Fin

by Larry Enright

  The large Cybernite moved to block his way. As the White began to utter his threat, Fin jabbed two fingers into his throat. The surprised Cy bent forward, clutching his windpipe. Fin grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head down against his knee. The White collapsed.

  There were two other Whites in the hall. One was holding a woman pinned to the floor. The other was on top of her, his pants pulled down around his ankles. A shredded gray suit lay beside them along with an SIA badge, Commlink, and Pulser. Fin’s eyes met Nova’s. He dove at the White raping her and drove him headfirst into the wall. Fin got up, dazed. The White who had been holding Nova down stood up and drew a knife. He came at Fin, but as he raised his hand to strike, the air crackled and hissed, and the White disintegrated in a red haze. Two more Pulser bursts and both unconscious Whites joined their companion in the dustbin of oblivion.

  Nova dropped the gun and began to cry.

  Fin knelt down beside her. “Are you all right?”

  She shook her head. “They thought I was you. They were after some reward they said was on your head. Filthy Pasties . . . When they found out I was a woman . . .”

  Fin retrieved what remained of her blouse and suit, and helped her sit up. “Put these on,” he said. He turned away while she dressed, staring at the scorch marks on the wall. “I am sorry, Nova. This is my fault. Tork wants me dead. Do you know if they sent for him?”

  “I think so. There was a fourth who took off. I don’t know.”

  Fin turned back to her. “You need to call for backup. Now.”

  “I can’t do that. If I tell Ben what happened, I’ll lose my job.”

  “Which is more important, your job or your life?”

  “Just help me get back to my apartment. I’ll be OK.”

  He asked about the leg she was favoring.

  She replied, “My ankle hurts like hell, but I think it’s just sprained.”

  Fin helped her into the elevator and they took it to their floor. When they got off, she was unable to put any weight on the ankle, so he carried her to her apartment. She placed her palm against the biometric lock and the door opened. He brought her inside.

  Nova’s apartment had reinforced walls; its own separately powered ventilation, heating, and cooling systems; and a nanobarrier protecting the front door. Her Homecom monitored every entrance and exit in the Cyblock and was tied directly into the SIA computer system. These were all upgrades to what they had provided Fin to make sure her safety wasn’t compromised like his had been. She explained all this to him as he set her down in a chair.

  “I am sorry they mistook you for me,” Fin said.

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  They stared awkwardly at each other.

  “Is there anything else I can do?” Fin asked.

  “I think you’ve done enough already.”

  Fin got up to leave.

  “Fin?” she said.

  He turned back. “Yes?”

  “Those were some nice moves back there.”

  “I am proficient in several disciplines of hand-to-hand combat.”

  “I noticed.”

  “But I prefer to use violence only when absolutely necessary.”

  “I think this was one of those times, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “I have never killed another living creature.”

  “Then you should be happy. Your record is intact. But you don’t look happy. What’s wrong?”

  He just shook his head.

  “What?” she said.

  “I understand why you killed the one with the knife who was threatening me, but why the other two? They were unconscious.”

  “They were creeps. Good riddance, I say.”

  “They were living beings, Nova.”

  “Look, I did the world a favor. Who knows how many others they would have raped or murdered if I'd let them live?”

  “I do not know,” Fin whispered.

  “Fin, they were just Pasties. It's not like it's murder. What’s the big deal?”

  “I should go,” he said. “I am late for work. I am not a med-tech, but you might consider having that ankle examined.”

  “I don’t think so. The less SIA knows about this the better.”

  “I know an off-grid clinic run by a Green. He is not a med-tech, but he has some training. Perhaps he could take a look at it.”

  “A Green with some training? You must be joking.”

  “I am sorry, Nova.” Fin bowed. “God be with you.”

  “Yeah. See you around, Fin.”

  Chapter 10

  It is wrong to kill. I give you this simple commandment. Do not choose to ignore it, to make exceptions, to justify your sins because you believe that free will gives you the right to decide what is good and what is evil. You do not make the commandments. You decide to follow them or not. Do not abandon your faith. Do not forsake me, for without me you will stand alone when judgment comes.

  When Fin left the Cyblock, a battle was raging in the skies over Cytown. An alert on his Commlink warned him to keep clear of Westend. There were reports that at least one Eastern Bloc gunship had been shot down and crashed in a residential area, damaging several structures. Scavengers were battling over the wreckage. Fires were out of control. Riot police were inbound.

  Fin took the long way around and was late when he reported for work at the Reconstitute factory's outer gate. He tried to explain why. He showed them the alert on his Commlink. They didn’t want to hear it. He was warned never to let it happen again or he would be fired. Worse, he would be blacklisted and never work in a Cytown factory again. Factory jobs were like plums. Everybody wants one but there are only so many on the tree.

  They directed Fin to one of the outbuildings where he filled out the proper employment forms. They scanned his tattoo and entered it into their database of Cybernites authorized to enter the factory proper. His lack of a number was a minor issue resolved by a call to Polyclonic Technologies. His blue skin in a factory of Whites was another problem altogether. He was told he would have to figure that one out himself. After they searched him for weapons and contraband, he was escorted to the owner’s office.

  Fin’s interview with the factory owner was brief. The man told him he would get the same wage as every other Pasty just starting out—the minimum allowed by law plus a daily ration of Reconstitute. The factory rules were simple: show up for your shift, do your job, and keep your mouth shut. The owner didn’t care if Fin was a friend of Ziggy’s. He didn’t care that he was a Blue and supposedly smarter than the others. One mistake and he’d be out on the street. With the interview concluded, a human foreman in full protective gear escorted Fin inside the factory gates for a quick tour.

  The Reconstitute factory had been a detention facility before the war. After being leveled in the first strike, it was repurposed into a sewage plant, then a Reconstitute plant. Ten-meter high walls topped with razor wire, relics of the old prison, surrounded it. Robotic guards patrolled the floodlit perimeter protecting against the repeated break-ins by gangs dealing Recon on the black market. Pulser cannons controlled the air space above the factory. The plant had been bombed more than once, and each time it was rebuilt it became less like a factory and more like a prison fortress.

  The plant was comprised of several massive structures. The first was the sorting building where common trash was separated. That was where materials such as plastics and metals—anything that could be remanufactured and recycled back into the economy—were separated out and shipped to other factories for processing. Materials that were beyond recycling but that could be used to produce fuel were transported to power plants throughout Cytown. Whatever was left was made into food for the Cybernites. Nothing was wasted.

  Another building contained the food processing machinery. Connected by an ancient network of sewers to the surrounding parts of Cytown, it was in that building that solids were separated out from sewage. Once separated out, the solids were treated and combined with the recyclable food waste fr
om the sorting building. Nutrients were added and the resulting slurry was piped through purifying machines and blended with the different colors and flavors that resulted in the distinct grades of Reconstitute. The last step was the molding process where hardening agents were applied to create bars of nutrient-rich food. Conveyors ran day and night carrying the bars from the food processing facility to the packaging building. From there, they were shipped to distribution centers throughout Cytown. All of the buildings were filthy, stifling places with inadequate climate control systems. Smokestacks reaching far above the factory floor pumped exhaust into the air that all came back to ground with the rain.

  Fin was assigned to the cleanup crew on one of the packaging lines. It was the duty given to workers with the least seniority. The Whites called it slopping because it involved cleaning up spilled Reconstitute that hadn’t hardened properly and then carting it back to a separate packaging line where additional hardening agents were added and the packaging process begun again. Fin soon found out that product spillage wasn’t the only thing they cleaned up. They slopped everything that ended up on the factory floor: the dirt, the trash, the spit, the vomit, the urine, the excrement. It was all mixed together without further decontamination or separation of the pure from the poisonous, and marketed as unseasoned low grade Reconstitute, the kind Mama bought. When Fin asked his White crew chief about it, he was told to keep his mouth shut if he wanted his job. The Man allowed no waste in his factory and there were quotas to meet. Fin later discovered that it was from this reprocessed spillage that the workers received their daily rations.

  The stench in the factory was sickening. The few humans employed there all wore climate controlled suits when on the factory floor, but not the Cybernites. Tests had shown their polyclonic makeup to be resistant to the effects of the toxins, so protective gear was determined to be an unnecessary expense. Fin got sick more than once that first day. There was no lavatory, no sink, not even a pot to throw up in, so like the other new employees still acclimating, he threw up on the floor and cleaned it up so it could be repackaged into saleable product. The air he was forced to breathe, the Reconstitute he was given to eat, even the water he was allowed to drink all reeked of the sickeningly sweet smell of decay.

  His twelve hours in hell ended when his shift was over and he lined up with the rest of the cleanup crew at the wash station to be hosed down before leaving the factory. As lowest in seniority, he was last in line. When his turn finally came, his crew chief, a burly White, abruptly shut down the station, saying they’d used up their water allotment. When Fin protested, he was told he could quit if he didn't like it. So he headed home, clothes stinking, eyes burning, with the taste of death still on his lips. He passed a self-recycle booth on the way and stopped to stare at the Cybernites waiting under its neon five-credit sign. A light flashed inside the booth. The door opened, releasing a puff of ash into the rain. The next Cy stepped inside. The door closed. Fin kept walking.

  Even with the rain, the stench of the factory was still on him when he arrived at Cyblock-101. He gave his daily ration to some Grays begging in the downstairs hallway and went up to his apartment. When he got there, the Homecom pinged his Commlink to tell him that there had been another break-in. The intruders had used the last of his monthly water allotment and stolen his spare clothes. Fin left, trading his dry floor for a spot in the alley beside the trashcans where he spent the night in the rain.

  The next day when he arrived at the plant, he stopped to watch a group of Whites offloading the contents of a trash truck that had broken down. There were two dismembered bodies among the waste: a White and a Yellow. The Pasties were laughing and joking, throwing pieces of the corpses at each other in some macabre game. Fin yelled at them to stop. They came at him, threw him into the transport bin, and began piling trash on top of him. A guard, realizing what was going on, came to the rescue; but instead of chastising the Whites he warned Fin that if there were any more trouble he’d be Recon by quitting time. Fin passed the rest of that day keeping clear of the Whites. That night, he called Dr. Shepherd, but the number was no longer in service and the network showed no forwarding number. He called Ziggy and left a message with his personal assistant that he needed to speak with him immediately. His call was never returned.

  The following day, Fin was assigned to a special-duty cleanup crew. They were sent to the area where the plant’s Reconstitute purification equipment was housed. When he got there, he found that there were no purifiers, only conveyors that came in one side and went out the other, and piles of trash and spoiled Reconstitute that had accumulated when one of the lines broke down. The Whites all knew there were no purifiers but they didn’t care. They didn’t complain. So what if the Recon wasn’t pure? They needed their jobs. Fin urged them to say something to management. The owner was breaking the law, poisoning Cybernites with tainted product. He wanted them to join him in a strike against the company for better conditions, higher wages, and safer food. It was their right under the law. So Council had decreed. The Whites let him know exactly how they felt about him and his ideas on rights. He went home bloodied and beaten that night. When he got to Cyblock-101, a couple of Tork’s men were hanging around the front stoop. Though there was precious little left of him to kill, the giant White still wanted him dead. Fin abandoned his apartment that night and staked his claim to a spot in a nearby alley.

  With the exception of Fin, all the workers at the factory were Whites. He had taken the place of one who had died after falling into a shredder. The others resented him for that. He wasn’t like them. Though his skin had taken on a sickly gray pallor of late, Drab or Blue, he had still stolen a Pasty-only job, and they took every opportunity to let him know exactly what they thought about that. When the Man was watching, they did what they could to make life miserable. Whenever the Man wasn’t looking, they beat him senseless. Every day was a day Fin wanted to give up. Every day was a day he didn’t. By the end of his first week, he could no longer smell the stench of the factory. He carried it with him day and night. Cys on the street avoided him. Homeless who had been living in the same alley moved on.

  He survived like this for weeks, declining in health, struggling on without purpose in a war in which the only victory was death. Every day, he did his best to do his job and keep from being beaten to death. Every night on the way to home to his hovel, he chose not to get in line with the others at the five-credit self-recycle booth. He gave his wages to the beggars. He gave his food to the hungry. He had become the tunnel rat hiding in the back alleys and dumpsters of Cytown, waiting for the trap to spring.

  He returned to his apartment one night. Despair had finally found him. He hadn’t the strength to go back to the factory. He hadn’t the will to run anymore. He was done with alternately starving and poisoning himself, done with his miserable life, done with everything. The apartment was empty. The power had been cut, the water shut off. He curled up in a corner of the common room and waited, knowing Tork's men would show up eventually. They always did.

  There was a knock at the door. Somewhere in his brain Fin knew it couldn't be them. They wouldn’t knock. It didn’t matter. There was nowhere for him to run even if he still could, nowhere to hide even if he wanted to. He was ready to be taken away from this hell to whatever lay beyond. He stared at the door that he had braced shut with a broken chair leg salvaged from the trash as death knocked again.

  “Hey, Blue. You in there?” Ben Clayborn called out.

  “Yes,” came Fin’s weak reply.

  Clayborn tried the handle, then kicked open the door, stepping inside the dark, foul smelling apartment. The light from the hall washed over the empty room, the graffiti-covered walls, and the pathetic Fin propped against the wall. Clayborn ordered the Homecom to bring up the lights, deodorize, and increase the air circulation. He cursed at it when it didn’t respond.

  “They cancelled the service,” Fin said. The words crackled on his dry, swollen lips. “The power is off, too.”
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  Clayborn fixed on Fin’s bony frame, his ashen skin, and the bare flicker of life in his sunken eyes. “You look like death warmed over, Blue. What the hell happened to you?”

  Fin didn’t respond.

  Clayborn said, “And what’s with the eviction notice on the door?”

  “I fell behind. What do you want, sir?”

  “Watch the attitude, Blue."

  “I apologize, Agent Clayborn. Does my behavior warrant immediate recycling?”

  “What? No. Old Doc Shepherd asked me to check up on you. He said he hadn’t heard from you in a while and was worried. You’re not answering his calls. He gave me your Commlink freq, but it tracked to a hooker way the hell out in Eastend who said she got it from a Drab who couldn't pay in credits. The dumb Slimer was afraid she’d get recycled for having it, so she stuffed it in her mattress with her stash. I figured I’d stop over to see what’s what.”

  “I traded it for food. Tell Dr. Shepherd I am fine.”

  “You don’t look fine. How about I buy you something to eat? We can hit one of those carts outside and you can grab yourself some of that Recon shit you love so much.”

  The thought of eating Reconstitute after spending weeks shoveling it off the factory floor so it could be repackaged with filth made Fin want to wretch, but there was nothing left in his stomach to throw up. “I am not hungry,” he said.

  “It smells like shit in here.” Clayborn sniffed his hand. "Jeez, I touched the damn doorknob and now I’ve got it on me." He went over to the sink to run water over it, but nothing came out of the faucet.

  Fin said, “I heard they shut the water off to six Cyblocks last week. They needed it for Periculum. The reservoirs are down to ninety percent of capacity.”

  “When’s it coming back online?”

  “Days, weeks, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yeah, well . . . Hey, I almost forgot. Remember that counterfeiting bust?”