by L. E. French
Ai made her wear a blue silk dress with embroidered gold dragons. I thought the dress an extravagant waste, but Ai insisted on something special for her last birthday before kindergarten. When Ai presented Miko with her dark hair in silky ribbons and wearing that dress, Miko bit her lip and looked at the floor. I switched off my emotion regulator and felt an almost unbearable swell of paternal love for my sweet little girl.
“I thought you said you were bringing Miko,” I told Ai, putting a trace of confusion in my voice. “I only see Amaterasu in the flesh before me.”
Miko’s small face lit up with joy. I scooped her into my arms and hugged her. She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed my cheek.
Ai ripped her out of my arms and jabbed a sharp, red fingernail in my face. “You lying, cheating bastard,” she snarled. I’d never seen her so angry and took a step back.
“I didn’t mean to,” I protested.
She slapped me. “Your dick accidentally fell into that whore?”
Rubbing my cheek, I scrambled to find words to fix this. “It wasn’t my fault. I can only resist so much—”
She slapped me again. “Bullshit, Hideo. You saw something you wanted and you took it. Just like you always do. Get out. If you try to get custody of Miko, I will bury you in an avalanche.”
My eyes snapped open in filtered sunlight. Someone pounded on my door, probably for the second or third time. I lurched off the bed and hurried to the door as fast as my sleep-fogged brain would let me.
“Doc, open the fucking door!”
I wrenched the door open to find Monster in the act of reaching up to knock again. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Passed out.”
“Get your ass moving, Doc.”
“What do you need now?” I shut the door and followed him, choosing not to go back in for the key. If someone snuck in, they were welcome to the Processed Food Product.
“Ungrateful son of a bitch,” Monster spat.
“I don’t understand?”
Monster clamped a hand on my shoulder and half-dragged me to room ten—already spotless—without another word. He tossed me inside and shut the door, leaving me alone with the chair and a new person. I couldn’t determine their gender by looking. They wore a grease-stained welding apron over baggy cargo pants with bulging pockets and a loose, button-down shirt. A brown trench coat obscured most of their frame. Dark-lensed goggles hid their eyes and neither the round jaw nor the short, brown hair offered any good hints.
This person perched on the arm of the chair and looked up from tapping on a tablet. “You must be Doc?” Their voice sounded like a husky alto to me. I decided it must be a woman.
“Yes.”
“That’s kinda generic. You may want to add something to it, like Doctor Death or Doc Martin. Doc Brown. Something.”
“Thank you for the suggestion.” I had no idea what else to say. Trapped in room ten with a strange woman left me uncertain of my situation.
She cracked a grin and hopped to her booted feet. “They said you were polite. I like that. So many assholes in this world.” Flashing me a bright smile, she patted the back of the chair. “Have a seat, Doc.”
I gulped. “Why?”
Her goggles moved like her brow raised. “So I can reach the back of your head? You’re what, five foot ten? That’s six inches taller than me.”
“Are you going to strap me down?”
“Only if you want me to, Doc. I can make this kinky if it’ll help you relax.”
For several seconds, I stared at her. “I don’t understand. Who are you?”
She laughed. “Your friendly neighborhood implant hacker. Call me Splice.”
“Implant—?” My mind reeled. Had I missed something? Did I perform so well in here before that Misery decided to reward me already? “You’re here to re-activate my implant?”
“Yep.” Splice patted the chair again. “Take a load off.”
I turned away from the chair and sat cross-legged on the floor. Maybe these people weren’t as awful as they seemed. They’d given the impression I’d be an indentured slave for months or years before they had my implant taken care of. And then I’d still be a slave. I rubbed my wristband and wondered if she could remove it. Since Monster left me alone with her, she probably couldn’t. Either that, or she wouldn’t due to some arrangement with the gang.
“When did they contact you for this?”
“A few hours ago. Do you happen to know which protocol was used to disable?”
Without knowing the time, I couldn’t guess how long ago they’d finished with Deadbolt. I did know the sun hadn’t gone down yet. Thinking about time made my stomach rumble.
“I’ll take that as a no and get to work here, Doc. Sit still and think of England.”
“What? Why? Is history important to this?”
She knelt behind me and pressed a cold metal wand to the flesh behind my ear. “No. It’s just a saying. It means relax and pretend you’re enjoying this.”
“Will it hurt?”
“Nope, it’ll just feel weird.”
Closing my eyes, I took calming breaths and tried not to fidget. Everything would be fine when Splice finished. I’d be able to connect to the ’net, and that would solve all my problems.
Some of my problems.
One problem. It would solve exactly one problem.
With that realization, I sighed. “I’m still fucked,” I muttered.
“Welcome to the Darkside,” Splice murmured. She shoved a heated needle into my neck.
Chapter 8
My world expanded in an instant. My ’link connected to the internet and I saw the data streams all around me. They ran everywhere, though thinner than I was used to. By reflex, I accessed my account and let it feed me the time and date, the weather, my curated news feed, and notifications, all as an overlay on my vision. The world righted itself. I felt like I’d regained a missing limb.
“By the sound of that happy sigh, I’m going to declare success.” Splice wiped behind my ear with rough gauze and patted me on the back.
Flicking through my messages, I saw several from Ai with a subject line of “divorce.” I ignored them.
“So you know, when your implant was disabled, your GPS tracker wasn’t. The fact you’ve avoided the police until now is entirely because you came to DeeSeat where GPS doesn’t work very well. I’ve disabled it. My advice would be not to use your personal account, because the temptation to do or say something stupid is really high, and it’s possible for the police to hijack you through it even without the GPS.”
With another sigh, this one much less pleased, I hung my head. “Tell me what to do.”
She set a hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently. “You’re going to be okay. This isn’t the end of the world, it’s just the end of a phase in your life.” With another squeeze, she gave me a sympathetic smile. “Access your account manager, wipe all your personal data. Save it. Ignore all the dire warnings and keep pressing it to save until it does. Then archive the account manager. You’ll have to relearn how to use your implant interface, but we’ve all been there, done that. It’s like a rite of passage in DeeSeat.”
“I’ll lose everything.” While I had no problems with never accessing Ai’s angry messages, I kept pics of Miko and had access to my— “I should empty my bank account first.”
Splice blinked, then shook her head. “Unless you already have a secondary bank account set up, you’d have to authenticate to do that. Even if it’s a really small amount, that’ll send up a flashing beacon pointing straight at you. I said the cops leave most people most alone in DeeSeat. When you infringe on the regular world, they toss that out the window and bring in High Threat Response teams to splatter your brains on the pavement.”
Disappointment must have shown on my face, because she added, “That life is gone, Doc. All of it. You’re starting over from scratch.”
“Great.” Damn Bunny for fucking my life with that blow job. “I have a daughter.”
&nb
sp; “No, you don’t. You have a blank slate. Whatever brought you down here, she’s better off thinking you’re dead.”
Her words punched me in the chest. “I can’t. She’s only—”
“Yeah, you can. The other choice is you try to see her and the cops arrest you. Stay around here and you’re safe. Leave and you’re in jail. Trust me when I say your daughter will be better off thinking you escaped or died than seeing you in the hellhole that is the Auburn Incarceration Facility.” Her expression hardened and darkened. “AIF isn’t a place you want her to ever have to visit.”
I remembered Miko in a series of flashes—twirling in her fairy princess tutu, as a baby in my arms, throwing spaghetti everywhere, smashing cake into her face, gazing up at me with uncomplicated love. My memories would torment me for the rest of my life. I’d never see her do so many things.
Pressing my lips together to keep a scream of anguish bottled inside, I stood and bowed to Splice. “Thank you for your help. I appreciate it. If you’re ever injured, I’m a surgeon and will gladly help you.”
“That so? Huh. Misery didn’t mention that tiny fact.” She stood and brushed her hands over her pants. Though I had many other things on my mind, her gesture drew my attention to her crotch. The fabric bunched there, leading me to wonder if I’d guessed her gender wrong. “You know how to attach and implant cybernetics?”
I nodded and remembered everything my implant allowed me to do. My emotions didn’t have to rule me anymore. Activating the regulator drew the poison out of the wound. Leaving myself that way would erode my sanity, but I could maintain my composure for Splice’s benefit. “My specialty is tissue and bone replacement. I’m accustomed to working with a full nanosuite, but learned originally without.”
“That’s kinda interesting to me, because my business includes building cybernetic body part replacements and enhancements.” She stood and we shook hands, then she told me her ’link code. “We should talk more about this.”
“I’d like that. Thank you.” Though it seemed I should leave, I rubbed the wristband. “I’m not sure how to ask this.”
She smirked. “If I could remove that thing in five minutes, I’d do it, Doc. I do know the guy who builds them for Misery, but I don’t have the schematics. Without that, it’d take me a few hours with equipment I don’t have here to be sure I can remove it.”
Monster had made a grave mistake in putting me in that room alone with Splice. Finding a way out of here without oversight couldn’t be impossible. No matter how many people their gang had here, a moment would arise when I could slip out. My room even had a window.
“Thank you. That gives me…things to think about.”
“Yeah, me too.” Splice opened the door and I followed her out.
Returning to room eight, I initiated the data removal Splice had instructed me to take care of. A flick of my will brought up my account information. Forty-one years ago, Doctor Soren Elstermann entered my Citizen Identification Number, birthdate, and parents’ names. Before my fifth birthday, my father had populated most of the rest of the fields. On my eighteenth birthday, the password he’d locked it with expired.
For twenty-three years, I’d dutifully updated the account, just like everyone else. Deleting my CIN felt like treason. The twelve-digit number vanished one character at a time. I watched it happen, thinking someone would break down the door any moment to arrest me for having the audacity to modify indelible account information.
My birthdate disappeared next, then my mother’s name and my father’s name. Numerous other fields went blank, one by one. All my certifications disappeared. I sat on my bed, holding my head. Activating the save feature took all my willpower.
Up popped a message.
Are you sure you wish to delete your account data?
I took a deep breath and confirmed.
Deleting this information is illegal under West America law. Delete anyway?
Yes.
If you continue, you cannot recover this information without a paid governmental records search. Continue or Cancel?
Continue.
Proceeding with this action will cause a beacon to be activated, notifying police of your location and activities. Proceed or Cancel?
This message gave me pause. Splice said she’d deactivated my GPS. What if she didn’t know about some other beacon? Then again, she’d obviously done it herself and said to ignore all the scary messages. At this point, the process seemed more annoying than frightening anyway. A lesser man might give up the fight as too big a pain in the ass. I took another deep breath and continued through that message, and the next seven.
Finally, the messages stopped and it deleted everything. I stared at the blank form, not sure what would happen now. The freedom I’d gained felt elusive and distant. Of course, it also limited me—no one without an account could move freely in West America. If I wanted to leave DeeSeat, I had to enter fake information into my account manager and hope no one noticed. There might be ways to get to Portland’s Undercity or San Francisco’s Downland, but I expected crossing the space between would take a lot of effort and a lot of money.
Bunny had shoved me into a little box, that bitch. I rubbed my face and remembered I’d activated my emotion regulator. Part of me wanted to leave it running. The rest of me understood the complex chemical reactions in my brain it interfered with. Over time, it would destroy my ability to deal with even the most innocuous emotion.
With a start, I realized that had happened. Since I shambled out of my daze yesterday, every little thing had either set me off or shut me down. I’d been bouncing from one overload to another, barely able to keep my shit together. For years, the thing had been running almost nonstop. It made me cool, rational, and logical.
So cool, rational, and logical that I killed a man without a second thought.
I switched it off.
Chapter 9
Two days passed with nothing more challenging than Phantom’s stitches. No infection had yet to rear its ugly head and no one else needed my skills, either for good or ill. This left me with far too much time to think. I thought about how I’d never see Miko again. Finding someone else to have a child with might fill that hole. Someday. Maybe.
Everything else, I sidestepped. I’m a coward, I guess. The chain of events that started two weeks ago made me cycle through emotions so fast I could hardly understand them. Bunny inspired rage-filled hate and lustful longing at the same time. Memories of Ai and Miko made me despair for the pleasant life that slipped through my fingers. And then there was Brad.
Looking back, I had to admit that even though Brad had been the one to fire me and deactivate my implant, he’d also given me a chance to flee. He could have called security and had me escorted into police custody. He could have locked me in my office. He could have dosed me into unconsciousness. Instead, he’d breezed in, announced my fate, stabbed me behind the ear, and breezed out again.
I owed him. Despite his part in imploding my life, he’d given me a chance to escape when he didn’t need to. His actions made no sense to me, though I suppose we’d been friends. We went out drinking together sometimes. We complained about our wives to each other. We worked together on complicated, high-profile patients. That didn’t seem like enough.
Setting the mystery of Brad aside yet again, I considered what I’d learned last night. I’d had dinner with Misery, Delusion, and Phantom, which had involved pretend food one step up in quality compared to those awful cans of gruel. The meat’s flavor had mimicked chicken, sort of. I could almost believe the vegetables had been grown someplace. Almost.
From what I understood of the light conversation, Misery served as the leader for a street gang calling itself Nightmares. The name struck me as melodramatic and silly, but all their fake names fit the theme, more or less. They controlled territory and moved drugs in some fashion involving delivery to users. If I wanted the latest street drug, I only had to ask. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted. Misery told me
about something called Memless, which fucks your brain up so hard you get amnesia for a day. Not having to deal with my memories of Miko…
Were it not for my understanding of how amnesia can become permanent, I might have tried it. But I’d spent too many years of my life gaining medical expertise and experience to take that kind of chance. She understood. I also refrained from asking for a bottle of whiskey for unknown reasons.
I dumped my brand-new cereal—Misery’s idea of a reward for staying after my implant activation—into a bowl and poured sugar and synthetic milk over it. This stuff tasted about the same as Processed Food Product with the marginal improvement of being crunchy. The sugar made it edible.
Why hadn’t I asked for alcohol? I still puzzled at that. There had been a bottle in my desk for years. Most days, I had a drink when I got home. Whiskey took the edges off for me. Considering my situation, a stiff drink seemed like a no-brainer. Then again, I did need to keep my wits close at hand if I wanted to find a way out. Alcohol would probably make that a challenge.
As I picked up my spoon, my ’link flashed with a message from Splice. I shoveled cereal into my mouth while I sent the command to open the message. It scrolled across my vision.
[Splice: Can you sneak out tonight? I’ve got a customer buying a spinal upgrade implant who needs a surgeon to put it in properly. She can pay and I know she’s good for it. If you can do it tonight, I can set it up for you. Otherwise, she can get a guy tomorrow.]
Blinking rapidly at this unexpected good fortune, my mind raced through all the logistical concerns of attaching an implant to someone’s spine. Could I do it? Of course. Even with basic tools, a spinal upgrade presented little challenge to me. Reversing paralysis was tricky work, but not upgrades.
The more important question chased it. Could I get out tonight? Maybe.
[DocSoo: What kind of implant is it?]
