B-spine

by Cam Winstanley

  “You got me,” shrugs Judy Alexis.

  “It tells me that the five names here are unconnected general admissions,” Kirsty prompts. “It tells me that Meat4 Power’s utivans brought six victims whose friends or family signed non-disclosure agreements before Meat4 picked up their MedAssist bills. That’s why they’re not named here.”

  “It tells you all that?” asks Kareem.

  “Sure,” says Kirsty. “You look for the holes rather than the data. Judy, try this one. Ten operating rooms booked between 1am and 9am but only five names on billing records.”

  “Oh I see now,” says Judy Alexis. “Five vics from Arclights went to surgery.”

  “And the sixth?”

  “Didn’t need surgery?” suggests Kareem.

  “Or, more likely,” says Kirsty, “died between admittance and surgical prep. Similarly, post-op room allocations show three unnamed admissions…”

  “…so two more died during surgery,” finishes Judy Alexis. “Hey you’re right, you can follow the holes.”

  “But why bother with holes?” asks Kareem. “You know where the survivors are, right?”

  “Sure,” says Kirsty. “Their names aren’t here but I’ve got room numbers, drug regimes, organ replacement serial numbers.”

  Kareem sucks the last of his shake and stands. “So like I said, let’s go see them.”

  “No.” The two young Grifters look at her like she’s nuts.

  “No?” says Kareem.

  “There’ll be guards on their doors,” says Kirsty. “And even if the vics are conscious, they won’t talk because medical treatment is conditional on their silence.”

  “Aww Kirstyyyy…” Judy Alexis sounds like the little girl she is. “If we can’t talk to them, why are we wasting our time here?”

  “Because,” smiles Kirsty, “the dead ones are no longer bound by non-disclosures…”

  Thursday 26 December

  09:47 am

  THE ADMIN ASSISTANTS ran fingers over dusty desks and wrinkled their noses at the smell while Bishop held two slats in the blind apart, ate an army ration breakfast bar with ten year shelf life and watched them from his moldy office. He was critical of Meat4 Power’s whole RESC system and openly scornful of the livedrives they produced but he could never criticize the corporation’s ability to produce excellent bureaucrats. They’d turned up on time and they were just what he’d requested. He noticed that all clutched admin-standard Slates with eight inch screens apart from one, who fiddled with red-framed glasses on her chain around her neck and held a ring-bound paper notepad with a pen clipped across it. He liked her already.

  As he walked into the main office, the eighteen women straightened up. As he cleared his throat, three raised their Slates to record him.

  “You, you and you,” he said, pointing to them. “Put your Slates on the desk and leave. You’re not needed.” They hesitated. “Was I unclear? Leave.”

  He waited as they hurried out, flushed and tearful and humiliated. “Regulated Security Consultants, RESC,” he said. “We’re not consultants because we carry out the orders of the board of Meat4 Power, albeit at several steps removed. We don’t supply security, we compromise the security of those who threaten us. More specifically, we kill. Regulated? Well, that’s there to make the government feel warm and fuzzy, to make them think they have some control over us. They don’t.”

  He looked around to make sure he still had their attention but they were listening. No one was taking notes either.

  “That’s who I am. As for you, I know what? Well, you’re female so you multi-task better than men and are less prone to obsessing on a single detail – that’s a fact. I also know you’re loyal to Meat4 Power, that you’re hungry to get ahead, that you probably think you should have made the next pay grade by now. All this is good.”

  He looked each one in the eye to see if anyone looked away. A few did, casting worried glances to the floor. “I’ve got a three month assignment that’s so top secret, I’m running it out of this crappy building. It will be long hours and much of the work will be repetitive and boring. Some decisions that I make and you implement will result in the deaths of others. If you can’t deal with that, leave now. If you can and if you are prepared to stick with me and keep your mouths shut, I guarantee every one of you the promotion to whatever position in Meat4 Power you want and are qualified to do. Decide now.”

  Three of the women left immediately, stacking their Slates on top of the ones already abandoned. A fourth woman looked unsure so Bishop told her to leave. That left him with eleven.

  “You made a good choice,” he told them. “You ladies are going to serve Meat4 Power by running a mercwar. Anyone know what that is?”

  “Simulated warfare for business gains,” said the woman with the red glasses and the pad and pen. “Moderated by a federally sanctioned union, mercenaries are licensed to affect ownership change of fixed installations by physically taking control of them.”

  Bishop smiled. “A text-book answer, Miss…?”

  “Bhaskar, sir. Martha Bhaskar. I watch the newsfeeds, sir. I stay in touch with what goes on around me.”

  “Well, good for you, Martha. I’ve been tasked to launch a mercwar against a rival company called Bostov Cryonics and to be honest, the prospect bores the shit out of me. Can you think why that should be?”

  Martha again. “Because it’s logistics?”

  “Oh you’re good, Martha,” said Bishop. “Right again. I have files on Bostov going back years that list all known facilities but those mercwar clowns need more than that. So first up, we have to acquire data on these installations. We need building schematics and street maps. We need to send RESC field crews out to shoot visuals of them. And by ‘we’ I mean ‘you’. It’s filing and research and I know you can do that.

  “After that, you run the mercwar units. Think of them as a fire-and-forget weapons system. Tell them where to go and what to hit and they’ll do it. You’ll arrange travel for them, inform P Shaun Balaban when they win and cover their MedAssist bills when they lose. Mercwar is federally approved and tax deductible, so remember to keep those receipts. Okay?”

  “Right, if I seem rude to you it’s because I’ve found that people expect me to be rude. Maybe that’s the way I am or maybe I’m a caring man forced into a harsh job by a dangerous world. Either way, that’s my fucking business.”

  He looked around at their worried faces. “That’s it, that’s my pep talk. There are sleeping bags and folding cots in that corner and you’ve got the rest of today to sort your living arrangements out. I’m sleeping in my office here, there are two more empty floor upstairs if you want to start calling dibs on rooms.” They turned to leave. “Not you Martha,” he added. “You’re with me.”

  When he sat down in his office, Martha did too. He liked that confidence.

  He took a moment to look her over. Hidden under pancaked makeup were pock marked cheeks and the faded silver traces of healed ringworm scars. This woman had grown up poor, getting by in low-income housing where they used and used then reused their meagre water allocations. He hoped she remembered that hunger.

  “I need someone to oversee the others, Martha,” he said. “Job’s yours if you want it.”

  The briefest smile dimpled her chubby cheeks before she stifled it. “Some of the others have seniority,” she said, humbly.

  “They didn’t speak up when they had the chance, Martha. And everyone but you brought Slates to a maximum security assignment.”

  “Am I allowed to ask some questions?” she said. “Without, you know, getting kicked off the program?”

  He held up his hands. “Go ahead.”

  “What aren’t you telling us?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  She pointed to the office’s exterior window, sealed off and screwed over. “Bullet proof window panels, food enough for a siege. And here we are in a mothballed office when RESC has a custom built building not two years old.”

&
nbsp; “I don’t trust RESC,” he said, simply.

  “You are RESC.”

  “That’s why I don’t trust them. Too many egos. Too many grudges. It’s safer to run this in a self-contained bubble.”

  “But why so much secrecy if mercwar is just administration?”

  “That’s what you’ll be doing, Martha. I’ve got other things to do.”

  “Such as?”

  He leaned on the desk. “Ah, you see… That, you don’t need to know.”

  “Because it’s illegal?” She made it a question rather than an accusation.

  “It’s the ‘security’ part of Regulated Security Consultancy. You do your job and I’ll do mine.”

  She nodded. “You said we could pick our posting after this?”

  “Absolutely. Name it.”

  “I’ve always wanted to work consumer liaison, Pet Division,” she beamed. “I just love the little tiger cubs they’ve bioengineered. The ones that are as gentle as puppies and never grow up. Not ever.”

  “Adorable,” he said flatly, then remembered what Jeff Chang had said about Reboot. “Pet Division does small species too? Monkeys and rats?”

  “Rats?” She pulled a sour face.

  “Bigger than rats then. What are those things with long backs and pointy teeth? Polecats? Ferrets?”

  “Sir, if you’d like me to order you a pet…”

  “This is work, Martha, it’s always work. Get me an inventory of Pet Division stock that’s puppy sized or smaller. That’s if you’re going to run this operation for me?”

  “Of course I am,” she said. “Where do I sign?”

  He smiled, confident that of all the troubles he faced, Martha Bhaskar wouldn’t be one of them. “You never sign anything here, Martha. You always get someone else to fill in the paperwork. That’s the golden rule of working for me – maximum deniability.”

  Thursday 13 March

  01:01 pm

  “HI KURTIS. LONG time, no see…” She sees his shoulders tense at the sound of her voice and he snorts heavy clouds into the frigid air before turning round and, for a moment, all Kirsty’s old feelings are there. His straw-blond hair poking out from a knitted docker’s hat, his goatee beard, those cloud-hazy light blue eyes. He’s pale and strange and interesting, same as he always was. Her stomach twists as she remembers why they’d hooked up for six crazy months.

  “Offi… cer… Pow… well…” He performs a clumsy bow in his quilted oversuit and heavy rubber gloves. “Haven’t seen you round this meat field in an age.” He smiles and Kirsty’s insides jump again – queasily this time – as she remembers why her friends had been right to warn her off him. Good looking, sure. Tall and lean and strong with it too. But deep down, Kurtis is a very, very creepy guy. She should have known it the first time she’d brought him home and Tim had taken to him like a best buddy.

  Kirsty got the address of this meat field from the morgue attendants over at San Fernando Memorial, who’d been helpful and friendly above and beyond the call. She’d got to them by keeping her head down and tailgating doctors and cleaners through locked doors as they swiped their access cards. If Meat4 Power try following up on her breach of the hospitals record, she’s left no trail that can lead them to Kurtis.

  Deep in a cold, tiled, windowless basement, the morgue guys had been more than happy to talk to a young, female Fedtech in regulation mid-calf cycle pants. “On or off the record, my guys are happy to help, Officer,” the shift manager had told her. “Just two things,” he’d added. “Don’t tell admin upstairs we said anything and don’t use the word ’morgue.’ My guys don’t like the term. Officially, we’re NPO Systems Operatives now…”

  Kurtis takes his cap off and, same as he always did, he’s got a blue silk scarf wrapped round his head. He flicks his thick rubber gloves off one at a time – plop, plop – to reveal black fingerless gloves underneath. It’s a constant thirty four degrees down here in the meat field but despite the cold, still smells bad.

  Kirsty wrinkles her nose to dislodge ice crystals and catches the odor of blood leaked into plastic liners, of muscle tissue laid open to the air, of punctured digestive tracts. It smells like every traffic accident she’s ever attended where either the passengers or vehicle died. It smells like Arclights when she first walked in, before she got used to it. “So Kirsty, ” says Kurtis. “This gotta be business because you never did return my calls.”

  She holds up Slate so he can see the San Fernando Memorial logo on the files. “This morgue threw out some John and Jane Doe scraps. What’s left ended up here. I need to poke and prod to see what I can see.”

  Kurtis reads the on-screen files then beckons her to follow. “I hope you didn’t call it the morgue while you were there. They’re having a major – and I mean abso-fucking-lutely huge – rebranding over at San Fernando.”

  “They told me,” she says. “Dead’s too negative a word, apparently. So now, corpses aren’t corpses, they’re Negative Patient Output, right?” She follows him through the dimly-lit grid of concrete stalls and checks out his broad shoulders set against his slender frame. He’d always had an amazing body but used to lounge on her couch and laugh at her when she got ready to go kick boxing in her spare time. Seeing him at work now, she appreciates why he’d never needed a gym membership. He hauls dead weight, day after day.

  The two NPO guys at San Fernando couldn’t get their rubber aprons off fast enough to light smokes and chat to her. She’d opened her long-dormant Arclights file and done things properly too – thumb prints, statement to Slate’s camera, all filed and correct.

  They remembered the Arclights bodies well enough. They said the stiffs had come in “pretty beat up”, right off the operating tables with cannulas still in their veins and the surgeons’ green felt tip markings still on their skin. One guy says he thought it had been a traffic accident since “it takes speed to slice people like that.” The other disagreed, saying it looked “gang related” and arguing that “wounds were consistent with a heavy blade, like a machete.”

  They’d processed the bodies together. Hospital records told them what organs to reclaim for transplant so they’d pulled them and packed them. Since the dead were nameless, what was left had been sent for recycling to Livedrive Depository 221. She’d recognized the address at once. Kurtis’ work place. A refrigerated wetware junkyard. A meat field.

  She’d only been in Livedrive Depository 221 one time before, the day she’d first met Kurtis. She’d been trying to track the carcass of a livedrive that was part of a consignment born with heart aberrations and he’d been at work, stripped to the waist hauling forty pigs that had been killed in stock train derailment. Seeing him sweating and steaming in the cold air had seemed like love at first sight. Yet her friends told her that any relationship that started over dead pigs was doomed and ultimately – annoyingly – they’d been right.

  For a few months, Kirsty defended Kurtis, arguing that what you did didn’t dictate who you were. She said if any of them had met Kurtis in a bar they wouldn’t feel so uneasy around him. Only when she did introduce him in bars, he still freaked people out. When she asked them why, they’d say “Maybe it’s those pale eyes, but damn Kirsty, your man’s just creepy.”

  Six months later, lying together one night and near sleep, Kirsty finally understood what they meant. Out of the blue, he’d started to dreamily tell her how the Hub’s simple, straightforward policy was due to be applied to death too. And not just livedrive deaths either – every death. He’d mumbled it out like some cute little tale he’d heard at work and when she’d looked over, she’d known it was over because he was smiling to himself.

  He’s got the same look now, a half smile on his face as he nudges the zipped up body bag at his feet. The bags are in one stall of many, just three cinderblock walls five feet high painted in high gloss white paint. She’s seen how a stall can hold forty dead pigs so these bags take up no space at all. “These are yours,” he says. “You need me to open them for you?” Th
at smile again.

  He’d always been like this. Daring her, pushing her, challenging her to go that little bit further. “You think I’ll faint or throw up if I don’t have a man here to hold my hand?”

  He shrugs. “Fine, I’ll leave you to it.”

  She stares straight back at him. “Fine.”

  He breaks the stare first. “Fine,” he mutters, then shakes his head and shambles off to smoke and get high.

  She drags the first bag clear of the pile and it’s light for an adult human, just the leftovers after the Negative Patient Output operatives of the San Fernando morgue and their singing buzzsaws have retrieved hands and feet, lungs and liver and all the useful stuff.

  She props Slate to record her work and opens out her rucksack for gloves and a mask and plastic sample pots. Then she unzips the bag and the mass of body parts is no more and no less shocking than anything else she sees at work. Apart from having a face though, which she doesn’t like, even when the precious eyes have been removed and the sunken lids taped shut with micropore tape. She gently turns the head away and after that, the bag contains just one more inert wetware system.

  She looks it over once, ignoring the clean incisions of surgery and limb recovery. She identifies bruising and tearing and there’s plenty of that. She records each injury on Slate. She blunt-probes every break in the skin for foreign objects. She swabs every one for DNA.

  The first bag’s a male, glass shards in abdominal wounds that she removes and tags and bags for forensics. She pulls the next bag and repeats the procedure. It’s a girl, flattened metal chunks in deep back lacerations that look to Kirsty like they might be bullet fragments. The last bag’s the most messed up, one arm torn from the socket and dropped in the bag like an after-thought. There’s a puncture wound under the ribs, a big ragged one. She blunt-probes and finds a torn human finger nail deep inside the wound. She pulls it free with tweezers and bags that too.