"You promised me information!"
"Of course." With his vision limited, Stephen estimated direction as best he could. "Listen carefully, Mark. I'm going to die alone and at peace, under the light of thousands of stars. But I think you'll die alone and crying in this ship. And I'm as likely to reach our destination as you."
Stephen cut off Mark's yell with a sharp twist to the module on his chest panel. He unscrewed it and set it adrift next to the hull. Now Mark could not track him. Stephen took a rung in each hand, bunching his legs under him. Looking up, he found the Dark Horse Nebula.
Stephen jumped.
###
Jeff and his wife live in the woods of northern Minnesota, where he divides the seasons into canoeing, cross-country skiing, and those few weeks in between when his writing output improves. His fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Jim Baen's Universe, and the UFO Press anthology Unidentified Funny Objects.
Sympathy for the Download
Matthew Lyons
Quinn knows this is going to be a bad one the second he opens the window. Standing on the fire escape in the dark, he can smell her already.
Alma Pearsson, age 91. Great-grandmother. Terminal. Pancreatic. Client number whatever-it-doesn't-matter-anyway.
The smell of it is overpowering. The smell of her. Only one thing in the world smells like that. It's the rotting-meat-and-sour-milk dumpster stink of months—maybe years—of unwashed flesh and too many uh-ohs in her pants.
But her money spends as well as anyone else's.
He pulls the window the rest of the way open and silently drops through.
These late night extractions always give him the willies, play hell up and down his nerves. These people who want it in their sleep, don't want to see it coming. The ones who go to sleep waiting for it with a bottle of wine, a fistful of Xanax, and a fragile little hope for a better life in a better world.
Weirdos.
The apartment's dark, but Quinn can mostly see where he's going thanks to the light-bleed from the city outside, beyond the windows, casting every shape and shadow in here into sharp chiaroscuro relief. He steps carefully, moving silently across the ruddy old carpet, through the living room and toward the hall. Takes mental stock of the counterweights in the pockets of his jacket—hand-length folding knife in the left, SCED in the right. Everything in its right place. Presses himself against the hallway wall and listens.
Silence.
Perfect.
According to the file, Missus Pearsson, a heavy sleeper, lives alone in this apartment and has for years and years—ever since her beloved husband died long ago. She made it clear in the file; she wants to go in her bed, while she's sleeping. Doesn't want to feel any pain. The Director had told her home service, especially one as immediately scheduled as hers, costs a whole lot more than doing it in the office, but she'd ponied up the scratch then and there. That was that. They'd booked Quinn to pay her a visit two days later. Quick, clean, quiet.
The file hadn't said anything about the smell, though.
If Quinn didn't know better, he'd think she was dead. But she's not. When clients sign the contract, they're implanted with subdermal chips that monitored their vitals and alerted the company of any and all medical emergencies. If Missus Pearsson had kicked off before her scheduled extraction, Quinn wouldn't be here tonight. The phone in his breast pocket would start to vibrate and buzz with a call from Management calling him off.
But he's here. Nobody's called him. Business as usual.
Quinn sweeps down the hallway like a shade, following the instructions Missus Pearsson had given them in the file. Main bedroom, last door on the left. Pauses outside the door, hands in pockets. Left drumming fingers against his thigh. Right curled around the SCED.
He doesn't know why he's waiting. Why he's not just going in and doing the job. He's done this two hundred times, easy.
He doesn't want to admit it to himself, but something feels wrong here.
He wants to think that he hasn't had a feeling like this since he was in combat, but he knows that's bullshit. It feels like every kind of bad trouble he's had since his deployment in the desert. Like staring down the barrel of a gun. No way out but the mercy of whoever's behind the trigger. Like your own personal Armageddon, except it doesn't feel like the End Times. It just feels like the end.
His pulse races. Things speed up and slow down. Everything in his mind spools out and back into a single moment of panic. Everything happens at once. He reaches out for the doorknob and he can feel the bad vibrations burning off of it but it doesn't matter and he opens the bedroom door anyway and he nearly screams and turns tail when someone inside turns on a light and whispers "Come on in."
But he goes inside.
Because that's the job. Because the job doesn't care about your clinically diagnosed stress disorders, and neither does your landlord. Your creditors. The fancy psychotherapist with the expensive bills that the VA won't cover.
He goes inside because her money spends as well as anyone else's, and right now, that's enough.
#
She's staring out at him from under the covers, her eyes huge and bloodshot and curious.
She's the oldest, frailest little old lady Quinn has ever seen, and yet he's the one pressed up against the wall, his nerves blowing themselves to hell as he tries his best to just breathe. He tries to not think about the words combatant, casualty, insurgent. Enemy. They have no place here, in this room, but refuse to be banished.
"You're him, aren't you? The operator? My operator?"
Quinn manages a slow, careful nod. Breathes deep through his nose. Regrets it.
"Of course you are," she says. "Well, come in. Relax. I won't bite. Nobody's going to hurt you." She looks at the clock on her bedside table. "Two thirty AM. You're right on time."
Quinn checks his watch and looks back at her. "You're not supposed to know that."
She smiles, almost wickedly. "I know," she says. "But I asked your Director really sweetly, basically I insisted, and what do you know? Here you are, and here I am. Who could be asleep for this sort of thing, anyway?"
He makes a noise like hrmmm.
"You do this sort of thing a lot?"
Quinn nods.
"Do you do other things, besides this? Or just this?"
He thinks about telling her about his barren studio of a home. The bare mattress and the exquisite collection of expired condiments in his fridge. The six years since he's spoken to his sister. The legion of bottles in his medicine cabinet.
He tells her none of this.
"This exclusively," he says. Another series of deep breaths. Through his mouth. Easier.
"And do you like what you do? Operating?"
"It's interesting," he replies honestly.
"I imagine that it is. Shut the door, would you?" He does. "Do most people who do this at home like to be asleep for it?"
"Most." He doesn't tell her about the man who paid to be extracted while quietly weeping in his dead daughter's bed, or the woman he'd extracted, per her specific instructions, mid-orgasm. Doesn't tell her about all the things he's had to forget. All the things that he's buried. The things that have rotted him from the inside out.
"Why do you think that is?"
"Dunno."
"Do you want to know what I think?"
He raises his eyebrows at her, gives the slightest of nods. A cautious go ahead.
"It minimizes cognitive dissonance," she says. "It's so much easier to become someone else if you go to sleep one way and wake up another. You can pretend that other person had just been a bad dream."
She's probably not entirely wrong, he thinks. He's sure there are people like that out there, people he's extracted, even. But he hasn't talked to them. Hasn't talked to any of them. Not like this. Every other client has just been dumb customer service. Like jockeying a cash register. Or going to war. Aim the equipment, press
the button, collect the check. Easy enough.
Still. She might be right. "Maybe so," he says. "Why not you?"
She smiles at him—the kind of knowing, forgiving smile forged, he can only assume, by nine decades spent walking the earth. Maybe she thinks it'll help his nerves.
It doesn't.
She nods to an upholstered little chair at the foot of the bed, avoiding the question. "Do you want to have a seat?"
He doesn't. "Why?"
"You're rewriting my entire life on my dime, the least you can do is walk me through the process," she says.
He sits. Waits.
She looks back at him, her eyes big and tired and wet and red. But thoughtful. No, wait. Not thoughtful.
Calculating.
"You had questions," he says. She rolls her shoulders and shakes her head as if waking. He stays still.
"I did. I do," she says. "Let's get the big one out of the way first: does it hurt?"
"Not if you do it right."
"And do you?"
"Yes."
"Every time?"
"Yes."
"How'd you get into this line of work, anyway?"
He looks at her. Considers lying. Doesn't.
"Military service. Few arrests for breaking and entering. Couple more for assault. Needed the money. Answered an ad. Here we are." He doesn't say: anger problems, substance abuse, six months homeless post-discharge.
PTSD.
She seems to consider his words. Then:
"What did you do in the military?"
"Medic."
"Hmm," she says, the smile on her face growing sadder. "So you do have some qualifications to be doing this."
"Seems so."
"How is it done?" she asks. "I've heard ghastly rumors, all of which seem to contradict each other and, somehow, themselves. So, tell me, Mister...?"
He almost tells her. He almost says it. The words, first and last, are on his tongue, but he bites them back. There's no rule about this in the Operator Handbook. No regulation against telling the client your name. But he holds back. Because doing otherwise feels wrong. Compromising. Vulnerable.
So he shakes his head firmly, once: no.
"Mister X, then. Tell me, Mister X: how is one extracted?"
He considers the question. Pulls the SCED out of his coat pocket. "With this."
"And what is that?"
"It's a SCED." He says it like skid. "Subcranial Cerebral Extraction Device." Holds it up so she can see. It looks like an oversized click-pen, complete with plunger at one end and aperture at the other. An array of buttons along the side for calibration. Its chromed body glints in the low light.
"How does it work?"
He takes a breath. "Calibrate it for the subject's age, gender, whatever you need. Press it up against the base of the skull, the sweet spot, right where your neck meets your head meets your brain stem. Press the button. Needle comes out, acts as an interrupt for all neural activity. Freezes it all in place. Downloads everything onto onboard storage, to be reintegrated into a brand-new, vat-grown body: memories, habits, personality, everything. Your body goes comatose, shuts down in about twelve hours. Collected and disposed of by the company, or it gets farmed out to the city coroner, depending on how busy the day is. You wake up in a brand-new body, tailor-made to your specifications. Total cerebral transplant, almost zero surgery. Total, extraction takes maybe five seconds." He thinks: been a long time since I've said that many words in a row.
"It's that fast?"
"That fast."
"Did they tell you about my new body?"
Quinn shakes his head no. "Why would they?"
She nods. "Fair enough, Mister X. Fair enough."
Her eyes refocus on the SCED. "Can I see it? The, ah. The...needle?"
He doesn't see any reason why not. He holds the SCED out again and punches the button. There's a noise like a faint digital screeee and the needle jumps out of one end, hard and fast enough to punch through flesh and bone in one go. Keeps it out long enough for her to get a good look, then takes his finger off the button. The needle disappears.
"It seems so easy," Missus Pearsson says.
"It is."
She shifts underneath the blankets. All he can see of her is her face, piled inside a hillock of heavy bedding that only faintly defines the form underneath.
"What about weaponry? Do you carry a weapon, Mister X? Seems like your job might be sort of dangerous, from time to time. A gun?"
"No guns."
"A knife, then?"
He doesn't say anything, but then, he doesn't have to. She lights up with self-satisfaction.
"Fantastic," she says. "That's fantastic." Smiles like a floodlight. The brightness hits him full-force and makes his stomach turn. He keeps looking at her as her expression shifts. Sours, somehow. Grows cruel. It's not something he could explain if he was asked—just a series of miniscule shifts underneath the skin. Impossible for him to say what changes in her face, but it's undeniably there. He moves to stand, to get on with the work, but she holds out her hand, staying him for the moment.
"Before you do what you came here to do, you have to understand something, Mister X: this is not a life I ever wanted. Not one that I was ever once interested in. It was thrust upon me. I was conscripted into it the moment the moron I thought was my loving husband guilted me into keeping a child I never wished to have."
Quinn can feel the air around them growing somehow colder, but he may be imagining it.
"I had a life. I had a purpose. I was my own person. Then I got pregnant, despite my best efforts, and my husband simply droned on and wept like a child until I thought he was right about wanting to keep it. I thought that way for nine months, until a small mewling thing that looked just like him came into the world and he expected me to care for it solely. From that moment on, my life was not my own. It became an endless parade of idiot children and grandchildren, and now, great-grandchildren. An entire brood of moronic things created by one moronic act. By my weakness. My momentary sympathies for his cretinous ways. I loathe them all."
Something sick rises in his chest at the thought of it. Something bilious and hollow that makes him think of his sister and how much he can't bring himself to hate his own family. Realizes too late his reaction to Missus Pearsson's words. He tries to hide it, tries to keep it off his face. She sees it and cocks her head to one side—a curious, weathered old magpie considering its dinner.
"Do I sound harsh to you?" she asks. "I must. But understand this: I have spent seventy years of my life watching my family grow and spread like a sickness, knowing for a fact that I was the point at which it began. Seventy good, usable years gone, and now, cancer? No. I refuse to let it end like this. I know you've read my file, Mister X, but make no mistake—there are worse cancers in my life than the one devouring my pancreas.
"Now is my chance to escape them all, forever. To become the person I was always supposed to be. The woman I was always supposed to be, free of obligation or tether. Free of all the things they shackled me to, free to pursue all the things that they took away from me. Another lifetime to finally become myself again. Which is where you come in."
He feels this ancient woman's terrible intensity, the cold fury encased in her being, and suddenly all he wants is to be gone from this place. He feels his nerves start to twitch and skitter. Everything is going wrong.
"You have to understand something about my family, however: they will never let me go. Never. Thanks very much to the codependent dynamic cultivated by my dimwit of a dead husband, they've come to rely on me for every little thing, even in my old age, and they will continue to leech mercilessly off of me until I am dead. If they discover what I've done tonight, their demands will never cease. Their children and their children's children will have another lifetime of mine to drain. So you see, a clean break is not only preferable, but necessary. They need to believe that I am truly dead and gone. Which I wil
l be, for all intents and purposes. With your help."
"Meaning?" He knows what she's going to say, but needs to hear her say the words.
"Meaning, once I am extracted from this rotten husk, I will need you to use that knife of yours to cut its throat. I imagine the extraction leaves a specific mark of some sort on the body?"
A little spot on the back of the neck, a pinprick at best. Visible if you know what you're looking for. Like a single little track mark. He nods, though he doesn't want to. Automatic.
"I thought as much. I need you to extract me, and then, when that is finished, I need you to kill me."
"Why?"
"This was always the plan, Mister X. Not that I could explain this in my meeting with your Director, but a woman's got to have her secrets. No, it was always going to happen like this. It always had to look convincing. Or weren't you curious why you weren't given a key? Didn't you wonder why you had to use the fire escape instead of the front door?"
He doesn't say: No.
He wasn't. He didn't. Just another quirk. Like the howling mid-orgasm. Like crying for the dear departed daughter, alone in her bed. Just another finicky, eccentric nothing not worth paying attention to. Not worth considering. Just part of the job.
Quinn stares at this woman, hears the things she's saying, and he imagines that he is anywhere else, having any other conversation with any other person. Not being asked to carve a soon-to-be corpse like a Christmas goose. Closes his eyes in a long blink and tries to ignore the memory of another soldier on loan from another squadron, some psychopath on a savage trip, cutting up a dead body for kicks under the desert sun. How sick watching had made him. How so many of the other soldiers had cheered. He breathes, tries to calm his bad nerves, but it only half-works.
He tries to remind himself that he's here, now. He can still get out clean. Get out of the apartment. Call Management, tell them everything. Tell them to refund her money. Tell them to never send him to a job in this neighborhood again. It's enough to get him to his feet.
Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 7, October 2014 Page 8