by S. C. Jensen
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s overly active imagination, and you can’t prove otherwise. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Pinky swear.
Copyright © 2021 by S.C. Jensen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. For more information, email [email protected].
First e-book edition: August 2021
Northern Edge Publishing
Hague, Saskatchewan, Canada
Cover design by Martin ׀ Cover Art Studio
www.coverartstudio.com
Formatted by Crafted by AF (IG/FB: @craftedbyaf)
www.scjensen.com
For Miss Johanna Bloodthorne,
who asked to have her witchy cosplay character featured in a book, and completely changed the direction of the story with her request.
Now that’s magic!
Thank you for picking up a copy of Bubbles in Space #3: Pop ’Em One!
My sincerest apologies for the cliff-hanger ending of the last book. I know many readers loathe cliff-hangers, and I always try to wrap up as many of the main threads as I can before moving onto the next book. Unfortunately, with the main story arc spanning the entire five book Bubbles in Space series, it isn’t always possible to do this to everyone’s satisfaction.
Pop ’Em One marks the mid-point of the series and features Bubbles Marlowe’s character arc. I think you’ll find a lot of loose ends connected in this book, and you’ll start to see a bit more of who Bubbles is as a person. I promise it ends more conclusively than the last book, and leaves plenty of room to continue the adventure in the final two books.
This series began as my personal homage to the American pulp noir writers of the early 20th century, with a neo-cyberpunk twist. It has become a lot more to me as a writer, as it represents a major milestone for me. Bubbles Marlowe is my first ever sober character, and she embodies my own struggles with alcohol abuse and recovery from addiction. This book in particular tackles many themes that might be familiar to those in early stages of recovery. If this is a subject close to your heart, I’d love to hear how you think I’ve done!
In this story, I’ve repurposed some of the slang popular in American pulp novels from the 1920s – 1940s. I have tried to make meanings clear with context, however, if you need clarification on any unfamiliar words, I have provided a glossary in the back with the original meanings and how they are used in HoloCity.
If you’d like to read more about Bubbles’ adventures, join my VIP Readers Group to get a free copy of my novella Dames for Hire, which tells the story of her very first case as a HoloCity P.I.
Enjoy!
P.S. This novel has been written in Canadian English. This means it includes an infuriating blend of American vocabulary with British grammar and spellings.
So, sorry about that, eh? We’re a little weird up here.
I pressed my face against the glass of the observation room and stared at my best friend’s writhing body. Her long, brown limbs lashed out from the medical bed, swiping at anyone who came close to her. The disposable examination gown twisted up around her body in pale-yellow cords. A guttural scream tore from her throat and she arched her back like she was being electrocuted.
That scream—filtered out into the hallway over the crackling comm system—lifted every hair on my body and washed my flesh in ice-cold dread.
“Help her!” I slammed my fists against the glass. “She’s in pain.”
Beside me, Madame Molly turned her face away from the window, her skin ashen beneath her heavy makeup. She blinked at me as if through a mask and said, “It’s not Rae.”
“Of course it’s Rae.” I whirled on the woman. “Look at her. You worked with her for years.”
A doctor in a white coat motioned for two bruisers in scrubs to hold Rae down on the bed. In one hand he held a long syringe filled with a pale pink serum. A little jewel of liquid glinted at the tip of the needle beneath the exam room’s bright overhead lights. Rae twisted on the bed like a crocodile rolling in the scummy waters beneath HoloCity—inhumanly fast and powerful. She bit into the doctor with eyes like daggers and growled.
“Get away from me.” The voice rumbled out of her chest as if from the bowels of the earth. It shook my bones.
Bile burned the back of my throat as understanding dawned. “Holy Origin.”
The orderlies approached Rae slowly, hands up, as if they were reaching for a wild animal. She curled her legs beneath her and crouched on the bed. Her head rocked back and forth as she tried to keep her eyes on all threats at once. Silver coils of hair hung around her face, wild and bedraggled.
It wasn’t Rae. Somehow, the thing that had woken up from the coma wasn’t my best friend at all. It was something else.
In the corner of the room, Rae’s boyfriend, Jimi Ng, sat stricken in his wheelchair as if frozen by the same realization. His injured leg stuck out awkwardly to one side, and he leaned forward in his chair with bloodless knuckles knotted around the armrests. His wide-set, black eyes were locked on Rae. Looking at his face, I felt something cold and sharp twisting in my guts. Sweat beaded Jimi’s forehead, and his jaw worked back and forth like he wanted to say something.
But the only sound coming from the room was Rae’s screaming.
Her scream, not the deep bellowing voice from before. It was a high-pitched, trembling wail like I’d only heard once before—the day we’d been told Jimi was dead. But Jimi wasn’t dead, and I wasn’t going to lose Rae before she had a chance to be reunited with him.
I dug my fingers into the edge of the window and heard the frame crack and splinter beneath my metal hand. How could everything have gone so wrong?
I hammered the glass with both my fists, as if I could interrupt the horror unfolding before me. As if I could stop it if only Rae would look at me. But my fists bounced off ineffectually. No one in the room acknowledged my pounding, least of all Rae. I slumped against the glass. My brain still reeled from the shock of the message I had received from Libra only moments before. I couldn’t make sense of what was happening.
Rae’s twisting body seemed to bleed into the raw image of Tom’s swollen, bloodied face from the video. Her screams layered over the harsh whisper of Tom’s chilling words, echoing in my mind ever since . . .
Let me die.
Libra. The ice-cold fear melted away beneath a wave a fury. Somehow it all came back to Libra.
I want the hard drive, the man in the video had said. And I want the plug, Patti Whyte. Find a way to get them back to me, and you can save your friend.
To save Tom, I needed the data from the hard drive. But the data was locked inside Rae’s head. And Rae was not Rae anymore.
I needed the data.
And I needed Patti.
At least that much I could deliver on.
Patti, the plug—the android who started all of this when she used me to expose Libra’s illegal use of AIs—observed Rae’s transformation with an expression of perfect neutrality. She might as well have been staring at a blank wall.
Patti stood behind Jimi with her hands on his shoulders. She was as still and lifeless as a plastic flower in a nature exhibit—perfectly smooth and symmetrical and utterly devoid of connection to its environment.
For the first time since I’d met her, I saw her for what she really was.
A machine.
A beautiful, nearly flawless machine, but a machine nonetheless.
And I hated her. I hated it. I hated that I had been fooled into believing in its humanity.
If Libra wanted its machine back, I would find a way to do it. What was it to me? I wanted my friends back. I wanted my life back. Never again would I allow myself to be a tool of corporate greed and government corruption.
Libra could have Patti.
I punched the glass again, hard enough that my upgrade tore at the flesh of my shoulder with the impact. This time, a crack splintered the window.
No one inside the exam room noticed.
Rae lashed out at the orderlies with her fingers hooked like claws. Patti watched impassively. Neat auburn waves fell around the android’s bronzed, artificial flesh. She cocked her head as if listening for some far-off sound.
Determination welled up inside my breast. I would find a way to get that data out of Rae’s head. I would save Tom and do everything I could to help Rae, even if I had to burn HoloCity to the ground to do it.
Patti’s eyes widened.
The android’s head snapped around and her gaze met mine. My heart hammered in my chest. Could she sense my thoughts? The illusion of plastic perfection slipped from Patti’s face, and she stared back at me with a look so painfully human that I instantly regretted considering selling her out to Libra. Feral panic glared out at me from those eyes, the survival instinct that had been keeping animals alive since the primordial soup. Patti’s hands tightened on Jimi’s shoulders and she opened her mouth as if to speak—
Another tremulous scream burst from Rae’s throat. It stuttered and deepened as the other voice took over. The words came out in a low, threatening roar. “Stay back!”
Rae’s long, lean body tensed and quivered on the bed, her eyes darting around the room. But her face seemed to flicker, like a bad feedreel connection, shifting between terror and rage.
“She’s still in there,” I shouted through the glass. “Don’t hurt her!”
One of the orderlies lunged. He threw his weight into it, diving toward Rae with open arms. His muscles bulged beneath the thick flesh of his pale, fat limbs, and he crushed them back toward his body as he made the snatch.
His small, pink-rimmed eyes blinked in surprise.
He gripped nothing but empty air. Rae had rolled off the bed and now, shrieking, she leaped on the man like a spider, wrapping her long arms and legs around his torso. He stumbled, off balance from the failed grab, and crashed against the bed.
“I can’t look.” Molly slid down the wall with her hands over her face. Her thin knees jutted out of her dark-green pantsuit as she crumpled into a ball at my feet. She groaned into her hands and said, “This is all my fault.”
A chill wormed its way into my bones. I could barely hear her voice over the ruckus in the other room. “What did you say?”
Molly’s shoulders shook and she cried into her hands.
“Now!” The doctor pranced around the edge of the room like the ref at a bare-knuckle boxing match, tense with the need to be close enough to see and the fear of getting hit himself. Ragged strands of his slick black hair fell in front of his eyes as he inched closer. The needle in his right hand was steady as a rock. He shouted, “Hold her!”
The other orderly, a stout brown woman with a face like a frying pan, swooped down on the grappling pair. She slipped her arms beneath Rae’s armpits and locked her fingers behind Rae’s neck, yanking her backward off her co-worker. Rae yowled and thrashed. She kicked wildly but her arms were pinned above her head. The pale orderly wrapped his thick arms around her knees and squeezed. Long red gashes dragged along his flesh where Rae had caught him with her fingernails.
Rae bucked her hips and arched her back, but she couldn’t break free of the orderlies’ grips. The doctor crept in, weaving back and forth with her movements as if timing a dive between rushing boiler cars on the grid. The strings of black hair in his eyes didn’t seem to bother him. He saw his moment. The doctor dove in, plunged the syringe into Rae’s neck, and flushed the pale pink serum into the bulging vein on her throat.
Rae kicked and twitched once more and then slumped into the female orderly’s arms.
Everyone in the room sagged with relief.
Everyone except Patti. The android wore a look of all-too-human shock.
“I remember,” she whispered, her voice quivering over the comm system. “I remember everything.”
Then Patti Whyte’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she collapsed in a heap onto the sterile, white tiles.
I stumbled back from the window like my limbs were made of lead. “What’s wrong with her?”
Molly sobbed into her hands, smearing makeup down her cheeks in thick black lines.
“I’m so sorry.” She fell against my legs, twisting her fingers into the fabric of my trousers. She stared up at me beseechingly and said, “It’s all my fault.”
The doctor burst through the double doors of the observation room, whipped off his surgical gloves, tossed them into the tubular receptacle next to the door, and scowled at me.
The strands of black hair fell in front of his eyes again. He huffed and pressed them back into place with the palm of his hand. “What exactly are you playing at, Ms. Marlowe?”
“Me?” My mouth fell open. “What—”
“When we agreed to take on Ms. Adesina as a LunAstro employee it was under the assumption that she was of sound mind.” The doctor brought up a holodoc on his tattler and projected it against the crisp-white wall of the hallway. Rae’s medical and employment history scrolled by in a series of charts and graphs and percentage scores that meant nothing to me.
“I’m sorry, Doctor . . . ”
“Truest,” he said. His eyes darted back and forth across the information. His lips flattened into a line so thin it could have been a surgical incision. “I see nothing in her files to indicate a predilection for violent, erratic, or otherwise abnormal behaviour.”
“Well, Dr. Truest,” I said, and crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m no government lab monkey, but it sounds to me like there’s something else at play.”
“There is no evidence of physical trauma.” He sighed and collapsed the holodoc. “LunAstro cannot assume the medical responsibility of a person whose employment application was tampered with.”
“The only abnormal behaviour we experienced was at the hands of your so-called recruiter.” My voice echoed down the empty, white corridor. “If that psychotic slave trader broke Rae’s brain with her godsforsaken data stick, someone here better assume responsibility,” I jabbed the doctor in the chest with my metal finger hard enough to make him wince, “because if you don’t, I will, and I guarantee there will be no sound minds left in this building if I have to—”
“It wasn’t Captain Urqhart.” Madame Molly scrambled to her feet, wiping at her eyes.
“Tell him.” I grasped her by the arm and hauled her up to our level, then pushed her toward Dr. Truest. “You worked with her.”
“Rae Adesina is one of the best cybernetics engineers Libra has ever seen.” Molly’s voice cracked as she stared through the window at the orderlies tending to Rae’s prone form. She rubbed at her face with the back of her hand and dried it on the leg of her deep-green pantsuit. Beneath the makeup, she looked old and worn. “We never had any problems with her. But . . . ”
“But nothing!” I yelled. Rage boiled up inside me and burned the back of my throat like bile. I clenched and unclenched my fists—one of which I wouldn’t even have if it weren’t for Rae’s genius and generosity—and fought the rising urge to plant one right in the good doctor’s face. “You should count your lucky stars she even considered coming to this dirty asteroid.”
“Then, how do you explain that?” The doctor’s voice rose to a shrill pitch, and he stepped toward me, stabbing his finger at the observation room. A f
ine spray of spittle misted the air between us. “Do you have any idea how much it costs to smuggle a competitor’s talent to LS-103? I signed off on her contract. It’ll be my butt getting keelhauled behind the next bangtail to Terra Firma when the board finds out she’s damaged goods.”
“She is not damaged goods.” I gripped the doctor by the front of his lab coat, picked him up off the floor, and slammed him up against the wall beside the window. “She is a brilliant scientist, and she is my best friend. And we are going to fix her. Do you understand me?”
Dr. Truest kicked his heels against the wall and twisted in my grip. “I don’t even know which one is her!”
“Is that supposed to be funny?” I crushed my fist against his chest, pinning him against the wall. “She’s the one you just jabbed with a bloody tranquilizer.”
“That’s just the body,” the doctor said, wheezing against the pressure on his lungs.
A vignette of blackness closed in around the edges of my vision, and my heartbeat hammered behind my eyes. I sucked in a lungful of air and held it, trying to stave off the panic clawing behind my breasts. The other voice. It wasn’t her. I knew it hadn’t been, but it didn’t make any sense. Tears stung my eyes and the doctor’s pale, frightened face swam before me.
Molly put a long-fingered hand on my flesh shoulder. “Bubbles, please. This isn’t helping.”
“No.” I exhaled shakily through my teeth. “It’s not.”
I dropped Dr. Truest to the floor and turned away from the observation window, flexing my fingers and gasping in sharp staccato breaths. I was supposed to help Rae escape from Libra. It was my job to save her. My muscles tensed. I wanted to run. To scream. To fight. I swung my fist into the glaringly white plaster wall of the hallway.
And screamed.
Wrong fist.
I had gotten so used to pummelling with my upgrade that I forgot how much it hurts to hit something with flesh and bone. But the shock of the impact shot up my arm and cleared the fog in my brain. I rubbed my bruised knuckles against the side of my leg and turned back to face the problem.