by Mark Wandrey
He had a little smile as he walked out of the shop, hat pulled down low. The first several people he passed either just nodded to him or didn’t pay him any attention at all. He was glad he’d given her 100 credits. It was probably more profit than she’d make in a month or more of hard work. It also decreased the chance she’d want to talk about him. At least, he hoped.
Satisfied with his cover, Sato oriented his location against a map in his pinplants. He was embarrassed to realize he was 11 kilometers from their hotel. “Oh, crap,” he said to himself. “Rick is going to kill me.”
Sato immediately turned back in the direction of their hotel and started walking. He didn’t bother waiting for a return bus, for several reasons. One, he didn’t know how long he’d have to wait. Two, he was desperately low on Mexican currency. Finally, three, he’d been too busy riding along to take note of his surroundings, so he didn’t know how far the nearest store might be on the route back.
The map in his pinplants turned out to be even less useful than he’d feared. More than half the businesses listed on the map were nowhere to be found. Either the maps just sucked, or the last few months of war and occupation had played hell with businesses. He guessed the answer could be both. Whatever the reason, it meant he couldn’t count on the map for anything more than basic directions back to the hotel.
It was four kilometers before he found a store. However, it wasn’t suitable for his purposes. It sold only the basics, like corn flour, fresh vegetables, and some meats. There was no seafood, except some river fish. Nemo’s bud had been pretty specific. He left with a nod to the cashier and walked on.
The next store had even less; it was a farmer’s market. He picked up some fresh fruit for himself and Rick, though, for a few pesos. The merchant gave him a queer look, both at Sato’s appearance and his unwillingness to haggle. To most Spanish-speaking cultures, haggling was a way of life. If you didn’t haggle, you were crazy. Or a stranger. He moved on quickly.
As he entered the optimal range for his pinplant connection to Rick, he crossed his fingers that he wouldn’t instantly be assailed with a string of curses and accusations. He’d been gone just over three hours. Nothing awaited him. He checked the connection and got the correct handshake response from his guardian’s own pinplants. Everything was fine, Rick was just asleep.
Well, that’s good, Sato thought and continued his search for a store that had what he needed.
The heat and humidity were oppressive. He didn’t mind as much now, since his apparel was better suited for the climate. He was sweating, but the new/used clothing was of a woolen blend that kept the sweat from building up against his skin. It was counterintuitive that a fabric so good at keeping you warm in the cold was also good at keeping you cooler in the heat. He guessed it might be alpaca or llama instead of wool. Not that he’d really know the difference.
When he was less than two kilometers from the hotel, he came across the Mexican equivalent of a supermarket. “Bingo,” he said, and went in. It brought to mind a faint memory. Stores had looked like this once, somewhere, sometime. Metal grocery carts were lined to one side, and he could see an extensive produce section, a meat market, and a frozen food aisle. He nodded and headed for the meat.
There was a lot of chicken, beef, and pork to be found. A number of signs placed on the old-fashioned glass displays didn’t translate properly in his pinplants. Regional dialects, he thought. A man with a blood-smeared apron came out of the back pushing a cart piled with freshly cut meat on Styrofoam trays, wrapped in cellophane.
“Can I ask a question?” he said to the man.
The butcher looked at him, blinking as he looked at Sato’s chest, where the words had come from his translator. “Yes, what is it?”
“Do you have any fresh seafood?”
“I have frozen fish.”
“No, fresh. Not frozen.”
“All I have are a couple live lobsters.”
“Oh, perfect!”
An hour later, he checked out with his cart. Inside were two live lobsters in a thick plastic bag, some more fresh fruit, bread and lunch meat, and a package of frozen seaweed that looked like it had been in the freezer for a century.
The lady at the checkout kept shaking her head as she punched in the prices of each item on the old cash register. Sato marveled at it. The thing was a manual register. It made a whirring sound as she added items. A whirring sound…
“Did you pick some candy, Taiki?”
He looked up at his mom and smiled, holding up a package of strawberry Pocky.
“I should have known.” She took it and handed it to the clerk. She had to be a hundred years old, he thought, as she punched the price into her register and pressed a button. The machine made a whirring noise, and he was handed back his treat. He smiled huge and hugged his mom.
“I said 442 pesos, young man.”
Sato blinked and looked at the clerk, who was in turn staring at him with a hint of concern on her face. Sato blinked, holding onto the memory. My mother, he thought. Her face was clear in his mind. He felt unshed tears in his eyes. He could remember his mother!
“You don’t have enough money, do you?” the clerk asked.
With an effort, Sato brought himself to the present. He pulled out their money and began looking through it. “I only have 260 pesos,” he said. She shook her head. “But I have a thousand quetzal, too.”
“We don’t like to take them,” the woman said. Then she looked at him and smiled. “The lobsters for your girlfriend?”
He almost said no, then stopped himself. “Yes,” he lied. “It’s our…anniversary!”
“Oh, that’s sweet. Okay,” she said and reached under her register. It was a chart with all manner of Central American currency. She calculated the exchange and took his money, giving him change in pesos.
“Thank you so much, she’ll be so pleased.”
The bags were heavy and unwieldly, mostly because of the gallons of water holding the lobsters. The butcher warned him that the lobsters would only live for a few hours, and to cook them soon for the best flavor.
Luckily he was only a short distance from the hotel. He had to stop twice to rest his arms. “I’m not used to carrying stuff in gravity,” he admitted to himself. The hotel was in view, so he bucked up, lifted the heavy bags, and continued on.
The clerk was doing some sort of paperwork at the desk. He nodded when Sato went by, so Sato nodded back and walked to their room. The truck hadn’t moved, but the door to their room was open. He stopped in the doorway, the dim interior harder to see in. Then he saw a tiny figure lying on the floor, its head covered with Nemo’s bud, arms writhing and flashing with scintillating patterns of light. A familiar doll was lying next to the figure.
“Oh, shit,” Sato said, and dropped the bags. “What did you do?”
* * * * *
Chapter Nine
Rick came alert instantly at the sound of Sato’s concerned voice and the bags hitting the floor with an unusual plopping sound. His pinplant-augmented memory immediately produced a playback of his surroundings for the last several hours. He was horrified by what he saw.
When he’d decided to sleep, Rick had set several criteria for being awoken. Anyone breaking into the room, of course. A call from Sato. The truck being messed with. Those were the criteria of alert. Anything else would just be observed. He’d needed to do this because as soon as Sato left, the Nemo bud had started to crawl around the room, exploring.
Rick decided the under-sized Wrogul couldn’t unlock the door, so he didn’t set up an alert for the cephalopod’s movement. He wasn’t alerted to the alien’s wanderings, but they were recorded.
The bud slithered around the room, examining the bed, squirming up onto it, and across the sheets. It moved onto the dresser and found the old-style television. It turned it on and watched some of the Spanish language programs. Getting bored, it then took the back panel off the television and took the control board apart.
“Pr
imitive,” it decided and left the machine in pieces.
A sound outside the door attracted it, and the bud quickly slithered down to the floor and across the room. It listened at the door. Rick’s hearing could only detect a voice, but not the words spoken. After a moment, the bud moved right to the edge of the door. There was a gap underneath. No more than five millimeters. A tiny gap even to the small Wrogul.
First a tentacle explored the gap, getting the measure of it. A moment later, the entire body began to squeeze through. In bare moments, with a slight squishing sound, it was through and outside.
Several minutes passed, then the door opened slowly. No breaking took place; the lock could clearly be heard clicking from a key. Rick slept on as the little girl walked in, her head covered completely by the Wrogul.
She walked to the open tank and bent over, submerging her head in the water for a long minute. Then she stood, walked to the center of the room, sat on the floor, and lay down. The only movement afterwards was the slight pulsing of the Wrogul’s mantle as it used the water it had just gathered to breathe, the girl’s own respiration, and two of the alien’s tentacles penetrating her skull.
Rick hadn’t laid down on the bed; he didn’t need to. The armor locked itself in place, and he simply sat in the chair while his biological body slept. At Sato’s exclamation, he came instantly alert, replayed the last several hours in an instant, and cursed.
“Damn it, what’s it doing?” he said, and moved with blinding speed toward the Wrogul.
“No, stop!” Sato snapped just before Rick would have grabbed a tentacle to pull it away from the little girl. “Look at the tentacles.” He knelt next to the pair and carefully pointed at the girl’s temples. Two of the Wrogul’s tentacles went into her skull, one on either side of the temples.
“What’s it doing?” Rick asked.
Sato sighed and shook his head. “I have no idea. We should have locked it up before I left.”
“I didn’t think it could get out,” Rick admitted. He reviewed the memory again. “Damn thing went through a gap under the door this big.” He made a tiny space with his fingers.
Sato nodded. “They have almost no bones in their body, just like Earth’s octopus. I remember…seeing…”
“Sato!” Rick snapped, bringing the other man around. “Now isn’t the time. What do we do?”
Sato moved his translator from inside his shirt to outside so it could see the Wrogul’s pulsing colors.
“It’s not talking,” Rick said. “I already read the color patterns.”
“Nemo’s bud,” Sato said, shaking his head. “It needs a name; this makes it harder. What are you doing?”
The two tentacles withdrew from the child’s head with no sound, leaving behind only a tiny trace of blood. Rick cringed slightly at the sight. The Wrogul slid back and onto the floor while the little girl’s eyes opened and blinked up at the roof.
“My Nina!”
“Oh, hell,” Rick said as the old cleaning woman swept Sato out of the way and charged into the room, sweeping the girl into her arms like she was a ragdoll. She wiped the tiny amount of blood away and cried, “What have you done to my Nina?”
“I-I’m fine, Nana,” the little girl said quietly. Nina took her grandmother’s face in her hand and turned it toward her. “I see you, Nana. I see you!”
“W-what? You can see? How?”
Nina pointed at the Wrogul, who by then had slithered back up its support tank and was floating on the surface of the water, content colors flashing benignly. The girl waved at the alien, who lifted a tentacle and waved back. She smiled and laughed.
“He cured the girl’s blindness?” Rick asked, looking between the two.
“Apparently,” Sato agreed.
“How?”
“Nobody understands the mechanisms of how a Wrogul does what it does.” Sato stared at the flashing alien. “We don’t even know how they think.”
“I don’t know how, but thank you!” the grandmother said. She looked from Sato to Rick, doing a slight double take at his glowing blue eyes, and fled with the girl in her arms before Rick or Sato could say a word.
“Could you say something before you go performing brain surgery next time?” Rick asked the bud. It looked like the bud was asleep, floating in the tank and only emanating gentle meaningless lights at random. Snoring? “I don’t think this is going to play out well,” he said.
Sato went back to the door and picked up the heavily-laden bags, moving to the room’s old and worn dresser. For the first time, Rick noticed the man’s dress. It was an amazing transformation, to say the least. If the scientist had walked past him on the street outside, Rick doubted he would have recognized him. The only thing incongruous about his dress was the floppy hat pulled low over his face. It hid his Japanese features well, though.
“Good disguise,” Rick said.
“Thanks,” Sato replied as he laid out the food he’d brought. “An old shopkeeper set me up.”
“What? Why?”
“She thought I was here to fight the Mercenary Guild. Her son is a merc, and she doesn’t know where he is, or if he’s even alive. I didn’t tell her she was wrong.”
“Lucky she didn’t call the police,” Rick said.
“I get the feeling there is no love for the invading mercs here.”
“You’re probably correct.” Rick looked through the food, noting the two lobsters waving their antennae at him, then the fruits and vegetables Sato had brought. “No meat?” Sato moved some apples aside to reveal a pack of beef jerky. “Good enough.” The two began eating.
Once Rick was full, he closed his helmet and belched. Mostly fruit and veggies, with a little beef jerky. Apparently Sato wasn’t much for meat himself. He shrugged. To each their own. His hunger was satiated, and his armor said vital materials were being replenished. He even felt rested after his sleep. He felt almost optimistic.
Shortly after they finished eating, the Wrogul stirred and bright blue eyes looked around. Complex flashes of multicolored lights followed. “Hello, Rick and Sato.”
“You were supposed to stay in the room,” Rick snapped immediately.
“I sensed an injured being and wanted to help.”
“You should have woken Rick,” Sato said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re irresponsible,” Rick said. Sato cringed and gave him a sidelong look. “It’s true. You admitted it. Nemo, and if I understand, this is basically Nemo, never, ever showed the slightest inclination to exercise self-control in just about anything.” Rick smacked his chest with a metallic clunk. “I’m a walking, talking example. He couldn’t cure my brain injury after one try, so he fucking grew extra Rick Culpers to experiment with.”
“Your words suggest you are not pleased with this,” Nemo’s bud said.
“I’m pleased I’m alive, of course. I don’t remember dying. I know it was an important mission where I died, mostly because Sato shared the log entries with me. But you mass produced me after my death. You didn’t do it to…what, resurrect me?”
“No, I was experimenting.”
“Oh, so you admit it.”
“Why would I not?” The translator rendered the Wrogul’s words with a deadpan tone, leaving Rick with no doubt the Wrogul had no issue with what it was doing. “Nemo was doing vital research on the Human genome and understanding the somewhat unique operating mechanisms of your intelligence.”
“Making a small army of Rick Culpers was wrong,” Sato said quietly.
“Nemo and you had numerous conversations about these ideas of right and wrong. He even conceded that, in some cases, such a code of morals makes sense. However in this case, Rick Culper was dead. What difference was there if he tinkered with the leftovers?”
“Jesus Christ,” Rick hissed. One of the blue eyes found him, and he shivered inside the armor at the gaze. “We believe we exist from a divine spark,” Rick said. There, I said it, so I guess I believe it.
“Divine spark,”
Nemo’s bud repeated. “Are you speaking of a religious belief?” Rick nodded, and a tentacle pointed at him. “You are referring to a mortal soul; is this the correct term?”
“Yes,” Rick replied, struggling with a growing anger.
“I would ask you then, why are you here?”
“Because you grew me,” Rick snapped. “Grew a bunch of mes.”
“Of course, that is obvious. No, I mean you, the soul of Rick Culper. If it exists, how are you here? Shouldn’t this soul have moved on to whatever you believe comes afterwards? Heaven? Nirvana? The Summerland? Valhalla? Yet here you are.”
Rick ground his teeth inside the armor, glad the Wrogul couldn’t see him, because he was sure the look on his face was one of feckless consternation. “That little girl wasn’t dead,” Rick said as evenly as he could. “She didn’t need to be brought back.”
“She was blind from a head injury some time ago. I fixed it.”
“Did you ask her?” Rick asked.
“Why?”
Rick turned his head and speared Sato with a glare. “Give me one good reason not to leave that thing here now and just get on with whatever you want to do here?” The Wrogul looked at both men but didn’t say anything in its defense.
“Why are you here?” Sato asked the bud. “Really, no hinting about a trip to Azure or anything.”
The Wrogul looked at Sato for a long time, its mantle rhythmically pumping oxygenated water through its gills. “Nemo knew you were on a voyage of discovery. The pinplants he installed for you aren’t a new design, they’re the same ones he removed from your brain many years ago.”
“What?” Sato asked. The words all made sense, but the statements didn’t.
The bud paused again, though not as long this time. “I’m here because he thought you’d need him, but he couldn’t leave. As soon as the pinplants were replaced, you started remembering things, correct?” Sato nodded. “That’s why you’re here. I’m predicting a 99% probability we’re on Earth because that’s where your story starts.”