These separatists. They had, at one time, been part of a fearsome and powerful corporation-state, the scourge of the southern hemisphere, but now, because they couldn’t bother to cough up a few kroner to unlock the chemical-rights management that the Denmark Corporation had lawfully, peacefully, and reasonably imposed on their water, they were reduced to agrarian hopelessness, cut-rate electronics sales, and an untalented dictatorship. So sad. And so unnerving, too. Life can turn on an øre if you’re not careful.
“Hey, Sigrid,” I said.
Sigrid was studying her face in a hand mirror. She pulled at the skin beneath her eyes, sighed, tucked a pink plastic dahlia behind her ear to see if it made a difference. “In my heart I’m a princess,” she said.
“Hey, Sigrid, I was just thinking. Have you ever felt like you could’ve done better?”
“Better than what?”
“I don’t know.” I glanced around at the sweaty little room, at the drab industrial furniture, at the assortment of souvenir coffee mugs from different parts of the world. “Better,” I said.
“Yeah, well, we could’ve done a lot worse too.”
“Mmm,” I said. “I suppose.”
“You suppose. Come on now. We’ve got good pay here, decent benefits, reasonable vacation. Lots of folks would give their left æggestok for a job like yours.”
And that was true enough, as far as it went. Sigrid was sometimes partially right about a certain number of things, and this could’ve been one of them. These jobs weren’t bad compared to most. We could have worked on a Venezuelan zinc scow, after all. But it wasn’t all blue skies and puppy dogs, was it? There was also a lot of unproductive stress aboard the Skanderbörg—a lot of job dissatisfaction. The crew was overworked in unchallenging ways. They felt unappreciated, expendable. Just last week, Gerrit in Livestock had his forearm chewed off by a breeding pig. Do you think he got a personal day? His team leader sent him down to Pharmacy, and he was back at work the next morning. A month before that, Karel in Weapons died in a freak Krag-Jørgensen blowback event. Rather than sending him off in a funeral raft, however, the bean counters at head office decided they’d dump his body in trademarking fluid and squirt the slop over some separatist chinchilla ranches in the eastern territories. Put that kind of stress and dissatisfaction in a small, poorly ventilated area like the Skanderbörg, toss in some recreational drugs and a constant fear of job loss and death, and what did you get? A volatile situation.
“All that peripheral stuff,” I said. “The holiday bonus. The dental. It can be a bit of a trap, can’t it? It lulls you into a false sense of security, keeps you from doing the things you really want to do.”
“And what is it, pray tell, that you want to do?”
“I don’t know. Something meaningful. Get out a bit, see the world.”
“Oh, come off it. What’s there to see that you can’t watch on holo?”
It didn’t take much thought. “The sex caves of Chernobyl. The ruins of the L’Oréal Pleasurelands. The Great Wall of Price-WaterhouseChina. Shall I go on?”
Sigrid barked out a joyless laugh. “Your problem is you have no problem. It’s a luxury of the underemployed. But comes a day when—” She stopped, bracing herself against the arm of her chair. “What was that?”
A series of loud, chiming reports, like firecrackers maybe, or bursting metallic popcorn kernels, was issuing from the stern of the barge, and the blue hull breach warning light by the fridge began to strobe.
“Fucking hell,” she said. “That can’t be good.”
A moment later the loudspeaker crackled, and an amplified throat cleared itself. It was Clausen, our skipper.
“Umm, hello?” he said. “Sigrid? Hans? You there?”
I glanced over at Sigrid, who just rolled her eyes and shook her head. She couldn’t stand Clausen. No one could stand Clausen. He was vain and stupid and indecisive, like all commanders. “Yep,” I said. “We’re here.”
“What, uh, what’s going on down there?”
“Big bang, strobey light.”
“Umm, okay, would you mind checking it out? Something’s, I think, fucked up somewhere.”
“All right,” I said, trying to shut down the conversation. “Sure. Fine. Whatever.”
Sigrid moaned and mashed the heel of her palm into her forehead. Her face turned blue, then pale, then blue, then pale, in the warning light. I’d screwed up—I knew it as soon as I’d given in to Clausen. I should have lied, told him we were in the middle of some other, more pressing disaster.
I shrugged out an apology, set down my coffee, and stood up. And Sigrid? She plucked a long, blonde hair off her knee, examined her cuticles, then dug some grunge out of the corner of her eye, but finally she stood up too. Then, slowly as possible, we went out to the processing floor to take a look.
Maybe I’d just been in the job too long, you know? Maybe I’d grown old and lazy and witless, no longer tuned in to the things that needed my attention. But, after several long seconds of half-assed examination, it was clear, to me at least, that nothing was wrong in our section of the Skanderbörg. The processing floor was just as we left it—a disgrace. Wrenches and screwdrivers scattered everywhere, buckets of stagnant seawater, plates of mossy, partially eaten sandwiches. A broken ping-pong table stood in one corner, piled high now with wrappers and pistachio shells and unemptied ashtrays. Not up to Enforcement standards, but definitely normal.
Sigrid, though, had other opinions. Picking her way through the debris, she’d stop, shake her head, and say things like, “This is it. Time’s up. Time to pay the bill.” She’d sniff at the air and say, “Something’s gone sour.” At one point, she grabbed her head and screamed. All of which wasn’t as disturbing as you’d think. A few years back, Sigrid had contracted Mongolian Gonorrhoea on shore leave, and, since then, once or twice a week, she’d have auras, vomiting, seizures, and psychotic/spiritual episodes. I assumed this was what was going on now.
She inhaled deeply, pointing toward the stern. “It’s coming from the hopper.”
“Okay.” I couldn’t smell a thing, but decided to take her word for it. “My proposal, then, is that we get as far away from the hopper as we can.”
“Come on, you pussy. It’s time to face our destiny.”
“What destiny?” I said.
She shot me a sour, disgusted look. “What are you, a soldier or a little girl?”
“Hold on, I know the answer to this one. Little girl?”
She jabbed me in the gut, then pushed me toward a knee-high vent that opened into a wall of pipes. This was the entrance to the hopper room. One at a time, we ducked down and shuffled our way through a warren of grease-caked machinery until, half a minute later, we reached the hopper. And I’m not afraid to admit it: I was worried. I mean, usually I loved this room, even if it did smell of fish heads and whatnot. But today? My heart was pounding, my armpits soaking. Every nerve ending was keyed into the possibility of my ruination.
I stepped into the room, looked around cautiously. Just as before, nothing seemed particularly out of place or strange in here. Like always, a loud, continuous burbling filled the joint. And the hopper—which was basically just a churning green pond sunk into the middle of the floor—looked fine too. Dim overhead lights bounced off the water and flickered on the pockmarked walls. It was a veritable spa.
Sigrid, of course, being Sigrid, didn’t worry about safety precautions. She charged right into the room, randomly flipping wall switches, pushing buttons to see what would happen. Only as a last resort, after nothing happened, did she turn her attention to the hopper.
She circled it slowly, thoughtfully, sucking in its aroma.
“There’s something down there,” she said.
“Something like what?”
She got down on all fours and squinted deep into the amoebic murk. “I don’t know,” she said. “Like a turtle or something. But it’s not moving.”
“A turtle? It must’ve chewed through the filters.”
“Whatever it did, it really wanted to get in here.”
I peered into the water and moaned. There was something down there all right. A black, turtle-shaped something, undulating in the gloom. “Little turtle, do you have any idea how much work you’ve caused us?”
Sigrid went over to the drainage valve and wrenched it to the open position. There was a muffled clunking sound deep inside the hopper, and the water flickered, but that was it—the level didn’t drop.
“We’ll have to drain it manually,” she said.
“Of course,” I said. “Why should anything ever be easy?”
She horked up a phlegm ball and spat it into the water. “Fuck, man, get some perspective. It’s just an itty-bitty turtle. What if it were, I don’t know, a cuttlefish? What would we do then?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big scary cuttlefish. Whatever.”
I’d heard this talk a thousand times before. Sigrid loved animals, land and sea, with a murderous passion. Cats, turtles, wolves, elephants . . . she’d save any one of them before lifting a pinkie to help a human. Any one of them, that is, except a cuttlefish, a creature for which, for reasons she would never explain, she nurtured an almost psychopathic hatred.
“Well?” Sigrid said, glaring down at her watch and then up at me.
“Well what?”
“Are you going to get some pumps, you lazy yob?”
All that anxiety over a turtle. Sweet fucking Odin. It was so typical of the kind of distorted thinking patterns I fell into. I tried to predict the future, I discounted positive outcomes, and I catastrophized minor events. The old Hans would’ve had none of that. He would’ve embraced his annihilation. But the new Hans? He was weak, just like Sigrid had said. He was limp-dicked and useless. The new Hans had fallen in love with breathing.
When I got back to the processing floor, I went straight over to the ping-pong table, then spent miserable minutes rummaging around underneath. Last time I’d checked, the manual pumps had been stashed there, but typically, so typically, they’d gone missing. Misplaced maybe; stolen probably, by some amphetamine-addled seaman who’d traded them for dope at our last port of call. I just sat there for a moment, staring mindlessly, furiously, at the floor until I heard someone knocking softly on the doorframe.
“Hans?”
I peered out from under the table to see Piroska standing in the doorway.
“P!” I said. “What are you doing here?”
She shrugged and smiled, riffling a hand through the back of her hair self-consciously. “Einar gave me a couple hours of liberty, if you can believe it, so I thought I’d drop by.”
I pulled myself off of the floor to get a better look at her— because Piroska didn’t look like Piroska anymore. Her hair was up in elaborate, old-fashioned loops on the top of her head. Her lips and cheeks and eyelids were smeared with artless blobs of makeup, garish reds and blues, like a child’s idea of a pretty lady. And her dress! It was an emerald-green number with puffy sleeves, tightly fitted waist, and cleavage-squeezing bodice. I might have thought she was joking if her expression didn’t seem so sincere.
“You look aggravated,” she said. “Is this a bad time?”
I thought about Sigrid, toiling away in the heat and stink of the hopper room. She’d be wondering what the hell was taking me so long. Emergency protocol demanded that I get back there right away, with or without the pumps, but because I was a people pleaser and because I couldn’t stop looking at Piroska’s breasts, I said, “No, not at all. This is a beautiful time.”
She strolled into the room, craning her neck to peek around corners and just generally check out the state of things.
“No Sigrid?” she said.
“Hopper.”
Piroska stood in front of me and pressed a hand against my sternum. She glanced up shyly, as though gathering courage, then quickly looked away.
“Umm,” she said.
“Yes?”
She reached out an index finger and began to draw little infinity symbols on my chest. “I know,” she said, slowly, choosing her words carefully, “I’ve been giving you mixed signals lately, and there’s, well, there’s sort of been a reason for it.”
“And what might that be?”
She sighed. She looked down at her feet, then up at my face, then down at her feet, then up at my face. Her chin quivered, as though she were about to burst into tears. After a minute or two, she shifted from one foot to the other, coughed twice to buy herself some time, then said, “I’m, uh . . . I’ve been umm. . .” She shut her eyes and forced out the words. “Technically?” she said. “I’m, uh, technically I’m, uh . . . dead.”
Her body tensed up: bracing itself for my reaction.
It took a second for the information to sink in. I didn’t quite hear it, I didn’t quite hear it—and then I heard it. And my first instinct was to step back, to put some space between me and the dead thing.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.”
There was a long pause, neither of us knowing what to look at or how to behave. My body still wanted her, I could feel it, but my mind? My mind said no way. From the time I was a kid, I’d been told to stay away from rebirthed girls. They’d seen things no human should see. They stunk of formaldehyde. They were walking cadavers, incapable of love or joy, sadness or sympathy. They were thieves and liars and con artists, all of them.
She lifted a hand to my chest. “Say something,” she said.
But I had nothing to say. My head was full of noise. For one thing, I was distracted by the hand, still pressed against my sternum. Did I like it there? Was I grossed out? I couldn’t tell.
“How,” I said, “How did you. How did you come to be—”
“Marauders.”
I lost my balance for a second. I thought I’d misheard. “You mean, Hungarian Marauders?” I laughed—a socially inappropriate thing to do. But it was just that I didn’t quite believe her.
She nodded.
“So does that mean you’re . . .?”
“A hundred and seventy years old,” she said.
“Fuck me.” Then, catching myself: “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s an understandable reaction.”
The Hungarian Marauders had been a notoriously vicious and well-organized band of thugs, CEOs, and drug dealers that, until about a hundred years ago, had sacked and rebranded the better part of the Central Eurasian Republic. I’d learned about them during “Conquered Nations Week” on the V!K!NG! Network. Their brutal business practices had taken on an almost mythical status over the years, and it was well understood that if it hadn’t been for the benevolent intervention of our armies, they would have overrun the world like so many plague-ridden rats. Piroska had been part of all of that. I had to admit it: beneath my disgust, I was a bit awestruck.
“So, I mean, why did they. . .?”
She shrugged. “My mom was the CEO of a rival multinational. Typical encroachment issues—she was trying to muscle in on Marauder territory. I was a warning.” She pulled her hand off my chest and showed me her wrist. “See?” A faint, serrated scar cut across the base of her palm, separating the pale skin of her hand from the even paler skin of her forearm.
“What am I looking at?”
“They cut off my hands and feet,” she said, “and left me in the road to bleed out.”
So many things were beginning to make sense. The troubles we’d been having, Piroska’s hesitation and mixed signals—it was all clicking into place. She was afraid, quite rightly, of my revulsion.
I scanned the room, hoping for something concrete and mundane and familiar to latch on to. The first thing that did it was my coffee mug. It was sitting on a clipboard, which was sitting on a toolbox, which was sitting on a battered metal side table. The mug was burgundy, gleaming in the fluorescence. On it, an illustration of palm trees and nineteenth dynasty Viking sodhut dwellings with the words, “Get Away From The Everyday— Try the New York Archipelago.”
Dead g
irls have too much baggage, I thought. They have issues. They bring these into the relationship with them. Never go out with a dead girl.
“What are you thinking?” she said.
I was about to say something then. Something important. Something heartbreaking and perceptive and devastating—but I couldn’t quite find the words. And then it was too late because, one split-second later, everything in the room—Sigrid’s stuffed animals, toolboxes, chairs—lifted into the air and flew around like frightened birds. Ratchets and hammers and wrenches narrowly missed my head as they whipped past. Piroska too—she tumbled by and glued herself to the wall, which had magically turned into the floor. My own feet floated off of the linoleum. I spun around and around, helplessly, until I smashed against the wall beside her.
The room went black.
And the walls began to weep.
How long had I been sleeping? An hour? An afternoon? I had no way of knowing. But my sleep had been full of dreams. I’d been lying on a roadside, floating in a pool of gently lapping blood. My hands and feet had been severed from my body and placed on top of my chest. Up above—a warm, blue sky, a circle of lazy trees. A tiny kestrel flew by, once, twice, then lit down on my face and tap-tap-tapped on my forehead.
My eyes flickered open.
Up above, I saw a ceiling, but not the one I remembered. This new ceiling was plastered with unicorn calendars and dotted with electrical outlets, from which ceramic lamps, still dimly glowing, dangled by their cords. The holoframes up there had broken loose and were projecting at random spots across the room: Miss Copenhagen posing in her swimsuit on top of a table saw; three puppies in a bucket suspended midair. Directly above my head, a fire extinguisher swayed dangerously by one thin strap, foam leaking from its hose and dripping onto a spot between my eyebrows.
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