by Rich Larson
Bathroom must have a concrete ceiling, I chat her. Get out in the open.
The smart mirror makes a read on her body language and throws up a filter, unfurling blackened wings behind her shoulder blades, turning her into an avenging angel. It probably thinks she’s about to pull or punch someone. I put another five minutes on the stall for whoever’s puking.
Nat slices past the vending machine, where a couple girls are already printing up cheap flats for the stumble home, and plunges out into the club. This is her element in the way I’ve only ever pretended it’s my element: She moves through the crowd like a fluid, depositing precise air kisses and brief embraces where she has to, never getting caught in conversation.
In another world, I can hear Yinka moving beside me, putting on the bodysuit designed to give him Quini’s almost exact proportions.
Nat’s eyes scan the upper level and suddenly there’s Quini, wearing a specifically tailored spidersilk suit, arm wrapped through the railing. He’s got his chin to his chest, laughing at something that makes the people around him look vaguely uncomfortable. She ducks behind the steroid-pumped bulk of a bouncer to break line of sight. The signal flares strong.
Got it, I say, and I start the spoof, using Nat’s implants to mirror Quini’s and send the signal, by rented pirate satellite, all the way to the villa.
The bouncer moves, and for a second it feels like Quini is looking right at us, but then I realize his eyes are squeezed shut. There’s a glimmer of tears on his face, sickly green in the strobing lights. Nat slides away into the crowd.
Please don’t let him see you, I chat her.
No shit, she chats back. You tell Yinka yet?
“Man, they fucked up,” our Fleischgeist says, not in my head but in the air beside it. His whisper is hoarse. “The suit’s missing one sleeve.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s the thing.”
I drop Nat’s eyefeed and come back to the safe room door. I should have told him back in the car, or back in virtual. But I couldn’t. Not after he said that thing about his ma being in a death cult, and then me hacking his phone and using a police timeline AI to figure out which cult it was, and then me finding out their main thing was dismemberment. Me finding out the sting caught his mom standing over him with a machete. Even ghosts have traces.
“What thing?” Yinka demands.
So instead I modified the virtual Quini, and I lied. It was a hell of a coincidence, and way too late to find another Fleischgeist.
“Quini’s nickname, ‘the Squid’?” I stroke my finger down my duffel’s enzyme zipper. It peels apart to reveal the refrigerated case and the surgical saw. “It’s one of those ironic nicknames.”
I show him an undoctored image of Quini, projecting it from my finger implant onto the stone wall. He stares at the wrinkled stump where Quini’s right arm used to be and sucks in air through his nostrils.
“He’s only got one tentacle total,” I say. “He had a bad time with some drug runners when he was a kid. Stole a pack of cigarettes from them, is the story. So they did that. Even after he made it out, even after he made money, he never got a new one grown. Never got a prosthetic.”
I can’t tell if Yinka’s listening. He’s looking down at the surgical saw with his mouth sealed tight. I wish Nat were here, to look at him through her lampblack lashes and make Yinka feel like the whole thing was his brave and beautiful idea.
“It’s temporary,” I say. “Five minutes in the safe room, remember? We take it off, put it on ice. You get in, get the Klobučar, get out. Twenty minutes, we’re back to the car—there’s an autosurgeon waiting in the back—and it gets reattached en route with zero nerve damage.”
Yinka looks me right in the eye and enunciates. “You fucking snake.”
I try to shrug, but it ends up more like a shudder. “Tight clock. You do it and we walk away rich as kings, or you dip and we did all this for nothing.”
Yinka looks away again. “How much time you set aside to convince me?”
“Four minutes.”
He curses at me in Yoruba—my babelware only gets half of it—then grips his head in both hands. He stares up at the ceiling. “Nat. She knew too.”
“It’s temporary,” I say. “I’ll bump your take. Forty percent. How’s that?”
“How high you gonna go?” Yinka asks dully.
“You can have my whole fucking share,” I snap. “It’s not the money for me. It’s personal.”
Yinka stays staring at the ceiling, not blinking. “Your whole share,” he finally says. “And if the reattach goes bad, I’m going to kill you with one hand, man.”
“You’ll have to beat Quini to it,” I say. “But yeah. It’s a deal.”
I put out my hand to shake and he ignores it, which is, you know, understandable. Instead he lies down on the stone floor and lays his right arm out flat. His face is expressionless but his chest is working like a bellows, ribcage pumping up and down. He’s terrified.
“Try to relax,” I say to both of us, sticking anatabs up and down his arm.
Yinka’s nostrils flare. “I’m not saying another fucking word to you until my arm’s back on.”
The tabs turn bright blue against his dark skin as they activate, deadening his nerves. The limb goes slack from his shoulder down. I wrap the whole thing in bacterial film, to catch the blood spray, and mark my line above the elbow.
Now it’s time for the bit I practiced on my own, the private virtual Nat and Yinka were not invited to. I switch on the saw and the high-pitched whine makes me gooseflesh all over.
We do the amputation in silence, even though when I practiced it I practiced mumbling comforting things, explaining the procedure—bedside manner and shit. The saw is so shiny it hurts my eyes. Everything is too bright. Too sharp. If I take any more speed I’m going to OD.
But my hands are still steady, and I know this is real. Virtual doesn’t get smells quite right, and right now I can smell the sour stink of fear coming off Yinka’s body, contaminated sweat leaking out from his armpits. When the saw bites into his flesh another smell joins it: hot, greasy copper.
The film does its job and seals the wound on both ends. Not a drop spilled, but my stomach lurches a bit when I transfer the severed arm—Yinka’s arm—to the refrigerated case. He’s already getting up, bracing carefully with his left arm, levering onto his knees and then onto his feet.
He stands stock-still while I slip the bioprinter’s mask over his face. It’s alive the way a skin graft is alive, warm to the touch, and the lattice of cartilage underneath approximates Quini’s bone structure. It would never work on its own, but there’s also the glove, more live tissue coated in Quini’s DNA and also etched with the exact ridges and whorls of his palm and fingerprints.
And now Yinka’s got the right proportions, too.
“Just how we practiced,” I say. “I’m sending it the open-up.”
I back away, dragging both duffel bags out of the sensor’s sight, leaving Yinka standing eye level with the blinking blue light. Nat’s signal is still coming strong from Flux, meaning Quini’s signal is also coming strong, and now all I have to do is bounce it to the safe room sensor with a simple entry command.
Yinka’s swaying on his feet. I did my research. I know field amputations can send people into shock, knock them out entirely. But I made sure there was minimal blood loss, and I stuck his nerve-dead stump with a cocktail of stimulants and painkillers. He should be feeling weirdly good, and alert enough to remember procedure.
We can’t run it again. The realization jolts me for the hundredth time.
The stone wall slides apart, offering up a palmprint pad. Yinka leans forward, slightly off-balance, and slaps his remaining hand against it. I watch the bioscanner deliberate in real time. The wall becomes a door, swinging inward. Yinka hunches against the bright light for a moment, then heads inside with Quini’s exact swaggering stride.
Five minutes is a fucking eternity during a break-and-enter. I start
checking the cameras again. The three overpaid security guards are still in the kitchen, learning to blow smoke rings from some net tutorial. The pair in the bathroom are still fucking, still clutching at each other and at the towels.
Still.
I get a tingling at the nape of my neck, and it only gets worse when Nat chats me: Quini’s leaving.
I go back to the kitchen camera and check the timestamps. Masked. I peel them out the hard way, and the tingling at the nape of my neck becomes jagged ice.
Nat, we’re burnt, I chat her. Get the fuck out of there. We’re burnt.
I’m opening my mouth to tell Yinka the same thing when the barrel of a scattergun shows up in my peripheral vision.
“Hush,” says a man’s soft voice. “Let the Fleischgeist finish his job.”
I shut my mouth. The man pulls something out of the folds of his jacket, and suddenly my head is stuffed with steel wool. I lose contact with my cranial implant, with Nat, with everything else. I feel the faraday clamp attach itself to the back of my skull, digging its tiny feet in. I’m blinded. But I was blinded before too. I was watching a fucking loop on the house cameras.
“So you don’t make any more mischief,” the man says. “My name is Anton. I’m Señor Caballo’s new security consultant. I believe you met my predecessor in the bathroom of a shitty wine bar.” He rests the scattergun on my shoulder.
“You had a trail on her?” I choke.
“Yeah. Been waiting for you ever since. Pawns move first.” He exhales. “Tonight’s been very educational. We’re going to make some major improvements here.”
Yinka emerges from the safe room with a tiny incubator pod cradled in his hand. He stops short.
“Sorry,” I say.
He says nothing back, which is understandable. Anton holds out his hand for the incubator. Yinka gives it up. Anton motions with the scattergun. We start walking back down the hallway, through Quini’s room where the sparring dummy clasps its hands over its head, victorious. All I can think about is my conversation with Nat in the restaurant, about seafood and salt water and how I am a yugga, yugga, yugga.
I know this is real, because now I can smell my own sweat. I smell terrified.
* * *
The drugs are wearing off and Yinka’s face, no longer hidden under the Quini mask, is contorted in pain. We’re outside by the steaming pool with Anton and two more armed guards. Anton has his pants rolled up and his feet in the water, swirling them clockwise, counterclockwise. I can see his leg hairs rippling.
“He needs medical attention,” I say. “Come on. He’s a fucking kid.”
“You cut his arm off,” Anton says. “He’s a fucking kid.” But he tips his head back, blinks, and I can tell he’s looking at something in his implant. “Reattachment should be viable for another five hours. Since it’s on ice.”
Yinka sinks slowly to his haunches. Neither of the guards try to make him stand back up.
“I fucked up,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
Quini arrives just as dawn is streaking the sky with filaments of red. His eyes are bloodshot and his grin is amphetamine-tight and he’s not wearing any shoes with his tailored suit. His arm is slung around Nat’s shoulders. I try to make eye contact with her, but she’s not making eye contact with anything.
“Afterparty at my place, and nobody fucking tells me,” Quini says. “Not even Natalia, mi gitanita favorita. Who tells me everything.” He kisses her cheek; her lips flex just a bit in return. I want to tell her we can get out of this, somehow, somehow, but my implant is locked up and seeing Quini does the same thing to my mouth.
He leaves Nat to go over to Anton, who reaches into his jacket for the incubator pod. Quini takes it—he doesn’t look happy to see it, more disgusted—and puts it in his pocket. Then he comes to me.
“And here’s my favorite hackman,” he says. “How are you?” He throws his arm around me and I can’t help but flinch. The last thing my body remembers about him is him beating the shit out of me. This time he’s exuding a cloud of sweat, cologne, black rum. He makes a rumbling noise in his throat and gives an extra squeeze before he steps back, cupping my face in his hand, beaming at me.
“My three favorite people all in one place,” he says. “Me makes three. Him, I don’t know.” He looks over at Yinka, who’s still crouched, clutching his stump. “Who are you, negrito?” He rubs his thumb on my cheek and his eyes flutter shut for a second. “Your skin is so fucking soft, hackman. You moisturize that shit.”
Then he goes to Yinka, who isn’t wearing the mask but is still wearing the suit, and squats down across from him. He puffs out half a laugh.
“I get it. You’re me.” He champs his teeth together—twice, three times—dentin clacking. “You’re me! You’re Quini. That’s how you got into the safe room.” He points at the stump. “He really did you like that, huh? He really took your fucking arm off?” He tips back his head. “Ha! My four favorite people. Me twice.”
Yinka doesn’t react. Still in shock. Better that way, with Quini. I’m cycling through the disaster scenarios we ran, but with the faraday clamp freezing my implant it’s only memory and it’s jumpy, erratic. Fear keeps bullying in.
“You want to know the real story? How I really lost it? You’re me, so I can tell you.” Quini sits down cross-legged on the tiles. He rubs his hand along the pattern. “I was just small. Just a little cabroncito. I grew up during the droughts. You’re African. You know. Getting food was tough.”
I don’t want to hear this story. I know it’s dangerous to be hearing this story. I can tell from the look on Nat’s face.
“My family used to work the aceituna. The olive trees. Always had Africans up to work, too. You from Senegal? They were mostly from Senegal. But one year the trees stopped producing, because the new gene tweak didn’t take, so people started chopping them up for firewood instead. It gets cold in Andalusia. People up here don’t know that. So, me and my brother, we were chopping firewood.”
Quini’s eyes turn wide and gleeful, like he’s a kid recounting his favorite part of a flick. “He thought I was going to pull my arm away! I thought he wasn’t going to swing! And just like that, gone. Oh, I was angry. Even back then, even little Quini, he got angry. But my brother was family, you know? And it was an accident. Nobody’s fault. Just the peristalsis of an amoral universe. You like that word? ‘Peristalsis.’
“But then, years later, years and years, I heard my brother was talking. Was saying he did it to teach me a lesson. Saying he’s the only person that makes Quini the Squid flinch.” Quini snorts. “So one night I went over to his house—his house, qué tontería, I bought him that fucking house—and I brought an autosurgeon with me. And I made things right. First I took his arms, then I took his legs.”
I can hear the whining of the blade all over again. My gut heaves and for a second I can’t look at Yinka, can’t look at anything except the backs of my eyelids.
“I cried while I did it,” Quini says. “But when it was finished, my anger was gone. Gone! We were brothers again. I bought him a chair—you know, to get around. A really fancy one.” He gets nimbly to his feet and heads over to my confiscated duffel bag. He grins at Nat while he gropes around inside. The saw emerges with Yinka’s blood still spattering the casing. “So who wants to go first?” he asks. “Hackman, how about you? You’re quiet tonight. I remember you like talking. I’m surprised you’re not talking yet. Trying to save your skin.”
I’ve done the thinking and I already know. Quini blames me for the job in Murcia going bad. He pulled my contracts for any other hackwork. Now he’s caught me breaking into his house to steal the one thing he cannot afford to have stolen.
“Nothing is going to save my skin.” I can’t keep my voice from quavering. I look at Nat, then Yinka. “I blackmailed both of them,” I say. “I took Nat’s bank account, and I poison-pilled his Catalonian citizenship request. Forced them. To help.”
Quini nods, inspecting the saw blade. “Okay. Sure. Bu
t what’s this all about, hackman? Why did you do this to me?”
I look straight ahead, not meeting his eyes. “I’m a big Klobučar fan.”
Quini stares at me, then barks a laugh so loud one of his guards jumps. “You too, huh? I’m starting to feel real uncultured, you know that? Everyone loves this shit. Me, I wish I could get rid of it. Swear!” The saw clangs onto the tiles. He pulls the incubator pod out of his pocket instead and waves it in the air, arm swinging dangerously close to the edge of the pool.
I can see Anton’s wince. “We should get that back in the safe room, Señor Caballo.”
Quini ignores him. “I’m working with some Koreans now. Some serious hijoputas until they get liquored, then friendly, real friendly. We’re in Seoul and the boss, he starts talking about Klobučar, how visionary she was, how killing herself was art. That was art! Bullshit.” He tosses the incubator pod up into the air, watches it, catches it. “But one thing leads to another, we seal the malware deal, and he says he wants to loan me his favorite piece for a month. One month, and it’ll change everything, he says. Doesn’t tell me it’s worth a billion fucking Euros until I’m babysitting it.”
He clutches the pod tight and rubs his face in the crook of his arm. “Makes me nervous, hackman,” he says, walking back toward me. “If I somehow lost it, no more deals with the Koreans. And there would be a bunch of ninja motherfuckers in chamsuits trying to knife me in my sleep. You knew that, I think. You knew it would hurt me. So now I’m going to make what I did in Murcia look like a tickle.”
My throat winches shut. I can feel the ghost of Quini’s boot swinging into my ribs. I can hear his men laughing.
“But I’ll give you a look first,” he says. “So you can decide if this was ever really worth it.” He thumbs the pod open.
It’s empty.
He scrapes his finger around the inside, and the first thought in my fear-fogged brain is that I do not understand art, that I am just as uncultured as Quini the Squid and I’m going to die that way.