by Joseph Lallo
“That’s... a mouthful.”
“People who can’t deal with it call me Karter.”
“I’m gonna go with that.”
Karter grunted in reply.
“You can call me Lex.”
“Lex? Your name is Trevor Alexander, and you want to be called Lex?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nicknames are the first half of your first name. Those are the rules. You can’t just use a random part of your last name.”
“What? No, nicknames are whatever someone calls you. I had a roommate nicknamed Tex because he always wore a cowboy hat.”
“Tex was in violation of established nickname protocol.”
“Everyone’s entitled to their opinion,” Lex said with a shrug, digging into the surprisingly tasty food.
“Pff,” Karter scoffed, sending a volley of beans and rice Lex’s way, “There’s people who are right, and people who are wrong. Guess which one you are.”
Lex looked at him flatly. “Anyone ever tell you you’re an asshole?”
“It is a fairly common observation, yes,” he said without a trace of apology.
“Look, it is pretty clear you don’t want me around. So if you can just point me to someplace that can patch up my leg and someone that can lend me a ship, I’ll be out of your hair.”
“No.”
“What request were you denying?”
“All of them. You are standing in the only someplace on the whole damn planet, talking to the only someone on the whole damn planet, and you aren’t getting out of my hair any time soon.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This is my planet. I’m the only one here. You want or need something, you get it from me. And you and whoever that was shooting at you stirred up the moat. There’s no way anyone is getting in or out until the computer remaps the whole thing and plots when and where navigable gaps will occur.”
“How long will that take?”
“Meh, forty hours or so.”
“Whoa... No. No, no. I’m on a deadline. I’ve got a delivery to make.”
“You probably should have thought of that before you blew up your ship.”
“Karter, I’m serious. I’ve never missed a delivery date. Ever. In my business, it is all about reputation. And this is a high paying gig.”
“I cannot put into words how much I don’t care,” he said flatly, “Listen, I sent the bus to pick you up because if you died here, someone would come looking for you, and I’d have to deal with that. I’m as eager for you to get the hell off of my planet as you are, but if you’re going to be doing it, you’ll be doing it in a loaner ship from me, and there is no way I’m letting you take one of my ships through the moat until I know there’s a safe window. You want to get yourself killed, fine. But do it where I won’t be inconvenienced, and don’t do it in one of my ships.”
“… Wow. Most people would be ashamed to show that degree of self interest.”
“I don’t have a whole lot in common with most people.”
Lex fumed for a moment. He’d dealt with people like Karter before. They don’t want anything to do with other people’s problems. Usually, if you wanted something out of a person like that, you had to pay them, which he would probably afford to do... But screw that. This guy was a jerk. There was no way he was handing cash over to him now. Fortunately, self absorbed misanthropes were easy to manipulate. You just needed to make your problems into their problems, and they would spring into action.
“Well let me ask you this. As a man who is familiar with serious injury,” Lex said, limping over to Karter’s side of the table, “What do you think about this one?”
He peeled off the tape and opened up the torn leg of his flight suit, revealing gash in his thigh. Karter eyed it critically.
“Hmm. Yeah. That looks pretty bad.”
“It does,” Lex agreed, slightly nauseated by the growing bruise and the depth of the cut.
“Yeah. You’re gonna need new panty hose.”
“Huh?”
“I’ll bet your ovaries hurt, too.”
Lex narrowed his eyes and sneered.
“Fine, I’m a woman. But if I get an infection and die, you’re going to have to deal with that, aren’t you?”
“You aren’t going to die,” Karter said dismissively, “but if you’re going to get your panties all in a bunch, we’ll fix it up.”
“Good. So there’s a doctor or some-”
“Ma!” Karter yelled suddenly toward the ceiling.
Lex flinched at the sudden sound. “Your mother is here?”
“What? No.”
“Please state request,” echoed the computer’s voices over the cafeteria’s speakers.
“You named the computer ‘Ma?’” Lex whispered.
“Please do not speak about me like I am not here,” the voice reprimanded.
“Ma, pansy here needs medical assistance for his booboo,” Karter jabbed.
“Processing... Processing...”
“What’s taking so long?” Lex whispered even more quietly.
“She’s trying to decide if she wants to help you or not. And she can still hear you.”
“Yes. I can. A medical drone has been dispatched. Please hold still and await assistance,” stated the voice.
A disconcerting whirring noise quickly approached from along the hallway. The doors opened and what looked like something that should be welding things together on an assembly line trundled into the cafeteria. It was a large industrial arm affixed to the end of a gurney. Splitting off from the main arm and hanging over the gurney like a chandelier was a wheel of smaller, spindly arms. Each was tipped with a different medical tool, and there were reels of gauze, needles, and tubes jutting from every possible location. Before he could object, or even react, Lex was maneuvered onto the gurney and restrained by a pair of arms that were clearly designed for the purpose. A laser line swept over him, lingering on the afflicted leg. Once it retracted, a clamp appeared from beneath the gurney to immobilize the limb. The wheel of tools hovered over the wound. An arm tipped with a syringe paused for a moment without deploying, then rotated to one that sprayed antiseptic.
A white hot, stinging pain seized Lex so hard that he couldn’t even scream. He just made an agonized croaking noise and flailed every part of his body that wasn’t tied down. By the time he recovered from the initial jolt of pain, separate arms had applied a trio of compounds that he couldn’t identify. Pincers then deployed and pressed the edges of the open wound together, sending a fresh surge of pain through him. One of the things applied must have been some sort of medical adhesive, because the wound stayed closed. A waterproof bandage was then applied, and all restraints released. As a final slap in the face, the gurney dumped him onto the ground.
“What the- Seriously, what the hell!” Lex panted when he managed to get back to his feet.
“Oh. Did I forget to apply anesthetic? Perhaps if I was a better computer, that wouldn’t have happened,” the voice said innocently.
The drone withdrew as quickly as it came. After a few steps, Lex realized that the burning of the antiseptic and a bit of bruising when he pressed on it were the only lingering effects of the injury. The stab wound was completely gone. He’d always been vaguely aware that medical technology could pull that sort of thing off, but it came at a price. Only the very wealthy could afford it. If he’d managed to wreck during his fifteen minutes of fame, he might have gotten that treatment. Everyone else made do with more traditional recovery times. He glanced up from admiring the remarkable recovery to find that Karter was already on his way out of the cafeteria. Lex jogged to catch up.
Good heavens, he could jog already.
“That was incredible. Did you make that?” he asked.
“The medical probe? Hold on.”
He stood still for a moment, eyes moving as if he was reading.
“I’ve agreed not to disclose that information for another three years,” he s
aid.
“… Isn’t that just a yes?”
“It is a contractually obligated ‘No Comment,’” he corrected, swinging toward workshop F again and stepping inside.
He picked up the auto-spanner, powered up the piece of machinery, and set to work on it again.
“You called this a class A power module? You meant D, right? Class A modules would take up this whole room.”
“That’s because most of the people making power modules are sucky quitters who give up on something after it blows a hand off once or twice.”
“Sounds like a good policy to me.”
“And that’s why you’ve never invented anything worthwhile.”
“It’s also why both of my hands are still made of meat.”
“I fail to see the allure... You know what?” he asked, a look dawning realization on his face, “You and I have almost opposite points of view.”
“It certainly seems that way.”
“This is good. This is an opportunity. Hang on a second.”
Karter paced over to the edge of the room and pulled out something that looked like a hat rack on wheels. He lined it up in front of the module he was working on, hung a tool bag on it, then disconnected his arm and attached it to a similar socket on the stand. The whole process was as smooth and practiced as tying a pair of shoes. The arm flexed and tested its motion a bit, then grabbed something out of the bag and went to work.
“There. Now, you’re probably not going to meet this delivery deadline, or whatever. And that’s your job, so probably you’re going to get fired. Which means you’re going to need money, right?”
“If I get a move on soon-”
“AND YOU WON’T, so you’re going to need money, right?”
“What are you getting at?” Lex growled.
“Follow me. I’m gonna show you some stuff I’m working on. The stuff I hit a wall with. The way I figure it, since your brain is orthogonal to mine, you might have the right perspective to get me unstuck. You focus group some of my dead ends and I’ll pay you.”
“Listen, I really don’t have time for this. I’ve got to-”
“You’ve got … thirty-eight hours, nineteen minutes, and forty-seven seconds. Now come on.”
Karter marched out of the room. Lex, with little choice, gathered up his things and followed a one armed man who wanted his help testing experimental devices. Surely this would end well.
Chapter 9
Karter and Lex stood in a stainless steel service elevator, silently waiting. The unstable host scratched at the socket where his arm should be, a vaguely distracted look on his face.
“So... what? The arm is running on automatic right now?” Lex asked.
“Wireless control.”
“… So you’re calibrating that thing blind?”
“There’s a camera on it.”
“… And where’s the video-”
“It is being broadcast into my eye,” he answered impatiently, “Look, let’s get all of that out of the way first. I lost my left arm at the shoulder and my left leg below the knee in two different explosions. The arm’s got a camera, it is wireless with a half mile range indoors and who knows how far outdoors, it can operate semi-autonomously, the hand has programmable fingerprints, a vibration motor, data interface capabilities-”
“Wait. A vibration motor in your hand? Why?”
“I’m a man, and I’m alone on the planet. Figure it out. Back to the prostheses. I was going to put wheels or something on the false foot, but then I’d keep busting my shoe, so basically the leg is just a leg. There’s a storage compartment, though. The eye and most of the right side of my head got wrecked by a coolant leak. The guts of my ear are still natural, but the flappy part on the outside along with my scalp and eye are replaced. The eye has video recording and playback, heads up display, network connectivity, the works. Aside from that, most of my internal organs are either cybernetic or synthetic. No bells and whistles. I don’t like to tinker with the vitals.”
“Most of your organs? Seriously?”
“Yep. One kidney, my liver, both lungs, my heart, I don’t even HAVE a gall bladder. I don’t have an appendix, either, but I replaced it with an organ that synthesizes caffeine. The fact that I didn’t have one already is a glaring evolutionary oversight, if you ask me. Then there’s the spleen, the pancreas... Hell, in many legal territories, I don’t count as alive. I’m on permanent life support. It just happens to be internal.”
“Hang on. If your arm was cybernetic, why did it bleed?”
“Oh, that’s the beauty part. All of the mechanical bits run on blood glucose fuel cells with battery backup. That way I don’t have to worry about running wires and charging things and what not, but it wreaks havoc with my blood sugar if I try anything fancy. And if I don’t remember to pump the blood back out of the limb before I remove it I start to get a little woozy. Gotta work on that.”
The elevator gave a pathetic little plink and the doors opened. Immediately, Lex was hit by a number of things. For one, this area was much less antiseptic and lifeless than the rest of the facility. It was subtle, but there was a disorganization, a lived-in quality, that indicated this was where he spent most of his time. Another interesting aspect was the almost museum-like presentation. The hall that greeted him was just as wide as those on the first floor, and was likewise lined with doors and display windows, but each one bore a lighted and labeled shelf. The shelves held rough, home-made looking devices surrounded with images, schematics, warnings, and manuals, all written in pencil. One thing thrust the rest of these observations aside and demanded to be addressed first. The smell.
It wasn’t strictly a bad smell, but it certainly wasn’t a good one, and there was a LOT of it. Lex didn’t have anything in his mental tool kit to compare the odor to. It was definitely biological, but nothing you would find in a locker room or bathroom. Not a human one, anyway. Whatever it was, it seemed to lay low, slipping under the nose’s radar until it got deep into the back, then asserting itself to the point that one could almost taste it. If Karter noticed it, he didn’t let on.
“Welcome to the Hall of Rejects,” Karter said with a magisterial wave of his arm, “It isn’t usually this crowded, but my usual beta testers aren’t available right now, so nothing is making it to 1.0, which means nothing is making it to 0.1, so things start to pile up all along the line.”
“What happened to your beta testers? They quit?”
“No. They’re serving multiple consecutive life sentences for committing war crimes.”
“You let war criminals test your stuff?”
“Only one of them was a war criminal beforehand. The rest became war criminals FOR using my stuff. It’s their own fault. I put it right in the EULA. The user assumes responsibility for any interstellar treaties that may be violated by the application of the device in a field environment.”
“... What the hell sort of person puts a clause like that in a user agreement?”
“A prudent one. I’ve got pretty much all of my bases covered. You assume responsibility for violations of local, regional, global, intrasystem, interstellar, intergalactic and interdimentional law, civil, religious, or military. I’m also not responsible for loss of life and limb, property damage, domestic disputes, engineered biological human dieback, nuclear fallout, violations of causality, cascading sub-quantum misalignment, hastening of cosmic heat death, rampant AI, accelerated climate change, geomagnetic reversal, vacuum metastability events, total existence failure, gray goo scenario, red goo scenario – that’s a nasty one – tectonic inversion...”
“Okay, I get it. Um... before we get started, what’s that smell?”
“What smell?” he asked, sniffing for a moment before nodding, “Oh, right. The Funk.”
“Yeah, what’s causing that?”
Karter looked at him blankly. “I just said. The Funk.”
He turned and raised his voice into a piercing falsetto.
“So-o-o-lb-y-y!”
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br /> Almost instantly there came a tapping sound from around the corner of the hallway. Something emerged a moment later. At first, Lex thought it was a smallish, black and white dog. As it came closer, it became clear that if it was a dog, it wasn’t any breed he’d ever seen before. The creature was entirely black and white, with a wide bushy tail nearly as large as the rest of its body. It had a very fox-like head, though a bit large and in strictly black and white rather than the traditional black white and red. Its eyes were a bit too large, as well, and silvery tan in color. Twin white lines ran down its back and along its tail to a white tip. It tapped its way excitedly along the hallway toward them, pointed ears perked and twisted forward with interest. Whatever the creature was, it was almost maddeningly cute. It looked more like the latest in a line of stuffed animals that his niece would beg for until they completely covered her bed.
When it got close, Karter crouched down with his hand on his knee, babbling to it in baby talk. It pranced around him, a look of wide-eyed, open-mouthed glee on its face. After collecting a few scratches and pats from Karter, the energetic little thing turned its attention to Lex, who took a cautious step back. It sniffed and scurried around him for a few laps, slightly oversized paws constantly in motion. Finally it sprang from the floor to the young freelancer’s shoulder in a single, deceivingly effortless leap.
“Gah, oh jeez, get it off!” Lex blurted in one of the less manly reactions of his life.
It continued to investigate his head, as well as make it exceptionally clear that it was indeed the epicenter of the potent aroma that filled the hall, until Karter stepped over to Lex. The critter moved to the freshly offered shoulder, then draped itself like a feathered boa across his neck, fluffy tail hanging down over the missing arm and head alert and inquisitive on the other side. It sat there with a comfort and casualness that illustrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was its preferred location.
“What is that thing?” Lex asked.
“It is a FoxSkunk cross. A Funk. This little guy is technically out of beta, but I’m not planning on taking it to market. I kind of like having the only one.”