by S. C. Jensen
Rae, with her silver hair hanging in lank coils around her sallow, sunken-cheeked face, stood in the middle of a room like a prison cell. The bare patch on her scalp where I’d ripped her hair out glistened, raw and pink, like a burn. The right side of her face was swollen and bruised to a deep purple. Blood trickled from the side of her mouth. Behind her, the bare walls—smeared and spattered as if with a macabre paint cannon—seemed to tip and bend toward her in the unfocused vidfeed. The white coffin-like capsule was torn open behind her like a mangled eggshell, twisted shards of metal bursting from the top like something had exploded out of it.
My throat tightened. I felt like Patti’s synthetic grip was crushing my windpipe again. But Patti stared blankly ahead, leaning forward hungrily. Her jaw worked over soundless words.
I couldn’t bring myself to look directly at the holoscreen. My cheeks burned and my lips tingled. The rest of my body felt like it had been dragged behind the bangtail in the unforgiving icebox of deep space. The room spun around me.
But from the corner of my eye, I watched Rae.
Blood dripped from her long, brown fingers, and the flesh had been peeled back along her forearms in wide gashes, as if she’d clawed her way out of the box with her bare hands.
“I know she is with you.” The words came from Patti’s mouth, but Rae’s face in the holoscreen mouthed them too, as if it was a vocal track on repeat. The screen fuzzed and pulsed as she spoke. The voice gave an electronic stutter. “B-bring her b-ba-ack.”
“What the . . .” Johanna’s already fair skin went a bloodless white. She stumbled backward, her eyes darting between the holoscreen and Patti.
“B-B-B-r-r-ring he-er b-ba-ac-k-k.” The image on the screen pitched and shuddered as if losing connection. Frozen in her chair, Patti’s body twitched and she slipped sideways in the chair, like a doll.
The bodies of LunAstro’s mercenaries took shape behind Rae, pools of blood beneath their crushed skulls.
“I will kill them all,” Rae’s image mouthed emotionlessly. She held something sharp and metallic up to her throat, where a small red stone hung between her collar bones.
“There,” I said. “The necklace. See?”
Rae said, “And then I will kill the host.”
Patti fell forward out of her chair, gasping as if she had lungs and had been held under water. The cube dissolved into silent blackness again.
Hammett killed the screen, sat back on its haunches, and shuddered. Looking slightly abashed, it said, “If I had known that’s what it was, I wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to share it.”
Patti crawled forward on her hands and knees, swaying her head back and forth as if she couldn’t see where she was going. Gore’s hand slipped inside his suit jacket, and he stepped backwards on the balls of his feet, as smooth as a dancer. He whipped a long, slender-barrelled handgun out and pointed it at Patti’s head, his face a mask of cool indifference.
“Don’t get any ideas.” Johanna’s hand curled around twin balls of purple flame that sputtered and hissed in the dead silence of the room.
“The only idea I have is finishing the job I’ve been hired to do.” Gore’s jaw twitched. “Which I can’t do if the android here turns homicidal.”
“She’s not going to turn homicidal,” Johanna said. “Are you, Patti?”
Patti pushed herself back on her heels and reached out to steady herself on the big metal table.
“Patti?” Panic strangled the edge of Johanna’s words, and the balls of flame flared. “I need you to be okay. Talk to me.”
“What happened?” Patti groaned and grasped the sides of her heads like she was trying to keep her brains from spilling out her ears. “Why am I on the floor?”
“We don’t know,” Johanna said, and the flames settled into a low flicker again. “You went kind of catatonic there and started speaking in tongues. What did it feel like?”
“I thought I was dreaming,” Patti said. “I haven’t had a proper dream since . . .”
She swayed slightly, then used the table to pull herself into a standing position. Her eyes focused on Gore and his gun and she said, “Why are you pointing that at me?”
“We had a little visit from a friend of yours,” Gore said, not lowering his weapon. “Care to explain that to us?”
“She doesn’t know what you’re talking about. Can’t you see that?” The tendons in Johanna’s neck flared, and she lifted one hand. The ball of flame crackled threateningly. “Put your weapon down.”
“Or what?” Gore said. “You’ll melt my eyeballs? Those flames are all show and no go, if you ask—”
Johanna launched a stream of flame at Gore’s chest. He shouted and leaped backward, tripped over the coffee table and dove behind one of the squishy white chairs. The cyber-witch trailed him with the purple flames, toasting the chair like a flambéed meringue.
“Johanna, stop.” Patti stumbled forward and grabbed the woman’s arm by the elbow and wrenched it back. “Let’s not make things any worse than they are.”
Johanna stopped, but she leered at the chair like it had personally offended her by protecting Gore, and she was glad to see it suffer.
“How could they be any worse than they already are?” I said, the words strained to barely a whisper. “That thing inside Rae just threatened to kill her if we don’t turn this bangtail around and deliver you. It spoke to us with your voice. Is it in there right now? Can it hear us?”
Gore poked his pale, wrinkled forehead up over the back of the chair. Black bubbles spread across the white surface like some kind of flesh-eating disease, and the stench of burning hair wafted up on a thin trail of smoke from the smouldering material.
“We can’t turn the ship around,” Johanna said. “Even that silver-haired psycho must know that.”
“She’s not a psycho,” I snapped. “She’s my best friend. It’s not her fault there’s an electronic demon leeching on her brain.”
I whirled on Patti and said, “What I want to know is how did it speak through you?”
She looked at me with a dazed expression on her too-perfect face. “I don’t know. It shouldn’t be possible.”
“We’ll figure it out, Patti,” Johanna said. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out together.”
“How do we know the same program hasn’t been listening in on us all this time?” I said. “How do we aren’t speaking to it right now? What makes you think you have any control over this thing at all?”
“Don’t panic,” Gore said, standing up fully but giving Johanna a slightly nervous glance. He didn’t put his gun away, but he lowered it to his side at least.
“Sure.” I threw my hands up in the air. “Maybe I should save it all up for some future catastrophe so I don’t run out of panic when we really need it.”
Patti shook her head slowly. “It can’t be. I defeated the program.”
“You said that you co-exist,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s still there. Like a ghost at the edge of my consciousness.”
“It could be communicating with the other one right now,” I said.
Gore smoothed his thumb over the stock of his handgun but didn’t lift the barrel. He sidestepped to keep the chair between himself and Johanna as she moved toward the android. Patti kept slowly shaking her head, back and forth, back and forth, like an animal that has been caged for too long. The haunted look I’d seen in Rae’s eyes—when they were her eyes—in the observation room came back to me now. The chunk of hair missing from her scalp. Her torn fingers and hands. The bruise on the side of her head where I’d hit her. Would LunAstro be able to heal her? How long until Rae was like Patti? A human mind trapped inside a synthetic body.
“What was it like?” I asked just to break the silence. “Fighting it?”
“Like trying to outwit a bad dream.” Patti fell back, her body st
rangely limp and mannequin-like. “It didn’t play fair. There were no rules. It destroyed my physical body, but in the end, I defeated it. It’s still in there, but I control it now.”
I swallowed at the thickness in my throat. “How can you be sure?”
“I feel it testing, sometimes,” she said. “But I . . . I can tell the difference now, between my thoughts and those that aren’t mine. I can.”
I considered all the depressive episodes I’d had over the years while in the coils of addiction. The times I’d felt like someone else lived in my head with me. The overwhelming darkness of self-loathing and despair, there, always there, even when you’re happy on the surface. I had my doubts about Patti’s control. It was hard enough to rein in one’s own mind, let alone an uninvited rider.
“But it wasn’t your ghost anyway,” Johanna said. “It was Rae’s. It spoke through you. Used you like a puppet.”
Patti trembled and stumbled backward into the marshmallow chair. “I’d almost rather it were mine.”
“It wants you,” I said. “It said it knew we had you and it wanted you back or it would kill Rae. Kill everyone.”
Patti curled up on herself, shoulders heaving, and sobbed into her hands.
“Oh gods,” Patti said. “It’s coming back to me. Like a nightmare. All that blood.”
“We have to assume it is watching us right now,” I said.
Johanna and Gore stared at me as if I’d invited the devil to tea.
“What?” I cracked my knuckles and shook my hand. The long gash where Rae had cut me still stung. A clear adhesive bandage ran the length of the wound, but it hadn’t closed up yet. “We have to talk about this.”
Patti said, “It shouldn’t be possible. None of this should be possible.”
“Which means nothing we think we know can be trusted.” I folded my arms over my chest.
“We have no choice then,” Gore said. “We’ll have to complete our mission without your assistance. We can’t risk exposing our plan.”
“What do you know about our assignment from LunAstro?” I said.
“Don’t say anything about it,” Gore said. “We haven’t yet revealed any crucial details.”
Patti shook her head. “I don’t have access to any of the managerial decisions.”
“What happened to you when things started to go sideways with Rae?” I said. “You passed out and then you disappeared. We could have used your help, but you ran. Why?”
“I have reason to believe LunAstro’s intentions for me are no more honourable than Libra’s.” She wrung her hands in her lap. “I have kept things from them.”
“Molly said it was you who hid the black box file on that hard drive,” I said, remembering suddenly. “What did you want with it?”
“If I did,” Patti said. “It was unintentional. I didn’t even remember there was a black box file until today.”
“You have admitted to keeping secrets, at least two people on that base are wearing the same necklaces you used to control your husband on the Island Dreamer, and you have a hostile software program hibernating in your brain,” I said. “And you expect me to believe someone is trying to set you up?”
Patti shook her head and her voice grew strained. “I know what it sounds like. But that’s not the kind of thing I’ve been hiding. I mean the cloaking skins. And my relationship with other experimental patients.” She shut her mouth and looked away.
“You mean Johanna?” I turned to the cyber-witch. “They gave you your abilities?”
Johanna scoffed. “I designed these upgrades myself. I installed them myself. These R&D giants get real bent out of shape about independents with skills they don’t understand. I had to flee from my home.”
Gore watched her carefully as she spoke, and I had the feeling that he knew something I didn’t. Johanna took a deep breath and glanced at him. Her eyes hardened.
“First it was Libra,” she said. “But I managed to get out of their clutches and ran straight into LunAstro’s. They tried to play nice at first, wanted to use me on their development team. When I refused, they picked me up in one of their employment sweeps and signed me up on an Urqhart special.”
“Been there,” I said.
“I’m now considered corporate property, experiment number three-one-three. Patti’s the only person I’ve met since landing on that rock who treated me like a human being instead of a lab animal. When she said she was in trouble, I helped her escape.”
“Assuming she is a person,” I said, hating myself for the words even as they came out of my mouth.
Johanna’s face flared as hot as her purple-flamed fingertips. She said, “You watch the way you speak about her. She’s more human than any of them.”
Johanna crossed the room and wrapped her arms around the android. The two curled into the chair together like twins intertwined in the womb. Sisters in trauma.
Gore cleared his throat loudly and motioned for me to follow him. He backed out of the room with his eyes on the two women. Hammett trotted along after him, glanced over its shoulder at me, and waggled its eyebrows. I followed them into the corridor.
“What is it?” I whispered once we were back around the corner where I’d had my meltdown.
“We need to speak privately,” Gore said.
“They were on this shuttle before us,” I said. “There might not be any privacy. They could have bugged the comms. They could have done a thousand things I can’t even think of. We don’t know.”
“Okay,” Gore said. “Good. We’re on the same wavelength.”
“So what’s this about?”
Gore shrugged. “The plan is we stick to the plan. But we don’t talk about it. We’ll find us a quiet box once we get HoloCity and hash out the details then.”
“I know a—”
Gore held up a hand to shush me. “Not here,” he said. “Just in case.”
I rolled my eyes but kept my mouth shut about it. “Fine. What do we do until we land?”
“We sleep,” he said.
“Both of us?” I said. “Is that a good idea?”
“We might not get another chance to rest until all of this is over,” Gore said.
I crossed my arms over my chest and said, “I don’t like it.”
“I can stay on watch,” Hammett said. The pig had donned a sleek black bodysuit, alarmingly similar to Johanna’s, that squeezed over its pot-bellied midsection like a snake that swallowed a human head.
“How much did that cost me?”
Hammett narrowed its eyes, crouched low to the ground, and crept back down the corridor toward the passenger lounge.
“I think that means I don’t want to know,” I said, and reluctantly followed.
“Don’t worry,” Gore said behind me. “I’m a light sleeper.”
The bangtail landed at a private pad to the north of HoloCity’s Harbour Station in the dead of night. Darkness shrouded the fenced compound. A solitary tower topped by a blinking red light was the only indication that the pad was anything but a bare patch of land on the edge of the city. The sheer extravagance of a plot of undeveloped land this close to Harbour Station made my head spin. But with enough cush and the right permits, an R&D mega-corp like LunAstro could have pretty much anything it wanted.
Despite my misgivings about Hammett’s first sentry duty and my lingering distrust of Patti, I slept heavily, not waking until Gore shook me by the shoulder and made me buckle into my harness seat. The landing, supervised by an unseen operator inside the control tower, went smoothly. Gore, Hammett, and I disembarked onto the tarmac and into a steady drizzle of rain, me carrying the pig under my arm. Patti and Johanna followed us at a distance, their eyes on Gore, nervous, it seemed, to do anything that might be interpreted as provocation. The women had been unsettlingly quiet since the episode with Rae’s “ghost.â€
Johanna held a transparent umbrella over Patti’s head. The two stopped at the bottom of the stairs, avoiding the puddles that had formed on the tarmac. Tiny white-and-yellow marker lights from the bangtail glowed in the darkness, shining like stars in the water pooling at my feet. Johanna tossed Gore’s body bag at him, and he caught it with a strange look on his face.
“How’d you get this?â€
“You forgot it under your seat, Mr. Espionage.†She curled her lip at him. “You’re welcome.â€
Gore blinked and shook his head.
“I’ll meet you outside the gate,†he said to me, and began walking across the empty expanse in the rain. I tensed, longing to run after the mercenary. I’d gotten used to the feeling of safety I had when he was around, not that I’d ever admit that to him. I hung back, though. I wanted to speak to the android one last time.
Patti waved forlornly and turned as if ready to climb back into the bangtail.
I switched Hammett’s skin off and put the sphere in the pocket of my jacket. I said, “What will you do?â€
“We’ll be sitting around, twiddling our thumbs,†Johanna said. “And praying that you can pull it off. Thought I’m personally not going to get my hopes up.â€
“Hey.†I held up my hands. “It’s not my fault.â€
“I wish you would just trust us.†Her eyes smouldered from beneath the umbrella with so much intensity I expected to see steam. “We could help you.â€
“We could have used the help,†I said. “But as you’ve already pointed out, this is bigger than us. The fate of the world and so forth. You know we can’t risk being spied upon by whatever has got control of Rae.â€
“I’m sorry.†Patti placed a hand on Johanna’s arm. “I know you were looking forward to striking back at the ones who have hurt us.â€
Johanna raised a hand, purple flames crackling over her fingertips, and threw a fireball into the puddle at my feet. I jumped back. The flame hissed and sizzled and died. She said, “I’m not giving up yet.â€