Loose Ends

by J M Thomas

  But their own minds had tucked that thought away, refusing to fixate on an idea that could destroy their confidence in themselves and their precious perceptions.

  The juror in that trial who didn’t cringe? He was some synthetic frogman from Ehksmis Prime. When everyone else flinched away from a godawful truth of being alive, that one smiled. In that instant, I loathed him and everything he represented. See, synths don’t run on fickle minds. For their memories to be altered, it has to be manual and intentional, a reprogram from the outside in.

  At least, I think that’s how it went down.

  The stories we tell ourselves shape us as much as we shape them. We all reshape our memories over time through revisiting them through different lenses. My memory of that scene could be a long way off from what really happened.

  I told that story to myself a lot in the early days of becoming a synth, holding onto my fear of losing my humanity to becoming plastic—hardened and inflexible. It was something like growing old, at least in my mind. You become a relic, a fixed point in your own history. I wanted to be like a tree in a forest—always growing, always rising toward the sky. Never a statue in a square—only good for growing moss and reminding people of something done and dead.

  In the thousand times I told that story to myself, I was never sure whether the concept of solid memory comforted me or terrified me the day the frogman smiled. But it sure as hell scares the shit out of me now. To lose my ability to change my mind about the past was to lose an aspect of my humanity, and I had plenty of those to count as lost to me.

  Or, I could count it as found. You see, whether or not your brain can alter the actual memory, you can willfully choose the lens through which you’ll view it. I could worry myself into a dissociative disconnect in which my body turned to sludge and my mind pushed my form away. Or, I could take solace in the new me, arguably a better me.

  The only thing I couldn’t do was go back to the way things were, to the good old days.

  I still remembered my death, if I tried hard enough. That memory had me going for awhile; I bet it’s how they keep everyone else convinced they’re getting a second life. That’s all lies; in fact, most everything SynthCorp says is lies.

  I’ve got my legitimate reason to hate synth’s guts, and no one’s taking that from me, by mechanical means or otherwise.

  If you’re not proud of your death, it’s rather funny how easy it is to re-invent the story to suit your own psyche’s need to be the hero, to be the good guy. I find it a little easier to go ahead and record the real events while they’re raw and I’m still doubting whether I did the right thing or not. Usually, it’s “not.” I wonder if my memories are as fragile now.

  Then, later, when I go back with the inevitable wobble of memory, at least I can read about how stupid I was back then and have a laugh. That’s what this is—my account of my own idiocy in the face of insurmountable odds. I don’t plan to revisit it again until I’m the hero of my own story. I’ll need to be pretty old for that narrative to get itself through my thick skull.

  Back on Ehksmis Prime, in that stupid trap warehouse, I made a series of blindingly moronic blunders I don’t intend to repeat. This culminated in me importing a corrupted memory file of my dead partner’s into my own access port. Of course, I realized when it was far too late to do anything about it.

  The rest of what happened occurred in my mind alone. It took me awhile to figure that out, but you need to know that they tamper with your mind—give you a fake death to hold onto so you’ll truly believe you’re alive again, not copied.

  So, at the warehouse, I killed Blade. I killed myself. Even if it was only in my mind, some construct from the synth interference, that doesn’t make it any less real to me. The only way I can tell that memory from any other is that I’ve seen the man I supposedly offed. I saw him alive, or at least somewhat alive.

  The only thing to be done, I reasoned, was to pop my own cap and keep both of our neural imprints, our identities, and memories from falling into enemy hands.

  I didn’t say I was smart, alright? I had my reasons for thinking like I did, but they didn’t have to be good ones. They just had to motivate me to take the next step.

  When I pulled the trigger, I had the strangest sensation that the fires of hell were about to lick me right on the sweet ass cheeks. I gritted my teeth and fell toward the void. Boring as that.

  Then, I woke up in a synth hospital, and, if you can believe it… Everything only got worse from there. So here we are now. Here’s my memories—those preserved from my half-dead, drugged up original that will never see the light of a court, and the ones that come after. Do with them what you want.

  The real me is as good as dead already.

  Chapter 22 – Revenge

  It turned out that Marsha wasn’t the only one with some semblance of a strategic mind. Marsh had a full-blown case file complete with door codes, maps accurate to the millimeter, and a fairly elaborate scheme to unfold. He’d been working on this heist for nearly a full orbit. His attention to detail was impressive.

  I listened with rapt attention to Marsh’s plan, a dopey smile spreading over my features. “Nice.” I gave a slow clap. “That’s a fantastic plan.”

  Blade narrowed his eyes at me. “However…”

  I grinned. “I got’ya one better.”

  As I headed back to my apartment, still sopping wet, I stopped by the matriculation desk that still boasted no sign of Lila. She’d been able to dodge my every entrance and exit since our little interaction, but I needed her if this plan was going to work.

  A quick snoop revealed a pad of paper and a jar of pens. Careful not to make my work illegible with dripping river water, I scrawled her a note: “The ghost needs to come out tonight. Wanna play cops and robbers with me again?”

  I signed my name, unsure if it’d work. After all, she was avoiding me like the plague. I didn’t exactly know her well enough to predict how she’d respond, but my instincts said she’d be there. Now to wait for my other guest to arrive and set up the place for a nice little showdown.

  Sure enough, within minutes, I heard a knock at my door. It was Marsha, and she eyed my fancy attire with suspicion.

  “Excuse me, but have I come at an inopportune time? You seem to be preparing for a date.”

  “I am indeed!” I grinned. “Let me fill you in on your part of this.”

  Marsha backpedaled a step. “I am beginning to doubt that I want a role in… whatever this… is… are those handcuffs?”

  “Aww, come on, don’t pretend Ehksmians don’t swing that way.” I grinned, twirling them on one finger, then noted the look in her eye. “Maybe they don’t. Anyway, the whole hot date thing is a ploy to get Lila in here. Last time, she pulled the same routine on me, so I’m just returning the favor.”

  To illustrate, I pulled back the well-ironed dress shirt to reveal an old school leather shoulder holster Blade had scored for me. I wasn’t armed with anything beyond my knives, but I rather hoped Lila was. I shifted the overshirt back and buttoned it.

  “You are plotting revenge?” Marsha eyed the exit with relish.

  “No, I’m planning to get the trinket she has. Hers can disable a synth the same way ours disables a computer terminal.” I waited for the reality to sink in. There it was—Marsha could taste the triumph that would suddenly become possible if we got our hands on a second trinket. “But of course…”

  “You can’t use it. No need to explain. I will be your ally. Just no… swinging that way, alright?”

  “None whatsoever,” I promised, wholly unconvinced of the veracity of my claim.

  Just then, another knock came at the door. I gave Marsha a second to duck for cover, a smile spreading the corners of my mouth as she rushed to dim the lights to a soft, romantic mood before stowing away behind the washroom door.

  “Come in,” I called, lowering my voice a tad.

  The sight of Lila always managed to make my breath catch. She might be a snake in wom
en’s clothing, but she wore that women’s clothing like the master tailors of the Martian colony had conspired to bequeath her with pure magic. Beneath a pale, faux-wool jacket, red satin and lace peeked out, a tease begging for me to unwrap the heavy outer garment and reveal what waited inside.

  Oh, but there was work to be done instead. Tonight was for getting even; Marsha had called it. I was plotting sweet, sweet revenge, and getting a rise out of every aspect of this little meeting. This was my time to shine.

  “You have something I want,” I said as I snaked my hands around her waist. Interlacing the fingers of my right hand with hers, I bent in for a kiss.

  “Well, hello to you, too, Jet,” Lila replied in that sweet, soft voice. “But what are you going to give me in return?” Her chin tipped upward toward me, lips reaching for mine.

  It wasn’t nearly as fun knowing we were being watched, and that Marsha was likely to gag in my washing machine if I didn’t keep to business. “Oh, I dunno,” I responded with a devilish grin, snapping the handcuff around her trapped wrist. “I believe I’m gonna catch me a robber.”

  In my line of actual business, we don’t find handcuffing folks to a table to be an act of pleasuring. I can’t think of a single GP officer I know who gets off on it. For one thing, we’re not romantically inclined toward the vast majority of folks who we drag through our doors. The other half is that the idea is simply to keep perps from getting violent and hurting themselves or, more importantly, us. The table and cuffs keep the balance of power in our favor, so it’s not exactly the time to be brushing up against somebody or nibbling ears.

  The combination of intentions made for a delicate balancing act on my part. I wasn’t sure how long to keep up the sexy play charade, especially since one low-situated aspect of myself suggested “all night” as a viable option. The part of me that wanted revenge for Lila getting the drop on me, upsetting my balance of power, said to draw out the experience for a different reason.

  The galactic patrol officer on duty in my head said to get this over with and get back to business. So, snapping the other end of the cuff around the table leg, I slid a chair up under Lila’s nice, round bottom and sat my own ass across the table from it, the physical distance not making things much better.

  First things first. I slapped my notebook down, in all its cutesy glory, so hard it made a nice, loud pop when it hit. “Last time we played, I believe you wanted something from me.”

  Her flinch turned into a smirk, inclined head indicating to me that she was still in game mode. That was fine by me; I didn’t need her to get serious just yet. I opened the notebook to a blank page and pretended to read from it.

  “The first thing I noticed when I entered the apartment complex was how neat and tidy everything was kept. Whoever management had put in charge here, they knew how to keep things orderly. Even the baseboards hadn’t collected dust in the corners, and that’s not just dedication to one’s work. That’s obsession.”

  Lila took this as a personal compliment, bowing her head a little in acceptance. “Think you’ll be exploring every corner of me tonight?”

  “Oh, I can be excruciatingly thorough.” I grinned, throwing in a wink as I attenuated my hearing toward the laundry room where I imagined Marsha was turning a whole new shade of green. Once again, the mental image of Marsha’s lunch making a retching reappearance in my laundry calmed me right down.

  “For example...” I pretended to read again, wishing I had a fake pair of glasses to shove up my nose for dramatic effect. “The second thing I noticed upon entering the hallway was a bloodstain on the floor and a glaring bullet hole in the back of a chair.”

  Lila’s playful demeanor evaporated, her gaze cooling about fifty Kelvin in the span of a second.

  “And see, when I happen upon a glaring discrepancy like that, it gives me the blinking neon idea that something is equally wrong with both scenes. It’s a sort of compensation—this girl doesn’t leave a dust speck lying around for a microsecond, but a bullet and a bloodstain remain for how long? Seems to me somebody’s subconscious doesn’t wanna let go of that bloodstain, amirite?”

  Lila stiffened in her chair.

  I licked my lips and dug around in my pocket for a little baggie. My hand closed over my fancy new pair of heat-sensing glasses and I put them on, hoping for dramatic effect. “I have a little trinket of my own here; want me to show you?” I reached back into my pocket and pulled out the bullet, waving it in front of her eyes.

  She snatched at it with her free hand, but I pulled it away at the last second.

  “Now, this is terribly contaminated evidence, even as cold cases go. My buddy’s grimy fingers pulled it from the couch, so there’s a limit to what we can pull from it. But that blood stain probably has some decent DNA left in it, and I might have swabbed our initials into it this afternoon.” I held up a second bag with a brown-tipped swab in it. “That means we can get murder weapon goodness, victim’s imprint, and half-decent ballistics if I can get this to an offworld lab. ‘Cause I’d be willing to bet my rubber buns nothing here’s gonna turn up the truth.”

  “Damn straight,” Lila said, breaking her stony silence with a hiss so vehement I half-expected a forked tongue to flick out from betwixt her teeth. She looked past me out the window behind my bed. “What do you want from me, Jet?”

  “I think I’ve got a way to get this back to Galactic Patrol’s labs in the central worlds. There’s just one little trinket I need to make it happen, and guess who’s got that thing on her hot little body?”

  Lila nodded. “I see.” With her free hand, she reached into her jacket pocket. “Or, perhaps, I could take those with me now and deliver them myself. Cut out the middle man, in more ways than one?”

  “You are certainly free to try.” I grinned despite the ringing already starting from her twisting her artifact to turn it on. “But you might not learn what else I know.”

  She stopped her fingers halfway through, seeming to consider her options for a moment. “Like what?”

  “I don’t need ballistics to tell me who it was, or to show you the scene again.”

  “Jet, I’m not sure I…”

  “Look,” I interrupted, pounding a fist on the table. “I might be easy when you catch me off-guard. That’s my bad, but I don’t plan on correcting it anytime soon. But I’m also a sucker for justice, and I can be extremely petty. And while we’re on a deep, intimate round of self-revelation, I’m also much, much better at playing the bad cop, so let’s just get this over with, shall we?”

  “No.” Lila shook her head. “You can’t have my trinket. I’ll knock you out again and take what I want, then leave you tied up just like last time. You never learn, do you?”

  I leapt back as she cranked the trinket on high. The ringing sent pain through my skull and weighed me down, even as I tried to slink away from its field of operation.

  It wasn’t loud enough to make me miss the low chuckle echoing from the shadows behind Lila’s head, close enough that she jumped in surprise.

  “Now we know that synth swing that way.” Marsha snickered, twisting Lila’s free hand in hers until the trinket slid free. Marsha slipped it into her pocket, turning off the infernal device as she did so. She met my gaze, a new appreciation and respect in her eyes. “Shall we give the young lady what she really came for?”

  “That’s what she said,” I mumbled, an impish smirk ghosting its way over my lips before I schooled them back into serious mode. “Go ahead.”

  Lila’s eyes widened as she glanced back and forth between the busy Ehksmian and my smug confidence. “What are you doing?”

  I crossed my arms. “The way I see it, this all comes back to memories. Somebody blocked one of yours off, a powerful, dark one. But it couldn’t block off your blood connection. I had a tech wizard take a quick gander at a record for me, and it confirmed my suspicions. See, you didn’t come alone to a strange world, a human in a sea of synths and Ehksmians. You came with someone who shared your last n
ame. The fact that you’re alone now is an emergency flasher with a klaxon. It says there’s something missing in here.”

  I tapped my chest where my heart used to be. “Something re-making your natural tidiness into obsession. Something making you refuse to clean up the last connection you have to the ghost. It’s not haunting the building, though. Just you.”

  Marsha snapped the helmet over Lila’s head, cueing the viewscreen up to elicit the memory. “There’s the block,” she said, pointing to the green brain scan on the side of the helmet. “What do you say we navigate the playback around it?”

  Lila’s hand came up and muffled yells emanated from within the whole-head-covering helmet. I laced her fingers in mine once more and nodded to Marsha.

  With a press of a button, the image played across the screen in my hand. “Let’s see what Miss Lila here doesn’t want to remember.”

  Chapter 23 – State

  “Hey, Lila, this is a pretty sweet gig!” the young man had to be about twenty to twenty-five cycles old. Just enough to be out on his own, not enough to be smart about it yet. He was lanky, his loose-fitting clothing looking a size too big, a little stubble lining the edge of his jaw. By the cut of his cheekbones and large, brown eyes, I’d have been able to pick their family resemblance out of a crowd.

  “Yeah, I got you a room upstairs and everything.” There was a smile in Lila’s voice, a tenderness I had never heard from her before. Her gaze narrowed, zooming in to watch his hands move as he tinkered with an ancient pocketwatch. “Umm, Heydin? What are you doing?”

  “Just… nothing.”

  “Hey…”

  “It’s nothing, I swear!”

  “Look,” Lila’s breath came out in a huff. “I brought you here for a fresh start. Don’t start getting into trouble so soon.”

  “No one said anything about trouble.” The young man snapped the watch closed as he hopped up off the couch with a grin obviously designed to put his sister at ease. “We’ve got a nice thing going here. I wouldn’t mess it up for the world!”