Something in his voice was friendlier than Jake expected it to be. Glancing upward beneath his hat, Jake noted that the conductor was only a few years older than Yulia, with the sort of hungry look Jake knew from high school. He was a man who didn’t spend all of his time thinking about girls, only ninety-nine percent of it. The remaining one percent had to suffice for everything else, like making a living and remembering to put his clothes on.
“Are you on holiday?” the conductor asked, his gaze wandering off Yulia and onto Kostya.
“Family situation!” Yulia answered. She sounded upset, which immediately drew the man’s attention back to her.
Somehow, in the last ten seconds, she had undone the upper buttons on her shirt, beneath the open front of her parka, so that her cleavage was visible. The conductor’s eyes latched onto her chest as he fumbled through the rest of the ticket-scanning.
“I can seat you somewhere warmer,” he offered to her breasts. Yulia, Jake suspected, was doing something with her arms under her coat in order to press them upward and make them even more noticeable. “I can find a place for you—well, for all of you,” he added magnanimously, without actually looking at either Jake or Kostya this time, though he did briefly shift his gaze up to Yulia’s face. “One less stress for your trip.”
“Maybe later,” Yulia told him, casually running a hand down her neck.
“So…good-bye, then,” the young man said.
He hesitated, as if Yulia might have forgotten that she was going to offer to sleep with him and he wanted to give her a chance to remember. Meeting only stony silence in her gaze, he moved off through the sliding door into the next car.
“Is that how Russians flirt?” Jake asked her, when the door had shut safely behind the man, leaving them quite alone in the luggage area. “Without ever smiling?”
“We don’t smile unless something is funny,” Kostya explained. “I’ve told you this.”
“That was funny,” Jake said. He mimicked Yulia’s posture when she’d pushed up her breasts.
“Americans.” Yulia shook her head as she buttoned her shirt. “Making everything a joke—”
The conductor had stopped to peer back through the door, and Yulia grabbed Kostya by the collar of his parka and pulled him into a long kiss. The ticket-taker watched this for a painful moment, before finally turning away.
“He’s gone,” Jake told them a moment later.
Kostya looked at Yulia in something like shock as she pulled herself away from his lips. Jake, who could read his friend’s artificial face so well, had never seen this expression before—shame and surprise mixed. Kostya stared helplessly down at his hands when Yulia released him.
“Sorry. It was the quickest way to get rid of him.” When she noticed the depth of Kostya’s discomfort, she asked, in English, “Is so terrible, to be kissed? Your lips feel almost like real lips.”
Kostya shook his head, too flustered to say anything. Yulia covered the awkwardness by adjusting Kostya’s collar to better keep his face and neck hidden. Then she did the same for Jake, who was amazed again at all the details when he saw her up close: her skin, her pores, the hairs of her eyebrows, her lips, all just a bit less than perfect, and therefore beautiful.
“What?” Yulia asked, noticing his searching look.
“So real,” Jake said.
11. LONG HAUL
It took nine months to reach the asteroid belt. Nine months with hundreds of slaves crammed in the cargo bay of the mining freighter. They slept in racks, they were fed by tubes, they were cycled through the waste facility to empty out their bowels, such as they were. They were taught to use their secondary arms for fine work, such as assaying ore using tiny, precise tools, and to use their ordinary arms for the grunt work. The majority of the time aboard, however, was spent under the punishing glow of a learning screen. An anonymous woman on that screen pounded the Russian language into them for hours on end.
Jake grew used to the sight of his new hands, suffused with their fake human flesh, in the white light of the learning screen.
Da. Nyet. Da, ser. Ya budu. Nemedlenno. Moya ruka slomana. Chto-to sluchilos’s moim datchikom geograficheskogo polozheniya. Ya nuzhdayus’ osnovnogo sredstva k sushchestvovaniyu. Yes. No. Yes, sir. I will. Right away. My arm is broken. Something is wrong with my geolocation sensor. I am in need of basic sustenance.
And of course: Platina, platina, platina! Platinum. Platinum is your god now. Platinum is your holy grail, your heart’s desire. You will draw it from the asteroids, a precious lifeblood to feed the hungry Russian markets back home.
On the freighter they met the bosses. Boss—the word was the same in English and Russian, but the Russian plural was bossy (BO-se), and this word, which was a friendly sort of insult in English, was entirely insufficient when used to describe their new overlords.
The bossy were nothing like the medics back in the warehouse. Those men and women had been aloof but scientifically interested in the slaves. The bossy were not scientific. They were stubble-jawed men, with a few women mixed in, who had chosen, out of misanthropy or a misplaced sense of adventure or to steer clear of debt collectors or as a plea bargain to avoid jail time, to work off-world in a remote, brutal, inhuman place. Their natures matched their work environment, either by inborn tendency or because of long years being molded by their occupation. This was, they learned, the first time the bossy had had slaves, and they were making the most of the experience.
The bossy lived on the upper decks of the freighter. Occasionally they wouldn’t see a single one of them for an entire day, but usually there were a handful of bosses with the slaves, ordering them into their racks, or knocking them out to make some adjustment to their inner workings, or messing with the sustenance feed to restrict the calories of anyone they found irritating, or disobedient, or an amusing victim. Several of the bossy smoked foul-smelling black cigars (ordinary to Jake but very old-fashioned, according to many of the more recently born slaves), and all of them drank huge amounts of alcohol. Jake had thought, after all those nights on the beach with friends, that he knew something about getting drunk. He’d been nothing but an amateur.
Two months into the journey, a boss hooked Jake to the opioid feed, except it wasn’t the opioid feed. A jittery hormone flooded his veins: adrenaline. The boss removed the feed, thrust a knife into Jake’s hand, and shoved him into the center of a circle of bossy wearing predatory looks. Another slave was shoved into the circle across from him. Neither of them was suffused, so their bodies were metallic skeletons, their fake flesh hidden behind their bones. The other slave was a girl. Jake didn’t know her name, but he’d begun to recognize everyone by now.
“Boy! Ubyts! Fight! Kill!” the guards were chanting. Jake was shoved closer to his opponent.
Neither victim did anything at first. They looked at each other, ramped up on adrenaline, bouncing from foot to foot, gripping their knives, but with no animosity, only regret. Jake wondered: Had she been young or old when she went to sleep? Had she been American like him or from somewhere else? Had she ever walked on wet sand on a balmy California evening, watching the sun die into the Pacific?
The bossy grew enraged when no fight happened. The shoves on their backs got more forceful, and the threats escalated.
“No food for a month! Two months!” they goaded. When this did not force a fight, Vadim, one of the most aggressive bosses, hit Jake’s shoulder and said, “I will remove your whole arm, slave—even the real bits that are left on the inside. Then I will take your eyes. Do you understand?”
The girl was getting similar threats on her side. Jitters rolling through him and fear taking hold, Jake stabbed his opponent, watched as the blade slipped between her ribs. He felt resistance as his weapon struck real flesh beneath. He was truly stabbing her. The girl dropped backward, a look of such surprise on her beautifu
l, fake face that Jake cried out, even though she made no noise at all.
The bossy cheered and slapped Jake’s back as the girl was dragged away. Someone stuck a cigar in Jake’s mouth.
“My little killer,” Vadim whispered in Jake’s ear. “Show the girl who is boss.” And then Jake was forgotten as the bossy went off to the upper decks, exchanging money, the noise of their movable party fading as they left the slaves in darkness.
Jake couldn’t shed tears, but in his sleep rack, he shook with sobs, overwhelmed by remorse. That was when he met Kostya.
“Anja is okay,” a voice said from the rack right next to his. “You don’t have to cry.”
The voice was male, with a Russian accent, but it was speaking English, and the sound of his native tongue hit Jake like cool water. He had begun to wonder if anything he remembered before the moment of reanimation was true or merely the hopeful dreams of a half-machine. And yet here was English, and he understood it.
He turned to see a face peering at him in the dim light. Jake had been studying artificial faces for a long time now; he could nearly imagine what the original boy had looked like.
“I think I got her heart,” Jake whispered.
The boy shook his head. “She will be all right. We watched them take her. They can fix her. It’s not even so hard. We’re difficult to kill.”
“Are you sure?”
“Very sure.”
The relief was so great, Jake could hardly breathe for some moments. At last he gasped out, “It was just a game?”
“Just a game,” the boy agreed.
“Oh, God.” A fresh wave of remorse overtook him, and for a long while he was crying again.
“What is it?” the other boy asked.
When Jake could finally speak, his voice was hoarse. “I used to say that, in the same way. ‘Show her who’s boss.’ I said it, and I did it.”
His companion silently extended a hand to Jake’s shoulder. When Jake had begun to recover, the boy said gravely, “I think they would forgive you, whoever they were.”
“Do you?”
The boy nodded seriously.
Jake didn’t know why this stranger’s pardon affected him so deeply. “Spasibo,” he said. Thank you. He lifted a hand to wipe his eyes, but of course there were no tears. He had left all of those back on Earth.
After a few more minutes had passed and Jake’s breathing had returned to normal, he asked, referring to the girl he’d stabbed, “Her name is Anja?”
“Yes, she’s German.”
“You know her?”
The boy shook his head. “I’ve learned everyone’s name. Words, names—I’m good with them.”
“What’s my name?” Jake asked.
“You’re Jake. English?”
“American.”
“Really?” The boy thought about this, apparently fascinated.
“Are you Russian?” Jake asked.
The boy paused. His upper lip twitched—in disgust? Disappointment? “Yes,” he admitted. “Is my accent so strong?”
“No. Your English is really good. It’s nice to hear English.”
This mollified him. “Even my father said that,” the boy muttered. “And for me, I’m happy to speak anything but my mother tongue.” He wiped a smudge from Jake’s forehead. He was suffused, his body almost human, his hands soft. “Most of us aren’t native Russian, so the bosses are not too careful about what they say. I’ve been listening to them. They might hurt us, but not more than they can fix. We belong to the mining company, so they can’t permanently damage us. They would get in trouble for that.”
He introduced himself. He was called Kostya.
“Were you frozen too?” Jake asked him.
“No. Cryo-freeze—that’s the word, yes?—it’s against the law in Russia. Also forcing people to go to the asteroids is against Russian law. But you aren’t citizens. You are kind of…spoils of war. The frozen people in conquered countries became possessions of Russian government. They can experiment on you.”
“And you? Aren’t you a citizen? How can they do this to you?”
“I’m not a citizen anymore,” Kostya told him, in a tone that didn’t encourage further questions.
A roving boss hit the edge of Jake’s rack with a metal baton, startling both of them. They had let their voices get too loud.
“Quiet!” the woman yelled. “No reason to speak! Platinum is what you should be thinking about!”
She yanked Jake out of his rack and deposited him into another one, farther away, where there would be no chance of continuing their conversation.
* * *
The female slaves, though almost identical to the males, had the suggestion of breasts built into their metal chests. The bossy made a sport of grabbing these pseudo-breasts and laughing uproariously when the girl-slaves recoiled. On the nine months of the trip out, Jake became very glad that there was nothing between any of the slaves’ legs. If they’d been left intact, who knew what the guards might be doing to them?
“Why do you think they make the girls look like girls? It draws attention,” Jake whispered to Kostya one day. “They could have made all our bodies alike.”
They were in neighboring racks, which had become their custom. To avoid being separated, they spoke so quietly that humans without augmented hearing could hardly catch the words.
Kostya took some time to answer Jake’s question. At first Jake had thought his friend was a naturally slow speaker, but now he understood that Kostya, when he paused, was wading through a tangled skein of unpleasant memories, searching for the one he needed. After a few moments, Kostya said, “I was in the first batch of slaves. Before they woke up all of you foreigners. There were maybe twenty of us Russians. The pioneers.” He smiled wryly at this word, which smacked of government propaganda. “They didn’t give us faces at first. We were just…” He ran a hand over his face, as though removing all of his features.
“Blank?” Jake asked. The thought made him cringe.
“Not blank. But metal with eyes and mouth—bare eyes like ping-pong balls, teeth showing. Not human.” Kostya shuddered. In unconscious sympathy, Jake shuddered as well.
After a stretch of quietness, Kostya continued, “It wasn’t possible….When we looked like that, we thought there was nothing left of us. We only wanted to be gone.” He closed his eyes. “We tried to kill ourselves.”
Jake could not stop two words from escaping him: “You too?”
“Yes. That’s when we began to understand how hard we were to kill. You can stab yourself, you can drop from a great height, you can swallow poison—but mostly you will not die. They simply fixed us up. But after this time they gave us faces. They gave the girls breasts. They gave us our fake skin. Not real faces, not real breasts, not real skin. But still, they are important.”
12. ROCKS
Nine months to the asteroid belt. The length of a human pregnancy. When they arrived, they were born into their new world, for which their new bodies were perfectly suited.
The new world was like this:
Broken fragments of rock tearing through black space. Some as big as countries, others as small as pebbles. Some clung to each other, almost coinciding as they orbited the distant sun, so that they appeared to be a string of siblings close enough to touch. These fragment worlds lived in extremes, the glare of unfiltered sunlight on one side, the inky dark of cold space on the other.
The inhabitants were the metallic mine slaves, with their smooth, beautiful faces and extra arms, moving across the rugged surfaces, drawing out the platinum locked in frozen rock.
Slave camps were established on three asteroids that traveled in a group. They were Phaenna5, Phaenna6, and Phaenna7. The slaves were divided among the three, as were the bossy. Jake and Kostya, by lu
ck only, ended up in the same group, assigned to Phaenna7, the smallest asteroid.
Mining for platinum was like this:
Inflatable bubble tents were staked into the surface of Phaenna7 over an access point to a platinum lode. An enormous solar collector, miles across, was unfurled, a great flower facing the sun. The solar heat was captured by this flower, concentrated, and then it was funneled down into the workings of the mine, where Jake and the other slaves used it to liquefy the platinum ore, which could be siphoned into holding tanks. Phaenna7’s gravity was so low that drops of liquid metal that escaped the siphon would leap up into the thin air inside the tent, forming a molten haze.
The tents were shielded, protecting the slaves from the worst of the ambient radiation, and airtight, providing a weak atmosphere to breathe. They let through just enough light to hint at the great darkness looming beyond the walls.
The slaves did not suffuse during their work hours, so the work tents were full of human faces on metallic bodies, scuttling like ants over the equipment and the rocky surface. The odor of burning rock and melting platinum was constant.
Platinum droplets and rock vapor adhered to the slaves’ bodies and worked their way into every crevice between their sturdy bones. These contaminants were hot, and when the particles reached the softer stuff behind Jake’s skeleton, they set off an ache that coursed through every part of him. Stiffness followed as the molten metal cooled and constricted motion.
Over many days, this residue would accumulate until it began to interfere with the movement of the slaves’ limbs. To combat this, they would be drugged and the contaminants would be scrubbed from their bodies by a machine that vaporized the surface layer of their bones to collect the valuable platinum molecules—nothing would be wasted. In his floating haze during this weekly ritual, Jake imagined the process as an extreme version of getting his teeth cleaned. Pain from the scraping, pain from the heat, but he was so high he could not complain.
Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful Page 18