Strangers Among Us

by Kelley Armstrong

  She jerked again.

  She started swearing like someone who’s just gashed her finger . . . but she didn’t stop. She kept going, words shooting uncontrollably out of her mouth: a flow of profanity in multiple languages, all shouted at the top of her lungs. She gave the Dog an embarrassed look, as if she wanted to apologize but couldn’t—some wild part of her brain had seized her voice, and the rest of her brain had no access.

  At least the woman hadn’t died immediately; on the other hand, brain dysfunction was bad. The woman must have realized the same thing because with a lurch, she turned back as quickly as possible toward the access panel, wanting to get the job done while she was still able. An involuntary jerk sent her floating away from the machinery—like her voice, her body was developing a mind of its own.

  Tics. Spasms. She looked to the Dog for help, even as she threw curses in his direction.

  He flew to her side and put his arm around her waist. She continued to convulse, but didn’t fight his grip. He guided her back toward the machinery.

  The six unattached circuit-boards were tucked into the pages of the manual books. The books themselves were tied by their strap to a pipe beside the access panel. The Dog took one of the boards out of the book that held it and offered the board to the woman. She reached out, but couldn’t control her hand enough to do anything useful. The Dog took her hand gently and moved the RFID chip beneath her shaking fingers.

  After a moment, the woman thrust her hand toward one of the empty sockets inside the panel. Carefully, the Dog inserted the circuit-board into the slot.

  They did the same thing five more times. The Dog found the process painful . . . not holding the woman’s warm body, but having her scream in his ear and seeing her twitch in frustration as she tried to control herself enough to get the job done. Her voice had become ragged with continuous yelling. And the Dog could feel her tiring from so much exertion—weak trembles underlay all her other spasmodic movements. When the final board snugged into place, the woman’s body seemed to slacken even though she continued to writhe and curse hoarsely.

  “Is it fixed?” the Dog asked her. “Can I restart the ship?”

  She shoved him toward the exit door. The room was getting stuffy—the woman’s shouts and exertions had used up a great deal of oxygen. But the Dog still took the time to guide her to her jump-couch and secure her thrashing body in the straps. He hoped she wouldn’t twist free in the time he took to get back to the bridge. If she was spinning around the room when the gravity came back on . . .

  The Dog didn’t have time to worry about that. He was getting dizzy from lack of oxygen. He’d been exerting himself too.

  Back at the bridge, almost unconscious, the Dog hit the big red button. Within a second, everything resumed as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  Almost.

  The Dog ran back to Engineering. By the time he got there, the other engineers had already unstrapped the woman from her couch—she was still shaking and screaming. As they hurried her to the sick bay, they gave the Dog hostile looks: what are you doing here, gawking at our friend?

  The woman herself seemed too dazed to notice. The ship coming back online would have jolted her hard: some of her augmentations would suddenly reconnect, disrupting what remained of her metabolic balance. The Dog wanted to follow her to sick bay and hear what the doctor said . . . but then the captain called him to the bridge to explain numerous anomalies detected after the jump.

  Such as nine heavy “carbon storage sinks” dangling from an open access panel in the Engineering room.

  Reports had to be filed, then carefully hushed up. It was bad for morale if the crew were forced to acknowledge how deeply they relied on an unaugmented nobody. Even the captain seemed eager to put it out of her mind.

  When things finally grew less hectic, the Dog went to sick bay to see how his Sleepwalker was doing. By then, she was under sedation; the doctor said she would stay in that state till the ship reached a planet with a full-service medical center.

  “She’ll be all right, won’t she?” asked the Dog.

  “Eventually,” the doctor replied. “We’ve reached the point where we can replace pretty much any part of the body that gets damaged.”

  “Even her brain?”

  “Sure. We take full brain backups whenever people sleep. We’ll restore everything as of last night—she’ll lose less than a day of memories.”

  “Oh,” said the Dog, “that’s all right then. I guess that’s good.”

  He went back to his Kennel.

  The captain would call when they needed him again.

  CARNIVORES

  Rich Larson

  Finch pried himself out of the autocab midway down Jasper Avenue, where Carnivor gastro-bistro, the city’s most exclusive new eatery, skulked between concrete high-rises. He’d read up on the restaurant’s architecture when he and Blake first started planning the heist, so he knew it was a collaboration between a Bolivian artist and a decaying engineering AI, and that the swooping ridges of the façade, together with its calcium-spike stalactites, were meant to evoke the maw of an animal. For everyone with neural implants synched up to fine dining augreality, the restaurant’s name was slashed into the air in bright red.

  Finch thought it was a bit kitschy. Blake, his partner in crime, thought it was bleeding edge haute couture and required Finch order a new suit that was not bleeding ugly. The Armani jacket already felt unpleasantly tight around his bookcase shoulders and thick-ribbed chest—a problem Finch was well used to. Not many stores catered to Neanderthal hybrid proportions.

  The autocab squawked for payment. Finch licked his massive thumb and stuck it against the reader, then held the taxi in place by its door frame while he checked his appearance in the window. He ran a hand over his slicked red hair and adjusted the Full Windsor noose around his neck, wondering if the tattoos clawing out from under his cuffs looked professional enough in cobalt blue or if he should have masked them completely.

  Finch let the autocab skitter back into traffic. It didn’t matter how he looked. The darknet CV Blake had done up for him was a bullshit masterpiece, and Carnivor’s proprietor, if her hacked pornstream was any indication, had a Neanderthal fantasy not uncommon among professional women. Finch inhaled. The cold air smelled like exhaust and something almost as pungent that his nose, tuned to Blake-imposed veganism, took a moment to recognize as cooking meat.

  He made his way through the dilating doors into a mirrored entryway, where he was stopped by a bouncer who seemed to be mostly composed of HGH-pumped muscle and hair gel.

  “Slow up, Red.” He tapped the neural plug set into the shaved side of his head, making his starched Mohawk wobble slightly. “I don’t see you on the facebook. In this modern day and age, you need to make a reservation, you know? And at Carnivor, we backlog up to three months.”

  “I’m not a guest,” Finch said, sizing him up on old instinct. Scarred knuckles, crooked nose, probably fancied himself a boxer. The nametag scrolling down his breast pocket read Vick. “I’m here to see Ms. Carrow.” He tapped his own plug, down behind his ear, and shuttled over the Carnivor-red interview request.

  A briefly hurt look flashed across Vick’s face before he regained his pre-set smirk. “Have to frisk you down, then,” he said, cracking his fingers. “You’re awful pale. Must be Irish, right?”

  Finch stood scarecrow as the bouncer frisked. “Not that I know of. You?”

  “You in the gravity gym a lot? What do you squat on standard?” Vick slapped one of Finch’s tree-trunk quads. “Big old haunches on you. Big veins, too, I got tiny veins, shitty circulation—”

  Finch snagged the man’s hand tight enough to feel tendons rasp up on each other, then slowly moved it away.

  Vick turned his grimace into a grin as he yanked his fingers back. “Your kind aren’t much for conversation, are they? More used to grunting.”

  “You done?”

  “Yeah, I’m done. Left your club at home
, obviously.” Vick nodded toward the interior. “Right this way.”

  Finch ran through a few ways to snap Vick’s neck as he followed him across a gleaming obsidian floor, past copses of smartglass tables and spiny organic sculptures. He watched a gaggle of Ghanaian businessmen wearing fashionably gashed suits put in their order while what appeared to be 2010s slaughterhouse footage played across their table. Finch shook his head. Kitschy as fuck.

  While Vick was distracted by the swaying hips of a neon-lipped server, Finch scanned for fire exits, motion sensors, and small black cameras nestled in the ceiling corners. What he took to be the private dining alcoves were hidden behind a noise-cancelling black shroud.

  Caught up in sending Blake the footage, Finch brushed against one of the shuddering sculptures and received a blast of hot peppery breath full in the face. He swore loud enough for Vick to turn around and give a hyena giggle. His eyes stung all the way though the silver-white labyrinth of Carnivor’s kitchens, where cooks doing prep-work shouted to each other in a thick blend of Tagalog, Somali and English. The smell of meat hung heavy, almost dripping.

  Finch was still blinking away tears when they arrived at the door to Ms. Carrow’s office. Vick pointed him in without speaking, suddenly sour-faced, then stalked away.

  “Thanks, Vick,” Finch called after him, flipping the bird to his turned back.

  Ms. Holly Carrow was in virtual conference when Finch stepped inside and closed the synthetic oak door behind him. Her dim-lit office was partially overgrown, with a faux-skylight shafting artificial sunshine onto the artful twists of branch and vine sprouting through the glass floor. Very envirochic, very expensive. It matched up with the utterly obscene amounts of anonymized money Blake had found flowing into Carnivor’s accounts, which in turn seemed linked to a mysterious bi-monthly delivery from a Brazilian medi/pharma company.

  Very envirochic, very expensive, very warm. Finch did not do well with warm. Wasn’t built for it. He could already feel sweat prickling along his hairline as he approached Carrow’s desk. She was reclined in an orthochair, her dark head tipped back in its cradle. Neural plugs pulsed at her chemically smoothed temples. Her lips looked like a line of dried blood and her jawline was wide and perfectly angled.

  Finch touched his own with some measure of jealousy, rasping his thumb along the coarse beard that helped obscure his Neanderthal lack of chin. As he stepped through the dappled light, a spindly-looking chair unfolded itself opposite the desk and blinked an inviting green. Finch sat gingerly; he’d done in their apartment’s cheap folding chair that morning halfway through Blake styling his hair.

  Finch put his hands on his knees to wait, and realized the roll of his trousers looked like a miniature chub. Right as he was smoothing out his crotch, the restaurateur’s eyes flicked open. People always came out of a deep slice at the most inopportune moments. Finch tried to move his hand in a natural path to his knee.

  “Sorry for the wait.” Carrow’s sea-green eyes tracked the movement like a laser. She gave a faint smile. “I hope it wasn’t making you . . . squirmy.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Good.” Carrow’s chair reconfigured, sliding her upright, and she extended a hand to make it all one sinuous motion. “Mr. Finch, I presume.”

  Finch took it, finding it drier than he’d expected and strong. “Pleasure.”

  “You have a very impressive CV, Mr. Finch.” She looked at the girth of his knuckles with more than faint interest—Finch remembered a few favourites from her pornstream and tried not to let it show on his face. “Private security coordinator for EpiGen. Paramilitary service in Pakistan and India. Very impressive.”

  Finch blinked. “I do what I’m good at, I suppose.”

  “Yes.” Carrow’s eyes roved down his chest, lingered a millisecond too long at his hips. Her cheeks tinted with a near-imperceptible flush Finch knew to look for. “We all play the cards we’re dealt. Genetically or otherwise. But I do wonder why a former CEO bodyguard wants to work security at Carnivor.”

  Finch squeezed his kneecap. Blake had made the CV too perfect. He had that tendency. “I’m at the point where I need a position that’s longer term and lower risk.” Finch paused, then played the trump card. “We don’t live so long as you. Thirty-three is middle aged, for a neo. Cell decay will set in soon.”

  The restaurateur leaned forward. “You’re a survivor from the original batch, then? From the Bangkok biolabs?”

  Finch didn’t have to lie on this point. “Yes. Number 23.”

  “I knew it,” Carrow breathed. “Well, ah, suspected. I’ve always wanted to meet . . .” She trailed off, trying to re-establish herself. “What they did in those labs was an atrocity. The experimentation. You should know I was a fervent supporter of the Diaspora Act. Referendum 88, as well. Neo rights are a bit of a passion of mine.”

  “I don’t follow the politics.” Another thing he didn’t have to lie about.

  “You don’t feel a certain responsibility to—”

  “I’m me, first,” Finch cut her off. “Anything else, second. Including neo.”

  Carrow’s dark red frown reshaped to a sheepish smile. “I’m sorry. I must sound like a paleochaser who’s side-windowing the wiki.”

  “Not at all,” Finch said, sliding the polite veneer back over his voice. “I can tell when someone’s reading the wiki. You know, ‘you must have been so happy on August 16, 2055 when clone-grown Neanderthal-human hybrids gained full citizen rights.’ Shit like that.”

  “Terrible.” The restaurateur rose; her orthochair reluctantly put its massage pads away. “I’ve been in virtual all day, Mr. Finch. Walk with me.” Finch creaked off his own chair and shadowed her over to the twisted trees. She wrapped her fingers around a moss-slick branch. “These aren’t real,” she admitted, sliding her hand up and down the length. “Real would have been too cheap.”

  Finch shrugged, ignoring the phallic tableau. “They’re nice.”

  “Sometimes people have trouble with real and not real,” Carrow said delicately, releasing the branch. “Sometimes mere illusion is offensive enough to make people take real action. An all-meat eatery, whether it’s vat grown or not, attracts its share of critics. That’s part of the charm, of course. Being contentious. The restaurant business is all about novelty.”

  “I tend to eat vegan, myself.”

  “So do I.” Carrow smiled as she wiped her hands together, then turned serious. “For the past month, Carnivor has been receiving anonymous vitriol from an individual, or perhaps a small group, who take issue with our mode and aesthetic. They think it trivializes the horrors of the defunct livestock industry. Or something. I wasn’t much concerned with them until they started making threats against our clientele’s safety.”

  Finch remembered the late nights with Blake, composing anti-meat rants and credible bomb threats over a bottle of Luna vodka and hash. They’d gotten quite good at it.

  “We attract an influential clientele,” Carrow said, leaning back against the tree, managing to exaggerate the camber of her back with relative grace. “Movie stars, moguls, athletes. Bookings for our more exclusive offerings are often made months in advance.” She paused. “We take the privacy of our guests very seriously. While most come here to be seen, others come here for the opposite. That’s why I’m looking to improve Carnivor’s security. I’d like to ensure no dining experience is interrupted by anti-meat radicals or celebrity chasers. The only man we have now, Vicky, is a bit . . . unreliable.”

  “I feel qualified to do that, Ms. Carrow,” Finch said, lowering his voice to a controlled rumble as he stepped closer. “Though I would, of course, like to negotiate upward on the salary.”

  Carrow smiled again, the flush coming back stronger. “Well, we haven’t discussed a benefits package yet, have we?”

  Finch couldn’t resist unzipping his trousers once he was out the door, then doing them up again, noisily, on his way past Vick, whose face turned taut and ashy in a way that almost made Fin
ch feel bad for the prick.

  “She doesn’t fuck in her office,” the bouncer snarled.

  “Doesn’t fuck you, you mean. Maybe it’s the haircut.”

  Vick’s response was guillotined by the arrival of a designer-swathed couple smelling like cheap pheromone spray and expensive liquor. He checked them against the facebook with his jaw clenched tight, and gave a smile that was more grimace as a server led them off.

  “Once she does fuck you, she’ll fire you,” he said. “She just wants some neo cock. Then you’re back out on your ass. She loves her little ironies.” He preened his Mohawk in the mirror wall, deadly serious. “And don’t even think about hurting her. I’ve always wanted a go at a caveman.”

  That word still sliced into Finch’s stomach, even after all these years. He felt the tips of his ears redden.

  “You’d have to buy me a drink,” Finch said. He looked Vick up and down. “Several drinks. And that’s saying something, since my gut’s got no enzymes to process alcohol. Pre-agrarian and all that.”

  “What the fuck are you grunting about?” Vick smiled like a shark; he had a nose for blood in the water. “Caveman.”

  Finch was squared to him without realizing he’d moved. “Say it again.”

  They stood toe to toe until the air was all but stinking with testosterone, or maybe just the sliver of vat beef caught in Vick’s teeth. For a moment Finch was ready to throw the whole job, the weeks and weeks of prep, just for a chance to bash Vick’s face in. Then a notification flag popped up in his peripherals. He opened it.

  Unit, you get the job or fucking what? I’m dying metaphorically over here. Save me.

  Finch scrolled Blake’s message up and down, allowing a smile to ghost onto his face. He turned on his heel and headed for the LRT station.