by J M Thomas
I couldn’t help the impish grin that spread across my face. “That’s what she said.” Dodging his swat nearly toppled me into the water, but I regained my footing just in time to look like an idiot without looking like a wet idiot. “Well, dismantling them couldn’t be that hard. There were barely any synth in there…”
My heart nearly stopped. “Blade…”
Blade had to stop laughing at me long enough to get the word out. “What?”
“Why? Why was there no one else at the synth factory when we were there? Why was it so easy to steal all those cryo-tubes? Was it some kind of dead zone? When I was in the warehouse, on all the non-government and business levels, I didn’t see but a few. That’s not enough for a conspiracy on this level, what is going on?”
“Come on, let’s go get a drink.” He steered me toward a nearby hole-in-the wall with good beer. “You ain’t gonna like the answer to that question at all, Jet. Not one little bit.”
I narrowed my eyes, our boots crunching through grass and pebbles as the path narrowed a bit. “Try me.”
“The synths missing aren’t the human synth. It’s the Ehksmian synth.”
I squinted at my partner, waiting for the other shoe to drop. “And?”
“This particular small, almost inconsequential branch of SynthCorp has a voluntary project known as the… you know what? You ain’t gonna care what it’s called. The juicy bit is that they’ve given the nice little socially enslaved Ehksmian synths a new job terraforming the fourth planet in their solar system. It’s a waterworld like this one, perfectly suited for colonists from the overpopulated…”
“Wait. That’s what this shit was for? So they’d have nice little worker bees to churn up the real honey?” I picked up a pebble and threw it as hard and as far as I could.
“You’ve been warned about the metaphors, Jet.” Blade’s headshake became a nod halfway through. It was terribly confusing. “You’re right, though. SynthCorp won’t just be a monopoly, they’ll be an interplanetary superpower. They’ll use up all sweet Mama Nature has to give, then belch back out more profit cleaning up the mess. It’s a crazy galaxy we live in, Jet.”
Blade liked talking about sweet mama nature in an almost ironic way—like she was all that had ever raised him, but that she’d been a bitch about it. To hear him talking about this… well, it warmed my heart. And by warmed, I mean acid burned my throat like fire the more my rage built.
I couldn’t abide the idea that the carriage of justice on Ehksmis Prime was to further enslave everyone to a system. It was like you were born doomed to assimilate. There was no hope for anyone, even those just trying to help.
Hell, Blade got a fine for not sitting back and letting an innocent bystander get hurt by a weapon discharge in a crowded room. Thank you kindly for your service, now pay for your infraction. It was downright infuriating.
“You know what these folks need?” Blade asked, holding the door to the little pub open. “They need a human solution, not just a justice algo.”
“I think they need somebody with a fancy security job to wait for a beat rotation to patrol the energy plant and blow this shit up once and for all.” None of my partner’s half-measures.
“Let me give you an alternative I think you’ll dig.” Blade looked thoughtful for a moment, his index finger scratching the dip in his chin. “How about… now, hear me out on this… how ‘bout we stay here? Let’s do what we do on our best days and bring some old-fashioned galactic justice. We can advocate for those the system silences and topple the monolith from the inside.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “And your problem with blowing shit up is…?”
“Alright, advocatus diaboli, say we blow shit up. What happens to the people like that little girl who gave us directions our first day out of the sack? Or Marsh and Marsha? A catastrophic loss of power and radiation surge will affect the little ones. Can you sacrifice the kid with the big brown eyes and buck teeth, Jet? What’s even the point of all your purported humanity if you fail to protect the helpless in the process?”
“Oh man, I wish you hadn’t gone there.” I squinted at my partner, not sure whether to deck him or admit defeat. I accepted a brew instead of either. “How do you propose we do finish this, exactly?”
“We’d have to become an alternative to the usual justice channels. When those fail, you can come to us and we’ll fill the gaps. Then, when business gets big enough, we bust on the big scene and start replacing the central justice system. Destabilization is a long game, but it works if you play your cards right.”
I groaned. “I’m guessing you’ve already got someplace in mind, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Blade grinned, sliding into a seat at a glossy corner table as he pulled an erasable marking pen from one of a dozen pockets in his ridiculous coat. With a few strokes on the table itself, he drew up a crude map of the streets near our apartments. “This spot ain’t on any maps. Like us, it’s managed somehow to fall off the grid. No idea how that could’ve happened.” He paused to wink at me like I was stupid or something, so I gave him a look like he was stupid.
“And?” I took a tentative sip of my beer, then licked the delicious foam from my upper lip. Perfection. I liked the idea of being out of the way of prying tin can eyes. Dodging the main streets during prime patrol hours had gotten a bit old.
“It’s an old bar called Loose Ends. I thought it was fitting, seeing as we’re the loose ends somebody didn’t quite manage to weave into the fabric of society. It has three rooms upstairs… separate rooms, before you have to ask.”
I snorted. “Depends on which end of yours is loose.”
Blade didn’t see fit to grace my reply with a response of his own, so I studied the map as if staring at it could osmose information into my brain. This gave me an unrelated idea.
“If we’re going to be replacing the local law enforcement bit by bit, we might be seeing some action, yeah?” A smile crept its way up one side of my face.
Blade nodded, one eye squinting.
“I think we’re going to need some upgrades.”
Blade grinned, then marked out a little bubble on the lake portion of his little map. “I had a feeling you’d say that. This here shop has some nice options I think you’ll be right pleased to peruse.” It was Marsh and Marsha’s place.
“So, we’re doing this? Using our pension money, retiring from the force to keep up our old, unfinished mission of bringing down the synth-creating racket on Ehksmis Prime?”
Blade shrugged. “You got something better to do?”
Chapter 29 – Loose
“Who’s the big baby now?” I grinned down at Blade as he flinched against Marsh’s touch on the side of his face.
“Nobody’s being a baby, it just…” He squeezed his eyes shut and forced his hands to still over his knees.
I crossed my arms. “Louder, so we can all hear it.”
Blade cringed. “It tickles.”
My chuckle nearly drowned him out. “Louder.”
“Stop it.” Marsh gave me a harsh look. “Hard enough to make him sit still before. Do you want his implant to have a big, squiggly line across his cheek because I put the sensor ink in the wrong place?”
“It can’t exactly hurt his good looks.” I said before heeding his warning, leaving them to finish adding Blade’s laundry list of augmentations. Internal translators for us both, vision focus boost on his left eye that gave him a cool blue and silver-flecked glaze over the brown.
Grin still firmly in place, I scritched at the spot on my neck where my own implant was still settling in. I had Marsh set mine up as an ostentatious and wholly unnecessary spinal graft—just like my old one from my original’s human body.
I had never felt more at home in synthetic skin as I did the second I stretched against the long, metallic line snaking up my spine and imbedding at the base of my skull, dozens of parallel metal threads disappearing into my dermal layer to rest against the muscles in my back
.
Marsh had griped for a full ten minutes straight about the unnecessary design before Marsha finally laid a calming hand on his arm and told him to “give the man what he’s paying you for.” Eighty percent of it was entirely superfluous. But to me, it was a love letter to my new skin. If I had to be trapped in a synth body for the next two decades, I meant to be a good synth and a good Jet two-point-oh.
The other twenty percent was a signal blocker preventing anyone from being able to read my mind again. As much as we’d enjoyed an almost eerie peace in our efforts versus SynthCorp so far, Marsh warned me they’d definitely come for us now that we’d blocked any internal log they’d hoped to access later in our bodies. Let them come. I’ll kick their rubber asses. For now, though, we’d be tough to track, especially since Marsh upgraded our wrist chips to connect to our off-world account.
I could extend the field and create a shield bubble around myself, recharge the capacitors with sunlight and kinetic energy… and some other thing I’d already elected to forget.
I’d also pestered Blade to get half his face encased in steel like before, but he vetoed that in favor of something subtle and refined. Of course, I spent the next half hour calling him Madame Blade and describing everything about him as sophisticated.
“How long do we have left?” I asked Marsh as he brought one of six tools on arms closer to Blade’s cheek.
He could’ve melted steel with his glare. “Do not rush art.”
Marsha laughed. “Got a hot date tonight? Perhaps with your SynthCorp snitch?”
“Nah.” I waved her off with one hand. “I’ve decided to let that one go. She’s about the only person who could bring me to my knees… not like that, you perv!” I cast a sidelong glance at Blade, who was turning red trying not to laugh as Marsh installed delicate pieces of equipment in his cheek. I got the feeling I was about to be kicked out for rabble-rousing, so I waited with something akin to patience for a few minutes as Marsh finished up.
I’d seen plenty of vids of different implantation masters plying their trade; Marsh wasn’t kidding when he’d called it art. The implements at the end of his six-armed workstation whirred like angry bees with soldering irons, saws, and needles for stingers. Marsh switched between arms and tools without even looking up from his work on Blade’s cheek. I’d have called him a mad scientist, but we already knew that was his beloved’s schtick. These were his orchestra, Blade was his concerto, and he was the conductor working pure magic.
When the last creepy arm whirred its final buzz and shut off, I dared to speak again. “You look like a fairy princess, Blade. I paid Marsh a little extra under the table to add a couple embellishments.”
“You didn’t, either, because you would die.” Blade accepted a mirror and grinned at the result, examining it with his new eye. “I can see every detail, and every bit is perfect. Thank you, Marsh.”
“Yes, thank you.”
Marsh gave a slight bow. “Your contribution keeps our cause moving forward. We look forward to returning every credit at Loose Ends when we require your gifts again.”
“Speaking of which, it’s time for me to go open up.” I gave the Ehksmians the customary grabby hug their people preferred as a farewell, then Blade and I headed for the surface.
“I went by SynthCorp last week,” Blade mentioned as he gingerly dried off the new implant. “There are fewer people than ever there, and they’ve stopped making new ones at the factory. I’m guessing it has something to do with our little briefcase.”
“Hardly,” I grumbled, cracking my neck and hailing a levcar to take us to the abandoned backside of Capital. “They’ve converted eighty percent of the entire populace of Ehksmis Prime as slaves.”
“You’re wrong on two counts, but I’ll hear you out.”
I sighed. “Synthetic bodies without souls aren’t people and don’t have rights. The charms can make the synth appear android/robotic, easy to control. Whoever built these charms has copied the tech SynthCorp was planning to use for their gain, and is instead using it against them.”
“You’re right about that, but wrong overall again.”
“Thanks for hearing me out. That means a lot.” I rolled my eyes as the car whirred to a stop.
“Something bothering you, Jet?” Blade picked up a piece of fruit I didn’t recognize from a roadside hawker, then pulled out a pocket knife and began whittling away the bright red peel.
My mouth watered as the spicy scent wafted on the evening breeze. “Why?”
“Because you look like something’s bothering you.”
“Sure. I lost my body, we’ve busted our asses and become criminals for the sake of these Ehksmians, only for them to still be shipped over to a new planet to live their lives as terraforming slaves. Nothing to be bothered by. Nothing to see here.”
I took a long, hard look at the tree growing directly opposite where our new bar was set up. A scraggly cityfied bird carried bits of grass and peat. She was weaving something to bring up her babies in.
I was unweaving someone else’s nest egg. “Why the Ehksmians?” I asked, unlocking the front door and stamping my feet on the welcome mat.
Blade snorted. “Why the Ehksmians? Because they’re generally disliked, find it hard to communicate with the outside worlds, isolated, a small visible community, or because their government system was greedy for bribes? Better question is why not the Ehksmians?”
I grabbed a bar towel and slung it over my shoulder. “Alright, fine. It’s a big galaxy. I was thinking there were stronger peoples out there, more effort and output-focused worlds…”
“You were thinking like a project manager, not like a predator.” Blade narrowed his eyes as I handed him the broom. “What use is a strong race like the giants of Forest II if they stick out like a sore thumb everywhere they go? If they can’t be isolated and controlled, you’ve just thrown away your investment.”
“Why, Blade, I’d never noticed before just then, but you would make such a nice evil crime lord! I do believe you’ve missed your career calling.” I didn’t quite dodge his swat in time, and it left the back of my head stinging. I made a mental note to get movement sensors next time I visited Marsh. “Watch the spine. It’s a bitch to polish.”
“I do not want to hear one more word about you polishing your spine or any other part of you.” Blade’s words alternated with the swish of the broom fibers on the real wood planks of the floor. “Keep it to yourself.”
I took a good look around our little establishment. It was shaping up nicely, and the grand opening had earned back about a quarter of what we’d put into it. We were on par to make money on this place within a year, and that wasn’t easy to do here, where operating licenses were prohibitively costly. Helps to know a guy who can bypass the pay screen and upload the cert straight away.
Blade and I had our artistic differences, so of course my half of the establishment had mismatched chairs that creaked and whatever curtains would hang long enough to keep the evening sunlight from blinding patrons while they ordered drinks. His side of the place had an entire book wall filled with curiosities and hanging decor.
The doorbell was an actual bell made of actual metal that made a high-pitched little ding-a-ling sound when someone entered. It rang out the presence of our first customer of the day.
“Don’t think you’ve gotten out of me correcting your ass, Jet.” Blade pointed the broom handle at me as he returned it to the tiny closet and stepped up to the register. “After closing, we’ve got a little field trip to make.”
Our first customer of the day was a human synth, a skinny dude with hair nearly to his shoulders and the first beard I’d ever seen on a synth. I pulled a frosted mug from the freezer and had it ready at the tap when Blade punched in the order.
I almost wished I’d gotten Blade’s hearing augmentation, because the young man’s voice lowered to a whisper. Blade leaned in conspiratorially, and I got the distinct impression I heard my name.
“Hey, Jet!” Y
up, there was my name, at a volume you could register a block away.
“Yeah?”
“Make it three. We’ve got some business to discuss.”
While I’d normally frown upon starting up drinking so early in an evening, I couldn’t wait to get a load of whatever intrigue this fella was bringing our way. He had that glint in his eye that said he liked to start things.
And oh, did he start us a doozy.
Chapter 30 – Ends
“This here fella seems to be a fine candidate for our empty room upstairs. He should have no problems helping out here and there in exchange for room and board.”
“Yes, as you can see...” I pointed to the floor. “We have lots of boards.”
The fellow smirked at my joke, and began discussing some tangentially-related small talk with Blade.
I got the sense I’d seen him somewhere before, a certain uneasiness in my stomach. Then it hit me and I blushed. “Heydin.”
The young man stopped mid-sentence. “How did you know my name?”
“I... I saw you die, through your sister’s memories.” I scratched the back of my head. “We took the bullet to the central GP for processing and evidence against SynthCorp.”
“Yeah, to be buried like the rest of the evidence.” Heydin shook his head. “I’d love to see a copy of that footage sometime, if you kept record. I’ll never get it from her.”
Blade glanced from one of us to the other, fingertips tapping the table in slight irritation. “You’re Lila’s brother, the bloodstain on the carpet in the high rise? How exactly did you deliver a Testament with a hole through your head?”
“I didn’t. I uploaded one every day, with a small, independent synth lifemaker. Offworld is the way to go, especially when you have, upon occasion, gotten into a scrap.”
I leaned in. “Pardon my assumption, but you’ve not exactly got the build of a cage fighter…”
“Speaking as someone who does, I’ll take that.” Heydin smiled and leaned back, mirroring my movements perfectly. “You want to know what kind of trouble to expect at your establishment, is that it?”
