by Kenneth Zink
“Take the moon,” the AI said, clearly analyzing the protesters and their slogans. “Speaking of which, you ever go to space? If you use the code UPANDUP I can offer you ten whole percent off your first purchase of a flight from—”
“Buy silence,” Robin said.
“That’ll be a buck ninety nine.”
“Fine.”
The AI chimed and went silent.
Robin looked out the window and scanned the sky for a faint grey circle and found it among the clouds, hovering like a pale coin. The moon was at the center of the latest but possibly last fight of the Warless War. America and China were both lobbying the United Nations to open it up to colonization. The theory was that whoever could dominate the moon, a hunk of resources waiting just above the earth to be used, would dominate the next hundred years of human progress. And win the war. Finally.
“Fastest route to 89 Bargo Street,” Robin said while the cab, wedged in a long line of other cars, inched through the horde of protesters.
“This is the fastest route,” the AI said.
“Find another.”
“Sorry ma’am, no can do. We’re in the thick of it now. Another buck though and I can give you a verbal tour of the capital. Did you know the White House is older than—”
“Silence.”
The AI went silent. Robin was thinking about getting out and running through the crowd and flagging another autocab once she was free of the throng when a protester, his hands sheathed in white gloves, banged on her window and plastered a sign against the glass.
STOP THE FRAGS
“Tint windows,” Robin said.
The AI chimed. “That’ll be an additional—”
“Just do it.”
“Sure thing.”
As the windows tinted she flipped off the protester and watched him morph into a lunatic. Punch the window. Call her a pig, a bitch. Abomination. Others stared, listened, morphed, put on their own white gloves. Followed the cab. Banged on the roof and spit on the windows. Regurgitated his slop. They couldn’t see her but that didn’t matter. They knew she was there. Behind the dark glass.
“Silence outside,” Robin said. “I don’t care what it costs.”
The AI muted the lunatics. After a minute of screaming and seeing nothing but their own reflection, they picked another car to harass, but before he wandered off, the first lunatic taped his sign to her window, the words barely visible through the tint.
STOP THE FRAGS
She, they, frags, were the crux of the country. A problem only Molly Walker had ever truly dealt with. Back in ‘22, after Robin had spent a year melting into a muddled pool of fragmented memories anytime their hands touched anything, a tech startup founded by entrepreneur Rex Hardy invented a device that, when implanted in the brain of a frag, tuned Erodium energy from chaos to calm, a still sea of memory, turning a curse into a gift.
That was what he’d marketed the Erodium mutation as. A gift.
The problem was, Hardy priced the device like a jet.
Enter Molly Walker, at the time a newcomer to Washington with a dazzling resume. Teacher, lawyer, mother. Walker drafted a bill called the Walker American Supremacy Act that allowed the government to subsidize those Erodium devices in exchange for service to the country. For kids like Robin that meant training and time served as detectives and spies, at home and abroad, making commission on each case, whittling away the balance on their contract until the metal in their brain was paid off. Back then everyone applauded, but now people on both sides of the aisle, idealists and bigots, slammed WASA for enslaving frags or empowering them. Robin just thought it gave her purpose. An answer to who she was and why.
Then came the National Institute for Frags.
And then Robin was safe. All it took was her parents signing away the rights of their only daughter to the NIF.
Four years ago, when Robin showed up at the polls reeking of booze, she’d stared at her ballot, at the name Molly Walker, for so long a poll worker asked from outside the voting booth if she was okay. Now, again, it was an election year. Two months until Robin would have the opportunity to reelect the President. The stakes were higher than ever. Molly Walker was running against Rex Hardy, the man who helped her create the NIF when Robin was just a kid. Three decades had turned an eccentric into a crackpot. Floating amidst his conspiracy theories and insults, Hardy argued the Walker American Supremacy Act hadn’t gone far enough. He never said what he meant by that.
As the cab finally emerged from the legion of protesters and left the White House behind, Robin took a drink.
89 Bargo Street turned out to be a bar called Anything Goes. The neon sign was cracked, the letters formed out of filthy tubes that hung above a plain door in a stout building. When Robin entered the place she took a headcount. Two at the bar. Three in a booth. One behind the counter. All men. Six total. Then the rest of the room. Sticky puddle of dried booze. Hole in the floor. Loose boards laid across a table. Back door in the far corner. Every square foot smelling of cooped up sweat. The men all chanced a look at her. Gloves and a trench coat in the summer heat. A fragment detective if they’d ever seen one. There was a fair chance they were only looking out of curiosity, but she couldn’t afford to be fair. Being fair might end with being killed.
At the bar she kept her hands in her pockets but one of the men in the booth still pulled on a pair of white gloves. Clenched his jaw. Spat.
“Cute,” Robin said.
“On the house,” the bartender said, wide round body and puffy red cheeks and mountainous grey beard, pouring four fingers of scotch in a glass and leaving the bottle on the counter.
“No thanks.”
“What can I do you for then?”
“I’m looking for someone,” she said.
“You and me both sister.”
“Not a lay, a fugitive. Name is Sahil Khatri. Seventeen. Black hair. Shorter than me.”
“Seehil, huh?” To his credit the bartender barely missed a beat, his cheek flinching at the mention of the target but nothing more. “Didn’t even know that was a name.” He arched his back and thrust his pelvis out and looked at an old man sitting at the end of the bar. “Hey Rick, you ever hear a name like Seehil?”
“Can’t say I have,” the old man said, tipping beer into his mouth. Small. Thin. Wearing a worn green jacket. The look of a veteran. Might be carrying.
Robin stared the bartender down before pulling out her badge, the crest glossy and black against white leather. “Last call.”
“I told you, I don’t know anyone named Sahil.”
“You mean Seehil.”
The bartender turned away and wiped a glass with a rag. She watched him in the mirror that stretched across the wall behind the bar. Kept her eyes on his hands. Waited for the sudden glint and swoop of a firearm.
Instead he titled his head toward the back door.
Robin grabbed the bottle of scotch and took a swig. “That’s for lying to me.”
“She can’t do that,” a man in the booth said, spit dribbling down his goatee onto a hard hat beside him, drunk by way of a nine beer cluster.
“Should you tell him or should I?” she asked the bartender.
“Quiet now, Bobby,” the bartender said. “She means well.”
Robin almost laughed. “Thank you kindly.”
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the old man at the end of the bar said.
She turned and almost pulled her gun, prayed he’d pull his, thought about dying, wondered what it would be like to blink out in an instant, to forget everything forever, to simply cease being, but all the old man did was slug the rest of his beer and stare at himself in the mirror behind the bar.
Leaving him and the others to drink and churn in angst, Robin stepped through the back door and into a narrow hallway. The walls were cracked and the carpet was hard and at the far end was a doorless frame filled with a thick curtain of hanging beads, sunlight and cigarette smoke floating through the still columns. Be
hind them came the hush of people arguing in whispers. She crept down the hall, but a few feet in, the floor beneath her creaked, and the whispers died like a baby suddenly smothered in its crib.
She stopped. Back out in the bar someone told a joke and the others laughed. More silence. Then she heard them. Footsteps. Soft, slow, dwindling by the decibel. Moving away from her.
She tapped her ring finger to her palm and her gun, an HK, shot out her sleeve and nestled in her hand. Warm. The trigger a magnet. Tugging her finger.
As she again crept forward she analyzed the runway of ratty carpet ahead of her, trying to guess which spots would creak, moving in tandem with the target backing away from the curtain of beads, a pattering tango, like dancing with a ghost.
When she was almost at the end of the hall another floorboard creaked beneath her foot.
More silence.
Then steps exploded into thuds.
Robin shot through the beads and cleared her corners before surveying the room.
A desk piled with papers. An ashtray with a pair of fizzling stubs. A frail man sitting in a chair, milky eyes, gaunt cheeks that looked like their tissue had been sucked out by a vacuum. A peeling black door with a dingy brass knob the size of a walnut. Half open.
Robin stormed through it.
A wet alley. When she looked left she saw the target, Sahil, disappear around the bend, out onto the sidewalk. Retracting her gun, she ran, her arms and legs pumping like bladed pendulums, pacing her lungs, settling in the sweet spot between falling behind and burning out.
She rounded the corner and barreled into the flow of pedestrians, rushing and weaving, elbows everywhere. They all looked at the target running with a laptop and then looked back at her, a fragment detective, before stepping aside, leaving nothing but a clear channel of pavement between him and her.
At the end of the block Sahil rounded the corner and Robin rounded it seconds later.
Then he was gone.
Then she saw an alley on the left and turned into it.
There he was, up ahead, belting through the chute of concrete that bisected the buildings, his long black hair falling out of his bun when he stopped to tip over a garbage can behind him. Rookie mistake. It slowed them both down. Delayed the inevitable. She vaulted over the can and slipped back into a sprint, the maze of architecture muffling the world to nothing more than the faroff honking of horns and the nearby slapping of shoes on manmade ground. Quiet all around.
He rounded another bend into another alley and she followed.
Then there was nowhere left to go. At the end of the alley, a towering fence blocked the way, the sidewalk sitting just beyond it.
But the target still ran. Stupid. He couldn’t climb it. He’d try but he’d fail. The thing was twenty feet tall with holes too small to stuff his feet inside, plus he had his laptop under his arm. At best that gave him a limb and a half. With more time he could scale the fence with just his arms, A-Cad ensured that, but he didn’t have more time. She had him. He just didn’t know it yet.
Robin slowed to a stop.
Sure enough he jumped up and hung on and scampered up but fell down. Feet on the ground. He shook the chainlink with everything he had but all it did was rattle and shudder. Denial. She could feel it from here. He even chucked the laptop up and over and watched it smash against the blacktop on the other side.
Robin spotted the motto for the FLF graffitied on one of the alley walls, the word us enclosed by a circle that touched the tips of each letter, and sighed. “It’s over, Sahil.”
“For you maybe,” he said, his fingers clinging to the fence like claws while he stared out at the street just feet away.
“All they’ll do is send you back to A-Cad, maybe tack a decade on your NIF contract. You’re too valuable for them to do much more than that. We all are.”
“I can’t have more years man.”
“Well if you hadn’t backed out of your contract—”
“—I didn’t sign that contract—”
“—and conspired with a terrorist organization,” she said, “then we wouldn’t be here right now.”
“The FLF are not terrorists.”
“They kill people.”
“You kill people,” he said.
“There’s a difference, and if you still can’t see that, I may as well put you down now.”
“You have a badge and they don’t.”
“On your knees,” she said.
He shook his head and turned to face her. Sharp bone structure, whiskers lining his upper lip, green eyes that seemed to wilt when he spoke. “I can’t go back.”
“Yes you can. You have a year left at A-Cad. Stick it out. Then you can work the beat until you have your contract paid off, and at that point, if you really think being a fragment detective is so bad, you can save some cash and do your own thing. Open a coffee shop for all I care. It’ll be boring and pointless but at least you’ll have money.”
“Money is a shackle.”
“Don’t be a puppet,” Robin said, recognizing the cliche from a distorted broadcast uttered by Joel, the leader of the FLF.
“Money is a shackle and the NIF is a jailor,” Sahil repeated as if Joel was hovering above him, pulling strings attached to his mouth while he stared off into space. “Once they’ve got you, they’ve got you for good. By the time my contract is paid off I’ll be like you. Nothing but a frag.”
Flashes of the past. Training at A-Cad. Reprogrammed until she was who they wanted her to be. Tactical, manipulative. Empty. Sucking up memories, shucking them for intel, tossing them over her shoulder. A walking void.
“Let’s try this again,” she said. “On your knees.”
“Please don’t send me back. Please. I just want to be normal.”
“That’ll never happen, you know that. There’s no going back. People like us, you and I, this is who we are.”
“It can’t be,” he said.
“What are you so afraid of?”
“You.”
“I’m exactly who I’m supposed to be,” she said.
“And that’s the truth?”
“On your goddamn knees.”
“What did you say just now? Don’t be a puppet?” Sahil looked over at the FLF symbol and reached behind his body. “Freedom means simply making the choice to be free. No matter the cost.”
Robin stood with her arms at her sides, her hands ready, her fingers still. “Don’t do this, kid.”
His face looked like it was about to crumple, like origami squashed in a palm.
The target whipped his hand out and the moment she saw his gun she tapped her ring finger against her palm and her gun popped out of her sleeve and she swung it up and aimed at his shoulder and fired a single bullet.
And missed.
He fell back, the fence clinking as he slid down the side, his torso lurching, his chest bleeding.
It was a shot she could have made with her eyes closed if she wasn’t drunk from the empty flask in her trench coat. Now feeling heavier than when it was full.
She stayed where she was. Kept the distance between them. Blood slithered through the clefts in the pavement and his body twitched and his eyes swiveled up at the sky, sickeningly beautiful, blue and white, crisp and clear, solid all the way through. While a crowd gathered on the other side of the fence, along the sidewalk, staring, whispering, recording everything with their phones, Robin flashed her badge and called the cops and ignored the corpse, burying the guilt, indulging in the ugly honest satisfaction that she was glad it happened, glad he’d pulled a gun so she could pull hers and shut him up so she didn’t have to listen to another fucking word he said.
3
When the police arrived the body had become so still it looked like a prop in a diorama, lit by red and blue flashes from the cop cars and ambulances on the other side of the fence, the stench of wet garbage making the body smell far older than it was.
One of the officers in the alley noticed her gloves. “Frag?”
Robin flashed her badge.
The cop eyed the gun on the concrete, the one the target had dropped when she neutralized him. “He fire on you?”
“Didn’t get the chance.”
The cop looked down at the body. “Shame.”
“Shame what?”
“Just shame is all.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Shame.”
Robin took an autocab to the Hull, the headquarters for the National Institute for Frags, and parked nearby, the sun hidden below the horizon, the sky emitting a sherbet glow. By now the target was in a body bag, heaved onto a gurney and shuttled into an ambulance, driven to the back of the Hull, wheeled into a wide elevator that plunged into the bowels of the windowless stone white skyscraper, shoved in a cold dark box in the morgue. She didn’t see it happen but she knew how it worked. Had been around long enough.
She looked at the laptop sitting on the seat beside her, sealed in an evidence bag, recovered from the alley. Took a drink but spat it out the window, disgusted by the way it made her mind deliciously curl. She went for another swig and braced herself to glug it past her tongue but the flask was empty. Fuck. She licked the drops on the rim and ran through the two stops she had to make before she could go home and top herself off.
Forensics.
Medical.
She got out of the cab and hiked up the long steps leading to the Hull. Pressed her bare palm on the pad next to the door. Ignored the memories stuck to it. Walked into the lobby. Surrendered her gun and the laptop to the guards at the security desk. Said nothing. Pushed away the fear that rushed her whenever the weapon left her body. Stood on the metal disk in the floor and let the AI in the ceiling sweep her body. Grabbed her gun and the laptop once it chimed. Stepped into the elevator. Wished the thing would hurry up, whisk her through what little was left of this case so she could put it all behind her.
Forensics. Fourth floor.
The elevator opened into a bland modern shiny empty lobby, a monitor on the far wall flanked by doors that led back to the labs. On her way to the monitor she crossed paths with a frag on his way to the elevator. He looked at her but quickly looked away like he knew her. Most frags did. She’d solved every case she’d ever taken. One of the oldest still around. She hated how much she loved it, the reverence for simply doing her job. It only got worse as the years dragged on and they treated her less like a person and more like a legend. Deep down, beneath her ego, she wished no one would ever look at her again.
