Starship Repo

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  “What is this mess?” The stylist lifted limp strands of First’s raven hair.

  “Yeah, yeah,” First said. “I haven’t been able to find a good conditioner since I got here.”

  “No, literally, what is it?”

  “It’s … it’s hair.” First looked at Loritt standing behind her in the mirror again. “Please tell me they’ve seen hair before.”

  The stylist looked at Loritt and shrugged. “Sorry. We specialize is polishing scales, preening feathers, and brightening fins. But I’ve never seen something like this before. What’s it made of?”

  Loritt returned the shrug. “First, can you shed some light?”

  “Very funny. It’s keratin, a kind of protein.”

  “What do you cut it with?” the stylist asked.

  “Scissors!”

  “Oh, pupa, no. Scissors are for school projects. We use lasers in this salon.”

  “I’m out.” First reached for the bib around her neck and stood to leave, but Loritt stopped her.

  “These people are professionals. Sit down.”

  “They cut through armored scales! What if they set the laser too high and slice my head off?”

  “That rarely happens,” the stylist said.

  “Rarely?!”

  Loritt and the stylist shared a laugh.

  “All right, all right. A real Abbott and Costello you two are,” First said. “How will you know what my hair is supposed to look like when you’re done?”

  “Actually, I’ve brought samples.” Loritt set down his handheld and pressed an icon. Holographic images appeared of Audrey Hepburn, Raquel Welch, Angelina Jolie, and half a dozen other starlets from centuries past that were only now being carried to this part of space by long-forgotten radio waves.

  The stylist leaned in to inspect the gently rotating images with the deliberate, attentive eye of an artist.

  “There’s less length here to work with than many of these examples.” They ran First’s hair through their six-digit hands, ending in suction cups. “However, I think I can capture the basics. Frame the face, accentuate the natural wave of the material, a new color … yes, we can accommodate your needs.”

  “Cut it a little shorter than you would want the final result to be,” Loritt said. “We’ll be in space for a while before we get where we’re going.”

  The stylist nodded, then picked up their sheering laser.

  * * *

  First, wearing uncomfortably cut clothes, carrying a dozen bags, smelling of rancid perfume, alien cosmetics, and burned hair, opened the door to the flat she shared with Quarried Themselves. She dropped everything to the floor before walking a jagged line to the couch on her unfamiliar, ten-centimeter stiletto heels.

  First had worn chunky platform heels before, but these things were ice picks, which had a distinguished history as torture instruments that had carried through time to inflict excruciating pain on her toes and ankles. She may as well have spent the last hour walking around practicing ballet en pointe.

  She kicked the left one off so hard it hit the far wall and stuck.

  “Noted,” First said to herself, then removed the right shoe by hand. She wanted nothing more than to lie on her ridiculously comfortable bed and binge on something. Whether that something was a show or a bottle, she didn’t really care in the moment. However, she still had homework.

  Her evening’s assignment was to go out and expose herself to “culture,” whatever that meant. Loritt wanted her to broaden her tastes to include the sorts of things the upper crust spent their leisure time on. Operas, art exhibits, mutual funds, manipulating democratic elections, frivolous toys whose price tags could feed continents, that sort of thing.

  First absently rubbed at her toes and arches, trying to come up with something she could report back doing to satisfy Loritt’s asinine request, when the answer hit her. She walked to her bedroom, got into the dingiest, most abused, least clean outfit she had and headed for the travel pods.

  She reached her destination a little over a quarter larim later and entered through her usual loose grate. This time, she wore a scarf over her mouth. “Bilge? Are you busy?”

  The eyestalk appeared in front of her, while the voice emerged from behind. “Hello, First. Did you change your hair?”

  First ran a hand through her new, wavy, bright aquamarine locks. “Hi, Bilge. Yes, I did. Thanks for noticing. Do you like it?”

  The eyestalk drew closer. “It frames your face nicely. What can I do for you today? Fair warning, the timeflies seem to be avoiding me ever since we captured a bunch of their friends. Thank you for that, by the way.”

  “You’re welcome, but that’s not why I’m here,” First said.

  “Oh yes?”

  “I’m supposed to ‘get cultured.’”

  “So you came to a sewer? Not to be self-deprecating, but there’s usually a different meaning of ‘culture’ associated with this place.”

  “I’d like to hear your first molding of Welsbar of Del’s Pouk Night Concert in piezo-electric.”

  The tentacles around her trembled. “For real?”

  “For really real.”

  “Then you came to the right glot hole, young lady. Have a seat.” Bilge paused. “Actually, maybe you should remain standing. Wait right there.”

  Her friend the monster departed in a swirl of wastewater. First figured she could risk leaning against the wall. The most it would cost her was a ruddy shirt and maybe a tetanus shot. Bilge reappeared moments later carrying a small silver deck, four wireless speaker units, and a large bass box. He took great care positioning them, frequently looking back with an eyestalk to gauge First’s position.

  “What are you doing?” she asked at last.

  “Trying to find optimum speaker placement for a biaural species such as yourself. My race has omniaural receptors in our skin, you see. It’s a challenge to, er, visualize how sound works for you with only two points of auditory reference.”

  “It’s okay,” First said. “You don’t have to—”

  “No trouble at all. It’s your first time; you deserve to hear this properly.”

  First waited patiently as an eighth larim stretched into a quarter. Finally, Bilge seemed satisfied. He said nothing as one of his arms reached out for the small deck and pushed a button.

  Instantly, the sewer tunnel filled with music, barely recognizable to First as such for the cacophony of alien sounds and instruments, like looking into a Nelihexu’s face for the first time. There were too many parts vying for her attention. But then she let go and focused on the underlying rhythm holding them all together. Stopped trying to understand it and fell into the experience. The individual components quickly lost their novelty and blended together into a unified, indescribable whole.

  By the time the first crescendo hit, tears rained down, lost in the swirling brown water.

  CHAPTER 23

  A week later, it was time to party. Last chance for First to polish her newfound poshness before the big game. It had been a hellish week of preparation for the Luck job. Every waking hour not spent in makeovers or culturing lessons was burned up researching casino security systems and their vulnerabilities, madly digging through the /backnet/ for existing hacks and ghosts, burning up credits hiring anonymous programmers to write crackers and bots to step in where the black market hadn’t yet provided, and writing her own interface to get them all communicating and working together in real time without hiccups.

  She still hadn’t finished that task, but she had all the components saved to her deck, and she’d have plenty of time on the flight over to work out the kinks. What little sleep First had gotten over the last week was plagued with a recurring nightmare of herself in clown makeup giving a speech in front of her old primary school classmates with nothing but leaves censoring her private bits, except their faces were all replaced with alien faces.

  Not a difficult nightmare to parse meaning from, that one.

  Loritt came to pick First up in hi
s Proteus on the twentieth-floor landing of her building. No self-respecting debutante would dream of showing up to this sort of party in a public transit pod. The passenger-side door scrolled open for her.

  “Kula’s not joining you tonight?” First asked.

  “We’re one of only a few Nelihexu couples on the station. It would draw too much attention.”

  The open seat next to Loritt was already busy recontouring itself for First’s body.

  “How does it know to do that?” she asked.

  “You’ve been in here before. It remembers,” Loritt said.

  “Oh, right.” First petted the car’s center console like a cat. “Sorry I tried to steal you.” The passenger-side climate control vents started blowing high-speed, ice-cold air in First’s face. “Hey, what the hell?”

  “She remembers that, too,” Loritt said. “Down, girl. She’s my guest this time.” The frigid air died away. “Better. May I say, First, you’re looking resplendent this evening.”

  “I look ridiculous.”

  “Then you’re three-quarters of the way there.”

  “I’m serious.” First pointed at the short mylar dress that had been sent up for her. “This thing crinkles like a bag of chips every time I move. It doesn’t breathe, and I’ve already dutch-ovened myself. I don’t care how much it cost, I’m not wearing it again.”

  “But of course you’re not. Duchess Harrington would never reduce herself to recycling a dress. You’ll donate it to the less fortunate tomorrow morning.” Loritt said, using the name they’d settled on for First’s alias and backstory. She was hereditary European aristocracy—old money, from the new Earth, doing what children of privilege had done for millennia: sowing their oats and making connections by going on years-long, alcohol-fueled, foreign adventures. She was part of the first wave of spoiled brats to dare travel so far from their home system.

  The best backstories managed to bury some truth inside the bullshit. First’s was no exception.

  “That’s wasteful,” First objected.

  “Conspicuous consumption is the point.” Loritt pulled the car away from the landing and merged into the evening’s traffic patterns. “Predators, remember? They can smell frugality. It’s a dead giveaway that you don’t belong. The entire point of an invite-only casino is to flaunt how many credits you can afford to lose without a second thought. Winning is secondary.”

  “Then why am I hacking the probability matrices?” First asked. “If they’re there to lose, won’t they be happy when I Change Your Luck?”

  “There’s losing,” Loritt said, “and then there’s being cheated. These people are fabulously wealthy. You don’t end up rich by tolerating being someone else’s mark. It’s all in good fun until someone puts a finger on the scales, then it’s war. That’s why your plan will work.”

  “It’s still wasteful.”

  “Hey.” Loritt nudged her. “I thought you’d be happy.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because aren’t these exactly the people you told me on my patio you wanted to steal from the night I recruited you?”

  First smiled. “Kidnapped and blackmailed me, you mean. But … yes. Yes, they are.”

  “But if we succeed, you will effectively join them. We all will. Doesn’t the hypocrisy bother you?”

  “Compartmentalization is one of humanity’s most versatile adaptations.”

  “I see. Don’t trouble yourself with the paradox too deeply,” Loritt said. “You’ll never be one of them.” First stiffened in her sumptuously comfortable seat. “Oh, please don’t take that as an insult; it wasn’t meant as one. You grew up in poverty. You understand the impact it has on people. On families. The needless suffering. The revulsion you feel at the waste, the squandered resources, that never goes away. You will always remember. Your children, however, if you choose to have any, they’ll hear your stories and take them to heart, but it will be less immediate, less real. Their children won’t have any idea and won’t care. They’ll believe their inherited wealth is the natural order of the universe, right along with their positions in it.”

  Loritt paused, some unreadable emotion crossing his face in a wave, but First was pretty sure she knew what he was feeling. He cleared his throat and continued. “The people in this party, and the people we’re ultimately trying to repossess the Change Your Luck back from, they’re many generations removed from even that proximity. Money has lost its meaning to them, become an abstract concept. You can’t know the value of a glass of water if you’ve never been thirsty.”

  “It sounds like you want me to pity them,” First said, arms crossed, almost under her breath.

  “No, I want you to understand them, see them for what they are, well enough to mimic them. Because once money no longer matters, it’s replaced with other kinds of currency. Social status, business favors, political alliances, honor debts, marriage—these are the sorts of things that confer power at this level of the game.”

  They flew along in companionable silence. First watched the buildings sweep by below through the window in the floorboards beneath her feet as they gained altitude, then suddenly pitched down into a large pit. It was only then she began to wonder where they were headed.

  “We’re not going to one of the tower roof gardens?”

  “Nope.”

  “Amphitheater?”

  Loritt shook his head as he’d learned to do around her. Most of them had. Well, the ones with heads.

  “To the Skins,” Loritt said, slang for the very worst housing blocks on the station, farthest from the rich, vibrant city inside the hub, closest to Junktion’s outer skin. They were dirty, crime-ridden, and cold. Not even First’s first apartment had been in the Skins.

  “That’s appalling,” she said.

  “It’s educational,” Loritt said. “We’re going to party among the abandoned sectors so we can get in touch with the plight of the less fortunate.”

  “It’s poverty tourism.”

  “Now, now, Duchess Harrington. It’s an opportunity to show our generosity. Throughout the evening, we’ll be implored to donate to a foundation dedicated to helping these poor souls. Sure, most of that money will go to paying the caterers, event coordinator, local performers with their ‘inspiring’ stories, and other associated costs of throwing this soirée for ourselves, but we’ll all go home warmed by drink and self-assurances that we’ve ‘done something.’”

  First heard the acid behind Loritt’s sarcasm, and something in her perspective on the man shifted ever so slightly.

  “You really hate them, don’t you?”

  “I wasn’t always … myself. I haven’t told many people this. Not sure why I’m telling you, honestly, but I’m assembled from cast-off parts. Pieces of factory workers and miners who either had to sell off bits of themselves to pay the rent or couldn’t afford to continue and chose to disincorporate entirely. That’s where I came from, once, long ago. Factories and mines in my colony closed or automated by their off-world owners without thought or regard for what it would do to the people who relied on those for their livelihoods. So yes, I really hate them.”

  First laughed, then stared at Loritt with wide eyes and a warm smile.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Not funny,” First said. “Not exactly. Look at you. A community of castoffs and misfits who made it big by nurturing castoffs and misfits into a community. Now, our whole team is kinda its own superorganism.”

  “I, um, I hadn’t thought of it like that before,” Loritt said, choking up on both his throat and the throttle. He pulled the Proteus up to the landing and brought it to a gentle landing on its skids. “Remember, don’t get out yourself; you’re waiting for me to help you out. And act fashionably aghast at the surroundings.”

  “I was visiting a friend in the sewers four days ago,” First said.

  “That’s why they call it acting, my dear.” Loritt did the face trick again, preparing for his own role. “The rest of the crew should ei
ther be inside or arriving shortly. Don’t bunch up with them. Remember the assignment: we’re here to ingratiate ourselves to as many people as possible and get invites.”

  “Roger that.”

  The doors peeled open. Loritt climbed out of the aircar, then came around and offered First a hand. Her dress crinkled like Christmas wrapping as she lifted herself out.

  As soon as she stood, First wrinkled her nose performatively. “What’s that smell, Tolos?”

  “I believe it’s called musty, Duchess Harrington,” Loritt said, responding to the alias he’d settled on.

  “Well it’s simply ghastly,” First said loud enough for everyone on the landing to hear. “I trust it improves inside.”

  “Only one way to know, milady.” Loritt, ahem, Tolos offered her his arm. First took it, and they walked together through the Mouth of the Underbelly, a garish, self-indulgent art installation arching over the entry to the gala like a birth canal. Or a colon. Doubtlessly made by whatever avant-garde local artist had been hired to sex up the misery of the population down here. First had to work not to vomit.

  “Isn’t it splendid how the artist incorporated actual refuse they found down here in the Skins into this archway, Duchess?” Loritt asked.

  “Oh yes.” First nodded along. “So evocative. It really creates an authentic atmosphere.”

  “Careful not to snag that gorgeous dress,” one of the other guests said to her from just behind and to the left. First turned her head to get a look at them. A Haswren female … probably. Their body plans went through several metamorphosis stages, and First didn’t know them all.

  “Oh, no worries there,” First assured her. “I won’t go anywhere near these grubby walls.” They shared a giggle. First was embarrassed how easily it came to her. She tugged at a corner of her skirt. “Do you really like it?”

  “It’s so simple and flattering. And being reflective, it goes with everything, doesn’t it?”

  “I know!” First said. “I’m almost tempted to wear it again some other time. Isn’t that silly?”

  “How droll! You’re really getting into the spirit of the whole underprivileged experience.”