Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  A minion slammed shut the case and Sabastia rolled left as his mate pulled the gun. The augmented man grinned as he stepped to the side.

  “Blocking their network.”

  All four winced, but the one with the gun fought through it. Sabastia’s display flashed red around his hands—if the gun’s onboard systems compensated for Tal’s signals, pistol-boy would put a hole in her head.

  Case-boy twisted across the table, avoiding his injured boss by a hair’s breadth. Sabastia’s feet pushed up as her palms flattened. She flipped into a handstand and lifted the arm directly in his path. He swung the case at her back as he slid across the table, but she dropped hard onto his gut.

  All his breath exited in a loud, decay-filled grunt.

  “Brush your damned teeth!” Sabastia retched, instinctively covering her face.

  Behind her, the gun clicked. Pistol-boy stared at it, swearing in a language Sabastia didn’t understand. He shook his hand and the gun fired a bullet into his foot.

  “He does not carry intelligence augmentations.”

  Idiots, the lot of them. One down and—

  Case-boy swung. Sabastia caught the container, yanking hard, but the bastard was stronger than he looked. The case bounced off the edge of the table, his arm wrenching. More rotting meat smell blasted into the air as he yelled, and Sabastia punched his nose.

  Another dagger flew, embedding in the light’s housing. Sparks and LED shards sprayed and darkness flooded the little room. The idiot under her swore. Tal switched to infrared and a high-pitched squeak popped out of his throat when Sabastia punched his nose again.

  The augmented flunky laughed. “Looks like it’s you and me, girl.”

  “Shut up, Stilson!” The captain whined. “I’m bleeding over here.”

  “I told you this wouldn’t work, Milford,” Stilson muttered.

  So he wasn’t just some back-up thug.

  “If I search their names, Stilson will know.”

  He didn’t move from his position next to the door. “Tell you what. The Frost? It’s mine. Then you kill these three. We call it even.”

  He wanted to pin murder on her. “Traders don’t kill.”

  Stilson laughed. “Yes, you do. You murder and steal and cheat all the time.”

  “We don’t work for Sheins-White. We don’t murder.”

  His face sobered. She hadn’t realized how generic he looked. Bland face, bland hair, bland eyes. He could walk into a room, steal everything not bolted down, and no one would notice. “At least we have the sense to earn enough money to make it worthwhile, child.”

  “He’s stopped all attempts to network with the other three.”

  “I’ll even let you keep the bauble.”

  The memory hilt. Quite the payment for dealing with his mates. Offering it carried more than a whiff of desperation, even if his bland voice didn’t. “I could make it look like you… had an accident, too.” Maybe she could pique his interest. Pull him off guard. “But you’ll have to sweeten the pot.”

  Milford slammed his undamaged fist into the table. “You’re not going to let some kid—”

  All three of the other men stiffened. All noises from them ceased.

  “He sent a burst over their network.”

  Sabastia held in a startle. What was this guy carrying? Black ops augmentations. Maybe he carried a CI, like her. If he did, they wouldn’t leave the room alive, much less with the hilt.

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “We go together. Less obvious that way.”

  A grin spread across his forgettable face, his teeth fluorescing on the enhanced display in her eyes.

  “Maybe. But only if you promise to keep those leathers tight, sweetie.”

  She grinned back.

  “Deal,” he said.

  “His body relaxes.”

  She slammed the case into the table, popping the lid. Within a fraction of a second, her fingers curled around the grip.

  “Locking.”

  Sabastia sprang from the table, hilt raised. Stilson should know not to let down his guard before she accepted the deal.

  The memory hilt’s monofilaments erupted out of the diamond matrix, weaving and braiding into a gleaming plane. Even in the gloom of the little room, the molecular cutting edge of the blade sparkled.

  He was a good seven inches taller than her, but she had the blade against his throat before he inhaled.

  “Tell you what. I leave with the bauble and you and your buddies have a talk about how well you handled this. How’s that sound?”

  “Releasing his mates from their paralysis.”

  The other three groaned.

  “You’re dead, Stilson!” Milford yelled.

  Tal opened the hatch. Sabastia glided around Stilson and backed into the corridor.

  “Paralyzing his systems.”

  “Say hi to your privateer buddies.” She saluted as the blade withdrew into the hilt.

  “I’ll find yo—”

  Tal closed the hatch behind them and locked it with a hiss.

  ~ ~ ~

  Meet the itch of time travel…

  Callous

  There’s an odd background itch to my implants. It feels as if tiny spies, all wearing synchronized watches and miniature versions of the armor they built inside of me, gasp and die as they crawl to the surface of my skin. The air outside of my body is too rarified for them to breathe.

  I itch because I’m dusted with a fine layer of corpses.

  Those of us who have implants don’t talk about the itch. Not directly. We nod and glance away when we see another soldier absently scratching at the air above his skin. We all know that giving voice to the phantoms will get us labeled crazy.

  So here I sit, now, in the deceptively bright booth at the back of the cleaner-than-it-looks campus bar, breathing in the scents of stale pretzels and grease, a honey-flavored beer in front of me and the hand of God brushing the dead off my soul three inches above the nape of my neck.

  Across the pitted pine table wobbling between us, Jeffrey is scribbling notes on his tablet. He works on the newest tech available, the “crinkle resistant” e-paper. I see distortions along the edges anyway. One of his kids probably got ahold of it.

  Or maybe I always see distortions. A little haze of blue here, a faint line of red there. It’s something else the implanted don’t talk about.

  Jeffrey is the babe among us at twenty-five, but he already has two kids—a toddler and an eight-month-old. Tina likes to tease him about “timing” and thinking that having children while all-but-dissertation was a good idea, because, she says, “They're a distraction, dude.” She’s allowed to be ironic, now that her own pregnancy is showing and her belly bumps against the table.

  From looking at us, you would think our enclave of Cognitive Psychology grad students was a horny lot.

  The itch dances across my neck and my hairs stand on end, but this group is used to my twitches so they don’t notice. Across from me, in our usual booth in the back of our usual bar, Jeffrey taps his e-paper one last time, oblivious to my phantoms.

  He sniffs as he sits up straight. He looks like all the other grad students: brown hair, nondescript eyes, a little shorter than me. Good “daddy material,” as he likes to say when he talks about his kids. He has all the average-guy implants: The slight glow of the touch implant embedded on the tip of his index finger winks off as he rolls away his e-paper.

  Touch implants don’t itch. I want to scratch behind my head but I don’t touch the air flowing down my spine or the bubble around my gut. Not scratching is one of the first things they teach us.

  “I swear the Review Board wants oversight of the color of your socks, Brandon.” Jeffrey waves the rolled-up e-paper under my nose. “But I think we may have it through, this time.”

  I sip my beer, watching the faint light of his e-paper first brighten the rim of my glass, then throw it into darkness as Jeffrey’s arm arches upward, blocking the overhead halogens. The sweet t
ingle of the honey in the beer brightens and shadows my tongue in time with his waving hand, as if it’s all locked together. I swallow what’s in my mouth.

  It is all locked together—the context of this moment, the context of my implants. My past, my present in this booth, the surrounding loud students and the younger faculty who think they have control of their future.

  On the other side of campus, an enclave of Temporal Physics grad students not unlike my little group here, is trying to figure out what “future” means.

  I glance at Tina. She sits next to me, close enough to give my implants telemetry, but far enough away she’s polite. Her belly is not big enough to give her true booth problems yet, but it will be in two months. Some paths into the future are contexts that cannot be avoided.

  She laughs. She has the pregnant woman glow. Her dark hair gleams in the light thrown by the halogen pendants over our heads.

  Smiling, I point at Jeffrey’s e-paper. “They better hurry. Time’s a’ wastin’.” I do my part to be funny and ironic.

  Tina groans and pats my elbow. “You don’t miss time jumping that much, do you?” She makes the mock shock face, because she knows I don’t miss it.

  But I do. Sometimes I wonder if, during a jump when the universe shifts under me, a tender part of me gets ripped off, but not all the little spies living under it. If the itching is my soul trying to heal.

  I sit up straight and place my hands flat on the pine tabletop, arching one eyebrow as I look from one experimental partner to the other. All three of us will pull data from my jump for our dissertations. Jeffrey’s collecting on my jump target. Tina, on me. I want hard images of a jump to find what causes the itches. I want insight.

  You might think after one hundred and eighty-seven jumps, I would know. “I do it for the glory, Tina. You know that.” One hundred and eighty-seven jumps, each in and out of similar wartime situations, all doing similar things but to different people. If I killed them, I don’t know. If I ensured they had the right baby, I don’t know, either. I never asked questions. Asking questions was against orders.

  Unlike here, at the University.

  Tina shakes her head and her fiancé looks away. Jeffrey’s smile turns serious. They don’t like it when I joke about my service.

  “Nothing more glorious than ABD in CPsy at the U of M,” I say.

  Tina laughs again, and Jeffrey chuckles. He’s looking at possible therapeutic and diagnostic applications of time jumping, that is if the Institutional Review Board gives us the go ahead. This is new territory for them. So they’re careful.

  I don’t care about careful anymore. Unlike my soul, careful toughened up a long time ago. At least that part of me doesn’t itch.

  Ten years ago

  My mother fiddles with her rosary. We aren’t Catholic, so to me it’s just beads. But to her, it’s something else.

  She counts, one, two, three, then blinks like she wants to continue counting, to find that place in her head where she used to lose herself and get her work done. The place where she used to be productive.

  “Mom?” I say. I’m eighteen. I finished high school three years ago, having been accelerated. But I didn’t go to college. Didn’t seem right.

  I know someday I will look back on this moment and wish I had said the correct words to make it better. That I had triggered the correct cascade of responses in my mother’s head to get her, finally, to turn in the direction she needed to see me, her doctors, her correct path. To let us help her out of this.

  But the world doesn’t work that way. Even at eighteen, I know it doesn’t work that way.

  I inherited my mother’s body. We have the same shape to our face, angular and cut. The same normal brown eyes and the same thick normal brown hair, complete with matching cowlicks. I carry the same basic set to my shoulders and the same slightly-too-long stride. She always laughed and said it looked better on me than her, since I carried the correct mix of X and Y chromosomes necessary to pull it off.

  I also got her quick wit and ability to understand numbers. Dad builds and was more proud, I think, that his son took after his mother than himself. Except when her numbers became things that jumped from her twitching fingers to her blinking face and then to her now trembling body. After that, Dad had a hard time looking at either of us.

  So I finished high school early and took a job hauling concrete. Three months, I was running the mixer. Four months, the crew. Most of the guys didn’t care I was a kid. They all felt sorry for me, I think. Because of Mom.

  The clinic does not like family visiting the patients in their rooms. This seems odd to me, until I realize I would have to walk down a hallway full of medical machines—screens and monitors, blood pressure cuffs and thermometers, bored nursing assistants clad in cheerful pediatric scrubs covered in cartoon characters from my childhood.

  A pretty nurse, in a moment of candor, once told me the children’s characters make the nursing assistants less threatening. Except to a few patients. She had glanced down the hall as she spoke, her sweet round face momentarily darkening under her sweet blonde bangs.

  That was when I realized Mom’s institution was probably better proof of the “multiple worlds” theories she used to curl up inside of on dark winter nights, as if her proofs and numbers were the cozy blankets and the material covering her legs was just some large sheet of e-paper.

  In this moment, Mom wraps the rosary through her fingers and I swear the beads give off a hint of cinnamon.

  I lie to myself and say this place didn’t have a scent. That it was simply “institutional” like the school lunch room or a grocery store. But it has a sweet waftiness to it anyway, as if someone had scrubbed away all its context and overlaid onto the bare concrete the simplest smells humans generate—cinnamon buns. Peanut butter. Chemical cleaners meant to smell like “sunshine” but didn’t come near the complexity of what “sunshine” meant.

  Simple things, to calm. Simple things, to lock simple memories into a mind, but I didn’t want the memories I make today simply locked. I want clarity.

  Mom taps the table between us, a grand thing made of pine and metal, her finger moving first into the slice of noonday brightness cutting through the blinds, then out again. She does it once, twice, three times, then blinks, her fingers returning to the rosary.

  “How are you today, Mom?” It takes great effort on my part not to tap. It’s difficult for a child to not mimic a parent.

  Mom looks right at me, seeing me, then not, and her brow wrinkles. “There are waves, honey. You know that, right?”

  “Yes, Mom.” There are waves. Always waves one after another, each doing a small portion of the shaping of the world. They all interact, and they come together to make us what we are.

  “You need to study.” Blinking again. Then tapping. “It’s our calling. The studying. I know you hear it. I know.”

  I reach for that correct thing to say. A phrase that might make it into her mind, but at eighteen, I’m not sure what it is. “Do you remember when you used to drink coffee, Mom, then not drink it? You used to say the sudden withdrawal shifted your perception enough for you to see what you wanted to see.” She used to drink and not drink other things, as well. And occasionally smoke and not smoke.

  Her eyes narrow. “Coffee is not the same as the medications, son. I’m not stupid.”

  After that visit, she would only see me for an exact number of minutes at the exact correct time of the day for the same angle of sun to shine onto the visiting room table. And she’d tap, staring at me, wondering what I would try to cajole her into next, as if she were the child.

  It took me some time to figure out why the timing and why the angle: She spoke until the sun hit her tapping fingers the same way it did when I tried to make meds analogous with caffeine. Once the angle passed, and the iteration of me across from her did not change, I was dismissed.

  Her version of the multiple worlds never changed.

  Now

  I don’t like Professo
r Anders. Arrogant men learn early in life that lording achievements over others takes less effort than understanding a social system. Tina is right: He is a grade A narcissistic prick.

  The Cog Psy department uses his bluster to access the Temporal Jump Imager in the Quantum Lab on the other side of campus. All departments, of course, want access to the TJI. Archeology, History, Computer Science, even the Spanish Department came up with a plausible—and valid—request for time. Therefore, Imager time is rationed.

  The Temporal Jump Vehicle, on the other hand, is guarded. The Vehicle moves large objects, like people, backward. The universe shifts and you step out into the past. Blend in. Do double-blind observational studies on subjects from the beginning of their issues up until their very end. But the TJV requires Institutional Review Board approval. And someone, like me, with the right implants to do the jump.

  Professor Anders wants time in the TJV. I continue to wonder if my necessary and protective implants are the real reason he took me on.

  His pull will get me into the University’s Vehicle and I will finally have accessible scans. The military won’t show you which god is scraping corpses off your soul when you grate against the universe. I need to know. I need to understand why the itching does what it does.

  Anders paces now, about four feet away, between my desk in the CogPsy grad student cubicle farm and the door to his office. He’s shorter than me by an obvious amount, but he works out, so he’s strong. No one knows what color his hair is because he shaves it off. He looks more military than me.

  I enlisted after Mom stopped talking to me. If I couldn’t help her, I would help my country. I did two tours, the first without implants, the second, with.

  Every so often, someone asks me about my service. Questions such as how many dead bodies have you seen, or is it true you have to wear extra oxygen masks because of the methane bubbling up over there.