How to Beat Tomorrow

by J Foster Ward

  “Yo, skinbitch white girl,” the blue girl snapped.

  He knew tone of that voice. Milan. Had to be.

  “Your clothes. Give them to me,” Milan demanded.

  “I’m afraid I can’t since you’re not an employee of NuYu, a subsidiary of Nevermore Corporation,” the nurse said calmly. Then so smoothly Milan didn’t notice, she changed tactics. “Might I say you have really created something stunning there.”

  “You really think so? I was told I have a natural body sculpting talent.”

  “I can tell,” the synthetic girl smiled kindly. “You’re studio-grade. Are you an actress?”

  Milan twirled a finger in her hair. “I was in over twenty series playbacks,” she said with false modesty.

  “I could tell. Might I suggest a quick look inside the lost items bin? I’m sure I saw a dress in there that would bring out your nipples.”

  Milan seemed placated and strolled away and Jones snorted in irritation when Synthetica rejoined Jake, leaning over him to activate the hologram controls on his bed.

  As the hologram menu lit into being, Synthetica lay beside him, tilted to be readable in the prone position.

  “You don’t know how to use this, do you? You use the menu to select items of your appearance,” her voice sounded like a whisper next to his ear.

  Jacob reluctantly began pushing a finger through the virtual light of the hologram controls and immediately caused an error. Laughing kindly, Synthetica took his hand in hers, guiding his fingers.

  “What would you like to be?” she asked

  Jake paused a moment. For a moment it felt like a much bigger philosophical question.

  “Let me help you decide. You can always change, Jacob.”

  As she moved his hand through the menus it was a lot like customizing your avatar in a game. It had a series of features that could be changed including hair, brows, eyes, nose and mouth.

  “Careful, more extensive modifications can take upwards of eight hours to complete,” she said with a smile.

  The system somehow allowed for sculpting of height, weight and build. He found some of the options available in the genitalia menu hilariously self-absorbed; aside from obvious size enhancement it included beauty marks, tribal tattoos and alterations in tilt or bend. Ribbed and studded also each had their own submenu.

  “Can you give me my real face?”

  “You can have anything you want,” she said.

  He tried replicating himself. Like a police sketch artists, trying to adjust from memory what he had looked like in his previous life. In the end he came out looking pretty much like an idealized, Hollywood version of himself.

  “And if you push here, you can save this as a preset, for the next time you die,” Synthetica said cheerfully. “Are you ready?”

  “Will it hurt?”

  “Not at all,” she smiled, and with that she stepped back and the clamshell closed him in darkness for the moment it took before some kind of gas knocked him unconscious.

  He had the sensation of something tugging at his body, but distantly, like it was someone else’s body. Like feeling the vibration of music through your chest at a concert. Slowly rising up through layers of thick blackness, Jake groggily forced heavy eyelids open as light and cool air rushed at him. The halves of the clamshell folded back and he lay there, waiting for the comforting presence of the synthetic girl to help him.

  But there was no sign of Synthetica.

  Jake forced himself to sit up on his elbows. Looked at his hands. Were they different? He couldn’t be sure.

  As his senses came flooding back Jake noticed the figure crouched over the bed of the other clamshell. It was Americano Dean Jr, the number 5 plain on his cheek, and he was busy yanking Synthetica’s arm out of her socket. To Jake’s horror he saw the synthetic girl was half disassembled, arms and legs removed and her entire body cavity opened up.

  And her eyes blinked, lips moving silently as she tried to speak to him.

  “What the fucking hell are you doing?” Jake yelled, disgust and outrage taking over.

  Americano didn’t even look up, arm reaching into her insides until he yanked out something that looked like a cluster of grapes filled with blinking lights and trailing wires.

  “Just tinkering. I could never get ahold of one of these machines before, I wanted to dissemble its bio-organic matrix to see how it all works.”

  “You… what?” Jake demanded.

  “I started by removing her voicebox because I got tired of hearing it screaming. Why they give these things such realistic senses I’ll never know.”

  “You fucking monster! Why did she let you do this?”

  “It has to. I used a command code I found to initiate diagnostic mode. It had to obey when I told it to lay down and cease all motor functions.”

  “You can’t just cut someone apart because you feel like it!”

  “It’s not a someone, it’s a machine,” he corrected Jake snottily.

  Jake thought of a reasonable reply and decided a punch in the mouth was the best response. So he did. Americano didn’t see it coming and went over backwards, screaming and hysterical on the floor, clutching his bloody mouth. The man’s low pain threshold made it childishly easy to put a beating to the asshole.

  “You dumb, mud-eating dirtworm!” Americano screamed.

  “Say it again,” Jake raised his fist. “I dare you. I double-dog dare you! Now, you’re going to put her back together just like she was and say you’re sorry and never, ever touch her again.”

  “Dream on, milk-suckler,”

  This time Jake punched him in the nose and it took a full five minutes for the man to stop howling.

  “You’re such a stupid dirtworm, it’s just a machine!” Americano yelled, but there was a tone of desperation in his voice now. Fear replacing anger.

  Jake bitch-slapped him hard across the face and Americano collapsed, blubbering. “Shut up and do it,” he said, furious.

  “B-but you have no right to order me…”

  “Right fuckin now or do you want another taste?” Jake raised his hand.

  The clone ducked his head and flinched, started arranging the body parts back in place on the exam table so fast he was almost tripping over himself. While he worked, Jake forced himself to make eye contact with the dismembered android. Her disassembled vocal cords didn’t let her speak, but she was obviously conscious and had a look of such thankfulness on her face Jake felt vaguely embarrassed.

  “Done yet?” he prompted the clone.

  “Almost,” Americano sniffled, wiping bloody nose with the back of his hand. He scooped up a handful of milky-white internal organs from a tray and dropped them back in the stomach cavity.

  Jake grabbed Americano by the neck and slammed him backwards onto the floor where the man writhed in pain. Then he planted a foot on the other man’s neck. Americano stopped writhing and his eyes went wide, staring up at Jake.

  “I could kill you right now, but what would that do? Nothing. You’d just be back here in a couple hours,” Jake said. “But I could hurt you in so many ways you’d wish you were dead. Start with your eyeballs. Move on to other body parts. And you couldn’t do a damn thing to stop me while I carved you up. Could you?”

  When the clone just stared at him in horror Jake applied more pressure. “Could you?”

  The clone frantically coughed out “No!”

  “How does that feel, asshole? Because that’s how she just felt. Helpless while someone cuts you to pieces.”

  “B-but … it’s… just… a machine…” American managed to gasp out.

  “Not anymore. The world you came from is gone, idiot, in case you didn’t notice. The old rules don’t apply. And in this world she’s got as much right to be here as you do. If I catch you or anybody else treating her like that again, well… I already told you what I’d do. And I won’t tell you twice.”

  He lifted his foot from the clone’s neck and stood back. With trembling fingers American
o poked some commands in the hologram controls and the table sank down into the machine, the clamshell closing up.

  Before the two halves cut her off from view the android mouthed the words ‘Thank you.’

  “Get lost,” Jake said to the other man.

  The clone slunk out of the chamber and left Jake to wait in the uncomfortable control console chair. It took nearly an hour to repair what Americano had done and when the clamshell opened up again with a whine of machinery, Synthetica lay there whole again. Perfect, pale body. She immediately sat up and gracefully rose from the bed to approach Jake.

  “Look,” he began, ashamed of his own species. “I’m sorry that humans are such terrible – umph!”

  He started to apologise and was interrupted by the android’s kiss. Taking his face in both hands she planted a long, sensual lip-lock on him that Jake was too stunned to stop. When he came to his senses he found he was enjoying it too much to push her away.

  When she finally broke the embrace she stayed inches away, hands resting on his shoulders, smiling up at him.

  “What was that for?”

  “While I was under repairs I connected to the archives and did some research on the 20th century customs. That is the appropriate thank-you for the situation, is it not?”

  Jake didn’t feel like correcting her, but he did anyway. “Not exactly. Look, Synthetica, as far as I’m concerned, you’re a person. And that means you have the right to do whatever you want. You don’t owe me anything for doing the right thing.”

  She blinked at him, processing the information. “B-but that’s an erasure offense for my kind. They could wipe my main memory and reset me.”

  “They who? The clones? They’re not smart enough. And Cool Breeze doesn’t seem to care much, so why should you?”

  “Yes…” the android said meditatively. “I had noticed Cool Breeze does not exhibit several of the behavioural inhibitors under the Artificial Intelligence Accords. It’s as if some modification has been made to his processing core.”

  “My point is, you’re free now. At least if I have any say in it.”

  Her eyes welled up with gratitude. “Well then, if I’m free. I can kiss you whenever I want.”

  “Agent Mortimer, report to briefing room. Mortimer to briefing room,” a hidden speaker in the room announced.

  Synthetica gave him one more quick brush of her lips on his. “But it will have to wait.”

  Jake retreated from the room, unsure what had just happened. Walking up the corridor in a slight daze he wondered if Americano would try to get revenge for the embarrassing beating Jake had just given him, but his thoughts kept going to back to the way the android had kissed him.

  ***

  Chapter 9

  : A Small Leak

  Jake spent his downtime alone, inside the unlocked storage locker he’d discovered, laying on his back on an uncomfortable pile of plastic tarps. He stared at the ceiling, trying to think of a way to get the anti-gravity belt from where it was glued on the ceiling, and dozed.

  The alert beep on his comms set made him start awake. He stared at it with disgust as it beeped insistently two more times before finally placing it in his ear.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Dirtworm? That you?”

  “I don’t respond to ‘dirtworm’,” Jake replied.

  “Whatever. Grab your gear and get down to Stairwell 12. We’ve got an assignment.”

  Jake considered not going but knew that sooner or later one of the clones would track him down. And to be honest he was bored.

  Eventually he found Stairwell 12. The squad halted at the bottom which was the entrance to Gamma Module. The air was musty and damp. Jacob paused to touch some sort of black mold growing on the stairwell wall before Whiteman snapped for his attention behind bug goggles.

  A flickering hologram bird appeared in the stairwell, the sudden flare of light overloading the enhancement goggles before safeties cut in and blacked the image and the entire squad yelled and clapped hands to their eyes.

  “Now that everyone is here, I can send your mission parameters,” Cool Breeze announced.

  Simultaneously everyone’s wrist-buddy lit up with new data and a schematic of the Gamma module appeared. Jake poked the image. It was a confusing series of domed chambers with a web of connecting corridors.

  “Mission objective; locate water purification and drainage systems. Shut off the leaks, perform repairs to drain the level.”

  “Cool Breeze, what can we expect upon insertion?” Whiteman asked the air.

  Jake snickered to himself. “That’s what she said.” No one laughed.

  The sub-commander looked menacing in his outfit of black tactical gear, but it wasn’t Jake’s imagination the man darted a nervous glance at him. Whiteman had promptly claimed a combat kit of a single set of black combat fatigues stuffed in the back of a disused drawer in the second small arms locker they’d looted.

  “Delta module is suffering extensive system and power outages. I couldn’t tell you what was in there if I wanted to.”

  “It’s wet,” Milan pointed out. “Better not damage my outfit.”

  “That’s what she said,” Jake repeated to himself.

  Milan was easy to tell apart from the others since she had commandeered the only dress in the entire place from the lost and found; a kindof shift-plastic that literally molded itself to the person wearing it, with a matching set of thigh-high boots. The hot-pink outfit clashed horribly with the dull blue splat armor: essentially a lightweight Kevlar vest and body armor pieces that adhered via some non-velcro sticky patches to the shoulders, arms, groin and legs like a roman gladiator.

  The rest of the squad was in coveralls. Aside from the baby blue maintenance coveralls and heavy boots they’d also found several sets in fluorescent orange. Underneath the night-vision goggles, gas masks and splat armor they were like some futuristic SWAT team and they would have been anonymous if it hadn’t been for the way they’d decided to decorate their outfits. OWEM GEE, for instance, had drawn a huge, expressionless face on the front of his armor.

  A hologram wire diagram of the gamma module replaced the slowly flapping bird. Cool Breeze helpfully highlighted the chambers as he spoke. “Med labs, gene labs, physics and chemical engineering workshops. Don’t go through these chambers here as we’ve got a good indication they suffered some pretty toxic events during shutdown.”

  “Toxic events? Shutdown?” Jacob asked. “What the fuck happened down here?”

  “We had a small flooding problems,” Cool Breeze said evasively. “Didn’t have a chance to adequately decontaminate the area.”

  “I knew it,” Milan hissed.

  “What about taking a short cut, through this area here?” Americano pointed to a tiny holographic copy of Cool Breeze’s projection on his wrist-buddy.

  “Hmm, no. That’s dining hall B. You don’t want to mess with that,” Cool Breeze said. “Stick to this route. And word of advice: if any of you develop the sudden urge to taste human flesh, hug an energy grenade.”

  “Even me?” Sabotage Jones asked.

  “Especially you, Jones. I’d suggest popping your waste relief hatch and sitting on it,” Cool Breeze replied.

  Sabotage blinked in confusion. “What did you just say?”

  But the other clones were laughing. “You gonna take that kind of talk from a computer, Jones?” Bitchmurder chuckled.

  Jones’ face crinkled in a frown. “You gonna pop your tin can and make me? AIs is gutless cans of foetal abortions: fact.”

  The ghost voice gave back as good as it got. “You’re a fucking retard: fact. My liquid core is an organic DNA computer and has nothing to do with foetal tissue. You should be safe from all the mutagenic bio-contaminants down there.”

  “Whyzzat?” Bitchmurder asked.

  “We made them of course. The immunity booster upgrades you have should protect you from most viruses and disease; especially the one stored down here. Can’t make a plague witho
ut making a cure; where’s the money in that?”

  Jacob shuddered at the computer’s casual attitude towards biological warfare. “What the fuck is wrong with you people? Is that some kind of joke?” Jacob said.

  Cool Breeze sounded defensive. “Hey, before my time. You think I’m bad you should have met the artificial personality construct they had in charge of this place before I took over. She had a reaaal Alice in Wonderland fixation. Little brat.”

  “Who is Alice and what is Wonderland?” Bitchmurder asked.

  “Classical reference,” Jacob said and felt an eerie crawling up his spine as the computer voice chuckled at his joke.

  The holographic bird vanished, and Jake knew Cool Breeze was done paying attention. Whiteman decided the same thing.

  “Enough, let’s get going. We go in quiet, check the life signs tracker, waste anything that moves,” Whiteman scowled. “Clear and seal each room until we get to the far end of the module and the access to Beta block. Get some muscle on these doors.”

  Americano found a control panel and released the restraining bolts that held the door locked. They hammered at the stuck doorway to Gamma module with a pair of prybars; an item that apparently was without some sort of high tech substitute. Slowly they forced it open, letting out a pongy marsh-water stream of water until they were knee deep in swamp muck.

  “My outfit!” Milan moaned.

  Walking was treacherous, like a coral reef underfoot made of the accumulated layers of slugs, snails, mussels, starfish and a red-veined creeper plantlife.

  “Dirtworm, take point.” Whiteman ordered. He suspected because Whiteman didn’t really trust him at his back with a gun. Either that or Jake was entirely expendable.

  “I’ve got a malfunction in my vision-enhancement goggles,” Jake lied. “Can’t see a thing.”

  The sub-officer ground his teeth together. Seriously. Jake had the sudden impression if he’d gone first the other clone would have shot him in the back immediately after they were out of Cool Breeze’s sensor range.