I Can Transform You

by Maurice Broaddus

  Mac reached inside his jacket for his Redi-Smokes, only to realize the package was empty. He crumpled it up and threw it against the wall. His hands trembled. He needed another dose of Stim, but at the same time, didn’t. Nor did he want a drink. His soul itched, but he couldn’t quite find the right way to scratch it.

  The nagging voice left him unable to find a comfortable position in bed. The day’s events flitted through his mind, and a strange anxiousness, a longing, filled his heart. The case wasn’t closed, not really. Whoever murdered Kiersten was still out there, drawing breath and living life. And once again, he couldn’t be the man she needed him to be. He needed something to take the edge off. It was more than late-night horniness. He just needed some sort of respite, and peace was not soon in coming. Not for people like him.

  Finally he settled on the idea of a companion. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t paid for tail before. Those relationships were pure, a simple transaction. Base need met with commerce. No expectations. No investments. No commitment. No judgment. Then and now, Kiersten haunted him. Then, knowing that he couldn’t be with her without tearing her down, he had retreated to the bartered embrace of companions. Now, with her gone, he sought solace in the illusion of relationship. In the illusion that someone cared about him and would hold him in the nights. In the illusion that he wasn’t the failure he knew himself to be.

  The call house said they’d send a companion right over. Five minutes later, the front alarm sounded at the outer door of his building. When he checked the vid screen, a woman in a raincoat, broad hat, and sunglasses that covered nearly half her face peered back at him. He buzzed her in. Wearing only a white tank top over pinstriped boxers, he flopped on the edge of his bed while he waited for her. The door opened, half closed—like a held breath—then shut all the way. She didn’t have to knock on the entryway frame or give a polite cough to let him know she was there.

  She was small, much smaller than he would have guessed from her appearance on the vid screen. Smooth brown hair pulled back into a bun, rimless glasses, and a moue with a garish shade of red lipstick smeared across it, which made her mouth look huge. Like a fussy librarian, except the way the raincoat cinched tight at the waist and revealed her generous cleavage he knew that she wore nothing underneath.

  “Ident chip?” She held out her hand, waiting for him to place his in it.

  “Business up front, I see.” Mac held out his hand. She waved her portable scanner over it.

  “Mac Peterson,” she read from her scanner.

  “At your service.” Mac reached up and twitched her glasses free of her nose. She remained perfectly still, only her eyes tracking his movements. He set the glasses down on the mantle over his bed. “And you are?”

  “Olga. Do you need a last name?”

  “No.”

  Confident in her charms, she relaxed, her head canted to the side and her lips parted a little. Her hands trailed down his side, resting playfully just below his waist. Her weight leaned into him, and by instinct his arms wrapped around her. As if in a practiced dance, she pushed him away, taking a half step backward herself. She undid the belt holding the coat shut. Draped only by the coat, her naked silhouette approached him. A provocative smile crossed her lips. She planted her hand dead center in his chest and shoved him onto the bed. Straddling him, her fingers dug into his hair to draw him close, plunging her tongue into his mouth, long and hard. His hands wriggled at his boxers. She batted them away, not breaking the kiss. Her hands slipped within the band of his underwear. As he lost himself in the moment, he let out an easy sigh.

  A primitive part of his brain, an echo of his soldier’s instinct, alerted him that something wasn’t right. The doors. Like a held breath. Held too long. The shadows on the other side of the room shifted. His dampener jacket rustled from where it hung across the room. A red dot gleamed in his direction and a figure rushed from the darkness. His Cougar PT-10 was under his pillow, but Mac barely had time to shift Olga’s weight out of the way to absorb the brunt of the attack. That was when the slight charge at the back of his neck stabbed at him and his world went black.

  Mac hated being knocked unconscious. He hated the wave of nausea that accompanied coming to. He hated the pounding in his head, like kids running up and down wood stairs. He hated the dizziness and disorientation as if he’d been on a drunken bender and needed to remember where he had passed out. Mac’s first thought was that the companion and her accomplice might have run a Murphy game on him. The problem was that with companionship having been made legal, there was little to gain by a pro and her erstwhile pimp rolling a john for whatever credits they could scrounge, especially futile with ident chips. Even if they tossed his place, they were in Old Town. There weren’t exactly a lot of eccentric wealthy people living there by choice. No, there had to be something else.

  Seated upright, Mac didn’t change his slumped posture, careful to feign continued unconsciousness while he assessed his situation. His shoulders burned, but Mac was happy to feel anything. His arms were behind him, each hand zip-tied to a part of the chair, which gave him little wiggle room. Still able to wangle his fingers. Though they were cold and increasingly numb. His legs weren’t bound to the chair, but his feet burned with a thousand pinpricks, as they had fallen asleep. His muscles stretched tight, each bruise and cut rose to the surface of his attention, throbbing reminders of his ill-tended accumulation of hurts. He allowed himself a moment of vanity, feeling ridiculous in his tank top and boxers. Mac chanced opening an eye and craning his head up as much as possible. From the look of things, he was in a warehouse of some sort. One with the distinctive odor of chemicals. He made out a few approaching figures, so he shut his eyes.

  “What did you summon me down here for?” Mac recognized the voice of Charleston Ptacek.

  “We have Peterson,” Olga said.

  “So? Who told you to do that?”

  “Your boy brought me. We can’t afford the loose end. It’s the Kiersten Wybrow scenario all over again.”

  “So you brought me down here to sort out your mess?”

  “We tried it your way, look where it got us. No we do it ours.”

  “No point in pretending you can’t hear us, Mr. Peterson,” Ptacek said. “We’ve gone through a lot of trouble to accommodate you.”

  “You shouldn’t have put yourself out.” Mac sat up straight, adjusting for the dull ache that had settled in his lower back.

  “Are you stupid?”

  “Immensely.” An empty warehouse, its disposable construction little more than a giant metal barn. A heavy door on a thick frame separating this room from the next. Mac tested the ties. He’d have better luck going through the chair itself. No jacket. No Cougar PT-10. He didn’t have a lot to work with. Mac turned to his female captor. “I’m guessing Olga’s not your real name.”

  “You’ve stirred up quite the little furor over the last couple of days. Your name came up so often I had to meet you for myself,” Olga said. “You’ve certainly managed to piss off a lot of people.”

  “Well, they say a man’s life should be measured by the quality of his enemies. By any measure, my life is shit.”

  “Putting on a brave front. I like that. A little coarse, but not without your charms.”

  “I’ve been told that I have my own brand of charm.”

  “You should have dropped all of this. Instead, you run off to tell the Carmillon…what? What did you hope to accomplish?” Charleston marched by a table. He inspected a few of the instruments, holding up the occasional blade or screwdriver for Mac’s scrutiny. Charleston made exaggerated faces of disgust at the possible destructive use of each implement before setting them back down.

  “What’s this all about?” Mac asked.

  “I doubt you’d understand. Though it all comes back to your jumpers in a way.”

  “The apocalyptos?”

  “My theory is that they subconsciously suspect the truth.” Ptacek paced the floor, going back and forth with the haughti
ness of a gloating hyena. “When confronted with ideas so much bigger than themselves, ideas which shatter the carefully constructed paradigms they live in, some people can’t face the utter futility of their lives.”

  “What sort of big ideas?” Mac asked.

  “That we aren’t alone. That we aren’t the center of the universe. That there is a whole other dimension to reality that sometimes bleeds into ours. That there may be wars fought on whole different planes of existence, all around us, that help determine our destiny. That our lives are not our own.”

  “It’s what you were talking about with the aliens, the idea exchange, the accident which left the…tears…in the sky.”

  “That story isn’t the real story. Not the whole of it, anyway. It goes much, much deeper.”

  “What’s the big plan? You want to take over the world?”

  “No, son, we already have. Don’t look so shocked. The world as you know it ended years ago, smothered to death in its sleep. Ending with a whimper. We’ve been here for a generation now. Blended into your world on your terms and you never noticed. We attended your schools, climbed to the tops of your corporations, embedded ourselves in every aspect of your society: finance, media, science and technology, military, politics, religion. That was Phase One.”

  “Let me guess, Phase Two: terraforming Earth to suit your needs.”

  “Very good, Mr. Peterson.”

  “You give me too much credit. I don’t get any of this. Kiersten was undercover investigating the Easton MS crew. During one of their ‘forays,’ she runs across your little operation. What it is, I’m still not sure. All I have is your version of coming clean.”

  “Olga is also a member of that esteemed group.”

  “You expect me to believe that you two are aliens? You don’t really look like one.”

  “What’d you expect? Scales and a tail?” Olga asked.

  “I…” Mac didn’t know what he expected. Little gray men with big heads and large eyes. Blue giants with whole new ways of life. Horned warriors set on conquering. But he’d read a lot of fantasy stories when he was younger.

  “Something like that.”

  “It’d be hard to blend in with your people that way.”

  “Case should’ve been closed, but you kept digging,” Ptacek said. “That was always your problem. You don’t know when to leave well enough alone and stop digging. You have to keep pushing and pushing until everything around you is left in ruin.”

  “This time it was because my partner doesn’t like loose ends and becomes grouchy and suspicious when delivered a patsy with a great big bow on him. Much more so when said patsy has people who care about him. So now we start nosing around and someone makes a ham-fisted attack on us. Which meant we were on the right track, we just didn’t know how to get to you.”

  “The subsequent attack was unfortunate. That wasn’t us,” Ptacek said.

  “That was my bad.” Another figure stepped out from the shadows. About six feet tall, a solid build but not overly muscled. A black vest, worn open, revealed a muscled, sweaty chest. Camo military fatigues and combat boots finished off his look. Clean shaven and bald, a band covered his eyes. He removed it to give Mac a more clear inspection. A dermal overlay procedure had been done, but the man had an implant much like Ade’s, though without any tubing or accessories.

  “Allow me to present…” Ptacek said.

  “Harley Wilson,” Mac finished.

  “You don’t seem that surprised.”

  “I was beginning to suspect. Once we started thinking about who all was after Harley, none had enough motivation to want him dead. Quite the opposite. The only one who would benefit from his death would be him. Then I thought about all of your prosthetics and thought it would be real easy to create enough material to stage a murder scene. Score some bioteched organs and two new souls join the army of apocalyptos leaping into the void.”

  “It seems I was remiss in underestimating you, Mr. Peterson. My colleagues, though less subtle, have the right idea.”

  “Nice eye. A friend of mine has one like it.” Mac worked the ties against the chair. He only needed a little more time.

  “Not like this one. This right here is the latest generation of wetware,” Harley said. “A gift from my employers.”

  “It still has a few kinks. Like signals getting crossed or piggy-backed on when you’re transmitting to your bosses. Or vice versa.”

  “You’re referring to the Quavay Middleton incident. More sloppy work, really. But young Master Harley is quite adept at cleaning up his messes. It’s why we continue him in our employ.”

  “I like to keep things simple,” Mac said. “You’re the bad guy. All I need to know is which one of you killed Kiersten.”

  “Kiersten got too close. A casualty of the truth. She was killed by a larger plan. Faceless corporations, collateral damage from an errant memo.”

  “All this shit—the energy fallout, the terraforming, the colonization—all that is too big for me. All I need to know is who did the deed.”

  “Harley, of course.” Ptacek turned to walk out. “And I’ll leave you to his tender mercies.”

  Baraka backhanded Mac across the face before Ptacek left the room. A wan smile crossed the executive’s face as he pushed through the door. Baraka’s ham-sized fist landed several blows in Mac’s ribs. Without his jacket to absorb some of the force, a bone cracked. Each punch rattled the framework of the chair. Mac was glad to already be sitting as his legs went rubbery. Baraka squatted low, meeting Mac at eye level. Mac met the man’s intense silence by spitting in his face. Unmoved, Baraka patiently wiped the sputum from his face, reached for Mac’s left hand, and snapped his pinky finger. His body convulsed, a shudder as a wave of fresh pain washed through him. His face twisted in agony.

  A crash came from down the hallway, followed by a rush of raised voices that soon became pointed shouts. Screams erupted, trailing the staccato pop of automatic weapon fire. Mac only needed a window of opportunity, but he would have to act quickly. Adrenaline surged in his system, coasting on a wave of panic. The world slowed to stop-motion.

  At the first sounds of ruckus, a well-trained Baraka sprang up and brought to bear Mac’s Cougar PT-10. Mac leaned forward in his chair and pushed to his feet, charging at Baraka. Baraka drew down on him. Mac smashed into him, leading with the edge of the chair. Baraka got off a shot. The heat of the discharge singed Mac’s cheek, but he dived, barely avoiding the bullet’s path. The impact demolished the chair enough for him to slip his bonds.

  Baraka swung around and pistol-whipped him with a blow to the side of the head. Mac returned with a punch, hammering down, causing the gun to clatter across the floor toward the thick door. His initial blows deflected, Mac charged again. Fists flying with abandon, he whirled and threw himself against Baraka.

  Baraka lashed out, two chops to the sides of Mac’s neck. The muscles went numb and a shard of pain jolted into Mac’s skull. In desperation, Mac dashed his skull into Baraka’s, the force of which sent Mac reeling as he remembered too late that much of Baraka’s skull had been replaced with metal to accommodate his eye. Mac clamped his teeth down and succeeded only in smearing the blood on his lip in an attempt to wipe it off.

  Lunging again, not wanting to give Baraka time or space to put his training and youth to use, Mac clawed at him then wrapped his hairy, bare legs around him, wrestling until he found himself on top of Baraka. He hated that he was self-conscious to the point of distraction that he was clad only in underwear and his junk was so vulnerable. Twisting, drawing his attacker along with him, they tumbled through the doorway. Baraka slipped in an elbow to his head before Mac could get him sufficiently entangled.

  The next room sounded like it held a barely contained war. A couple of people skittered down the hallway; a few wore protective filter masks and gloves. They startled both men, but Baraka used the opportunity to slip from Mac’s grasp. Mac dodged Baraka’s combat boot, which landed only inches from his head. He couldn
’t imagine the state of his skull had the blow connected. He neither was in the mood nor had the luxury to fight fair. Baraka kicked out again, but Mac rolled then scampered after the gleaming metal. Too late, Baraka realized what Mac was going for.

  Mac fired off a shot through the red target of Baraka’s eye before he realized he’d even squeezed the trigger.

  No joy. No relish. Only action.

  Mac bent down to inspect the body. Putting his feet up to Baraka’s, he decided the other man’s boots were a good enough fit, certainly better than his bare feet. Ditto the camo pants.

  The air grew thick, and Mac had a difficult time breathing. The gun battle hit tanks, releasing chemicals into the air. Bullets pocked the wall inches from him. Strays from the gunfight on the other side of the door, but Mac couldn’t worry about that. He took cover behind a nearby counter. Two dead bodies had fallen on each other at the end of a hallway. The gunfire stopped. Mac peeked around the corner of the counter.

  Ade’s twin semiautomatic crowd-control machine guns pointed directly at Charleston Ptacek. “Everyone stay right where they are!”

  Mac eased out from his hiding spot. Ade glanced at him, and something akin to relief flickered across his face. “How’d you find me?”

  “Finally was able to backtrace the signal that hijacked my eye and thought I’d bring some friends to the party.” Ade upticked his chin toward Elia and members of the Carmillon. He then turned his attention to Mac’s wardrobe. “I don’t want to burst your moment or anything, but I really hope you don’t think the glasses help with your look when you’re dressed like an army clown.”

  “Beats running around in my drawers. Don’t ask.”

  “Are you here to arrest us, Officer? Even if you were to go through the motions of detaining me, Mr. Peterson’s presence in the case, much less the Carmillon, would be enough for our team of lawyers to sink any criminal case brought against us.”