by J M Thomas
She sputtered, fumed, and railed for a few minutes. I decided right then that we were definitely never getting married. Instead, I’d sic her on Blade as a sweet, sweet revenge for leaving me in this predicament with no clue what the hell was going on.
Finally, she seemed to make up her mind and stormed off in the direction of the bathroom. When she returned, Lila was dressed in her own clothes and her hair was neatly pulled back as if nothing had happened. Without speaking to me or even daring to look me in the eye, she picked up her trinket.
That was when she tripped, her heeled shoe catching a loop in the carpet. She fell, tumbling forward with the little star swinging at me. Like I’d been hit with a log, I blacked out fast and hard.
Chapter 18 – Sorry
I awoke to bright sunlight streaming through my window. My door was still cracked open a few centimeters, and a booming voice echoed from the other end of the hallway. It had likely awakened me through the fog still swirling in my brain.
Oh, shit, it was Blade. My happiness lasted less than half a second before I realized what predicament I was in. At least I was wearing underwear, but that was very little solace when I ascertained where my hands were and why I felt like I’d gnawed the shittiest shoe-leather jerky all night.
It was because Lila, in all her wisdom, had tied my wrists around the foot of my own bed with my necktie—my good necktie I’d just bought at a stupidly high price, no doubt ruining it. She’d looped my belt around my mouth and cinched it to the metal bar holding my bed aloft. I could work my way out of this mess, given a few minutes, but the heavy footfalls and knuckles rapping on my door frame told me I had seconds, not minutes.
Completely losing all sense of dignity in 3… 2… 1…
“Aww, hell, Jet.” Blade’s massive form filled my doorway. “I knew you’d get in trouble without me, but I didn’t imagine…” His gaze flitted across the room and actual concern darkened his brow, if only for a second.
Then his old mocking was right back on point. “You always did have the best first dates.” Tsking his tongue and not bothering to help me untangle myself, Blade squatted in front of me and held my little notebook aloft. In a flawless, looping script cursive, she’d written. “I’m sorry Jet” and left the note at my feet.
To make matters worse, she’d reapplied her lipstick and kissed the page. I was never, ever going to hear the end of this one. With a groan, I worked my way out of the knots holding me in place, then unbuckled my belt to survey the damage to my wardrobe.
“What time is it?” I asked when I had enough saliva in my jaws to speak. “Don’t we have work?”
Blade shook his head. “Ehksmians take every fifth cycle off, and apparently that really does mean everybody. No shops open, no mechanics open, not even a food cart. It’s like a holiday.”
“You mean there’s no breakfast. Great.” My stomach took the opportunity to growl.
“Or lunch, or supper. Good thing they fed me before discharge.”
Oh yeah, he did that. “Yeah, speaking of…”
“There isn’t much to tell. We can find some hiking to do in the meantime.”
I took his suggestion to mean we couldn’t talk here, so I nodded. “Got nothing better to do.”
“That’s the spirit.” He clapped me on my still-bare shoulder, the rubbery smack reminding me to go look for a shirt.
“Grab an extra set of clothes while you’re at it. Ya never know.”
I understood instantly where we were going, and had an inkling as to why. I wasn’t a huge fan of what I assumed to be his reasoning, but I had my own purpose for heading back to the underwater fortress.
We puttered around, chatting about pointless drivel through the whole levcar ride out to the river docks. I deliberately suggested the wrong dock two kilometers away from our actual destination. As soon as the levcar returned toward the station, I faced Blade head-on, arms crossed.
“Start talking.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “Man, as many times as you tell me to shut up, those words are pure music to my ears.” His eyes twinkled as he continued, “There’s really not as much to tell as you think, Lover Boy.”
“Start me back at Flamenco and work me up to here. If we need to pass on by our dock and come back around, that’s fine, too. I’m done with going into these situations blind.”
Blade’s laugh ground to a halt as he fixed his eyes on the river ahead of us. “Alright, then. You knew long before you got pulled out of that undercover op that it was going nowhere. A total bust, as it were.” He snickered at his own pun, seeing as I wasn’t inclined to do so. “As much as you try, Jet, you even smell like a cop. Your tight ass walks by, doesn’t matter if you’re wearing granny panties and a bathrobe, folks go ‘better shape up, the fuzz is here.’”
“And you could be in smartest regalia and walk by, those same folks are gonna start up ‘pull out the cookies, grandpa’s showing up.’” I flashed a smirk. “So… you sold me out to get yourself in undercover?”
“Yup. I was basically the snitch, feeding the little lines the boss thought it was okay to feed them. Followed the ninety-ten rule, keeping to ninety percent truth, ten percent bullshit. Better ratio than honest snitches. That much you probably figured out already.”
“I did.”
Blade skipped a rock over the lapping current, wind whipping against his throw. “What you didn’t likely catch is that my hazard pay for that particular gig was half the value of any busts made in conjunction with that venture. Controlled substances only.”
“And the blue shit…”
“Was controlled on the planet we picked it up on. Not so much here.”
“So I gathered.” I furrowed my brow. “You are prime loaded beef now, ain’t ya? I got dragged through the shitshow while you raked it in.”
“Yeah, I know it ain’t fair, Jet. That’s why I’m halving it with you. The bigwigs didn’t have to offer you anything, so they didn’t, but I ain’t doing you that way.”
“You ain’t doing me no way,” I returned. “But there is still the matter of the Jet and Blade that actually did the work.”
“We made more than one bust, Jet. There’s Flamenco, then that Pro Wrestling Girlfriend op. Trust me when I say there’s more than enough for you, me, whatever’s left of them. Money ain’t no object, or it won’t be whenever I can get offworld to collect. There’s an order of operations on this thing, though, and we’ve gotta play our cards just right, especially after you went and fucked up.”
I stopped in my tracks. “Excuse me?”
“The Ehksmian you beat to death in the cell.”
“I had no idea that was…”
“Yeah, well, he was real, alright? That’s the thing with those illusion things, the brain can project an image, but if your hand goes right through it, you lose it. The whole point of the damn program was just to get you to accept the eventuality of a synthetic body enough to give a clean transfer. You had to go make it about losing your sense of self and some spy games interrogation shit. Because of that, one of our best inside guys got his face caved in.”
I chucked a rock of my own at the river, not caring to skip it. It landed with a dull plunk just shy of the water. “Sorry. I wouldn’t have if I’d known.”
“I know, Jet. But, dammit, I’d tried to give you an education on how those things worked enough beforehand that it wouldn’t seem suspicious. But you picked the wrong half of the conversation to pay attention to. Now we’re scrambling to complete this phase of the op, and you’ve got a nasty debt to society prohibiting you from leaving the planet.”
I’d had enough of being on the receiving end of this brow-beating, so I figured I’d turn the tables a little. “Speaking of debt, how’d being a prison bitch go for ya? Like the view from the other side of the bars?”
“I gotta say, the legal system here is one of the weirdest I’ve ever seen.” He shook his head. “There’s a reason they don’t send Galactic Patrol out here often, and it’
s because they don’t mess around. If the infraction’s between citizens, you’re fined for the offense and you have to work it off. Basically, institutionalized slavery. That’s where your little manslaughter and my assault charge work their way out.”
“Wrist slapping, basically.”
“Yeah, but you live in shitty apartments and work government jobs until it’s at zero. Then you qualify for a real career, upward mobility, all Ehksmis Prime has to offer its upstanding, law-abiding citizens. Social engineering, stratification… yeah, I know. I’m losing you.”
“I get the point. So, what happens when your infraction is against the state?”
Blade gave a tight-lipped grimace. “You get a trial within one cycle and immediate execution if found guilty.”
I nearly dropped my teeth out of my jaw. “And that’s…”
“...why Marsh and Marsha probably told you I’d be back by this morning. They knew the trial would find me not guilty, at least if the courier came through and gave you that doohickey that would erase the database’s info. And if Marsh readied the interface in time.” Blade let out a wry chuckle. “The memory recall helmet wouldn’t be an option for reasons you’re intimately familiar with, so they had no case and had to declare me spotless. Done and done, strike the arrest from the record.”
“At least I’m good for something, even if that’s vomiting on the right circuit.” A thought entered my mind and I paused for a second to let it sink in. “You let yourself get taken in, hoping I’d execute a complex set of mission parameters, all without me knowing the first thing about any of this shit.”
“And here we are. Despite your best efforts, you managed to be predictably competent.”
“Not sure if I should deck you or thank you,” I admitted. “How exactly did you manage a state infraction?”
“Same way you did to wipe my data.”
A low growl rose in my throat. “‘Ceptin’ I had no idea what I was doing or why.” Same way I didn’t know how I suddenly thought in metrics. The same way a lot of things still didn’t make sense.
“Get used to it.” Blade shook his head. “Especially dealing with synths, the Ehksmians prefer to keep as many people in the dark about as much as possible. I doubt there’s a single one of them who knows every part of the resistance.”
“Blind pairing. I’m quasi-aware.” As I was quasi-aware that we’d reached our destination at the end of the pier.
“As you should be. That’s the name of the game.” Without further preamble, Blade made a swan dive into the murky water.
I checked to ensure everything I didn’t want getting wet was secured in the zipping bag. I was never sure why, but I had to check. Perhaps that’s what Blade meant by saying I was predictably competent. Even on autopilot, I had facets of myself I couldn’t turn off, little traits and hangups that kept me safe from royally screwing up my responsibilities.
Following the bubbles left by Blade’s entrance into the water, I dove in, wholly unprepared for the floating corpse that filled my vision the second I opened my eyes.
Chapter 19 – Blood
The standard operating procedure for cold, dead flesh enveloping you as soon as you dive into the murky depths of a river… most certainly wasn’t coming to mind at that moment.
I made instant plans to add that to my long and non-exhaustive list of things they really should’ve taught me at the PatrolEdu Academy. If I ever got a chance to be a guest instructor, I had material for days.
What I didn’t do was hold my breath. That evacuated straight away in the underwater version of a girly scream as I kicked away. Faced with the options of swimming my way down toward the riverbed with no oxygen supply to the motor running my muscles or returning to the surface to grab one more breath, I elected to push through.
Swimming around the corpse as the current carried it downriver, I kicked furiously to drive my body lower. Un-buoyed by lungfuls of air, it didn’t take long to drive my way through the forcefield bubble and onto the drain mat. As I fell, I sucked in a precious lungful of air, which escaped again with a whoosh as I crashed into Blade with a clumsy pile drive and a series of panicked gasps.
“You idiot!” he exclaimed, shoving me off and rolling away. “You know we don’t need air every minute like we used to, right? This ain’t a combustion engine.”
Before he could give me a dissertation on the propulsion systems of synthetic life, I jabbed him one more time. “Squishy landing.”
“You wish. Ya know, if you crack one of my ribs with your foolishness, I’ll have to get it repaired. We don’t just heal up no more.” His glare dissolved into a wince as he rubbed the sore area I’d just nailed with my elbow.
“My ass agrees with your statement. One good slap, and it’s been sore for days. Alright, I get it. You’re fragile and need me to play nice and use my inside voice.” I went ahead and ducked the smack to the back of my head I knew was coming. Then, as his hand swooshed past my ear, I realized there was quite a cacophony of amphibian croaks around us.
Blade seemed to notice it, too. He sobered and lowered his eyebrows, listening to the sounds. They had to be difficult to translate, overlapping like that.
Pulling out my translation earpiece from the waterproof bag, I attached it and dialed it up. Sure enough, the sounds were overlapping and the translator kept picking up snippets of different voices. My efforts at ascertaining what was going on didn’t seem to be going any better than Blade’s.
Lowering his voice to a whisper, he leaned in toward me. “It’s part of why they don’t bother with pronouns. They speak and understand at the same time—no need for taking turns. Creates a more cohesive, unified society with less sense of otherness.”
I nodded as if I understood at least half of what he’d just said. “Imagine bringing a bunch of synth into this party.” I decided I’d do just that. Motioning for Blade to follow me, I stepped up into the hall where the clothes and towels had been, then past the doorway to Marsh and Marsha’s lab. Beyond it was a conference room full of noisy Ehksmians.
The quiet once they noticed our presence was downright eerie. Out of respect for the gathering we were obviously intruding upon, we waited in the arched hallway just before the threshold.
When she noticed our presence, Marsha slid out of her seat and joined us. She greeted us warmly, taking Blade’s hand in hers, her other closing around my elbow with gummy fingers. “We’re holding a conference of the resistance. It’s been a difficult week, and we have lost several precious members.”
Blade’s quick nod coincided with his whisper. “I see. Pardon our intrusion.”
She shook her head. “No intrusion. Your presence will soothe our trouble. Come, I will announce you.”
In a clear chirrup that rose in pitch, but not volume, above the others, Marsha called out: “We have much to mourn, my kin! But we must make room for hope once more.” Her large eyes blinked an entreaty.
The others responded by falling silent. With a smile, Marsha beckoned for us to join her at the center of the horseshoe-shaped stands, nothing more than rising reed-woven benches upon which the members stood or sat. No frills for this resistance. Apparently, their comfort budget took a backseat to tech.
We stood on either side of her, Blade on her left and me on her right. She never lost her grip on each of our arms the entire time she spoke, prompting me to look around the room again. Every Ehksmian was in physical contact with the other Ehksmians around them. There was room enough for each to have physical space, but none of them elected to sit apart from each other.
The gesture of closeness I’d taken for spousal or lover-level connectedness between Marsh and Marsha seemed doubtful. I wasn’t sure whether “beloved” meant something else to them. Were they all beloved?
Before I could imagine this meeting devolving into an orgy, Marsha began her address:
“We have suffered much loss, and we will suffer again. But hope brings us a new kind of ally. From the offices of the Galactic Patrol, whose he
lp we solicited revolutions ago, a team joins us. And not just a pair of seasoned officers—these have given their lives in service of our liberation, and therefore reawaken synthetic.”
The silence was deafening as fifty pairs of eyes widened and breath caught in however many lungs these guys have.
“Yes,” she continued. “We now have allies who can walk amongst our enemies. So, my kin, welcome these new members to our ranks. They will share our history and our future. They will know our pain and our joy. Invaded with us by predators disguised as friends, forced to work for a system that cares nothing for our lives, now resisting the advance to beat back the synth invasion… I give you our hope!”
An overjoyed cry arose from the seats as the Ehksmians leapt to their feet with a chorus of cheers and croaks. I thought my eardrums would burst. Beside me, Marsha’s look was still triumphant, but her eyes held the weight of a massive responsibility. This only deepened as Marsh stepped up to meet her as she walked with us back toward the foyer.
A young Ehksmian, a hint of a tail still waggling behind him as he walked with his head low and his gaze fixed on the back of Marsh’s knees, followed close.
“Please, Marsh. Not another. I can’t handle another, not today. Please.”
Marsh met her gaze, his eyes watering with emotion. “But who will do it? Do we leave this one to his fate? What kind of life awaits him as one of them?”
“Please! Please do it.” The young one spoke up. “It… itches…”
The reality of what unfolded before my eyes hit me like a dropped log. I glanced at Blade, but for once, I seemed to be the one miles ahead. With a surreptitious step backward, I whispered to my partner, “Flamenco.”
The itch is in his veins. Kid’s been jabbed, there’s no going back for him now. Life as an addict, followed by death, then resurrection on Team Synth. There’s no detox for this shit, not for Ehksmians. Taking another long look at the youth, nausea rose in my throat. It was always worse with kids. A life just started, so quickly ruined.
