by Sean Kennedy
He found Vincent Slate, still drunk, and still on the kitchen floor with his pale fifty year old body, face down in dried vomit as the stench of urine filling the room.
Faded battle-honor tattoos ran like lines of code across his shirtless back, survival scars from the mining wars, the first human conflict in space. Mac watched the names as Slate’s breath made them rise and fall.
He stood awhile, watching Vincent's back, listening to the pain as he wheezed each breath and hoped Jacob didn’t see his uncle like this.
How long did Vince have left? A year? Maybe two before whatever was killing him finished the job. And now, after all this time, someone needed him.
How do you know? Jacob had asked. A sensible question, Mac figured, perfectly reasonable to ask when one is abandoned in a quarantined junkyard by the corporation that killed your parents.
How do I know? Mac thought. How do I know anything?
Mac turned away from Vincent and let his long legs carry him out the front door. Each stride down the mismatched steps whispered he was doing the right thing.
A red barn emerged from behind the shifting cargo stacks as Mac weaved his way between them. It was large for a barn, but small for an aircraft hanger. Like the house, the siding and metal roofing was mismatched salvage, but still sturdy enough. He pulled on the metal fire door and slipped beyond, into the cavernous interior Mac called ‘The Shop.’
He let the heavy spring pull the door shut behind him. Shelved crates, slotted into rack walls, overflowed with circuitry salvaged from the quarantined ships as Mac made his way through his perimeter storage maze.
Thousands of LED light-strings hung in long loops from the rafters far above, like vines climbing a hovering forest. Scattered workbenches waited in the workspace beneath, laden with projects patiently waiting for his return.
Mac pulled away the rubber floor mat from beside the only empty bench, revealing the heavy wooden trapdoor to the barn’s old manure pit. He pulled on the recessed metal ring, and the door’s hinges howled in the stillness.
He slapped a switch on a wall as he descended the staircase into the cool dryness, marching towards a great red safe at the end of the concrete hall.
Mac laid his hand on the brass dial, and it turned in fluid silence. Technomantic safes blended strange and dangerous science and precision craftsmanship to create uncrackable containers. After the dial’s final turn, Mac pulled on the great brass handle and it swung the safe open in the same soundless motion.
The safe had enough space for a small duffle bag, along with a large stainless forty-four revolver in a brown leather shoulder holster, as well as three document folders, six stacked mass storage microdrives, and a small brown padded envelope resting on twenty five bars of gold bullion.
As he pulled out the faded duffel bag, the weight in his hands made him wonder how long it had been since he had touched it. Ten years had passed in the blink of an eye.
He unzipped the bag on the dusty floor for a quick check, and the familiarity of drills spurred Mac’s confidence on. He pulled out a Space Corps issue Neural Programming Helmet out to check if the rad-batteries were still good before replacing it and zipping up the duffel. With the strap across his shoulders, Mac pushed his way back up the steps.
His world settled into the absolute focus a mission brings. Projects that usually begged his attention were quiet as Mac marched through the shop. He moved past the shelving maze, out the heavy fire door, and into the evening’s light.
Halfway through the cargo spires, Mac felt it hit; that familiar wave of self-doubt came crashing in.
Was this the right thing?
Shouldn’t Slate have some say in this?
I could be wrong.
I've been wrong before...
He shut his eyes, stumbling and bracing himself against a cargo stack’s BBQ lid. They’d been out of the Corps too long. The old Vincent Slate, the combat pilot he knew before, would have understood the reasons Mac had to do this, but the drunken sick thing passed out on that floor was not that man.
Mac took a breath of oily air, and willed himself forward under the weight of his cerebral attack. He kept walking, pushing through the doubt and three paces later his mental noise started to fade; in five it had reduced to a mere stabbing pain at his temples.
Maybe this wasn’t the right thing, but he had to give the boy some kind of functional family for whatever time they had left. Whatever needed to happen would happen. Maybe good, maybe bad, but no matter what, Slate would be able to start fresh without the pills and booze.
He climbed the mismatched steps, moving through the front doors and into the kitchen where Slate still gurgled raspy breaths. Mac slid the bag off his shoulder and set it down. Without waiting, he unzipped it and pulled out the visorless shell of the neural programming helmet.
Laying it on the kitchen tile, Mac rummaged in the bag to find the electric shearing razor that came with each unit. He felt the tubular housing and pulled the hair clipper from the bag before thumbing the switch, letting the rad-batteries jump its blades into a hum.
He slid one of his coveralls’ legs under his partner's head, and then the humming blades into Vincent Slate’s salt and pepper hair. He sheared away the hair where the vomit had dried first, letting them fall to the floor.
Mac wondered what would happen if Slate woke.
Would he agree?
Would he be angry?
Would he try to hold on to the wreck he’d become?
But he didn’t wake.
The steady march of uselessness, the unwanted mission of being a civilian had worn away his mind with the pills and alcohol as surely as space sickness had eroded his body.
The years fell away from his friend as the gray hair fell to the floor in clumps. He slid the razor back into the duffel and gently lifted Slate’s head. Slipping the helmet on, the indicator lights came alive with neural contact. He tucked the corner of the bag under the helmet to keep it out of the crusty vomit pool on the kitchen tile.
He reached back into the duffel and found his last Space Corps reorientation drive, a small square neural map not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. He unwrapped the sealing plastic, disregarding the instructions that fell away like ticker tape as he slid the drive into the bay within the helmet’s crown.
As the drive lights came on, Mac pulled up his Immersion goggles from around his neck, snapping the strap over the back of his Kaizen cap. A hovering control panel hologram flashed open in his augmented reality display.
He logged into the helmet’s interface and began entering data. Being partners for three decades made filling in Vincent’s orientation data simple until he reached the entry for who would be Vincent Slate’s new Commander. After a moment, Mac smiled and keyed in the name ‘Jacob Faith’.
Mac scanned each data field three times before moving forward to the next screen. It felt good to be using Space Corps software again and a calm crept into Mac’s mind, breaking the waves of uncertainty.
He reached into the duffel bag and pulled out two auto-injectors. One was a nanite-booster; microscopic drones that, once injected into Slate's system, could temporarily strengthen the neural and nerve connections of his body. It was an aggressive way to establish a brain connection, and this would be Slate’s seventh time using it.
Maybe this will be his final burn.
Mac popped the cap off the injector and pressed the tube against his partner's leg until he felt the jerk of the needle drive home. The booze in his system might help the process by thinning his blood, but still Mac listened, desperate that Vincent's breathing might suddenly stop from the rush. When it didn’t, Mac pulled out the second injector, this one containing his last dose of syntheltryptamine.
Syntheltryptamine was the cerebral lubrication that allowed the neural programming to take place. Unlike the clumsy wipe or the scorched earth of a full reformatting procedure, the Kaizen neural programming helmets allowed the Space Corps to manipulate neural pathways and kee
p existing knowledge, or in this case, reapply training along past pathways in a kind of mental reset.
Mac held the second injector against the back of Slate’s other thigh. He wondered, as the tube jerked from the needle strike, if the nanites, syntheltryptamine, and whatever drugs Slate had taken, would make a terminal cocktail.
After a ten count, the nanites had smoothed the gurgle out of Slate's breathing, enough to proceed with the imprinting.
With a thought, Mac hit the start command in the AR interface, and another for the confirmation that popped-up. A whispering whine came from the helmet’s circuit fans, and Mac heard Slate gasp and gag for just a moment before his breathing steadied, and he was away.
He sat back, leaning cross-legged against the fridge and looked at what he had done with a heavy sigh. There was a chance something could go wrong.
There was always the chance...
His eyes fell again on Vincent Slate’s tattooed battle honors. Dozens of slaughters, now without even a unit to remember them, washed away by the politics of space and the power of the market.
They were the last holdouts, and that meant something, they still meant something. He wondered if having the Kaizen droids helping them around the place was part of the problem. With the slow neural decay his brand of space sickness brought, there wasn’t much to keep the Rainwalker Mission alive.
But now, there was someone else. Now there was his nephew.
Mac remembered the tears tetrazine couldn’t stop.
How do you know? Jacob's voice echoed in his mind. He looked at his partner stretched out on the kitchen floor and whispered.
“I promise.”
Chapter 3
Jacob bolted upright, his head whipping around as mumbled memories faded beyond his grasp. His white arcology suit was soaked with sweat and stuck to his skin as his gasping breath echoed around the room
Where am I?
He was still wearing the Shidoshi iGlasses, and they blinked the same location licensing message to answer his question.
The quarantine zone.
They had sent him into the quarantine zone to live with strangers. An unseen weight pressed him to lie down as his hand reached for the precious tetrazine pills.
He felt the pill bottle and curled his fingers around it like a tiny teddy bear. He could take another one; he wanted to, but something was stopping him, telling him he’d had enough.
The tears came hot and desperate as Jacob’s body shook. He felt like he was going to throw up between sobs, but he tried his best to slow his breathing and suppress the nausea, shaking until his tears made his pillow damp.
He closed his eyes, willing reality away, but when he opened them he found himself still in the dark attic. He breathed in and squeezed the tiny bottle.
What am I going to do?
The quarantine zone was a place for unlicensed people, or those afflicted with unspecified illness; a trash heap where everything was left to die. He remembered a tall man, Mac was his name.
Mac must be dying too, or he wouldn’t be here. Jacob thought as the blinking iGlasses arrow repeated the distance to the zone’s edge. Having run dry of tears, he didn’t know where he would end up, but knew he didn’t want to stay here. Jacob sat up and swung his feet over the side of the bunk.
His eyes adjusted to the window’s moonlight as a dim outline of the room came into focus. The attic door was open, calling out to him across the floor. The space around his bunk had gotten bigger since he laid down.
Jacob slowly stood, fighting a lightheadedness that almost made him sit back on the covers, but was able to steady himself by grabbing the top of the table lamp on his bunkside crate.
After a moment, Jacob felt his feet take a step towards the attic doorway. Past the attic door, the creak of his footsteps on the stairs made him expect a voice to call out, but none came.
At the base of the stairs, there was a stillness in the house. Moonlight beams shone through the blinds and curtains, giving just enough light for Jacob to see the colored glass of the front doors.
Stepping as lightly as he could, he crept past the collection of chairs and reading tables. The door handle turned, and the stained glass swung quietly outward. Jacob didn’t look back as he slipped out onto the farmhouse’s veranda.
The moonlight amplified the still silence of the yard. Cargo stack towers cast stark shadows like black doorways, and the night wind washed the strong petroleum scent away as it swept through the yard’s columns.
The moon shone its surreal light through a patchwork of dark clouds and across a kingdom invisible after the dawn. Jacob felt something looking back from the forest of stacks as he surveyed the landscape, as if the cargo piles were sentient, crowding around him.
If he could make it out of the quarantine zone by going back the way he came, he could at least get online; he could do something, figure something out. Following the arrow in the AR display, Jacob started down the steps.
The feeling of being watched stayed with him as he followed the iGlasses’ path through the stacks. Soon he recognized the area where the autopod had dropped him off. The cargo loader was gone, but the arrow highlighted a clear trail along the road.
Jacob looked back, but the stacks had already obscured the house. He wondered if he would be able to find it again through the artificial forest if he needed to. A twinge of panic mixed with the feelings of being observed, and he thought again of his pocket's pill bottle, but resisted the urge to take one. Instead, he took a breath and started slow and steady on his trek back along the illuminated path.
Rainclouds and anxiety monsters, swept in by the coastal winds, shifted with the cloud breaks in the dimming pulses of moonlight. The distance counter to the quarantine border descended with each step, and the cargo stacks drifted into the distance behind him.
A vision formed at the edges of his mind. He saw himself standing outside the Cornucopia, staring up from its foundation, and wondered who would care.
The monsters started to bite as the first drops of rain hissed around him. Jacob clenched his jaw as an immense pressure wave came at him from all sides, making him stumble. He closed his eyes, and the wave broke. His senses stabilized, and Jacob opened his eyes to see a break in the roadside fence through the rain, and beyond it, a flash of bright yellow caught his eye.
The light rain drops gave way to a bombing downpour as Jacob stepped through the broken fence, finding the boxy cab of another discarded and forgotten cargo loader, the exact same type he had seen at his uncle's house.
This time Jacob climbed up into the loader’s covered cab to escape the sheeting rain. The yellow seat’s cracked vinyl padding was soft and warmed quickly as the rain growled on the roof.
His breath quickened, and more than just the damp started him shivering. His eyes burned, and Jacob shut them against the tears of tetrazine withdrawal. A spear of sadness nailed him to the loader’s yellow seat. In the slight shelter of the loader’s cab, Jacob curled into a ball, and his sobs echoed through the rain into the shattered waste of the zone.
The embers of his life dimmed in the heavy rain as he trembled a while. Despair shook him, grinding his white arcology clothing into the yellow seat’s dust. He hoped his life’s flame would just go out, and he could rest here forever. Jacob looked past the edges of the loader’s cab and through the rain, to the AR illuminated path. He thought again of his small white pocket pills.
If I could just take one...
No! The pain was his; it was real. He wouldn’t let them take that from him too. The decision was a turning point in his mind, and it seemed to affect the weather. The sudden cloud burst tapered off and the high altitude winds allowed the moon’s light to fall on the trash-scape.
The petroleum stench seemed lessened by the rain, and Jacob felt a growing strength as he peered out of the cab’s shelter. He took a breath before pushing himself out of the seat, standing on the lip of the cab to look back towards the scrapyard manor.
The loader s
at on the crest of a subtle hill, and with the extra height, Jacob saw the cargo stacks like jagged teeth in the distance. He wondered how many of these cargo loaders were abandoned out in the zone, left to rot like the ships they’d worked on.
In the moonlight, Jacob saw the familiar Kaizen calligraphy logo, badly faded but still legible on the shoulder of the loader's right arm, like an old navy tattoo under layers of dirt.
“Thanks," Jacob said to the great hulk of metal. The rain clouds didn't look done yet, but there was enough of a gap to press on. He jumped to the damp ground and resumed his gradual plod.
He had passed the large blue pill, where the hard packed dirt became shattered asphalt, and felt the monster closing in on him again.
Hard despair was rattling its claws, and something inside told Jacob to run, seek shelter, even though he knew there was no way to hide from it.
The terror wave came faster this time, and Jacob lowered to his hands and knees, readying himself against the shaking that he knew would come again. The looming seizure tried to take hold, but Jacob crawled along the road, focusing on his breath and simple small movements.
He lifted his eyes, and past the night wind’s fluttering plastic, Jacob saw a broken sailboat, lying by the roadside, torn in half as though hit by a transport.
Fighting the monster, Jacob pulled himself towards the sailboat’s split hull as tears fell from his face. He wondered if someone could cry so hard that they’d die of dehydration, and collapsed in the keel’s darkness as a fresh wave of withdrawal swept over him.
Jacob wept. When he tried to cry out, despair allowed only a small choke to escape him. If it was possible to die of sadness, Jacob knew he would have died right there in the shadow of the broken sailboat. But he didn’t die, and with each breath his lungs told him they’d keep going no matter how he felt. He focused on his breathing, and slowly the despair faded faster than it had in the loader.
Jacob found the sadness exhausting. He thought about sleeping under the keel of this ship, and was peering into the interior of the bisected boat, when he heard something approaching from the road.
