by N Lee Wood
Laidcliff spun around, and said, “Johnny, stop…” in a strange, friendly voice. Halton froze into complete catatonia. Laidcliff’s muscle-boy was holding his wrist, and had to extract himself very carefully from Halton’s rigid grip.
“Jesus, fuckin’ son of a bitch!” the man swore loudly, grasping his injured hand and dancing around the room—“I think he broke it”—before he remembered a minor detail. He stopped, and gently pulled his Eclipse out of Halton’s paralyzed other hand. Then he glared at Laidcliff resentfully. It was the second time the fabricant had gotten the better of him, and he didn’t like it.
“I told you fabricants were fast, Ed,” Laidcliff said scoldingly. “You let your guard down. You’re damned lucky you’re not dead.”
“Shee-it,” the man sneered, but eyed Halton suspiciously anyway as he slipped the Eclipse back into his armpit holster with his good hand.
“Now, get away from him,” Laidcliff said. Ed was holding his injured wrist against his chest gingerly. “Go get that wrapped—find a split or something—there’s a first-aid box in the jeep. I’ll call you if I need you.” He sounded disgusted.
“Mr. Laidcliff…” Ed said dubiously.
“Don’t worry about it. He can’t hurt me.” Laidcliff showed teeth in a vicious smile. “The sound of his master’s voice.”
Unconvinced, Ed left. Alive.
Well, hell. That trick wasn’t going to work twice. Halton stood immobile, muscles quivering. A line of sweat trickled down from his forehead, dripped from his nose.
“What have you done to him?” I said, lisping wetly through swollen split lips.
Laidcliff sniggered. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing he wasn’t designed to do in the first place.” He walked over to Halton, put a hand on the fabricants shoulder and said sweetly, “Johneeeey.”
Halton straightened up slowly, and looked at Laidcliff, terror in his eyes. Laidcliff tskked and shook his head ruefully. “What’s the matter with you, boy? You’ve been behaving very strangely. Young Lawrence of Arabia is dead, right?”
“Yes,” Halton croaked. “He’s dead.”
“So his contract is null and void, terminated, isn’t it?” Laidcliff’s voice was smooth, obscenely soothing. Halton heard terminated and visibly trembled. He didn’t answer, and Laidcliff went on. “And what happens if the subject a fabricant has been allocated to becomes deceased?… Johnny?”
“The legal ownership of the fabricant reverts automatically to the manufacturers,” Halton said, reciting brokenly. He was staring at me, horrified.
“Who is… ?” Laidcliff patiently prompted him.
“CDI.”
“And I am… ?”
“My CDI trainer,” Halton said, swallowing and turning his eyes slowly to look at Laidcliff. “Sir.” It hurt him to say it.
“That’s right, very good.” Laidcliff smirked. “So now why don’t you be a good boy and tell me where the slipclip is, Johnny.”
Halton stared at him, unblinking. “I don’t know, sir,” he said thickly.
Laidcliff’s eyes narrowed. “Where’s the clip, John?” he said, the smirk and his arrogant condescension vanished.
“I don’t know, sir,” Halton repeated.
“Johnny. Don’t lie to me,” Laidcliff said in that same tone that had first paralyzed Halton. “Where is the slipclip?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Halton repeated again. There was a faint edge of panic in his voice, which I’m not sure Laidcliff heard.
Laidcliff simply stood in front of the fabricant for a long moment, studying him. I was sweating in terror, sure Halton would crack in a second. I forced a contemptuous laugh.
“You asshole, Laidcliff,” I jeered, forcing his attention back to me. “Are you really so stupid you think I’d trust my one and only safety net to a goddamned spook fabricant, especially one you were so inept in planting, it was obvious you’d set me up?”
Oh, that got his attention back, all right. And Halton stood there watching helplessly as Laidcliff decided I should repent my words a little. It was primitive, but it was effective.
He didn’t rape me, nothing so simple as pushing a protruding part of his body into a concave part of mine. But he didn’t need to. He wasn’t planning on keeping me around afterwards, so he didn’t have much concern about permanent damage. He was careful not to create an injury I could actually die from. Not then. Not at first. He systematically broke several of my fingers, pausing between screams, then expertly squashed my nose into pulp.
He’d just gotten started. He took his time, carefully, methodically, and crushed in one side of my face, knocking a couple of back molars loose. I blacked out when he smashed my cheekbone. He took a break, waiting for me to wake up. When the pain pushed me unwillingly back to consciousness after a few moments, he had stepped back, panting slightly after his exertion. I wept and drooled blood.
He cupped his hand under my chin, forcing my face up to look at him. “I won’t ask you what you’ve done with it, sugar,” he said to me. “That was just to remind you where you stand. Now, we’ll get serious.” He smiled and wiped a tear away from my one good eye with a gentle finger. The other eye had already been buried under swollen flesh. I couldn’t help whimpering.
“I didn’t blind you,” he said, “because I want you to watch something… just watch, and think about it.”
He walked around Halton like a dog sniffing a strange object. Stopping behind him, he pondered for a moment, then kicked the back of Halton’s knees so that the fabricant dropped to the floor.
“Hands on your head, Johnny,” he said mildly.
Halton complied wordlessly.
Laidcliff sat down in the chair, one ankle propped on his knee, and fished a knife from his pocket. Ten inches long, black-and-chrome, unadorned and functional, he flicked the switchblade out, then eased the blade back in with his thumb, then—click—out, slide it back in—click—out, over and over. A schoolboy bully’s toy. Halton just watched, kneeling on the floor, his hands laced behind his head like a POW.
“You damned fabricants,” Laidcliff sneered finally. “You all think you’re so fucking great, don’t you?”
Halton had to clear his throat before he answered. “No, sir.”
“Don’t get cute, Johnny.”
“I’m not, sir.”
“You think you’re so superior to us poor humans with your fancy designer genes.” Laidcliff grinned, amused by his own pun. “Anything the best of us can do, we’ve just wired into you—add water, shake and presto, instant Superman.” He tapped the blade of the knife under Halton’s chin, just grazing his neck. “You’re not all that extraordinary, Halton. You’re not jack shit. You know that, boy?”
“Yes. Sir,” Halton whispered.
Laidcliff was jealous of fabricants. I know I’m stating the obvious, but I had some time to sit there and watch, part of my brain wondering how someone like Laidcliff could be so goddamn mean.
I had considered Laidcliff as just some CDI lackey, which was true. He had risen as far up the ladder as he was competent to go, but not near far enough to satisfy his ambitions. Laidcliff was the kind of man who carries around an inferiority complex his whole life, hiding it behind a façade of bravado. He remained obsequious to his superiors while hating them, and took out his frustrations as much as he could get away with on those further down the chain. It was bad enough when it was just other people like himself, then along came the fabricants. I mean I was envious of fabricants—who wouldn’t be? But it seemed to have sent Laidcliff over the edge.
He had been nasty the brief time we’d met, but not necessarily sadistic. I had written him off as unimportant, and forgotten about him. He obviously had not forgotten my little jest at the Orbital airport.
Normal legal constraints, like going to prison for the rest of your life for murdering someone, are usually enough to keep the minor Laidcliffs of this world at least socially tolerable. His anger and inadequacies had just been exacerbated by fabricants; they were
better at doing the job he had wanted to do. He was being supplanted. I could understand that fear. Then I’d added insult to injury.
Now the restraints were off: Laidcliff was allowed to do whatever he wanted, and in his furious resentment there were no holds barred.
“I can’t believe you actually fucked this ugly bitch,” he said, and turned his head to grin at me. And laughed at my astonishment. “You did, didn’t you?” He was guessing after all.
“Yes, sir.”
Laidcliff tsk-tskked. “And I’ll bet you just gave it away for free, too, didn’t you? After all the really nice girls I set you up with, you learned nothing.” Halton flinched. Laidcliff pimping for his fabricant hadn’t been one of the secrets of his love life that Halton had revealed to me. “You at least have a good time, Johnny? Was it good for you?”
Halton was shivering uncontrollably. “Yes, sir.”
“Monotonous, isn’t it?” Laidcliff suddenly said to me, and mimicked in a high voice, “ ‘Yes sir, no sir, anything you say, sir.’ Got about as much imagination as roadkill.” He turned back toward Halton. “Johnny…” It was that tone.
Halton’s face was bloodless. “Yes, sir?”
“You have become psychologically contaminated.”
“No, sir…”
“John Halton. Indigo. Faubourg. Salicylic. Pentacle. Go.”
At first, nothing happened, then Halton’s eyes rolled up in his head, spine arching as he fell backwards, twitching violently.
“What are you doing to him!” I screamed, appalled.
“I’m not doing anything to him.” Laidcliff laughed. “He’s doing it to himself.” Halton was drooling, hands clenching and unclenching in uncoordinated rhythms, muscles spasming. “Every fabricant has built-in fail-safes. The nanos. Fabricants have them from before they’re even born. It’s so closely fitted to their fancy tailored genetics, they can’t tell the nanos apart from their biological bodies. They don’t even know how many different designs they’ve got floating around inside them.”
He jerked a thumb at the convulsing fabricant. “That’s a little army of nanos marching around inside his Grade-A Prime brain, been sitting there waiting to be called into combat all this time, and he never knew it,” Laidcliff said conversationally as Halton’s feet drummed the floor. “They’re triggered by the specific sound of my voice repeating a preset sequence of words.” He grinned, holding up two fingers like a pair of scissors. “Snip. Snip. That’s the sound of thousands of little nanos cutting neuron connections. Snip— whoops, there goes another one. Snip… Like Alzheimer’s in fast motion. Snip…”
“Stop it, stop it!” I was screaming. “Stop it!”
“Hey, no problem. That’s easy.” He turned, and said in the same tone, “John Halton. Stop.”
Halton shuddered violently, then lay still, staring at the ceiling, his chest barely moving, struggling for breath as if he’d forgotten how his lungs worked. I was sobbing, hysterical, while Laidcliff idly played with his switchblade and enjoyed the show.
“C’mon, Johnny,” he said finally, nudging the fabricant with his boot. “Get up off your backside.”
Clumsily, Halton managed to roll himself upright, sat on the floor, feet tucked under him, and slowly locked his fingers behind his neck. He swayed, slightly unstable, his head bowed, his face glazed in a stunned expression.
“So, sweetheart,” Laidcliff said softly to me. “Honeybun, sugarlips, you ready to tell me what you did with the slip-clip, or would you rather watch me slowly turn your toyboy into a vegetable?”
“You bastard.” I knew he’d gotten to me, knew it was hopeless. Fucket. There wasn’t going to be a miracle, no cavalry riding over the hill to save us at the last minute. It was pointless and stupid to keep on resisting when we were just going to die anyway. Maybe by now it’d be too late. I could hope. For a moment, I gave up, trying to figure out how to make a deal, trade the slipclip for quick, painless deaths for us both.
Laidcliff was watching me, gloating over what he saw in my face. He didn’t see Halton raise his head. He didn’t see the single tear run down the fabricant’s cheek, or see his mouth move, a silent desperate No.
Jeez, the amount of trouble and abuse people will tolerate for someone else that they wouldn’t put up with for two seconds for themselves. “Go fuck yourself,” I said weakly. I wasn’t up to being creative at that moment. Laidcliff was, however. He ripped my shirt open, buttons pinging on the floor.
There was a point when he’d backed off to admire his work, knife clenched in one bloody fist, where I thought nothing could be worth this. Blood was pooling between my legs from the decorative calligraphy he carved on my breasts and stomach. I had to fight to keep thinking this horror would have to be over sooner or later. If I could hold on, I could go knowing I’d screwed over Laidcliff and the CDI on my way out.
Laidcliff took a breather, sitting back to smoke a cigarette while I hung tied in the chair and bled, crying quietly to myself. The acrid smell of bad Turkish tobacco hit my shattered nose with almost as much pain as the torture. I hadn’t had a smoke for hours. I wanted one, even in the condition I was in.
Goddamn it, I thought, disgusted with myself. I really gotta give it up… and almost laughed.
Halton stayed kneeling on the floor, stonelike. Laidcliff decided it was the fabricant’s turn again. “Even if I didn’t need you at the moment for leverage, Johnny, we’d have to terminate you, anyway—you understand that, don’t you?”
Halton slowly looked away from me to stare at Laidcliff.
“Fact is, you’ve brought this all on yourself. It’s your own fault. You fucked up, boy. The minute you started giving away company secrets to little Miss Perilous Pauline here during that really classy dinner up on the Station, you dug your own grave.”
He leaned over to wipe the blood off his switchblade onto Halton’s shirt. The fabricant didn’t flinch.
“That’s right, we heard you. You don’t have little nanocameras in your eyes”—he turned momentarily to look at me—“although I like that idea. We’ll have to think about that one”—then back to Halton. “We’ve got a complete range of other ways to keep tabs on our little boys and girls. You broke the rules, Johnny. Your whole design went under review, and you know what? Your entire series had to be yanked. You were all flawed and unreliable. Contaminated. Defective. Malfunctioning. You understand, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Halton said. He didn’t bother to hide the despair in his voice.
Don’t believe him, John. Don’t believe him… But of course, he had to. He was designed to.
Laidcliff was a puppeteer, too. Halton was his own personal bubblehead. Hey, Lew, you think you’re audio-sensitive, watch this!
Laidcliff wasn’t paying attention to me; he was busy having fun jerking Halton’s strings. I felt something cold move inside me, my muscles going numb, a powdery-weird sensation. Something deadly glacial, something like what I imagined a fabricant might feel, slid along my nerves, quiet and subtle. I was watching the pulse in the curve of Laidcliff’s neck, feeling my legs turning to numb posts. I pressed my feet solidly on the floor, an icy, metallic snake coiling around my spine. I had no thoughts, no plan in my head. Time seemed to slow. I felt utterly calm. Peaceful.
“Johnny,” Laidcliff said, caressing the word.
“Yes, sir… ?” Halton whispered, terrified and helpless.
“John Halton. Indigo. Faubourg. Sali…”
I pushed off the floor, chair and all, like I was jumping out the door of a parachute plane. I could distantly feel my muscles ripping from the strain. My mouth open as far as possible, I screamed as I catapulted into Laidcliff. I caught a quick glimpse of his startled eyes as he turned toward me before I clamped my teeth down on his throat.
I hit him hard enough to ram him off his chair. We tumbled to the floor. The chair I was tied to broke, and I wriggled frantically to stay on top of him. I felt his skin give, my teeth driving through, the bulge of his windpipe under m
y tongue. Distantly, I could feel my broken cheekbone rasping as the muscles of my jaws ratcheted down. The tang of warm blood bubbled into my mouth, which for once wasn’t mine. My nostrils filled with it, and I couldn’t breathe, drowning in the taste of his blood.
I didn’t care. Laidcliff was struggling, trying to both stab me and wrestle me off him at the same time. His collapsing windpipe vibrated under my mouth as he tried to shout, only a muffled hiss by my ear. Sharp pain sliced in deep underneath my arm, and I grunted, clamped down harder. I felt cartilage cracking under my jaws. Laidcliff’s legs kicked out under me once, twice, and went limp. I had my teeth buried as far as they could go into his flesh, biting harder, unable to breath, not about to let go.
I couldn’t believe he was dead, I couldn’t have killed him that fast, the son-of-a-bitch had to be faking…
“Kay Bee…” Halton said softly, tugging at me.
Amazed, I relaxed, letting Halton drag me off Laidcliff’s body. I retched, vomiting up blood, the pain from my broken cheek kicking back in with a dizzy vengeance. But my mind seemed unusually clear.
It was astonishing how easy it was to kill him I didn’t think someone could die that quick from being throttled maybe I’d hit an artery or something…
But when Halton pulled me away from Laidcliff’s body, I noticed there was something seriously wrong with the dead man’s face. Halton had jammed both his forefingers straight down into Laidcliff’s eyes, smashing through the thin orbital bones beneath them, burying his stiffened fingers deep into Laidcliff’s brain. One eye had burst, like a deflated water balloon; the other dangled by the optic thread out of its broken socket as if trying to look over the dead man’s shoulder.
Halton’s hands holding my shoulders were sticky. Pieces of grayish brain matter mixed with his own bright red blood where the sharp edges of shattered bones had gouged the fabricant’s fingers.
If you cut me, do I not bleed…?
Halton got the switchblade and was behind me, sawing through the ropes tying me to the broken chair. My hands came free as I heard footsteps. Without thinking, I reached over Laidcliff’s corpse with both broken hands to slip the Eclipse out of his armpit holster.
