by Erin Hayes
“How does it look, doc?” I ask.
“Your circuits are fried,” Taka says. “I can patch you up to a decent state, but you’re going to need to get that new foot as soon as possible.”
Of course. I need another few runs at least before I have enough saved up to get a new foot. And that would wipe out all of my savings for the foreseeable future. So much for retiring early.
“Ow,” I mutter, flinching on reflex. My right foot twitches in response, my toes curling with the pain. “I think sensory functions are back online at least.”
Taka gives a demure smile.
“How long have I been out?” I ask Captain Louis. We only have a three-hour window of when we’re supposed to pull out of FTL to transfer our data. If I’ve been out for longer than that, then we could be missing out on our huge payment. Someone like Taka or Orion could dig through my memory banks for the data, but doing that is a severe invasion of privacy.
And there are certainly things in there that I don’t want anyone seeing.
“You’ve been out for an hour,” Louis answers, and I sigh in relief. “Are the files damaged?”
I hide my smile as I quickly run diagnostics on my memory banks. Now that I’m back to my snarky self, Louis puts up his pretense of detachedness. He cares about his team, but if we’re out of danger, he starts to pretend to play captain again.
“All files are accounted for,” I say, relieved.
At least my hard drives are harder than my head.
Louis nods. “Think you can upload it to Farer-Prime, then?”
I twirl my right ankle once, and Taka lets out a surprised noise. I must be recovering quicker than he thought possible.
“Of course. Might just need some help.”
Amusingly, it’s not my leg that’s giving me trouble walking; it’s my head. I can’t seem to keep things from spinning and matching up with itself, and it’s making my inner gyroscope mess up and it thinks I’m in a tailspin.
Which I am, I suppose. “Fucking head,” I mutter.
“It’s what you get for having a bio-head,” PC says amusedly. He should know the benefits—he has a metal plate on one side, which covers most of his skull.
“Shut up,” I say, and he snickers softly.
He helps me hobble my way to the bridge, where I can set up a secure line to Farer-Prime and upload the files. The bridge isn’t too fancy, just a dual-level room with one wall open to the sea of stars beyond us.
As we enter at the lower level, classical music hits my ears. It’s played over the loud speakers in the bridge, filling every space with violins. I pause, waiting for the computer side of my brain to identify the song as I’ve never heard it before.
“It is Antonio Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni,” a familiar voice says, before I can come up with an answer. “Otherwise known as The Four Seasons. Particularly L’inverno, movement 1.”
Ahead of us, a taut, rigid figure with his back to us turns around and gives us a smile that’s not exactly cold, but it doesn’t necessarily reach his eyes. Orion is an interesting android in that he’s somewhere in between a full robot and a human. Sometimes, he can come across as more human than Taka, and at others, he’s more robotic than a zapper.
Looks like we caught him in the middle of one of his latter moments.
“It’s pretty,” I admit as the violins raise in a crescendo. “I’ve never heard it before.”
A muscle twitches in Orion’s cheek, and I wonder if he’s trying to smile or if there’s a malfunction in his cheek. There’s something uncanny about androids that you can just never put your finger on.
Sure, Orion looks human enough, but he’s almost too perfect. He stands at six-and-a-half feet tall, with a body built with simulated muscle. His skin is a deep umber that catches the light from the stars flashing by us in the window. A chiseled jaw and sculpted cheekbones round out his features under his shock of thick, coarse black hair.
An Orion-class android was meant to be more of an escort than a navigator, and looking at him, you can believe that every woman and man’s fantasy could come true with him.
“You’re trying to outclass us, Orion,” PC says as he helps me over to my chair.
The android frowns. “How so?”
PC winks at me. “You just have better taste in music.”
The muscle twitches again in Orion’s cheek. “All music is a form of math,” he explains. “And the reason why this must sound more pleasant is because—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Captain Louis says gruffly, causing Orion to look at him. “We get it. Take us out of FTL so Clem can upload the data before our cut-off. We’ve already had a few hiccups with today’s run, so I’d like to send off this data and purge it as soon as possible.”
Orion hesitates for the briefest moment before clasping his hands behind his back and snapping his feet together. “Of course, sir.”
Captain Louis rolls his eyes. No matter how many times he tells Orion to stop calling him “sir,” he keeps doing it. It’s a part of Orion’s programming.
We all strap ourselves in. Everyone that is, except for Orion, who can hold himself straight up with the Grav-functions in his feet.
“Everyone, please prepare for deceleration,” he says into the intercom. Somewhere on the Pícara, Venice Moon, Oliver Twist, and Daisy are strapping themselves in.
After a few heartbeats, I feel the sedative prick my human left arm, feeding me drugs that will keep my heart from exploding with the sudden deceleration. Faster than light is an amazing advancement—we can travel across the galaxy in the matter of a few months, but the human body can’t handle it as well as we’d like.
A part of me resents that fragility in me. The other part wants to hold onto it as much as possible. Because the more human I can be, the less I feel like a fraud.
“Go for it, Orion,” Louis says from the captain’s chair.
The android nods and pulls the lever towards him, and I can feel the shift in the Pícara all the way from every cell in my body crying out from the change, as well as the nuts and bolts rattling themselves apart within me. My vision blurs with the sudden headache, and I wonder if it’s from knocking my head or if it’s from the ship braking so damn hard.
Both are possibilities.
Maybe this is the part I most hate about my job.
“Clem,” Louis says. He sounds as winded as I feel. “Open up a com and start uploading to Farer-Prime. We’re running out of time.”
“On it.” I extend my right hand and call out the port on my middle finger. I insert it into the hub, feeling that similar tingling feeling ricochet through my body. My tongue is fried again, and it feels like I’m breathing smoke.
I take it back. This is definitely the part of the job I hate the most.
It doesn’t help that the Pícara isn’t a big fan of me assimilating with her. She views me as an invading entity and constantly tries to kick me out of her system. It’s not that I can’t fight back or anything, but I don’t want to make an enemy out of the very spaceship I live on. One time I had to bypass her security protocols to upload a dangerous file, and I had to deal with cold showers every day that week.
I’ve told Taka and Captain Louis about it many times, but they’ve called me crazy for it. The ship isn’t supposed to have a personality or AI, and I understand that what I experience should be impossible. But it totally isn’t. It’s unlike any other ship I’ve assimilated with.
It makes me wonder if there’s more to computers and AI than I know. Orion’s indicative of that. And I catch him watching me.
I swallow back the bad taste in my mouth and continue typing in my uplink password with my left hand. Finally, I join their server.
“We’re uploading to Farer-Prime,” I say, as I command myself to grab everything from “/cordinates" and copy it. I’m ready to purge myself of this information as soon as possible so I can clear out my memory banks and run at full efficiency once again.
Well, except for my busted leg
.
“And in time, too,” PC says approvingly. He’s watching the loading form to see the estimates for when the packet will be delivered. Just in the nick of time, it seems. I breathe a sigh of relief and sit back in my chair, letting my cyborg body do the rest of its business. There’s no further communication between us and Farer-Prime, because to do so will be an admission that we were doing business together, which the other corporations wouldn’t like.
Even though they all do it. It’s like they avoid any association because they don’t want to admit they’re no better than everyone else. We get our jobs through encrypted messages, and we receive payments through unknown sources.
It’s how the world works. At least ours as space pirates.
I feel the ding through my body as I’m alerted that the transfer is complete. I glance over at PC, who looks down at his console. A wide grin spreads across his face. “We’re now 45 million Space Yen richer.”
There’s a collective sigh of relief throughout the Pícara. Still though, I can’t help but grumble.
“Should’ve asked for more,” I say to Louis. “After all, I got shot. Again.” I can’t seem to stay out of zappers’ ways, whether it’s going for a loot run or just running to get some food. I tend to piss people off.
“Your kidney injury happened on a Farer-Prime run as well,” Orion says thinly before Louis can respond. “It was wise of Captain Louis to not bring that up, or else they’d start thinking we’re running a scam here.”
“We are running a scam,” I point out to him as I cross my arms. “And that was Farer-Prime last time? All these different corporations are blurring together.”
Orion nods, his full lips pressed to a thin line. I wonder what it would be like to kiss those lips, but I avert my attention away from him and look at Louis. “What do you think of that?” I ask him point-blank.
He chuckles dryly. “I agree with Orion,” he says. “You got a rather large payout last time.”
“It was only enough to cover my pain pills after my kidney replacement,” I retort.
“Just a hazard of the job,” PC says with a shrug. “Other Free Agents aren’t so lucky.”
I don’t have a reply for that. It’s widely known that life without a corporation to protect you is much harsher. I go to some space ports and see Free Agents missing limbs or using very old equipment to keep their bodies running. If you’re not a space pirate, you’re either a space junk collector, water distiller, selling your body, or farming on an asteroid with shitty, infertile soil. Most decide to not go the space pirate route, mainly because they don’t like getting shot at.
Then again, I’ve earned more money in this one run than any of them will ever see in their lives.
Daisy is the only one of us who was born a Lifer, underneath the banner of Kavelin Works. She left when she was fifteen years old and refuses to talk about her time there.
Then again, I don’t have a memory of life before Captain Louis found me. Maybe I was a Lifer, too, at one point. I look down at my cyborg hand and make a fist. All through my body, I have metal and wires, a lot of it necessary to keep me alive. 52.8% of me is machine, making me have more in common with Orion than anyone else. The replacement kidney brought me over that line. The others on the Pícara may have cyborg parts, but I have the most. It’s not a game I want to win.
I hate it. I feel like I’m losing my humanity. At what point do I become a cyborg with human parts instead of the other way around?
If I lived as a Lifer, would I be in better shape?
I’m still contemplating how different life would have been if I’d been born underneath the banner of a corporation when Venice Moon rings the dinner bell. Seriously, it’s a triangle that he dings over the intercom. Sometimes you can’t take tradition away from a man.
“Food’s ready,” the old man gruffs before shutting off the link.
And that’s how all meals start on the Pícara.
Chapter 3
“I’m going to get me one of those robotic dogs,” Daisy announces around her mouthful of food. Today, it’s some kind of colorless mush. Venice Moon is a good cook, but we don’t give him much to work with in terms of ingredients. Usually, he’s working off MREs and recycled food.
“A dog?” Oliver Twist asks, his eyes big and round. The boy is only around nine years old with copper skin and huge, expressive eyes. He’s the only member of the crew with his body intact. I’ll do everything I can to keep it that way. I know Daisy will too. She’s grown close to him since Louis took him in a year ago after finding him in a dumpster on a space port.
Daisy gives him a good-natured nod. It’s strange seeing the big, scowly woman so tender with the little boy. That maternal instinct is present, even in her. Oliver’s innocence has really smoothed out her rough patches.
“After this run, I have enough saved up,” she says to him with a wink. “Maybe one of those big brown models. Or a wee little barky one. What do you think?”
Oliver gives an excited yip, covering up his mouth with his hands.
“I won’t have a little shit running around the ship barking at us and marking his territory with oil,” Captain Louis mutters as he spoons out another helping of mashed something. He sprinkles some salt over it. Salt’s really hard to come by, and we only use it in extreme situations. I can tell from Venice’s frown that it doesn’t escape him.
So I keep the conversation going before the cook threatens to quit again. “If Oliver keeps an eye on the dog and trains him,” I say, grabbing a forkful of my own meal, “then that shouldn’t be a problem. Will it, buddy?”
He shakes his head. “I’ll look after him. Please?”
I see Louis’s resolve waver and hide my grin by shoveling the fork into my mouth. Oh, that is foul. My eyes water as I remind myself that over half of my body isn’t being poisoned by this meal. If only my tongue were mechanical—I could try to change the taste profiles within my computing systems, but I think that may screw up a few other things.
I learned a long time ago not to mess with my internal status quo.
“Fine,” Louis mutters before he adds pepper to his meal. I’m thinking about doing the same. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Taka eats his meal without any fuss or making a face. I think he’s probably trying to solve some sort of mathematical problem in his head. He does that when he’s quiet.
To my right, PC eats in silence but only because he’s looking at the news on his mini-tab, a companion device that can be used to access the Net or play different forms of media. He always likes to catch up on the events that are happening in the wider galaxy.
I try to avoid it as much as possible. Keep everything as close as possible to Clementine Jones’s world, and I’ll be happy.
Across from me, I see Orion watching us with a curious expression on his face. As an android, he doesn’t have to eat like the rest of us, which, for once, I’m jealous. He sits bolt upright and only speaks when spoken to. I bet he wants to go back to the bridge and listen to some more Vivaldi.
“What are you thinking?” I ask him, point-blank.
He blinks at me. “Thinking?”
“Yeah,” I say, twirling my fork to indicate the whole table. “It’s when your processor runs through a few different functions and computations to mull over some problems. Or it could be that you’re running through the probabilities of what you’ll be doing later. Or contemplating the bigger things in the universe. Thinking.”
Orion’s mouth curves up slightly. “Not much,” he says cryptically.
Of course. I nearly growl into my bowl of food. It’s been a shitty day.
“Holy space balls!” PC shouts as he scrolls to another article on his mini-tab.
“Language,” Louis mutters, even though he has the worst mouth out of us all. He’s been trying to teach Oliver some manners, but that’s been a challenge for him because of his foul vocabulary.
PC doesn’t seem to hear him, though, as he scrolls throu
gh the news article. “It’s gone!”
I frown, leaning over the mini-tab to see what the hell he’s talking about. “What’s gone?”
“Syn-Tech Port Delta,” he says. He taps on the screen, and the mini-tab opens up a hologram in the middle of the table, illuminating all our faces and the shadows of the mess hall. In front of us is a three-dimensional map of a space station in the 4th Galactic Quadrant in the Milky Way. A few pieces of information pop up, that the space port is home to over half a million people, that they manufacture pharmaceuticals, and that over 95% of the population are Lifers—people born under the Syn-Tech umbrella.
Then the headline flashes over the whole diagram: VIRUS KILLS ENTIRE POPULATION OF SPACE STATION. NO SURVIVORS.
I narrow my eyes. “What?” Daisy curses under her breath, and Taka just blinks at it curiously. Orion’s eyes are narrowed as well, and I can see that he’s saving the data in his memory banks based on the movement of his mechanical eyes.
Space is a dangerous place. Every new territory that humankind discovers is another chance for us to encounter something deadly, whether it’s asteroids, alien-life, warped time scales due to gravity, and more. Many, many people die every day from something like this. Except usually in a space port as big as Delta, there are measures in place to protect the populace.
It’s rare that something this big ever happens.
PC is still scrolling through his mini-tab as he continues to read through the article. “Says that some freighters brought it with them, and it wiped out the whole space station in a matter of days.”
“Do they know what virus?” Taka asks dazedly.
After a moment, PC shakes his head. “No.”
Louis sits forward with his hands clasped. “Is it quarantined, then?”
“Says so right here.” PC looks at the diagram again. “The Feds are planning on nuking the whole place and have eliminated any escapees who could possibly carry the virus away from the port.”
