Dealbreaker

by L. X. Beckett

  Upton gave a dismissive snort. “Cockroaches like Barnes never die on their own.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve overheard any chatter among the pilots?” Misfortune asked. “Is she sharing plans with Maud?”

  “Maud’s pinging and Frankie hasn’t answered. But anyway, can’t you just chase ’em down?” Champ said.

  Misfortune and Upton shared a glance. Weighing whether to tell him something?

  “Diplomatic has filed a complaint against the Kinze for breaking the treaty. They’ve widecast a request for an advocate or ombudsman.”

  “Rubi Whiting’s work?”

  “Who else?” Upton growled. “In any case, our allies need to tread carefully. They have to be seen obeying all the rules.”

  Champ kept his eye on Upton; Misfortune didn’t have any tells. “So, fine, send me after ’em. I’ll sort Barnes.”

  A thin-lipped smile from Misfortune. “You will indeed.”

  “I outweigh the woman by forty pounds. I don’t have to earn some kind of virtual badge in beating her to a pulp; I just need to tase or sedate her and lock her into a hibernation pod.”

  “It’s three versus one, remember? Her husbands?”

  Champ scoffed. “You can’t tell me you think Ember Qaderi’s up for a brawl?”

  Misfortune mojied weariness at Upton, clearly saying You see what I have to deal with?

  “Son,” Upton said. “We’re just going to help you along. Get you over this emotional hump.”

  “Hump?”

  “The hesitations.”

  “Help me how?” A moment of fear, so total that he felt his scrotum clench. Champ refused to let himself look at the scalp scars on the old botomized servant.

  “Augments to your augments to your augments.”

  Champ fought to hold a neutral expression.

  “Now show me your sacral plug—I’m going to put in a pathway monitor and watch as you and Misfortune spar.”

  “A monitor? That’s it?” He knew he’d protested too much from their chilly expressions, but he crossed his arms. They wanted him aggressive, right?

  “That’s it,” Upton affirmed. “For now.”

  Champ turned, baring his plug, pretending he had a choice.

  As Upton connected, a sim painted itself over Champ’s augments. He sank into VR, finding himself in a densification camp dating to midway through the Setback. A food queue? Yes. He was lined up behind Misfortune. They had been cast as refugees, waiting on a dispensation of protein, vitamins, and hydrogel amid a hungry crowd.

  He scanned the line for toons that resembled Frankie, Maud, or Ember Qaderi.

  “I thought you’d enjoy hitting me today,” Misfortune said, seeming to read his thought.

  “I wouldn’t say enjoy.”

  “Therein lies the problem. Here, we’re going to give you some Conviction.”

  Buy-in drugs added to the sensory immersion of a sim, making it harder to tell constructed reality from life on the Surface.

  Champ obediently chewed the stiff, drug-laced marshmallow. As its dose kicked in, a cold autumn wind dragged its teeth over him. He tasted staleness in the air, a burnt, oily smell. They were nearing the front of the food queue, and now he spotted a woman dispensing food and water: a golden-swan somatotype, like Irma. Whatever was going to happen would happen there.

  And, indeed, as they arrived, she spread her hands apologetically.

  “Sorry,” she said to Misfortune. “Our records show you got a morning ration. Priority dispensation goes to people who’ve fasted since last night.”

  Misfortune stepped aside with a sardonic expression and a please, after you gesture to Champ.

  His buy-in meds were kicking in now—the sim’s hyperrealistic graphics and the scents already supplied by his imagination were getting ever more intense. The woman behind the table had a chipped tooth. A hopeful rat was circling the food storage pod.

  Champ stepped to the front of the line.

  Misfortune moved with the speed of a striking crocodile, catching the aid worker by the wrist before she could offer a food package to Champ.

  Cry of surprise and pain from the victim du jour. Even though Champ knew they were deliberately manipulating him, he felt a burst of outrage.

  Misfortune would mock him if he did the reasonable thing and tried to negotiate—he’d already learned that the hard way. So, he stepped in without so much as a hey, back off. He caught the offending hand, attempting to break Misfortune’s grip.

  “Let her go,” he said, bracing for a punch.

  Instead, Misfortune flicked his left temple with her index finger.

  White light exploded across his field of vision. He smelled … burnt blood? No, roses. No, meat.

  “Come on,” she growled. “This a fight or a dance party?”

  Spark of anger. Ducking as she tried to club him with the aid package, Champ swung, roundhouse. To his surprise he connected, knocking Misfortune back against the table, loosening her grip on the food.

  With a great yank, he wrenched the aid packet away, backing up with it, placing his body between Misfortune and the blonde.

  “Freeze sim,” Misfortune said, and then, presumably to Upton: “You see?”

  He shrugged. “The Solakinder have spent a century training people to pick flight over fight.”

  “I can stop Frankie,” Champ said. “Gimme a chance. This isn’t nec—”

  “Isn’t there someone else we can send?” Upton asked. “It’d break Irma’s heart to mulch him.”

  Champ let out a nervous chortle.

  “It’s not a joke.” Misfortune flicked his left temple again. “What do you think we’re going to do here, Chevalier? Ship you back to Canada in a sarco pod so you can sell us out to @GlobalSec? We’re in the endgame. Zero tolerance for fails.”

  Another flick to the side of his head.

  “Either the Foreclosure goes forward or we’re all fucked. And if we’re fucked—”

  Another flick, and he was legit furious now.

  “—if we’re fucked, I will personally make it my business to have Upton slice out your free will with a rusty scalpel so I can set you to mopping cholera wards until your organs liquefy.”

  “You can’t—” He put up a hand to block the next flick—their forearms met bone-to-bone, and pain rang up his arm, adding red to the edges of his vision. “You can’t just go pounding people willy-nilly.”

  “No, you can’t. That’s the bloody problem.”

  “You just said I’m the only game in town, old lady,” he said. “Your bones would turn to powder in deep space, and nobody else is experienced in station ops and nullgrav.”

  She bared her teeth.

  Champ felt an electrical tingle from the vicinity of his implant plug. With it came an urge to feed Misfortune her own fingers.

  Misfortune’s toon morphed into Frankie.

  “Barnes is able for a fight, I guarantee you. If you can’t target anyone I choose and throttle the life from them, with or without provocation, if you can’t show enough initiative to strike first—”

  She got under his block and flicked his temple again.

  Conditioning, Champ thought, the little temple taps are some kind of …

  Something interior roared; he had a weird, sudden, all-encompassing desire to open his mouth and bite into her.

  “You said you wanted to step up—”

  “You want initiative?” He popped her in the nose.

  No surge of guilt this time, no faint sense of horror at the feel of cartilage crunching under his hands. There was a rush, instead. Loud, gratifying—like ripping hot, rare, dripping steak off the bone with his teeth while simultaneously having sex.

  Misfortune, disguised within the toon, was a brick; her head barely snapped back. A very Frankie Barnes sigh—that air of holding her temper, putting up with incompetents, escaped her.

  “Was that not hard enough for you?” Champ went for her, tooth and claw, throwing himself at the wall of her body,
kicking and clawing and punching. Every blow landed. Every cry of pain came with a sweet, righteous kickback of emotion and sexual heat. He threw her against the aid table and, when the ballerina blonde tried to get him to stand down, he slapped her too, hard as he could.

  Fuck you all! Are they playing with my endocrine system? Augments to the augments to my augments …

  It’s this, botomy surgery, or mulching.

  He gave in to it.

  The edges of the Sim melted then, color running like wax until Misfortune and Upton stood before him in a featureless room. They raised a fallen sim of Frankie Barnes to her feet. She stood, panting, head down, not fighting back.

  “Come on,” Misfortune said. “Gonna let her catch her breath?”

  This wasn’t—“She’s down.”

  “Touch your head, here, if you need to.” Upton indicated the temple, where Misfortune’d been flicking him.

  Uncontained aggression. That was what they wanted. “I don’t … I don’t need to…”

  “Prove it.”

  Head down, helpless, just standing there.

  Mulched.

  “Hit! Now!” Misfortune rapped out the order.

  Champ howled, burying a blow deep in Frankie’s gut. She folded without a sound, and he gagged acid over a burst of angry but pleasant but disgusting feels—food-and-sex satiation again.

  “Again!”

  He struck. This time, she fell.

  “Give her a few kicks.”

  Champ reconfigged his onesie for a hard boot, drawing back a foot.

  Misfortune roared. “Why are you wasting my time, Chevalier?”

  Champ kicked. Once. Again. Again. Rage and joy broke through him, savoring it—the snap that might be a rib popping, the boot sliding in a smear of what was probably blood. Fury, joy, fury, elation.

  Serves you right. Accuse me of treason?

  Arousal.

  His entire body began to shudder.

  “Augments off,” Misfortune said suddenly.

  The white room stayed the same; Misfortune and Upton, likewise, were unchanged. Unmarked, too … he hadn’t landed a blow on the old crocodile.

  The two of them were nodding over a shareboard he couldn’t see. Probably, he guessed, tracking his brain chemistry as he stood there, mid-orgasm, hating himself.

  At his feet …

  Champ looked down, past his torn knuckles, past the constriction in his groin—his shrinking cock, slick in soiled onesie material and his own juices, past his red-splashed reinforced toes.

  He made himself swallow bile.

  On the floor was the botomized worker. She stared up at him, mute and fearful, aspirating blood.

  Misfortune walked over to Champ, put a hand on his shoulder, and then pressed a slow, deliberate finger against his right temple.

  “Imagine Frankie and Teagan9 looking up at you like that. Imagine Ember Qaderi.”

  The nausea vanished. Euphoria and pleasure flooded his body; his cock rose again.

  “Do what I say or you’re the one gets mulched,” he whispered, drawing back his boot.

  “At last!”

  “Zero? What do you think?” asked Upton.

  “Yes,” Misfortune replied. “This I can work with.”

  CHAPTER 31

  NONINTERFERENCE ZONE, PROCYON SYSTEM

  EMERALD STATION (INFORMAL DESIGNATION: SNEEZY)

  Babs1 had never held anyone prisoner before, naturally enough, but Scrap made it clear from the start that there was no chance he would take the Emerald crew up on the old-timey idea of an honorable officer’s parole. Let him out of the birdcage-sized bell jar and he’d run for the ducts, start setting fires, and generally go full-on nuisance.

  It was reckoned cruel to keep human prisoners in isolation. Who knew how Kinze reacted? Scrap’s only complaint so far had been about the dark matter attractors spewing pixie dust in Sneezy’s vicinity, apparently disrupting its comms. He couldn’t talk to his people, and his outrage about that was limitless.

  Babs1 was attempting to be good company, but figuring out what a Solakinder sapp and an alien saboteur might have in common … well, who knew?

  Also, there was the small matter of running the station.

  Teagan9’s Mayfly™ body was managing, with KangaBOT support, to continue to circulate blood and air. She was a husk, nothing more. Were there ships out there? Scanners that could see her, register that stuttering heartbeat as a sign of life?

  As per her last request, Babs1 was also tending an organ pig, a limbless, mindless pouch of flesh, blood, and transplant organs, in a tank in the wet room.

  The only indication that the deception might be working was negative evidence—nobody had salvaged them yet.

  Babs1 had tiptoed to the edge of considering whether they could use the last of the eggwhite and other printstock to make a new Mayfly™ body, to attempt to EMbody a Teagan10 backup into it. But that would leave nothing to feed her. Not to mention that traumatic reEMbodiment could damage Teagan.

  The Kinze equivalent of life signs appeared to be electrical charges, positive and negative flows of energy humming within the caterpillar structures Babs1 thought of as the entity’s “needles.” Scrap insisted he didn’t need to eat, in the conventional sense, as long as he had a bit of heat, water, and a pinch of carbon-heavy printstock. Over time, he digested the stock and produced new needles. He had grown a little in the process … Babs1 estimated he’d leveled to the size of a biggish plum.

  There was so much the two of them, captured and captor, couldn’t talk about. If Babs1 inquired about Scrap’s problem with the pixie dust, for example, they were effectively asking for technological data about offworld comms tech. That was the sort of information the Kinze might happily provide, only to then tell you that you owed them this year’s wheat crop or had violated the noninterference agreement.

  When in doubt, lean on your fandoms. Babs1 resorted to playing Scrap all their teen sleuth media, starting the impromptu viewing fest with all ten seasons of Veronica Mars. As it ran, they laboriously explained the vintage human social dynamics. They unpacked toxic masculinity and one-on-one heteronormative marriage. Guns and US honor culture, cars and US car culture …

  Scrap probably wasn’t interested in the ancient history of beings he referred to as Primitive-Them, but spieling about the early twenty-first century kept Babs1 on safe conversational ground, allowing them to keep Scrap company while leaving plenty of intellectual resources left over for station operations. There was a good deal to do: repairing fire damage to Sneezy, sustaining the organ pig, getting the power membrane up, and trying to find a way to increase the station’s limited computing resources.

  There should have been plenty of computing tish out here, enough even to try launching Happ. But the server-room fire had gutted the supply; they would need a complete rebuild before Babs1 could reconsider expansion.

  Repairs meant power first. They’d unfurled additional power membrane, turned the lights on full, and used a BeetleBOT contingent to scrape the burnt material off the walls.

  It was when they were watching Scooby Don’t 2055 that Scrap dropped what had been a long, sulky silence. “This domesticated mammal.”

  “Yes?” Babs1 checked in with the story. In sim, Shaggy and Scooby were befriending a tuxedo cat.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s your…” It paused for translation. “Avatar.”

  “I’m currently wearing more of a Persian look, but indeed—my toon is a cat.”

  Babs1 saw Scrap access the station wiki. “Persian subspecies. This is merely a matter of coloration.”

  “You shouldn’t ignore the fluff factor.”

  “The difference is essentially cosmetic.”

  “I can’t even imagine how an assembly of bioelectric fibers would perceive VR footage of a cat,” Babs1 said. “I’m not asking how, mind … Don’t bill me for the information.”

  “Scrap no longer has the right to approve purchase orders for the All.”

/>   “I beg your pardon?” Did that mean Babs1 could ask it questions now? That seemed too good to be true. Still … what about a leading statement? “I suppose #Missionfail has you in trouble with your superiors.”

  Another translation pause. Then: “Possibly.”

  Babs1 let that sit, focusing on a complicated transaction involving Scooby snacks and catnip. Could they exploit this?

  “You were saying?” Scrap said.

  “I cannot understand how you perceive this e-state, or the video feed itself. Frankly, I’m not sure how an expert would explain my ability to parse entertainment graphics. They certainly weren’t designed for me.” They gestured at the sim around them, a drive-in movie theater. Babs1 lounged in the driver’s seat of an old convertible. Scrap drifted midair above it, presenting as a tiny, winking point of light.

  Moji burst from the offworlder’s twinkle, a human face nodding agreement: “It’s rare for individuals of any species to fully understand their own integral systems.”

  “Indeed.”

  “The All construct sensory organs for trading partners,” Scrap said. “With attendant neural-processing architecture. These models are exposed to standardized sense phenomena until empathic comprehension is achieved. Operating files are then added to our perceptual translator database.”

  Babs1 crunched this. “You grow a pair of artificial eyes and a brain to run them. You expose the array to stimuli and analyze the data. And then finally commit it to code?”

  “This is a reasonable description of the process.”

  “Perceptual translation.” Ember would go into orgasms over this concept.

  “The All can experience your Veronia-Them Noir in … through the eyes, you would say—of seventy different individuated races.”

  “It’s Mars,” Babs1 corrected, trying to imagine this.

  “However, Scrap has only installed Solakinder defaults for this mission. I experience your real and virtual stimuli as a sapp would, as Teagan9-Them does, and as myself.”

  Did Scrap just say … I?

  He’s starting to lose the Us/Them.

  Babs1 felt their claws extend. This could be a feint, an attempt to distract them either from prisoner support or … well, Scrap and its All-Us could be up to anything.