"I'm all ears."
"No, you're all arms. Lose two of them, and I'm yours."
I stared at her. She was all veneer. I hadn't learned to see through that yet, and until now, I hadn't wanted to. “You're serious,” I said.
"Completely. I had my neck fixed because of you, so now it's your turn."
"That was just cosmetic surgery. Arms, that's a whole different animal."
"Exactly. And I'm not going to make love to an animal. To be honest with you, Jimmy, I don't think anyone else will either."
She had a point there. I instinctively clutched my smaller hands together, which was about the extent of their range of motion. They had good feeling though, and when they held each other, the damn things felt precious. I hated them.
Tina had me wanting her right then, but I wasn't going to be manipulated like that. So I abruptly called it a night. No door slamming though.
I had recently made my semiannual quota at work, so I had two weeks coming to me. I had entertained the idea of asking Tina to go on a trip with me, but I wasn't sure I could stand her for that long. But two weeks might be about enough time for a double amputation. Maybe it was time to get those meat hooks out of my life.
Cutting off your extra hands is like buying a new car. Once you make the decision to do it, you can't get your mind off it until it's done.
* * * *
I'd chosen the government hospital because of the complexity of the operation. It wasn't like having a giant wart removed from the back of your neck. Besides, it would cost a lot less this way, and if something went wrong, I wouldn't have to worry about suing anybody; the government would make good. They always did—not millions of dollars for pain and suffering, but enough to keep people happy. The alternative for them would be to admit that the social program was a failure, and there were plenty of political machinations to prevent that from happening. It's funny how nothing fails anymore.
Tina played the role of sympathetic friend, but I could tell there was more to it than that. I didn't fool myself into thinking she really liked me, but it was tempting. Love is dead, but it still haunts this pitiful world. Hell, Tina herself was the one who got me listening to the new “love is dead” stream, and though anyone can care for someone else, there's always something else behind it. I was nervous as hell and was grateful for her being there, whatever the reason. My eyes couldn't focus on the paperwork, and she was almost eager to help me get through that.
I had a perverse idea to keep my arms in a jar of formaldehyde, as a souvenir, but she talked me out of it. “You should donate them to research,” she said. “It's your moral obligation because they might be used to advance medical science and help others in need."
"Since when did you care about others in need?"
She just gave me a fake hurt look. Anyway, I signed the forms, just to get on with things.
We were both quiet while I was being prepped. When the nurse moved out of the way, I saw that Tina was looking at me intently. I thought maybe she was worried about me, but then she said, “Do you mind if I use you in one of my stories?"
"What stories?"
"I write dark fiction, mostly horror."
That was news to me, but it did sound like her. A hint of post-Goth. She seemed like the kind who would write for therapeutic reasons. “What's the story about?"
"It's about these Siamese triplets."
I stifled a guffaw.
"I know,” she conceded, giggling. “Asshole."
"I'm sorry. Seriously, go on."
"So this one triplet—the most viable one, the one in the middle—decides she's had enough of her parasitic sisters, so she kills them in their sleep."
"Ouch."
Tina smiled a wicked little smile and giggled again. “It gets better. So she has to, like, carry them to an unlicensed chop shop, which is really hard to do, of course. She pays some flapjack doctor to cut her dead sisters off. So he does, and everything goes fine, until the sisters start haunting her. They're like phantom limbs, you know?"
"Like when a person loses a leg, but it still itches?"
"Exactly. Except the sisters don't itch. They beat her up, over and over. For real. They do other nasty stuff, too, but I don't want to give it away."
"So what does she do?"
"There's nothing she can do. She's too much a coward to kill herself, so she just lives like that for the rest of her life."
"That's really scary,” I said. It was, but what I was thinking was that Tina was pretty scary herself. Given the way people treated her for her entire life, I couldn't blame her.
"You really think it's scary?” Tina smiled again. “Thanks! Don't tell anyone about it, though. You're the only one I've ever told one of my stories to."
For once I knew a real smile on Tina when I saw it. It was a good feeling, to have broken her veneer, and it was a good time for that to happen. I immediately forgave how inappropriate her story was, under the circumstances.
"I won't tell anyone,” I said. “But what's that story got to do with me?” Well, I'd almost forgiven her.
"Nothing, really. Your arms gave me the original idea, that's all."
The nurse returned and chased Tina out. They wheeled me to the OR, where I thought I would count down to unconsciousness, but I fainted the moment the gurney bumped the doors open.
* * * *
I had disturbing dreams. My parents were conjoined twins, literally joined at the hip. Then I was born, but not the normal way. I grew from them like another parasitic twin. Even growing up, I was still attached to them. The three of us were fused in a big, grotesque lump. After Mom and Dad died, they were still there, dried up and shriveled. I had to carry them around, one on either side, no matter where I went. And they were like those phantom limbs, itching and aching.
I remember waking up and falling asleep several times, looking at the recovery room ceiling. I lay there, very still, mad at myself for being afraid to look at my chest. One night I awoke and lay there a long time, building up courage. I tested my good arms and found I could pull them out of the sheets. They looked normal, and I turned them over and over. Then I put them firmly at my sides, afraid to let them get near my extra arms. I didn't want to feel that they were there or that they were missing. In the morning, I told myself.
That night I was dismayed to discover my parasitic arms still attached. They started to move by themselves. They tore off some bandages and pulled down the sheet. I tried to sit up, but they slammed my chest back down. Then they began choking me. I couldn't breathe, and even my normal arms could not pull those wretched things from my neck.
It's horrid having nightmares when you're alone.
Tina never came to visit, which I thought strange, and I didn't call her either. I was the patient, damn it, and I wasn't about to call anyone for sympathy. I was in the hospital for almost two weeks, which seemed like forever, especially when you have to eat crap like Honey Smackerels every morning and dry soy burgers every night. All day, every day, I suffered through a marathon of a British soap opera, “Bag Enders,” on the Hobbit Channel.
The doctors removed the bandages and showed me my new chest. The parasitic arms were gone for sure. They had done a good job of covering up the holes, and once the scars healed, you might not even notice. It felt strange to touch the scars where my little crooked arms had been. I had mixed feelings, since they had been a familiar part of me. It hurt to touch there, which proved that I was wounded, as opposed to healed. My upper chest was now flat, like a normal person, and that made me feel a way I had never felt before: like a man.
I marveled, my fear mostly gone, and wondered what my parents would think if they could see me. I liked to think they'd have been pleased to see their son looking normal for the first time, even if it meant I would finally never be the super-surgeon they had once imagined.
It was nearly three weeks before I could return to work. I'd overextended my leave and now owed the company some time. If I accelerated my quotas, I c
ould make up for it. It felt good to be back in the office, and I got a sense of what Tina must have felt to go in with her growth removed. I felt taller and more confident. I walked right by Kaitlin's cube and sat at my desk, as if nothing was different. I wanted people to remark to me first, rather than me parading myself around. I sat and caught up on some things. Midmorning, my chest started to ache. It hadn't hurt like that in several days.
No messages from Tina. At break, I went up to at least pass by her office. She wasn't in. I didn't want to ask about her, but when I happened on another coworker who had been promoted to her floor, I asked anyway. Apparently Tina had been granted leave, but was overdue getting back.
It was serious enough that I convinced someone to call the cops. The police turned up nothing in her apartment. Evidence was that she'd left. Her car was gone, and her bank accounts showed a big withdrawal that suggested a trip.
I felt abandoned by Tina, just when things between us might have taken a good turn. My chest ached more often, and while the two wide surface scars below my collarbone were healing, there was some swelling.
I had a recurring nightmare that phantoms of my discarded arms were trying to strangle me. I'd wake up, and my chest would hurt. I called in a couple times, but the doctor said pain was normal at this stage and that the dreams would eventually go away. Amputated limbs itching or aching was normal, too, he said, but I wasn't experiencing that.
Another week passed, and I began to really worry about Tina. That was when I received an e-mail from her.
* * * *
Jimmy ~ hope your ok. sorry to leave while you hospital, but i had to get away. I did something very bad to you and I'm sorry. Its my fault, but mostly the company. You can sue them for a brazillian dollars. I'm serious you can put the basturds out of business for cannibalonialism. They knew all the time and one tree was on the right river too. Test signal was to see if I would and I'm sorry I did it. ~T
* * * *
It wasn't from her company address—there was no return address—and it wasn't signed, but it had to be her. My arms were gone, and so was Tina. What the hell was going on? Whatever it was, I had to do something. Getting a lawyer seemed like the thing to do, but I needed advice from someone I could trust.
The state penitentiary welcomed me with iron bars.
"Well, well!” said Tina's dad, eyeing me through the Plexiglas.
"Yeah,” I said, still self-conscious. “I had them cut off."
"Good for you."
"Tina cut her growth off too."
"How does she look?"
"Oh, great."
He didn't know she was missing, so I told him. I handed him a copy of her message and watched his face for reaction. His best guess was that she had gone off to find her mother. It made sense, especially if I was right about her having more self-confidence lately. As to where her mother was, he had no idea. We ran out of visiting hours talking and arranged another meeting. Since he was in a hacker's prison, he wasn't allowed computer access, so we couldn't correspond by e-mail. Phone was okay, but monitored, and we decided to just meet in person.
By the end of our third meeting, Tyler (as I called him) slipped me a closed envelope through the window slot. He was allowed to do that. I took it, and he held up a hand to mean not to open it yet.
"Are you a religious person?” he said.
"Well, a little.” Right, if they still made pennies.
"Me too.” He winked.
* * * *
"Tina has disappeared,” I said to Swami in his office. “I think she's in hiding because the company is after her for some reason. It has something to do with me. I need your help hacking into Genie to try to figure out what this is all about."
I filled him in and showed him Tina's message. He nodded sympathetically.
"I can't help you in any case,” he said, “because I don't have a clue how to hack into the computers around here. I'm not smart enough."
"What if we had help from someone who can do it?” I told him about Tina's dad and his reputation as a master hacker.
Swami turned that over and looked up at me from his wheelchair. “Maybe,” he said. “One condition."
"What?"
"If we get in, you help me target the mother herb."
That figured. I stalled, my eyes falling onto one of Swami's tree posters. “Hey,” I said, “do you like that new tune by Got 2B Shvat?"
"Who?"
"You know, the Hasid Rock group? They have a big tree on their video. Shvat is some kind of Jewish arbor day, isn't it?” Blank stare. I'd been curious since I first visited Swami's office, and curiosity got the better of me.
"I don't know."
"So ... you're not Jewish?"
"No.” He smiled a deliberately mysterious smile. “Rasta Nova."
"Oh.” That made sense of all this obsession over drugs, Jah being the god of marijuana, and all. “Too bad. The ‘I've got friends who are Jewish’ card might have come in handy to play some day."
"Jimmy, you're a jerk."
I bowed facetiously, then agreed to help him find his almighty weed.
* * * *
The trouble with Tyler helping us hack into Genie was that he was imprisoned for hacking. The whole place was set up to deny him any kind of online access. All lines in and out were screened, and he wasn't allowed to have a computer of any kind. His phone calls were monitored, his mail read, and I don't know what else. The plumbing was isolated, so that signals couldn't be transmitted through the pipes or the water itself. The only places he had any privacy were in the bathroom and the chapel.
"The law provides for privacy of religion,” he said, “so there's no monitoring in prison chapels. I bribed the company that supplied the windows."
Swami and I called up Celia, a woman named on the note Tyler had slipped me. She was a craftswoman who made the stained glass windows in the chapel. Moreover, she was part of Tyler's little crime syndicate, and the windows were part of a larger plan that revolved around his being able to hack systems from prison. They weren't ordinary windows. They had a layer of some kind of thin gel with unusual properties. The gel would compress slightly when hit with sound waves, which made it change color. Thin film interference, she called it. “It's actually a rather old and crude technology,” Celia told Swami and me. “A poor man's secure receiver."
Another property was that the window glowed briefly when hit by light. A computer-controlled laser could draw letters on the window. Tyler would read them, and they'd fade away in a few seconds. This apparatus provided two-way text messaging, leaving no artifact in the prison.
Celia and Tyler had conspired to rent an apartment that was in the line of sight with the prison chapel. The idea was that Tyler would pretend to pray, and a telescopic color analyzer in the apartment would detect the color changes in the special windowpane. It then translated the changes back into sound, and we'd hear what Tyler was saying. Then we could laser messages back to him. Or plug into another system at our end, and Tyler could operate it remotely from prison.
"It gives a lot of deniability, because there's no direct linkage,” Celia explained. “It'll be really hard for anyone to even figure out what we're doing."
"Why?” said Swami. “The Pentagon used to have countermeasures for this sort of thing. They were afraid spies would read the vibrations from windows of rooms where classified meetings were taking place. They'd have radio speakers up against the glass, to wash out the vibrations from the voices."
Celia smiled knowingly. “You've done some homework. But I don't think the prison will be expecting that sort of technology. They've been too busy worrying about subcutaneous nanochips and wireless sets hidden in tooth fillings. This ancient history stuff is mostly forgotten. We could have tried reading direct sound off the glass, but using light turns out to be better, and it gives two-way communication."
Tyler had already used this system to hack around some, and was keen to try something bigger. Swami was no hacker, but he knew a l
ot about Genie, and the other systems in the company—the ones used for e-mail, networking, and all that jack. With a little help from a master, he could be dangerous. We were ready for some test signals of our own.
The eighth-floor apartment was dark and almost totally unfurnished. A single table lamp sat on the floor with a dim fluorescent tube and no shade. There were a few water bottles in the musty fridge, and cheap blinds on the window facing the prison. Two devices sat on heavy tripods by the window, the laser and the telescope. I couldn't tell the difference between them. Some notebook computers and other stuff sat on two collapsible tables, all connected together by a pastafest of wires. Celia explained that they never went wireless on this kind of risky job. Closed circuit was much safer.
According to plan, Tyler went into the chapel, turned on the lights, and started to pray. Swami, Celia, and I sat in the darkened apartment, the scope trained on the chapel window and wired into the color analyzer. Celia showed Swami how to jog the scope around a little until he found the most active spot. We recorded some very clear color changes, and the analyzer showed a lot of structure not visible to the naked eye. The modulated frequencies were translated into audio, and Tyler's voice rang tinny out of a speaker.
"Test prayer number nine, number nine, number nine ... For score and seven years from now, when I shake loose the surly bonds of prison, free at last, free at last..."
"It works!” Swami remarked.
Celia smiled with satisfaction and did some fine-tuning.
Tyler's voice became clearer. “Now is the time for all good men to come Watson! I need you!"
We typed a response, and the laser jittered invisibly, scrawling words on the window, or the finger of God writing on the wall, as Swami preferred to call it.
"My prayer has been answered,” Tyler said.
"Now it's time to pray to the system,” Swami quipped.
I found it ironic that I was going to fight the technology that had been working so hard to prevent or cure handicaps like mine. We owed Tyler and Celia, and I promised to pay them well, if any fruit fell from the trees.
The next time we met in the apartment, Swami was ready with a connection from the apartment to the office network. That link was wireless, but encrypted. The apartment was old enough to have landlines, but they were analog. Swami was going to rig a converter at the office before we went much further. Now we needed to steal an administrative password. There were all kinds of ways to attempt that, we learned, and most of them were detectable by security. There was a simple one that Tyler always tried first. Once set, I phoned Tyler and told him to go and say his prayers. In a few minutes, we were reading him.
Analog SFF, May 2008 Page 4
