by Kyle Harris
Libby covered her mouth, but she didn’t say anything.
“I don’t remember much, not even the pain. I woke up in a hospital bed a few days later. My friends said my shoe got caught on the rail and tripped me. The wheels got me at the shins, and I guess the car dragged me a ways and gnarled my knees too.”
“That’s awful.” Libby’s hand fell back down. “I can’t imagine what you must have felt waking up after and seeing…”
Chaz shrugged. “But now I can say I’m a badass cyborg, so I think it worked out.”
Libby’s smile dimpled the corners of her mouth. “Optimism is a frequently overlooked strength.”
Yeesh, thought Chaz, suppressing the urge to groan. God, and now proverbs? Back in Kennedy’s office, she’d been so stunned by the six-figure number that she hadn’t given a thought to squeezing a little more out of him. Maybe she should double her asking price.
Libby said, “Your openness has inspired me.” She looked down at her lap. “The man at the club was hired by my father.”
“What?”
Silence.
Several seconds went by before Chaz realized her mouth was hanging open. She closed it. She’d thought she’d heard wrong. He hires them? Hires, as in pays? Libby took careful sips from her drink as if nothing at all unusual had been said.
Maybe five minutes passed. It felt like five minutes. Chaz said, “What do you mean he hires them?”
Libby looked up. “His name is Cliff.”
Chaz leaned forward in her seat with a noncommittal expression—to show Libby that she wanted to know more and that she was not judging her.
Libby went on: “My father pays people like Cliff to follow me around and shout things. Anytime I’m out in public, wherever I go, and…you saw the rest.”
“They’ll shout that you’re a lesbian? Out in public? Like humiliate you?”
She nodded.
What the fuck. But still reserving judgment. “Why would your father do that shit?”
Libby spoke quietly, even a little shamefully: “I went to that club hoping I could fix it. I’ve never had a drink before, never been with a boy. I knew it was illegal for me to be in there, but I thought if I drank enough, and I have heard your mind relaxes—if I was relaxed enough, and if I just let it happen…”
“To have sex with a guy?” asked Chaz, her voice at a similarly reduced volume.
Libby nodded. “If I just let it happen with a guy, it might fix what’s wrong with me.” Then she shook her head. There were no tears, but the beginnings of them shone in her eyes. “I don’t know, Chaz. I don’t know. It was stupid.”
Her hands were laying flat on the table between them; Chaz considered holding them. The sympathy, the show of support, that kind of thing. Nah, awkward. They barely knew each other.
Instead she said, “First of all, there’s nothing wrong with you, Libby. So, get that shit out of your head. No matter what your friends or family, or what these stalker bozos tell you. Nobody else can tell you who you are. And it’s never your fault for what you feel. Got it? If they can’t understand you, then fuck ’em. Fuck your father. Fuck Cliff. Fuck any hetero piece of shit who’s got a problem with it.”
Libby nodded.
“And for anyone who does have a problem, you kill them.”
She open-mouth stared.
“Now, hiding the body can be tricky. You don’t want anyone to see what you did, obviously. If someone finds—I’m just fucking with you now, you know that, right?” Chaz started cracking up.
Libby shared some of the laughter. That was a relief.
“You probably shouldn’t kill anyone.” Chaz thought the girl’s eyes looked different: bluer, brighter, lashes a little longer. “But sometimes it feels that way. For what we have to go through. Some people don’t understand, and they never will. But we can’t let those people tell us how to live. Right? The only voice that matters is yours. What does it tell you?”
“It’s telling me you’re right,” said Libby. She wiped her eyes with a napkin. “Thank you, Chaz. And I want to believe that God would tell me the same—though without certain words that you are fond of.” She stared for a time. Then she said, “I’ve never met anyone like you. And no one’s ever stuck up for me like that.”
Chaz bowed her head. “Pleased to do it.”
They ordered and received their meals—a vegetable omelet for Libby, a fungal hamburger for Chaz. She was glad to see the cook had followed her instructions: Cram that bitch with pickles like you trying to get it pregnant.
Libby didn’t talk while she stabbed, sliced, and munched her food, and that gave Chaz time to catch up on her thoughts. With each new piece of information that came out about Libby’s father, she was more convinced that she wouldn’t be satisfied until his head was on a fucking spike. Paying assholes to humiliate Libby in public was some scumbag shit. And how long had that been going on? Based on Libby’s reaction in the club, probably for some time. And what else was that piece of shit doing to her? What psychological scars had he already left on her?
Shit. Libby could be hiding something a lot worse. Growing up fatherless had been Chaz’s one childhood blessing.
After Libby had devoured her omelet, she excused herself. Chaz then heard chatting and turned around. Libby was talking to an older couple at the far end of the diner. The man and woman were white-haired, liver-spotted, wrinkly—the age to be making crematorium prepayments. They seemed to know who Libby was.
A minute later, she returned to her seat.
“Friends of yours?” asked Chaz, pushing her empty plate aside.
“Brian knows my grandpa—they were friends since before I was born. Brian has ESRD.”
Chaz raised an eyebrow.
“Kidney disease. The wait time for a replacement is two years, but he doesn’t have that long. Another option is prosthetic kidneys. They’re way more expensive. But I’ve been…”
Chaz leaned in closer. “Been what?”
Libby glanced around like she was afraid of being overheard. Then she said, “Have you heard of Pruitt Financial?”
The shrug was easy. “I’ve seen the name.”
“It’s my father’s company. It’s been a family business since before this city was even here.”
“No shit? Then you gotta be loaded, right?”
Libby smiled, bashfully. “It’s always the first impression. But I don’t want it to be. So many people assume things about me when they learn who my family is.”
Chaz straightened up. “Yeah. Right. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I know. Because you’re a good person.” She pulled out her tasker—a Samsung Glyder E70. “My father has a lot of money, and I want to pay for Brian to get new kidneys, but there’s a restriction on my access.”
Chaz refrained from asking, What the hell is the point? One look at that old geezer, and she knew he had anywhere from five to ten critical malfunctions waiting to happen. What would a shiny new pair of kidneys solve in the long run?
She held out her hand for the tasker. “Let me see it.”
Libby hesitated, then handed it over.
Holy fuck. Chaz pried her eyes away from the portfolio’s total balance. Opening up the hierarchy, she saw that Libby’s two sources of funds—CHECKING and COLLEGE SAVINGS, both empty—were subsidiary to a primary account, designated MAIN. The transaction history revealed that Libby was receiving a monthly allowance of ten Gs—fucking rich people—but its strict permissions disallowed any adjustments on her end.
“How much does Brian need?”
Libby lowered her voice. “About three hundred grand.”
Chaz whistled. “A whole cheddar factory.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” She held the tasker up so the reverse-side camera could identify Libby’s face for security confirmation. Then she typed in a few commands, did this and that, and returned the tasker to her. “All done.”
Libby’s eyes widened when she looked at the screen. “
Three hundred grand. What did you do?”
Chaz basked in Libby’s astonishment for a moment before breaking it down: “I have the same bank. Can’t do anything about your little monthly allowance because two parties are involved—that means you’d have to get authorization from Daddy too. But there’s a little trick.” She drummed her fingertips on the table. “If you set up automatic billing for a subsidiary account, the bank will withdraw the money from the primary account if you don’t have any available funds. So, I just created a one-time health care bill for this date and time that debits your account and pays the money directly into the same account.”
Libby was shaking her head in disbelief. “You’re incredible. You’re good with computers, aren’t you? You have to be.”
“Not as good at telling you what to say when your dad looks at his next bank statement.”
“He has millions and millions. Why would he miss three hundred grand?” She stood up. “I have to go share the good news.”
Chaz watched the conversation over her seatback. She couldn’t hear any words, but then the old man and his wife were embracing each other, choking up. Tears, smiles, rejoicing.
She reached for a cigarette.
Yeah, whatever. Big whoop.
Sandiford’s repair shop was near the bottom of a dead-end street that never saw daylight. He’d said it was a population sinkhole: more people moving in than moving out. With space at a premium, rooftops had been on the rise for decades. Then someone had gotten the bright idea to merge the two sides of the street about five stories up, amalgamate the housing units into one large residence block. If the Christmas lights swinging from the underside weren’t intended to be a mockery, somebody just had bad taste.
Chaz pushed through a drapery of strung-up disposable air fresheners. Sandiford was behind the counter at his workbench, stripping down a mangled robotic leg. Looked like a Case-model civvy based on the off-white bonework. He’d separated out the microcircuits and ball bearings and copper wiring into distinct piles.
The air fresheners rustled as they fell back into place, and he looked up from his salvage project. “Well, look who it is.” He wore a headset with built-in LED lights, his eyes made huge by magnification lenses.
“Want my advice?” said Chaz, limping in. “If you’re gonna try your hand at decorating, hire someone who knows how to fucking decorate.”
“I’m experimenting with this new décor, to get people to come in.” A little clump of hair stuck straight up when he removed the headgear. It made Chaz think of an antenna. “Nah, they help with the smell,” he said. “The ventilation crapped out a couple weeks ago, and I decided I would try to freshen up the place. And the kids have been wonderful. Once I put those things up, they’ve been my best customers.”
“Kids are buying your stupid junk?”
“Nope.” He gestured to a three-tier display rack next to the counter. “Air fresheners. The latest ones I got in are called Aloha. I guess that means hello in Spanish, or one of those languages.” He waved. “Aloha, Chaz.”
“You got a moment?”
“Sure. What do you need?”
Chaz cut to the chase: “I took a hard landing yesterday, and I think I threw out a stabilizer. Something’s off down there. I need you to take a look.”
“Sure thing.” He cleared the countertop of parts and tools and carried over a battery-powered lamp from his workstation. “What’s got you breaking stabilizers?”
She smirked. “Girls.”
Sandiford nodded like he agreed and was sympathetic. “Chasing tail crosses a man’s wires. I’ve been down that road, sister. Then you fall down that rabbit hole called love, until that light at the top is just another star with the others.”
“It’s not like that. It’s just a job. I have to get close to some rich girl.”
“Oh yeah? Job with benefits, huh?”
She didn’t say anything. Agreeing would mean that most of what had happened yesterday was not herself but just a paid performance. But it didn’t feel that way—the hollowed-out pit behind her sternum didn’t feel that way.
She couldn’t hold back a little smile.
“Let’s see that leg, lovebird.”
Chaz pulled off her boot and rolled up her pants leg. Decoupling was easy: all that kept her leg attached were half a dozen quick-release fasteners. She thumbed them loose and gently twisted the prosthesis back and forth, working it free.
When it was off, she laid it on the countertop.
“And I might need a new ankle joint too,” she added, rolling the foot around to show him how the supposed-to-be-frictionless ball chattered. “Or at least some greasing.”
“Yeah, they’ll do that,” he said, strapping on the headgear again. “Past warranty, stuff falls apart like it was programmed to. All just coincidence.”
Years ago, Sandiford had been a midlevel mechanic for one of the major robotics companies. He had stories about software with encrypted expiration dates and parts that wore down by design. There were Utopian-model limbs known for seizing up after a few years, conveniently beyond the certified free-replacement window. And Panther had taken heat for their allegedly rustproof parts showing signs of oxidation.
Sandiford removed the shin carapace and shone his light inside. “Well, it ain’t a stabilizer,” he said, nudging at something with his forefinger. He pulled his hand back and showed her a dark blotch on the fingertip. Oil. “I think you busted a shock absorber. Here, have a look.”
Chaz peered inside, and he pointed out a little metal cylinder just above the ankle joint. He aimed his light at a tiny crack, maybe a centimeter long.
“A hard landing, wasn’t it?”
She nodded.
“I’d say the piston inside bottomed out, maybe even fractured, and a piece of it came through the chamber right there. I didn’t see a puncture on the outside, so…”
He picked up the whole prosthesis and overturned it, shaking it around. Something rattled out—a tube of metal the width of a toothpick.
“And there it is,” he said, holding it pinched between his fingers.
Chaz looked up at his magnified eyes. “You got a replacement?”
“It’ll be OEM.”
“Okay.”
She eyed a plastic broom nearby and grabbed it. While Sandiford began to fix up her leg, she crutched around his little shop.
Chaz would’ve asked if anything valuable had been stolen—the clutter of limbs and disarray of civvy guts had all the markings of looters. Except the shop always looked that way. In one corner were stacks of exoskeleton components—chest carapaces, thigh shells, craniums. The light from a nearby heat lamp exposed the cobwebs. On a diagonal set of shelving units was a medley of arms and legs from all the major companies. The paint fade on the plastics showed a timeline stretching to a decade or more back. And there were boxes at her feet that contained all sorts of bits and pieces: microcircuits, coils of copper wiring, joint sets, gearing, ocular sensors, gyroscopes, rubber fittings, hydraulic cylinders.
It was like a fucking scrapyard.
Hanging from above were about a dozen civvy chassis, chains looped under their arms and tied around crossbeams. The legs were gone, and most looked to be empty shells, their metal entrails dedicated to new projects or sold off separately.
Chaz did another circuit of the congested aisles, and then Sandiford called her back to the front counter. He was tightening the last couple screws. After that, he took an antistatic wipe and cleaned the dark-gray gloss finish.
“Now you should be fixed up and ready to go,” he said. “And I took a look at that ankle, but I didn’t see any damage. I’ve seen legs like yours, and that lubricant that Panther uses dries up after a while. Go figure, right? That, and you get all kinds of dirt particles and debris sucked up in there. It just needed to be cleaned.” He moved the foot: no more chattering. “See? Good as new.”
“Fuck yeah.” Chaz parted with the plastic broom and took her leg. There was always a brief tin
gle as her nervous system gained access to the synthetic muscles through the bioelectrical linkups.
She tested the shock absorber by jumping. The landings were stiffer in the right foot than the left, but the suspension just hadn’t been broken in yet. It would soften over time, like a pair of shoes.
“What are we doing? Cash? Debit?”
“Yeah, debit.” Chaz pulled her right cuff back, and Sandiford scanned her wrist. “Thanks, man.”
“You just be more careful chasing after them girls next time,” he said, and he winked. “I get it, you know. The hormones running wild. Seeing things you didn’t see before. It’s a whole new frontier out there.”
“Thanks, Dad.” Something caught her eye behind him, on the back wall. She nodded. “What are those?”
Sandiford looked. “Oh. Yeah. People don’t like the junk anymore, and the air freshener enterprise isn’t so remunerative. So I’m broadening my spectrum, and I’ve had a few folks asking me about personal protection. The streets aren’t as safe as they used to be.”
“Isn’t that the shit corrections officers use?”
“Sure. Bought a bunch of them wholesale. The civilian ones aren’t as strong, but they still pack a punch.” He grabbed the center baton off the hooks and laid it on the counter between them. The price tag said $800.
“That’s a pretty fucking expensive stick,” she said.
“No, no, not just a stick.” He pointed out the two little bare-metal prongs on the end. “When one of the fruitcakes doesn’t want to calm down, a CO pushes these two electrodes into their body. Then he presses a button on the handle”—he showed her—“and about fifty thousand volts come out. It stuns them, makes them think twice about getting back up.”
Chaz shrugged, the show-and-tell having no effect on her opinion. “It’s still a fucking stick for eight hundred bucks. Just get a fucking gun.”