by Corey Furman
After a time, Luna let her go and pushed up on one elbow. “We stayed a week in that big house. The time flew by… Pap took us fishing on the second day, just long enough for him to catch one. The thing stank so bad in the bucket in the back of the lift, but it was wonderful that night after Gramma cooked it.”
Into the silence Maré said, “I wish I could remember it.”
Luna slowly pushed out a breath. “Yeah… I do too, Maré.”
“What are they going to do with us, Luna?”
“I… I don’t know, honey,” she said as she tucked Maré’s hair behind her ear.
“I’m afraid, Chroma.” She might have shook with it, giving in to the immense fear, but she was tired way down in her soul, and she just didn’t have anything left to sacrifice to it.
“I am too.”
Luna laid back down and instinctively they braided.
Two days later, the androids took them by the arms and brought them to what they supposed was Dr. Almeida’s office. It was the first time they had ever been there, or that they had ever seen such warmth in this place. One wall to the right was dark glass, but the other three were burnished wood paneling of a dark brownish-orange hue. Almeida sat behind a desk at the back of the room. Reluctantly, they navigated the occasional, comfortable-looking furniture and stood before him.
He wasn’t smoking the weed he normally did; the one he now had smelled strangely festive, maybe fruity, and oddly pleasant. He was just pouring himself a drink of something viscous the color of the walls out of a cut-glass decanter, the implants in his fingers ticking against its sides. “I’d pour you two some,” he said as he replaced the stopper, “but I only have the one tumbler.”
He closed his eyes, inhaled its vapor then sipped the liquid. He made a small, satisfied face at the taste. “More expensive than drugs, but worth every penny.” He looked up at them, sat back and propped his worn shoes on top of a stack of papers that was being vomited out of one of the desk drawers. “Well, you might as well sit down.” He waved his hand at the two leather chairs arranged in front of his desk. “Enjoy those, it’s unlikely you’ll ever sit in anything like them again. Hell, most people never do.”
They were extremely plush, hugging their contours as if they’d been designed for their use. Luna said, “Doctor, is this real leather? I read about it in one of the archives.”
He laughed. “Hell, no – are you crazy? I can’t afford real leather.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor – I don’t mean to offend.”
He waved again as he coughed a few times. “It’s nothing. I guess you couldn’t know.”
Maré spoke up. “What happens now, Doctor?”
“You want to get right to it, eh? Fine.” He put his feet on the floor, took another sip, and punched a few keys on a panel on the desktop. A light came up in the room behind the smoky glass in the wall to the right, revealing a bed, machines, and 85. She had several tubes and wires connected to her and a mask over her nose and mouth. They could just tell that her eyes were open, periodically blinking, and staring upward, but vacant and sightless.
“She will live, but you did quite a number on her, Bravo. She had a subdural hematoma. Her brain scans don’t look promising, but the techs were able to drain off the blood. We have to wait for the swelling to subside, but once that happens we should be able to get a better sense of the extent of the damage.” He let that sink in. “I think you can probably tell just by looking at her that it’s probably extensive.”
“I’m not going to tell you I feel awful, Doctor, or that I’m sorry. This is the result of her own self-destruct, and she got what she deserved.”
“You may be right, Bravo, but consider this: you weren’t summoned here to talk about her fate, but yours.” He looked over at Luna and said, “and yours, too, Alpha.”
Luna hung her head a bit and said, “I’m not sure we could say anything that mattered at this point.”
“Just so,” he said. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, though. The damage this situation has caused was really quite minor, all things considered. 85 was the best worker we’d had here in a long time, but she was less than two years out from expiration. I’d probably let the two of you stay on as you are, except that my superiors have decided to take this gift-wrapped opportunity to rap my knuckles. I’ve been ordered to make the two of you go away.”
“Expiration?” Maré said.
He stared at her, considering. “Perhaps you don’t know. Why don’t you explain it, 183?” he said slightly amused.
“I haven’t told you… it’s a thing we don’t like to talk about.” Her brows knit in thought. “The difficult truth is that we only live about ten years, and then we expire,” she said quietly.
“Expire? As in die?”
Luna averted her eyes and nodded her head.
Maré took it in. “So you have, what, about nine years left?”
“Something like that, yes,” she quietly murmured.
Maré sat there stunned, not sure what to say. She had to say something though. “Well,” she said uncertainly. “At least it’s a long way off.”
Almeida spoke up with a dry chuckle. “I’m afraid it’s not going to work out like that. You might make it, 370.” He pointed at Luna. “But not her.”
“How do you plan to repurpose me?” Luna said in defeat.
“I probably would have considered selling you off as a cheap pleasure model, but you really haven’t the looks, and your sexual dysfunction makes you even less ideal. There aren’t very many options left. I thought maybe I might keep you on; 85 is going to need a lot of care, and it might have been interesting to have kept you on to do it.”
She leaned forward and stammered, “Please Doctor, I —”
“Relax, it isn’t really an option. I probably could have kept your endorphin levels high and would have kept you useful, but then what fun would that have been? Actually,” he said as he hunted for a pen and started making notes on his blotter and muttering to himself. “If the damage to 85’s brain is extensive maybe it might be amusing to push her chemistry to orgiastic levels.”
Maré exhaled noisily at his callousness.
Luna sat back. “Is it the organ farm, then?”
“Maybe some of you – I still have to figure it out. The good news is I’ve decided to grant you a minor boon. When I terminate you it will be painless.”
Maré said, “if a quick termination is the good news, what’s the bad?”
“You’ve a bold streak, 370, I’ll give you that. The bad news is we don’t waste good protein around here.”
The girls sat there horrified.
“Take it as a lesson, 370. Boldness is dangerous for a simulant, and asking questions can always bring awful answers. I recommend you learn to keep your curiosity to yourself in your future endeavors.”
He tossed back half his drink, looked at the glass and tossed back the rest, then he carefully refilled it.
“What will those endeavors be, Doctor?” Maré said.
He shook his head, and said, “Some have to learn the hard way.” He began to croup again, this time easily as hard as when he’d first examined her. He scrambled to pull a few tissues from one of the pockets in his lab coat. When he was done, he threw them on the desk, then used another one to wipe his eyes. Maré noticed the wad of tissues on the blotter had specks of bright red blood in them. Curious.
When he had himself under control, he finished his thought. “Actually, there isn’t really a lot I could do with you, now that you’ve killed another simulant and I’m forced to get rid of you. I probably would have sent you to the organ farm, but I have just received a special request for a pair from this bloodline. Some poor and desperate colonist out there on some corporate world wants two of you in the worst way – too bad he’ll only get one, though. I was able to recoup the normal price for you; you’re damaged goods, but the client doesn’t have to wait. Once you’re asleep, I will have the
necessary hormones to develop your physical characteristics administered, at least as much as possible. You’ll never be voluptuous, but your new master should be able to look at you without too much trouble.” He paused. “Call it another boon.”
“You’re a monster, aren’t you?” Maré asked, doing nothing to mask the terrible awe in her voice.
“Am I?” he grunted as he scratched his ear absently. “I guess it might look that way to the likes of you. It’s what you were born to.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“I mean you were just sold by some remote, faceless corporation to some nameless dirt farmer on a particularly uninteresting rock somewhere out beyond nowhere. Life is cheap for the best of us, and so much less for your kind.”
“Why are we so worthless, Doctor? Why don’t we count?”
“On the contrary, you have value, and you do count. If it weren’t for you specifically,” he said putting the cigar between his teeth and dragging on it, “I would have taken a much larger loss in the budgets.”
Maré was stunned into silence by the sum of his cruelty.
“Will you let us have some time to say good bye, Doctor?” said a desperate Luna.
“I’m afraid I’m all out of boons for today, 183.” He punched a few more keys on his desktop panel. Their collars exuded chemicals into their spinal columns, and the world went dark for the two of them as they slumped into the plush faux leather chairs. “LabSys, have workers sent to my office. Please close the case files for 370 as resolved, and mark 183 as abrogated.”
“Acknowledged, Doctor.”
He mulled it over for a few seconds as he chewed on the end of the cigar. “Strike that, LabSys. Mark both case files as resolved. Maybe we can still get something out of 183.”
“Acknowledged, Doctor.”
Almeida settled back into his chair to suck down another draught from his glass. “Damn, that’s good scotch,” he mumbled.
Part 2 – Crescendo
Sixteen
Though he could only manage six short steps, Harry Westport paced his tiny office in concern when Joss didn’t show up for work, the intervals between consuming hand-rolled cigarettes shortening as the number of turns he made added up.
This was really out of his character – the guy’s always on time. I just hope something else hasn’t gone wrong at home.
He and his crew were already running forty five minutes late, and the simulants were clearly getting impatient when he checked in on them. Yet he delayed them from moving out with a stand-in supervisor while he went into the office and punched up the contact for the Breylin home and hit Connect. There was no answer, but Larissa might have returned to work. Joss had mentioned something about how he had been hoping she would at some point. There wasn’t any answer on his mobile, either. Strange. Harry sat there a few more minutes twirling a pen around his fingers, dragging long and hard on a cigarette, and trying to figure out if he should release the crew or wait a while longer.
When there was still no sign of him at the turn of the hour, he asked one of the other guys to take the crew out to the Zone and get started. Doing it last minute like this would make it impossible to keep the others from noticing Breylin’s unexplained absence – the rumor mill was probably already in full motion – but Joss had been a model employee, and he’d earned a little latitude. If anyone didn’t care for their friendship then they could take it up with him; between his unease and heavy intake of nicotine, he was in just the right mood for an argument.
Comms still produced nothing but mildly warbling static by the time the second hour had crawled by, and Harry was done sitting around. He decided to take a lift out to search along the route to where the Breylin’s lived. Hopefully he wouldn’t find anything, but Joss might have had an accident and could be lying somewhere unconscious – or worse.
He did his best to quickly stitch back and forth over the dry, rocky terrain surrounding the primary route of access between Twilight and Amity Canyon. I’d forgotten how remote it was… He was glad at first that he hadn’t found anything, yet his anxiety grew as the kilometers added up and he neared the settlement. When at last he got to the Breylin home, he found Joss’ abandoned lift next to the burned out remains of the house, the driver side door still open in its up position. The fire had guttered out in the storm, Joss was nowhere in sight, and Harry’s breakfast his wife had made him hours earlier was threatening to pay his lap a visit.
Harry pulled his lift right up into the yard and he killed the power. He sat stricken while the acid in his gut churned, and he had no idea what to do next. Either the house had no automatic sensors or they’d failed, and as remote as this settlement was, no one had intervened. I should just call Emergency Services, he thought, but he knew the time of their limited usefulness had long since passed. Joss and his wife were dead, nothing would bring them back, and a dark cloud of morose futility settled on his shoulders. His friend was gone.
Where do I go from here? But his only answer was the patter of the rain hitting the glass around him.
He lit another cigarette and cupping it against the rain, climbed out. He walked over to the rubble and looked around, afraid to look, that he might see something horrific, but unable to stop himself regardless. From his point of view he could see nothing among the desolation, except the occasionally hissing construction foam beams that were still producing wisps of greasy, black smoke. Thankfully the breeze was at his back and it kept him out of the stink. He couldn’t see much… but I’m certainly not going to walk around in their ashes.
He was stunned; the situation was obviously much worse than he had imagined what he’d find. Standing there, loss washed over him, and the rain pelted the scalp under his thinning hair. There was nothing here, and he forced his legs to get him away from the carcass of the house.
Returning to the shelter of his lift, he slammed the door shut and shook the rain from his hair. “Dammit,” he muttered in frustration under his breath. He used a rag from a small compartment in the door to wipe his face off as he tried to think of what to do. Sitting there drying his face and doing his best to suck down the end of his smoke, he puzzled over that the way Joss’ lift sat with the door still up. He must have gotten to the scene after the fire had started… A small hope bloomed, and he punched in Joss’ mobile one last time. If he didn’t pick up, he’d call the authorities – for all the good it would do.
After three tones, there was a crackle and hiss as the connection opened, and Breylin’s tinny voice came through. “Harry?” he said groggily.
“Joss? Stars! Where the hell are you?”
“I’m… still in bed.”
“What? What the fuck are you talking about? I’m outside your house, and it’s burned to the ground!”
“I’m in the house next door. Is that your lift out there?”
Harry let the silence hang for a moment, then sighed and said, “thank the Stars you’re all right. You want to tell me what happened? Where the hell is your wife?”
“I’ve been a mess. Just… gimme a minute, Harry. I’ll be out.” There was another burst of static, then the line went dead.
“Shit!” he said as cold rain continued to drip out of his hair and down the back of his neck, but he allowed himself to feel a little relieved. Fire was bad – the Breylins had probably lost everything – but it was a thing you could recover from.
A couple of minutes later, the passenger side of the lift opened and in climbed the wretched figure that used to be Joss Breylin. His skin and clothes were filthy, and though the horrible smell of the fire still clung to him, it was the stench of piss and body odor that made Harry recoil. He could see the whites of his eyes as he sat there blankly staring out the front window towards what was left of his house with his eyebrows climbed halfway to the top of his forehead. It was hard to believe that this was the same person who’d left for home on Friday evening. Harry was a pretty stunned himself.
�
��Holy crap, Joss. You look like shit.”
“Do I?” He looked down at himself, then shook his head. “I guess I couldn’t care less.”
“Joss… what happened, man?”
“It’s all gone, Harry. All gone.” Breylin said in a flat whisper. He reached up and scratched his nose, streaking the dirt on his face even worse.
“Everything?” he said, then quietly, “Larissa? Your simulants?”
He turned and looked at Harry as shadows crossed his eyes as they unfocused. “Yeah. There was a fire, and Riss… she’s… moved on.” Breylin squeezed his eyes shut and sobbed with emotion.
Harry rubbed his eyes as he tried to think of what to say. There really weren’t any words for it, and he began to cry at the immensity of his friend’s loss, too. Some things are damn hard to recover from.
Two weeks later, a thinner, hollow-cheeked Joss Breylin returned to work with his new, green coveralls hanging off of him.
“Are you sure you’re ready to come back to work, Joss? If you need more time… You look like you could use more.” He looked up at the ceiling, pursed his lips, and blew out a stream of grey smoke. “We’ll manage fine. Whatever you need, take it.”
There was a dim, layered haze from the smoke, making the cramped office seem closer than it really was, and Joss wondered if Harry had been smoking more today in anticipation of his return to work. He would rather just get out and get to that work – away from this office and Harry’s questions – but he didn’t want to offend his friend and boss, since he’d been really accommodating over the past couple of weeks. “Uh, yeah – thanks mate. You’ve been really accommodating, and I can’t say thanks enough, but I’m done sitting around the house looking at the empty walls and thinking about her.” Breylin coughed and shifted uncomfortably. “Thanks for the clothes, too.”
