by Sam Sea
I will be back. Sky people will pay for destroying my bearskin! Let them just go back to sleep, he thought as he finally reached the first of the trees.
He moved slowly over forest edge, trying to find his father and his friends, wondering if they made it or not. He was sure he reached the place where they all were. He could see the cut branches and soil indented from people laying on it, something his father would have done as he waited for him to come back.
Maybe they just went deeper inside the forest. Maybe they will be back here. I will just wait here for the sky people to go back to sleeping and turn their suns off. Then I will go back to get my head.
But after a while, sky people didn’t go back to sleep. Half of their suns did, but they still lighted fires high and light was everywhere around the wall. Irkoniss felt the doubt start to creep inside of him.
Maybe my father left…If those were not straw men, and I have brought down their heads when it was time, maybe I would get back to leave with them. Irkoniss cursed his bad luck, all the way until the first of the sun rays announced the longest night over.
If I make a kill tomorrow, and run through the forest, maybe I will be able to catch up with them before they reach the village, he thought as he moved deeper inside the forest.
So he decided to find a place to hide until the night returns, so he could return and finish his job. He ventured deeper inside the forest, and picked a few barriers on his way. He climbed one tall tree all the way up with nearby leaves covering him completely. He looked over the tree tops, hoping to catch a glimpse of his father and their party, but nothing other than trees could be seen.
But by midday, he felt the worst thirst twist his mouth, and he came off the tree and moved toward the river.
That is when he spotted his opportunity, to make everything right again. A man was kneeling inside the river, with his back to him. He had a funny looking brown hat, and a light blue jacket that didn’t even cover his arms. He seemed to play with the river’s sand, and Irkoniss put his hand on the eagle and stepped closer to him.
But before he could make the eagle fly, a sound reached him behind him. As he turned to see what it was, a round wooden stick met his forehead, and he fell to the ground losing his consciousness.
Chapter 4 - Going Underground
The Old City - Capital
"Irkoniss....you have a very strange name. Does it mean anything in the place where you came from?" Silent asked curiously.
"No, no it doesn’t...My mom named me Irkoniss because it sounds like a wind coming through the branches of the trees, playing with the leaves. She liked that sound, so that's how she called me.”
"Your mom, seams she loved you very much."
"Yes, yes she did."
"Is she still alive?"
"I do not know."
That's not right. How come?
“She lives far away, on the other side of the empire, and I have not had a chance to go and see her.”
“Maybe you should..."
"Yes, I definitely think he should go and see his mommy..." Mikka said with a notable doze of sarcasm.
"I don’t think I can."
“How about you, Mikka, how about your mommy?"
“NO, my mom is dead. She was killed a long time ago... right in front of me."
“So we are going to stay in the Capital?” Silent asked after a long moment of silence was only interrupted with their forks hitting the plates as they ate their breakfast eggs. “I was hoping that I could see other planets…everything seems so unnatural here. People all seem just obsessed with themselves and everything seems to be created by them for them.”
Mikka and Irkoniss decided not to comment that.
“I really would like the planet where Irkoniss grew up. His stories are so fascinating…I wish I could see that forest.”
“No, we have to stay here for now. We need money to go anywhere else…Maybe once I finish the job, and I find a person I am looking for, we can go there. I’ve never been there myself. Would not mind seeing it…do they have butterflies there?”
“Yes, a lot of them…in the spring time, a whole sky is full of them…” Even Irkoniss got excited until he saw expression on Mikka’s face saying ‘I meant that for Silent to get excited, not you…’
“What man do you have to find?” Silent asked.
“The one that took everything from me.”
“If we are to stay on this planet, we need a good form of transportation,” Irkoniss told them.
“I really never thought about it…before, I was just by myself, I just use a jetter.”
“A flying scooter won’t do for taking all three of us around, especially if we get into a jam and need to run fast…”
“Yes. You are right. The scooter I bought a few days ago, I do not even like…the one I had before was so much better. This one is just a garbage…would not mind selling it and getting something better we could use.“
“Why don’t we just use what everyone else does…? I’ve seen tens of thousands of different people flying around in those huge yellow cans.”
“That’s a public transportation. And neither one of us can use it, you know…”
“What do you mean?” Silent asked again
“We are not chipped, you know.”
“What kind of transport did you have in mind?” Mikka asked Irkoniss.
“I know a guy who sells low-drags. For 2g credits, we can get one which is not auto-piloted. We might not use it on highways or around downtown, but it sure will be able to take us anywhere else on the planet.”
“We also cannot stay here.”
“There is a place we can go to, but you will not like it.” Irk told Mikka. She just nodded her head and told him to just have everything done, and make arrangements to take them where ever they would be safe. She wanted to prepare for work and wanted to distractions.
She relaxed every muscle on her body, and concentrated all her energy on her breading, just sitting still, feeling the silence of the apartment which Irkoniss has already left a minute ago. Silent would not disturb her. She might look at some video files or maybe would even sit next to her and do everything exactly as she was doing. In twenty minutes, Mikka felt refreshed and with a calmed mind, she opened up her communicator, and started going over the files, thinking of her next move, and what was the best place to assassinate one ECI commissioner.
She was still deep inside the files when Irkoniss came back.
“I have a sedan…We can go to my place right now. But I’m telling you again, you won’t like it.”
Mikka didn’t care at the moment. Her mind was already inside the game, and everything else was just a distraction.
“Let’s just go.”
They emptied the place in less than ten minutes, and went ten floors down to the garage.
The sedan was run-down green color, obviously much older than Mikka herself.
“You sure that old thing can move?” Mikka asked.
“Sure it can. It moves rather nicely actually… you will see.”
As she walked toward sedan’s already open door, she was surprised how roomy it was. She didn’t even need to lower her head to get in. Seconds later, she placed her folded jetter and her baggage in the back.
“You can sit in the front,” she told Silent to her delight as she set in the back and aired some of the files in front of her.
The sedan rose a foot off the ground, and Irkoniss took it out of the garage toward the city. They ran through the traffic of the old town, but before hitting the highway, Irkoniss took her to the tunnel which started to spiral down.
Irkoniss was right. Mikka didn’t like it. They took the tunnel to twenty floors below the surface before taking an exit to a four lane underground street. Both sides were packed with small shots selling everything anyone could want and need and their neon signs lighted the air. A lot of people were moving all around.
But as they went deeper in the ground and further along, the crowds thi
nned out and the shops gave way to residents of those that were less fortunate to live above the ground.
"You are right...I do not like to be in a hole."
"Most people don’t like it, but they still do it...there are actually a lot of people here who can afford to live above the ground. This is not only for the poorest of the poor..."
"Why do they do that? Why do they live here?"
"Because it is so cheap… and they are frugal...they want to save credits." Irk tried to explain.
"Why?"
"If they have enough money they can pay for a new body. Don’t you know that?"
"What?" Silent asked.
“Don’t you know she lived on Pluk her whole life? We have to explain it all to her.” Mikka cut in, tired of Irkoniss not accepting that Silent just did not know everything they did.
"They buy new body, you know, when you get old… You get a second life like that. If you have enough credits, you never have to die” Silent was not saying anything to that.
“That is the way to live forever… if you are a citizen." Mikka was confirming it.
"Shouldn’t it be free for everyone?” Silent asked.
“That’s not how things work.”
“How exactly does it work, and how much does it cost?"
"Well, I do not know how much the new body sells for right now, but before I was sent to Pluk,you could have gotten a decent 18-year-old for about 1 million credits. “
“So, you can just buy a new body?” Silent still could not understand it all.
“Well, not really…you need to go to the Emperor's Hospital. It is the only place in the whole empire that performs this sort of operation. There you can select from available models of bodies they have on ice, and they transfer you into your new body. I mean, they transfer all your memories and your inner beings, or what some like to call your soul. And you live in it as nothing has changed. Simple.”
“And you can choose any body if you have enough... credits?”
“Sure.”
“Can you become a boy if you were a girl?”
“Sure you can… but I bet it costs extra.”
“So if you want to be tall…”
“You just buy a tall body.”
“And you can do it as many times as you want to?”
“As many times as long as you have enough money to pay for it. That is why people save money so much…”
“So, one day you can be one person, and another you can be someone completely different?”
“Yes, but you know, nobody I know has that kind of credits..”.
“Wouldn’t two of you want that, I mean to become somebody else?”
“Well, it doesn’t exactly work like that. Your body changes, but your brain waves are the same. So, you are the same person, just with a different body.”
"Also, I and Irk can never do it.”
“Never? Why?”
“No. Ever. Our scans are in all police databases. We are already labeled as criminals, and if we even get close to the Emperor's Hospital, they would clip us and either send us to Pluk or worse.”
"Yeah, we are goners."
"That's sad. Isn’t there anything you can do about it?”
“No…and I am not sure I want to…”
“Why not?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain…”
It took a long moments of Silent to process all of that. They moved deeper inside the tunnel with lights becoming less frequent
“But what happens with your old body after you've been transferred to a new one?”
“I think they burn your old body...I don’t know. I've never been transferred. Don't know that much about it to tell you the truth.”
“And you Mikka?”
“No.”
“Would you like to if there was a chance?”
“I already told you…I am not so sure...Look at these people here, they live inside the hole, try to save every credit so they could have enough. They do not even live the lives they have. They live like shit, they eat shit, smell like it too...just so they can have a second life and continue to live like shit? Why don't they just live a good one now? One good life is better than countless shitty ones, if you ask me.”
“You are weird...”
“Yes, yes she is.” Irkoniss agreed with the smile.
"It's not too late for you though... If you go to the orphanage and become good, contributing member of the society, you can earn enough to buy another life for yourself...” Mikka told her “You are certainly smart enough. You deserve to have a normal life, you know…”
"Forget about it. I would rather stay with you and be 'goner.’"
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. You know, before I met you, I was always just scared...scared of everything..."
"That's normal, what you've been through."
"But now, when I am with you, I am not. I actually feel like nothing bad can happen to me, you know?" She said as Mikka rubbed her shoulder from behind.
"Here we are" Irk interrupted them as he stopped the vehicle in front of an unmarked metal door.
Down the dark passageway, few rats ran across the way.
"I guess we do not have to worry about what we are going to eat." Mikka said more as a joke.
"I actually had those on Pluk...not bad if you have time to roast them, if you dare to start the fire up." Silent said as Mikka and Irkoniss just looked at each other.
Irk got out of the vehicle, went to the wall and opened a control box. After pressing a number of keys, the wall suddenly came down. But the space that was suddenly lighted looked awe fully small. Their sedan could hardly fit in.
"I thought the space was cheap down here...Where do you expect us to sleep?" Mikka protested. “Inside the sedan?”
"No, Come this way" Irk said as he moved toward the end of the garage. There he opened another control box, and a second later, the back wall revealed the door which came down as he put his palm on it.
"This way…"
"This is not an apartment, this is not a garage, this is a dungeon..." Mikka said as she saw the stairs which spiraled toward the darkness below.
"We will be safe there. No scanners make it this deep."
But the space below didn’t look all that bad after all the lights got turned on. One of the walls was covered by a wall-to-wall screen showing a 3D image of a waterfall, with its clear blue water shinning off the hovering moonlight. Silent really liked it and stopped to look at it for a long moment, unsure if the scene was real or not, if she could walk in the water or not. She smelled the freshness of it, and as she walked toward it and extended her hand, it got even moisture.
She giggled and turn around to see them looking at her.
Then, Irkoniss moved his finger and the screen changed showing a dear grazing in the morning mist. Its head turned around, and big dark eyes zeroed in on Silent. As it slowly came closer to her, deer’s breath steamed out of his nostrils. She extended her hand and felt the softens of his skin as the animal let her caress her head.
“I love it!” She screamed happily.
Behind that wall was a comfortable bedroom with the ceiling covered in the same type of a screen, a workout room with all the weights for lifting and mats for stretching, a bathroom with a large enough tub to submerge completely inside, a small but neat-looking kitchen next to a storage room that was stocked with enough food to last them a lifetime.
Mikka considered that behind it must have been another room where Irkoniss must have keep all his valuables and his tools of a trade. She decided against pushing him to tell her about it just yet.
But to her and Silent’s delight, everything was surprisingly organized and clean, obviously the cleaning done very recently.
“So this is your hole in the ground…where you curl up and hide while you are not robbing people…this is where you come and sleep with your rat friends,” she teased Irkoniss who was obviously slightly nervous waiting to see how they would like the place.
>
“Well…I do not mind being a rat…certainly better than being a snake.”
“Why, don’t you know that the snake eats a rat.” Mikka answered as she wiggled her body to his and open her mouth as if she was trying to eat his head off.
Irk and Silent laughed.
“Never knew you could be funny,” she told Mikka.
“No, actually, this is not bad. Not bad at all,” Mikka admitted as she threw herself on a couch.
“Are you kidding me…? It beats living in sewage, living scared that you may end up on a spit.” Silent said all happy.
After they settled in, Mikka decided to go back to her job and look over the files again. The photos of the commissioner and his video feeds filled the air in the main room.
“You said you do not want to do that anymore.” Silent’s pleading words suddenly interrupted her.
“Yes, I know what I said…But we need money. And 50,000 credits won’t do it.”
“And why are you constantly upset at Irkoniss? It seems all he did, everything he did, he did to help us.”
“I know…that is why he is still breathing. But still, I have no desire to live my life thinking that he may do something stupid one day and put me in danger.”
Mikka took her eyes of the pictures and looked at Silent’s disapproving face expression.
“Back there when I saved you on Pluk, you said you wanted to learn to be like me…to kill like me. Now, have you changed your mind? Do you want to go back to being a little 10-year old who is ready to be a victim? Again, do you want me to take you to an orphanage? I can do that. I was fine when I didn’t have to worry about any of you.”
“Look, there is only one way this can work…” Mikka said after a while, pointing to two of them. “The only way our relationship can work is if you guys listen to me. If you cannot, do not want to, do so, I’ve already told you, we can all just split up.”