cross in the first place.”

  Now it was my turn to make an expression of confusion. “Wait, what?”

  “Yeah. You were in undercover during Project Flamenco when we hit the cell of synth druggies. I played informant and raked in a tidy sum to get you in. I was playing dirty cop, getting you found out and all, as soon as it was time to pull you out. It was a passing of the ol’ baton, if you will. They exchanged one shallow cover cop—Officer Jet Flamenco Parker himself—for one deep-cover cop feeding them whatever convenient little lines the precinct wanted them to know.”