by Joe Zieja
“Ah,” Mailn said. “Well, if Klein says it helps, then it helps. Whatever keeps him doing all the great work he’s doing up top.”
You mean all the great work I’m doing up top, Rogers thought bitterly. His suspicions about Klein had been growing every moment he saw the man work. From what he could tell, Klein hadn’t been doing anything other than writing speeches and polishing his Toastmasters’ certificate.
“Yep.” Rogers said.
“Yep.”
They stared at each other for a few long moments, before Rogers realized that they were expecting him to open the door.
“Oh,” he said. “Right. I have a little bit of a problem. My keycard doesn’t seem to work down here. I guess Admiral Klein forgot to add the codes while he was, ah, memorizing enemy battle formations.” Or making me memorize enemy battle formations.
“That’s no problem,” the Viking said, covering the distance between Rogers and the doorway in about a fifth of a step. A titillating sense of excitement washed over him as she came near, and he felt his resolve waver for a brief moment. She swiped her card in the reader and pressed the button, and the door opened to reveal a giant pile of trash and a very interesting smell.
“There you go,” the Viking said. “Smells like a sand dragon’s asshole in there.”
Even her profanity was exciting. Rogers took a deep breath—something he regretted immediately, given his surroundings—and slowly pushed the cart into the room.
Then he just stood there. He turned around. Mailn and the Viking were just standing there too, looking at him. Mailn raised her eyebrows.
“Well,” Rogers said, “I’ll see you later?”
“Just dump the stuff,” Mailn said. “Some of the marines are getting together on the training deck to throw each other around for a while. We thought you might like to come.”
Mailn stabbed a secretive finger at the Viking and winked at him. Was she trying to help Rogers’ romantic inclinations? Would it work?
Briefly, a vision flashed by of him and the Viking in the training room, alone, bodies sweaty and dressed in those old-fashioned karate uniforms, their belts loosely tied around their waists. She would throw him but not let go, landing on top of him as they rolled around on the mats while the room caught fire. Suddenly, the Viking would be outside, and she would kick down the door to rush in and rescue him from certain peril.
“Are you alright?” she would ask.
“Are you alright?” she really was asking.
“Um,” Rogers said, swallowing hard. He could feel a new layer of sweat coating his entire body. “No. I mean, yes. I’m fine. It’s just that I’ll have to, ah, catch up with you later. The admiral’s instructions were very specific. I need to take all of the clothes out of the laundry and fold them before I throw them away.”
“That seems kind of pointless,” Mailn said, frowning.
“He’s a very particular man,” Rogers said, realizing how stupid he must sound. “You should see what he does with his straw wrappers.” He held his hand up to his neck. “Stacks this high. Whatever it takes to be a genius, I guess, right? Ha? Ha?”
The Viking shrugged. “Whatever, metalhead. We’ll be in there for the next six or seven hours, so come by when you’re done and I’ll have Mailn here show you a thing or two.”
“That sounds great,” Rogers said. “I think. Thanks for helping me open the door.”
The two marines left, leaving Rogers with only his rapidly beating heart and a bunch of junk for company. The standby light overhead came on as the door closed, giving the whole place an eerie brown-red glow. The ambience—and the smell—made him feel like he was in one . . . particular district of Aaskerdal, an infamous city on Merida Prime. Rogers kind of wished he was there now, except that the Viking wouldn’t be there.
“Okay,” Rogers said. “Okay. Deep breath. Regroup.”
Who the hell was he talking to? First the random counting in his room before he’d tried to hang himself, now giving these strange instructions to someone who wasn’t there. This place was making him crazy.
Taking a quick glance around the room, he saw that this particular chute contained mostly metallic parts, which didn’t explain at all where the smell was coming from. As his eyes passed back over the doorframe leading to the corridor, however, he saw a small piece of cardboard-like material hanging from a string. On it were written the words HARD-BOILED EGGS AND SPOILED BEEF STEW. SCENTS BY SNAGGADIR’S.
The distance between the door and the hatch leading to open space seemed like a monstrous distance, and, in truth, it was. Rogers was basically walking through a large cylinder, the far end terminating in what looked like the three-toothed maw of a metallic giant. Above, wide tubes connected this room to different locations all throughout the ship where items could be discarded. Rogers wondered how they separated all the garbage, but if a computer could (almost) control a squadron of armed robots, it could probably tell the difference between one type of trash and another.
After one of the longest walks in his life, Rogers eventually found himself at the end of the corridor. The three-toothed door was infinitely larger than it had seemed when he’d entered the chute, and the task before him certainly didn’t seem any smaller either. Uncovering the laundry cart, he pulled out the components of the VMU and his provisions, which he’d sealed in cryo-wrap and tied together in manageable bundles. Once he got into open space, he’d have no problem loading them onto the Awesome.
The VMU wasn’t exactly his size—beggars couldn’t be choosers, after all—but thankfully, it was a little on the big side rather than too small. The thick layer of protective covering would fit snug against his skin when he vented the air pressure, anyway.
Vented the air pressure. Opened the chute to vacuum. Jumped out of a spaceship and floated to the Awesome with a bunch of packaged food and a prayer. Rogers felt his body shaking a little as he put his helmet on and started checking the suit’s systems. He really wasn’t meant for this kind of life. Sneaking around, running away, jumping out of spaceships. It was just too adventurous. Rogers preferred the quiet life, the classy drinks, cheating very discreetly at cards.
All the more reason to be done with this soon, he thought. He snapped the last clasps into place and turned on the VMU. The suit, reading the ambient pressure in the area, didn’t change anything, but he could hear several air gaskets opening as the suit prepared to do its job. Out in space, once he flipped the mobility switch on the back of his helmet, it would excrete little puffs of air, triggered by reading Rogers’ body movements, to get him where he wanted to go. It was a comfortable, familiar thing; he’d worn these thousands of times while making repairs on the outside of the ship. So, it was a terribly confusing feeling now, since he felt like he was about to shit himself.
He moved over to the control panel to the side of the door, making sure that the SEWR rats weren’t going to fly out the hatch as soon as it opened, and examined the controls. It wasn’t overly complicated; there was one large red button and one large green button. Above the red button was printed the word SHOOT, and above the green button was printed the word CHUTE. Rogers thought there might have been a better way to label it.
Underneath the control panel, a warning was issued in yellow lettering. ALL PERSONNEL MUST ENSURE ANY ITEMS AND PERSONNEL NOT INTENDED TO BE JETTISONED ARE FIRMLY SECURED, AND ALL VMUS ARE IN WORKING ORDER BEFORE MANUALLY VENTING THE CHUTE.
Under that sign was another warning.
FIRING THE CHUTE SUPERVISOR OR HIS PRIZE-WINNING BONSAI PLANT COLLECTION INTO FREE SPACE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED.
And another, this one printed on actual paper.
TRICKING THE CHUTE SUPERVISOR INTO FIRING HIMSELF OR HIS PRIZE-WINNING BONSAI PLANT COLLECTION INTO FREE SPACE IS ALSO STRICTLY PROHIBITED. ALSO, WHOEVER STOLE THE LABEL-MAKER, PLEASE BRING IT BACK TO ME ASAP.
Rogers’ finger hovered over the red button as he looked at his datapad. 1502 ship time. If the helmsman had listened to him, the targeting compute
r would have been off for two minutes and would remain off for the next twenty eight. Just enough to push the Awesome to full burn and get to the Un-Space point. If Hart had moved his ship like he said he would. If the engines were fixed like Hart said they were. If the MPF hadn’t confiscated all the credits stored locally on the Awesome’s systems.
So many ifs. But there was only one way to find out.
Then someone slapped him on the ass.
“Ah!” Rogers jumped in the air and turned around—no small feat with the added weight of the VMU—expecting to find Admiral Klein, or, worse, Barber Bot standing behind him.
But there was nothing. Nobody. Just piles of trash.
“What the hell?” Rogers said, his voice reverberating through the interior of his helmet.
Though . . . as he peered into the nearest pile of junk, there was something about it that looked familiar. He stepped forward and realized that it wasn’t just a pile of scrap metal; it was a pile of droid parts. A graveyard of shinies, as it were. And these weren’t just any shinies; some were the former members of the AIGCS that had been destroyed during the incident in the training room.
Rogers couldn’t remember the details, having been wounded during the courageous execution of his duty, of course, so he’d never gotten to see the extent of the damage. Now he could see it looked like a twisted surgeon suffering from tremors had taken a plasma cutter to them in the middle of an earthquake. They were barely recognizable; in fact, Rogers wouldn’t have known they were the droids at all except for one head that had somehow remained intact. Thick, jagged cuts ran all the way down their midsections, spilling their metallic and silicon interiors onto the floor, and a sort of strange engineering curiosity made Rogers bend down and examine them. How did they make these, anyway?
He saw computer boards, hydraulic systems, wires, actuators. Standard stuff, stuff you’d see in just about any piece of computer technology in modern times. One thing, however, stuck out to him. It was an open-faced cube of old-looking parts integrated with magnetic coils and other sophisticated tech, but Rogers had seen it before. It was a power generator that fed off the inertial motion and magnetic charges of artificial gravity generators. Really technical, smart stuff. The droids would never run out of power as long as they were inside a ship that had a modern gravity generator on it.
A question nagged at Rogers’ brain, but he was too busy screaming like a wounded lemur to focus on it at the moment, because something had grabbed him again.
He tried jumping up—jumping up just sort of seemed like what you do when you were startled—but he’d been squatting by the pile of destroyed robots. He succeeded, instead, in falling backward hard and doing a very poor impression of an inverted turtle, arms and legs flailing as he forgot how to control his own body.
“Who’s there?” he yelled, and received a poke in the kidney as an answer.
“Stop that!”
Another poke.
“When I find you, I’m going to press that red button and—”
Click.
The mobility switch on the back of his helmet had been turned on.
“Congratulations on activating the mobility mode of your Vacuum Mobility Unit!” a voice intoned in his ear. “You are entitled to one free—”
“Noooo!” Rogers cried as the movement of his foot caused the pressurized air in his suit to blow outward. He shot rapidly away from the trash pile and embedded his head firmly in another one, this one thankfully full of scraps of cushioning rather than metal rods and sharp edges. He reached up to free himself, and the air pockets in his arm units made sharp hissing noises as they reacted to his movements, sending him spinning around on the floor. The red light of the garbage chute turned the whole thing into a spinning-wheel painting, something out of a zip jack addict’s art studio.
He felt the rip in his suit as he grazed a jagged piece of scrap metal, felt it tug on the central air reservoir inside the unit, and then felt like the Viking had just elbow-dropped him. All of the air exploded out of his suit at once, warning lights flashing on the heads-up display of his helmet to tell him that the integrity of his suit had been compromised and that he was quickly running out of air reserves.
But Rogers didn’t really think about any of that, as he was too busy being flung halfway down the corridor by rapidly exiting air deposits.
When he finally came to a stop, feeling like O-71 inside a bingo machine, he couldn’t bring himself to move. Every part of him hurt in strange and new ways. Flashbacks of the incident with the droids popped into his head; he instinctively curled into a ball and whimpered, expecting to be stepped on by one of their giant metal legs any second. Thankfully, nothing more serious happened than the last bits of air leaving the tears in his suit and making a flatulent noise.
“Uhh . . .” Rogers said analytically.
Slowly, he pulled himself to his feet and looked back toward the refuse heap he’d been examining when someone had obviously assaulted him. He could see nothing other than a pile of metal, glinting softly in the red glow of the overhead lights. But something had grabbed him.
Rogers snuck down the hallway, bracing himself after every step for a team of garbage ninjas to rush out of the shadows and deal him the final blow. The corridor was quiet. No ninjas. Stillness.
“CALL FUNCTION [ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK!]”
Rogers squealed and dove to the side of the corridor, expecting the mangled remnants of the AIGCS droids to come to life and begin their zombie/droid assault. But no matter how tightly he gripped his head between his knees and muttered nonsensical gibberish, the Attack! Attack! Attack! never came.
“Ha,” a voice said, “you humans fall for that every time.”
Peeking up from his armadillo defense, Rogers found himself nearly nose to nose with the disembodied head of a droid. At least, it seemed that way at first. It was actually the disembodied torso—could you really be disembodied if the body was included?—with the head and one arm attached. It might have been a droid that hadn’t been disassembled properly before it was dumped down here. It looked older, worn around the edges. A little bit of rust here and there, perhaps, though it was difficult for Rogers to tell in the light.
“Who are you?” Rogers asked, then frowned. “You look too old to be a Froid.”
The droid’s head twitched to one side, then made an ambiguous computation noise.
“What’s a Froid?”
“Those new droids that have the Freudian Chip installed in them. But they’re new.” Rogers pointed at him. “You’re old, but you talk like the new ones.”
“Oh, I have one of those. I’m not old,” the droid said. “I’m corroded. There’s a difference.”
Rogers walked over to where the droid was peeking out from the pile of metal to get a closer look. It looked similar to the Froids, he realized, but there was something off. Something unfinished about it. The important part of its torso was still intact, if very dented, probably thanks to the mountains of metallic garbage being flung on top of it.
“You ruined my escape plan, you know,” Rogers said.
“Oh,” the droid replied. “I was just having some fun. I don’t get a lot of company.”
Raising his eyebrow, Rogers gave the droid an appraising look. “Since when do droids care about company?”
“I don’t know. Are you upset that I ruined your escape?”
Rogers sat down and took off his helmet. “No. Yes. I don’t know.” He sighed. “I probably wouldn’t have made it, anyway. I don’t know anything about this adventuring stuff. I just want to drink beer and play cards. Is that so much to ask?”
The droid didn’t respond. It didn’t do anything much at all, really. Just stuck out of the garbage pile like a weed from a garden of metal, staring at Rogers expectantly. Could droids look expectant? Rogers thought they always sort of looked that way. Whoever had designed their “faces” seemed to favor a look that walked the intersection of boredom, condescension, and expectancy.
“Anyway,” Rogers said, looking up at the ceiling, “what are you doing down here? Droids need to be fully wiped before they’re destroyed. And how did you get all that damage?”
“It was those EXPLETIVE pieces of OBSCENITIES in the maintenance bay!” the droid said in a burst of volume. “They have their heads so far up their ANATOMICAL REFERENCE that they can’t think straight!”
Rogers frowned. “Are . . . are you trying to swear?”
“Of course I’m trying to swear, you EXPLETIVE! How else am I supposed to express myself ?”
“I didn’t really know droids were into expressing themselves.”
“They’re not,” the droid said, his anger seemingly gone. “I’m a prototype of the Freudian Chip droids that you call Froids. My serial number is PFC-D-24. What is your serial number?”
This droid was actually trying to introduce itself and make pleasantries. It made Rogers a little uncomfortable. Had it been discarded because the Freudian Chip didn’t work properly?
“I don’t have a serial number,” Rogers said. “My name is Rogers.”
“I see,” D-24 said, making another ambiguous computation noise. It kind of sounded like an old video game, and, in a way, it was almost pleasant. A lot better than the harsh, guttural noises that the standard droids made.
“So, Serial Number Rogers . . .”
“Just Rogers.”
“So, Just Rogers . . .” The droid made a noise that might have been considered a chuckle.
Rogers paused a moment, frowning. “Are you being ridiculous on purpose?” Rogers asked.
“Yes,” D-24 responded. “Was it funny?”
Funny? The droid was asking him if he was being funny? Since when did droids care about company, and expressing themselves, and being funny? This prototype was strange indeed.
“Actually,” Rogers said, thinking about it for a second, “it kind of was.”
“This pleases me,” D-24 said. “I will add this joke to my database and reserve it for later use.”
“I still don’t understand how you ended up down here,” Rogers said, “without being properly deactivated.”
