There’s a pink bathrobe on the wicker chair that you grab as you sit up.
It takes everything you have to stand. Muscles protest, and every cell seems to ache.
“Feeling better?”
She’s sitting by the kitchen counter, hands up, watching you warily.
You nod.
“Okay. So here are the rules. Any sudden moves I fire another one of these pips into you. If your hands aren’t where I can see them, I shoot. I doubt you survive another one. So sit. Put your hands on your lap.”
The bathrobe is comfortable. You slowly wrap it tighter around you and sit. Her tone drips with suspicion, guarded overtones. The air is tense.
She points at your leg. That’s where they tattooed the small logo on you. Inner thigh. It really, really hurt.
“You’re ShinnCo.”
“Yes.” She knows, you know. No point in denying.
“And the doorman?” she asks. “Did you know about him ahead of time?”
You shrug.
She stares at you and you stare right back, not sure where this is going. You have the faintest sense that you’ll get out of the door alive.
“Why are you still here?” you ask, which also implies, why am I still alive? ”You could have left me here.”
Stamm smiles.
“I felt bad for you.”
That is not the response you really expected. And you don’t believe it for a second. Someone this dangerous isn’t that stupid.
“You know what I am . . . ”
“Get real. They want me alive. You’re not that dangerous. Neither was the doorman, he was just a backup. It’s unfortunate they don’t care a whit about his life.”
You’ve never spotted backups of any sort before. This is different. Very different. She spots the frown.
“Is this your first high profile recapture?” Off in the distance is the whipcrack of another space launch, and she smiles. It’s a broad one, full of glee. “Look, I’m within walking distance of getting away. They’re getting desperate. I shouldn’t have gotten this far. You’re a backup, the doorman was an emergency backup, and the first three they sent after me are all lying in alleys somewhere.”
She’s dangerous.
Kouroupas tried to warn you.
“So what now?” you ask.
“Well I’m hungry and making some breakfast. Can I get you anything?”
You smile.
“Anything with sugar, I could really use something sweet.”
She nods.
“Yeah, I’ll bet you could, but I know what makes you tick.” Your smile drops. “None of that for you. I’m leaving you weak, and slow for now. Just stay on the bed, don’t move, and I’ll bring you some diet soda.”
You stare at her, and she laughs at you.
“I know a lot about those systems in you. How do you think I ended up with those little pips I hit you with? I designed them myself.”
She walks into the kitchen, opens the fridge, and tosses you a can.
“Drink up . . . what is your name?”
You look down at the sugarless drink in your hands.
“Pepper,” you say.
Susan Stamm. ShinnCo property since birth. Mother died having her, orphanage signed Susan over. She starts telling you all this stuff as she sits at a small table across from you and eats obscene amounts of breakfast sausage and eggs. The place reeks of it.
“You never even realize there is a different way of life,” Susan says. “But I remember, when I was twelve, suddenly understanding that there were people who didn’t have to have logos on their bodies, who didn’t have to report into minders once a day, who weren’t being encouraged to study certain things that the company needed.” She picks up a greasy link, pauses.”And then I decided I would escape it.”
“How many years has that been?”
She flashes a smile and downs the sausage.
Then the dishes are tossed in the sink, she washes her hands while looking over her shoulder at you. You’re still sitting in the pink bathrobe, sipping from the can.
“Just on the other side of Eleytheria is a launcher. I have a ticket off this world, and out there I have passage far out as crew on a mining ship. I know it won’t be easier, but I’ll be my own person.” She raises a wrist. “I can burn this fucking logo off my skin.”
“So you’ll leave me here?”
She shakes her head.
“I have a proposition. You can’t buy your freedom from ShinnCo, I’ll bet, not for a long time yet. But what would you do for a ticket offworld?”
You just stare at her.
She takes it as hesitation.
“You owe me your life anyway. I need someone at my back, because if it’s just me they’ll try and pick me up at the gates to the launcher. Last ditch, overwhelming numbers.”
“Okay.” Opportunity glints in your eyes. At any point along this journey you may have an opportunity to overpower her. She spots the reaction. She thinks she has you.
“You’ll walk me to the launcher, then I’ll hand over the ticket. Try to double cross me before then and I’ll fire another one of these nasty little critters into you. So it’s in your best interests to work with me.”
You nod.
She laughs.
“You realize you’re free, don’t you? You weren’t just physically disabled,” she says.”I scrubbed clean all your systems. You understand what that means?”
You test everything she has just said, and she is right. But . . .
When you look down to your wrists she steps back slightly. It’s an unconscious move.
“Those still work,” she says. “They’re bio-mechanical. Nothing that can be scrambled, infected, or shut down.”
For the briefest flash of a moment you’ve seen freedom. And then, you think to yourself, there is the matter of the countdown. That’s firewalled off from the rest of your body and bio-mech. You can’t see the countdown, but you know it’s there. You don’t explain this to her. Right now she thinks you’re in her debt.
Play along.
“I’ve set you free from them,” she says. “You can do anything you want now.”
You nod again. “Okay, fair enough. I’ll help you for the ticket. Can I have my clothes back?”
The smile on her lips fades. She sizes you up, squinting. Apparently something satisfies her.
“Other side of the bed.”
They’ve been washed, pressed, and folded into a neat pile. The Astra Model Cub pistol lies on top of them all. It’s loaded.
Golden. Like that tantalizing glimpse of freedom she’d tried to give you.
Fifteen minutes later you’re both out the door. You’ve got the overcoat draped over your right arm. You’re weak, tired, and at a disadvantage, but all it will take is one well-placed shot where you can drop behind some cover, and she’s down.
Susan faces you as she locks the door, still wary, but there is joy in her face. She can see the end of the road.
It’s almost sad.
You walk down a corridor toward a pair of steel doors. As sunlight spills into the dimly lit area, you scope a vending niche just ahead and to the right. A drink machine hums a long low note.All you have to do is slow down, just get behind her by one step, shoot her, and use the machine for cover if she tries to use one of those lethal darts.
Two shadows force their way through the doors at the end of the corridor.
The gun’s easy enough to spot; you duck and jump to your side. Susan fires at one of them as you dodge into the niche.
What puzzles you is the wrenching pain in your shoulder that drops you to the floor in front of the neon glow of the soda machine.
They’re not aiming at Susan.
That was meant for you.
Your chest is wet with blood and your left arm can hardly move, but with your right you feel around the inside of your overcoat as Susan falls to the ground. Unconscious, not dead.
You drape the coat over the good arm to hide the Astra an
d wait.
It’s Kouroupas that turns the corner.His wild hair makes a halo around his head, bathed and filtered in the light of a flickering fluorescent overhead. There is no waiting, he looks down at the overcoat hanging over your right arm, hesitates for a second, and you fire four times in a row, blowing a hole in the overcoat that the muzzle sticks through.
“Damn it.” Kouropas looks shocked as he slumps to the ground.
You crawl over to him and lean close.
There are no last words, no apologies or explanations, just his creased eyes looking up at the ceiling, his flour covered hands holding his bloody stomach, and then he stops breathing.
With some effort you retrieve his gun, pocket it with your Astra, and slump with your back against the soda machine.
Fifteen sodas later you shake Susan awake again. The first time you tried, after plucking the feathered dart out of her neck, she just lolled back into unconsciousness.
Your shoulder is packed with a shirt torn off the anonymous, dead, would-be assassin at the far end of the corner. You’re still seeping blood.
“Come on,” you whisper to her. “You need to wake up.”
Her eyes snap open.
“No!” she shouts, throwing her hands up in front of her. You grab her wrists, a quick snapping motion, and look at her. She thinks she’s been captured and been taken back to ShinnCo.
“You’re okay, you’re still here in the lobby. You got one of them first, I got the other.”
She looks at you, then calms.
You’re keyed up, your body’s retooling itself, parts coming back online. She’d given you an out, a way to leave. Your body, deactivated, could have been worked over by any shitty street surgeon. There was the slightest chance you could have found a way to be free eventually, thanks to her trick.
Now the insulin is surging, the blood sugar’s up, and the teenies in your blood scurry around, revived and back to business.
You’re back. Rebooted. Tiny emergency warnings flash in your vision, detailing the damage done to your shoulder. It numbs itself and the bleeding clots and stops.
Susan hardly protests as you pick her up off the ground by her wrists with one arm.
“Do you still have time to make your launch?”
She’s dazed, but focuses.
“Yeah. Yeah. We need to move.”
Gun in hand, the other shoved in a pocket so you don’t move it, you sweep the area ahead. Nothing stops the two of you.
In the cab she asks you why you stayed with her.
You sit there, adjusting the bloodied shoulder bandage, and avoid her gaze.
“They came at me first,” you explain. “I’m a target now.” ShinnCo has spent too much time up in orbit, not enough time on the ground. You are just ants, resources to be used. And in their eyes you’ve turned on them, bitten them. It’s easier to eliminate you and find a new worker of your talents than risk something going bad. You’ve seen it before. No doubt you’ll see it again. “What good is bringing you in if they’re going to shoot me as I try do it?”
“You could still have just left me there.”
True.
You wrap your coat back around you and look up at her. “I owed you one.”
The cab bumbles on down the road while you both sit in silence for a while. Then she puts a hand on your knee.
“You rebooted. I can fix you again, so you’re free of all their machines.”
You look down at her hand.
“Take too long. You have a launch.”
“Yeah.” She pulls back away, crosses her arms over her chest, and looks out the window. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” you say. “Your trick probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.” And you tell her about the ticking bomb in you, the nano flechettes timed to go off unless they get their little code from that contact on the gyro stand.
We own you motherfucker.
“They aimed at me first,” you tell her. Kouroupas came to finish it, and they’ll get to aim at you again when you have to go back there to the cart in three days. Or you’ll be sitting, standing, somewhere, when the bomb goes off. You’ll look normal for a while, to bystanders, until your body falls down in a shapeless mass. Shredded from the inside out.
“That’s why I rebooted.”
You look out the window now as well, watching the terminals approach.
There isn’t much to say after that.
There are some things you know about memory technology.
One is that it began here on Earth. Using existing technology: superconducting quantum interferometer devices that map specific memory recalls. It was pretty much there when the Pacification happened. With alien technology brought down out of orbit it got nudged along just a little further into maturity.
Two. The memories are burned out of your head. They aren’t coming back.
Three. The same alien technology that matured memory alteration allows backups.
Four. When you figure out how to disable the bomb inside you, you will then go out and find that backup.
If there is no backup, there will be payback.
You walk Susan up to the terminal booth. Several streets behind lay the bodies of more dead ShinnCo who tried to stop you. You stand on neutral ground. Even ShinnCo wouldn’t piss off the alien launch corporation that owns Eleytheria. Overhead the floors sweep out over the road like wings. The architecture is impossible, like Frank Lloyd Wright on crack. The supports are too small. The wings too large. It’s a building designed by something that evolved on a lower gravity world and is forcing their sensibilities onto an Earth object.
The inside of the booth is filled with a light pink gas of some sort. It’s more than bulletproof; any hostile action you could take would result in vaporization.
Alien ticket takers don’t put up with shit. Too many Earth terrorists tried to take out their aggression on them in retaliation for the Pacification. The orbital corporations that own the rest of the solar system found it annoying, so they put in countermeasures.
Susan scans her ticket in.
Inside the booth, tentacles move. Half of them are plugged into the wall, the other half seem to support a globular mass. This creature looks like a cyborg octopus. It’s light years from home, trying to scrape out a living in a weird world, looking out at you with three eyes at the center of its trunk and burbling something.
“Clear. Proceed,” the speaker orders.
The security gate to the right of the booth slides aside.
Susan turns to you. She slides an extra ticket into the palm of your hand.
“In case it ever works out . . . ” she says.
You wonder if the memory of her walking through the security gate, or the memory of her hand sliding away from yours, could easily be burned out of your head.
Not this time at least.
Several minutes later the capsule thunders out in the great above and the thing in the booth hisses at you, wondering what your deal is.
Time to move on.
You stop at a public access point near the corner of a road.
The demands you send the ShinnCo emergency contact points are as follows:
One negotiator familiar with your case, with authority to bargain. The cart, fully functional, in the usual space. And you’ll confirm the cart from a distance, making sure it isn’t a fake.
Two hours. They couldn’t get an identical fake, with heat generating machinery of the same signature inside in that time.
Or else?
Or else you have time enough to go hunting before the countdown hits the last second.
You’ll need a hatchet, for starters.
It’s a metaphorical high noon. They’re not going to back off, and neither are you. The first sign of weakness is death. You’re locked in, no turning back.
They set a nice trap. The gyro stand is up, and what looks to be a middle-aged man stands there. He isn’t putting much into the façade, half-heartedly telling interested passersby that he�
�s out of flatbread.
You spot the three snipers on balconies above.
Two men in doors nearby, lounging.
Four pedestrians.
One by one would take far too long, so you steal a bubble cab.
Even the new gyro guy doesn’t spot you until you swerve the stolen machine off the road and slam into the cart. Flour, flatbread, meat, and sauces explode into the air. They drip off the door as you swing it up and open, using it for cover as you knock the stunned man out with a flick of your wrist, and pull him into the car.
The shots start. Silent insect-like buzzes and then explosions of concrete. The glass windows of the cab explode, the seats kick up leather and stuffing. In addition to the glass splinters buried in your face, the concrete shards ripping your overcoat apart, they hit you in the thigh, and then again in a foot.
Keep moving.
You grab the hatchet and smash the cart apart while keeping low, and pull out what you need. Your forearm gets hit, bone splitting out of the skin and causing waves of pain and nausea until things inside your body decide the pain is getting in the way of your ability to function.
The cab can barely hold everything. Glass bites you in the ass as you sit down and barrel out of there.
Engine smoking, tires flopping, it lasts long enough to get you deep into an alley.
The gyro man is coughing blood and dying in the back thanks to a well-aimed shot to the stomach. What you really want to do is get to work on him, make him forget about that pain and worry about a whole new universe of hurt. Maybe it will help you forget about yours.
Instead you work on bandaging your own wounds with strips of fabric torn off the overcoat and watch him struggle to stay conscious.
His eyes dilate, mouth drops open.
“I know about your memories,” he croaks.
“You the negotiator?” You hadn’t expected them to actually put him next to the cart. He ignores that, moves on.
“You don’t have any. You never had any,” he says quickly. “You came to ShinnCo looking for ways to reverse the process. But you were state of the art. Recent government surplus, useless after the Pacification. If ShinnCo didn’t claim you, some other corporation would. So they screwed you over.”
“I can’t help you,” you say. Even if an ambulance got here in time he wouldn’t make it back.
Lightspeed: Year One Page 10