by S. C. Jensen
“So, either the Dickie in my office is one of these plugs”—I grabbed Dickie’s right arm and twisted it behind his back, knocking him to his knees—“or you are.”
“Ow! Hey! Not me,” he said. “Definitely not me.”
“How do I know for sure?”
“I’m going to wet my pants if you twist that arm any harder,” Dickie said. “That’s a pretty sure sign.”
“Go take a leak.” I shoved him away from me. “Cosmo, watch him.”
“Girl, that is not my scene.”
“You’re going to be travelling with him,” I said. “You might want to know if he’s a robot.”
“It’s okay, man.” Dickie picked himself up off the floor and shook one leg like he was warming up for a sprint. “There’s not much to see. But what I lack in size I make up for with unbridled enthusiasm.”
Cosmo rolled his eyes and followed Dickie to a far corner of the room.
“Where are we?” the woman asked, turning her dark eyes on me. A silver strap slipped off her shoulder.
“On the Island Dreamer.”
“Hank,” she said. “Is he okay?”
“More or less,” I said. “Except he thinks you’re dead.”
“I never meant to hurt him.” Her voice trembled and her eyelashes glittered as if with tears. “Everything we were trying to do. It’s all got twisted.”
“You definitely don’t remember hiring me?”
“To do what?” She wiped at her dry eyes and started to crawl out of the bag. “I don’t even know who you are.”
“I’m a private investigator.” I helped her to her feet. She was barefoot. Tiny. Barely tall enough to see over my shoulder. “A couple days ago I had a call from a client who was looking for a woman matching your description. She had a message to deliver.”
“What message?”
“Mama wants the drop.”
Fear washed over her expression like night falling on a city; she shimmered sharper and brighter. She reached out and grabbed my arm with a child-sized hand. “Mama wants …”
Then she stepped back with a hand over her mouth. She whispered, “The choker.”
I swung my bag around to the front and opened it, digging through the rumpled contents until I found the box. I brought it out and flipped the lid open with one hand. “Is this it?”
Patti Whyte shrieked and stumbled backward. She knocked into one of the pink-robed plugs and fell sideways, crashing onto her right hip and hand. The body fell on top of her and she struggled under its weight. The acolyte rolled, and an arm flopped to one side, hitting the floor with a dull thud. Its dead eyes stared at the ceiling as if they were made of glass. Patti managed to get herself out from under the thing and scrambled over it like a wild animal.
“Get it away from me,” she screamed. Her white-rimmed eyes danced frantically around the room. But the way she stared at me, I knew it wasn’t the bodies she was afraid of.
Cosmo appeared at my shoulder. “What’s the ruckus? Why are you scaring the poor thing?”
“It’s not me,” I said. “It’s the necklace.”
“Oh, those things.” Cosmo slapped the lid closed again. “Fashion tragedy of the decade. Just give it a week. Hardly worth screaming over.”
“Where did you get that?” Patti asked.
“They’re all over the ship,” I said. “You—or someone who looks like you—ordered them for all the Platinum Package guest rooms.”
Patti shook her head. “I would never …”
“That’s a relief,” Cosmo said. “The girl has some sense, although I don’t know about the Shoeless Josephine thing. Speaking of relief, your friend appears to be human”—he waved a hand in front of his face—“and very dehydrated. His story checks out.”
“Good,” I said. “I need you to take these two away from here. They need to lie low. Set them up in your room.”
Cosmo clapped his hands. “We can do make-overs!”
“Can you make me blond?” Dickie called from over by the door. “I always thought I should have been born blond.”
“Honey, I can make you anything you want to be.” Cosmo picked his way carefully over the pile of scattered bots and stood next to Dickie. “Can we go now? This place gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“No,” Patti said. “I have to contact the Rose. There’s been a terrible mistake.”
“What a coincidence,” I said. “That’s where I’m headed. I’ve got some questions I need answered, and I think he is the only—”
“The Rose is here?” Her voice tickled with something like horror. “On this ship?”
“That’s what I’ve been led to believe.”
“We’ll just be going then,” Cosmo said. “I remember the way out. We’ll meet you on the strip after I liberate my merchandise”—he turned to Dickie—“how do you feel about breaking and entering?”
Dickie shrugged. “I’ll try anything twice.”
I turned and motioned for them to move. Dickie looked over his shoulder and lifted a hand, then stopped. His jaw fell open. Cosmo’s eyes widened. He slapped a hand over his glitter pink lips. A high-pitched noise escaped.
“Uh, Bubbles,” Dickie said. “You might want to—”
I spun around and lifted my upgrade to protect my head. Something whipped past my face, making the air sing. And twice. I flinched back and caught a blow on my forearm. A pink-robed acolyte stood between Patti and me, another stood behind her with an arm wrapped around Patti’s throat. Others were stirring. I shoved back on my attacker, but he didn’t stumble. He—it—smiled.
“You will all be coming with us,” the android said in a perfectly human voice. “Don’t waste time fighting. You will only tire yourself. The Rose wants you in shipshape, at least for your interview.”
A pink-robed army lifted itself off the floors and benches of the storage room, moving as a unit. It would be pointless to resist. Patti’s eyes bulged, and her fingers clawed uselessly at the pale arm of her captor.
“You might want to let her breathe,” I said.
The plug loosened its grip slightly, and Patti wheezed. One of the acolytes stepped forward and directed me toward the door. I turned. Dickie and Cosmo were wrapped in some kind of netting. Two pink soldiers moved in unison to pick the men up and sling them over their shoulders. I swallowed as Dickie and Cosmo were carried out the door, followed by a unit of eight more android acolytes.
Something hard hit me in the small of my back, and I took a step toward the door. Only the faint rustling of robes betrayed the fact that another twenty or so of the robots were moving into formation behind me. I was marched through the holoscreen and into the meringue-coated corridor outside. Once I emerged, the preceding unit fell into step ahead of me. I glanced once over my shoulder to make sure Patti was okay. She, too, was slung over the shoulder of one of the acolytes. I half expected to be picked up myself, but they made me walk. Maybe it was my lucky day. Or maybe they were wary of the upgrade.
Our strange procession marched through the maze of corridors. I followed our progress on my visilens map. We buzzed straight to the bud at the centre of the flower, like busy little bees. I wondered if the Last Humanist Church in HoloCity followed a similarly twisted floor plan. It was kind of fascinating, even if the Rose had some strange ideas about hospitality. The purity of the species, too, while we were on the topic. Maybe Swain wasn’t so bad after all. At least he just traded in the usual human vices.
We followed the corridors in what felt like a convoluted spiral. Once we’d wound ourselves toward the centre of the maze, the soldiers fell back, lining the corridor on either side ahead of me. The two acolytes that held my friends stood before a door. It looked like the petals of an enormous flower folded in on themselves. I approached behind them. The acolyte who had been prodding me stepped to my left, and the one carrying Patti appeare
d to my right. The layered panels of the door shifted and fell back like a flower opening itself to the sun. From inside, a blindingly bright light spilled into the corridor.
I followed the soldiers inside.
The room was filled with a stepped dais, atop of which a pale-pink throne made of iridescent petals bloomed against a curved wall that seemed to glow with starlight. A figure, blurred against the light, perched atop the throne in perfect stillness.
Swain was there. His body draped over the steps like a dingy bit of old carpeting. A dark stain spread from his body and dripped off the steps into a puddle on the floor. The soldiers in front of me dropped Dickie and Cosmo like sacks of laundry, and the sacks grunted but lay still. The soldiers stepped back to guard the door.
“Greetings,” said a soft voice, neither kind nor unkind, male nor female. “We wondered how long it would take before you joined us.”
“I didn’t intend to join,” I said. “Cults aren’t really my bag.”
“And yet you are here,” the voice said. “With us.”
“I’m here, anyway,” I said. “Bit late to the party, I guess. When did Swain get here?”
“The fool bribed the admiral in order to hitch a ride on our bangtail.” Bell-like laughter rippled through the air from the dais. The voice raised the hairs on the back of my neck. “Isn’t that just too perfect?”
“All that planning for nothing, huh?”
“You are a difficult woman to guide, Betty ‘Bubbles’ Marlowe. We laid many paths to direct you here. It is always interesting to see which tiny flecks of pollen attract which bees. It says much about a person.”
I clenched my cybernetic fist and wished again that I hadn’t sworn off firearms. “And what have you learned about me?”
“Swain was attracted to power,” the voice said. “Being the Chief of Police only gave him a taste of it, and he wanted more. Like a snake, he wriggled his way to the top of the HoloCity rubbish heap and crowned himself king.”
“Seems a little hard on snakes.” I twitched a finger and my tattler started pinging like mad. A news feedreel scrolled quickly by until I killed it with a button. “Sorry, I don’t really know how to use this thing yet.”
“We know exactly how to use men like Swain.” The speaker on the dais ignored me completely, revelling in their own brilliance, I supposed. I let them talk. “The admiral likes to pull strings just to watch the puppets dance. He wasn’t difficult either. And Patti Whyte just wants to save the world. Isn’t that right, Patti?”
A muffled noise came from behind my shoulder, then a thump. I didn’t look back. Patti struggled her way to her feet and said, “That’s what we all want.”
“We do, my child. We do. And you have done well. You will be rewarded.”
Patti stepped past me and climbed the dais in her bare feet, slipping past Swain and the blood, to kneel before the Rose. She stayed like that. As still as a glittering silver stone. My stomach sank.
“You called me to find the girl in the silver dress?” I said. “Why?”
“Punch Blanco called the admiral. But you know all about Punch, don’t you?”
“Punch Blanco doesn’t exist,” I said. “That doesn’t answer my question. Why bring me in on it?”
“We needed someone competent, who would not be swayed by corruption.” The Rose stood against a halo of light and stepped down the dais toward me, past Patti, like an angel descending from heaven. Long, narrow feet, bare and pale in the light, came into view first. Then the long Last Humanist robes trailed behind like a river of pink satin, spilling down the steps after them. “Someone motivated by human suffering above all else.”
My eyes fell on Swain’s corpse. “Needed me for what?”
“To stop him.” The Rose’s torso, narrow shoulders, and small breasts with collar bones like daggers, slipped out of the blinding halo of light. Then her face, as calm and expressionless as the moon, came into view, surrounded by a crown of white-blonde hair.
“You’re a woman,” I said.
“Am I?” She smiled at me. “Swain knew about our formula. A nootropic of this magnitude would be a powerful bartering chip to a man like him. In the right circles—the drug syndicates, the highbinder politicians, the trade barons—it would be invaluable.”
“If not for the side effects.”
“That’s right.” She smiled wider, perfectly white teeth in a perfectly white face. “Swain’s eagerness got the best of him. He flooded the market with a deadly drug. And the city licked it up. Every last drop.”
“That’s what you wanted all along.” I relaxed my nerves and let my arm fall limp beside me. “Patti wasn’t trying to stop the delivery at all. She was trying to draw Swain’s attention to it.”
“The Purification of HoloCity,” the Rose said. “Swain opened the gates for the first wave. And the second wave—”
“Starts here,” I finished. “With the necklaces. What’s in them?”
“Your friend Jimi made a very significant discovery,” the Rose frowned. “A brilliant human mind, unfortunately contaminated. Tropical Punch is exactly what we intended it to be. Jimi wanted to remove the secret ingredient. A tiny thing, really. Microscopic.”
“A virus,” I said.
The Rose laughed suddenly, a musical trill that lifted the hairs on the back of my neck and made my bowels turn to water. “Patti told me you were primitive.”
“What then?”
“Particulate intelligence,” she said. “Nanoids. It’s perfect, really. We can eliminate bodies contaminated with incompatible tech and turn pure bodies into vessels for the Spirit of Humanity, vehicles to aid the second wave of Purification.”
“The girl who attacked me in the casino,” I said. “You were controlling her?”
Her and how many others? Whyte, for one…
“People have become so fond of technological contaminants.” The Rose frowned. “They hardly notice when they’re receiving outside inputs anymore. The fools think every thought that pops into their heads originates with them. As if we haven’t been manipulating the human mind via social norms and media representation for millennia.”
“So, the Last Humanist Church is, what?” I turned my wrist toward the Rose in all her radiant purity. “And end-of-days cult?”
“Don’t be simple, child.” The Rose turned her heavenly face toward me, and her expression hardened. “Terra Firma has millions of solar rotations ahead of it. Such a human presumption, to believe that the end of you will be the end of everything. No. There is so much more in store.”
“What are you, then, if not human?”
“I am the last of the Last Humanists and the first of the New,” she said. “Now, you have something that I want.”
I took a step backwards. “Me?”
“You don’t think I brought you here just to reveal my plans for world domination, do you? This isn’t a comic book.” She smiled again. “My techRose operative transferred a file to you. I need it.”
“Your operative was dead when I got there,” I said. “Didn’t you get the memo? Your friend Tesla lopped off the poor bunny’s head. I thought it was Patti.”
“Tesla decommissioned two very expensive AI plugs,” the Rose said. “And stole our prototype necklace. But not before you delivered my message, and my operative reciprocated the gesture. I hope it didn’t pinch.”
My hand wandered to the side of my neck where the skin was still tight and sore.
“Oh. Is that where she hit you?” The Rose cocked her head to one side and smiled again. I was beginning to think she had missed some important social cues as a child. “In that case, I’m afraid you might find the extraction process unpleasant.”
Her right hand shot out toward my throat.
Metallic fingernails like knives sliced into my flesh as I twisted away. I grabbed the nearest android in pink and ham
mered it in the spine with my metal fist. The fabric of the robe tore away with the flesh skin, exposing a pale skeleton of alloyed metal and sparking wire nerves. A blood-like fluid pooled on the ground where the machine fell.
The Rose snarled and lunged again, but Dickie rolled onto his knees and threw himself into her path, sending the First New Humanist sprawling across the dais. “Take that, robo-Rose!”
“Are you okay, Dick?” I hit the button on my arm that released the grapefruit knife and attempted to cut away the strange, sticky fibers of the net binding his arms and legs. Something clobbered me across the shoulders, and I fell on top of Dick with the air knocked out of my lungs. The blow should have broken my back. Then I remembered the mesh armour Hammett had commissioned for me and promised myself I’d buy any new toy in the SmartPet catalogue that the little piggy heart desired if only I could stop being dense for long enough to survive the next fifteen minutes.
I felt the assaulting android approaching from behind and waited until it was just close enough. Using my enhancement for a little extra vertical thrust, I donkey-kicked backward and hit the thing where the groin would be on a human. The man screamed and collapsed on the ground. Oops. The not-a-robot clutched at himself like he was afraid something would fall off and rolled on the ground in agony. Maybe I shouldn’t have kicked so hard.
I caught a motion from the corner of my eye, and I spun sideways with my arm up for protection. The pink-robed monster carried a disturbingly human looking arm, torn from one of its fallen comrades and still dripping synthetic blood from wires like tendons. It swung the severed limb in an overhead arc, lunging forward at the same time, and brought the makeshift bludgeon crashing down on top of me.
I covered my head with both arms and felt the blow ricochet across the mesh armour. The impact jarred my joints and ligaments and felt like it bruised every square inch of muscle in my body, but my bones didn’t shatter. I considered that a win. I broke the block and swung upward with my cybernetic arm, striking the robot in the chest to send it flying backwards. Scrambling to my feet, I scanned frantically for some kind of weapon. None of the androids appeared to be packing heat, but I didn’t think I was going to be able to grab and punch my way out of this one. There were at least thirty more soldiers outside.