Loose Ends

by J M Thomas

  “Better to be myself than someone whose determining trait is ‘bald.’”

  His spirits nigh unto undampenable, Blade laughed and showed me the levcar station mapped on a wall terminal. “Hey, it’s better than ‘old and bald,’ which is what you would’ve used a week ago.”

  “And what would you have used a week ago, besides ‘ancient and decrepit’ to describe me that’s changed?”

  Blade squinted, crossing his arms as his eyes assessed me with every bit of his keenness. “Despite your best efforts, Jet, ain’t nothing about you changed in the slightest, other than having a new body. Sorry to disappoint, but you’re just as cantankerous, mean, offensive, irritating…”

  “Smart, funny, good-looking, and inciting of the utmost reverence and jealousy for my enchanting personality. Yeah, you ain’t changed all that much, either.”

  With a heavier gut and a marginally lighter heart, I made my way toward the levcar station, not waiting on Blade to keep up. I had the address punched in and my card further drained into the negative by the time he stopped his lollygagging and sight-seeing to climb aboard.

  We reached altitude within seconds and cruised across the city to our new home. I took a good, long look out the levcar window at the rising towers of Capital, the only land city on Ehksmis Prime. I’d hardly believed the name when I’d heard the name the first time, but Blade told me they didn’t even refer to it by that name very often, because they could call it “the city” unless they were feeling fancy and get away with it.

  I suppose they didn’t need to set it apart from any other city, so the title worked as well as any. Plus, it saved space in their language for the forty words for swampy ocean, river, and bogs that covered the rest of the planet. Even the city itself seemed somewhat reclaimed on account of the trees and hanging plants cascading over the corners of the buildings. Flora and foliage softened the edges of the only things jutting skyward over the gentle rolling of the marshland.

  When you’ve been on a few planets, you get a general feel or sense of one fairly quickly as soon as your levcar climbs to the approved altitude. Smoggy cities all blend together after awhile—there’s only so much distinctiveness you get from giant jenga games stacked atop each other, jockeying for sky footage.

  It’s not really until you’re on the ground, mingling with crowds and listening to the hum of the thing that you get a good idea of the soul of the city. Ehksmis Prime was almost alarmingly clean—no smog, no dust of pollen, no trash in the streets. It was pristine to the point of seeming unreal. This was a massive difference from the dockside we’d first arrived at—war-torn and half-demolished.

  There were no spots of teeming crowds, at least not that I could see from where I looked out the window as we zoomed by. Instead, I was almost looking down at an ant mound where the thousands of inhabitants moved in pre-distinguished lines and rivulets. They didn’t stop to chat nor bump into each other. They simply continued unabated toward their destination.

  Tomorrow, I was supposed to join the ants. Me and Blade, just two more heads in a steady stream of flowing synthetic bodies. I couldn’t distinguish human, Ehksmian, or synth from the height we were flying, but from the reports I’d heard, my guess was that the city’s population was at least eighty-percent synthetic.

  I had to be just a little impressed at the scope of this con. SynthCorp had no advertising on billboards or light-up signs or painted walls. In fact, there was no advertising anywhere visible here. The only place I’d seen their slogan “Better Bodies for Everyone” was engraved above the synth conversion facility’s exit door.

  This confused me. By the time you leave, you’re already converted. There’s no need to advertise your menu to someone who just ate at your restaurant—so why put the motto above the exit?

  I opened my mouth to ask Blade why, then shut it again. I wasn’t exactly still concerned about being in a holoroom or illusion, nor was I concerned that this synth Blade was a fake any more than I was. But I was still sore that he’d been hiding his little side gig from me all along. Watching the familiarity in his eyes as he scanned the city, I got the sense he’d spent a good chunk of my rehab time here. I had the awful thought that I might’ve been jabbed with the addictive substance just to give me a reason to disappear from the scene so he could work his angle.

  Before I had a chance to lose myself in even more questions and embittered pondering, we’d arrived at our apartment highrise. It was all manner of boring, decorated with paint colors I would have named “nondescript beige” and “total yawn grey.” Zero imagination whatsoever went into the planning of this place, perhaps to create a blank template upon which each inhabitant could project their bullshit.

  Funny, I used to care about stuff like that, decades ago. When dealing with the aches and pains of everyday life takes so much effort and energy, you kinda lose steam for details. With my renewed energy came a renewed sense of irritation. No, more than that. I thought I’d long passed my years of making the worlds better, so I’d gradually relinquished my responsibility to pay attention as the planets moved on without me. Now they were stuck with me, and I with them again.

  Yeah, whatever. This high-rise might be spartan, but it did have a pristine foyer with wooden doors labeled “office” and “gym.” An open arch revealed a little bistro conveniently tucked inside a food mart with a hot bar restaurant in the lobby.

  Some kind of arcade room, the only evidence that human or Ehksmian children might possibly live here, stood to the right of the entry door, open and inviting. The floor was bare and well-worn, minus a few worn couches in a semi-circle facing nothing but a blank wall.

  As I surveyed the room, the hackles went up on the back of my neck. Blade nearly barrelled into me as I stopped dead in my tracks.

  “Aww, nothin’ like the principles of minimalism misappropriated.” When he noticed the look on my face, he lowered his voice to a whisper. “What is it, Jet? What’s wrong?”

  “Nice place for a shootout, don’t’cha think?” I pointed to the hole in the back of one of the couches, then to the dark mark on the floor that hadn’t been cleaned properly. These weren’t fresh any more than the food I smelled in that hot bar. In a sea of immaculate, they weren’t exactly difficult to spot as out of place.

  “We should ask the concierge.” Without waiting for my assent, affirmation, or asinine comments, Blade strode up to the desk and caught the attention of the cute young thang operating it. I brightened a good bit to know we’d be able to exchange pleasantries regularly with the prim girl standing behind the desk, sporting brown curls and abundant freckles.

  After a minute, Blade returned to where I still stood frozen in place, afraid I’d contaminate this already plenty-contaminated crime scene from eons ago.

  “According to Lila over there, it was a government intervention. She wasn’t here the night it happened…”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if she was born the night it happened,” I quipped, squatting to put my finger through the hole in the back of the couch. If it wasn’t a crime scene, me touching wasn’t contamination. “What do you make of it?”

  “Forensics is above my pay grade, Jet. I ain’t about to go reconstructing it,” he said, before indeed reconstructing it. Even in his new synth body, I could almost see the cogs spinning in his brain as he calculated angles.

  “Well, you wanna call in the professionals? I’m sure there’s a tin can parked right outside.”

  “If they ain’t investigated it by now… I’m suddenly contemplating a career change to Ehksmian forensics.” Yanking my hand away from the suspicious hole in the back of the couch, Blade stuck his own sausagey finger in the spot mine had just vacated. He dug around in the fibers for a minute before tugging something loose.

  “Wedged in at a forty-five degree angle. If this couch ain’t been moved, which is a crap shoot enough…”

  I whistled, stepping back to demonstrate with my pointer finger and thumb. The trajectory line went straight from my posit
ion, through the puddle and spray, all the way to the bullet’s final resting place wedged in the couch. Execution-style hit, so textbook it felt like grade school.

  I scratched my head. “Riddle me this, Blade. What kind of government intervention, with robot laser-taser trash can cops, shoots execution-style with old Earth-type guns from a height taller than said trash can cops, and leaves behind a mess and a bullet?”

  Blade’s look turned dark as he lowered his voice, turning the mangled piece of metal over and over in his palm. “I have a feelin’ I ain’t gonna like the answer to that one.”

  “Lies, that’s what kind.” I crossed my arms, letting out a lungful of air between my lips. “Think we can even trust these guys to tell us which way to our rooms in this place?”

  “Best make our own way up,” Blade admitted sadly.

  A pang of guilt hit me all unexpected. Here I was, drawing attention to all the problems with this place, these bodies, this way of being. It was all he’d ever dreamed of. A life of half a body, and he finally had a whole one. A life of sideways looks, and he finally appeared like an average person. He was a whole, intelligent, synthetic man amongst his kind, and all I wanted to do was point out bullet holes and bloodstains.

  I clamped my big mouth shut as we ascended the staircase and took up our places in our own rooms. They weren’t much to speak of—a fold-out, convertible couch/bed, a kitchenette, a little toilet, shower, and laundry closet. A fellow could exist in a spot like this, but thriving was right out of the question.

  Almost instinctively, I tugged the cord to the shade, displacing hundreds of dust motes as I raised the thin fabric to let the sun in. The window creaked as I cranked the handle to open the lock. My motion displaced where the whole window unit had been painted shut, showing a darker color underneath the whitewashing. Like everything else here—lookin’ fancy and fine on the outside, but dark and dead underneath.

  Such was life as a thing.

  “You know…” a soft voice startled me out of my reverie and I near about jumped out of my own legs. I spun around to see the soft brown curls of the girl from the front desk as her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh! I’m sorry to startle you.”

  I shook my head, not quite managing to mumble what I wanted to say about it being no problem.

  She took the place in with a single glance. “This was his room. I wonder if you’re here for a reason.”

  “Whose room?” I asked, then watched as the line of her eyes dropped to the floor. “The smear on the floor in the lobby? That ‘his room’?”

  She nodded, then turned to make her way back how she’d come. A devilish thought entered my mind, and I stepped through the doorway, catching her by the hand.

  “Would you mind telling that guy,” I gestured with my thumb over to Blade’s closed door beside me, “exactly what you just told me? Except add that his ghost sometimes walks the halls.”

  Her eyes widened and her mouth made a little circle.

  “He’s superstitious.” I added with a sideways grin and a wink, my voice almost a whisper.

  An impish little light seemed to come on in her eyes. “Sure thing, Mister…”

  “Jet.” I grinned again. “Call me Jet. And you are?”

  “Lila.” She smiled as the syllables rolled off her tongue in an accent so smooth it was almost a drawl, then she shooed me back into my room.

  I shut the door behind me and put my ear to the wall, catching muffled bits of their conversation. Pulling my bed down, I lounged on top of it, covering my eyes with my forearm. I had a full minute to look as innocent and asleep as I could, and I meant to make the most of it.

  About forty-five seconds later, the pounding on my door sounded. The three rough knocks reverberated through my room. “Come in,” I called.

  “That’s what she said.” Blade dashed through the open door, wiping a bead of sweat off his expansive dome. “Aww, man, Jet, you ain’t gonna believe what I just found out about this place…”

  Chapter 11 – Places

  The next morning, after a powdered egg and local slimy fruit experience I don’t plan to repeat, we reported to whatever mall cop job Blade had managed to snooker the lady at SynthCorp into giving us. I was still picking soap-flavored fruit seeds out of my teeth when we input our destination and headed out for our first day at work as civilians.

  He was surprisingly quiet the whole levcar ride to the place. When we showed up, I figured out why. He was preparing his very best gloating, for lo and behold, we marched our asses right up to the main government building to sort our clearance. Blade didn’t look like much to the casual observer, but he had some innocence or goodwill that made people trust his shifty ass. I could never figure out what it was, but it’d paid off again.

  As much as I give Blade hell for pretty much everything, even I had to admit, he’s pretty good at getting us into the deepest circles of shit I’d ever known. I was downright impressed.

  He was especially good at going undercover, which is how he’d even managed to get me thinking he was playing for Team Synth. He was. He was also managing to sell them out and get us better cover than any other Galactic Patrol cops had in this operation. Our boss and the bigwigs could never have dreamed of the level we’d managed to permeate, just now as a slate grey metal door clanged shut behind us and we beheld… the mainframe.

  A corrugated metal causeway, made of the same cheap stuff everything else in this place was made of, stretched like a holey doughnut around what I assumed was the reactor core powering this section of the city. Three stories above us, and three below, the tube had an ominous thickness to it that spoke of its power.

  The floors beneath our feet, the walls surrounding us—those were thin because the only powers they needed to contain were the elements and the people. This had reinforced concrete several meters thick all around it, with meticulously-cared-for equipment. The power in this room was immense beyond my feeble imagination.

  With a knowing look, Blade pointed a single finger at the massive slogan written across the wall.

  “Better Bodies for Everyone,” I read aloud. “And this is the government building. I’m beginning to see why they’re not advertising everywhere else.”

  “Yup. They don’t need to. SynthCorp practically governs Ehksmis Prime now.” Blade gave a low whistle, turning his attention to the reactor below us. “Nuclear. Old tech, but extremely efficient. They put their mainframe in a nuclear power plant. I’ll bet it ain’t just to save money on extension cables, either.”

  “You mean it’s a security measure?” I looked over the setup. “Look, there’s only one cooling system, too. It’s all wired in together.”

  “They had to know some knuckleheads would come along at some point and try to blow the operation in a single fell swoop.” Blade shook his head as we leaned on the metal railing and observed the workers below. They scurried like little ants going to and from a picnic basket on a summer day, bringing their fill of juicy sweet goodies to the queen.

  “Who runs this shindig?” I asked. “If these are the ants, where’s the queen?”

  Blade grinned at me. “Giving up on taking out the power source so soon?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Seeing as how any kind of misfortune to befall this general area would be catastrophic to the whole city, yes. I’m willing to explore other options.”

  An Ehksmian in a hard hat carrying a clipboard strode past, his bare amphibian feet slapping on the metal.

  “Excuse me sir, we were wondering…” I flagged him down, then paused. “Blade, what is it exactly that we were wondering just now?”

  Blade scratched his chin. “We’re from the quality control department and need to see a printout of your latest efficiency parameters.” He swiped the clipboard and shuffled through the frogman’s notes. The poor fellow croaked out a startled acquiesence before heading to comply.

  Blade stopped him. “One more thing: is the information for the personalities stored centrally, or is each individual self-con
tained?

  I caught the glint in Blade’s eye as he asked the question.

  My heart nearly sank to my toes before soaring near enough to my eardrums to cause a pounding I was sure they could hear from the outside. By some miracle, they either didn’t hear it or didn’t care.

  “Self-contained, sir. That way, the units can travel anywhere. The only thing a station meltdown would remove is the chance at re-download in case of brain damage or deterioration. There is no other facility designed to store the experiences of so many lives.”

  We were really going to do it. We were going to blow this place to smithereens.

  “Thank you.” Blade nodded, almost convincing me of his authority by the dismissive wave of his hand as we resumed our beat patrol. Forty years of Galactic Patrol service, brand new synth bodies, and Blade got us cover as glorified mall cops. We could case the place to our hearts’ content and get paid to do it.

  As soon as the lackey was out of sight, I grinned like a kid on Christmas morning. “Gotta work out how we’re making this happen, ol’ boy.”

  “I’m sure we’ll think of somethin’.” Blade’s keen gaze swept across the causeways. “We have a few challenges, but nothing so big we can’t put our thick skulls together and royally screw it up.”

  I scratched my head. “My biggest question is how we won’t get arrested for acting outside the bounds of law enforcement.”

  “Who says we’re not in our jurisdiction?” One side of Blade’s face turned upward slightly. “Last I heard, we were officers of the Galactic Patrol sent to investigate suspicious activity related to SynthCorp’s Ehksmis Prime division.”

  “But we have no jurisdiction if we’re synths!” I gestured with my hands as if that’d make him understand faster. “And SynthCorp, for all I can tell, seems to own the only major city on this mudhole.”

  “Oh?” Blade turned to me with an eyebrow raised. “And who exactly has shown up to request that we turn in our badges? This here form we’ve taken on is just part of our extreme undercoverness. We are dedicated to this mission and performing our duties as officially assigned.”