by Elle E. Ire
Four hours, thirty-seven minutes, twenty-two seconds, VC1 supplies to my unasked question.
You need to stop interpreting my thoughts as inquiries. Seriously. Sometimes I’m just being hypothetical.
You did not wish to know how long you were unconscious?
I stop. Yes, I did want to know. So why did her fulfilling my unspoken desire annoy me so much? Some people would (and did) kill for that kind of service. I guess… I begin, feeling my way through my emotional response, which was never a strong suit even before the accident that made me part machine… I want to have the right to voice my request, internally or externally, rather than you assuming what I need. When you jump into my thoughts it’s… rude. It makes me feel less human.
A pause while she processes that information. Then, I will endeavor to be more… polite. However, I stand by my continual observation.
And what’s that?
Human beings are strange.
That earns her a smile I’m sure she can feel. Reaching up with one hand, I place my palm flat against the bottom of the upper bunk so I don’t cold-cock myself. Then I swing my legs over the side to sit up. The cabin swims in my vision. Something partially damp but mostly stiff falls to the floor—a small face cloth. One of the guys must have laid it across my forehead when I fainted.
Right. I fainted. Wasn’t going to live that down anytime soon.
The other two bunks attached to the opposite bulkhead are also empty, so they’re giving me my space. It’s a nice gesture, considering the long flight and the limited privacy on one of these shuttles. Either that, or they want to be alone too.
Two months ago, Alex finally confessed his romantic feelings for Lyle. Fortunately for everyone on the team, Lyle felt the same way. Unfortunately, they’ve been going at it at every opportunity. They try for discretion, but… they fail a lot.
I shake off that lovely image and take in my condition. I’m dressed in the clothes in which I boarded, so that needs dealing with. I’ve been wearing the same set of standard-issue office wear—white button-down shirt and tan slacks, comfortable boring faux leather brown shoes—for two days. My gear’s stored in one of the footlockers bolted to the deck at the ends of the bunks. I need to feel like me.
These days, I rarely do.
Shower first. Is it available?
The sanitation facility is unoccupied, VC1 responds.
Good. And she waited for me to ask this time. Baby steps.
I stagger to the hatch leading into a bathroom made as small as possible by the shuttle’s designers. Yeah, Carl and I are going to have some words about our accommodations.
Even with VC1’s assurances, I wait for the hatch to open all the way before glancing inside. It wouldn’t be the first time I walked in on Lyle and Alex. If I forget to ask VC1, she lets me do it. I think it amuses her. But the space is thankfully empty.
I peel off my undercover business casual wear and leave it lying on the floor. Then I step under the automatic spray in a stall the size of a gym locker. Ice picks drive against my skin, telling me even though the guys aren’t here now, they were recently. They always use up all the damn hot water, and I can’t imagine how they fit in a space this small.
Images pop up on my internal display.
Oh. Geez, come on! Knock it off. I can’t not see what’s in my head. Won’t be able to unsee it later, either. You promised to wait for a direct request, I remind VC1.
I promised to try.
“Fuck you,” I mutter under my breath, but there’s no heat in it. Still no heat in the water, either, but the pressure’s good, and it relieves some of the tension in my muscles while the chill clears my head.
Which has the unwanted result of bringing the events of the past week into sharper focus.
The civilian space station orbiting Jupiter had been reporting children going missing for months. (Where did children go missing on a freaking space station?) Occupied mostly by gas miners and their families, along with the usual gamut of support businesses and their employees and a security force, the station possessed an excellent surveillance system and scanning tech. They needed the most cutting-edge equipment to detect pockets of revigen—the latest in a number of recently discovered gases determined to be effective fuel sources for interstellar craft. So, they knew the kids weren’t being spaced. They would have detected the bodies, even in pieces. And yeah, wasn’t that a lovely thought?
An image of severed limbs, small ones, tiny ones, forms in my internal view. I wish this were one of VC1’s sometimes twisted metaphors, but no. These I witnessed first-hand when I tracked down the coworker in the station’s mining accounts division who’d been acting suspiciously.
I press my palms flat against the shower’s tile wall, the water beating down on the back of my neck, willing the image from my inner sight and failing to dispel it. Instead, they keep coming.
I spent a week playing number cruncher—not difficult with VC1’s assistance. I learned his mannerisms, talked to him, befriended him, though being anywhere near him made my cloned flesh crawl. We had the right guy. I knew we did. His odd, darting glances, his focus on any children outside the duraglass windows of the cubicle complex, the way his hands tremored and his tongue darted out to lick his lips whenever he saw someone under the age of twelve.
When I followed him to his hidden torture chamber buried deep in the maintenance access tunnels of the station, he was holding a little girl’s detached foot in one hand while he held her still-alive, still-screaming body down with the other one.
I retch, gag, and spit bile onto the shower floor. It swirls down the drain with the pouring water. Doesn’t much help that the kid lived, that I blew the psychopath’s fucking head off. I had to watch that too. And there were so many others. So many more parts and pieces lying about the forgotten space.
VC1… can you… help?
VC1 gives me the same answer she’s been giving after every mission for Undercover Ops so far. The receptacle where I stored your other unpleasantness is no longer accessible to me. I continue to seek a better method for blurring these images as if they were merely stored in your organic brain tissue, but reducing my capacity for memory storage is limited and proving… difficult. It also would be painful for you if I attempted to do so.
Again so soon, I think to myself and wonder why that thought occurs. I push it away.
In other words, she’s having a hard time dumbing herself down. Yeah, I can see where that would be an issue for a sentient computer, not to mention there’s probably some programming in there that requires her to store everything. Sentient or not, we’re both restricted by our makers.
I’m shivering now, my breath coming in quick, short gasps, goose bumps flaring over my naked flesh—my unscarred, naked flesh. My cloned flesh, unblemished until I sustain some unavoidable injury. My breathing borders on hyperventilation. I fight to even it out and marginally succeed. If I don’t find a distraction, an emotional outlet soon, I will redline the implants.
One plus about being part machine—with a comm unit embedded in my skull, I can initiate communications from pretty much anywhere, including in the shower, where other technology would suffer from water exposure.
Closing my eyes, I mentally instruct the unit to connect to Kelly’s personal comm. If she’s not available to talk me down, it’s going to be a long journey home.
Chapter 2: Kelly—Long-Distance Relationship
Vick is struggling.
WHEN MY comm buzzes with Vick’s identification pattern, I’m not surprised. It’s early in her current mission assignment, but she surpasses Undercover Ops’ expectations on a regular basis, and she always contacts me at the end of each trip out. It’s the timing that has me starting, sitting straight upright in my bed back in our Girard Base quarters, fumbling for both the comm and the light at the same time and finding neither with my clumsy hands.
The one item I do locate is the touch-sensitive bedside clock. Its numbers illuminate when I make contact wit
h it, glowing at just the right brightness so as to not blind me in the otherwise pitch-dark bedroom—3:17 a.m.
“Damn,” I breathe out loud, though no one can hear me.
I’m not cursing because she awakened me. I’m cursing because I know she wouldn’t… unless something is very, very wrong.
I locate the still buzzing comm by the light of the clock, its sound harsh and grating in the otherwise silent room. Well, okay, Girard is never silent. Gravity generators hum. Air recyclers whirr. But after so many years working here, I’ve finally gotten used to the background noises I thought I’d never adjust to.
I wrap my fingers around the communicator and hit the Connect icon, then tap the speaker symbol, sending her signal through the double speakers wired into the headboard of our bed. We have sets of them in each room of our quarters. It’s easier than trying to hold the device to my ear, and I can be doing other things while speaking to her.
Sometimes intimate things, especially when she’s away for a while. VC1 ensures everything remains encrypted and untappable, and we have steel walls, so no passersby can hear me from the hallway. My lips quirk upward a little, but I sober fast enough.
“Hey, Vick… what’s going on?” A yawn splits my inquiry in half. I clear the phlegm from my throat. “Are you all right?” My hands twist in the sheets. She’s not. I know she’s not. We’re too far apart for an empathic connection, but my psychic skills aren’t my only ones. I can read behavior patterns (and deviations from them) quite well.
“Kel? Why do you sound— Fuck, what time is— Shit.” A pause, then much softer, “I’m sorry.”
I frown. She hasn’t activated visuals. Vick’s comm may be deep in her skull, unlike mine, but VC1 simulates a standard unit’s visual capabilities by accessing whatever camera pickups might be present, which is virtually everywhere on most civilized worlds. So, either she’s someplace uncivilized, or in a bathroom where even the military doesn’t usually place cameras, or she doesn’t want me to see what sort of shape she’s in. I do detect water running in the background and an echo in her voice, so, shower?
“You know I don’t mind,” I reassure her. “If you need me, I’m here.”
“Doesn’t matter. Should’ve checked the time difference. Slipping,” she growls.
I absorb the emotion in her tone, not empathically but analytically, and reach a quick diagnosis. “Panic attacks don’t keep timetables. How bad was it?”
She knows I’m referring to the mission, not her current attack. That isn’t over yet. “Bad,” she admits. “Kids. Dismembered kids. Still alive dismembered kids….” Her voice trails off.
I pull my blankets to cover more of my suddenly freezing body.
“You don’t want me to go into more detail than that,” she says.
“If you need to, I can take it.” I’m not certain I can. I’ll have nightmares. But I’m not porcelain. Some pain is worth taking. My gaze drops to the ring on my finger, glittering green gemstone surrounded by tiny diamonds. “You’ve seen gruesome things before.”
“I shot him point-blank. No warning, no trial.”
“He was murdering children.”
Vick’s conscience powers her ability to do what she does. Since being drafted into Undercover Ops, they’ve tilted her moral compass. I don’t like it, and I don’t like them. But where Vick goes, I go. And as she reminds me often, she is doing good. So beyond the trauma, what else is bothering her?
“Spill it, Vick. There’s more.”
A pause. “You can’t read me from there,” she says with faint surprise, which tells me I’ve hit the mark.
I wait her out in silence.
“Just nightmares,” she admits, rewarding my patience.
“That’s not all.” She’s too worked up for this to be the usual nightmares. Too much tension in her tone, too many hesitations while she tries to find the words.
“I can’t remember the details. But—” Vick blows out a resigned breath. “—Kel,” she continues, and I detect a faint tremor uncharacteristic of her, “do I still have a soul? Did I have one when I was just part machine? Now that I’m a clone, is there anything left of the actual me?”
“Oh, Vick.” Back on Elektra4, when she first came to me in her new… form, she’d had to convince me she was still her. It took her all of about five minutes. From her posture to her mannerisms to her word choices, I knew her, and when we touched… the empathic bond between us reasserted itself like another lightning strike. “No matter what… edition, no matter what U Ops makes you do, you are you. And you have the most beautiful soul I’ve ever seen.”
Her only response is a relieved sigh, then, “Thank you,” and the connection drops.
Chapter 3: Vick—Delicate Interaction
I am ill-equipped.
“I CAN feel it. You really don’t want me here, do you?” Kelly accuses, hands planted firmly on her slim hips, lips pursed in a pout that would be fucking adorable if it didn’t precede our unavoidable upcoming argument. It’s been a week since I had to call her en route home from the last mission. This is a new one, what should be a less stressful assignment, except for one thing. Kelly’s with us.
Lyle and Alex take this as their cue to scurry out of the cockpit of the transport I’m piloting.
Cowards.
I turn back to the controls, feigning a need to concentrate more fully on our approach to the small moon that is our destination—a hidden slave-trade operation on the rock’s surface not unlike the secret base my father lived in, though they are some lightyears apart.
Kelly laughs, though there’s no humor in it. “Don’t try to fool me. VC1 could fly this thing by herself, and we both know it.”
“Indeed,” comes VC1’s familiar yet inflectionless response through the overhead speakers.
You are not helping, I admonish her.
Her chuckle carries much more emotion than her words.
Okay, then. I mentally turn everything over to my AI symbiote and swivel the pilot’s chair to fully face my life partner. Her eyes flash in anger, so I focus on the ring on her finger instead, a testament to our lifelong, if not legal, bond.
Machines can’t get marriage licenses on Earth’s Moon. Dead women can’t get them on Earth. In other words, our partnership will remain purely symbolic until Kelly’s politically connected mother can convince one of the governments to change its laws.
I have lots of love and respect for Kelly’s mother. I still believe she doesn’t have a chance in hell.
I draw my attention to the more immediate problem.
Technically, I could lie to Kelly and deny her accusations. She can’t discern untruths for certain unless we are in physical contact. However, lying to her has never turned out well for me in the past, and I don’t expect that to change.
“No,” I say, going for forthright. “I don’t want you here now, or on any of the Undercover Ops missions.”
I spare a glance at her face, regretting it when her glare narrows. “This isn’t like the others,” she says. “It’s not….”
Even she can’t say it, but I hear it easily enough. It’s not an assassination. The team has been with our new division of the Storm for almost six months, and the four missions I’ve completed with them so far have all been fatal for my targets. U Ops wasn’t foolish enough to force Kelly to go with me, considering what she’d feel from my murder victims.
Not murder. Assassination. And always for good reason. They do extensive research before accepting contracts, VC1 interjects.
Whose side are you on?
Yours. Always. I am attempting to make your career path more palatable.
It’s not working.
She shuts up.
Turns out my conscience, which always struggles with killing, even when done from a fair, face-to-face, defensive position, cannot handle shooting people from a distance or stabbing them in the back or pulling a weapon on someone whose trust I’ve gained.
My hard-earned mental stability began to
slip, hence the reason why—
“Vick. You need me on this one.”
Yeah, that.
Her tone has lost its edge and I risk another glance—softened features, sympathetic eyes. We can have a conversation now.
It’s not that Kelly’s unreasonable or anything, but sometimes I wonder if being calm, collected, and stable for everyone else makes her more volatile when she does get angry. I don’t want to make her angry. I try so hard not to.
“I know,” I say, attempting to placate her. “It’s just not something I want you to see.”
She frowns, a wrinkle forming between her eyebrows. “I’m not following you.”
I drop my elbows onto my knees and rest my chin in my hands. A stray auburn curl tumbles in front of my right eye, and I stare at it a long moment before recognizing it as my own. I brush it away, more violently than I intend, pulling it in the process. “Geez, I don’t even look like myself.” I wave my arms about, frustrated by my lack of ability to explain what I’m feeling.
Nothing new there.
Kelly frowns further, then comes to kneel beside me on the carpeted deck. The civilian shuttle we’re using has all the luxury extras: high-end shielding, illegal military-grade weaponry, shiny new furnishings, and of all things, deep blue carpet. My boss, Carl, assured me it was the current rage among slave traders.
She catches my hands and pulls them down to rest on my lap. “Come on, Vick. Help me understand. I can feel how agitated you are, especially when you look at me.” Her gaze bores into mine. “One thing at a time. What does your hair color have to do with any of this?”
“It’s not mine,” I say. I gesture to my whole body, dressed in what amounts to a dark gray business suit cut to fit my curves. Masculine black dress shoes press indentations into the sea of plush navy at my feet. “None of this is mine.” Especially not the hair.
Kelly, at least, looks like herself, though her hair is pulled back into a tight bun. She’s wearing black spiked heels, a very short, straight skirt that barely covers the upper half of her thighs, and a low-cut, filmy white blouse leaving little to the imagination. Every bit of the costume screams both sex and assistant—in everything. She’s agreed to it to be there for me. I don’t know how to deal with that kind of loyalty or my kind of guilt in response.
