by S. C. Jensen
So I did the only thing I could do.
I smashed my metal fist into the side of her head.
The first crunch filled my mouth with bile, but still the thing inside her shrieked.
I hit her again.
I hit her until the screaming stopped and she wasn’t moving anymore.
Then I scrambled away from Rae’s body and vomited on the blood-smeared tiles.
The next few hours went by in a blur.
Molly disabled the security gate from outside and called in reinforcements. Doctor Truest and the female orderly took over the care of Jimi and the guy Rae had sliced. Nervous LunAstro scientists, accompanied by some high-tech mercenary types, swarmed around Rae. The white coats asked questions I didn’t know how to answer. I shook my head a lot, feeling like a balloon stretched so full of emptiness it was ready to explode.
They strapped Rae down on a psych-ward-grade stretcher and slid the unit inside an oblong, white container. I cried and hollered at them for a while. At least I think I did. I experienced the scene from somewhere completely outside myself, but I can only assume the pink-haired, blood-smeared lunatic throwing herself on Rae’s body was me. One of the doctors shot me with something and spoke to me in a slow voice until I came back down from the shock.
No, it wasn’t a coffin.
Yes, she was still alive.
No, they didn’t know what was wrong.
Yes, they would try to help her.
A whole lot of words without any answers.
Eventually, whatever they’d given me kicked in and I passed out. I don’t know how long I slept.
When I woke up again, I was back in my own room. My bag was open at the foot of my bed, and the clothes I’d been rooting through earlier were neatly folded and placed inside. A small metallic sphere—the illicit SmartPet I’d unwittingly smuggled onto the asteroid—sat on a charging disk on my bedside table. Someone had found Hammett.
That rated.
Might as well add a stint in LunAstro’s prison mines to round out the back-alley dumpster fire that was my life.
I groaned. A bone-deep ache weighed down my body, and my head throbbed in a way it hadn’t done since I’d lost my arm and quit drinking. I rolled over and pushed myself up into a sitting position, closing my eyes against the stabbing pain in my temples. When that didn’t help, I opened them and reached for the sphere.
Tom had been kidnapped and tortured.
Rae was possessed by a homicidal . . . something.
Dickie Roh was in hiding, probably in the alligator-infested sewers beneath HoloCity.
I had no idea how Jimi was doing after his second near death experience in as many days, third if you count the fact that we’d thought he was dead for the past year.
I was starting to feel like I might be the poisonous thread connecting all of these things. Could one person possibly be so unlucky?
Maybe luck had nothing to do with it.
Maybe I was just a magnet for toxicity.
I’d had my share of trouble in life, but I’d thought most of it was caused by the booze. Now it was like I was battling the Hydra of poor life choices; for every bad idea I cut off, another two grew back in its place.
Quit drinking, they said. It’ll be better for your health, they said. Sure. I’ve got a monster on my backside, and I’ve bricked up the only escape route I’ve ever known. Class idea, Bubbles. Top notch.
I needed to talk to Hammett. It might be an annoying, uptight little pig, but it was trained to talk me off the ledge when I was feeling like . . . however I was feeling. I didn’t know anything except that someone had driven an icepick through my temple and that I wanted something to take the edge off.
I wrapped my hand around the sphere on my bedside table and ran my finger over the power button.
Nothing happened.
A low, tired voice said, “I wouldn’t touch that if I were you.”
I flinched so hard I dropped the sphere and almost fell off the bed. Heart hammering, I spun around to see Madame Molly sitting in a chair in the corner of the room.
“Holy Origin.” I clutched at my chest. “How long have you been sitting there?”
Molly folded her long arms across her narrow torso and looked at me the way she might look at rat she meant to dissect. She wore a long, white lab coat over her deep-green pantsuit. Garish blots of crimson marred the crisp synthetic material of her coat. Her thin, angular face had been covered in a fresh layer of makeup. The corners of her mouth pulled down, dragging all her features with it.
The effect was more predatory insect than concerned friend.
She spun an empty syringe between two bony fingers and said, “Long enough for this to kick in.”
“What did you shoot me with?” I rubbed my flesh arm and the sides of my neck, trying to find the place she’d jabbed me. “Tapdancing elephants? I feel like I’ve got a heavyweight dance recital going on inside my skull.”
“I had to counteract the sedative they gave you.” Molly dropped the syringe to the floor and crushed it beneath the toe of her spikey green pumps. “It’s so much more gratifying to break fingers when your subject is awake.”
Molly Elless—a former co-worker of Rae’s from Libra, and originally known as a man named Mol—escaped the confines of her past identity, and her past planet, to start a mining colony on the asteroid now dubbed LS-103. Though she worked as an engineer for LunAstro, her true passion was for running Madame Molly’s Casino Club, a little nest of sin in the heart of the asteroid mining town. While I wouldn’t put it past her to have goons to do her dirty work, she didn’t strike me as that kind of woman.
“No offence, Molly.” I eyed the poisonous-looking pumps. “But you don’t look like a finger-breaker to me. A whip-cracking, stiletto-walking, naughty-boy-breaker, maybe. But I think you’d leave the fingers to someone else.”
Her lips, painted a shade of toxic sludge, twisted into a thin line, and she glowered at me from beneath heavy black eye makeup. Then she sighed and sagged against the back of the chair. She said, “You’re right. It’s not really my style.”
“Why would you want to break my fingers?”
“It’s the least you deserve.” Her eyes hardened into little black marbles. “After what you did to Rae.”
“What I did?” My voice came out tight. “Last I heard, it was your idea to store those smuggled files in her brain. What was it you and the doctor called it, the black box? That’s not on me. I nearly got killed trying to save Rae and now . . . ”
Molly glowered at me through a wall of tears. “And now it might all be for nothing.”
My stomach lurched like a boiler car hitting a dead track. “You said she was possessed. By what? Did you learn something?”
“The black box is the name of an encrypted file containing some exceedingly sensitive information,” Molly said. “Not just information. Programming. Failed software from Libra’s attempts to create an artificial intelligence.”
“Like the plugs that infested the Mezzanine Rose,” I said. “And Patti Whyte.”
“Like that,” Molly said. “But failed.”
“Failed,” I said. An image of the android, staring at me through the one-way glass in the observation room like a startled rabbit, flashed in my mind. Had she known I was thinking about selling her out to Libra? Is that why she’d run? “What do you mean by failed?”
Molly stood, teetering slightly on the glittering green pumps, and strode over to my bedside table. She wrapped her long, thin fingers around the SmartPet sphere, and said, “There is a reason we don’t allow personal smart products within our facilities.”
“Look,” I said. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t even know it was in my bag. My friends packed him for me when—”
“Friends?” Like a snake striking at a rodent, Molly whipped her eyes at me. “Are
you sure about that?”
My gaze travelled down her arm to the sphere and back to her eyes again. I swallowed. “Why are you asking me that?”
“Fool!” She slammed the sphere back into its cradle so hard it jumped out and rolled under the bed. “You have no idea what you’ve done. You have no idea what kind of horrors you have unleashed on us all.”
Horrors. I didn’t like the sounds of that. I could accept the fact that my life was a dumpster fire. I could accept that I was a human magnet of self-destructive life choices. But I was not an unleasher of horrors.
Not on purpose, anyway. The gnawing in my guts travelled up my throat and tickled my gag reflex. I shook my head slowly.
“You’re right, Molly.” I raised my hands in the air, wincing at my aching muscles and throbbing head. “I’m a dumb bunny. I’ve got no cush and no ideas. I’m not R&D material. I wasn’t even good enough for the HoloCity PD. Doesn’t look like I rate much in the private detective gig either. But Rae was in trouble and I tried to help.” My voice cracked and I took a shaking breath. “If you’re telling me I had something to do with whatever is going on in her head right now, I’m probably going to puke.”
Molly stepped her flashy heels back a bit. “You really have no idea what was on that device?”
“Hammett?” I sniffed and rubbed at my eyes. This was no time to crack up. “It’s a sobriety support pet and a pain in the neck. It had a message from Dickie, my business partner, warning me about—” No. Wait. Back it up. I stood up suddenly. “The message from Libra.”
“You received a message from Libra and didn’t tell anyone?” Molly stiffened and glowered down at me.
“Holy Origin,” I said under my breath. “I need to talk to the SecurIntel goon.”
“Whom?”
“Gore,” I said. “Big, albino-gorilla-looking guy. He’ll know something about this.”
“Something about what, exactly?”
“The message. Did you watch it?” I whirled on her, my head spinning faster than my body. I put a hand on the bed to steady myself. “Hammett had no idea how Libra managed to get the file into its storage without permission.”
“There are specialists going through the data we scrubbed from your device,” Molly said. “Doctor Truest discovered the anomaly in Rae’s computer-brain interface unit. Not in the storage component but in her biocontrols panel.”
“Biocontrols?” I said. “She never told me about that.”
“One of the perks of working for a corporation like Libra is getting first crack at all the best tech.” Molly shrugged her thin shoulders and patted her wig.
I wondered why it had taken Molly so long to ditch her old identity with all Libra’s tools and tech at her disposal. But I didn’t want to pry. A prosthetic limb was one thing, one’s entire identity was another.
Where I grew up, in the Grit District, we knew about the things people could do with science—re-growing limbs, cybernetic enhancements, genetic manipulation—but the stories we told always had a hint of magic about them. It was like the old adage said, “The future is already here. It just isn’t evenly distributed yet.” Maybe that’s why Rae had worked so hard to get in with Libra. She wanted a bit of that magic for herself.
“Rae had the CBI unit installed,” Molly continued. “That’s how we were able to store the data from the hard drive in her brain. But she hadn’t utilized any of the trendy biohack apps most employees do.”
“And that’s where was it hiding?” I said. “The anomaly?”
“The black box was in the files from the stolen hard drive,” Molly said. “Just as we feared. But the anomaly in Rae’s biocontrols is something else. A de-encryption virus capable of unlocking the black box.”
Not wanting to hear the answer, I asked, “Where did it come from?”
“We traced the path of the virus back to your SmartPet,” Molly said. My heart sank. “It left a trail of corrupted files in its wake, seemingly able to jump across any device connected to the mainframe network. Almost like whoever designed it wanted it to be found.”
“I never connected Hammett to the network,” I said weakly.
“No,” Molly said. “But we cleared your tattler for basic comm use, and your SmartPet synched automatically when you turned it on.”
“Shouldn’t you have some kind of firewall or something to prevent this from happening?” I shouted without meaning to.
“We do,” Molly said. She crossed her arms and frowned at me. “It’s one of the reasons we don’t allow devices like your SmartPet into the compound without a thorough cleaning.”
My stomach flip-flopped. Dickie had been so excited to send Hammett with me on this adventure, and I had been thrilled to find it in my bag. I never imagined that as I was opening Dickie’s message, I would unleash a virus that might destroy Rae.
I whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
“Even so, our security systems would have caught it if it had been a normal virus.” Molly uncrossed her arms and placed a hand on my shoulder, but she stood awkwardly far away from me. Probably still worried I’d throw up on her shoes.
“But it’s not normal.”
“Libra being what it is,” she said, “this particular piece of malevolent code is unlike anything that our techs have encountered before. It appears to be specifically designed to unlock that black box. As if they knew LunAstro would get their hands on the file.”
“You think we were set up?” I tried to wrap my brain around the complexity of an organization that could pull off that kind of sabotage. I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t make any sense. The file Libra sent me was an ultimatum. They want the hard drive”—I considered keeping the bit about the android to myself, but if they were scouring the data they’d find out soon enough. If Rae’s life was in danger, LunAstro was my best chance to help her. I had to lay all my cards on the table—“and they want Patti Whyte. I’ve got seven days before they start sending pieces of my former partner up here via the bangtail special.”
Molly pursed her lips. “I think it’s time we watch this video. We’ll meet in the conference centre. You think the SecurIntel mercenary has useful information?”
“And Patti,” I said. “If we can find her. Jimi. Anyone else who used to work for Libra. We need everyone.”
“We might not be able to trust everyone,” Molly said. “If this was a set up.”
“What choice do we have?” I said. “I have to save Tom. I need you to save Rae. We need all the help we can get.”
Molly ran her fingers beneath the collar of her lab coat and shrugged her shoulders as if warming up for some virtual workout regime. She stretched the toe of her glittery green pumps under the bed and kicked Hammett’s sphere out into the middle of the floor. Warily, I bent to pick it up.
“Bring it with you,” she said. She pinged directions to my tattler. “Get something to eat and be there in an hour. I have something I need to look into.”
“Sure,” I said. The disconnected feeling I’d had in the observation room was starting to come back. I put a hand against the wall and took a deep breath. Molly opened the door to my room and stepped out into the corridor.
“Molly,” I said. “What kind of failed projects are we talking about exactly? Like ‘forgets-to-take-out-the-recycling’ or . . .”
“More like, ‘refuses-to-acknowledge-the-rule-of-mere-mortals,’” she said.
The room spun around me in a blur of white and chrome, but I stayed on my feet. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
The conference room was a long, narrow chamber with black mirrored walls, perched at the top of the eerie black tower Rae and I had glimpsed when we first arrived to the asteroid. At the time, I had joked that these big muckety-muck mega-corp types always had a tower. I never expected to be sitting at the top of the thing. Rae maybe, but not me.
Ghostly lights emanated from
an indeterminate source, perhaps behind the glass walls, adding a tinge of otherworldliness to the edges of the furniture. A thin, black table ran like a gash through the centre of the room with high-backed chairs wrapped in a kind of synthetic fabric that seemed to disappear in my peripheral vision.
I blinked at my reflection in the smoky glass and reached inside my jacket pocket for a piece of gum. Empty. I cursed under my breath and leaned back in my chair, staring at myself in the mirror. The staggered spacing of the chairs meant no one in the conference room had to look anyone in the eyes, except themselves. Thousands of iterations of my face blinked back at me in the mirrors, as if they were angled just so, to create a kind of infinity vortex.
Shadows moved behind the glass as the ghostly lights shifted and a creeping sensation skittered over my skin. I felt like a rat, stalked by an alley cat, knowing the beast was out there, somewhere, but with no idea when the thing would pounce. From the corner of my eye, I could just see the SecurIntel mercenary’s pale face staring into his own reflection as if he were thinking the same thing.
His colourless gaze slid across the glassy surface to me. He grunted a greeting, and I was surprised to find the sound come from beside me, the room’s disorienting effect already working on my brain. I nodded at his reflection and licked my lips with a dry tongue. A faintly sweet residue clung to them from the doughnut I’d eaten while following Molly’s directions to the conference room. It sat like a lump of rare earth metal in my stomach. Maybe I should have gone for the nutriblend smoothie. Rae’s always telling me I should eat more fruits and vegetables.
Molly had given me an hour to meet her here, but I hadn’t realized I would need most of that time to traverse the hive of underground passages that made up LunAstro’s research facilities to make my way to the base of the tower. I’d arrived, breathless, after an unsettling ride in the tower’s high-speed lift and stumbled into the conference room, expecting to be the last one there.
