Dirty Job

by Felix R. Savage

  “So what does that prove?” Dolph said. “Guys are vain?”

  Sophia sighed. “It proves that we can be whatever we want to be. We can shape our own destinies. Shifter dick size is trivial in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a proof of concept.”

  Dolph pulled another switch. “I’m not seeing how this fits in with plotting to murder millions of innocent people.”

  “You’ll understand when Mike gets back.”

  Dolph raised his eyebrows. He had assumed she wanted to launch before we returned. He had assumed it was our ship she wanted to steal.

  “We’re waiting for him,” she said. And grinned. “He’s such a loyal friend. I’m sure he’ll trade the TrZam 008 for your life …”

  51

  Justin and Pippa gathered up their luggage. They had backpacks, rope-bound bales, and duffel bags of supplies. They had planned their escape in detail … and then the Travellers had come. They couldn’t have taken off with three Traveller ships in orbit. They’d have been sitting ducks.

  But then I had come along and helpfully removed the Traveller ships from the equation.

  “Nice ship,” Martin said. He’d got MF to light up the exodiamondite wall again so he could see the arrowhead cruiser parked outside. “Military surplus? Which one of you is gonna fly it?”

  He had a good point. Pippa couldn’t fly a spaceship. Justin couldn’t. Who did that leave?

  “I’m gonna fly it,” said a familiar voice.

  Zane Cole walked into the room. The cuff of his right sleeve hung empty. He nodded hello to us, smirking all over his chipmunk face.

  “How you gonna fly a ship with only one hand?” I said.

  “That ship is a state-of-the-art passenger cruiser,” Zane said. “Practically flies itself. It’s all AR, anyway.”

  I said to Justin, “You trust this guy?”

  “I’m not as naïve as you seem to think,” Justin said.

  “Guess it’s all about the KGCs,” I said.

  “No,” Zane said. “Actually, it isn’t. I joined the Travellers for the money. But they don’t make bank like you think they do. Some of those big motherships in the Core, all the micro-gravity levels are filled with burnouts and children growing carrots in freaking sewage. It’s all a pose: a big performance. Look at us, we’re free. Big fucking whoop. You’re eating rats on a stolen space station orbiting a neutron star, and you pity the folks in the Temple for believing the hype?” He chuckled, and picked up his pack. “Sayonara to all that.” He gave Pippa a strange look. It reminded me of the way he used to look at Sophia. Almost worshipful. “I’m ready to take a bet on something different.”

  “You won’t get far,” I said.

  “Keep on believing, Starrunner.”

  I wheeled to face Pippa and Justin. “The Fleet is holding my family hostage.” I was talking about Lucy, but I also meant Irene and Rex and their kids, and the jungle wolves, and Robbie’s family and friends, and Dr. Zeb, and … and everyone. All the Shifters on Ponce de Leon would pay if I failed. Yet why would I expect Pippa and Justin to give a damn about my problems? They were young and in love. That’s why I was surprised when Pippa stopped, her face crumpling like my words had hurt her.

  “Can’t you please try to understand, Mike? This is my only chance to be happy!”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Robbie growled. “Happy for a few months, until IVK starts making you go like this?” He let his jaw hang, rolled his eyes up, cocked his head at an angle, and imitated an IVK cripple’s palsied walk. I don’t think he would have done that if he knew I had IVK, too.

  “Very funny,” Pippa snapped. “I don’t have IVK anymore.”

  I tensed. “Wait a minute what did you say you don’t what?”

  Maybe her diagnosis was mistaken? But she said she didn’t have it anymore—

  “Come on, Pippa.” Justin caught her hand and pulled her towards the exit of the bunker, while she kept apologizing to me, saying that she’d never known what love was, but now she did know, and nothing mattered more.

  I did a lightning-speed situational appreciation. Martin, Robbie, and I were at the end of the bunker with the exodiamondite wall. Our rifles were piled on a cot two yards from me. All the Sixers were trailing after Justin, Pippa, and Zane, helping to carry their luggage, except for the two guarding Rafael Ijiuto. I edged closer to the rifles. I didn’t want to do this, but what choice did I have? I would try not to hurt Justin. I would try not to kill anyone. I hand-signaled to Robbie to Shift. In the same instant, I snatched one of the rifles, threw it to Martin, and grabbed a second one for myself.

  Rafael Ijiuto tore through the Sixers, body-slamming them aside.

  I already had my rifle at my shoulder, so I shot him.

  I guess I must have missed.

  He went through Justin, and I swear to God it looked as if he literally went through him, disappearing through his torso and coming out the other side. Justin clapped his lower hands to his stomach with a look of complete surprise. He was now blocking my view of Ijiuto, but I saw Ijiuto’s hands and arms coming out from behind him, stretching and stretching and stretching towards Pippa’s throat—

  —but Pippa was not there. She had been there a split second ago but now she was stretching and stretching away, bending over backwards at an impossible angle, her neck and chest elongating. She fell to the floor. Ijiuto pounced on her, scrabbling for the TrZam 008. But instead of landing on top of her, he went through her. For an instant their bodies actually seemed to occupy the same physical space, but I couldn’t be sure, because it was hard to look at, like the blurring that you see for a couple seconds when someone Shifts, except that this went on for long moments and moments. All the Sixers stumbled away. It was a natural reaction. Reality itself seemed to be bending and blurring. Ijiuto’s head reared out of Pippa’s head and shoulders, his face contorted with hatred and desperation—

  I shot at him again.

  Yeah, I’m real creative with my solutions.

  This time I knew I hit him in the head. But at the same time as the bullet pierced his skull, or before that, his head went blurry again. Justin plunged on top of him and hit the floor like a rugby player missing a tackle. The next I saw of Ijiuto, he was dashing out of the bunker. Blood shone red on the back of his head.

  Maybe I didn’t actually hit him.

  Maybe the bullet just grazed his skull.

  But I didn’t think so. It had gone straight through him.

  Now I knew how he had bailed out of a tumbling, burning Traveller ship, and landed in the Tunjle, and hiked back to civilization, without sustaining any serious injuries. All of the damage just went straight through him. He’d probably left that cut on his foot to make it more plausible.

  A gray blur sped past me. Robbie chased Ijiuto out of the bunker.

  Justin lifted Pippa to her feet and brushed her off. Her hand balled at her throat. The tip of the TrZam 008 peeked out of her fist.

  MF rolled up to them, squawking in concern— “Pippa! Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

  “I’m OK,” Pippa said. “Thanks to you, Krasylid Athanuisp Zha.” She used MF’s real name, and gave him a watery smile.

  Martin growled, “OK. What the fuck just happened?”

  *

  “It’s called the Transcendence,” Sophia said. She was now sitting in the St. Clare’s left couch with her feet on the consoles. She’d helped herself to vodka from the dispenser. Her voice had grown a bit foggy. “It’s the DNA patch to end all DNA patches. Your Big Shift scientists were on the right track, but they didn’t go far enough. This is Shifting plus. Shifting the way it should have been.”

  “The Transcendence? Sounds like a religion.” It had gotten hot on the bridge. Dolph was fighting sleepiness as his high wore off.

  “That’s exactly what it isn’t,” Sophia said. “You always did see everything through a religious lens.”

  “So what is it? Not just ye olde transhumanism with a modern twist?”

 
“Closer,” Sophia admitted. “But the transhumanists envisaged uploading human consciousness to computers. If that were even possible, of course, the uploaded consciousness would cease to be human. It would become an AI. That’s a dead end. So the solution is to attack the problem from the other side of the equation: not the brain, but the body.”

  “What problem?”

  “The problem of mortality, of course.”

  “That’s a problem?”

  “I know you believe in life after death,” Sophia said. “But you’re wrong. After this life, there is nothing.”

  “You’ll find out differently when you die,” Dolph said. Like me, he was raised Catholic. Like me, he honored the teachings of Christ more in the breach than in practice. But unlike me, he retained a matter-of-fact belief in Heaven and Hell. He once put it like this: “Mike, the difference between us is that you’re afraid of going to Hell. I know I’m going there.”

  Sophia said, “If you were right about that, I’d be on my way to shake hands with Old Scratch, for sure. But your premise is void, because I’m not going to die.”

  “Everyone dies,” Dolph said. The maintenance bot was still standing behind him. The injector glinted in his peripheral vision.

  “Not the royalty of the Darkworlds,” Sophia said. “The oldest of them are something like five hundred. Or I should say, they used to be. The Fleet made damn sure they got whacked in the civil war between the Gessyrias. The Transcendent are capable of unlimited rejuvenation and self-healing, but that can’t save you if some shithead drops a nuke on your house. They should have been more careful. All the same, a handful of them survived the war. That guy I was working for, Rafael Ijiuto? How old would you say he looks?”

  Dolph was silent for a moment. “Twenty-six, twenty-seven?”

  “Right,” Sophia said. “He’s actually two hundred and thirty years old. And he still chooses to look like that. I guess it’s a homage to his ancestors. Me, when I get the Transcendence, I’m going to lose these love handles and get 36DD tits.”

  “Wouldn’t surgery be easier?”

  “You’re missing the point.”

  “Your tits are fine the way they are.”

  “You didn’t want to fuck me, though.”

  There was another silence. On the external feed screen, one view of falling snow followed another. The drifts around the St. Clare’s engine pods were getting deep.

  52

  “There are only two of us left in the universe,” Pippa said. She was standing in the protective cage of Justin’s arms, drinking broth from a dirty mug. She looked drained from her tussle with Ijiuto, but that new confidence radiated out through her skin, stronger than ever. I’d thought it was the look of royalty. It was actually the look of the Transcendent.

  “What about Jan and Leaf?” I said. “Are they Transcendent, too?”

  “They have a lot of the Code in their DNA, but not all of it. Rafael and me are the only ones with the whole Code. I always knew that, but Gran never told me what the Code was. I guess she thought it was safer for me not to know. Maybe she was planning to tell me when I got older.”

  “Don’t cry,” Justin said.

  “I’m not crying. I just never knew. Until …”

  “Until I told her,” creaked MF, swaying on his wheels. “I told her everything.”

  I stared at the bot. “You said this shit, the Transcendence, could destroy humanity. You said Pippa should be killed.” Justin growled and pulled Pippa closer. My attention stayed on MF. “Why in the hell would you turn around and tell her how to use it?”

  “I had to make it up to her somehow,” MF wailed.

  “Make it up to her for what?” Robbie said.

  I caught my breath, remembering MF’s betrayal on board the St. Clare. He, Martin, and Irene had taken the TrZam 008 from Pippa by force. Afterwards, he must have felt bad enough about it that he decided to make it up to her. Maybe that’s even why he stayed on Mittel Trevoyvox in the first place. I’d always known he was smarter … more human … than most AIs.

  Human enough to make terrible decisions.

  “Guess I owe you an apology, too, Pippa,” Martin said.

  She smiled at him over the rim of her mug. “It’s fine. It’s forgotten. I thought the crown jewels were the important thing, but actually, I had the whole Code in my head all along. I just didn’t know what it was … until Krasylid Athanuisp Zha explained.”

  She patted the top of the bot’s housing affectionately. He goggled up at her with an adoring light in his sensors. I suspected his decision had also been based, in part, on his chronic weakness for cute girls.

  “Now that I know what it does,” she went on, “I’m going to fix Justin, too. I might be going to live forever, but what would be the point, without him? And he’s not going to live past fifty without help. He has an enlarged heart, high blood pressure—Sixer DNA is just terrible. But I can fix him.”

  “I was going to reverse-engineer the genetic defects out of my people,” Justin said. “But the Transcendence is more elegant and subtle than modern gene-modding technology. I’ll be the guinea pig. If it works on me, we’ll return and offer the same treatment to everyone.”

  “If only the Eks hadn’t destroyed the laboratory,” Pippa lamented.

  “It was the Eks?” I said.

  “Oh yes,” Justin said. “They bombed the MTEV building from orbit. Olthamo must have found evidence of my purchases when he went through Burden’s files. The Eks disapprove very strongly of genetic engineering.”

  I shot MF a look. “Well, the cat’s out of the bag now,” I said, wondering how this would play with Smith. Actually, I knew how it would play with Smith. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  “We really have to go,” Justin said.

  Pippa nodded. “We need to find a new lab, so we can build the patch and program it into a rewriter virus. That’s why we’re leaving, Mike. You do understand, don’t you?”

  “Wait,” I said. “Go back to the IVK thing. You … healed yourself? It’s gone?”

  “Yes. I just had to Transcend and then come back the way I wanted to be. It was easy!” She twirled around and headed for the door.

  I went after her. Justin tried to stop me. Martin grabbed his arms.

  “Pippa. The TrZam 008.” I could not find the right words. “If I don’t destroy it, and deliver the pieces to the Fleet, they’re going to kill my friends. They’ll take my daughter away. I … please …” I didn’t have to fake the desperation in my voice or on my face.

  Pippa looked at me thoughtfully, and then lifted the TrZam 008 over her head and placed it in my hand. “OK,” she said. “I don’t really need it. I have the whole Code memorized, anyway.”

  She left. Justin left. The whole lot of them left. Even MF went with them.

  I stood with the TrZam 008 in my hand, quietly thinking for a moment.

  “Gimme that,” Martin said.

  “Huh?”

  “Anyone finds it on us, we’re fucked.”

  “I know what you’re going to do,” I said. “I’ll do it. Watch the door.” I shut my eyes tight for a second, concentrating.

  Then I held the TrZam up above my face.

  And began to Shift.

  Into a snake.

  My head flattened. My neck elongated. I’d never tried this before, but I’d seen Martin do it hundreds of times. How hard could it be? I held the image of a python just like Martin in my mind. My shoulders sloped into my neck …

  It’s normal to start Shifting from the head down. That’s how all the best Shifters do it. The difference was, this time, I had to stop my Shift just south of my heart. Amidst the normal pain of Shifting, I concentrated fiercely on controlling this new form, not letting it go any further down than my esophagus, and—

  Just before my arms would have started to weld to my sides, I dropped the TrZam 008 into my snake’s gaping jaws.

  And swallowed.

  I felt every link of the chain as it was going down. T
asted like old-fashioned money.

  I took a breath, and reversed my Shift. My shoulders filled out my clothes again. My neck shrank. My head bulged back to its rightful size. An inhuman hiss escaped my lips as they retreated into my reforming jaw.

  I sat down—collapsed, actually—on one of the cots. I felt like I had just woken up from one of my Chimera Syndrome dreams, where I’m Shifting uncontrollably into grotesque and unnatural forms, and can’t Shift back, even if I try. It shook my confidence in my own humanity. I clasped my hands over my stomach.

  Martin stared at me. He had taken several steps back. “That was the fucking ugliest thing I ever saw.”

  “I was just copying you,” I said.

  “Cap’n, that wasn’t no python. That was a chi …” Martin trailed off in the middle of the word. “Chimera.”

  I smiled lopsidedly. “Give that snake a gold star.” It’s amazing how people don’t want to see what’s in front of their eyes. Martin had known I had more animal forms than anyone he ever met, but I had had to Shift into a chimera right in front of him before the lightbulb went off. “I’m a Chimera Syndrome survivor. Comes in handy sometimes.”

  I rubbed my stomach. I could feel the TrZam 008 in there, not painful but uncomfortable. On the bright side, I no longer felt nauseated.

  “You know how long that’s gonna work,” Martin said.

  “Yeah. Until I Shift again.” The next time I Shifted, the alien object would fall right out of my body.

  “I was gonna say until you take a dump.”

  “Good thing those meds got me constipated.” I went over and cupped my hands against the exodiamondite wall, trying to see out.

  Without warning, the wall moved, the solid surface under my hands rippling and contracting. An arch-shaped opening gaped in the middle of it. MF rolled amidst a gust of cold wind and snow. The exodiamondite stuff must have been in some way similar to the mysterious material that MF’s own chassis was made of. He rolled to a stop before us.