Oh god. Oh god, black table. Black cushiony table. Oh god! They’re gonna fuck my butt.
I turned to run but they grabbed me by the arms. The guards did. I wiggled. I wiggled so good. If I was greased up. Son of a bitch, if I was greased up, it would have worked.
The table had straps. Really good ones. Firm straps. They laid me on it, stomach-down.
“Why am I stomach down?! Why am I stomach down?! What is this?! Don’t fuck my butt! Don’t fuck my butt!”
I held on hope that screaming exactly what I wanted to not happen would make that thing not happen. I felt a sharp pinch on my ass. Right cheek, well away from the crack.
“This is how it starts! Ahhhh! No! This is how it starts!”
I heard a zipper. I know I heard it. It was a real sound.
I blacked out.
When I woke up later, I was still strapped to the table, face-down and, curiously, my ass didn’t hurt. I felt woozy, though. And they may have just numbed my spicy manhole. Nothing was out of the question at this point. The room was dark. Not pitch-black, but the main lights were off and I didn’t hear anyone moving around in the room with me. It’s quiet moments like these that I tend to agree it’s advisable to give some thought to your life and the decisions you’ve made. For me, that began with a summing up. The only person I could really stand had escaped into a bathroom ceiling and I was strapped to a table in the murder basement of a company that will get away with killing me whenever they remember I’m in here. Unless this is the murder part. Seems like a strange way to go. I’m sure that guard would be happy to give me an insane monologue and then cut my skin off.
I wiggled some more, but my stomach put an end to that almost immediately. I was genuinely scared. The silence made it worse. I could just see the door to the hall and all my brain kept imagining was a man walking through, putting a gun to my head, and pulling the trigger.
Then I fell asleep. I was very tired. It was all very tiring.
The fun part of falling asleep was that I woke up to the sound of the door sliding open. A heavy metallic scrape. Not loud or painful to the ears but very distinct. Then I panicked. The adrenaline rush made me both bold and, I assume, articulate.
“Alright, assholes. Let me out of these restraints. I’ll fuck you all up. Pussies. Stupid pussies. You guys are just scared of all this, right? Buncha punk bitches. With your… little… bitch. Faces. Can’t do shit.”
A guard, a new one I think, came to the side of the table. “Alright there, Gun Show, calm down. I can do one of two things depending on how crazy you want to keep being. I can take you to your cell or I can leave you strapped to this table again.”
Again? That was a concerning word. Clearly I’d woken up before. The woozy head was making sense now, but there were no memories to validate the logic.
“Is cell a euphemism for murder?”
“WorldGov has very strict laws against murder, especially of prisoners.”
“WorldGov?”
“Yeah, you’re officially a prisoner of the state. You and your little girlfriend. You’re being kept here awaiting transfer.”
“But… my butt. You guys…”
“Implanted a prisoner tracking and identification device.”
Well, the butt was a wonderful place to hide things. This was making more sense. Jail was better than death. And a cell was better than this table. Plus, Marine would be more likely to find me there.
“Okay. Cell, please.”
The guard got me off the table, gave me a very classy black and white checkered jumpsuit, and took me back through the evil villain basement reception area. I reasoned that there was no use in making a break for it. My legs were noodles and my stomach was a soup of displaced organ mush from the feel of it. Beyond that, there were just too many floors to be dealt with between here and an exitable doorway.
We got to the prison area. It was pretty much as you’d expect. Two cells across from one another. A wall blocked the nearest one from being able to see into the hall. At the left side of the room, next to the hallway that led in, was a desk and computer. A guard sat at it, typing away. He looked up for a half second when we came near and then went back to the keyboard.
“Psycho finally woke up? Boss wants ‘em both in the same box.”
Both? It didn’t stand to reason that they could mean anyone else. We rounded the corner and I saw her. Marine was sitting in the eight-by-eight cell looking dejected. The door clicked open when the guard pressed a button on his desk.
“Don’t cause any trouble.” The guard who’d brought me gave the warning and started back down the hall.
“Hold up.” The guard at the computer got up and went with him. He didn’t return immediately so I turned to Marine.
“They got you, huh? How’s your ass?”
“What?”
“Your ass, they didn’t… do anything? To your ass?”
She looked at me like I was crazy and shook her head.
“Son of a bitch!” Unacceptable. But I’d have to worry about it later. “How’d they find you?”
Marine’s voice was low and, though she tried to hide it, frightened. “They killed the card. I dropped out of the ceiling into a storage room and… and it didn’t work. Buzzed red. I couldn’t get back up into the ceiling and they got me.”
I laughed, hoping to lighten her mood somehow. “We really nailed it.” I let my laugh trail off into a nonchalant sigh. “Well, not bad for less than a minute’s planning. We’re inside anyway. What’s the plan now?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Plan?” She looked around, motioning at the jail around us. “What fucking plan, Laze?”
“Yeah, and I am not really digging on it, to be honest. And it seems like they’re playing by some rules here, so why the hell wouldn’t we try to escape? You want to try to escape from WorldGov proper?”
Marine shifted around, her lips pulled tight in annoyed thought. “Alright, you’re right.”
“Oh—”
“No. Don’t you fucking even. I said it, that’s good enough. Let’s just do whatever we can.”
“Great.” I sat down a few feet in front of her on the floor. “Oh right, check this out!” I got to my knees and lifted my shirt up. It was all gross and purple and green like I thought.
“Holy shit, Laze.” She leaned forward putting a hand on my stomach. I winced away from it, half because her fingers were like tiny icicles and half because I just hadn’t expected the firm caress of a woman. “I’m sorry. Oh… just… are you okay?”
“Yeah, no. It’s fine, more or less. I don’t feel like I’m bleeding internally, but that’s half the fun, I think.”
She put her hand back on my stomach, lighter this time. She had a sad concern in her eyes. Watching her start to hate herself because of my injury hurt somehow, more than the bruises. It wasn’t really supposed to go like that. I pulled my shirt down and forced a smile.
“Hey. It’s fine.” She looked up at me when I said it, hesitantly moving herself back to a sitting position. “We’ve got other stuff to worry about anyway. The food here’s probably awful.”
Chapter
SEVEN
Being put in a cell has a real mood-ruining quality to it. I really wanted to sort of be the bright shining light in the whole situation and, in my mind, that was going to be easy. Marine and I would be playing tic-tac-toe on the floor and it would always end in a draw because tic-tac-toe is mathematically solved and anyone who still plays tic-tac-toe is an asshole. Seriously. You play center and then a middle-row side and that’s it. Congratulations. If you can tell basic shapes, you’re now a tic-tac-toe expert.
See what I mean? How the hell am I supposed to cheer someone up when the only fucking game we could reasonably play on the floor of a cell with no drawing implements is tic-tac-toe? I tried coming up with some better games we could play. Finger
games or something. Nothing. Well, not nothing, but they were all worse than stupid tic-tac-toe. Guess how many fingers I’m holding up? Guess which hand the thing is in? Awful. Not even games really. There was only one bed in the cell, at that. And it was just a vinyl-covered, semi-padded bench. I spent a while thinking of things we could do with that, but they were all sex and, again, the mood was poor to say the least.
To be fair, my efforts were helped none at all by Marine’s insistence on being such a sad sack about the entire thing. Sad sack, it’s worth mentioning, was a comic book character. Is? Still? The comics weren’t wiped from history or anything. One of those super old ones, too. We have a weird surfeit of insulting names for people that came from old timey comic strips. Sad Sack, Milquetoast. There’s probably some other ones. It was supposed to be a longer list. Even then, somebody is probably looking up Sad Sack and getting indignant that the name comes from a military phrase. Yeah, I looked it up too, asshole. Nice try.
Getting back on track, we mostly sat around in the cell. I had slept in the butt room, so I figured it was well past the evening. I think Marine managed to sleep a little. She laid on the little bed thing, anyway. There was a shift change that I watched happen. I doubt I’d have noticed the guards switch if I hadn’t been awake. Honestly, it really didn’t matter. The new guy looked over at us once while he was being told we were here and then just sat at the computer the entire time. How the fuck do you get a job that cushy? It makes no sense. The shit I have to do for cash, and this idiot just sits in a room that’s empty most of the time and looks at off-track betting sites.
It must have been morning when they shifted over the second time. That was my guess anyway. A few hours after the morning guard came in, there was a call. Things started getting pretty busy after that. The guard was in and out of the room every few minutes. A receptionist looking lady came in. Then a team of guys in suits. Either they were getting ready to transport us or there was going to be a fun little visitor soon. Someone important no doubt. About an hour after the checks, the phone rang which sent the guard jogging down the hallway. I nudged Marine, who was laying on the bed-plank but wasn’t sleeping.
“Someone’s coming.”
“Who?” She sat up on the plank.
I shook my head. “No clue. It’s been all mumbling and well-dressed idiots coming in for a while now. Any idea who runs the place?”
“More than an idea.” There was anger in her voice. Plain anger.
Before she could say anything actually useful, there was the sound of mumbling and footsteps in the hallway. Metal carried sound pretty well. The footsteps stopped abruptly and a single sentence rang into our cell.
“I don’t care. I’m going in alone, understood?”
The voice belonged to a guy in his forties maybe. It’s hard to place that decade range in there. Maybe late thirties. A single set of footsteps continued down the hall and a guy in a suit came in. Expensive suit? No clue. How can you tell, really? Isn’t it just a label thing? I bought a really nice t-shirt once. Like fifty bucks. It was just really thin. I guess sort of soft, but I can get those for fifteen dollars, you know? Robots make all that shit. What are the overheads anymore? Does it really save money to have the robot make a slightly rougher shirt? Does cotton even work that way? It occurred to me that my knowledge of textile manufacturing would not be a strong point if I were ever on a game show and the category came up.
“Marine. I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”
The guy had a real smarm about him. You ever wish you could slap someone with something other than your hand? Like a really hairy guy’s sweaty back. The area just between the shoulder blade and the armpit. That’s the sort of thing that’d just be really satisfying to bring into contact with where this guy breathed from. He looked like if Pugsley Addams had a really skinny body but didn’t quite figure out how to get rid of the neck fat or the special ed haircut.
Marine stood up. “Jericho.”
“Ha!”
Marine whispered, her voice serious. “Laze, don’t.”
“I know what you’re here for. You’re never going to see it.”
She started to speak. “You—”
“Tut, tut. Don’t speak out of turn now. You see, I’ve decided that this is a good—”
“Hey!” I was done.
“—oppor—”
“Hey. Hey. Kale Salad.”
“—tunity—”
“That’s you. Kale Salad. I know you hear me you turkey necked piece of shit.”
“What?!” He finally looked at me, shrieking the question. His voice cracked a little bit and he immediately straightened because he heard it and he knows I know. Oh, I know alright.
“If you came down here to monologue like a fucking cartoon villain, fuck off.”
“Is that your way of protecting it, Charles?”
“Oh! Oh, spooky! Oh!” I looked at Marine, feigning terror. “How does he know my name? Oh whoa! This is more than I—” I whipped back around. “You’re a fucking joke. You have a stupid joke name, no one in here is scared of you, and we’re going to get Marine’s shit back and I’m going to piss in your desk. All that is going to happen.”
He bit the inside of his lip. I don’t think he thinks I saw it, but I saw it. “Oh, I’m a joke, Charles? You’re sitting in my private prison and yet—”
“God damn, are you going to call the guys working here your henchmen next? Yes. You’re a joke. You run a multibillion dollar arms and tech defense company with blatant sway over government heads all over the place and you call yourself Jericho. I mean fuck me, why not just paint a tiny dick on the back of your suit and change your name to erectile dysfunction? And even then, what a fucking terrible name. You named yourself after a town so shitty, the walls fell over from being yelled at. I mean, you know that right? You didn’t just pick the name because it sounded cool, did you?”
He had turned bright red the literal instant the words “tiny dick” had come out of my mouth and his palette change didn’t show signs of stopping. I’d never seen a human being bust blood vessels in multiple parts of their head at once, but I was hopeful for a moment. He calmed when he looked at Marine, somehow.
“And you don’t even know, do you? About that thing in there with you. Risking your life for it.” He stomped, still trying to keep his temper about him. He couldn’t find anything else to say so he stomped away. “Carla!” His voice cracked again as he went.
We were alone again in the room.
“Who do you think Carla is? You think she…”
As I turned, I saw that Marine was ghostly pale. Worse than at her shop.
“Marine? Rinny?”
She looked terrified, her eyes scanning my face intently.
“I’m sorry, Laze. Please… I didn’t mean to keep it a secret. I don’t want you to find out from him.”
I raised an eyebrow. It hadn’t occurred to me when I was insulting him, but he called her a thing. I had been so caught up in maintaining my bluster that it had just run right over me.
“Oh man. I know where this is going.”
“Laze, no you don’t. I am serious, you—” She took a step closer to me.
“You have a dick don’t you?”
She hit me. Open hand. Right on the arm. It wasn’t so bad, but I flexed my stomach to brace against it.
“No!” she yelled. “Ass. Idiot.” She hit me a few more times. “God, you’re making this so fucking… weird. Just…” She huffed in frustration. “Just shut up and let me talk.”
Of course, immediately after saying that, she stopped talking. She still seemed upset and shaken and unsure of what to do, so I let that go.
“I’m…” She drew in a deep breath like she was preparing for the worst. “I’m a trashcan.”
A trashcan? I searched the word for some kind of hidden meaning. A metaphor. The obvio
us one jumped to mind, but I didn’t want to be flippant at the moment so I gave it another run through my mind and I came up with nothing.
“I, uh…” I rubbed the back of my head with my hand. “That seems like a really negative way to think about yourself.”
She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Okay…” She sounded exhausted. “That one is sort of on me I guess. I just… I don’t want to ramble and I don’t want you to get freaked out and I don’t… I don’t know. I don’t want you to hate me. Or something.”
“Well—”
She held up a hand to shut me up. “Just give me a minute, okay?” She shifted around, psyching herself up. We were standing closer to each other than we’d ever been, I’m pretty sure. She looked down and exhaled sharply. She looked up at me. Her eyes were piercing. “I’m prefacing this, okay? I know this is weird. It’s not a joke. Okay?” She paused and I wasn’t sure I was supposed to answer. “Answer.”
Ah. “Yeah, okay.”
“You know those little robots with the brushes and the pincer arms and all? The ones that clean up trash? I’m, I was, one of those. I was made from one.”
I shook my head, running through the possible implications of that. “An android?”
She nodded, solemn. No hint of a joke.
Let me explain why this sounded like absolute bullshit. Firstly, there were two functioning androids in the entire world. Neither of them lived in a fucking shop in the half-shit part of town and wore loose shirts and weren’t looking at me right now making me feel… stuff. Weird, inappropriate stuff. They were loud, whirring pieces of kind-of capable tech. Show pieces. And AI wasn’t… it wasn’t this. It wasn’t her. It was imperfect. Sort-of learning, sort-of abstracting. Most of it so desperately poorly conceived that it spidered out until it burnt out whatever hardware it could force itself into. They were thinking viruses, not cute, slobby girls.
Cyberpunk Trashcan Page 5