by Jett Lang
Syntheia tilted her head in return. “As you wish. In two days, I expect you thoroughly versed on the material.”
“I will be, ma’am.” He was out of his chair and through the doorway leading back to the dim, polished wooden hall. Didn’t even look at Queen.
“I think he needs a hug,” Five-Nine said. It removed its fedora and brushed nonexistent dust off the middle dip. “Or another lay.”
“Manners, dear,” Syntheia said.
“The backbone of civilization.” It placed its hat back on its bald, titanium head.
※
She found Jack reading the dossier on the floor, his back against his bed. He licked his thumb, turned a page. Repeated the process in a lethargic rhythm as he scanned the copies. A memory of a bunkmate studying for a combat exam sprung to mind: same position against the foot of the bed, same bored, absorbent expression. Her bunkmate had ended up failing the exam and dropping out to work in Entertainment District retail. A greeter or salesman – she couldn’t recall.
Queen booted the door closed. Steel locks clicked into place.
“So this is what we’re doing, huh?”
Jack moistened his thumb, peeled back another page. “Why don’t you come over? We can swap ideas, brainstorm. Lots of information to cover.”
There was no belittlement in his tone, no reprimand for interfering with Syntheia. Just an emotional void. Numbness. Just as she had felt before she emptied a round into his Winnow and foot.
“Jack.” Her shadow encompassed his curled body. He looked up at her and smiled. Inane. Meaningless. She swatted the folder out of his hand and slapped him.
He kept staring at her, kept smiling. She spoke louder. “Jack.”
“Queen,” he said. “Have a seat.”
“I’m done having a fucking seat!”
“There’s no need to shout.”
She half expected him to try and pick up the scattered contents of the dossier. Was glad when he didn’t.
“If you don’t want me to slap you again, you need to start acting like yourself.”
“I am The job is the most important thing here. We do that right and we live happily.”
“Stop talking like that.”
“Like what?”
She mimicked him: “Like. This. Like a child whose had his toy taken away.”
His mouth dipped from a smile into a frown. The black stubble around his mouth made the switch appear more profound than it was.
“Funny,” he said, not laughing.
“You’re sabotaging everything I’m trying to do for us by acting like this.”
“Oh, c’mon. We’re loose ends to her. Everyone involved will be a loose end,” he said. “Just like the old arena master and his daughter.”
“She has our profiles. We’re in her system now, we’re her employees.” She pushed her hair back. “We’re useful.”
“Our profiles just make it easier for her to get rid of us.”
“Only if we fail her.”
“And we will. If we were worth shit, the boss wouldn’t have sold us to her. She doesn’t want the best, she wants the worst. No regrets flushin’ the waste.”
“Waste?” Queen spat.
“Did I fuckin’ stutter?”
“You’ve gone straight from distrustful to paranoid. Don’t try and pull me down into that sad little hole with you, Jack. I’m learning from my mistakes.”
“You’re not learnin’ shit, sister!” He lurched to his feet, jabbed a finger at her. “You’ve traded one whip-cracker for another. We both have.”
Jack pushed past her to the table. He leaned over it, spread his undamaged fingers upon the dark red veneer. The dressing around his other hand was frayed and dirtied. Jack hadn’t asked for supplies to rewrap it, probably wasn’t going to. Syntheia’s people might have to force it on him.
Her stomach lurched, and she covered her mouth with her hand. He didn’t notice.
“I’m trying to stay positive for us,” she whispered. “We can’t run from these people. You must see that.”
Jack’s head slumped. “We had it all for a little bit, didn’t we?”
“All of what?”
“An easy life, plenty of money, excitement. Everythin’ at our fingertips and then some.” He gazed upward, into the sonorous hum of a white bulb, and closed his eyes.
Queen sucked in her lower lip, released it with a small moist squeak. “Listen,” she said, “we do this one thing for Syntheia and we’re either set, or we’re dead. That’s it. I want to be secure, you want to be secure. Right now, we can’t factor freedom into it. We just do the job.”
She risked walking forward, and gripped one of his sagged shoulders. He didn’t try to shove her away.
Jack turned to her, dark eyes open. “She just pisses me off. She’s havin’ fun at my expense.”
“Playing with you. You do that to other people.” She rested her chin atop his other shoulder, close to his ear.
“It’s kinda annoyin’, won’t lie.” Hint of a smile in the table’s lacquered surface.
“You’re lucky I tolerate your dumb ass.”
Quiet for a long time. Jack exhaled through his nose. “So this is how it feels to be on the choppin’ block.”
“Lowest of the low points, huh?”
Jack looked at the black wall to their left. Paint faded to grey in some sections. “This room’s weird.”
“If we get the job done, maybe we can get an upgrade.”
“That’s how the game works, isn’t it?” He turned, eyed her up and down. “You didn’t eat earlier.”
“Yeah, I don’t feel great.” The nausea she felt at breakfast was coming on stronger than before. Sour taste on her tongue, pressure against the front of her skull. Jack ushered her towards her bed, sat beside her when she lay down.
“What do you need?”
“Maybe medicine. Tell them I–” A knock on the door interrupted her. Bolts clicked. The aged butler who had escorted them to their room ambled in with a wrinkled brown paper bag. He placed it onto the table.
“Medicine,” he said hoarsely. Sounded like he needed some himself.
Jack unpacked the bag. Pill bottles and clear vials with fine, tiny print. There was a small, red and white container that she recognized. Jack was quick to identify it, too. Uncapped it, popped a couple of the capsules into his palm.
She sat up and took them without water. She started to thank the butler, but he’d gone.
Jack was there to accept her gratitude. “I’m a miracle-man,” he said.
“Pill-Popper Jack, they calls him.” She lay down on her side and got cozy with a pillow.
He leaned in to kiss her check. Whispered. “Cameras.”
“Yup.”
“So, no sex then.”
“I’m sick. Don’t start.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He collected the scattered hardcopy at the foot of his bed, re-ordered the chaos she had introduced, and, within a half a minute, had the folder in its original, organized state. He set it in the middle of his bed, then unzipped the upper-half of his flight suit.
“That thing doesn’t look comfortable,” Queen muttered. The drugs were making her feel far better, far faster than she had expected. No complaints on her end.
“Built-in monitoring system. Heats or cools to the wearer’s preferences,” he said.
“Cool,” she breathed.
“That is my preferred mode.” Jack scooted himself back to the headrest, opened the dossier. With a reader’s focus, he searched over line after line with the steadiness of comprehension. Despite her earlier outburst, he found the page where he had stopped.
“You should read that to me,” she said.
“Oh, I should?”
“Give me an idea of, erm, what we’re up against.”
“I don’t think you’ll retain it while you’re coastin’ off those morphine pills.”
“Shush. Just read.”
In the dark guestroom, her pale
face made paler by the lamplight, he narrated the rundown on their target facility as if he were reciting a bedtime story. It was nice. There was a lingering fear that, at any moment, he was going to melt into crimson ooze like her dream-child Self. She closed her eyes and tried not to think about it. He asked her if she wanted him to stop.
“No, it’s fine.”
She turned over on her other side while he read. Crossed her arms against her chest, and listened to each detail.
※
The pills had worn off and her body was in pain again by the time Five-Nine unlocked the armory. It swiped the reader with the silver key it had used to enter the Angel Bay apartments – universal card. What wonderful toys Syntheia was stealing.
They walked through the steel slide door and white light flooded the room automatically. A combination firing range and equipment storage, to the left and right, respectively. An assortment of matte black and metal rifles, pistols, and shotguns were racked and caged above body armor stacked in cube shelving. Five-Nine swung a section of cage outward. It grabbed two gel-vests from below, then unlatched a square compartment imbedded in the anodized wall. It pulled out twin Winnows, one after the other, placed them on a ledge underneath the armaments.
“How did I acquire these, they wonder,” Five-Nine said.
Jack and Queen looked on.
“’Parting gifts’, I believe were the words of your previous employer. He is a wise man that knows how to cut a deal. Also a generous man.”
The robot tossed the vests and the pair caught them without breaking eye contact. It hefted the Winnows, the grips conforming subtlety to the shape of the machine’s slender hands.
“He was even kind enough to unregister them. Now a lowly factory worker could handle this piece. There is something to think about.” It made a show of examining the intricate curvature of the pistol, the impeccable fluidity of its parts.
“Boss-man was mighty eager to wash his hands of us, huh?” Jack said.
Five-Nine gazed over to him, nodded once. “‘Boss-man’ was indeed. You are our problem now.”
“Property, you mean?”
“That is your inference, not mine,” Five-Nine said, and brought them the Winnows. “Be sure not to lose these. We do not need commoners gallivanting around with this level of hardware.”
“I’ll keep it extra close next time I visit a whorehouse,” Jack assured.
“Ah, jokes.”
The robot shouldered between Jack and Queen, straight to the firing range. There were ten partitioned booths, each with a white shelf in need of a cleaning. The range was twenty yards deep, she estimated, made of polished grey concrete. It took up half the length of the armory. The other half was excess storage, cages packed high with plastic and metal crates.
Five-Nine stepped into one of the booths and leaned over the counter. It flipped a plastic switch-protector, pressed the red button housed there. Along the range, hard-light holograms blinked into life. The floor projectors moved back and forth with another button press. The holographic silhouettes had a self-contained aura that formed no shadows on the field, and they were soundless as they glided along.
“You will practice here for three hours,” Five-Nine said. Activated a switch. This one superimposed red bullseyes over areas of the silhouettes. Brain, neck, heart, stomach, lungs – a beginner’s catalog. The robot was trying to insult them.
“Three hours,” it repeated.
“Right,” Queen said. Jack was already setting himself up; checked his weapon, adjusted configurations. After she tinkered with her own Winnow, she made to take the robot’s place.
“No.” Five-Nine lifted a hand to halt her. “I will practice with you. Yours is the booth to my right.”
“Since when did machines need to hone muscle memory?” she said, even as she obeyed and took the booth indicated by the robot.
Queen primed the Winnow. It thrummed. She dialed it to single-shot with a push of her thumb and aimed at the divide between her and the robot. How easy it would be to finish the job she had begun in the hovercraft. Reluctantly, she lowered the gun. A quick and stupid end for both of them, if nothing else. She aimed down the range.
“My programming has some quirks,” Five-Nine said.
“Oh yeah?” Jack said with no real interest, his voice muffled by the partitions. Then, a flash of molten orange. His first three shots were nearly as soundless as his target, impacted once in the head and twice in the lungs. A kill. Smoking and sizzling.
“Very good. You are well on your way to becoming a professional again.”
A deafening shot rang out, and the hard-light silhouette passing in front of Five-Nine’s aisle was marked by a smoldering bullet hole. Right in the center of the chest bullseye.
“One-upmanship,” Queen said. She aced her target with three rapid shots. “Another quirk in the system?”
“I was designed to kill; you were simply trained,” it said. “How auspicious that we assassins are in demand. It is the only reason I was made, and why you remain alive.”
“Do you ever shut up?” Jack said, and squeezed off another volley. Hit his mark dead-on.
Five-Nine switched off the bullseye superimpositions. Reprisal, perhaps, but it did no good: Jack landed a vertical burst across the top-center of a holographic target. The perforations on the silhouette hissed and crackled as the hard-light self-repaired. Feedback illusion. She’d used the same firing range tech during her training. Sensors in the projector determined the make and model of the firearm, the bullet type it was using, and calculated the proper effect on impact.
Revitalized targets passed by Five-Nine’s booth, but the robot didn’t fire. It laid its Super Glock down on the counter, must have drummed its fingers on the gun. Sound of alloy on alloy.
“This challenge is not adequate,” it said, finally.
“Between us we’ve spent hundreds of hours on ranges like this,” Queen said. “We know how to kill. We’re more than qualified.”
“I will hold my nonexistent tongue on your last point.”
Jack leaned around to the robot’s side of the partition. He looked almost chipper, and she knew the relief he felt. She had been too long without a weapon in her hands and a target in her sights as well.
“What kind of challenge are ya talkin’ about here, metal man?”
“Neither of you is wearing a vest. Put one on, and I will increase the speed and reduce the size of the targets.”
“They’re human-sized,” Queen said. “Proportionally accurate.”
She placed her Winnow aside and latched on the gel vest. Her muscles, still aching from her sickness, protested loudly. The vest was too small; tight around her chest and heavier than she liked. Better protection, though. Pluses and minuses. Jack sounded like he was experiencing his share of minuses.
“Do you require assistance?” Five-Nine said.
“No,” Jack grunted.
The hard-light targets narrowed to stickmen with only the briefest flash at the instant of change.
“I had a question.” Queen recalibrated her weapon. “A personal one.”
“For me?” Five-Nine said.
“Yes. Who made you?”
“My, my, are you warming up to me? Your lover is present. I think it improper to continue this conversation around him.”
“You don’t have a clue, do you?”
Palpable silence. Then, “Whoever made me, made me Before. The file is no longer within me, or it has been overwritten.”
She narrowed her eyes at the machine. “You fought in the Wars?”
“That is a broad question, but the answer is ‘yes.’ Audio logs and timestamps place my service at the very beginning.”
“That would make you over five hundred years old,” Jack said, still leaning on the partition. He gave Queen a disbelieving look.
“It would,” Five-Nine said. It loosed a clamorous report, a gunshot that burned through a luminous, symmetrical head.
“How?”
“You need to clarify, dear Jack.”
“How are you here? They purged outdated models en masse.”
“A common weakness among human beings is that they hide what they care about,” Five-Nine said. Fired off another round. “Someone cared for me. Mended me, improved me.”
“Who?”
“I do not wish to share the memory with you.”
“Hey man, we were havin’ a moment here. Don’t leave us in the dark.”
The no-glow targets slid by. Not one of the three killers bothered to take a shot. Queen wanted to hear if the allegedly ancient machine had anything further to say. Over five hundred years of life, or whatever the robotic equivalent was; and here it was, walking and talking with all that history stored in neat, digital files. She was sure some research and development lab would have no qualms about tearing it to pieces to extract those memories.
“You are a perceptive man, Jack. Switch to another topic,” Five-Nine said.
“Alright, then. Your software poses some fairly advanced threats.”
“It learns, I learn.”
“Illegal.”
“Correct. Prudent, then, that I keep the company of those who make the law, or to whom it does not apply.”
Jack flashed his cocksure grin. “I didn’t think you could make jabs at your employers.”
“That was no ‘jab.’ Merely an observation.”
Queen sensed the virus was restricting its honesty on this score. To go from an employee to a servant; she was sure an uninfected Five-Nine would have much to say about that. Maybe even as much as Jack did.
“Huh. Coulda sworn there was some ruefulness there.”
“You are projecting.”
He winked at Queen, still smiling. “Must be.”
For the remainder of their time in the armory the assassins remained silent. They aimed and fired, didn’t miss their targets. Didn’t waver in their devotion to illusory damage.
※
Hours later, Queen was glad to be out of her leaden gel-vest and lying in her unmade twin bed. The sickness was gone, whatever it had been, but its ravages remained in her tired limbs, the dull ache in her head. Jack was on his own bed, his hands folded behind his head as he looked up into the black void of the ceiling. He seemed weirdly at-peace.
“So,” he said, “turns out you’re right.”
