“Just a minute, I’m—”
“Letho!” the voice interrupted.
Baran Gall, his supervisor, was standing behind him, a little too close. Letho could feel the man’s slight but round belly nudging his shoulder. He turned, and the man stepped back. The belly looked distended on Mr. Gall’s thin frame and reminded Letho of starving people he had once seen in a videodoc from Eursus.
“Hey, I was just calling you! Look at this story!” Letho said, grinning from ear to ear.
“Yeah, I know about it already. Listen, you haven’t checked your email, have you?”
The onion-sweet smell of Mr. Gall’s sweat was overpowering at close range.
“No, why?” Letho asked, firing a look at his boss that said are you nuts even as he gestured at the headline on the monitor.
“Well, for starters, you’re so late to work today that it defies all logic or description. And this makes the third time this quarter!”
Mr. Gall’s tiny eyes flared, his thin features drawn and drooping on a head that was too big for them.
“I know, I know, and I’m really sorry. But what about the story?”
Mr. Gall took a deep breath, composing himself. “Yeah, about the story. Turns out some punk kids hacked the communication servers and sent out a fake distress call. I just got the call from the civility sector. Instructions are to disregard. We aren’t printing this on the news site.”
Letho’s grin faded.
“Anyways, the story is being purged from the system,” said Baran, his eyes darting between Letho and the computer screen, like beetles scattering after a light has been turned on. Sure enough, the story had disappeared from his feed.
“Really? Are they sure? I mean, if Fulcrum stations are getting attacked, don’t you think that people should know about it?” Letho asked, watching his supervisor’s eyes. They darted down and to the right as Baran prepared to speak.
“Nope, false alarm,” he said, chuckling. “Letho, I need to see you in my office. We have to talk about...” Baran paused. “…things. Lots of things. See you in fifteen.”
Letho’s stomach rolled into a taut little ball of pure anxiety.
It’s over. You’ve finally done it, his panicked mind said.
But then another thought, one that tumbled past the firewall of chemicals the Fulcrum station had installed in his brain.
Maybe after the dust settles you’ll finally be free.
He started to wonder if he had finally gone insane, but he couldn’t help but savor the way his arms and legs tingled with excitement, the way his stomach unclenched just a little. He didn’t even attempt to work; he just sat and waited for fifteen minutes to pass. When it finally did, he pressed the button on the top right of his display, and held it for a second. The screen blinked out hard; some of the text and images were still smeared across it as pixels and the electricity that stimulated them faded. He stood up from his desk, smiling, and felt purpose in his strides as he headed to his boss’s office, toward what could only be financial doom and professional suicide. He knocked on the door.
“Letho Ferron, Red Sector, designation 0219, please enter,” said Mr. Gall.
Letho opened the door and stepped into his boss’s small office.
“Letho, please sit down.” Mr. Gall seemed to be doing his best to sound cordial.
Baran Gall’s demeanor had changed in fifteen minutes. There was grittiness to his voice, and Letho didn’t like way that his jaws clenched and his eyes refused to engage Letho’s. It all signaled pissed off.
Letho took a seat in front of the man’s steel desk. He noticed the raised rings from coffee mugs, the patina of nicks and scratches on the faux-wood-grain surface, the missing flecks of industrial gray paint.
His boss was consuming breakfast, and it was an unpleasant sight. Letho smiled, uncomfortable as he watched bits of detritus touch down on his boss’s jumpsuit.
“I was wondering,” Gall said in a flat, controlled voice, “why you can’t seem to get to your commuter shuttle on time like the rest of the people in your sector?”
Letho considered several replies. There was, of course, the one that his brain deemed the appropriate response: to exaggerate work-related stress, anxiety, depression and the like. But Letho was feeling a little stirred up today. He decided to go with defiant. His internal voice yammered like the copilot of a plane going down in flames.
“Well, Barry. Can I call you Barry?” Letho paused, the edges of his lips curling into a slow grin that might someday cause a woman’s heart to flutter. He didn’t wait for his boss to answer. “Let’s be honest here. I hate my job. I think the real question here is: how do you get up in the morning and show up to work on time? I mean, honestly, of the two of us, whose behavior is more absurd?”
Letho had never spoken like this to a person out loud. He had thought like this a thousand times over a thousand cups of bad coffee, but today it was happening in the meat-space. And he didn’t care. The sensations didn’t feel like crazy; they felt like strength.
In that moment, Letho realized that he despised his boss. He hated the man’s overt use of business-perfect prose, dripping with condescension and a misplaced sense of superiority.
Please confirm. Please advise. We all need to make an effort to increase productivity. I know we can work together and improve. Sincerely, Baran Gall.
He hated the harsh gleam of the man’s bald pate under the harsh lights, and the way that his smile never quite reached his pitted, rodent eyes.
But most of all he hated what this man represented. Letho had finally found an outlet for what he perceived as unused, unappreciated intelligence, and he focused it all on the man before him with laser-like intensity. As Letho saw things, Baran’s job was to recognize Letho’s gifts and reward them. The idea that Letho might not have earned such things yet was nowhere to be found in his young, angry mind.
Baran’s expression could only be described as stupefied.
“Well, Letho, I really don’t know what to say to that. It’s what you are expected to do. And you get paid well to do the work that you do—which, I might add, has been of very poor quality as of late.”
“Maybe if you gave me an assignment with some actual substance…”
“And why would I do that, Letho? Why would I give you something like that when you continually disrespect everything we do here by showing up late and turning in what can at best be described as half-assed reports? The only thing worth printing that you’ve generated of late was the triplet story, which, by the way, is the only reason I am not throwing you out of my office right now. You have potential, Letho; why are you wasting it?” Mr. Gall’s voice was getting higher and shriller as frustration overtook him.
Years later, when Letho ruminated on this pivotal point in his life, he would feel shame for how he had treated Mr. Gall, who had only been trying to help him. But in the moment, he couldn’t see that Mr. Gall’s last statement was an olive branch, a way out. Letho bull-rushed right past it, as many young men had done before, and would continue to do, for all time.
“I ask myself the same question all the time, boss. I mean, what the hell are we doing here? What is all this? Seriously! Writing stories about watermelons and babies on a space station in the middle of nowhere? What the hell?”
Now Letho’s voice was rising. Mr. Gall was speechless; greater men than the both of them had devoted their entire lives to this very question, living in cloisters, taking vows of silence, trying not to step on bugs that might be loved ones from the past.
“Letho…” Baran Gall said in a voice that had dropped an octave and had become a near-whisper. “Why don’t you sit down?”
Letho realized he was standing, fists clenched. But he didn’t sit down. He took a deep breath, trying to douse the fires inside that even now turned his skin a bright red and made it hard to breathe.
“I quit!” he said.
“That would be impossible, Letho. That’s not how this system works. Everyone has an as
signed task, and you can’t just walk out on it. No one does that, except for those that end up in the low-income sector. Why don’t you just sit down, and let’s talk about this?”
“Well, I’m doing it. It’s happening right now, Barry. What are you going to do, have station inspectors carry me to work, push my fingers down on the keyboard? I am done. I won’t write another pointless article.”
At some point in the exchange, his boss had become the calm one. The one in control.
“Letho, I want you to think carefully about what you’re doing. It’s not too late to fix this. The station has very good counseling programs, and chemical adjustments can be done—”
“I don’t want to be chemically adjusted, you pompous ass!” Letho was a bombastic orator, an actor chewing scenery in his own epic. In a fit he slapped Baran Gall’s coffee mug, sending a hot brown spray onto Gall’s jumpsuit, an act that he would never forget, and always regret.
Gall gasped, but did not stand and retaliate as Letho thought he might. His inability to become enraged at this egregious slight made Letho pity the man.
As Letho’s anger receded a little, it dawned on him: this wasn’t some sick machination to keep Letho down; they were both trapped in a system that was designed to hold people in place, alive but not kicking. This man was just doing his job, and probably had a couple of mouths to feed back home. Letho envisioned a hypothetical little girl who just might think that Baran Gall had hung the stars that she saw out the windows of the station. And in his guilt-descent, Letho failed to see Mr. Gall press a red security button under his desk.
“Mr. Gall, I am sorry, I don’t know what I—”
“It’s all right, Letho. It’s going to be all right. Just have a seat. We’ll figure it out.”
Behind him, the door opened, and two station inspectors filed into the office. Letho whirled to look them in the eye, and their hands went snake-quick to stun devices on their belts. They were garbed in full riot gear. Spherical black helmets with translucent orange faceguards that displayed an informational overlay. Thick, angular plates of armor, made of some dark alloy with a reddish-brown mesh suit underneath. Letho turned back to Mr. Gall, unbidden tears threatening to spill from his eyes.
Please don’t let me cry in front of these men, he thought.
“You called security on me?” Letho stammered.
You did this, Letho. Not him.
“Hey buddy, we need you to calm down,” said Station Inspector Number One.
“Mr. Gall, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. You know that, right, Mr. Gall?”
Mr. Gall did not respond.
Really, Letho? You think he’s going to help you now? You really are a fool.
“We have an agitated subject here,” said Station Inspector Number Two, turning his head down and to the left, closer to his collarbone, as he spoke into his com device. Letho was struck with a moment of unhinged hilarity: to him, it looked like the guy was whispering sweet nothings into his own collar.
Letho laughed. It was a crazy, agitated chortle.
Apparently the station inspectors didn’t take too kindly to suspects who issued crazy-person laughter. They took two steps forward.
“Whoa, guys, let’s talk about this,” Letho said, the inflection of his voice uneven as it rode the waves of rising adrenaline.
The two armed men seemed to be in no mood for a chat. Station Inspector Number Two lunged forward and clapped his hand on Letho’s wrist. Letho almost passed out from the orgasmic wave of adrenaline that filled him, threatening to burst his head like an overripe pimple.
“Get your hands off of me!” Letho roared.
In his mind he saw a many-headed slave bear, riding a chariot of red and wielding a great, curving scimitar.
Letho felt an exhilarating charge arcing between him and the station inspector in invisible gouts. The hair on his arms stood on end, and everything became too clear and sharp. A queer feeling washed over him as his élan vital rose to the ceiling of Mr. Gall’s office. Below him, the displaced body called “Letho” began a visceral ballet.
He turned, bending the wrist of his assailant. He punched as hard as he could, aiming for the man’s throat. The move was inelegant but effective. Inspector Number Two fell to the ground gasping, and Inspector Number One drew his stun device.
It looked like a boxy little insect with two copper pincers extending from its maw. There was a small, popping explosion as the two pincers—which were really electro-darts—launched across the room and embedded themselves in Letho’s neck. His entire body became his funny bone as his muscles constricted and failed to respond to his brain’s frantic instructions.
Letho snarled and pulled the wires from his neck. The station inspector froze, unable to process the fact that the perpetrator hadn’t gone down. They always went down.
Letho froze as well, and for a moment the two combatants eyeballed each other, each panting. The inspector dropped into a practiced stance, hunkering down and putting his hands out in front of him. He began to circle, moving his hands in small ellipses, clenching them into fists.
For some reason these motions enraged Letho, galvanizing him. A kind of physical intelligence overtook his conscious thought processes; somehow his muscles knew exactly what needed to be done. To survive. To win. To escape.
Letho seized the moment and surged toward the station inspector. He put his head down and charged like a rec-ball linebacker, taking the man hard in the midsection. The inspector crumpled, breathless, and Letho laughed like a madman as he pictured yellow cartoon birds encircling the station inspector’s head. He gave the fellow a couple of kidney punches for good measure, then he was up again, hunched at the waist, arms out in front of him, fingers hooked into claws.
To Letho’s surprise, the inspector got up. He threw aside his helmet and faceguard and wiped a thin streamlet of blood from his upper lip.
“That all you got, Ferron?” said the inspector in a breathless yet menacing voice.
Letho intended to retort with the perfect, pithy comeback—but instead he vomited a guttural roar from the pit of his stomach, articulated by the primitive, reptilian part of his mind. He slithered forward like his own long-forgotten ancestor, forgoing eons of evolution that might have stopped his forward motion, might have sought a way to bypass the violence that was to come.
Letho charged forward, grinning, snarling, drool hanging from his chin in crystalline ropes. The inspector marveled that the boy seemed to move quicker than a person ought to, as though the air around him had become slippery.
Yes, the boy was quick, but he telegraphed his movements before he made them, and Inspector Number One just happened to be the best on the station when it came to close-quarter sparring. He sidestepped the boy’s scary-quick but clumsy charge, bringing his clenched fist in a downward arc that met with the back of Letho’s head with singular slap-thump. Letho’s face hit the ground hard with a wet thud.
Baran Gall, who still hadn’t moved from his desk, flinched at the sound of meat and bone smashing into the floor. Standing above Letho, the station inspector smiled. He seemed pleased that his stun dart had failed; there were so few opportunities to crack skulls in the day-to-day grind.
But the boy defied logic again, getting up from a blow that would have rendered the average Eursan unconscious, in a concussed state, and in need of medical attention.
“Need some backup! Where’s my backup?” Inspector Number One said.
There it was again: the inspector was whispering sweet nothings into his collar. Letho didn’t laugh like a maniac this time, but the look in his eyes gave the inspector pause. When he wrote his report later, Inspector Number One would leave out this part; the boy’s eyes seemed to effuse their own light, and he could have sworn that the irises, perhaps just for a moment, had shifted to bright, burnished gold.
Letho banished all conscious thought. In his mind he pictured the void outside the walls of the Fulcrum station. He filled his mind with blackness and conc
entrated on his pulse, felt it coursing up and down his body like a tidal flow. He thought about the very bones inside his body and the muscles that actuated them. Letho then focused on the station inspector, waiting for him to charge, his own arms down and his eyes closed. The inspector took this change in posture as a slight, and it was he who charged this time.
With uncharacteristic and newfound grace, Letho pirouetted to the side and brought his right foot forward, swiping the inspector’s feet out from under him. Letho kept his eyes on the inspector’s, relishing the man’s surprised gape. But Letho did not smile; to do so would have been a waste of mitochondrial energy. There was only focus on a cellular level now, as though each individual molecule in his body were striving toward the singular goal of eliminating the threat before him.
As the inspector tumbled, he seemed to float in midair—as everything around Letho slowed down. Letho could see dust motes leap off the man’s collar and take flight, as if spirited away by the light itself. Globules of sweat floated like tiny moons in orbit around a greater celestial body.
Letho spun and brought the back of his right hand crashing into the inspector’s jaw, sending the man’s body into a slow upward tumble in the opposite direction. Letho reversed his spin and met the inspector on the opposite side, bringing his hands together at his chest and thrusting them forward, away from his body, palms open. The crushing blow took the inspector in the middle of his back and sent him flying.
Then everything returned to normal speed, and Letho became aware that his boss was staring at him in fear. Somewhere in the background the inspector rebounded off a wall and clattered to the floor, not moving. Letho stood there for some time, regarding Mr. Gall, chest heaving, limbs on fire. The mingled look of awe and terror he saw on his former supervisor’s face made his heart sink. Mr. Gall’s eyes were wide O’s, and his entire body trembled.
“Please don’t kill me, Letho.” Baran Gall whispered, his choked voice barely audible.
Fulcrum Page 6
