Loose Ends

by J M Thomas

  They needed a detox, some way of understanding and undermining this substance. But what they had was a tiny lab and a conference room. I wasn’t even sure they had a broom closet to add to that. This resistance was under-staffed, under-funded, and out-gunned.

  “Oh no,” Blade groaned.

  Marsha heaved a sigh, a slight quiver in her shoulders belying her feelings. “Come, officers,” she said. “I suppose you should see what it is you’re fighting now.”

  With a growing sense of trepidation, I filed in behind Marsh as Marsha led the somber procession toward the lab. She had that same jaw set, the same stony look I’d seen from death row officers bringing in the condemned. You had to partition it off, keep reminding your feet that marching forward is their duty until the day is done.

  Breaking down and falling apart could come later, or not at all, depending upon how strong that dam was, and how vast the river behind it. I’d left up the wall after about six months on the job, never letting it down again. I didn’t even want to imagine what had taken up residence in the lake I had back behind my reinforced rebar and concrete wall.

  So why did I get the feeling it just might crack with what I was about to witness?

  Ignoring the rest of the equipment, the kid hopped up onto Marsh’s low-backed computer chair, his feet tapping with what almost seemed like eagerness.

  Marsha flicked on a camera and gathered some supplies, training the lens on the back wall. “Alright, we’re rolling.”

  The little guy rolled his chair up to the wall and rested his back against it, his fingers twitching and hands splaying out over his knobby knees. Blade tiptoed around Marsha, hoping to get out of the way. As Blade brushed by, the young Ehksmian lashed out with one hand, his eyes lighting up as he made contact with Blade’s arm.

  The contact seemed to calm the little guy’s fidgeting and twitching. Blade swallowed hard, his hand clasping the kid’s skinny forearm.

  “Do you have something you’d like to tell your clutch?” Marsha asked, her voice holding steady.

  “Yeah. I want them to know they’re dear to my heart, and I want my sisters to stay away from the west end alley. They’re waiting for us to take a shortcut home from school, nailing us as they walk by.”

  “Did you see the one who attacked you? Did you get a clear sight of the person’s face?” Blade cut in, his grasp firm.

  The little guy shook his head. “Oh, and I don’t want a big mourning like today. Just send me down the river. I hope my blood helps you find the cure.”

  Marsha patted his knee as she inserted a needle into his arm. “I hope so, too. Thank you for your service to the resistance. I wish you a wonderful rest.”

  The little guy smiled. How could he smile? His blood was draining away, collecting in a little bag. They only needed a little bag, because he was still so young. His body would join the one that had about smacked me in the face when I dove into the river, be carried lifeless down the current.

  It wasn’t fair. He kept smiling as he slumped back against the wall, even as his eyes closed. He was so resolved, so peaceful about his fate. His color paled, then blued before his breathing slowed to a stop.

  I watched with my lips pulled tight. Blade couldn’t bear to look, only held the tyke’s hand until it was over for him. Marsha scooped him up when the chair began to slip, removing the line when the blood ceased to flow.

  Handing him off to Marsh, who nestled the body close to his own chest, Marsha dribbled the blood from the tubing into a vial. With heavy steps, she turned to spin in a centrifuge that looked like it’d come from a child’s chemistry set.

  The sight prompted me to see their situation in a whole new light. The Ehksmians were bleeding out, losing numbers to this invading pestilence at an alarming rate. There wasn’t even an overt acknowledgement of the existence of an underground by SynthCorp’s monopoly on lives. Every new Ehksmian born was just another future customer waiting to be tagged with the good stuff.

  “There.” Marsha pulled the vial from the centrifuge and held it to the light. A rainbow of colors had layered out of the sample. She pointed to the different layers. “We have leukocytes and erythrocytes, much the same as you. You’re probably familiar with this already.”

  “Umm, yeah. I know all about that stuff.” I didn’t sound convincing.

  The corners of her mouth pulled her lips upward a fraction, but the smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Your spun-out blood would probably look fairly similar to this, minus a bit of a compositional difference, back when you had human blood.

  Blade saw fit to cut in with a dig of his own. “Maybe a thicker fatty layer from all those fried dumplings, but yeah. Even the glowing blue residue. Damn, does that stuff not break down?”

  “It does eventually, which is why haste is important.” Marsha heaved a long sigh. “I’ll be up all night separating it out.”

  “And how exactly do you hope to find a cure for this?”

  “I don’t.” Marsha’s voice cracked. “At the present, I have no hope of developing a cure.”

  Heat rose up my neck as my temper flared. “Then what the hell was the point of that?”

  “Shh.” Marsh shook his head. “While Marsha may be unable to develop a cure here, she is collecting samples and data that can hopefully be of use, if we can get it to an independent laboratory, somewhere far from the synth’s reach. Someplace with proper, expensive equipment, and careful staff, and diligent minds.”

  Blade shook his head. “But, of course, SynthCorp bought up the levcars with rocket attachment capability. Careful inspection is in order, and to date, not one sample, living or otherwise, has made it offworld in the hands of an Ehksmian.”

  I recognized why they needed us. Galactic patrol officers made synths… we had access where no others did. We could get into places, but more importantly, we could get out of places. Here, specifically. We could do it, as long as we managed to make it look like the course of duty.

  All that was assuming we could get rid of the debts over our heads. A few years of keeping our heads down with hard labor, perhaps, or maybe Blade had a plan for that already. He didn’t seem concerned about it, at least not as concerned as he was about the plight of this random group of people from this random planet with their big eyes and their gooey finger pads.

  And dammit, their plucky attitude and determination was growing on me, too. It wasn’t just the impassioned induction into their future hall of fame that had me ready to learn their national anthem. It was how deeply they resonated as one, how hard they felt every loss. How they couldn’t figure out what a pronoun was because they saw each other as extensions of themselves.

  Somehow, in the span of a week, I’d become a synth and a frogman, too.

  Chapter 20 – Stay

  Blade helped Marsh shove the boy’s body through the bubble and we watched him float, almost weightless in his watery grave. If I didn’t look too close, I could imagine that little tail nub wobbling in the water, propelling him downstream to swim away and be free.

  But it was not to be so. For a few minutes, the macabre, surreal scene captivated us. We stood silently watching the Ehksmian’s body drift away, the only funeral this boy would get. Then, the current swept him from sight, and it was all over except Marsha’s long night spinning his blood and siphoning off the necessary components to use for evidence or send to a better lab.

  Somber and with wooden movements, we followed Marsh back to the little one-room excuse for a lab, operations center, and probably breakroom, too. In one corner, Marsha was spinning another round, meticulously removing the little blue glowing speckles from her fallen comrade’s blood.

  I peered over her shoulder as Marsh and Blade struck up a conversation in technobabble and fiddled with equipment.

  Finally, Marsha spoke up. “There’s some kind of nanobot in there. I’m hoping its presence violates a law requiring they can’t track people without their permission, at least not on other worlds. Here they can do whatever they d
amn well please.” Again, her voice cracked, so she collected herself with a sigh and a pass of her palm over her eyes. “I can only hope this is the last night I’ll spend doing this terrible task.”

  “You and me both,” I agreed, swallowing down the bile that had taken up semi-permanent residence high in my throat. It took me several minutes to recall why we’d come down here today in the first place, then the bile threatened to rise again.

  Blade was gung-ho about letting them scan our memories with the DypThink helmets. Apparently, now that we were synthetic, it would be simple enough to tell if a memory had been implanted or tampered with. Our experiences, however we relived them, were admissible as primary evidence in the Martian Spaceport’s grand inter-galactic court system.

  He volunteered to go first, accepting the helmet with a calmness only he could manage. The metal and rubber helmet passing over his eyes and mouth filled me with dread. I could almost smell the vomit from the last time.

  “Need some air?” Marsha asked, her gooey fingertips finding my shoulder again.

  “I’m fine.” I responded, doing my best to minimize the hard swallow.

  “If it helps you, the device here is not capable of making a change in your mind, only demonstrating what is already within. An old Earth equivalent would be a magnetic resonance imaging device. It can only display and will not cause harm.”

  I nodded as Marsh hooked up the leads from the device to the main computer.

  “Still, any peek into the internal experiences and thought of an individual is an invasion, and not to be undertaken lightly.” Her finger pads squeezed my shoulder in a reassuring gesture. “Though my beloved may not understand our quaint ideas, I feel as you do. To stop one invasion, we must allow another. It is the way of things, but neither of us have to enjoy it.”

  The screen lit up with the familiar scene of the roof of the cells we were kept in. Blade’s hands came up in front of his face and he seemed to be touching his new skin for the first time.

  “Oh, my fruity land of goodness and plenty! Two arms! Two fucking legs! Aww, man, that is sweet. They made me nice and young again…” He hopped up and did a little jig around the room. “Yes, yes, yess… Nothing hurts, nothing’s missing or broken or glitchy! I’ll take that, thank you very much. I will!”

  I couldn’t help but smile as his hands patted his own head for the first time. “Aww, shit. Where’s my hair? How hard could it be to put something up there?”

  “Pretty hard,” I mumbled. Marsh and Marsha shushed me as one. As Blade onscreen continued to prattle and narrate his every new feeling and experience, my smile compounded itself into a grin. I realized why I hadn’t been sure if I’d heard his internal thoughts while he was occupying my head space. It was because the ol’ fellow expressed his every thought aloud.

  Around that time, a knocking sound echoed through his room. That creepy nurse dude with the bad hair showed up and tried to convince Blade to help them get my progenitor to cooperate with the download.

  “Aha, good ol’ Jet. Gotta make things difficult, don’tcha?”

  “Excuse me?” Nurse Poodlehead asked with a raised eyebrow.

  Blade crossed his arms. “Show me my old man.”

  “You knoow we cannot do thet.”

  “Because I have his memory of you hitting him with industrial quantities of that drug?”

  “How did you… The drug is necessary to track the parts of the mind to copy.”

  “The highly addictive nature is just an added benefit, then?”

  The nurse fell silent.

  “So where is Blade now?” It was tremendously odd hearing Blade asking that question.

  “He is safely in cryogenic sleep. Should you need a repaired download, we may be able to attempt a second transition…”

  “That won’t be necessary. I’m fit as a fiddle. So you want me to talk to Jet, huh?”

  “There is a… complication.” The nurse’s odd accent drew out the last word as if he was reticent to phrase it that way.

  “Oh?” Blade advanced on the fellow, his figure towering head and shoulders over the poor man.

  “Never mind. Perhaps you will not be as persuasive as I thought.”

  “Now wait just a damned minute.” But it was too late; the synth nurse was already fleeing the room.

  Too bad for Nurse Badhairday, Blade is like greased lightning with his wallops to the back of the head. The fellow was dropped before he could even get a single step in toward the door. I take personal credit for all the opportunities Blade’s had to practice on my thick skull. His knuckles bouncing off the guy’s fluffy cranium was a sight to behold.

  As Blade made his way down the corridors, he opened every door, locked or not, clearing each room until he burst into mine. Or at least, he burst into Jet’s room—the real Jet.

  The sight of my progenitor lying half-propped-up on a dull metal table, his head entirely enveloped in a large metal helmet with wires and tubes, sent me reeling backward in horror. He had a whole infusion drip running straight into his arm of a blue glowing liquid, and his veins looked ready to burst from the stuff.

  I had these memories. They were copied to me from Jet the First, but I was watching Blade stooping over me, not daring to lay a hand on my shoulder for fear of sending me into death. He turned his attention to the Ehksmian wired in with me, whose own headgear only covered a palm-sized portion of the side of his face and ear.

  That fellow dropped hard, too, and Blade entered the simulation as himself. He quickly began pacing the floor, using up the full length of the wires to give my progenitor a hint he could accept about what was really happening. It was downright surreal to watch Blade’s point of view, of what he was seeing as he gave me what he could.

  Then, he tied the drug infusion line in a knot. An alarm beeped, the loud, irritating one I couldn’t place within the simulation, and Jet began having nasty symptoms. I got the feeling Blade had hoped to spring Jet or carry him out before they could ice him. There was no moving this poor sucker. He’d be dead before they got to the door. He punched the side of the helmet to keep Jet from sliding under entirely, holding off the downward spiral until the synth nurse dragged his groggy self in there and hooked up to the emergency second headset on the wall.

  In a final act of desperation, Blade listened to Jet’s addled suggestion to break their connection. He sprinted back to his room, yanking the connective wires out, tearing his face and damaging the helmet.

  That little act of sabotage was all he could manage before the half-dozen armed patrol arrived to escort him back. Leaving Jet behind, and swearing up a storm, Blade paced his own quarters. He was still muttering and pacing when a couple Ehksmians poked their heads in, chittering and croaking loudly between themselves.

  It was Marsh and Marsha.

  “Not now,” Blade cautioned them. “Not here.” They seemed to understand and moved along.

  Then Blade did something I’d never seen before. He sank onto his metal bed, put his face in his hands, and wept.

  As Marsh switched off the helmet, Marsha shut off the feed to the camera. “The recording is clean. Nothing altered. Labeling the chip and adding it to evidence.” With a heavy sigh, she turned to me. Wiping a tear from my cheek, one I had no idea how it got there, she gave a gentle smile. “Your turn to tell us your story.”

  Chapter 21 – Story

  As I closed my eyes, the cool of metal sliding over the skin of my face caused me to shudder. A sense of confinement made me restless, so I grabbed the armrests with both hands and balled up my toes. Then I was “in.”

  Marsh’s voice in my ears asked me to tell them the story of how I got here. That’s too long, I replied.

  Let me tell you a story from the good old days.

  The good old days are never as good when you’re going through them. Your memory softens and plumps them up later as you recall them. Imagine bouncing the already shaded memory around the grey matter in your noggin until it makes the thought whatever you
r mind likes.

  That’s how good old days came to be in the first place—figments of our imaginations, really.

  Back then, I was a cybernetically-augmented officer of the Galactic Patrol, newly assigned to the Martian spaceport, where there were great officers, great tech, and halfway-decent fried dumpling carts on every street corner. I was living the dream, or so my memory tells me now.

  I had caught some mid-level crook for swindling folks and threatening a few others with extortion. I had to appear in court to present the evidence, all part of a day’s work. That was my first encounter with DypThink, a subsidiary of SynthCorp.

  They had little helmets you could put on and it would scan your memory banks. With a little suggestion, you could bring forward the memory and watch it unfold before someone’s eyes, then watch and record it on a handy little viewpad, batteries not included.

  I got to watch the whole crime unfold, from the time the witness looked up from his work desk, to the accused striding into the room, pulling a weapon, shouting, waving the thing around...

  Nifty to say the least, until the defense attorney took the same witness, same tech, made a slightly different suggestion, and changed the actual memory. No longer was the guy wearing a blue shirt, it was black. The accused’s hair length changed, the weapon was a long-barreled semi-auto, not a handgun.

  The defense played the video back both times, the key details describing the person in question contaminated as if someone had just reached into a crime scene and rolled around all over the damned place.

  But the crime scene was the witness’ mind.

  Now, we all knew that memories, even reliable witness evidence, could be a minefield. That’s what corroboration was for. It was still disconcerting to watch that jury, nineteen of twenty represented planets all show their cultures’ version of doubt in themselves, in what they’d been told, in the very fabric of reality, due to one stupid helmet showing them the truth they’d known…