Long Fall

by Chris J. Randolph

  "Alright," she said, "we're ready." She thought she was ready, at least. She glanced up at the two troopers, Maria Chen and Vasiliy Romm, both standing above her with bloodless faces and bright eyes. The rest had wisely found something else to do. "You don't have to watch," she said.

  Neither looked away. She hadn't expected they would.

  She looked back down at her leg, and the sight made every muscle above her shoulders tense. She felt nauseous again. The thigh was malformed, bubbling outward around mangled bones trapped inside. Colors were a swirling mixture of red, purple, and lifeless yellow. No one ever wished for a compound fracture, but it certainly would have made her job easier.

  Amira swapped through a series of color filters that made various details beneath the skin visible. She saw veins and capillaries pulsing in rhythm with her heartbeat, waves of blood flushing into wide bruises.

  She dialed up the zoom on her headset and found her gaze marching along a rolling landscape of subtle diamond patterns, dotted with small hairs sprouting out of shadowed divots. At this magnification, she hoped she could pretend it was another piece of broken machinery.

  Amira lowered the pen and gave the surface a few trepidatious pokes. She felt nothing... like someone else's body. Then she activated the RF knife with a squeeze, and the tip lit up. Her headset automatically darkened the image to keep its bright light away from her dilated pupils.

  "I can do this," she mumbled.

  The heated blade approached.

  The skin didn't even quiver. The team's improvised nerve-blockers kept her leg perfectly still and detached.

  Her leg.

  Amira softened her grip and pulled back.

  "I can do this," she said again. "I fucking can."

  The pen's tip bobbed up and down. It was only a few micrometers, but it meant she wasn't fully in control.

  She didn't have time for full control.

  Amira squeezed the pen again and the RF knife came to life. She grimaced and lowered the tool with a sharp thrust, and flesh parted around it like gelatin. Even in the absence of pain, Amira let out a low growl and bared her teeth.

  "Chief?!"

  "I'm okay," she said and continue on. Her blade cauterized as it cut, keeping everything neat and tidy, and there was little damage despite her graceless entry. It was a good cut. It didn't get her any closer to the goal, but it was workable.

  "I'm okay," she said again. She refused to cry.

  Instead she focused on technique, confident it would push anything useless aside. She zoomed out, lowered the blade again and began a larger curved cut. Her other hand darted in with a pair of forceps and pulled the skin aside revealing torn tissue and rough bone jutting upward like treacherous mountains. Shattered fragments lay everywhere, white speckles and polka-dots in a landscape of red.

  Amira felt herself begin to gag.

  She quickly changed color filters and the subject no longer looked like something in a butcher's backroom, then her tweezers swooped in and began plucking shards out of the shredded muscle fiber. She collected each in a metal pan to the side, and they each landed with a ding that was barely audible over the rumbling APC.

  With a deft stroke of her blade, she quickly severed the threads of quadriceps that remained untorn. It felt needlessly destructive, but she wasn't a surgeon and she needed space to work.

  Besides... she'd fix whatever she broke.

  Amira tore a clean path to her target, revealing both open faces of her cracked femur. Her headset scanned and recorded the patterns of tissue—ossified and porous outer shell, spongy marrow inside—then it automatically measured the angle between the two ends and calculated how far to lift her foot to realign them. She forwarded the command, and the troopers slowly complied.

  Nothing tore.

  When they stopped, the two halves of the bone sat facing each other with only a small gap between them. Then Amira lowered her pen into the opening and began to sketch in a rough facsimile of the missing materials.

  Marrow came quickly, bubbling up like the froth on a good beer. Her gaze occasionally snapped to another section of tissue, and the pen used that new area as the source to imitate.

  "Marrow's finished," she said.

  Someone exhaled loudly. Then the APC bounced, the leg jostled, and her freshly drawn marrow ripped away. Nothing else was damaged, though.

  Amira took a deep breath and began again, more hastily than before. Instead of clean strokes, she worked with short, fast hatching, and the resulting material came out grainy, rough, and oddly striped.

  It would have to do.

  Next came bone, which printed slowly. She had no choice because the calcium compound wasn't one of her pen's native materials, and it struggled to keep up.

  She finished that as quickly as she could, then sprayed the new surface in an enzyme bath that would solidify her work, followed by amino acids to feed the fresh tissue. While that set, she began reconnecting the nerves that had been damaged by her hasty entry.

  Then it was time to move onto the muscle layer. Her hand was about to move into action when she paused. The APC lurched over some kind of hole, but everything miraculously remained in place.

  The short break gave her a second to stop working and think, and she realized with a start that she had a strange opportunity. Here was a blank canvas sitting in front of her, just waiting to be filled in. She could do her best forgery of the previous artist's work... or she could paint something entirely new.

  The thought struck her as terrifying and morbidly alluring in equal measures. Short of time to really think over the consequences, she chose the option that frightened her.

  Amira went back to work. She quickly reinforced the bone's outer structure with a non-reactive silicate that would make the patch stronger than any other bone in her body. She drew it as a diamond latticework whose edges trailed off smoothly. Whatever problems might arise, at least she knew her patch would hold.

  Next, she began mating the severed ends of her quadriceps together with Eireki-style myofiber. The new muscle was shades of amber and gold, composed of glittering threads woven together in intertwined helixes. It would be stronger, more resilient, and capable of storing an electrical charge.

  She built it up in layers, bundles twisted together into larger bundles until the entire organ was once again complete. To that she attached a small socket-port, then pulled back the flap of skin and closed it with an organic sealant that would naturally dissolve as she healed.

  The bruising was dark and pervasive, but she simply didn't have time to go in and fix that kind of cosmetic damage.

  With that, the task was done and Amira took off her headset. Then she reached down and untied the belt they'd used as a tourniquet. All that remained was to wait and watch.

  To her surprise and titanic relief, nothing leaked.

  She took a breath and the exhaustion finally caught up with her. She was mentally fatigued in a way she'd never experienced before, like strong hands had been pulling her brain apart for days on end. On top of that, her entire body was a heap of aches, some dull and others decidedly not.

  She had to count on the omnibodies to do the rest. She felt herself falling, and she was asleep before she landed.

  Chapter 23

  Adaptive Domain

  Charlie Hernandez was lying awake in bed. It was raining outside the apartment and he could hear fat drops striking the roof and overhang like a thousand tiny drumsticks. It reminded him of sounds he'd prefer to forget, the sort whose memories often kept him up in the middle of the night.

  Lisa Albright lay beside him on her side, asleep and peaceful, probably in some land far away from all the fucking horrors back on Earth. Blue-green light shone in through the window-slats and outlined her shape beneath the ratty blanket, small but swollen at the middle. There was new life inside of her.

  Charlie could hardly sleep recently, no matter the weather. If it wasn't nightmares of long passed battles or recent grisly crimes, it was the creep
ing feeling that something just wasn't right in the air. There was something coming for him, and he had no way to know what it was.

  He managed to get by on an hour or two a night, and the occasional cat nap when he could force himself, but the deficit was catching up to him. He felt like a marker that'd run out of ink, but he just kept scraping himself along the page.

  The thought occurred that he would probably kill a man for a single night's rest... but then again, he'd killed men for less. His service with Carbon Corps had started off idealistically enough, but at some point he realized he was manning guns for a paycheck, and the fact never left him.

  Charlie slowly turned in bed and lowered his feet to the floor. He stood up and tucked the blanket in behind him, then started hunting for his clothes.

  He found them in a heap on the floor and quietly slid inside. Pants from his Carbon Corporation uniform, combat boots, a utility belt, and what had once been an ugly sweater but which was now simply available clothing. There weren't a lot of options out there, and he was just glad to have something produced in a factory before the Fall. The things he saw people wearing on the street now made his heart heavy. It made him angry, without any good target to unload that anger on.

  He'd long ago come to depend on anger in times of need, and it seemed like he needed it more than ever before.

  Then he grabbed the one piece of clothing in his collection that was genuinely new. It was a short slate-grey jacket with bright orange stripes at the shoulders and elbows. This was what passed for a uniform in Amiasha's Civil Protector Corps.

  His brother would never admit it, but Charlie just knew the color scheme had bubbled up out of Jack's imagination. Even here in this amazing city, working his balls off day and night to keep innocent folks safe from harm, he couldn't escape his brother's shadow. He doubted he ever would.

  As he went to pick up his badge and weapon from the nightstand, he heard a rustling in the blankets.

  Lisa rubbed her eyes and looked up at him. "What are you doing up?" she asked groggily. Her slightly curly, strawberry blond hair was mussed from the pillow.

  "Got called in," he lied. Lisa had enough to worry about right that second; she didn't need Charlie's creeping neurosis heaped on the pile. "Someone has a lead on this Bright Cipher thing." There was at least a seed of truth in that.

  "Okay," Lisa said, continuing to watch him. She obviously knew something was wrong but neither of them wanted to talk about it. If there was any true thing Charlie knew in this world, it was that everybody already had plenty of their own shit to deal with.

  He picked up the badge and slid it into a hidden pocket, then lifted the sidearm (what they'd nicknamed a thumper) and gave it a quick inspection. Not that he understood a damned thing about it, or would even recognize it as a weapon if he didn't know. It looked like a thin piece of dark metal shaped to wrap around his knuckles, and it might've worked as a subtle piece of jewelry if it hadn't been designed to knock suspects clean off their feet.

  The thumper was yet another Amira Saladin special, but these too had Jack's fingerprints all over them. The weapon fired some kind of pulse that hit like a heavy beanbag, and dissipated completely after fifty yards to prevent unfortunate accidents.

  In another life, Charlie would've laughed at such a thing. Nobody went to war carrying a stun-gun. But lives changed.

  He slipped the thumper over his fingers, and felt a small buzz as it woke up and initiated contact. He could fire it at any time just as easily as he'd bend a finger or pucker his lips. It was just like another muscle suddenly integrated into his body.

  Charlie looked back to Lisa and said, "Go back to sleep, eh. You and the baby need rest."

  Too tired to maintain suspicion, she nodded and curled back up around her pillow. She was asleep and lightly snoring seconds later.

  Charlie gave her one last glance. Despite everything else, sometimes the sight of her was enough to make it all seem weightless. For a tiny instant, all the blood and shit and despair washed away, down a gutter and gone.

  And he could never seem to bear that feeling for long.

  Charlie left their flat and the door sealed itself shut behind him, leaving him on a walkway that spiraled up the outside of his building like the threads of a screw. The dizzying sight of Amiasha stretched out in front of him, a city full of neon light and activity at all odd hours of the day. The domed ceiling loomed above, so impossibly large that the sight of it gave Charlie a twinge of vertigo, with a surface that glowed soft blue speckled with brighter points like twinkling stars.

  The inside of Amiasha was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, and each night it surprised him just as much as the last.

  He marched along the walkway until he came to the nearest lift, which waited stashed between apartments for its passengers. He ducked inside and touched the top of the panel, then the lift whisked him away. Unlike nearly everything else in the alien city, that experience was shockingly familiar.

  The doors opened and Charlie stepped out onto the building's circular roof. The space was ringed with stables for Yuon Kwon, the alien vehicles that were Amiasha's brothers and sisters, and they sat there contentedly feeding from soft tubes.

  Charlie crossed the pad and found his personal flyer, Remmy, one of the new Selim Yuon Kwon which looked like the children of sport-bikes and tuna. Remmy's cradle cavity spread open as he approached and waited eagerly for his link.

  Charlie slid inside and the cavity closed, hugging him tightly from all around. A moment later, he started to see spots on his vision, and he reflexively blinked and blinked again. Then the link washed over him.

  He felt Remmy's presence like God's love, a wellspring inside of him that seemed to warm and comfort without any effort at all. What the creature felt was unconditional and pure, like a child's affection distilled to two-hundred proof.

  When they first linked, the name Remmy had popped into Charlie's head like a random memory plucked from the air. It was a name that brought back pain and resentment—the family dog which Jack had been forced to put down—but given to the small flyer, it took on a new life.

  Remmy and his pilot released the feeding hose and lifted up into the air, driven by a pair of organs near their aft which Charlie couldn't help confusing for his legs. The flyer climbed up into the traffic filled air and rocketed off toward its destination.

  The Selim flyer was faster and more maneuverable than the various other Yuon Kwon clotting the skies. It was smaller and could easily dart around the ponderous transports and cargo carriers, and that made their journey together disappointingly short.

  They swooped down at the precinct building, a red and rounded hexagon that sat wide and low over the ground, and they approached the rooftop. Remmy set himself down in an open stall, and with some regret opened his cavity once again.

  Charlie dropped back into his own body like being snapped out of a daydream. The feeling was like having his hand rapped by a teacher's ruler while imagining what color bra she was wearing.

  He stepped backward, stumbling just a little, and shook his head to clear the cobwebs. The combination of chronic sleep deprivation and a high-speed acid trip left him off balance for a few seconds, but it cleared quickly and he was off on his way.

  Two floors down, Charlie entered the administrative level and found his squad-room, an orange and lime office with dozens of desks in rows. Like the open streetway outside, there was always life here; men, women, and the sexless Sey Chen aliens battled piles of paperwork, while others walked purposefully past from one meeting room to the next.

  There was endless work for Amiasha's Protectors, and never enough people to do it.

  The squad's chief, Gibbs, approached. He was an older black man with a South African accent, and a very stately mustache. He had a big chin and kind eyes.

  "What the fuck are you doing back here, Hernandez?"

  Eyes lied sometimes.

  So did Charlie. "Had some ideas about Bright Cipher. Thought I'd come in
and see if they panned out."

  Gibbs squinted at him. "Yeah, bet you did. Doesn't matter. That partner of yours is still at it, too."

  Charlie looked past the chief and saw Shazz hard at work. He was Sey Chen, a species whose body filled roughly the same space as a human's, but couldn't have been shaped more differently. Thin, backwards-bent legs held up a torso shaped like a swollen football, where his slit of a mouth and pointed ears resided. A pair of stalks held his head-pod and its bright green eyes, while arms on either side branched at the elbow, resulting in four diminutive hands.

  The entire shape of Shazz reminded Charlie of some high-tech broadcast antennas he'd seen, and after some thought, he doubted it was a coincidence.

  Shazz held his hands out on either side of a metallic orb, and an electric lightshow connected them. The device had a diagonal slice across it like a bishop from a chrome chess-set, and the surface glowed red wherever Shazz's lightning danced.

  "Good," Charlie said, "I could use the help."

  Gibbs turned and allowed Charlie past.

  When Charlie got to his desk, Shazz opened his eyes and the arcs of electricity disappeared. He turned and brought his two pairs of hands together, and the air between them began to faintly throb with light. "Back already, Hernandez?" The words had a slight buzz, but otherwise sounded unnervingly human.

  "You know me," Charlie said. "Just can't get enough."

  Shazz's eyes rolled in opposite directions. Charlie was told this was how the Sey Chen laughed, but he couldn't help wondering sometimes.

  "You're still working on Bright Cipher?" Charlie asked.

  "Yep. Not getting anywhere, though. I just can't see the waveform."

  Charlie squinted. "Come again?"

  "Sorry," Shazz said. "The pattern."

  Charlie sat down and pulled the case file out of his desk, then flopped it down with an audible slap. He opened it and started idly flipping through pages and pictures. It looked like a big mess.