by eden Hudson
CAUGHT IN A LIE!
YOU FAILED!
Carina was so frustrated by the fifth time that she yelled, “I did not!” as the world faded to black. Then she realized she was yelling at a VR game and forced herself to calm down.
On her sixth run-through of the bedroom, Carina finally realized the trick. Miyo was a flesher who got sick at the sight of blood and hated the feel of humanskin leather against her own skin. In a society like the fleshers’, based entirely on status and conformity, a nonconformist would be an abomination. There was no concept in the fleshers’ world of the warrior who only desired peace or the banker who rejected worldly riches. Inconsistency wasn’t noble, it was shameful, disgusting. So when Miyo called to her mother that she was searching for her favorite shirt, what she was actually saying was, “I’m looking for the shirt I’ve led you to believe is my favorite in order to keep up the illusion that I’m like you and we are in agreement.”
As the countdown timer ticked off seconds on her sixth attempt to beat the bedroom level, Carina sifted through the leather shirts until she found one—dark and distressed—that Miyo’s superimposed memories identified as the shirt her mother thought was her favorite.
She pulled it on. The leather was soft against her skin, and warmed to body temperature almost immediately. Miyo’s flesh crawled with revulsion, causing Carina to shudder.
The prompt popped up in cheerful counterpoint:
Now you look like the daughter of the wealthiest man in Tsunami Tsity!
Bonus: +2 Appearance, Even enemies and angry friends have a hard time resisting your charm, Miyo!
This time Carina joined Qiva around the kitchen fire pit with almost ten seconds left on the countdown timer.
The older woman took in her daughter’s clothing and smiled. “I suppose that was worth the wait. That shirt just suits you, Miyo.”
“Thanks,” Carina said in Miyo’s voice.
“You should eat.” Qiva gestured to someone behind Miyo’s back and snapped, “Muskfruit,” then turned back to her daughter. “You’ll have a big day ahead of you when the raiding party returns.”
A length of dark red muscle, a thin yellow fat layer, and formerly white tendons that had turned dingy without protection from the elements reached into Carina’s view and sat a bowl of sliced fruit in front of her. Miyo’s superimposed memory registered the sight as one of the many unnamed household slaves.
The muscles in Miyo’s face twisted into a grimace before Carina could stop them.
Oh, no, Miyo! You’re showing your true colors! Everyone’s going to know that you’re different!
Penalties: -1 to Appearance, Conduct in danger of penalty
Duration: Unknown
“Is something the matter?” Qiva asked, eyebrows pulling down into a frown.
“Muskfruit,” Carina said, adding some childish entitlement to Miyo’s voice, “was not what I wanted for breakfast.”
Qiva tittered. “Let that be a lesson to you about sleeping in, then.” She clicked her finger blades together at the slave. “Bread.”
Good save, Miyo!
Penalty to Appearance removed. Conduct no longer in danger of penalty.
Carina turned to watch the naked, skinless slave—a woman—disappear into another room. Her heart and her skin ached at the sight. Nausea and revulsion warred in her stomach.
No, nausea and revulsion warred in Miyo’s stomach. The emotion was superimposed via the base memory of how Miyo felt about the slaves, and the characters in this story weren’t real. Carina could almost hear her mother—Sir Siobahn, her real mother—saying, I told you, Carina, little girls who can’t even tell the difference between reality and a story shouldn’t play VR games.
The slave returned with flatbread wrapped in cloth. Actual cloth, not humanskin. Carina tore off a piece and held it over the fire to warm it while Qiva rattled on about Tsunami Tsity gossip.
Although the bread was delicious and soft, Miyo’s body didn’t want to accept the food. First it stuck in her throat, then the nausea tried to force it violently back up. She was too upset.
You have to eat it, Miyo! Your mother is watching! The slaves are watching! Someone is always watching!
Objective: Eat all of the bread you took.
Objective2 (optional): Ask for seconds. Comes with unknown reward!
Carina smiled. This was one objective she was uniquely suited for. The same acid that had destroyed her face as a child had also destroyed her stomach. The surgeons had had to replace it with the poly-alloy implant her parents jokingly referred to as Carina’s iron stomach. Now nothing in the real or the virtual world could make Carina Xiao vomit.
As soon as she set her mind to it, Carina was able to keep Miyo from throwing up. She completed the first objective, then because good enough had never been good enough for her, she ate a second helping.
Nice one, Miyo! No one suspects that you’re a disgusting ball of emotions!
Reward: +2 Conduct, Neutrals and Friends will ignore small lapses from the norm, Enemies can be reasoned with
She was starting to get the hang of this. She could see why Van Zandt liked Tsunami Tsity so much. The player had to get a beautiful teenage girl to pass for something she wasn’t. It was just another day in the life for him, another chance to prove what a skillful manipulator he was.
Nick, however, was becoming more of a mystery. She couldn’t see why this game appealed to him beyond beautiful women and a general sense of escapism.
“Interesting,” she mumbled, mimicking Van Zandt. “Very interesting indeed.”
“Did you say something, Miyo?” Qiva asked.
“No,” Carina said.
While she was finishing her second piece of bread, a male slave entered the kitchen and bowed to Qiva.
“Speak,” Qiva said.
“A message from the master.” Without lips, the slave’s Fs and Ms were skewed. “The raiding party has returned.”
Qiva dismissed the slave and clapped her finger blades together with glee. “Oh, Miyo, I do hope your father got that tawny skin I needed to finish my scalloped skirt!”
Hooray, Miyo, the men of the tribe have brought back new meat from their raid!
Objective: Meet the raiding party and prepare the new slaves
FOUR:
Jubal
I woke up six hours later, just as the sky began to turn the pale steel of early morning and our plane had started its descent into Soam International.
This passage into the country went much easier than mine and Carina’s had. No smiley eelfuckers with their crowd of SecOps trying to give us the ol’ Soam Welcome to the back of the head. A few of the security personnel watched Nick as we passed through the terminal—you’d have to be blind not to see that he was some kind of career combatant—but dismissed the big galoot as maybe a dogfighter or some kind of kong mutie when we made it through the Entering Soam/Inendas Soam line without raising any red flags.
I was even able to stop at the Transpo desk and hire a HeliCab to fly us into Courten, cutting the eight-hour drive time down to a two-hour sky-hop. The HC pilots didn’t mind if we ate in flight, so Nick and I snagged a couple of breakfast baati boxes apiece from the first-class lounge before leaving.
“Man, my first job with Carina would’ve gone so much faster if she’d just kept her head down and let me do the talking,” I told Nick as we lifted off.
Nick grunted and pinched the tiny crystgrass and egg wrap out of the upper left section of his baati box with a surprisingly dainty two-fingered grip.
“You’re probably used to that, though,” I said, popping a spicy-sweet mini hellberry muffin into my mouth. Not quite as spicy as PCM fire, and without that smell that filled every corner of your sinuses. I swallowed, trying to ignore my disappointment at the flavor. “She’s always got to do things her way.”
Nick looked up from the second tiny egg wrap. “Believe it or not, I don’t want to talk about the time you brought my fiancée here and almost killed her.”
“Because you’re afraid I seduced her,” I said. “Don’t worry, Nickie-boy, Carina’s not my type. She loves me and she definitely wants me, but I wouldn’t want any part of that. Zero out of ten—maybe one if I’m feeling generous—but ultimately Would Not Bang. A little too ugly in the facial region for me.”
His top lip curled up in a snarl. “If I didn’t need your help, I’d toss you out of this HeliCab and take a holo of you as you dropped.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you the name of our contact,” I said, shooting him a wink and a finger gun.
“You have no idea what she’s really like,” he growled. “You don’t deserve to know.”
I giggled. “But the siltbrain who turned his back on everything he believes in and sold his soul to a vocor does?”
I started to add, “I am the only one who deserves to know her, Nickie-boy,” but I couldn’t tell if I got all of the words out because PCM fire filled my mouth and the whole world with heat and light.
***
When I came back around, lungs gasping, heart racing, throat cold and aching at the loss of that perfect burn, Nick had finished his first baati box and was opening his second. The HeliCab pilots were still up front, quietly flying us through the early morning sky.
I couldn’t tell how much time had passed while I was out, but I wanted to know what had happened. Did Nick think he’d struck me speechless or taught me some kind of lesson with that fishshit about who deserved what?
That meathead had no idea what Carina was. If anybody deserved her, it was me. I knew her. I knew everything about her. Not the inane minutiae like birthdate and favorite color and most hated food that you memorize to make it seem as if you care about someone. I knew her—how her mind worked, what she felt, what she needed.
As the HeliCab angled slightly west over the jungle, I pictured the moment I had grabbed Carina’s hand to pull her into the Dangerous Game chopper eighteen months ago. If I hadn’t cut her cord, if I’d taken everything I realized about her handling me and just said fuck it, and pulled her into the helicopter… I could feel her in my arms like a memory, like it had happened.
I grinned. Nickie-boy had no idea how close I had come to making him a part of Carina’s past. But he was going to find out.
FIVE:
Carina
Carina stepped onto the porch of Miyo’s family home and looked out at the flesher village. Although the houses had been cobbled together out of salvaged First Earth materials like plastic siding, lumber, crimped sheets of tin, and huge metal tanks, the whole of Tsunami Tsity was built in the treetops over a swamp just like the skinner’s villages were in the real world. Long bamboo poles stuck out of the ground for traveling between houses. She eyed the pole between her porch and the next.
Hi-ho, Miyo, away!
Objective: Use the poles to transport yourself from one house to the next. The raiding party is waiting on the edge of the village!
Pretty straightforward for a game about hiding in plain sight.
Carina took a few steps back, then ran and jumped. When she hit the bamboo pole, her hands tried instinctively to wrap around, but the finger blades were in the way. They caught and sliced at the bamboo as she slid down the pole.
The world started to flash yellow again, the warning that she was going to fail this objective and be sent back to the last checkpoint.
Carina dug her finger blades into the wood. Pain lanced down the bones. She was putting too much drag on the embedded blades. If she didn’t take some weight off, she was going to snap one. She wrapped her legs around the pole, squeezing with her thighs until the slide stopped. Then she pushed up until her full weight was on her legs. The pain in her fingers dulled to an ache.
One at a time, Carina pulled the blades out of the furrows they’d dug into the bamboo. She had to wiggle the deepest one to get it loose. Obviously, a flesher couldn’t rely too heavily on the first two fingers of either hand for gross motor function. The blades were a fine focus tool. That was something she would have to remember if she wanted to get through this damn game without having to go back a hundred thousand times.
By the time her finger blades were free, the bamboo pole had stopped swaying. She could probably get it swaying again if she tried, but her hands had begun to shake and most of the soft pads around the finger blades were bleeding from the strain. Her phalanges and metacarpals throbbed in time with her heartbeat.
In time with Miyo’s heartbeat. These were Miyo’s hands, Miyo’s blood. If Miyo were real, she would have to throw her weight back and forth until the pole leaned close enough to the next porch to hop off, then navigate the next pole with her aching, bleeding hands, then the next and the next.
But Miyo wasn’t real. None of this was.
Carina pulled Miyo’s throbbing hands away from the pole, threw her head back, and released her legs’ grip. The world flashed red and an alarm sounded as she splashed into the swamp water below.
YOU FAILED!
A moment later Carina opened her eyes on the porch of Miyo’s family home. Her hands were as good as new. She clinked her finger blades together, smiling at the metallic sound they made.
“I failed better,” she corrected the prompt.
She stepped back, got a running start, and launched herself at the pole again.
SIX:
Jubal
The HeliCab set down on an open stretch of blacktop about a mile out of Courten. I didn’t want to spend any more time in this board-covered shitter of a town than we had to, so I made Nick shell out the pilots’ exorbitant seven percent waiting fee so I wouldn’t have to dick around trying to find transportation back to the airport once we had our information.
Early winter being the only temperate time of year in Soam, the walk to Courten was almost pleasant. Nick shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, sticking to his brooding silence. I checked the ’Shan’s status. It was listed as In Triage, meaning one of the mechanics was going over my baby with a fine-toothed comb, searching out every bit of damage.
I closed out of the Crotalinae app, then scooped up a handful of rocks and winged one at a time down the road ahead of us. My head had cleared completely and the ache in my left shoulder was gone. The PCM must’ve corrected whatever injury the wreck had done. Shame there wasn’t an incurable disease that custom-built crotchrockets could catch to fix what was wrong with them. Then the ’Shan and I really would be two of a kind.
Still, that was something to think about if I started to run low on time: The more physical damage to my body, the more work the PCM had to do to make me into a beautiful corpse. It probably wouldn’t come down to scrambling for a few more days or hours, but it was good to know, just in case.
From a distance, Courten seemed to have remained exactly like I left it—plenty of open-air multiple-family dwellings, that ecotourist hovel, a few big houses belonging to the jungle barons. The eight or ten businesses and the town’s central market all seemed to be doing decent trade for this late in the tourism season.
I’d planned to head down to the catfish hole in the river where Carina and I had met with Re Suli the last time we were there, but a fat little surprise in dirty bib overalls was waiting for me at the edge of town.
Het waved with both hands as we approached.
I wasn’t great with the passage of time, and I didn’t have much experience with kids other than having been one for a while, but unless I was mistaken, the little guy hadn’t grown an inch or aged a day since I’d last seen him.
“How ya been, bubba?” I asked.
“Just all right, for sure,” he said. “Miss Re’s real excited to see you.”
“I knew she would be.” I hitched a thumb at Nick. “She care if I bring this stinking gigantopithecus with me?”
Het grinned, showing off his four missing canine teeth.
***
Instead of taking us down to the river, Het led us around the outskirts of town and through the underbrush in the opposite direction. The layou
t of Courten I had burned into my head said we were headed toward Re Suli’s little run-down shack.
Even though it was early winter, and the bloodsuckers had calmed down, the constant buzzing and chirruping of insects vibrated in the air. Saw-toothed leaves and thorny brambles snagged my and Nick’s clothes, and we had to keep batting thulu vines out of the way as we struggled to keep up with Het. The little guy never slowed down, and I never saw him move a vine or branch out of his way. When we finally stepped into the clearing, Het’s bare arms didn’t have a thorn-scratch or bug bite on them, whereas Nick and I were stinging, bleeding, and itching all over.
The first time I’d been here, the clearing had been lit by a full moon. In the daylight, I could see subtleties that hadn’t been visible before. Red-orange rust stained the crooked little shack’s tin walls, and tufts of grass had sprouted here and there on the roof. Moisture dripped from heavy green curtains of moss that hung off the southern eave, leaving streaky wet trails in the rust. An ancient stained-glass window in a peeling wooden frame sat on the ground under one of the glassless holes cut into the wall. Today, the old screen door hung open, creaking as it listed back and forth in the breeze.
“Miss Re?” Het hollered at the shack. “Miss Re, I brung ’em.”
From inside came a lovely feminine groan and the muted crackle of joints popping. A frizzy red halo of hair appeared in the window hole, followed by a creamy pale face. The Courten fix-it witch smiled dreamily at me and stretched her freckled arms overhead. That baggy crop top she wore rode up on her chest to reveal the soft white curves of the underside of her breasts.
She disappeared from the window hole. A second later she padded outside on muddy bare feet. “Thanks, Het. I sure do ’preciate it. Go on ’n run along, now.”
The kid nodded once to the witch, then gave me a big, gap-toothed grin before sprinting off into the underbrush.
“Took you long enough to get back here, thief,” Re Suli said. “I thought by now you’d’a surely come to learn somethin’ neat. Or’d you forget what I told you?”
