05 - Changeling

by Chris Kubasik - (ebook by Undead)

  He saved his work and shut down the portable. Then he got up off the floor and pulled out the troll-strength chair he’d bought the week before. He knew he probably should start working at the table, but the habit of working on the floor was too ingrained in him now.

  Eddy pulled down the cheap plates they’d swiped from a fast food place and placed one before Peter.

  Peter eyed him suspiciously.

  “What?” Eddy asked. “What? What?”

  “You’re being awfully nice.”

  “I can be nice.”

  “I’m not denying that. I’m just saying you usually keep it hidden.”

  “Ouch.”

  Peter looked at the food. Six different dishes waited his approval. “Thanks for dinner.”

  “You’re welcome. Now, why are you a troll? Why are there trolls? Why trolls? Why not talking rabbits?”

  “Talking rabbits?”

  “I saw an old flat cartoon once. Flat cartoon. It had a talking rabbit. Once trolls and talking rabbits didn’t exist. Now we got at least one of them. One. Why?”

  Peter scooped a spoonful of octopus onto his plate. “That I can’t tell you. My guess is, my guess is that once a lot of the monsters did exist. A long, long time ago. And then the magic went down…”

  “The magic went down?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been reading about magic. I figure, I’m a troll, and I better know about magic.”

  “You know, you’re talking better.”

  “I am?”

  “Maybe not better. But stronger, more confidence.”

  “Huh.” Peter opened his mouth to take a bite of octopus. It tasted meaty and of the sea. He continued talking while he chewed. “Anyway. This guy, a mage, Harry Mason, he guessed that what happened in 2011, when all the magic started occurring… that was the start of magic’s rise. First the elves and dwarfs started being born. Then the Indians got their shamanistic powers. Then people started tapping into hermetic magic. And then, in 2021, some people just spontaneously began to change into metahumans—orks and trolls—one out of ten—it just happens. So the magic built in power.”

  “Yeah. I see.”

  “So he postulates that the magic, before 2011, was slowly growing back in strength after being down for a long time. It fell from a great height a long, long time ago. Like Atlantis—that might be a true story. A powerful place based on a time when magic was even stronger than it is today.”

  “Atlantis? You mean Atlanta?”

  “No, I mean Atlantis.” Peter looked carefully at Eddy to see if he was joking. “You’ve never heard of Atlantis?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “It was a place. An island that supposedly sank…”

  “Oh! Right! There’s that foundation that’s looking for clues about Atlantis.”

  “You never heard the stories about it?”

  “No. Should I have?” Eddy seemed a bit defensive.

  “I don’t know. When I was growing up I read lots of stories like that. Atlantis. King Arthur. Alice in Wonderland. They weren’t supposed to be true. But, fantasy. You know. Childhood.”

  “Profezzur, you remember how you and me used to live on the streets when we first met?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My parents died in the plagues. That’s how I grew up.”

  “Oh.”

  A silence formed, and the two of them tried to ignore it as they scooped more food onto their plates.

  “So those were people you read about,” Eddy said finally, “that King and Alice? Or are they flatscreen and trids?”

  “I read about them. But people made flatscreens and trids about them, too.”

  “Hmmm. Yeah. I never read.”

  “Would you like to learn?” Peter offered. He really wanted to help Eddy do that if he wanted to.

  “Naw. That’s for profs like you. I know you all think reading is power or somesuch, but, if you haven’t noticed, I’m getting by just fine without it.” Peter thought he heard regret in Eddy’s response, but he decided to ignore it.

  “Well. That’s the magic. Maybe it was here once before, and maybe it’s back now. And the way I see it, the magic is something in the environment that caused my body to change from what it was.”

  “What? Like getting a tan?” Eddy laughed, and Peter joined him. But then Peter added, “Yes! Kind of. Like a suntan. The sun influences the body to react a certain way.

  “See, the genotype… the genetic sequence… it determines what the body will be like. And the brain, too. But it isn’t set in stone. It isn’t as if, at conception, a person’s body and mind are completely determined.

  “What the body and brain end up as, those are the phenotypes. The genotype determines which phenotypes can arise in any given sequence of environments in which the individual who carries that genotype lives and develops.”

  “Huh?” Eddy asked, and laughed.

  “It’s like a kid growing up. He’s given a genotype at birth. But how he ends up… Well, if he gets enough food to eat, he develops one way. He’s healthy. He’s got muscles that support him. If he doesn’t get enough food, his limbs get thin, his belly bloats. Both bodies are consistent within the range of possibilities dictated by his genotype. But only the genotype’s interaction with the environment can fully determine what the phenotype will be.”

  “So you’re saying you had the range of genetic possibilities to become a troll, and by interacting with the environment, an environment with magic, you became a troll. Became a troll. Became a troll.”

  “That’s my guess. I don’t know. Nobody knows. Another theory is that people have been subconsciously using magic since it rose in power. The mages know how to use it on purpose, but the rest of us just sometimes tap into it without much control. Maybe parents back in 2011 made their kids into elves and dwarfs, then later, people transformed themselves into orks and trolls. The idea is that it’s kind of like…” He searched his head for the magic terms he’d recently reviewed. “A kind of physical manifestation of a person’s true nature, just like a mage in astral space has a true nature.”

  “So you turned into a troll because you thought you were a troll?”

  “Yeah. Maybe. I guess.”

  “But you hate being a troll.”

  Peter thought back through the haze of memory before his transformation. He remembered that he’d felt only loneliness, a longing. He felt himself ugly and socially inept. He couldn’t remember the specifics, but the sensations filled his chest, hollowed out his lungs, replaced them with a thick chill. Could he have believed himself into being a troll? Maybe.

  “Anyway,” he said, shaking off the feeling, “how it happened is almost a religious debate at this point. There’s no way to prove the past now. No archaeological records. No one knows. What matters is that my DNA is really different now. That’s all I’ve got to work with. Whether it was passed down to me or whether I did it myself doesn’t matter. This is just the way it is.

  “The research on this has only been around for thirty years, and since the corps gained power and the U.S.A. fell apart, information isn’t developed or shared too well. Somebody might be working on a means of identifying and manipulating metahuman genes right now, and I’d never know about it.”

  “But you could find out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are ways of getting data out of corps. Like I used to do.”

  “But that takes money.”

  “Exactly, Profezzur. Exactly.”

  Eddy shoved a forkful of rice into his mouth and the mouth shaped into a huge grin. And Peter could see now that even though Eddy had not once brought up the heist, and that even though the conversation was all about genetics, their life of crime rested at the center of the subject matter, like a nucleus floating in the middle of a cell.

  10

  Peter stood beside a hangar, along with Eddy and three mobsters from the Itami gang. The way the men’s muscles rolled under their coats when they moved frightened
Peter. These slags were another league.

  The five of them looked out toward one of O’Hare’s runways. The lights of the O’Hare Subsprawl were even brighter than those of Chicago, changing the night sky into the pale white of early dawn. In the cold, Peter saw their breaths roll out as a thick mist of red, then dissipate to pink, and then nothing.

  Everybody but Peter held Uzis. His weapon was a Predator II heavy pistol, specially fitted for his hand. After practicing with it all week, he could use it well enough now. The recoil felt light in his hand, but he knew the gun packed a terrible punch.

  Seeing a small, private plane roll to a stop on the runway, Peter felt his breathing become rapid. As planned an armored truck waited to meet the plane.

  Perhaps Eddy had been right when he assured Peter that everything was in place, nothing could go wrong, no shots need be fired. But the gun in his hand, the metal cold in the winter air, bit into his flesh. “I’m here,” the metal said, “and if I wasn’t needed, I wouldn’t be around.”

  Peter’s mind swirled as he tried not to think about the problems that might arise.

  Watching the guards move with clean precision, shifting the crates to the truck, Peter saw a beauty in their motions. He had been spending so much time crammed into his chip, learning about the smallest elements of human life. But now, watching it all come together, watching how DNA allowed the guards to move …

  …To move the cargo that a man had gone out and hunted. To allow a pilot to fly the hides into Chicago. To allow someone to design the plane that the pilot flew…

  And Peter and his cohorts. All five of them thieves, all capable of stealing the hides away… All because their DNA gave them the urge to want more and the ability to take.

  And the guards, they could try to keep the hides.

  But they wouldn’t. Down through the generations, the capacity to be bribed.

  All this coming together on the tarmac.

  A genotype determined which phenotypes arose in a given environment. The body as well as the mind. And part of the environment was made up of other people, other phenotypes. And since it was nearly impossible these days for someone to interact with an environment that wasn’t manmade, almost everything was controlled by the phenotypes of other people. Life was made up of phenotypes turning genotypes into phenotypes over and over again.

  “Hey, Profezzur?” Eddy said with an edge of harshness in his voice.

  “Yeah?”

  Peter came out of his daze and saw the truck moving down the runway. The plane’s flight lights flashed on as it began to taxi in the other direction.

  “You’re not going to shut down on me, are you?”

  “No. I was just thinking.”

  “You should watch that. Crime isn’t crime isn’t crime isn’t an introspective profession.” Eddy smiled up at Peter, who smiled back.

  The mobsters became shadowed blurs as they ran for cover behind a pile of crates.

  Eddy tugged on his arm. “We’re up. Stash the metal. Metal.”

  Peter slipped his gun into his holster and followed Eddy out into the road leading off the tarmac. The truck drove up and slowed to a stop. The cab doors opened, and two laughing guards climbed out. Against the cold night air their faces glowed a bright red. “Well, it’s all yours,” said one of them. “Let me just get the guys out of the back.” Peter’s muscles relaxed. It was going to work.

  Eddy followed the guard around to the other side of the truck, and Peter followed Eddy. “And now we just drive away with the hides?” he said.

  “That’s that’s that’s right.” Off to the right the lights of a van switched on, and Go-Mo, an old friend of Eddy’s brought the van around to the truck. “They continue down to the U. of C, go through the whole rigmarole with the boxes, sign in and out. Next day, the boxes are opened and the hides are gone. They think they were stolen from the U. of C., and we weren’t anywhere near the scene of the crime.”

  The guard slipped his lock into the back door of the truck and opened it. The lights of the van illuminated the interior of the truck, revealing two men, one in his late twenties, the other in his early forties. The older man’s jaw trembled, his face a mask of fear.

  “We’ve got a problem,” said the young guard.

  “What’s that?” asked Eddy.

  “Jenkins isn’t on your payroll.”

  “Jenkins? Jenkins? There’s no no no Jenkins.”

  The young guard hopped out the back of the truck. “Oh, yeah there is.” He jerked his thumb at the man inside. “Jenkins, welcome to a robbery.”

  Everyone fell silent, staring stupidly at the guard.

  Eddy whirled around and stamped his foot on the ground. “The stupid decker shorted it.”

  “Jenkins isn’t in on it?” said the guard who opened the door.

  “He asked me why we were slowing down,” the young guard told him. “He didn’t have a clue.”

  Peter looked at Jenkins, his heart going out in sympathy to the man. Jenkins sat on a crate, silent, confused not only at the robbery, but at a robbery in which his partners were in on the heist.

  “What do we do?” asked the young guard.

  Eddy turned to Jenkins. “Listen. Listen. We’ve got a problem problem here. I’d like to make you an offer.”

  The man’s mouth moved, but he was too terrified to speak.

  Go-Mo got out of the van and came over to Eddy. “We can’t trust this guy. Look at him.”

  Eddy glanced first at Jenkins and then at the three other guards, obviously trying to gauge the expressions on their faces. Peter saw only a hardening of some kind of loyalty with Jenkins.

  “How about we call it off,” Peter said. Eddy gave him a look. The other guards looked at Jenkins.

  Then Peter realized there was no way to call it off, not if Jenkins didn’t go along—he could tag the other guards. And if he did go along, there was no reason to call it off. The fear from earlier crawled up the inside of his skin to his chest, where it came to rest and gently fingered his heart.

  Eddy stepped toward the three guards and ignored Jenkins fiercely; he cut Jenkins out of the universe.

  Peter glanced at Jenkins and saw that the man had lost his place in the world. He took a half-step back into the harshly lit truck. He fingered his gun, but didn’t draw it. Behind him were the crates with the hides. Peter realized the man might well soon die so that Eddy could get those crates. In his mind Peter saw thick slugs ripping through flesh and muscle, the impact startling Jenkins’ body so much that it ceased to function.

  As Eddy talked to the guards, Go-Mo pulled out his Uzi. “Drop the gun,” he told Jenkins. His face going slack, Jenkins placed his gun carefully on the floor of the truck.

  Peter wondered why Jenkins’ just didn’t fake it. Why didn’t he just say he’d take some money and be quiet, and if he wanted to fink, he could do it later?

  Maybe he couldn’t lie well and was afraid everyone would know it was phony. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to lie. Maybe on the verge of death he didn’t want his last words to be a desperate act of cowardice.

  “What do you want to do about this?” Eddy asked the guards. They didn’t look at each other. Peter sensed that in Jenkins presence they felt shamed. Eddy took a step closer and lowered his voice. “Listen. There are are are only a couple of choices here, none of them pleasant. Pleasant. I’ll outline them so we can get on with it. We shut this guy down or else the whole thing turns bloody.” His neck twitched violently.

  Peter wondered if Eddy’s body was about to betray him. So many things all interacting, so many things that could wrong.

  “I don’t know about killing Jenkins,” said the first guard.

  “Do we have a choice?” said a second.

  The third glared at Jenkins, as if the man had purposely hosed everything up. Then he said, “I don’t know…”

  “I think your indecision speaks megabytes,” Go-Mo said, then suddenly his gun was up, a roar filling the air as blood sprayed up fr
om the third guard’s chest. Peter felt a warm wave rush up his body. His face tightened and he thought he might scream.

  “Down! Down!” Eddy shouted and he dove for the asphalt and worked his gun free. Peter found himself wanting to move, but unable to. Then the mobsters behind the crates started shooting wild automatic fire. Bullets slammed into the truck’s armored sides, their impact clattering harshly in Peter’s ears. Out of instinct he dove for the ground on the opposite side of the truck from the guards. Then he rolled under the vehicle, desperate for safety.

  To his right Peter saw the feet of the two remaining guards outside the truck. They stood, the truck momentarily sheltering them from the thugs. Turning his head, he saw Go-Mo and Eddy on the ground, crawling for the van. Then one of the guards took two steps toward the back edge of the truck. Peter heard the rapid fire of gunshots and then saw Eddy’s right leg twitch violently.

  Peter felt very warm and excited and angry. And he was so giddy with fear that a cry almost escaped his lips. He didn’t want to see Eddy in pain. Fighting his better judgement, he rolled to the edge of the truck, where he was suddenly looking up at the guards. Neither saw him—one was shooting, the other looking across the tarmac, searching for shelter, thinking about what to do next.

  Peter raised his Predator II and fired twice at the guard shooting at Eddy. The gun sent a soft motion through his arm. The bullets pierced the guard’s pelvis just beneath his chest armor and ran up through his lungs. The man looked down at Peter for a moment, clearly surprised that his life would end this way, and then toppled over.

  The second guard, startled for only a moment by the loud gunshots, turned his gun down toward Peter. With a frightened gasp Peter rolled back under the truck. Slugs slammed the asphalt centimeters behind him. He just wanted to be home. Home with his father. Home with Eddy. Any home. Just home.

  Then a roar of submachine gunfire went off. Peter turned his head and saw the last of the guards outside the truck fall to the ground, the man’s body twitching rapidly. Bullets had turned his face into a landscape of torn flesh and blood. Peter looked right and saw Go-Mo beside the van, his head pointed forward, a big smile on his face.