by J M Thomas
“Wait… why are you telling me this now?” No, Blade, don’t be tying me up in triple cross knots. I can’t take it. My brain isn’t used to being synthetic. You know as well as I do they’re listening. Why would you tell me if you know they’re listening?
“I’m about to have to do something, and I need you to realize why.”
And now he feeds me a line. Great. “I am too fucking old for this shit! I might look like I’m thirty-five, but inside, I’m a decrepit old geezer; retirement is just over the next hill. I ain’t got time for riddles.” My ears began ringing, a signal that my blood pressure was rising again; drawing a full breath became an all-consuming labor. This is how they stop me thinking. This is how they stop me from puzzling out the answers. They trigger this thing when the cognitive dissonance gets too high. No, this is something else. Think, Jet, dammit!
Whatever Blade tried to tell me next was lost in the ringing and throbbing as I sank to my knees, gasping for breath. He hefted me over his shoulders with surprising ease and sprinted for the hospital window.
“Blade, I…”
“Shut up, Jet. Just keep breathing, alright? We’ll get a doctor in here; you just overdid it, that’s all.” He dumped me unceremoniously onto my bed.
“No!” I gasped for breath, my elbows and knees digging into the mattress as I clutched the edge of the bed’s foot railing in my hands. Something was beeping again, and despite my labored gasps, the room kept going dark. “Listen, you idiot.”
Blade put his ear to my mouth as I searched for the words that had been so clear in my mind a few minutes before. “Go out… the far end.”
“What, you want me to go back out the window to the other end of the roof?” Blade seemed hesitant; whether he didn’t want to leave my side or break the illusion, I wasn’t sure. Maybe both.
I nodded, then collapsed on the bed. Quick, sharp footsteps echoed down the hall, becoming more distinct even as my hearing succumbed to nothing but the now-familiar pounding of my synthetic heartbeat in my ears.
“Now!” I croaked out, squeezing my eyes shut and putting my throbbing head between my forearms. I had to hope to God he’d done as I’d asked. I couldn’t see or hear anything, and the room was rocking too much for anything to make sense.
With a jolt, I realized the room really was rocking. My head really was splitting. My vision and hearing really were impaired. Blade had really done it for me. He’d run to the opposite end of the wall for me, despite my presence anchoring him like a pup on an invisible leash.
And in doing so, he’d broken the holoroom illusion. The system didn’t have a programmed value for projecting his image that far off the mapped screen, so the whole room glitched out, if only for a moment.
I reached my hands up and felt. My real hands this time, and they closed around a metal helmet twice the size of my actual head. Wires, dips, and rivets met my fingertips. Which ones to pull? I thought through the fog in my brain. I wasn’t sure—this wasn’t technology I wanted to risk destroying while it was still attached to my actual head.
A pair of strong hands closed over my wrist, pulling it down and away from the helmet. A sting burned my forearm, then tingles ran up and down from that spot. I knew that feeling. I knew what came after that feeling. I was confused as all levels of hell in an avalanche.
How were they hitting me with drugs if my body was synthetic? And, if my body really was my own, how had I managed to not die when I’d shot myself in the head?
The only answer I could think of was that I’d not shot myself in the head after all. That memory was a lie, planted so I’d believe I’d died and was re-uploaded into a synthetic body.
But if I hadn’t died, that meant the real Jet was still out there. It meant I was just a copy.
The mental image of my new synthetic body punching a man-sized chameleon in the gut was the last thing I saw before the room went black.
Chapter 4 – Dissonance
I awoke with a cough and a gasp, Blade grinning stupidly in his hospital bed.
“Welcome to the afterlife. I’m your guardian angel. You gotta be real good if I’m gonna let you into heaven.”
“Shut up, Blade.” I sat up and looked around as the blinding white light faded to color so intense it hurt to open my eyes. Blade’s silence from his bed brought the memories flooding back, the weight of the truth threatening to shove me all the way into my pillow.
“What do they want from us, old pal?” I asked, turning toward the figment of my partner sitting so close I could reach out and grab his shirt to shake the information out of him if I wanted to. I didn’t want to. He was wearing an open-backed hospital gown, so shaking him by the shirtfront was likely to get me an eyeful I had no desire to experience.
“If you knew what they wanted, you’d find some bullshit to feed ‘em instead. Throw ‘em a poisoned bone, let ‘em chew it up, then laugh while the indigestion sets in.”
“Well, aren’t you a perky little mutt today.” I doubted I’d ever get used to seeing Blade smile with human gums and both sides of his mouth pulling back in a symmetrical fashion. All our years together, he’d been half man, half machine. Seeing him full synth was a shock to my system every time I opened my eyes.
But how many times had that been? How many failed attempts had they erased from my memory, just waiting for me to open up about the one thing they wanted to know? How many times had this cheesy hospital scene played out with me chatting amiably with my old partner, only to slowly realize it wasn’t him? If they could alter a memory, they could erase and start over.
Maybe it was time to do this differently. I’d finally managed to put two-and-two together with the crazy panic attacks that weren’t related to actual panic. I’d put together that Blade wasn’t Blade quickly enough this time. I’d managed to carry over my memories from the last illusion, whether it was the first or the hundredth attempt.
“Well, they’re gonna spend me up long before they get what they want, then.” I shrugged to whatever was sitting beside me. “They made it too easy.”
“The hell you on about?” His forehead scrunched as he reached for the remote.
I stood, just to get the sensation going. “Easy. My Blade never shuts up when I tell him to.”
His smile froze at my verbal admission that he wasn’t real. As long as the bastards were listening, I planned to give them an earful. So I kept going before my drugs wore off and the withdrawal symptoms started up again to ruin the experience.
“’Sides, the second I shot myself in the warehouse, I felt a searing heat. At the moment, my brain interpreted it as the fires of hell coming to lick my ass. I realize now it was your drugs—they’re great hallucinogens, can make the brain believe whatever in the cosmos you want. When those lovely little flames of hell licked at me, I clenched my teeth. Even then, whatever pieces were left of the old noggin managed to think a thought, to ask a question.
“So, even then, when I shouldn’t’ve… I had a brain. But my thought was this: how am I gritting my teeth with a gun between them? I didn’t think to wonder how I was thinking with no brain in my skull, but that’s drugs for ya. They let you fixate on one thing at a time, whatever tingles the old senses.”
Blade hadn’t moved to even blink, so I kept up.
“The way I see it, reality as I knew it ended when I popped Blade’s corrupted chip in the back of my skull. You synth bastards always had a great head for deception and lies, but even then, I really underestimated you. Bravo.”
I gave a slow clap as Blade stared at me like I’d become a hydra before his very eyes. I grinned in triumph. “You guys actually had me going for a few minutes there on the first one. If you’d picked any other person in the universe, I’d have been silent as a tomb in the face of a conversationalist. You had to use Blade if you wanted to get me talking. He’s every orbit and revolution by my side. I can’t be dishonest about what’s bugging me around my own partner.
“So here I am, being interrogated by life in a surre
al world. No, not surreal. Unreal. But here’s where we’re hitting a wall, see? I can’t believe the person in front of my eyes is Blade. I can barely believe that the person inhabiting this body is me. I definitely don’t believe we’re in a holoroom or a hospital. So tell me this much… where the hell are we, and who the hell are you?”
Blade appeared frozen in place. I had a sudden, inexplicable urge to reach over and tap the side of his head, the new non-metal side. “Earth to Blade. This is Mission Control, come in Blade.” I rapped my knuckles on his bald pate, and he didn’t even flinch.
As the walls around me glitched in and out in time with my ever-loudening heartbeat, I sat cross-legged on the floor and waited for the symptoms to worsen. There was nothing to do but bide my time until the weird devolving time loop I seemed to be stuck in repeated itself. It was like waiting to die.
“Fuck this,” I said to no one in particular, struggling to my feet. I grabbed the screen and threw it through the window, which broke into a thousand pieces, but didn’t make a sound. Next, my fist went through the crackled hole. It didn’t even hurt. Only my head and chest hurt as I raged.
With a roar, I planted my fist into Blade’s frozen, dumb face, pounding where the metal half should have been. He fell back onto the bed, but didn’t move in protest nor blink. The simulation wasn’t programmed with a brawl in mind, so I just roared and pounded as his face spazzed and glitched in time with the window and the walls.
Sweat poured from my body as the pounding reached a frenzy, but the pain in my bleeding knuckles kept my mind in the here and now, refusing to surrender to the worsening withdrawal symptoms.
“Damn you, Blade!” I yelled as I cocked my fist for another round. “You’re only real enough to hurt, not real enough to fix anything!” Thuds of the impacts of my fists hit his dummy body between each word. “Useless... fucking... synthetic... bullshit!”
As if the illusion was a window of its own that I’d finally managed to put my fist through, the entire scene crackled like shattered glass and fell away into dark and quiet. The very real warmth of blood and ache of swollen, shredded knuckles shot up my arms.
Once again, the added pounds of the virtual reality helmet over my head weighed on my neck, one of Blade’s personal favorite sayings ringing in my ears.
Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
Without warning, I vomited into the helmet.
Chapter 5 – Synthpathy
I’m going to drown in my own vomit like a rockstar. It’d been a long time since I’d had that particular thought. How the tables had turned. Me, not exactly sober, nearly fifty years later…
Those irritating beeps kept sounding over and over, in rapid-fire succession like a kid’s toy with the button stuck. I was occupied with trying to roll my head into just the right spot to keep my nose out of the vomit bubbling up to fill the helmet, so when someone grabbed my arm, I jumped and backed away.
Someone grabbed at the helmet, shifting it, rolling the vomit back into my airspace. I struggled, trying hard not to breathe as my own stomach acid burned my face. Soon, a second set of hands pinned me down as the first tugged at something attached to the helmet.
With a whoosh of broken suction and resetting valves, it disengaged. I burst forth like some newborn alien creature, my face burning, my eyes shut and watering. My head was covered in all manner of nastiness as I gasped and gagged. Squinting one eye open, I broke free of the hands restraining me and clambered toward the cool far wall.
Noises registered again, albeit muffled by my racing heart that hadn’t gotten any better. Footsteps and angry, exasperated whispers echoed off metal walls and floors. The overwhelming scent of vomit became tinged with odors of silicone and steel.
My hand found the corner of the room and I pressed my forehead into it, both knees plus one palm biting into the corrugated metal floor. There wasn’t much else I could do but wait and sweat while the nausea, full-body aches, and misery hit me full force.
Finally, someone had the good sense to shove a stiff, rough towel into my hand. I wiped my face clean of the blood, sweat, and vomit. Blood—why is there blood if I’m a synth? I opened my eyes, checking for the source of the bleeding.
Then I realized it wasn’t steel I’d been smelling, and the blood was everywhere. Some of it was mine. The better part of that seemed to be coming from my knuckles, which I expected.
The maroon-colored stuff splattered over every corner of the place came from whatever lay on the floor, now covered in a black tarp. I got the distinct feeling I’d really killed whoever was providing the computer-generated image of Blade with something solid behind it. It added another layer of nausea onto the already-rising tides of sickness washing over me.
A thin trail of acrid smoke seeped out of the helmet and wafted its lazy way upward to curl around the ceiling. It was a surprising bit of peace in an otherwise chaotic situation.
The room I was in was twelve feet by twelve feet, which I’d expected. I’d also expected the pewter grey metal flooring and walls, though not how corroded they were. Two Ehksmians—or “frogmen” as I called them to irritate Blade—and a humanoid synth bustled about, the Ehksmians cleaning the floor, walls, shelf bed… actually, everything. The synth had busied himself trying to shut off the helmet before a real electrical fire broke out.
To my left, the reinforced metal door stood ajar. That perverse part of myself couldn’t help but be curious about what was on the other side and whether I could sneak past these people into the unknown beyond.
My arms shook from the exertion as I tried to push myself to my feet. I stumbled toward the door a few steps before one of the folks cleaning noticed me and raised the alarm. In a moment, all three had abandoned their efforts to focus entirely on returning me to the cold metal shelf bed.
I managed to elbow one in the face, though purely on luck, as standing made my head swim. None of them thought to close the door to the room, and it only took a moment before I realized why.
The form of the nerdy nurse from before filled the doorway, his bedraggled mop of curls cocked to one side in a strange mixture of surprise, horror, and anger. He hissed to the people in the room, speaking in a language I didn’t understand and had no earpiece to translate.
All three immediately took on some variant of sheepish looks, only answering in quiet, acquiescent responses. He disappeared again, reappearing a minute later with what looked like an oversized gurney in tow.
I assumed it was for the pile of pulp that had bled out on the floor. I kept up that assumption all the way until they led me up to the gurney and motioned for me to lay down on it. I wasn’t entirely sure how I was supposed to accomplish that, seeing as I was barely able to stand upright and the bed part was chest-high, but I at least gave it a try.
The synth who had been tinkering with the helmet’s controls pushed a little button on the side of the gurney and it lowered itself so I could tumble down upon it, raising it again as soon as I’d crashed down.
I was up and off again in a second as the nurse tried to strap my right wrist to the chrome handle. Not today, Nurse Poodle. You ain’t nowhere near pretty enough for me to let you do that to me here. I scrambled down the hall, aching, trembling muscles protesting every single movement as my stomach heaved.
Dead end. The bare concrete wall at the end of the hallway loomed ahead of me. I spun to face my imminent doom. The oversized gurney with its accompanying gaggle of Ehksmians and synths pushing it in my direction held a calmness that told me they knew they’d won.
As a last ditch effort, I straightened as much as I dared, holding my hand out in front of me with the most authoritative pose I could strike. My hand! It was my real hand, the achy old near-arthritic one with the bones sticking out and the thinning flesh over it and everything!
I was downright elated.
“This is Officer Jet Parker of the Interplanetary Enforcement Agency’s Galactic Patrol Division.” I had to stop here to dry heave again, which I hoped would
suffice as a dramatic pause in my delivery. “You’re all under arrest for kidnapping and holding an officer against his will. Put your hands in the air and come quietly.”
A look of confusion passed like a wave over their faces, then a snicker followed. As they strode steadily forward, I sank to my knees, which saw fit to add their protest to my actions with a twinge and a pop each.
“You are very funny, Officer Jeet,” the nurse said as he and two others dragged me up onto the gurney and strapped my wrists, legs, and chest to the soft inclines of the cushions. “Trust me when I say I haf utmost sympathy for your condition.”
“You have synthpathy!” I managed, though speaking threw me into a fit of coughing and gagging. “Where the hell are you taking me?”
“Detox, Officer Jeet. You ahr a very sick man.”
No shit, I thought as the motion of the gurney only elevated the nausea and made the room spin as the lie blared a warning in my skull. The time I got hit with this stuff in Project Flamenco, the synth said it couldn’t be detoxed. I had to go to an offworld rehab clinic that specialized in systematic toxin removal for six months of intensive therapy. The hippie facility ate half my retirement to pay for the treatment, but it was better than the seizures I’d eventually die of if I didn’t cough up my life’s savings or stay on the drug for life.
I moaned. “But you don’t have a detox for this shit…”
He smiled as I descended once again into darkness. “Precisely.”
Chapter 6 – Mud
I awoke.
To the average observer, that might not seem like such an exciting feat. But, looking back now, I’m pretty impressed that I managed it. It wasn’t exactly the easiest thing I ever did.
