Severance

by Chris Bucholz

  Most of the officers at the barricade had their backs turned, a ripple of laughter spreading through the group, which came to a sputtering halt when someone noticed their commanding officer bearing down on them. “Chief Thorias. Sir,” one of the brave ones said.

  Thorias walked right up to the group and stopped, standing with his hands behind his back. “Carry on. Don’t let me interrupt you.”

  The officer who spoke swallowed. “It’s nothing, sir.”

  Thorias fixed his gaze on the officer. “It wasn’t nothing. You were telling a joke. I’m in one of my rare joke–hearing moods right now. So please, go on.”

  Thorias waited while the young man weighed the pros and cons of disobeying a direct order versus telling a poorly thought out joke to a superior officer. “What’s the difference between a Chinese kid and an Othersider kid?” he finally said. Helot felt his jaw tighten. It wasn’t the first time he had heard that term used to describe the people on the other side of these barricades, but he still didn’t like it.

  A moment passed before the involuntary comedian delivered the punch line. “The Chinese kid doesn’t want to be a popsicle when he grows up.” The sound of a dozen officers shifting uncomfortably. Thorias pursed his lips and nodded. “Because they’re going to freeze to death,” the comedian added. The color began to drain from his face.

  “What’s the other kid being Chinese have to do with anything?” one of the other officers asked.

  “Nothing. I don’t know. It’s a new joke. I’m still working on it.”

  “It’s good,” Thorias said, still not laughing. “I think it’s funny.” To judge by his officers’ reactions, this was somehow much more intimidating than yelling. Thorias continued, “Just popping by to tell you to keep up the good work. Carry on.” He turned and began walking away, a thin smile on his face.

  “That joke was awful,” Helot said quietly as they left the barricade. “For a lot of reasons.” Thorias didn’t say anything. “You need me to list them?”

  “Just a joke,” Thorias said.

  Helot began collecting his words, needing to correct his valuable subordinate as delicately as possible. “We can’t…” he began saying, interrupted by the sight of Thorias flying into the air, arms, legs, and seemingly several other limbs all flailing uselessly. With a sickening thump, Thorias went down hard on his back.

  “Sir!” someone yelled. A half–dozen officers from the barricade ran over as Thorias gasped in pain. Helot stood back, still not sure what had happened. A pair of officers crouched beside Thorias, helping him up to a sitting position.

  “What the hell did I step on?” Thorias yelled. One hand clasped to his back, his head darted back and forth, looking at the patch of floor he had just trod over. Helot couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  One of the officers, the involuntary comedian, prodded his foot on the ground behind Thorias. “Careful, Brint,” another officer said, too late, as Brint’s foot slid out from under him, sending him into an uncomfortable looking set of splits. A strangled gasp escaped Brint’s lips as he rolled to his side, clutching himself.

  “What is that?” Thorias said, getting to his feet. His hand reached behind him for a moment before recoiling, clearly desperate to rub his ass, but unable to lest he further damage team morale and discipline.

  “It’s that slippery shit,” another officer said, his voice rising to be heard over Brint’s moans. “There’s patches of it all over the fourth level.” He got down on his hands and knees and probed the ground carefully with his hands. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out an orange marker, drawing a big circle with an X through it over the slick part.

  “Where’d it come from?” Thorias asked. “Where’d they come from? And why hasn’t anyone told me about this?”

  The officer looked up from his handiwork, indecision on his face. “Would you tell your boss that you just fell on the floor like an asshole?” He looked around. “We don’t know where they came from.”

  “It was that fucking little robot, I bet,” Brint said, who had managed to get to his knees, both hands still buried between his legs. “Remember?”

  “No one saw it except for you, Brint. And how would a robot make things slippery?”

  “Get back to your posts,” Thorias ordered them softly. The officers hustled back to the barricade, Brint hustling a bit slower than the rest. “I’ve seen enough,” he added, before blinking, seeming to remember who he was talking to. “How about you? Sir?”

  Helot didn’t smile, but it was a struggle. “I’ve seen enough, Chief.”

  But as they walked back to the nearest elevator, his mood darkened. If he had needed any further proof that he had less control over the situation than he should have, the sight of his security chief demolishing himself on a simple walk would have done it. Slippery shit? Tiny little robots? What the hell was happening on his ship?

  §

  As the light from the windows turned the hospital room from yellow to orange, there was a noticeable click as the lights on the ceiling turned on. Stein looked up at the ceiling in surprise, then down as another glass of Grape was set in front of her. Griese winked as he poured another for himself. On the other side of her bed sat Bruce and Ellen, also Graped up. Their vigil at Stein’s bedside had gotten quite a bit rowdier in the hours since Stein had woken up, much to her doctor’s dismay.

  “The infamous flying quadruple cockpunch!” Ellen squealed, doubling over with laughter. “I had completely forgot about that!”

  “The what?” Griese asked.

  “The infamous flying quadruple cockpunch!” Ellen repeated, no less delighted the second time around.

  “It was a lot more than four punches,” Bruce corrected her. “More like eight.”

  Ellen frowned. “Octocockpunch!” she squealed again.

  “Seriously, what are you guys talking about?” Stein asked. She had thought they were talking about something about the Breeders, Stein mostly just listening as her shady friends illuminated the shadier parts of their past.

  “It was when we were fabbing some stun grenades,” Ellen said, her eyes flicking down to her bag at the foot of the bed. Stein knew full well that she was the only one in the room not armed, although at least her friends were still making attempts to conceal their weapons. “We nearly got caught by a security officer,” Ellen continued. “Bruce saved us.”

  “With the octopunch?”

  “Octocockpunch,” Bruce corrected her.

  “I’m going to need a little more than that.”

  Ellen swirled the Grape around in her glass. “We were in one of the ratty fab plants we were using at the time over near America. I forget which one. Zimmer was there, Bruce, myself, and Vince.” Ellen looked around, checking that she had everyone’s attention, then continued. “So, one of the fab lines breaks down. Vince, Zimmer, and me are trying to start it up again when we hear a voice behind us: Put up your hands, you punks!”

  “This would be the victim of the infamous octocockpunch, then?” Stein asked.

  “Ahh, don’t spoil it,” Ellen scolded her. “Anyways, we turn around and there’s this little doofus of a security goon, and he’s got his little pop gun out. We freeze. Zimmer was carrying — he was supposed to be watching the street, but had come inside to help us with the machine. Bruce was…”

  “In the upstairs office,” Bruce filled in. “Standing guard.”

  Ellen snorted. “Guarding a fucking sandwich.”

  “And did you see any security officers eat that sandwich?”

  Stein smiled. “So, you’re standing there, hands up. What next?”

  Bruce drained his glass and tossed it across to Griese, drips of Grape specking the bedspread over Stein’s legs. Griese caught it and poured another refill. “Well, I hear all this commotion below, and after securing the sandwich,” he said, patting his stomach, “poked my head out the office window to have a look–see. Sure enough, there’s a security officer standing there with a pistol.
Directly below me.”

  “So, you jumped?” Griese asked.

  “I did.”

  A pregnant pause, as they waited for Bruce to continue. “And?” Stein finally asked.

  “He missed,” Ellen said with a smirk.

  “I didn’t miss. The ship moved.”

  Everyone but Bruce groaned. “The ship moved” was the standard excuse for every botched athletic feat on the Argos, something everyone learned as a child. In this particular case, there was a bit of truth to it, though only a bit; from that height, the Coriolis effect couldn’t have shifted Bruce’s descent more than half a meter.

  “So, we’re standing there, about to be shot or arrested, when the dumbest projectile that ever was falls out of the sky. Boom.” Ellen illustrated an explosion with her hands. “Everyone freezes. We’re staring at the cop, he’s staring at us, and we’re all staring at Bruce lying on the floor. Then the cop starts laughing. So, we start laughing.” Ellen paused here to refill her drink. “So, we’re laughing, right, enjoying the moment, when in a blur, fatty there spins his legs around and trips up the cop. Bruce pounces on top of him, knocks the gun away, and they start wrestling.” Grape sloshed out of Ellen’s cup as she pantomimed this. “Somehow, Bruce here gets the security guard into an advantageous position, and then WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM.”

  “The octocockpunch,” Stein said.

  “Not yet,” Bruce corrected her. “WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM. That’s eight.”

  “At which point Zimmer zapped the poor guy, preventing the possibility of a…whatever nine is cockpunch,” Ellen concluded.

  “Noctocockpunch,” Bruce suggested. Ellen threw her mostly empty cup at him, which bounced off his forehead and clattered to the floor. The group broke out laughing.

  Stein immediately regretted the laughter, as it sent jabs of pain up her right side. Something awful had happened to her upper arm in the crash, involving some pointy part of the van’s drive system driving itself through the floor and into her arm, nearly amputating it. Now wrapped up in a healing wrap, the arm didn’t hurt too badly anymore, so long as she didn’t move it. Her leg actually felt worse, despite just being bruised. Years of obtaining similar injuries in similar circumstances had caused her to start classifying them as Brucing. Seeing Griese looking at her with an expression of concern, she forced a smile. “How’s the play coming along?” she asked.

  Griese held up his hands. “It’s not. All my players disappeared. Something came up. Some sort of riot. Don’t know if you heard — you were gone for a while.”

  “Ahh.” She watched the quiet fellow for a moment. “But you’ve been keeping busy though?” No one had yet told her what exactly Griese and Ellen had been doing while she and Bruce were on the run, but from a couple of hints, she got the impression they had been busy with some kind of deadly new toy.

  Griese shifted in his chair and looked away. “Yeah.”

  “I won’t ask.”

  He smiled sadly, still looking away. “You just did.” Ellen gave her a small shake of her head. Bruce burped.

  The door opened, an interruption everyone was probably grateful for. Stein’s doctor, a lanky man called Berg, entered smiling. “How’s my famous patient?” he asked. He broke step for a moment, seemingly surprised by the number of people in the room.

  She shrugged, one arm doing a better job of it than the other. “Okay. How are you?”

  Berg seemed to seriously consider that question. “I’ll live,” he finally said, before laughing at his own joke. He poked something into his medical terminal. “You’ve been up for a few hours now, so I’d like to run a brief brain scan on you. If I may? Check for a concussion, cognitive damage, tau wave synchronization. It’s easier if you’re awake.” He looked at Stein’s friends, then down at the Grape stained bedspread, then to the bedside table and the three empty bottles standing vigil there. “Might be easier if we’re alone, too.”

  “I think he wants us to go, guys,” Bruce said, standing up abruptly, knocking his chair over backwards. “As a student of human behavior, that’s my reading of the situation.”

  Ellen rolled her eyes, but got up as well, patting Stein’s leg as she did so. “We’ll be just outside.”

  Stein smiled and watched her friends leave. She looked at the bottles on her bedside table and then up at Dr. Berg. “They’re just happy I’m alive.”

  Dr. Berg nodded. “Well, they can hardly be blamed for that.” He wheeled the bedside table out of the way and sat down beside her, poking some instructions into his terminal. “Could you look into the yellow light, please?” he asked, holding the terminal up to Stein. “Have you had any dizziness? Blurred vision?”

  “No,” Stein said to the yellow light. “Not lately. Not since I woke up.” She remembered the fuse torch and the flash of letters, and quickly weighed the pros and cons of keeping that secret to herself any longer. “I was seeing one weird thing though. These strange shapes in my eyes. Before the accident, actually.”

  He looked up from his terminal. “What did these shapes look like?”

  Stein swallowed. “They were letters. I saw an extremely bright light that nearly blinded me, and when I closed my eyes, I could see letters.”

  Berg’s eyebrows crept upwards. “What kind of light?”

  “It was the blade from a fusion cutting torch.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A really bright blue light.”

  Berg shook his head. “And it made you see shapes? That looked like letters?”

  “They were definitely letters. Is there any way you could, I don’t know, scan my eyes?” She pointed at the medical terminal.

  “For what? I still don’t know what you saw.” Berg tapped something into his terminal, eyes scanning the screen as he waggled his head back and forth. “Okay. I guess this couldn’t hurt. Now, look into the sensor once again. Good. Now look up. Look down. Look left. Open your eyes wider, please. Thank you. Look right. Your eyes are fi…huh.”

  “What?”

  The doctor scratched his forehead. “I honestly don’t know. But the terminal’s seen something.” There simply weren’t enough doctors on board the Argos for more than a handful to specialize in the various subfields of medicine. Almost all doctors were generalists, relying heavily on the semi–intelligent diagnostic and prescriptive recommendations of their instruments. “Hang on,” he said. “Okay. Look into the sensor again. This could be bright.”

  Stein looked directly into the sensor. A nearly blinding light appeared, which she struggled not to close her eyes against. Forcing them open, she watched the light as it started vibrating, flickering, and changing colors. The letters appeared in her eyes, fainter than before.

  “Wow. Do you see data?” Berg asked.

  “What?”

  He looked up from the terminal and squinted at her face. “The letters in your vision. Do they say ‘data’ in all caps? Like this?” He turned the terminal around and showed her a false color image of her retinas, the word “DATA” etched in badly misshapen letters.

  “It’s upside down and backwards.”

  Berg snorted. “I guess it would be from your side of the retina, yeah.” He chuckled. “That’s funny. Strange as hell, but funny.”

  “I was starting to think I was crazy. I mean, seriously, who the fuck is Vlad?” Stein rubbed her eyes, relieved. “Not that ‘data’ means a lot more to me.”

  Berg looked at the terminal again. “Looks like there’s maybe more off to the right. Or the left. Or whatever. An ‘O’ maybe.”

  “And it’s not like ‘data O’ means much to me, either,” Stein said. “So, why am I seeing it?”

  “Scanner says it’s probably a retinal tattoo.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, remembering her earlier reading. “Is that like a corneal tattoo?”

  Dr. Berg frowned. “Probably not, I’d think. I mean they’re different parts of the eye, aren’t they?” She watched his eyes scan rapidly back and forth over the terminal. “Okay. It�
��s a tattoo imprinted on the retina, visible only to the person who has it. They’re always visible, all the time, often obstructing huge portions of their vision. I guess a few religious folk tried this back on Earth. To overlay their holiest images on every thing they saw. Sounds like a great way to go insane if you ask me.”

  “Well, I’ve never had anything like that. And I don’t see this all the time.”

  “Says here it’s possible to do them so that they fluoresce only under certain lighting.”

  Stein snorted. “Okay, fine, but I’ve still never had anyone tattoo my eyes.”

  “Terminal says you have.”

  “How?”

  Berg set down the terminal and looked at her thoughtfully. “Implanted when you were asleep? Sedated? Do you like to party?” His eyes flicked down to the stained bedspread. “Sorry.” He scratched his chin. “Maybe when you were a child? Were your parents kind of crazy?”

  Stein rubbed her eyes. “My parents.” She shook her head, an idea popping loose as she did so. “Hey, you’ve heard of genetic tattoos? Artificial birthmarks? Could this be something like that?”

  Berg’s eyes widened. “Huh. I don’t see why not. But I also don’t see why.” He looked down at his terminal again. “Well. Maybe. The edges of the letters are a bit irregular. Blotchy. That’s characteristic of a genetic tattoo, I think. But that would mean your parents did this to you when you were conceived.”

  Stein swallowed. “You have my medical history on that thing, Doc?”

  “Of course.”

  “Who are my parents?”

  “What?”

  “Just look.”

  Berg paged through his terminal. “Oh. Huh. What?” He looked at Stein. “You’re a canned baby? Sorry.”

  “Uh–huh.”

  “I really am.” Berg put down his terminal and looked at the ground. “I didn’t actually know there were any of you left.” He smiled weakly.

  Stein looked out the window, at the last glow of the sunset. “They keep trying to make one every few decades or so. To see if we’re less crazy. I’m one of the success stories, apparently.”