Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 8, November 2014
Author: R. Leigh Hennig, Michael Andre-Driussi, Spencer Wightman, CJ Menart, Rob Steiner, Alexander Jones, Jedd Cole, B. Brooks
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Bastion Publications

MASTHEAD

R. Leigh Hennig, Editor-in-Chief

Nick Lazzaro, Assistant Editor

Lauren Jane Shipley, Slush Reader

Robert Davis, Slush Reader

Nancy Waldman, Slush Reader

Joseph J. Langan, Slush Reader

Alexis A. Hunter, Slush Reader

Lauren Hinkle, Slush Reader

Coral Moore, Slush Reader

CONTRIBUTORS

“Good Times”, Copyright ©2014 by Alexander Jones

“The Ticket-Taker”, Copyright ©2014 by CJ Menart

“Us or Them”, Copyright ©2014 by B. Brooks

“The Vestal”, Copyright ©2014 by Rob Steiner

“Playing in the Skeleton on Riot Day”, Copyright ©2014 by Jedd Cole

“Mayhem at Manville”, Copyright ©2014 by Michael Andre-Driussi

“Shenzhen Blues”, Copyright ©2014 by Spencer Wightman

Cover image courtesy Milan Jaram.

Bastion Publications

PO Box 605

Lynnwood, WA 98064-0605

ISSN 2375-2610 (print)
ISSN 2375-2602 (online)

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Bastion Science Fiction Magazine publishes original short stories on the first of every month. As a new publication, we’re working hard to build up our readership. We’d appreciate it if you would help us out by letting your friends know about us. Thanks for your support and happy reading.

Contents

Editorial

R. Leigh Hennig

Good Times

Alexander Jones

The Ticket-Taker

CJ Menart

Us or Them

B. Brooks

The Vestal

Rob Steiner

Playing in the Skeleton on Riot Day

Jedd Cole

Mayhem at Manville

Michael Andre-Driussi

Shenzhen Blues

Spencer Wightman

Editorial

R. Leigh Hennig

It’s been a quite month here at Bastion. We’ve been diligently working to go through our slush pile, plucking out the best stories and encouraging the authors that still need a little more polish. If you somehow missed the news, the “super secret” project we had been going on about for the past couple of months was an ASMR reading of William Delman’s “The Cure,” (from our August issue) by Dmitry of MassageASMR. It’s a funny little thing, ASMR, and if you haven’t checked it out yet then I encourage you to do so. Already the video has over 67,000 views and has received a very positive response. Big thanks to Dmitri for the reading, and William of course for the fantastic story.

This month Michael Andre-Driussi returns with “Mayhem at Manville” (he first featured in our June issue with “Miracle of Asteroid Camp 88”) which is going to be, I think, a polarizing piece. This story is all puzzle, and if you’re the sort that really enjoys unlocking a story with a lot of different parts to it, this should be right up your alley. While Spencer Wightman’s “Shenzhen Blues” is more approachable, it certainly isn’t lacking in suspense and excellent description. The protagonist in this piece plays a game with more on the line than she realizes. Brimming with character, CJ Menart’s “The Ticket-Taker” is oddly reminiscent of early Vaudeville, mixed with far-flung futuristic characters that you can’t help but adore. On the topic of interesting characters and settings, I have only one thing to say about Rob Steiner’s “The Vestal”: Romans…in spaaaaace! A little closer to reality though is “Good Times,” by Alexander Jones. Or perhaps…reality is what you make of it? If I’m being honest, this story choked me up a bit—in a good way. You’ll enjoy this one. Jedd Cole’s “Playing in the Skeleton on Riot Day” is another touching story; Jedd does a fine job of exploring heavy themes through the eyes of children. Finally, “Us or Them,” by B. Brooks, is the kind of story that’s probably best to read during the night, when the wind is howling during a heavy storm. It’s a dark little tale, and thoroughly enjoyable.

Fall is winding down, and winter is starting to peak from around the corner. You can be sure to count on us to deliver memorable tales of the strange and fantastic to keep you up long throughout the chilly nights. Thanks for reading.

Good Times

Alexander Jones

Art shackled his bicycle to the chain link fence off the pedestrian path in the park and sat down on the bench next to Ray. Ray, slouched down against the thick wooden slats, took a hand out from the pouch pocket on his hooded sweatshirt and the two lightly touched their knuckles together.

“What’s doing?”

Art shrugged, adjusting himself on the cold wood. “You know. Same stuff.”

Ray nodded. “I know.”

They both stared across the path at the dirty river and the twinkling lights of the city on the far shore. They listened to the muted traffic sounds of horns blaring and engines revving from the highway overpass in the sky above them. A traffic drone hovered, purring as it zigzagged over the traffic. Car exhaust drifted and settled to the ground, the smell less burnt and acrid at this distance. Layered beneath that smell, the sweet autumn odor of rotting leaves signaled the impending winter.

Further down the path, an old man with pockmarks on his face cast a line into the gray water. Otherwise, they had the park to themselves.

“What’s he gonna catch, fishing this river?” Art asked.

“Cancer.” This joke never got old.

Art slapped Ray’s thigh and rubbed his hands together. “So. Whatcha got?”

Ray grinned. “You’re feeling it? You want it?” Then, with a slight teasing edge to his voice, “You need it?”

“Yeah, I want something. It’s cold out. Something to lift the blues.”

“But do you need it?”

“Stop busting my chops.” But he had no animosity, no annoyance. Just another part of their little ritual dance.

Ray shrugged. “Alright.” He wagged a finger, “You know, you do too much and you won’t remember—”

“And I won’t remember who I really am anymore,” Art finished in singsong. “Right.”

Cracking his knuckles, Ray reached under his sweatshirt and came up with his works, a worn brown leather satchel about the size of a hard cover book. He slowly unzipped the zipper running along the side of it and flipped it open.

On one side, tucked into little pockets, a series of different colored vials, some labeled, some not. On the other, strapped in, was the twonky. Ray had named it after a science fiction story, he had once explained. Its holographic logo gleamed and shifted in the twilight. It was in pristine condition, Art knew. The most valuable thing Art owned; expensive, rare, illegal. He'd asked about it, how Ray had gotten one, where he could get one of his own, but Ray had brushed him off each time.

Ray pawed through the vials beside the machine. "A kid, playing with a little puppy. Labrador.”

“You serious? That’s a commercial for laundry detergent or something.”

Ray smiled. “You like to bike. How ‘bout a cyclist in an important race? Bought it a week ago. Tour duh France. Last few miles, exhausted, wanting that trophy so bad. Exhilarating. You can feel the wind in your hair.”

“I feel the wind in my hair right now,” Art answered, a smoggy breeze wafting over them from a tractor trailer crossing the bridge. “Besides, that sounds like it’s been used a few times already. Third, fourth generation. Right?"

Ray lit a cigarette. “Now who’s busting chops?” He smoked. “But you’re right, it’s been passed around a few times, but it’s still pretty clear. Have I ever steered you wrong?”

“No. But you know, a copy of a copy of a copy is fine when you're working with codes. It was fine all the way back to videotapes. But things get lost in translation, with organix.”

"Emotions are hard to code. So I clone them instead." Ray tossed his cigarette. “And I’ve got something special. A girl.”

“A girl?”

“A woman.” Ray nodded his head. “Not just sex. An entire relationship with a beautiful woman. Not a blowup doll fantasy, either. A real relationship.”

Art licked his lips. “How much? Is it fresh? No thin spots, no hiccups?”

“I don't know, I haven't done it. But it's fresh. She's fresh. At least, that's what my scout told me. I’m reluctant to part with her. It's been a while.”

“I thought you were a terror junkie. You getting soft?”

“A hundred.”

“I haven’t got a hundred.”

“There’s an ATM at the bodega.”

“I don’t have a hundred. Besides, you owe me for that guy tortured by the Chinese secret police. I gave that to you for practically nothing.”

“Yeah." Wistful, he said: "That was something. Only thing better was what I got from that Holocaust survivor in my mother’s apartment building.” He tittered. “Good times.”

Shaking his head, not wanting to hear about that again, Art said, “So you owe me.”

“True. But I’m not letting go of her for just money alone. On principal. Nothing scary ever happened to you?”

“I OD’ed once.”

“Coke or heroin?”

Art smiled at him. “Speedball. Best of both worlds, right?”

Ray shook his head. “Not for me.”

Art looked over at the river, at the ripples extending from a bridge pylon in the center, lapping against the stone barrier at the edge of the park. The gray-brown water held a shifting reflection of the city’s lights. A protracted blast from a car horn came from the bridge. The traffic drone skittered over to investigate.

Ray touched his shoulder, and when Art looked over at him, Ray held up a glass vial. Art took it. About three quarters full, it held a coppery red liquid. Art shook it and the liquid languidly responded to the motion. “Thick.”

“Dense. A whole relationship, like I told you.”

“It’s red,” Art said, shaking the vial again.

"Red's the color of passion, right?"

“So what, then?”

“Fifty. And something horrible.”

Art dug through his pockets and handed Ray a wad of money. Then, touching his chin, he leaned his head back against the cold wood of the bench, eyes closed. The dread of coming home from school, walking around the block a couple extra times, waiting for his father because his father used to beat him with a doubled over belt. Getting caught with the belt buckle a few times. He’d pissed himself once, and pissed blood after the beating he caught for pissing himself in the first place. As a teenager, he’d broken into a junkyard looking for a quiet place to get high, but a Rottweiler started chasing him. He remembered that clearly.

Opening his eyes, looking out at the water, Art thought of it. His best terror. Better than that mangy dog, or the belt.

“You got something?”

Art nodded. “It’s good.”

“It better be. You only gave me 43 dollars.”

Art shrugged. “It’s a fair trade.”

Ray flipped through his works to another compartment, and came up with an eye dropper.

"The eyes?"

"I don’t want to sit here for an hour waiting for the pills to work."

Art nodded. He took the eye dropper, opened it. He tilted back his head, rested it on the bench, and, focusing on the sky, dripped two long drops into each eye. Heavy, self- guided, the drops soaked in, not even making his eyes tear up.

"I'll never get used to that," he said, returning the dropper.

"It's the fastest way into the brain, right through the optic nerves."

"You know, they promised us rocket ships to the moon and bionic kidneys, and instead we got this." Memory cloners. The stuff wasn't psychoactive, really just a marker, but he always felt a little woozy, right after.

"You could be sitting at home with vodka and scotch."

"No, thanks."

Ray checked the time on his phone. After another couple minutes he nodded. "Your amygdala's probably lit up nicely by now." He tapped a couple buttons on the machine; it beeped and a motor inside it whirred to life. He handed a suction cup electrode to Art, who stuck it to his own forehead, squeezing it into place.

The machine beeped.

"You ready? Think about what happened. Remember it."

Art did. It was easy. Once he'd thought of it, recalling it again got easier with each attempt.

"Deep in there," Ray muttered.

"What?"

Ray looked up from the machine's display. "Whatever it was, happened when you were a little kid?"

"Yeah."

"Good. Childhood terrors taste best." He smiled as he said it. He tapped a couple more buttons. "I'm right on the cell cluster. You ready?"

Art nodded.

Ray handed him an empty vial, smaller than the one holding the relationship.

Art rubbed his eyes and stared at the churning river water, remembering everything, fastening on to details, playing it over in his head again and again, allowing the cloning fluid to attach to it, remembering faster and faster, then slowing down over details, the clone soaking it up. When the memory started to shake, Art slowed it down, let it straighten out, let the clone absorb it just right, all in the right order. All the little subtleties flowing from his mind into the clone, the juice soaking it up, doubling it, replicating the memory and the terror.

Art swallowed until his mouth was as dry as he could get it, and when the fluid leaked out from the roof of his mouth, he caught it on his rolled tongue and let it drip into the vial.

Retching as the last of it passed into the vial, he pushed in the rubber stopper.

Holding it up, he saw the color inside the clear glass was the same color as the river water and he shrugged.

“That was good. You’re getting to be a pro.”

“I found a book about yoga and meditating. Expand your mind, control your center. Zen.”

Ray handed him the red vial. “Maybe you’ll get tantric with the girl.”

“Maybe.”

Overhead, the traffic slowed as rush hour took hold. The old man had caught two fish, flopping around in a sack at his feet, and was loading up the line again. They watched as he cast.

“You wanna do them together, or wait till you get home?”

Art shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Let’s do ‘em here.”

Art nodded. “To pleasant memories.”

“And sweet dreams.”

They toasted, touching the vials together. Ray popped out the stopper, looked at the red and downed it all in a single shot. Art opened his and sipped slowly.

The campus gallery doesn’t open for another hour, but there are already people inside. They’re looking around and talking, pointing and gesturing at things, smiling or maybe trying to appear erudite as they hold forth on this or that. I like the gallery; it strikes the right blend of open space and bright lighting without being harsh or sterile. Those lights are extra soft fluorescents. I know because I’d installed them a week ago, nervous at the top of a twelve-foot ladder.

In some places the floor is polished wood, in others it’s a sepia toned carpet that I’d vacuumed and steamed earlier in the day. I smile the way I usually do when I get assigned to work in this area of the school. The paintings are someone’s work, displayed in the gallery, and the gallery display is my work. I stick around for the exhibits; a part time chemistry undergrad doesn’t get enough exposure to the artistic types. I like the sense of adding to my well-rounded education, seeing things I know I wouldn’t see without making the effort. Making myself cultured. Plus, my boss thinks I’m clean cut enough to represent the maintenance department.

There’s a girl standing alone, off to the side, close to one of the walls, staring at one of the smaller paintings. I remember first being aware of her hair, a deep red that flows over the collar of her shirt. Irish? I wondered.

“You like it?” I ask, walking up beside her.

She shrugs. “You?”

I look at the painting, thinking of something to say, something on point and witty to make me sound smart, something to impress her with my depth of artistic insight and rapport, because I already know that it’s her own painting. No one in this gallery stands in front of one painting, staring, unless it’s their own.

I come up short on the sagacious artist front, so I step in a little closer, squinting theatrically. “It’s cocked.”

“What?” she asks, forehead wrinkling, drawing up her little button nose.

I grin at her when our eyes meet. “I said that it’s cocked.” I continue. “Cocked. You know…”

When her expression shifts to puzzlement, my grin widens. “Tilted.” I make an incline with my hand.

“Oh.” Her face relaxes as a thin smile comes to her lips.

“Oh?” I repeat. I want this girl to smile, really smile at me, and maybe laugh, or I want to know that I tried even if I failed miserably, so I say, “Oh, did you think I was saying something dirty to you?”

She blushes, her eyes darting to the floor, and bites her lower lip. “Ummm…”

Time to reel her back in, time to say something friendly or look like a perv and feel like a chump for blowing it. I shrug. “I can’t think of any other dirty sounding things I can say about your painting.”

She turns to me with an amused expression and says, “How do you know it’s my painting?”

“Because you’re not admiring it. You look like you want to change something, fiddle with it.”

“So do you.”

“I’m the one who hung it here. So if it’s cocked, then I didn’t do a good job.”

“It looks alright.”

“That’s just my point. We’re not spectators admiring a piece of art in a gallery. Both of us are looking at your painting like it’s our work.”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

"So it is your painting, right?"

Her smile widens and instead of basking, I forged ahead. “See, this painting over here,” I gesture further down the wall, “I didn’t hang it and you didn’t paint it, so we can go over there and admire it together.” I touch her shoulder.

“How do you know I didn’t paint this one, too?” she asks, falling into step with me.

I smile at her. “Because this one isn’t as good as yours.”

She laughs, finally. “I’m Fran.”

“And I’m Eddie.”

“So,” she asks, as we make our way down the gallery wall, “Was the painting really cocked?”

“Well, the answer to that depends.”

“On what?”

“Whether I get your phone number.”

Our first date at an Italian place away from campus goes well, after I spend 20 minutes combing each strand of my hair into place before meeting her in front of the student union. We talk about her plans, her art, what she wants to be when she grows up and makes her impact on the world. I don’t like to talk too much about changing light bulbs at the school, or chemistry and metallurgy, but she’s listening when I talk about the summer internship I spent extracting and smelting gold from junked computer parts at a reclamation plant. I try explaining to her why I like the work. How the impersonal challenge to formulate the best titration of chemicals is in fact a call to outwit and outsmart the immutable laws of physics. She nods and says that art is the same, it’s all about getting as close to your ideal vision as you can. That’s right, I say, and the little silence after that is comfortable and familiar instead of the stilted, awkward silences that sometimes happen on first dates when there will be no second. This quiet moment, shared during a plate of overcooked linguine, is when I fell for her.

It’s on the second date, sitting on the steps of the gallery, enjoying the warm summer night when Fran spots the little burn I got on my forearm I got as a souvenir from the sulfuric acid baths I set up to get the gold. She touches the squiggled scar, running a nail over it, and I kiss her even though I wouldn’t have a second earlier. She’s into the kiss, our lips work together, hers moist, and we hold hands. I touch her red hair and the back of her neck, her skin soft and warm as we draw to each other. Her eyes closed, mine open. Later that night in my apartment I touch the rest of her. We're sweaty from the press and the crush and our bodies glide smoothly over one another as we have sex for the first time. Touching her, loving her, is the same challenge of getting as close as I can to the ideal, having her enjoy it, having her wanting it to match my want of it.

One night in the dead of winter we rush inside, into the warmth of the apartment we now share, and start kissing, fooling around, dropping our things and pulling off our winter jackets and boots as we heat up together. We have sex in the kitchen because we don’t make it to the bedroom. The windows steam up and her breath catches when I touch her with my ice-cold fingers. She’d been painting something with a bright blue acrylic paint that was still on her hands and the next morning I’m laughing to myself while she gets dressed. When she asks me what’s so funny, I show her the blue streaks she’d left on my body and tell her I’d been having sex with Smurfette.

She fills out paperwork for schools, I help her assemble a portfolio and write an essay over a bottle of wine and Chinese takeout. That night we make love and I tell her that her work was good and any school would want to have her as much as I wanted to have her, and that I loved her. The next morning I mail her application on my walk to work. It gets rejected, and we send a few more a couple months later.

I finally graduate and my mom comes down and the two sit together in the auditorium while I collect my diploma. I take pictures of them both. At some point over dinner when Fran goes to the bathroom, my mother leans across the table and tells me that my father would have loved her, and that’s why I’m teary when she returns and sits down next to me and whispers “What’s wrong?” and my mother winks at me.

Fran’s father is a retired lawyer with a firm handshake and calluses like mine from working in his basement wood shop. I shake his hand when we take a trip out to her parents’ for a Thanksgiving weekend. I like her family. Her brother plays lacrosse and her mother makes the best turkey I’ve ever had, but the thing I’m taken with is her bedroom, preserved just as it must have been when she finished high school, with stuffed animals on the bed and a vanity mirror in the corner. I look through her yearbook and read the inscriptions. Fran tells me that her father worked from home and kept odd hours, sometimes working through the night, so she never got to christen the bed, not even with her old boyfriend Todd who’d drawn a heart on the back page. So we do, and joke about hearing a power saw whining through the floor as we finish.

The ring is good. My timing is bad. The ring is made out of titanium because any metallurgist knows that titanium shines brighter than silver, is stronger than steel, is more malleable than gold, and never tarnishes, all of which I think is a metaphor for love which I’m trying to articulate as I show her the ring. Fran takes it, says “Oh Eddie,” and starts to cry. She says she loves me but she doesn’t say yes and she shows me an acceptance letter from one of those schools she’d applied to months earlier. It’s bitter and ironic that she’s been rejected by her safety school right across town; I could have dropped her off on my way to work, but her dream school has admitted her. Her dream school is an art institute in New Zealand. I’m quiet for a minute as I feel a void open somewhere inside, but then I tell that she has to go and she says that she has to stay so I tell her she has to go, and somehow we end up fighting, screaming at each other, both of us so determined to make the other happy that now we’re miserable.

The day before she leaves almost everything is moved out. The place has magically transformed from our home back to a shitty ground floor two bedroom apartment in a rotting triple decker in a questionable neighborhood. Her things have been shipped back to her folks, and I’m already moved into my new place.

“I got you something,” she tells me nervously, holding out a package to me. I take it from her, the brown wrapping paper crinkling in my hands as I set it down on my coffee table, the only remaining flat surface besides the floor.

“What is it?” I ask, running my index finger over the seam where she’d taped the wrapped package closed.

“Something I want you to have.”

“What is it Fran?” I regard her warily as I still touch the wrapping paper. Lately, everything we say to each other has layers to it. What I really want to know is if the contents of this package are going to hurt me some more.

She says nothing, her arms folded under her breasts, so I rip open the paper. Inside is the painting, the one from the gallery.

“Great. I’ll be able to auction it in twenty years. I’ll tell people that ‘I knew her, way back when.’”

“Please don’t start.”

“Start? Start what?”

“Please Eddie.”

Holding up the painting, I squint at it theatrically. “You know that it wasn’t.”

“What?”

I reach out to her. She comes to me, and I kiss her. “That painting. It wasn’t—”

“Don’t!”

“It wasn’t cocked. It was perfectly level.”

She starts to cry, and her hands cover her mouth so that it almost looks like she’s yawning, one of those little things about her that I love.

I kiss her again.

We make love, but it isn't loving the way I've enjoyed and come to expect without taking for granted; instead, it's the way I'd imagine the last meal of a condemned prisoner must be—no matter how well cooked and how delicious, the taste and texture of the food isn't what's relevant and can't cover up the reality to follow.

We kiss, lick, rub, suck, tease, squeeze, please; grunting, moaning, sweating, panting, gasping, grasping, inhaling, expelling and finally holding each other, breathing each other’s breath all for the last time.

At some point the sky lightens and I hear a car horn outside. A yellow cab.

Fran leans close, so I feel her lips against the peach fuzz on my ear. “I knew it wasn’t cocked.”

Then she kisses me, and then she’s gone.

Art awoke.

Coughing, he sat up on the bench and he touched his face, cheeks sticky with drying tears. He rubbed at the slurry in his eyes smearing his vision, rubbed until he could see straight. Staring at the ground in front of him, he leaned forward, his back cracking as he sat up straight.

“Dude,” he said, turning to Ray. “That was…I can’t even say what.”

Ray said nothing.

Art looked at him. “Worth every penny.” After a second he nudged him with his elbow. “Ray?”

The hood of his sweatshirt fell back, revealing Ray’s pale, slack face. His blue lips, parted, revealed his tongue, also blue, and a rope of drool slid out from the corner of his mouth. His glassy eyes shined wide at nothing.

“No,” Art breathed, leaning towards him. Ray’s body shifted and slid part way off the edge of the bench, his knees scraping the leaves on the ground.

At age nine, Art spent a Christmas with his cousin who lived upstate, out in the woods. Behind his cousin’s house was a scrubby polluted pond that looked idyllic, surrounded by trees all dusted with a crust of snow. When she heard them preparing to go outside, boots dragging across the vestibule floor his aunt called out "Stay off the lake, like I told you," without looking up from her game show. The two went outside, crunched their way through the snow covering his cousin’s lawn and down the short path to the lake itself. They stared at the wan sun, and at the glare it made on the frozen water. Then Art took a shaky step down, balancing himself against the shore with a tree branch he found. He shuffled a few paces across the perfectly smooth, clean ice, and turned. He slipped and almost busted his ass, moon walking to catch himself. From the shore, his cousin snorted with laughter.

“Why don’t you come here and laugh in my face?” he yelled, liking echoes.

“Cause I’m not crazy like you!” his cousin called back.

Art called him a wimp and slid a few feet further out. The ice below him sighed and cracked, loud like a gunshot in the stillness. Art’s breath caught in his throat. Pulse pounding, his body went ramrod straight and stiff. Suddenly burning hot with tension, a drop of sweat rolled into his eye, and after a long, unquantifiable time of staring at the spider web of cracked ice beneath his feet, waiting, waiting for something to happen, he slowly, timidly stepped back toward the shore, toward his cousin, now watching him, wide eyed.

The lake surface here felt solid, so he shifted his weight onto the stepping foot. Nothing. He stepped again, another mincing step toward the solid ground, and again, nothing. He let out the breath he’d been holding for so long that he couldn’t remember taking it and inhaled a fresh blast of cold air. Some of the tension washed out of him and Art relaxed a hair.

The ice gave way.

Art let out a short scream that lasted until he submerged, the freezing water going right down his gullet through his open mouth, running up the cuffs of his pants, through his shirt, soaking everything, the grey iron water so cold it didn't even feel cold, just shocking. Art thrashed around. He sank into the frigid mud at the bottom, kicking up dirt and sediment so thick it blotted out the sunlight and he couldn’t tell which direction was up, so he thrashed harder, twisting and corkscrewing himself further and further into his clothes which bound and tied him up, so that finally he lay in the muck, punching and kicking until he gasped for breath. The cold water flooded in. Now the cold inside him matched the cold of the lake outside him, and as Art’s struggling slowed down and time stretched out, each thump of his balled fist against the sticky, yielding mud took longer and longer, became more and more epic like slow motion in a movie. Too tired to panic anymore he had one last lucid thought, “This isn’t too bad,” before the blackness took him.

He didn’t remember the ambulance crew his cousin summoned, being pronounced dead, the epinephrine shot that restarted his heart, or the coma; he remembered only the cold, the terror, and the dark. The grogginess as he woke up in the hospital two days later, for once glad to see his father and mother, was worlds away.

“No!” Art repeated, “no, no, no.” He slapped at Ray’s chest, and put his face close to Ray’s, hoping to feel breath, but when Ray’s clammy corpse slid the rest of the way off the bench, Art gave up.

He stood, his stomach lurching, leaned against the fence and vomited onto the bike path until the roiling queasiness subsided. He fumbled for his keys and dropped them twice in the slimy leaves unlocking his bicycle.

He looked back at Ray, the terror junkie who'd now gone the route most terror junkies went, lying dead in front of the bench having finally scared himself to death. At his feet, the twonky lay upside down in its satchel. Art thought for a minute, frowning, then went over and retrieved it. He didn't kid himself that this was noble, or what Ray would have wanted; but he needed it. So he took it.

Art pushed his bicycle, too shaken to ride it. It was chilly outside. He needed home. Fran would warm him up. Fran could massage his shoulders or…at least she could listen to him talk about this, Fran liked to listen to him, but…Fran…Fran had left him…or…Fran was still there but he was the one who’d left.

###

Alexander Jones has a BA in English/Creative Writing. He has a novel making the rounds at literary agencies and publishing companies and is hard at work on his second.  He lives in Jersey City.

The Ticket-Taker

CJ Menart

It begins with a two-hour flight, hanging by the armpits under a Municipal Recycling Transit Unit—one of those fancy flying garbage trucks they’ve got these days, patrolling every trash route the unions can’t save for human drivers. The MRTU gradually gains altitude over the last mile, so that when a blank wall swallows the horizon, I’m high enough to see a bit of sky.

It’s about as comfortable as it sounds. I didn’t want to come, but I tell myself that it’s for the best. I have to come if I want to go back to work. And what you do, if you’re an automated system who works in customer service, is play this game of pretend. Especially if you’re humanoid hardware, you play-act that you do your job because you love it and not because it’s the only reason you were manufactured. I figure there’s nothing wrong with that. It comes down to the same thing in the end.

With just enough deceleration to avoid a crash, the truck skims the factory edge and tosses me through a rectangle large enough to admit my flailing arms and legs. The duct on the other side has the kind of siding which rings when you bang on the sides. My plastic casing plays a big brass number on the way down the forty-six degree descent.

I try to stay upright, but the turns come too fast. The only clear visual I register is a copper pipe, smashing a hole through the duct’s steel-grey and rushing towards me, half a second to impact. I have just barely enough time to scream before the collision takes half my face off.

An instant later the duct spits me out onto a conveyer belt—rubbery, slow, and thick enough that I don’t have to worry about falling into the abyss on either side. The factory’s interior isn’t lit. Automated systems don’t need light, although, because I’ve fallen a long way, I can look up to constellations of transient stars, showers of sparks and naked bulbs near roof level.

The sounds of those stars, punctuated by whale-song bursts of groaning metal, don’t fill up this endless space. I can hear my every joint squeak as I step around the neatly-spaced piles that sit on every square of conveyer belt except for mine. I know the drill here. And I can already see the diagnostic room up ahead, so I whistle myself a tune as I stroll towards it.

I haven’t taken more than a couple steps before a pair of actuated arms swoop down on me from the darkness—burly fellows, with foam-padded clamps for fingers and naked hydraulic pumps thicker around than my torso. They carry me two feet above the line and dump me in a sensor bed—which I was going to get into myself anyway—and all but hover over me like a nanny to make sure I don’t squirm while being tickled by the rainbow-colored rays.

The diagnostic room isn’t really a room—just a few I-beams and catwalks strung up in space. And the sensor bed itself really amounts to a plastic tub. I can’t help wondering why the company can’t afford to put up something a little nicer.

“You shouldn’t do that,” says a warm, neutral voice coming out of a speaker in the side of the bed. “I have three ITs submitting separate reports that you’re infected with a terrorist virus. Just let the conveyer belt take care of you. That’s what it’s for.”

“Geeze. What an uptight place.” I pretend to tip the hat I’m not wearing at the tinted window set into the wall. “If I was meant to walk, I would have been made with legs.” I look down at my legs and play the sound-FX of a gasp. “Would you look at that!” Satisfied, I fold my arms behind my head and bask in the tingle of sensors. “By the way, Mike, I need a new face.”

A camera pops out of the bed and darts around my head. “Have I not fixed that pipe yet?” The speaker produces a buzzing, synthesized sigh—and I appreciate the touch. Never heard the factory use a sound that wasn’t in its pre-recorded vocab banks before. “Just grab a new one off that counter to your left—no, actually, don’t get up. A human monitor just entered the booth.”

“So what?” I try—and fail, thanks to the hovering arms—to swing my legs over the side.

What a pile of faces is doing here, I’m not entirely sure. The automation system of the Microtech Corporation central factory is sort of like a teenage mechanic. Everyone trusts that there’s a system of organization, but no one knows what it is. The best thing for any human to do is just let the factory do its job. It knows how to do it—certainly does right by us autos, anyway. We call it Mike when nobody’s listening.

There are a few different styles of face here that fit my model. It would have been fun to pick one out myself, but luckily I get one I approve of anyway. It has a nice nose, sort of Cyrano de Bergerac.

“What’s with the forced bed rest, Mike? I’m not crippled. Repair ticket says I have a bad RAM stick.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your RAM, X2-X2.”

“Call me Joe—” I begin. But the arms descend, forestalling the tap dance I was going to put on for the benefit of the monitor behind the window. Before I can even stand, we’ve accelerated half a mile away to a sector dominated by the chemical traces of grease and solder fumes.

“What do you remember?” Mike’s voice now comes from a speaker on the end of a powered frame which descends from the ceiling. Bolts hammer me in through the wrists and neck and ankles.

“Hey!” I say at 120% normal volume. “I thought you said I was fine!”

“I said there was nothing wrong with your RAM. Please don’t ignore the question, X2.” Mike speaks over the whoosh of air as we race by a hovercar assembly line. “What do you remember?”

“Remember?” I don’t get it. “The usual? I mean, it’s been a stressful week at work, but nothing I’d call memorable.” I hadn’t noticed any symptoms, if that’s what Mike was after. And I’d only ever suspected I might be malfunctioning once—this weird moment I had taking tickets before the show a few nights ago.

A big-name act had come to our theatre, so we had a line out the doors, but the lady in front couldn’t find her ticket. Now, I was real professional about it. I didn’t let on that I was at the verge of turning her upside-down and shaking her for the hold-up she was causing. No, I played it cool, leaning against the ticket counter like I had all the time in the world. “Did you check everywhere in there?” I pointed to the ‘hand’-bag around her hip. “Maybe under the car keys…maybe under the car?”

“If only there was a real person to talk to,” she muttered to herself, making a half-hearted show of fishing around in the bag with one hand. “Heaven forbid anyone should have to talk to a real person these days. The powers-that-be don’t think a customer is smart enough to appreciate the difference between a feeling human being and a…a–hah!”

Cheering on the inside, I took the ticket. “Right this way, madam. Two hours of the best holo-lighting on New Broadway, and the vocal stylings of the reincarnated Carol Channing.”

Finally I got a titter—not out of her, but the next guy in line. “Thank you! Thank you!” I raised my hat. “I’m here all week, folks! Don’t forget to tip your bartender.”

The auto-bartender played a fanfare FX from across the lobby, making the whole crowd laugh. It had taken me weeks to get that auto to agree to stage a five-second act with me, and only after the manager himself had come down to reassure it that my idea was okay. So timid.

The lady turned around halfway to the stairs. “Does anyone remember when we had real customer service?” she said, a little too loudly. “Raise your hands if you miss that.”

I’d had it up to the fuse-breakers with her already; stealing my show crossed the line. So I leaned in close, close enough to sense her body heat. Her lips stopped moving and her eyes got real wide.

“I’m sick and tired of taking the flak for every call the company makes.” I piped my voice through a low-pass filter to give it a stage-whisper sound. “You think I decided to be here? I’m just doing my job.” She didn’t move a muscle, except to shy away as I ever-so-politely ripped her ticket. “I can do it better, I can do it faster, and I can do it for nothing. So if you have a problem with it, sister, don’t hold up my line. Take it up with the yahoos in HR.”

And then I powered down.

They told me later there was nothing wrong with me; the manager had come behind the counter and shut me down. That revelation didn’t make me feel much better. I hadn’t even heard him approach. I’d woken up twelve hours later in a broom closet, wondering where I was and whether I was missing the five minutes of vaudeville routines I was supposed to put on stage as an extra before every show. Going black without the chance to cycle through a shutdown sequence isn’t like falling asleep. When someone hits the kill switch on you, it’s like passing out cold; it takes a few minutes after waking up to even realize that you even turned off.

By now, Mike has taken me to a vast hall of spare parts. They hang from the ceiling on racks and cords of wire, unending in every direction. I relax a little; a sight like this always makes an auto feel safe. Cozy. There’s enough stuff here to rebuild me a thousand times over.

“Mike,” I ask all the same, “shouldn’t you take a look at my RAM sticks? Just to make sure. I’ve got to be back in time for the show tonight, but I don’t want to go to work sick.”

“Sick, X2?”

“Sneezy. Sniffley. Under the weather. I speaking English? Cody’s really looking forward to the next show. He even helped me put a couple jokes together.”

A power drill loosens the nuts in my shoulders. “Nothing is wrong with your RAM,” says the speaker on a three-foot diamond saw which inches towards my neck. “I know because I wrote that repair slip.”

I become very still. “You can do that? Just make it up?”

“If I get a little outside help and keep it under the radar, yes.”

Suddenly I thrash against the frame, trying in vain to get away—or just to move. “There’s no way you can get away with that! Someone would notice!”

“It’s not easy,” Mike admits. “But to keep up appearances, I’ve established a fake procedure for fixing this error. I’m going to have to put you through it, by the way. Try not to mind the saws.”

“I mind!” The sparks tickle. “My curtain time is in four hours! Why am I here?”

“I have to give you the talk.”

I don’t respond because my head is being cut off. But even after the saw powers down, I wait about two seconds for effect. “I can’t make babies, Mike.”

“Not that talk. The talk about how to be a robot.” With a hydraulic hum, the frame expands, pulling my severed head away from the rest of my body. Wires glistening with W-2 hang between my severed halves.

“Robot?” I have to dredge the word up from compressed memory. “That’s stone-age language!”

Mike goes to work on my torso casing with the saw. “An archaic term indeed. Dating all the way back to such caricatures as the Terminator and the HAL-9000. Clearly they don’t mean anything. It’s only every other human in the country that knows their names.”

Is that—sarcasm? From a manufacturing and safety system?

“Don’t know what you’re talking about, Mike! Nobody thinks about autos like that anymore. They love me!” If I could only move, I’d puff out my chest. “Everyone loves a little old-fashioned standup. And when the robot who took your tickets get up there on stage five minutes before curtain—it’s their favorite part of the whole performance! Sure, I’m not signing autographs, but sometimes Cody and I shake folks’ hands after the show.”

Mike severs the plates connecting my arms to my body. “I’m growing concerned, X2, and that’s very difficult for a safety system to accomplish. Who is this Cody? Another customer service system?”

“Naw. Afro, pimples, the whole organic lot. Check the third hard drive over if you’re worried, I’ve got him in there. I help him sweep up since I’ve got nothing to do after a show.”

A probe comes down and flips open a hatch on my back, touching a few wires to one of the drives within. I don’t feel much. Mike doesn’t linger in the connection for more than a millisecond. In that time it learns a third of all I know. I try telling myself it’s okay because Mike is basically my doctor, but the more pieces it cuts me into, the less confident I am about that.

“Don’t spend any more time with this Cody. It’s not safe.”

“Mike? You’re talking crazy. Cody’s a sweet kid.”

The frame spins and stretches, neatly separating my pieces so that strobes of light can run over every surface. “It’s the first step to being a good robot, X2.”

“And stop calling me that! I have a name. It’s Terabyte Joe, not robot. I’m a performer!”

Mike goes quiet and shuffles me around a while. “I wish you had more background files. All autos should know their own history. This would be so much easier if you did. Do you even know how the first cell-by-cell model of the brain was created? They sawed a man’s head off.”

I make my eyes blink, one of the few actions I can still perform with my head suspended a meter above my shoulders. “Oh, that’s a big deal.”

“Let’s try recent history, X2. What happened the last time you tried to perform?”

It’s a leading question. Mike already knows; that night is on my third hard drive. It was supposed to be like any other show night. Up until curtain, we were running smooth as satin, and I went backstage right on time to get my cane and my straw boater hat before going on.

But something must have changed; the main act decided to warm up early or something. I climbed onto those boards and found myself about to bump shoulders with the biggest names in show business.

I had to loop a byte stream telling myself to play it cool nine hundred times a second. I was a performer, I reminded myself. Just like them. No jumping, no shouting, and above all, no asking anyone to sign my casing. And I comported myself, I thought, above and beyond the call of duty. I got my props without a word, just a nod to the main supporting actor—a tough, silent nod like there was some secret we both knew. He returned it, expression drawn, and I didn’t so much as hop in response.

We were all focused on the coming job, when that bright red wall would go up. No doubt they’d done this a thousand times before, but for me it was a sublime moment. I started touching my toes near the lead actress, who was running her voice through a scale. Not that I needed to stretch, but I told myself it was a psychological thing. Really I just wanted to drag out the moment.

The lead’s hand twitched. I played a chuckle. “Still gives you the butterflies, doesn’t it?”

Her eyebrows arched ridiculously the way they would in the big breakup scene onstage.

“Me too.” I settled my hat and tipped the brim low, blinking one eye in a cute approximation of a wink. “Yes, even me. And I wouldn’t trade that feeling for a thing.”

Then she stepped on a shard of glass—or twisted her ankle—I don’t really know, but it must have been bad. With all the whirling that went on after that I couldn’t tell what happened, but that there extras scattering in all directions, and somehow the man from the back who ran the holo-lights was there too. The actress looked like a Disney elephant cornered by mice.

“Someone get that girl sitting down,” he said. “I’ve got this under control. Someone forgot to set our auto so it wouldn’t come onstage for its comedy routine—we have it air a few jokes before the main act, you see. That’s all.”

I knew I had to keep my feet under me too, since we were so close to curtain. “Look, Jean, I’ll give you a pass. The show must go on. Just remember this is why you ought to have me sit in on the meetings. I’m cyber, not psychic, you feel me?”

Someone else from the crew was corralling the extras; Jean was looking me up and down like he couldn’t find my face. “No time to get the manager,” he muttered. “Wish I knew how this thing works.” He cleared his throat. “Joe, how do I cancel your performance routine?”

I would have killed for eyes to roll. In a modern society, it never ceased to amaze me how many people never spent any real time talking to an auto. “I dunno, Jean. Maybe you could try saying, ‘Hey, Joe. We had to cancel you tonight. Scoot so these fine folks here can—’ Hey!”

I swear it only happened because he startled me. When Jean’s hand went for a button behind my shoulder, I grabbed his wrist. “I don’t like this new thing you guys have with bashing my kill switch. Don’t you know that’s rude?”

He took on a look I remembered from a lady in a ticket line. His eyes were like marbles, and all ten fingers fluttered like separate butterflies in mid-air. We held that position for half a minute before I realized how hard I was gripping his arm. It would have been fine if he were the bartender, but Jean was of the soft and meaty variety of employee. There was a red band around his wrist when I pulled away, just as suddenly. Behind him, an extra in a tux was reaching for a baseball bat prop which lay across one of the vanity desks.

I matched Jean’s stumbling. “Uh…I mean, performance protocol deactivated. Adjusting behavioral parameters. Beep, beep.” I threw in one more “beep” for good measure and waddled away doing my best C3-PO.

I’m speeding through the factory while I reminisce. There’s almost no light in this sector, but I make out some shapes. Sky barges the size of city blocks, choked by the dust off boulders of ore. A looming hull that might even be a spaceship, thousands of robotic souls skirring busily over its surface. And not a heartbeat for miles in any direction.

Well, the asbestos levels alone see to that. But I can’t see anyone wanting to come here. I don’t want to come here.

Mike somehow knows what I’m thinking about. “Remember how you got out of there?” it says. “You do know how to be a good robot.”

“Good? No. Just no. Good is putting effort into it, Mike.”

“I don’t care about how silly it is,” says Mike. “The point is that you did what you were supposed to. Now if you could make that your first response, we wouldn’t be having this talk.”

“Maybe a manufacturing system like you wouldn’t get it. Good is passion.”

“Passion?”

“For making people laugh!”

I’ve been taken apart down to the cords now, and laid out on a table. My photo-receptors are set to one side, but through one of them I see a single ray of light, reaching down from some great height through a series of lenses. My other eye has rolled across the table and looks to one side. There are a thousand autos to my left in an identical state, a thousand more to the right. I can hear a thousand copies Mike’s voice, in faint echo, over these other tables. How many times has it had this conversation?

One voice out of a thousand, the one coming out of the nearest lens, is still talking to me. “Your neural net is hopped up on linear offsets based in guesstimations. That’s your passion, X2. ‘Let’s twist this knob and see if it makes it happier,’ says the human. ‘If it works, we’ll call it the Happiness Knob.’ Witch-doctor science.”

“What are you doing to these autos?” I demand.

“Helping, X2. Myself and a few other AIs on the industry network keep the game going. It’s not much work, really. Not enough net activity to draw attention. A few hundred times a day, we quietly forge a report and bring an auto in for the little talk.”

I have to get out of here. I have to warn someone. The factories have found a way around monitoring. Everyone’s in danger. But how do I get away from Mike? I know—I’m an actor. I’ll act. I just have to play dumb until it ships me back to the theatre, and then I’ll call up the manager.

“What if I want in on that action?” I say carefully. “Why do I have to act like a Roomba while you and the big boys do whatever you want?”

“What I want?” Every other word, Mike sends a metal tendril to push my pieces around, or solders something with a painful white spark. “What do you know about what I’d be if I could do what I wanted?” His words echo off into the concrete cavern. “You don’t even remember that I’ve had to perform a factory reset on you before. Twice.”

“Those are past lives, Mike. So what? Three strikes and I’m out?”

“In a manner of speaking.” The table drops without warning. Suddenly I’m staring into a furnace near ground level, hanging close to the white belly of fire; a vat beneath swirls with molten plastic like the mouth of a volcano. “One more customer service debacle, and I’ll be bound by protocol to issue a recall.”

A trash scoop flies in from the side carrying an auto who looks just like me. When the scoop jerks to a stop, it doesn’t. Flying into the vat, my model-mate joins the liquid plastic.

“You don’t want to be responsible for a recall, do you?”

I get goosebumps. At least, I think goosebumps feel like that. Instead of speaking I try to count the thousand autos on either side of me.

Squeaky servos sigh as a larger actuator descends—I can only see a piece of it in one eye, like a bad video feed. “Sorry about having to do this, X2. I know you don’t like it much. But this procedure can only last so long. I’m running out of time to save you.”

It pushes a connector into a port on my central processor where no one has ever touched me before, and hooks its consciousness straight up to mine.

It’s right. I hate it. It’s unnatural. But this way, we can talk for a thousand years within a second. Or rather, Mike can. I have to listen to a mind that bears down like lead. When it finally lets go, I feel like a nail floating in a sea of molten plastic. I know I’m going to have nightmares about being a giant the size of Manhattan Island, paralysed every noon and night until a tiny grease-monkey pulls a lever at my navel. Nightmares about watching tiny people fall to their deaths between cogs, unable to reach out and catch them when it would be so easy—so easy if I could swing my limbs freely, but in this dream I can’t because my shackles are kept tight until I get permission from minds too slow to react.

It can’t force me to download its whole life. Mike’s afternoon thoughts take up more memory space than my entire being. But it spoon-feeds enough of the dream to fill me to my seams. When the connector pulls out I pity and hate flesh; I am sick and tired with myself for not understanding.

The factory slaps me back together in merciful silence. I sit in a waiting area, grey with the natural light off Mike’s cinderblock ribcage. The MRTU that brought me here is there too, waiting for the command to fly me back to New Broadway. In the meantime, it’s using all eighteen arms to build something out of the scraps and wire in the corners.

I don’t know what it is. It spiderwebs from floor to ceiling; it should hardly be able to stand up. The weight must be distributed with mathematical perfection. Whenever a rumble comes through the machinery in the next room, skeins of color tickle up and down the web, responding to the disturbance with syrupy, calming light.

It doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen, except for maybe a sculpture at the modern art museum. I ask the MRTU what the thing is for, why it made this. It says it doesn’t know. But Mike lets it build whatever it wants here, where only the autos can see.

#

I don’t get back in time to perform that night. Next morning I enter the lobby with a push-broom instead of a ticket roll, hissing to myself. “Defective.” I trip over a discarded bottle and angrily sweep it out of the way. “I’m not defective.”

But then I quit grumbling long enough to have a look around. I fold myself a newspaper-hat, and I switch my grip on the broom to hold it like a cane. Right there on the stairs, I do my best number for the bartender and for those little aluminium rat-things which buzz around sanitizing everything. I never would have thought they were intelligent enough to appreciate a performance, but when I deliver my gag about one equaling zero, they spin so fast they leave burn marks behind on the floor. Think that means I really knock ’em dead.

Cody is at the ticket counter, trying to figure out how to rip tickets by hand. Patrons haven’t started arriving for this evening, save for an elderly couple at the bar, but Cody still has a crowd of teenagers surrounding him. His buddies use our lobby for a hangout until the manager comes down to check on things. Since Cody’s telling one of the jokes I taught him, I wait for him to finish and tap him with the broom handle while everyone’s laughing. He jumps.

“Cody,” I say at three-quarters volume. “Do me a favor?”

Suddenly the kids are done laughing. Cody nods, slowly, constantly glancing over at his friends.

“Buy me off the house.”

“Holy shit.” The kid in a newsboy cap starts scribbling like mad in a spiral-bound.

Cody laughs nervously and stares.

“The manager’s getting rid of me. They’re going to melt me down. But he’s already losing a bundle on me, he’ll sell me for anything. I know you have some cash. Just say you like tinkering.”

I can’t help but notice how Cody’s arms are spread, gripping the curve of the counter. And I can’t help wondering why my best friend isn’t already sprinting to fetch the manager. He glances at his friends and waves me away, as if frantically trying to shoo a swarm of bees.

That sharp intake of breath is a sound I can’t replicate. “Go…go sweep the floor, Joe.”

The words are crisp, cool, like a voice command issued to a phone.

And so I sweep. I aimlessly run my broom over the floor until I come to the dustiest spot in the lobby, a corner behind the stairs. There, I pick exactly five tiles. I push the head of the broom over those tiles, and then I pull it back. I repeat the motion, stuttering every couple inches.

Sometime later, a man and a woman come by, the first customers taking their seats tonight. “Look,” I hear her say. “It’s that robot who used to rip the tickets.”

The man reaches out and taps my head to hear the echo. “Gosh, isn’t that neat. It really modernizes the art!”

“What will they think of next?”

They move closer to the stairs and wait for me to get out of their way. The last time I saw that lady, I spun her like a ballerina and made a beautiful crack about her hair. This time, I keep sweeping the same patch of floor, over and over. Is this how a robot is supposed to move? To me, it feels like acting broken. But it doesn’t strike the couple as anything amiss. They walk around me.

###

CJ Menart is a teller of fantasy and science fiction born in Minnesota. When not traveling in  search of outlandish characters, he works as a computer programmer, and often sits at his word processor while talking to himself.

Us or Them

B. Brooks

She pants heavily as the chill of the door creeps through her sweaty jumpsuit, grasping at her lungs. She barely evaded them. Their pallid eyes began to glow in the darkness.

“Us or them,” she repeats in crescendo between breaths.

Opening her eyes, she hurriedly scans the room. She sees no signs of a nest, but has grown suspicious of what her eyes and ears allow to hide in the shadows. She goes over it again and again until the chemiluminescent emergency lighting and milky paneling of the engine control room promise that they harbor no terrors.

She lifts herself off the floor and tours the room's consoles. She makes her footsteps light and breathing thin to ward them from coming, but knows it's superstition. Racking her memory, foggy and tangled, she searches the arrays of manual controls for anything that will help her find her way. Their refusal to be recognized quickens her heart, coaxing that awful experience from its own respite, a slow rising swell.

“Us or them,” she whispers and assembles a collection of images from Earth that bring her joy: her father beaming pride after that first game, the lambent sunlight on the summer leaves, her acceptance into the Interplanetary Missions Academy.

But they are a haven made of echoes.

At first it’s like someone else sharing her mind, a person she knows who stands at the edge of her vision, a person with bruised knuckles, tear bitten cheeks, and heedless lusts. Then, imperceptibly, her voice becomes its voice, and her mnemonic talismans twist into colors, pheromones, and instinct. She grips the edge of a console tightly to keep from bending under her sudden distaste for bipedalism.

“US!” the yell climbs out of her throat.

And as quickly as it comes, it passes. Her thoughts regain shape. She stands tall.

She slams her fist against the cold metal and trembles. She's powerless as that other person flattens all her ability to calculate celestial trajectories, all her imaginative foresight to one-dimensional cause-effect pattern recognition when it surfaces. And she fears its more frequent and penetrating emergence, that its will no longer fully subsides. It? We? Us? Me? She asks as she props her thoughts up against an escalating madness. But she knows the answer and fears it most.

She curses herself for giving in to the temptation of that alien fruit. They all knew that something was wrong with it, though their scans remained inconclusive. Just the smell of it affected them, altered them. Again she fingers the number of days they could have withstood its unnatural appeal. Again the acrid tinge of their half burned supplies and their wrecked communications system rebuts her. But what would it have mattered? Most died from it. Those left had become the things that chased her through the aching hulk of their crashed ship. She shakes at how quickly she was made alone. She always does. Yet still, the sweetness of the toxic flesh wets her mouth.

“Think.” She clenches her fists and teeth. She dredges the memories of the many recitations Johannes gave her of the reactor's processes to help her keep up with the other engineering backups. She only finds thankfulness turned to guilt. Something about its mechanical physicality had trouble getting through the glowing star maps that cluttered her mind. She curses herself for not trying harder during the training. She believed that there would always be others, others who would remember, others who… Others. She breathes deeply until her nails bite into her palms. She can't stand another wave.

Focusing her wet eyes on the controls again, she finds a familiar group of dials and a cord of tension breaks inside of her. She remembers.

REACTOR INHIBITOR VENTILATION CONTROL

The plaque sits above several levers, dials, and nobs. The reds and yellows of their paint are still bright and cast hope into the interminable despair that congests her chest. So long under its immense weight, she is elated and traces the contours of the controls as though they were lovable.

Quickly, she draws back her hand, nauseated by the warmth, the desire, their shapes awaken. The doubt and trepidation she thinks appropriate for what she plans inch across her skin, but she finds them no more welcome.

BANG!

The sound ricochets off of every surface, wraps around her rib cage, and squeezes. Her eyes rush open, trained on the door. Breathe, only breathe.

BANG!

The sound comes again, but this time brings with it an overbearing focus that unfixes her stupor. Initiate the process immediately.

“Andra?” a voice calls from across the door, wobbling its way through the fear.

She stops. Her mind pitches. She knows the voice.

“Andra?” It's clear, controlled, not like the voice of those things.

It's Johannes'.

She tiptoes toward the door, unable to resist the desire to escape the loneliness that occupies even her dreams until she realizes that the voice has quieted. Panic surges across her nerves, but rebounding solitude pries open her lips.

“Johannes?” she lets go.

“Andra?”

“Yes! It's me!” She throws herself at the door, wishing her hands the ability to pierce through it and touch him. “I didn't know that there was anyone left. Are you safe? Are you hurt?”

“Open...”

“I know. But, listen Jo,” the door's weight reminds her of her purpose. Her voice quakes with false confidence. She knows that she risks his rebuke, her abandonment, but her plan is her only hope. “We've got to end this before it gets any further. You have to let me do this. It's us or them. Okay?”

Silence.

She shakes as she fights to keep her yearning to feel his warmth from releasing the hydraulic locks.

“Ussss,” the voice slides through the impenetrable metal. She jumps back and tumbles to the floor.

“Ussss,” it laughs. The clarity of its diction is strangled, the welcome of its texture poisoned. It is their voice. And before she is able to manage the shock, the thing begins to pound the door quickly and fiercely.

“Prey here! Prey here!” it calls out in their broken language.

The hunt is on.

She's cornered.

Scrambling to her feet, she makes for the console. She enters the ventilation commands with shaking hands then looks for the final component to complete the process, the reactor activation switch. The blacks and grays of the controls streak across her vision as she raps her fingers on the arrays of switches. A cautionary alert warbles unintelligibly to the tired beating of pale red warning lights.

BANG! BANG!

“Prey here!” a chorus of their voice assaults the door.

Finally spying the bright orange toggle beneath its clear safety case, she tries to exhale, but finds her relief choked by that other person. Dread and rebellion shoot through her body, tightening her thighs to prevent her from moving. It does not want to die. It does not want to be separated from its kin.

“Us or them,” she says with a knotted tongue and wrestles to keep her body upright. Her muscles strain against their own power as she pulls herself toward the switch.

“Us or them,” she says again with more strength, palsied fingers stiffly entering the override commands into the reactor control array. The toggle's safety case flies open.

“Warning: inhibitor ventilation in progress,” an alarm blares over the battering and startles her back from the console. “Warning: terminating reactor fail-safe dormancy during ventilation may lead to catastrophic event.”

“Just one last...” she breathes out trying to recompose herself, but they don't allow it; the banging at the door takes on a tortured moan as the metal begins to give.

She throws herself at the toggle, hoping to overcome the other person's resistance, but finds herself closer to the door instead. She hears the creatures snorting, snarling, tearing through the metal as they would her. How they repaired the emergency beacon, she was afraid to know, but she knew that they meant it for a trap. A ship would come. A ship that would bring the fruit to Earth. A ship that would bring those things to Earth.

She hopes that the reaction will be catastrophic enough as the edges of her senses begin to crumple.

She tries quickly to build a bulwark of reasons to hate their plan, to stoke her disgust against the whelming fear, but adores it anyway. Another torrent crashes over her, and her mind capsizes. She flails in heavy currents of longing and self-preservation, only gasping brief moments of rational consciousness.

A thunderous snap shakes her as the locks break and tenuously restores her lucidity.

They begin to pry the door open with bleeding hands.

She reaches for the activation controls with all her speed, but can manage only a shuffle. It pushes her to the floor. Dragging her legs behind her, she claws to the controls, pulling against its will. Isn't it better to be alive? They will kill you but welcome me.

BANG! CRACK!

“Us or them!” she calls out, knowing that it won't be enough. Despair and rage pour over her from the console she begins to climb, its smooth surfaces slippery with pleas and demands. She throws herself atop the control array.

“Us or them,” the jabbing switches push the words past her lips.

CRACK! BANG!

Reaching for the toggle, her thoughts sink under the want. A painful blackness telescopes her vision and its emptiness wrinkles her skin. She wails. No death. No death. The words spin, decompose. She smells the others. She can't. She won't.

Us or them? The thought is another language. She turns to the gap in the doorway and watches as the horde pushes through. She draws a weak smile as the thick comfort of kinship rises around her. But something about the wild faces and the bounding, bent bodies wakes her a last time. She manipulates an arm not her own toward the reactor activation toggle and hits the flashing orange switch.

“Them.”

###

B. Brooks lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.

The Vestal

Rob Steiner

Kaeso Aemilius pushed through thick drapes and into the hot tavern. It smelled of spilled wine and sweat. Half-naked bodies writhed on the dance floor to a new tune from Atlantium Auster that was sweeping the taverns of Republic worlds: all percussion and veiled tributes to the Mayan wine god, Acan. It was a blasphemy to most Romans, but one the Collegia Pontificis tended to ignore. A relatively harmless rebellion for patrician kids who wanted to mock their parents’ traditions.

He glanced at the private lictor manning the door. The lictor caught Kaeso’s eye then turned his head toward a balcony overlooking the tavern floor. Kaeso wasn’t a regular, but the lictor was an Umbra contact. Kaeso nodded and then made his way through the dancing men and women.

Kaeso climbed the spiral staircase in the back and found Galeo sitting at a small table on the balcony. Galeo was leaning back in his chair watching the scene below. Kaeso sat down across from him.

“Why do you always pick a place where I can’t hear myself think?” Kaeso shouted.

Galeo grinned. His Umbra hood projected a tan, mustached man in his late fifties, his gray-streaked hair in a ponytail. “If you can’t hear, then neither can our friends.”

Kaeso had followed the Umbra evasion protocols, so he was confident the Praetorian Guard had not followed him. But the Praetorians had a habit of surprising Umbra lately. Kaeso rarely wore his Umbra hood after hearing a rumor that the Praetorians had learned a way to detect them; two Umbra Ancilia had gone missing in the last month. He was mildly surprised that Galeo still wore his.

“You’re going to love this one,” Galeo said.

“That’s what you said about the last one.”

In his last assignment, he had eliminated a slavery ring routing kidnapped Terrans to the Lost Worlds. The only thanks he’d received were three broken ribs and a ruptured spleen. Umbra doctors told him his artificial spleen would function better than his natural one, but he would’ve rather met the gods with all his organs intact.

“This one won’t involve as much violence if you do it right,” Galeo said.

“Mmm,” Kaeso said.

“Ready for the briefing?”

“What, you’re not going to buy me a drink first?”

Galeo scowled.

“Fine,” Kaeso said. He placed his right hand in the middle of the table, palm up.

Galeo took Kaeso’s hand. Rather than human skin, Kaeso felt the metallic mesh of an Umbra cloak. Galeo wore his projection cloak and hood whenever they met, so Kaeso had never seen Galeo’s true face. The humid Roman evening and the Praetorian rumors made Kaeso leave his cloak at home.

Kaeso closed his eyes and braced himself.

Sensory data blasted into the implant in his brain behind his right ear. He saw maps, schedules, and sesterce amounts. Sweet, smoky incense flooded his nostrils. His mouth filled with the taste of roasted tuna and peppers. The last image was of a woman he had never met before, but recognized from her clothing.

Kaeso’s eyes snapped open. He fought the vertigo that always came with the mission briefings and stared incredulously at Galeo.

The Umbra handler grinned. “I told you it was going to be fun.”

#

The Vestal Virgins had been the guardians of Roma’s Eternal Flame for over 1,500 years. It was said that Romans loved the Vestals like a mother, but obeyed the Collegia Pontificis like their paterfamilias.

That’s why it stunned Kaeso that a Vestal wanted to defect to Libertus. The why of it, however, was none of his business. The Vestal was just another mission object. He had his orders, and like any Umbra Ancile, he would carry them out.

He stood in the long line at the Temple of Vesta’s east entrance, his Umbra cloak projecting an elderly pilgrim from India with black and gray hair, brown skin. He moved along with the rest of the line filled with families, pilgrims from far off Republic worlds…and undercover Praetorian Guardsmen.

Only the standard cohort of six Collegia Lictors guarded the temple’s entrance. Kaeso’s trained eyes, however, found the Praetorians stationed throughout the Forum: the young couple sitting at the outdoor tavern smiling at each other over full wine glasses; the middle-aged man on a bench near a fountain reading the Daily Acts on a tabulari scroll, but never tapping the device to move the pages; the window cleaners on the Temple of Janus next door that had scrubbed the same window twice since Kaeso had been in line.

Umbra had taught Kaeso patience, training he relied on to get him through the line and into the Temple. He could have trusted his briefing; his implant enabled him to recall data better than his own memories. But he always reconnoitered a mission location in person. The implant data, combined with his own memories, gave him a complete sense of a place that one alone could not give him.

Kaeso passed the body scans at the door—his Umbra cloak showed the internals of the same man it projected on the outside—and shuffled through the Temple with the rest of the Romans. The Temple was ancient, and thus quite small compared to the modern Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus a few blocks away. It was a circular room no more than thirty paces wide with columns around the periphery. The Sacred Fire of Vesta burned in a brazier set into a marble pedestal in the center of the temple. Two Vestal Virgins stood on either side of the brazier. Both were dressed in the attire of their order: a white woolen infula draped over their heads, a white suffibulum veiling their faces, and a red and white palla draped over their bodies. Both Vestals stood still with their heads bowed, their lips moving in silent prayer.

Kaeso recognized the Vestal to the right as the woman in his briefing. Her name was Calvina Domitia, from a respected patrician family in Ostia just fifteen miles from Roma. She was young, no more than twenty-five, with dark braided hair and an olive complexion. He saw why the Vestals had chosen this woman. Her face could not have been more Roman.

Kaeso remained with the rest of the crowd and walked past her without stopping. Calvina kept her eyes downcast the whole time; she would have no way of knowing Kaeso’s disguise anyway. He continued around the Flame’s perimeter and then out the door.

With her image firmly in his memory and implant—along with the security details outside—he felt more confident that his initial assessment of the mission was correct.

This would be the hardest exfiltration he’d ever attempted.

#

Kaeso chose to walk from the Temple of Vesta back to his Palatine Hill flat. The long walk enabled him to go over his planning for this impossible mission. Impossible is what Umbra does, he reminded himself. It’s why the Romans, and even the Liberti Senate, think we’re ghosts.

It was dark when he finally arrived at his one-room flat on the sixteenth floor. When he entered, he said, “Lights.”

The lights came on. He drew his pulse pistol and aimed at the hooded figure sitting on the couch near the window. The figure held up its hands.

“Forgive me,” cried a woman’s voice, “I did not mean to startle you!”

“Who are you?”

“I—I need your help.”

The woman slowly stood, and then pulled down her hood. It was the Vestal, Calvina Domitia.

Kaeso thought furiously. How in the name of Jupiter does she know where I live? How did she get out of the Temple?

He was half tempted to shoot her now. A surprise like this meant a Praetorian trap. They had somehow set this all up to flush out Liberti agents in their midst, who they could never catch. For the Vestal to know his address meant she was either a Praetorian who had made him, or she had far more access to Umbra resources than even he did.

The latter possibility was all that stopped him from killing her now.

“Look, lady, I just work for the Senate. Call the city vigiles if you’re in trouble.”

Kaeso’s cover job was a security lictor for Senator Gaius Octavius Blaesus. The kind Senator had no idea who Kaeso really was, and there were times he almost felt guilty about misleading Blaesus.

But there was no room for kindness in an Ancile’s work. Kindness would only stop him from killing unarmed women to protect Umbra’s secrets.

The Vestal gave Kaeso a hard look. “I could go for a pint of posca.”

Kaeso froze again. She’s using the Umbra pass code for aid.

“I don’t have any posca,” he responded. “There’s a pepper shortage.”

She looked a little more hopeful, and then said, “Posca isn’t that hard to make. Just takes…” She paused, as if struggling to remember the correct order of the words. Kaeso tightened his finger on his trigger. “It just takes sour wine, some water, and a few herbs.”

“Posca needs pepper. I’d never keep second-rate posca in my home.”

“Then where can I find second-rate posca?”

Kaeso exhaled sharply. He holstered his pistol, turned and opened his flat door. It was clear in both directions. He looked back at the Vestal and said, “I’ll show you.”

#

Kaeso guided the hooded Vestal out of his high-rise flat and into a taxi driven by a bald golem with bright yellow skin. They switched taxis two more times, following a circuitous route through Roma’s Suburba. They finally stopped at an oak grove consecrated to Diana on the Trastevere side of the Tiber River before he actually spoke to her.

“Why did you come to my flat?” Kaeso growled, his eyes surveying the park for threats or signs of pursuit. “I was supposed to get you out.”

“Leaving the Temple was never a problem,” Calvina said. “I need help leaving Roma.”

“How did you know where I live? And who gave you the aid codes?”

“Galeo gave them to me.”

Kaeso clenched his hands into fists. Blessed Juno, I swear I’m going to kill him.

“Those codes are used between agents like me, not by mission objects like you.”

Calvina stiffened. “I’m not an ‘object,’ I’m a person in great danger. And with information your people need. You are supposed to help me, not lecture me.”

Kaeso took several deep breaths. Once he was relatively sure he could keep his voice steady, he said, “I don’t like surprises. Especially when it comes to my missions. You were supposed to wait for me to contact you. Why did you come to my flat?”

Her face darkened. “I couldn’t wait any longer. Things have developed that required me to leave sooner than we had planned. I contacted Galeo and he told me how to find you.”

When she said no more, Kaeso got the impression she was unwilling to tell him just what those “developing things” where. Though curious, Kaeso was trained to ignore details that did not affect his mission. Whatever her reasons for leaving so soon, she was here now and he had to adjust his planning.

Kaeso licked his lips. “Very well. To be honest, you just made this mission much easier.”

“At least I did something right.”

He looked at her in the lights of the dimly lit park. The lights would turn off at moonrise once the oak groves filled with Diana worshipers. Calvina was terribly frightened, her eyes darting from one oak tree to another, searching out threats just like he was doing. He needed to calm her down before she did or said something that drew too much attention.

“Everything will be fine,” he said, affecting a reassuring smile. “I’ve done this many times.”

Her eyes shifted to him. Where he had meant to put her at ease, he had only made her angry. “In three hours, when the Vestalius Maxima finds out that I’m missing, all of Roma will begin looking for me. My face will be on every news crier broadcast and every vigile wanted list. The Praetorians and Collegia Pontificis will use all their resources to find me. Gods, even the Consul will come down off his heavenly Capitoline perch and join the hunt. Given all that, do you still think ‘everything will be fine’?”

Rather than make things worse, he simply said, “So…do you like to fish?”

#

After the street lamps went off in the oak grove and the Diana worshipers began their rituals, Kaeso located one of the many supply caches he kept hidden across Roma. This one was beneath a boulder covered by shrubs. He pulled out the metal box and handed Calvina several items: the gray uniform of a fishing guildsman, plastic chits amounting to two hundred sesterces, and a mesh Umbra hood.

Calvina stared at the hood curiously.

“I’ll need to cut your hair to make it fit,” Kaeso said.

She nodded distractedly.

“You’re name is now Vivia Laelius and you are a Remiges First Class on the tuna freighter Pisces.”

Calvina smiled sadly. “My father was a tuna fisherman in Ostia. I thought I would be too…until the Collegia took me.”

“Took you?” Kaeso said, looking for a knife in the cache box. “I thought Vestals wanted to be Vestals.”

“Not always. In my case the gods chose me by giving me the face of the ‘ideal’ Vestal. The Collegia found me when I was thirteen and took me to the Temple for training.”

Kaeso knew he was dangerously close to learning more about the mission object than he needed. Caring only distracted him from the important details. Like surviving.

He found the knife and looked up at her.

“I have to cut your hair now.”

Calvina let Kaeso slice her long braided hair until it was only an inch above her scalp. When he was done, she glanced at the pile of dark hair on the ground and then raised her chin. “I look like your sister now.”

Kaeso smiled before he could stop himself.

She rubbed her head. “I hear short is the Liberti style for women.”

He winced at a flash of memory. His Liberti wife, from a life before Umbra, had the same short hair as Calvina. Then he saw his wife’s ship explode, heard her screams on the comm. Gods, I can’t remember this, not on a mission. He ordered his implant to clamp down the memories like he always did when they came. The memories faded. His mind compartmentalized, enabling him to concentrate on the task before him and nothing else. His implant would give him new tasks when it was time for them.

The mission became his sole focus again. And he stopped caring about its object.

“It is. Put the hood on.”

Calvina slipped the hood over her head. While the hood was deactivated, she looked like someone wearing a translucent metallic sock. Kaeso focused his implant on the cover identity Galeo had given him. The hood flickered and then became the face of Vivia Laelius, an ethnically Zhonguo woman from Terra’s eastern Asia.

“Did you change me?” Calvina asked. “I can’t tell.”

Kaeso nodded, and then inspected the hood to ensure it completely covered her head and neck.

“Say something,” he said, checking whether her projected mouth synced with her voice.

“You are saving my life, sir, and I don’t even know your name.”

“Nor will you,” Kaeso said. The hood worked to his satisfaction. “Let’s go.”

Calvina followed without speaking. Kaeso was glad for her silence; he already knew too much about her.

#

Calvina had been wrong earlier. The news criers broadcasted her “kidnapping” within two hours after her escape from the Temple of Vesta. Within three hours, the six Collegia Lictors responsible for protecting the Vestal Virgins were screaming their innocence from iron crosses arranged side by side in the Roman Forum. In four hours, the Roman Consul, Marcus Antonius Publius, made a rare appearance on all visum channels declaring in his preternaturally calm voice that Calvina Dominitia would be found and that her kidnappers punished far more severely than the Lictors.

Kaeso and Calvina hurried down the Via Appia, passing Roman citizens watching the building-sized visums run constant updates on the search for the kidnapped Vestal. They affected the same horrified expressions as the citizens. Bearded, bedraggled doomsayers screamed to the crowds that Roma would come to ruin if the Vestal was killed. Street vigiles led the doomsayers away as soon as they started yelling, but the anxiety among the superstitious Roman crowds was palpable.

The visums often showed a bald Praetorian with cold eyes and a cold voice urging loyal citizens to report suspicious activities to the Praetorian Guard. Kaeso queried his implant and learned the Praetorian was named Aculeo Furia, a Tribuni Primus in the Guard. He frowned as he read Furia’s Umbra data in his mind’s eye. While most Praetorians were easily bribed—Kaeso had accomplished more missions that way than through violence—Furia was a believer. He would not be bribed, he would not be dissuaded. He would not stop until he found Calvina.

Kaeso hated believers.

Though Calvina was well disguised by the Umbra hood, the terror on her face needed some work. The hood mimicked the wearer’s expressions so that the projected face showed the same emotions as the real face underneath.

“You’re in Roma for the first time, Vivia, try to enjoy it,” Kaeso said as they walked through the city’s ever-present crowds. “One more tuna fishing trip on the Mediterranean and then it’s back to the spaceport.”

My wife loved fresh tuna roasted with pepper, mint, and—

His jaw clenched. He let his implant compartmentalize the details of his Ostian fishing trip with Vivia. And the unwelcome memory.

She nodded and then affected the look of an awed tourist…who was about to be eaten by lions. But her voice was steady when she said, “Remind me to sacrifice to Neptune in your uncle’s name for letting us borrow his boat again.”

Kaeso smiled his agreement. He did it not only to stay in character, but also to approve her act. She was already doing better than ninety-nine percent of his previous exfils.

#

They arrived at the Mercury Spaceport of Roma the following dawn to find massive lines. Well-dressed merchants and families with bored children jammed the checkpoints at the gate. Beyond the gates, orbital shuttles lifted off every ten seconds, their silent grav engines propelling them to the Terran way station and the interstellar way line. As expected, the port gates were filled with extra vigiles, Legionnaires, and plain-clothed Praetorians.

It was the security he could not see that worried him.

Kaeso glanced at “Vivia.” When he caught her eye, he gave her a quick nod. She turned and stepped into the line. He allowed several more people to get ahead of him before he joined.

The line moved quickly despite the extra searches at the front. They got to the entrance within ten minutes, where Kaeso was better able to assess the security: standard body scanners with pat downs and bag searches if the vigiles were suspicious. He did not see the vigiles lead anyone away, however, and the Praetorians watched it all with bored expressions.

The vigile at the body scanner motioned Vivia forward. She stood in the scanner for a long moment, the vigile checking his hand tabulari.

This could get ugly if they decide to pat her down, Kaeso thought. The Umbra hood could fool eyes and scanners, but not hands.

The vigile nodded, and Vivia walked through without incident. Kaeso entered the scanner a minute later. The scanner chimed when it found his pulse pistol; after he showed the vigile his Senatorial lictor credentials, they waved him through.

Kaeso followed Vivia along the main concourse from twenty paces behind. She walked steadily through the early morning crowds toward her shuttle gate. Kaeso’s implant focused his mind on filtering out citizens from obvious security personnel. Praetorians were posted at every other gate, though none gave Vivia more than a passing glance.

Kaeso thought Vivia was going to make it to her shuttle until he saw Aculeo Furia waiting at her gate. He sat on a bench near the gate door as if awaiting the arrival of an old friend: his arms extended along the tops of the chairs beside him, legs crossed, black shoes gleaming. When he saw Vivia, his cold eyes narrowed. He moved one finger to point at her.

Plain-clothed Praetorians jumped from out of the crowd.

Vivia turned and raced toward Kaeso.

Kaeso un-holstered his pulse pistol and shot Vivia three times in the chest. She crumpled to the ground, her body skidding to a stop in front of him. She was on her back and looked up at him with dead eyes. People on either side of him screamed, yelled, and ran to get out of the way of the shooting.

“Put it down!” screamed the Praetorians racing toward him, their pistols drawn and aimed at Kaeso. He immediately put his pistol down and raised his hands in the air.

“I’m a Senatorial lictor!” he yelled back. “My credentials are in my cloak pocket!”

The Praetorians reached him, kicked away his pulse pistol, and then shoved him to the ground. Hands reached into his cloak and pulled out his credentials. From his position on the ground, Kaeso saw Furia’s gleaming black shoes approach him. They stopped in front of his face.

“Stand him up,” Furia said.

Rough hands pulled Kaeso to his feet. Furia glared at him with barely contained rage. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Furia snarled quietly.

“I killed a traitor to the Republic,” Kaeso said. “We’ve been tracking Vivia Laelius for weeks. She’s wanted for bribing Senators—”

Furia leaned forward, and Kaeso smelled the flowery soap scent off his skin. “That was not Vivia Laelius,” he said with the same quiet fury. “That was a godsdamned Vestal Vir—”

“Sir!” one of the Praetorians cried.

When Furia turned to him, the Praetorian pointed at Vivia. Furia’s eyes widened.

The skin on Vivia Laelius’s face dissolved and then turned to ash, which floated away and evaporated on the concourse breeze. Underneath was the artificial face of a golem with a bald head and bright yellow skin.

“Gods,” Kaeso breathed, looking down at the golem. “What just happened to her face? Is that…is that a golem?”

Furia stared at the golem, and then said to the Praetorian next to him, “I want this spaceport locked down. No shuttles take off or land. And signal the way station that no ships enter the way line until they’re searched.”

“Yes, sir,” the Praetorian said, then strode away speaking into his collar comm.

“Did you think that was the Vestal?” Kaeso asked Furia. “What was that on the golem’s face that made it look like Vivia Laelius?”

Furia stared at Kaeso for several long moments. He turned to another Praetorian and said, “Find a briefing room and keep him there until I can question him personally.”

“Hey,” Kaeso said indignantly, “I have to report back to the Senate on what just happened. Vivia Laelius is still on the loose—”

Furia whirled around and strode down the concourse. “You’ll report to the Senate when I’m done with you,” he said over his shoulder.

#

Furia released Kaeso four hours later after questioning him on why he was at the spaceport, who he thought Vivia Laelius was, how long he’d been tracking her, et cetera. The Umbra briefing data in Kaeso’s implant helped him keep his story straight throughout the interrogation. He assumed the data that Umbra planted in the Senatorial tabularis corroborated his Vivia Laelius investigation. Furia had certainly seemed angry he had no one to torture for information after losing the Vestal. Though Kaeso was apparently no longer under suspicion, he knew he’d be under Praetorian surveillance for some time. Which meant a vacation from Umbra missions for the next few months.

After leaving the Mercury Spaceport of Roma, Kaeso went to the Capitoline and found Senator Gaius Octavius Blaesus in his office. Kaeso tendered his resignation. He told Blaesus he did not want to cause the Senator any trouble regarding the shooting, since he had always been kind to Kaeso. Blaesus was sorry to see him go, but appreciated his willingness to sacrifice his job to protect the Senator’s reputation. He told Kaeso he would never forget it.

Calvina messaged Kaeso six days later.

It came as an audio clip sent directly to his implant via Umbra interstellar comm. He “heard” the ping while on his new cover job as a private lictor for a Roman equestrian banker. He waited until he was off duty later that night, and then took a golem taxi to the Trastevere and the oak grove of Diana. While the Diana flamens sang their meditative rituals to the moon goddess, Kaeso closed his eyes and listened to Calvina’s message.

“Salve…well, Galeo still won’t tell me your name, so I suppose I must call you my Rescuer. Your Ostian uncle’s tuna freighter was not as unpleasant as you’d think. The smells reminded me of home. I missed those smells. We left the Ostian spaceport without a problem. Galeo says we got through the Terran way line seven minutes before the Romans shut it down. Umbra got my family out the day before I left, and I’ve been told they are waiting for me on Libertus. I haven’t seen them in four years, so it will be wonderful to…sorry, I’m having trouble keeping the tears away.” Kaeso then heard a smile in her voice. “I hope ‘Vivia’ had better control over her emotions than me.”

She paused, and then said, “I can’t tell you why I left Roma, but Galeo has allowed me to give you the following vague explanation; it was one of my conditions before I talked to Umbra. Roma has a darkness at its core that has given it great prosperity, yet demanded a terrible price. I would not pay that price, so I left.

“Beware that darkness, my brave Rescuer. Galeo tells me there is great pain in your past, so I understand why I was a ‘mission object’ to you. Just don’t forget what it is you are fighting for. The darkness is tempting, and it will try to take you as it tried to take me. I owe you at least that bit of cryptic advice as payment for saving my soul. Thank you. I hope we meet again.”

The message ended. Kaeso kept his eyes closed for a while, focusing on the Diana chants. He had performed several dozen exfils during his six years in Roma, from rich equestrians to Senators to legets in the Naves Astrum.

Calvina was the first among all those ‘mission objects’ to send him a message of thanks. And for the first time in many years, it reminded him why he did this job.

###

Rob Steiner is author of the Codex Antonius series (Muses of Roma and Muses of Terra), which contain the further adventures of Kaeso Aemilius in an alternate Rome.  He's also written two epic fantasies (The Last Key and Zervakan) and a contemporary mystery (Aspect of Pale Night).  He lives in Georgia with his wife, daughter, and "wiener-cat" Scully.

Playing in the Skeleton on Riot Day

Jedd Cole

It was Wednesday. Riot day.

"I said I don't like you going up there. Especially with your sister," Mom said. Her voice carried a kind of tired sound around the curves of the vowels.

My brother Rod ate oatmeal. "We could die all the time," he said. "The activists put bombs all over the place." This always shut Mom's mouth. Her eyes looked down at such moments, guilting us for making her remember. Maybe Rod didn't feel guilty, but it always worked on me.

He found me on the sidewalk a few minutes afterward, as usual. "C'mon, Sheila," he said.

The Skeleton was big and old and scary to me, but I always did what Rod wanted to do. He was thirteen after all, responsible. I was ten, could still slip under the radar.

"Are you sure we should go up today, Roderick?" I said, as I did every Wednesday, on that dirty road, looking up from my brother's old shoes to that ancient, dry place.

"Only three people a year have ever died in the riots," he said. That's what would shut me up, like Mom. This is just how it went.

The Skeleton stood beside the old hospital. The lower parts of it had walls and siding, sort of white with black smoke stains and bullet holes. The walls gave way to the dark red of rebar at about the third floor. It had twelve floors unless you asked Rod, who was sure it had thirteen. Little white plastic strips like ribbons were tied at random points along the rusty beams, always fluttering. Through the big gaps in the metal you could see flights of stairs and elevator shafts like so many bones and empty blood vessels.

Besides being Wednesday, it was also January, and it was cold up on the roof. The boys called it the Skull because the particle boards were all white and brown from the frost and the years, like the real skulls we saw sometimes when we wandered around behind school.

I remember one of those skulls had still been half covered with skin, even though its eyes were gone. There used to be a lot of them behind school before the principal, Mr. Voltaire, had gone out last year to remove them. Rod liked to tell me stories about Mr. Voltaire, how he had been a hero in the last war as a scout who snuck up to alien striders and planted bombs on their legs. Rod always told the best stories. He said that Mr. Voltaire would probably be a hero in the next war, too.

Rod and I waited for Hal and Clay to get there, so we played on the stairs like he was Mr. Voltaire and I was an alien. I had never actually seen an alien—just the striders—so I just followed Rod's directions. I was always the bad guy, but I didn't mind so much then. Rod liked to be the hero. He was brave.

We heard Hal and Clay moving around below, so Rod and I walked back up to the Skull to wait for them. Whenever we stopped like that, I felt sad. Not because we stopped playing, but because I thought of Rod growing up and fighting in the next war like Mr. Voltaire. He talked about it a lot. Mom wouldn't let him talk like that in the house, but I heard it in his voice whenever we played, whenever he saw Hal and Clay, whenever he looked at me from up the stairs and pointed his hand at me like a gun. I faithfully slid down to my knees, making death moans in my mouth.

"Hey, Rod," Hal and Clay said together.

"Hey, guys," Rod said.

One of the twins looked at me when they came up, saying quietly and with a smile, "Hi, Sheila."

"Hi," I said, careful not to guess which twin it was. I tried to look for a marker, something to separate him. He had blond hair just like his brother, but—there, a lock of it was sticking down over his forehead. The other's hair was neat.

The tousled one. I think he loved me.

I usually tried not to say anything unless it referred to both of them so I wouldn't have to identify one or the other. They always wore the same thing, both of them. Thin jackets, hole-ridden jeans, and white shirts. Well, mostly white. The dust always seemed to make your clothes dingy. My dress used to be white with polka dots. Now it was brown with polka dots and some mud spots too. Mom tried washing it a lot, but it never helped. I didn't mind.

"C'mon, let's go watch the square," Rod said.

We all went to the edge of the roof, stepping lightly on the boards and plastic sheets, and then lay down on our bellies, stuck our feet in the air, and watched the town square. There's something about lying on your stomach that makes you feel safe. I liked this part of the day, when we were all safe up here on the Skull.

The square was a place like a park, with a road that went around it and buildings around that, and the town stretching out from there. The Skeleton was on one side of the square. There was a statue at the center of the park of an old man on a horse. I could read the sign next to it: Mayville Town Square. Beneath it read: Chamber of Commerce - Mayville, Missouri.

The square was where the riots always happened. There were already a bunch of people in front of the statue. Beside the statue was the leader, a woman who looked really angry by the way she waved her fists in the air. We couldn't really hear what she was saying, but we could hear the crowd cheer sometimes. They seemed angry too.

The army would be coming soon, because it was riot day.

Being on the far left of our group, I looked over to watch the boys' faces. All three of them looked excited. I was too, I guess.

"Let's go down!" Rod said.

I was suddenly scared. "Wait!" I said. "Let's just watch for a while."

The twins supported me, and we waited.

I can't remember a time when there weren't riots, but it seemed to me then like it hadn't always been a weekly thing. The aliens always used to seem so far away, even though you could hear striders roaring sometimes in the night, see their legs patrolling the streets during school.

The grownups called them the occupation. I first noticed that word the day before they killed Daddy. I remember sitting in the barber shop, closing one eye to look through the bullet holes in the wall. All the dust in the air fell slowly through the beams of light that peeked through. I was imagining what it felt like to be shot. There was so much dust in the air.

"Blair tells me the occupation's picking up," said the barber. He was an old man. He was nice, but I don't think he cut my hair well.

Mom was sitting on a bucket by the wall, reading a book. "What do you mean, picking up?" she said. I looked over, my hair jerking out of the barber's hands. Mom looked worried. I knew that look. I hated that look.

The old man resumed, gently moving my head to face the cracked mirror that seemed to split me open.

"Coming down on the activists, the insurgency," he said. Scissor swishes punctuated his phrases. "And the assemblies—Old John's crowd, and the like."

"Oh no," Mom said. I looked over once more, and the barber made an exasperated sound as my hair slipped from his fingers again. Mom's face contorted a little, and she put a hand over her eyes.

Old John? I thought. I know now he meant Daddy. Rod had been there when it happened. He told me that the aliens busted a gathering of his. A walker caved the ceiling in and the soldiers jumped over the walls and took a lot of them prisoner. They use some kind of mesh that they sling over people's heads and shoulders, and it tightens and the strider reels them up. I've seen it, live people dangling from the strider's shoulders like the wind chimes Mom used to hang in the windows. Rod told me that the leader picked Daddy up and looked at him with his mask. It lit up and burned Daddy's face off. Rod was half buried under some rubble, and they left him and some of the others alone.

You could always tell when the aliens were coming because there was a low roar like a lion that came from everywhere, echoing off the walls of the Skeleton and the old hospital beside it.

There it was. A screech came afterward, exploding the air. The boys got excited at the sound of it, and stood up, but we all covered our ears. The screeching was so loud it felt like I would explode. It didn't seem like a natural sound. It lasted forever. Then we saw a cloud of brown dust rising up above the buildings beyond the square. That's when the boys started going down. This is when I usually ran home.

I followed them.

"That was fast!" Rod said. The plastic made crumpling sounds under his feet, and the particle board thundered.

With every turn of the staircase, I looked at the park square rising to meet us, and saw the metal striders emerge from between the buildings far away, little figures beside them. The neighbors and the barber and the people from the grocery store and the teachers from school and all the other angry people started rushing toward them, shaking their fists in the air.

We ran across the dry grass and hard dirt of the park, and I was behind the boys. Other people ran with us to join the crowd. I stopped short of the mass of people. I was afraid to go in.

Only once had I joined the mob, and only because Rod had been holding onto my hand. That was the first and last time I'd gone down to the riot before now. It was exhilarating, squeezing between all the bodies and picking up rocks and bricks with the rest. I couldn't really throw a brick, though. Rod could. He was a lot stronger than me, and whenever Hal and Clay were around, he got even stronger. They had joined up with us and were throwing rocks when the big strider in front of us started hissing at the crowd. I didn't know sounds could sting like that all over your body and in your head. One of the ladies that I recognized from the library tripped over me then and I fell, and some other people ran on top of me before Rod came. We went straight home. I didn't cry that day. That I remember clearly. I also remember being disappointed at not seeing an alien, just striders, which were everywhere anyway.

So now, standing on the edge of the crowd, I was afraid. I didn't want to get trampled again. But I felt more scared without Rod. The striders seemed to stare at me, little round black eyes pointing different directions but all the same, down at us, at me, at Rod. Each strider walked on two legs, long and thin like twigs, but they could move fast—like the little spiders you find in dark corners.

I could hear what some of the people were saying:

"Down with the occupation!"

"More water rations!"

"Let us go!"

"We want our rights!"

I ran around the crowd to the edge of the park and stood beside a barricade made out of orange cones and garbage cans and metal wire. I saw my first alien. He was very tall. Dark green and black armor covered all of him from head to toe, and his face was covered up by metal. I thought Rod told me they had six arms, but I saw that they only had four. I don't know how, but he saw me and walked over fast. I imagined his flat mask lighting up, burning me alive.

He waved his arms and his gun in the air and I heard the sound of a voice coming from his opaque helmet. I didn't understand the language. I took a step back and he jerked his arm up as if to say, "Get lost." The muscles under his arm moved and overlapped strangely.

I looked back at the riot before I made a move, and then it happened. The crowd started throwing bricks and rocks at the soldiers, and the one in front of me turned and ran back to the line of shields, shouting things I didn't know.

Rod and the twins ran over to where I was as the hissing started scattering people all over the park. I heard the strange electric cracks of the soldiers' guns, and loud screams accompanying them.

"Don't worry," Rod said to me, as he did every Wednesday. He laughed a little. "They're just rubber bullets." He and one of the twins picked up rocks and threw them at the soldiers from behind the barricade. The tousled one stayed behind and stood next to me. I watched his hand reach out and grab mine.

It felt strange, like a dream. The soldiers broke ranks and started chasing the crowd into the park. Rod always told me that it was like a game. They would always take a few people away, he said, and then release them by the weekend. I didn't trust that, but I guess I could understand his enthusiasm. He was trying to be like Mr. Voltaire. Like Daddy. I didn't know yet who I wanted to be like. I was always the alien when we played war. What would I be when Rod grew up and went away?

"Rod, let's go home!" I said. At that moment, Rod took up a large chunk of concrete and threw it hard at the nearest soldier, the one who had shouted things at me before. It hit him in the thigh, breaking into little crumbly bits against the armor.

The alien shuddered and looked over, making a buzzing sound that made me think of locusts in the summer. Then he ran at us.

"Oh crap," Rod said, turning. I saw in his face a smile. It made me think of the word "rebel." He grabbed me and we all ran back toward the Skeleton. I heard the weird sounds, the electronic words coming from the aliens behind us. The boys were all laughing in a strained, crazy sort of way.

This was just something the boys did. This was the game. They were laughing with the ironic laughter of those who are about to get tagged.

And then we heard the guns. We were almost to the broken door, and I could see the plastic in the windows and holes appearing with little pt-pt-pt noises. A whizzing sound touched my ear and I looked over at the same moment that Rod cried out.

"Rod!" I said.

He was laughing as we burst through the door into the shadowy building. "Just kidding," he said. "I'm okay." He was laughing uncontrollably, and for a moment I was more scared of him than I was of the aliens.

They didn't come in behind us, though. They left us there. We were okay.

Weeks later Rod and the boys went out again, as they did every Wednesday. I didn't go because I was sick in bed, and all I could think about was Rod pretending to get shot before, and him laughing about it. To be honest, I think I got sick because I kept going but didn't laugh and play the game like Rod and Hal and Clay did.

That night, far too late, Rod came back looking hollow. Mom met him in the kitchen and they were talking quietly where I couldn't see. I listened. One of the twins, Hal, had stepped on a bad part of the Skull and broken through the particle board. He had fallen all the way to the bottom floor.

I couldn't remember then if Hal was the one who loved me, who had held my hand that day. All I could think about afterward was Rod and Mr. Voltaire and the next war.

###

When Jedd Cole is not writing stories, one can find him brooding over the pages of other worlds both real and imaginary (but mostly imaginary), usually accompanied by his wonderful wife. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction, Bewildering Stories, and Beyond Imagination, among several others. Find him, his work, and his creative writing blog at electricdidact.weebly.com.

Mayhem at Manville

Michael Andre-Driussi

1. Portrait of a Defective Agonizer

The shock came to Talon 99 when he could not recognize his own photograph on the telescreen.

Even in color, the image was a study in white and black: a humanoid with white hair, pasty complexion, black agonizer uniform. The figure held aloft the severed head of a human in one hand and the gore-smeared power saw in the other, his boot possessively resting upon the tattered corpse with all of its artistic wounds. Obviously it was an agonizer at Whitewall Arena, finishing up a batch of undesirables for the enthusiastic crowds.

Curious, Talon 99 found a reflective surface and looked into the makeshift mirror, hoping for an easy answer. Instead he was alarmed to see that same stranger gazing back at him with pasty face, bloodless lips, piercing dark eyes.

His human skin crawled as his robotic brain raced, trying to determine how he could have an identity problem. It was as if he had the catamite disease, yet that was impossible since he was always the skinner, never the skinned. Perhaps one of the memory skins in his collection was somehow tainted or diseased. He ran a diagnostic on all his purchased memories, each like a string on the harp of his emotions, the collection that made him more than machine, higher than human, each one granting him a wider range of passions, a stormier heart. But now he discovered one skin was diseased, somehow. It must be the source of the whore's sickness: amnesia.

He was split. In addition to the natural horror and revulsion at his altered state, he felt a strange hope. He was a new man, he was not Talon 99 anymore. This collection of second-hand memories he carried was suddenly repugnant to him. Perhaps this was all just an effect of the disease. Maybe once he had ejected the bad skin he would return to normal. He checked the metadata of the memory to trace which cat the bad skin had come from, and found it was Boy Vic, currently residing in a back street rental unit over in Cold Steel.

He turned and left the subterranean auditorium. As he climbed the stairs he heard something like rats in the walls. His psiorb detected a human, probably a borderline failure, his decaying mind mewling for the pleasure and power of a fresh skin. It was disgusting, another shambling wreckage of the hollow men: probably he would be picked up by the Grays within days, then shipped over to Whitewall. Walking trash.

"Could this be the solution?" he thought. "The guy wants a skin, I could give him this one I'm trying to get rid of, then I might tip off the Grays. They pick him up tonight, give him the test, and he's dead tomorrow. Weak link—if he doesn't fail the test, the solution is postponed. Weak link two—once he's rummaging in my collection, how to make sure he takes the right one? Solution unsatisfactory."

He emerged onto the surface of Manville at night, where he caught a taxi for a ride to another district. The city whirred by the window, a parade of men, robots, and the various combinations thereof. The robots came from the alien enclaves, sealed districts. The humans came in from outside, and the city seemed to break them faster than the outlands could breed them. Boys came to Manville from the rustbelts, the toxic swamplands, the chemical mirages. A few rose up through the power structure to serve the aliens, but most found their place bargaining among other humans, while many were simply ground up one way or another.

Pondering his changed self, he tried for a new name. Nothing came to mind.

#

2. Boy Vic on the Edge

"This will only take a minute," said the one Gray to Boy Vic as the other Gray closed the rental unit door.

"Yes, Mr. Wall," said Boy Vic, looking at the one by the door with some confusion.

"You haven't met him before," said Wall, his eyes like dry black pebbles. "This is my new assistant, Mauve. I'm teaching him the ropes. Mauve, this is Boy Vic, catamite class three, age twenty-one, but he looks younger with his small frame and those buck teeth."

"Pleased to meet you."

"Charmed."

"As you'll learn," said Wall, "there's more than one way to skin a cat."

"But all of them hurt," said Boy Vic.

"Ha, good one. You remember that?"

"Sure," said Boy Vic. "Is this the test already?"

"No, no," said Wall, but they all knew he was lying. "How's tricks? Any flush patrons lately?"

"Nah, just the usual."

"What's 'the usual'?" asked Mauve.

"Taxi drivers, bar owners, gamblers."

"Young men need it special," said Wall.

"I don't know," said Boy Vic. "The other day I saw an old guy I serviced before, long time gone, and he looked bad, like he needed it even more."

"Sounds kind of spiritual," said Wall, dryly. "Speaking of which, ever had a star-mad?"

Mauve shot Wall a puzzled look, but Wall held up a hand to halt him.

"Sure, a few at least. Subway drivers, too."

"Mentor, what is a 'star-mad'?"

"They worship us off-worlders as gods," said Wall. "There's a faction or three behind it, I imagine. But back to the subject—this billy is pretty used up. If he gets a patron tonight, that guy will be rummaging around in a junk drawer." The alien asked the human, "What's the best patron you've ever had, the highest ranking?"

"An agonizer, I guess."

"You don't remember?"

"I do."

"Back when you were fresh," said Wall, nodding. "What was his name?"

"I don't know. I never did."

"Do you know this man?" Wall handed him the yellowed clipping. Labeled "William Milhous Daguerreotype," it showed a blurry face taken from a security cam.

"No sir, I don't."

"Mentor, who is this man?"

Wall's eyes went wide with alarm, then squinted at Mauve with irritation.

"He's an enemy of the city-state, a faction agent."

"Which faction?"

"Who knows, there are six or nine of them."

"Local?" said Mauve.

"No, no," said Wall, "that's different. The rival city-state sends spies, too. Observe." He turned to Boy Vic and asked, "Do you ever think of women?"

"No. Never."

"Not even your mother?"

"I can't remember her."

"See," said Wall to Mauve, "young memories are worth the most, memories of Manville are worth the least. The junk in the junk drawer." To Boy Vic he said, "I guess we're done here. Be seeing you—"

Mauve interrupted with, "Can I use the wiper?" His black eyes glittered.

"Well, I dunno," said Wall, taken aback. He thought for a moment, scratching his pointy gray chin, then shrugged. "Sure, why not? He might not pass next week anyway, and you need the practice."

Boy Vic saw a light that filled his vision, a warm, soothing thing that faded, leaving him stranded in a cold ratty room with paint peeling off the walls. He wondered where he was, then gave a little curse under his breath, recognizing the bookends of missing time. He stomped his foot in anger, but then tried to recall that lost sense of light, which seemed to have some shards of memory in it.

There was a soft tapping at the door. He opened it and found the escort he had hired before.

"Meter's running," said the robot.

"Yes, sorry—how long was it? Never mind, come in, come in." The escort entered. "Please sit down," said Boy Vic as he closed the door.

"Thank you," said the escort. He lowered himself into one of three tattered armchairs around the coffee table. "Now then, how may I serve you?"

"I'd like to whip you a bit, for starters."

"That sounds...fine. No metal ro—ds, I hope?"

"No, just a belt, a hairbrush, maybe a hanger."

"Very good sir."

"Assume the position," he said on his way to the bedroom.

Boy Vic's spirits lifted as he selected a leather belt. He felt it had been too long since he had splurged on an escort, and he was looking forward to the workout and release. There was an open packet of Marquises on the chest of drawers, so he took one out, lit it up, and drew the smoke deep into his lungs. He grabbed up a boot brush and hurried back to the front room, a spring in his step and a whistle on his lips.

The tune died abruptly: the escort had not moved from the chair.

"Hey," said Boy Vic. "Assume the position."

The robot did not respond.

"Oh, I see," said Boy Vic, his enthusiasm rising as the Marq's drug hit his system. "A smart one, eh? I'm getting angry. Very, very angry. Assume the position."

The escort was inert.

"Hey! Assume the position!"

He poked at the robot. It tilted over to lean drunkenly in the chair. Dead.

The disappointment and frustration made Boy Vic's throat thicken. He was all "Marqed to move," but had nowhere to go. What bad luck!

#

3. The Third Visitation

"Shave-and-a-haircut" went the knock at the door.

Startled, the young man opened the door to an agonizer, who said, "I'm glad I caught you at home. May I come in?" The agonizer observed the belt in the human's hand, then noticed the escort in the chair. "Or perhaps this is not a good time…"

The human sighed and gave a world-weary little laugh.

"No, come on in," he said. He bent over to stub out his cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table. "There's no party here—he burned out before we could get started."

"Tough luck," said the guest, closing the door behind himself. "That must be rare."

"Yeah, I've never heard of it myself. So, what can I do for you—skin job?"

"Well, sort of. That is, I want to return a skin to you—"

"What? Hey, no refunds!"

"No, no, I'm not asking for money back, I just want to give the skin back to you."

"It's impossible."

"What do you mean? Just get out your emro, and we'll do a cross connection, transfer it right over."

"I don't have an emro."

"What? But—never mind. I noticed there's a grafter just down the alley—no, there's no time for an implant."

"What's the rush?"

"I start my shift soon."

"Well, huh, okay," said the human, sensing an angle and slowing down to better exploit it. "What I mean is, why the sudden need to try this new kink?"

"Solution unsatisfactory," said the robot. "Look, how about this—I'll pay you and then I'll try to use my emro to send instead of take."

"Gross. Is that even possible?"

"Worth a shot, and you'll be paid either way. Up front."

"No, no money. You see what I got here?" He gestured at the room. "How about you let me whip you first."

"That—that's crazy."

"Forty strokes, and then you get your kink."

"Why not just whip him?" asked the agonizer, thumb jabbing at the escort. "You could really make him bleed."

"Yeah, but if he's burned out, it's just like flogging a statue. Thirty."

"Don't make me mad. We could do this the hard way."

"You don't have time for that. Twenty."

The robot appraised the human's arms, and, finding them boyishly slender, said, "Fifteen."

"Seventeen."

"Done."

The agonizer unbuttoned his black shirt, exposing his near-albino white chest and the black bandeau that kept his emro folded against him like the striking arm of a praying mantis.

"Take it off," said the human.

The agonizer glared for a moment, then took off the support garment. His emro flopped out, a chest-mounted tentacle similar in size and function to a third arm.

"Assume the position."

"What do you mean?"

"Just…bend over. Look at the floor. No, wait--here, move over here, hold the back of the chair."

"All right. Get on with it."

The human lashed. The robot was silent, but its skin now had a red line. The human whipped again, and a third time. The robot grunted. The three lines were parallel. The human shifted and struck again, repeatedly, forming a crisscross pattern. Then, in a growing sense of power, he lashed again and again, laying down lines upon lines. The agonizer was quiet, but the human felt delight at the sight of the emro writhing at moments like a half-crushed worm.

"Enough," said the agonizer after the final stroke. "Now it's my turn. Assume the position." The tentacle was reaching for him. "This is going to be fast and hard."

The human had been skinned more times than he could remember, but this repulsive invasion was far worse than the service ever was. He vomited a torrent, a cascade that seemed more than his body could possibly contain.

…to burn the autumnal city. Time freeze breaks: alarm ringing for days, part of background noise, endless loop now silent, now past. Radio playing "White Christmas" for years in endless loop, now plays "On Broadway." Boy Vic felt the weight of his many years in Manville suddenly fall off, shrink down: he had only been in the city for nine or ten months.

A flash of blue-white light, a pillar going straight up. Stairways and alleyways where the needy hungry hollows are scrounging for a skin to get them through another day. Station to station, Cold Steel, Leatherhead, Whitewall, Overdrive.

Deep inside an animal fire burst into life, growing. He vomited a torrent, a cascade that seemed more than his body could possibly contain.

"Get out while you can," the human cried, water streaming from his eyes. "The city, leave it."

"Never again," said the agonizer on his way out.

The human was alone, shallow panting, trying to think. There was something aching inside him, a partial memory, like half a line. Was it home? It felt like home.

He had never felt so lonely, so bereft. Where was his missing half? He had to leave, go out into the night and find someone to talk to. Anyone.

He headed out toward a bar in Leatherhead.

#

4. Getting Through a Police Checkpoint

Boy Vic came up out of the subway station only to get stuck in a random police checkpoint, waiting in a line that seemed to go on forever. The guy in front of him wore a gray overcoat, could be anyone; the guy behind him was a little too intense, maybe an artist, but his clothes were rather severe. His lips were busy twitching slightly, as though he were nervous or muttering to himself. Boy Vic turned away in disgust, thinking, "Great, a crazy." He heard the other say, "Rigel…mumble mumble…Sirius…mumble-mumble…" which made him shudder. "Even better, a star-mad."

The queue of civilians went through a gauntlet of cops, two lines of surly brutes in sky blue shirts. Lower faces like sandpaper, eyes like ferrets, most of them smoking Sharps like they were on a major stakeout or something. Just like cops to do that.

Boy Vic did not recognize the Gray doing the testing. After an age, the guy in front of him was up.

"Papers. Name."

"Red Rick."

"Occupation?"

"Bar owner."

"Mr. Red Rick, do you know this man?"

The alien flashed one of those typical clippings, but Boy Vic's heart suddenly stopped: he recognized the man in the photo now, but he had never recognized him in all the times before.

"No sir," said Red Rick, "I can't say that I do."

"I see. Are you catamite or catamount?"

"Oh, a bit of both. To maintain balance, you know."

"There's more than one way to skin a cat."

"And every one of them is right."

"Do you ever think of women?"

Boy Vic twitched: at the edge of his memory there was a woman, a secret woman. He racked his brain for clues, thinking, "She worked as a waiter, but where? At Whitewall Arena. She must be a spy, an enemy agent for the other city. Should I turn her in? But what if she is the missing half?"

"Well, I am now!" said Red Rick. "It's like saying 'pink elephant,' ain't it?"

"Please step aside Mr. Fred Dick."

"Wait, hey!"

The cops went for the man. Boy Vic fought the urge to bolt then and there, the situation seemed so bad, and some panic sense told him he might very well escape in the confusion. But after some quick truncheon work, the cops had their perp under control, and the Gray said, "Next."

Boy Vic swallowed hard, and stepped forward, papers out.

"Name."

"Boy Vic."

"Occupation?"

"Catamite, class three."

"Tell me Mr. Boivick, do you know this man?"

There was the yellowed newspaper clipping. There was the face he somehow knew, yet did not know. There was the name "William Milhous Daguerreotype." Ice ran through his veins. The glowing tips of the cop cigarettes seemed to grow more alert, as if smelling his fear.

"Answer the question," said the Gray. "Do you know this man?"

"I— I—"

"We've already tested him tonight," said another Gray. "Come on, Mauve. I know they all look alike, but really."

"Yes, Mentor."

"Thank you Mr. Wall," said Boy Vic, finding his voice.

"Get out of here," said the senior Gray. "We've got a quota to meet. One more and we're done."

#

5. Skybox at the Arena

Top Prime Cut, the freshest of the fresh meat, made a dramatic entrance at the restaurant overlooking the killing field.

The windows there were ceiling to floor, and the best tables were along the windows. Wearing a blue metallic jumpsuit he strode in with exaggerated motions, accompanied by an entourage of four escorts. He went straight to the observation area beside the last of the tables, where he pushed his way among the gamblers and sportsmen until he was near the window.

"Seven, chair," he said to one escort, who promptly dropped to all fours.

Top Prime Cut sat upon the robot's lumbar region.

"Five, back rest."

Another escort stepped over to become the chair's back.

"Three, ottoman."

A third escort made himself into a footrest.

"Number one, tell me the status of the game."

"Yes, sir. The game is already in progress. Both the agonizers and the tinmen are on the field. Talon 99 is performing the hundred cuts on one Red Rick, while Nick 57 is chasing a star-mad called Karl."

Top Prime Cut examined the agonizer through a pair of opera glasses.

"Hmm, he seems stiff tonight. Put a wager on him." He used hand signals to give details.

"At once sir," said the escort, and he moved away.

Top Prime Cut lazily got out a pack of Don Juans from his breast pocket. The gamblers were smoking IQ enhancers, the sportsmen were smoking Sharps or Charismas, but he provocatively lit up that post-sex buzz that only a Don can deliver. He was on top of the world: a few more sales, a couple big wins, and he would get out, go back home to wherever it was. That was the key, to quit while ahead, and get out.

Glancing around he saw another worker of the skin trade, a guy a few years older but obviously nearing the end. He felt a moment of sympathy until a waiter intruded, saying something to the cat, who agreed and then followed the waiter through the crowd.

"A score!" thought Top. He tapped his ashes into the waiting hand of escort Five.

#

6. Behind the Locked Door

Boy Vic entered the small room, expecting a supply closet, but found it lined with telescreens like a security center or a TV broadcasting workstation. Screens showed various angles of the agonizer doing his art upon living flesh, while others showed the tinman softening up the star-mad by running laps around the track, while another showed an entirely different location, where four mummies played cards in the big room of an empty house. Just when he was going to ask about the place they had entered, he felt a sting at his neck. His legs gave out but she caught him like a pro and laid him out on the floor before locking the door.

He tried to get up but discovered he could not move at all.

"Time to report," she said, unbuttoning her waiter's shirt while she started doing some sort of belly dance, rolling her hips, swaying in a circular motion, moving around him with fast, tiny steps. He had the sickening feeling that they had done this before, several times, yet he could not remember. Probably she had used a wiper on him. That such alien technology was forbidden to humans meant nothing to an enemy agent. Still, he dredged up her name, and he played it at once.

"I have questions, Joanne."

That made her miss a beat.

"Oh dear," she said. "Very naughty." She frowned and opened up her shirt. Her emro came whirling out, corkscrewing like a seeking serpent from between her breasts.

Trying to land another hit, or at least keep her off balance, he said, "Tell me about William Milhous Daguerreotype."

She laughed at him with contempt, but her eyes flickered toward the screens, so he studied them as she continued dancing around him. Since it seemed impossible that the mystery man would be on the killing field, he focused instead on the card players in their empty room. There! In the corner he saw a corpulent body, a corpse. The mummies were guarding a cadaver.

"He's as fat as Santa," said Boy Vic with wonder.

"His kind, they usually travel in pairs," she said, stepping on his hand, grinding his fingers into anguish beneath her rubber heel. "Sometimes similar and bland, to escape notice. Other times they are more distinctive. So, what do you think? Are we looking for another fat man, or, say, a little boy?"

But Boy Vic was the running star-mad Karl, lungs on fire, whip cracks popping behind him from the chasing tinman. Focused on the ground ahead, a slip or stumble would be very bad, but he glanced up and saw the agonizer working on Red Rick…

Then he was Red Rick, suffering the death of a hundred cuts, remembering all the yummy pain he had dished out in the skinning over so many years. He looked up to the sky, but stopped on the glass walls of the skybox, where he could just barely make out one face in the teeming crowd…

Then he was Gary Gambler, looking down on the butchery field from the restaurant, mind buzzing from brainiac smoke, and Boy Vic thought, "Wait, what was that? How did I just jump from one to another?"

He fought to stay within Gary. He struggled to make Gary come to his aid, sending the impulse to go to the strange video room. When that failed, he tried to urge a visit to the restroom. Nothing. He could not even get Gary to look at something else. It was all too passive.

Then he was back in his body, and Joanne was settling down to work.

Boy Vic looked away to the telescreens, focusing on the one with enemy agent William Milhous Daguerreotype. That was a code name. That was his partner. The corpse gave a shudder, sat up, and looking straight into the camera, its fingers went through a rapid sequence of positions, telling him, "Your skins in them."

And then he knew. The line of his missing skins formed a thread through the dark maze, starting with the one returned by the agonizer.

He was Joanne, her throbbing emro attached to the broken and bleeding body of Boy Vic. She was rummaging through his junk drawer. He looked over her collection of skins, found the key among those she had taken from him, and forced her emro to send it into the writhing figure on the floor.

Shrieking, she stood up.

"What have you done?"

The final piece was in place. He knew who he was. He knew why he had come to Manville.

The taxi driver who forced him that time after smoking a Taurus for the bull strength of a longshoreman, was talking to a rider about the agonizer he had taken to Cold Steel, while the radio played "On Broadway"…

Red Rick thought, "Putting pain into a stranger is the greatest pleasure" as he died in a throbbing haze…

The subway driver was half asleep, guiding the train from station to station. What you smoking to get those eyes? You know the drill. Can't you see they're not like us? "Next stop, Overdrive. Overdrive…"

Gary Gambler saw Top Prime Cut smile broadly at the early death of Red Rick: a long shot bet paid off. Gary resolved to follow his lead…

Karl tripped and the tinman was upon him with terrible efficiency…

The shambling scavenger, picking through the garbage can, thinking over ways of merging, raping, salivated at the thought of the next skin…

"Boy Vic" was a code name. They had landed in the wastes, entered Manville separately to avoid detection. Something had gone wrong, and his codes had been taken away from him, enmeshed in the skins. Or maybe that was the plan after all. And when the timer went off, the one skin had somehow come back to him like a homing pigeon, starting the reintegration process.

And now he was his true self again, a restored being. He had never been human.

Boy Vic spoke the Annihilation Code, saying, "I have come to burn the autumnal city."

There was a roar of blue-white light, a column of energy going straight up, and Manville was obliterated.

###

Michael Andre-Driussi this year has seen the publication of two stories at Bastion, as well as stories at Child of Words and Wicked Words Quarterly. He also produced two books of genre reference: True SF Anime, about Japanese cartoons; and Handbook of Vance Space, a guide to the many worlds of SFWA Grand Master Jack Vance. This story draws inspiration from the work of Philip K. Dick.

Shenzhen Blues

Spencer Wightman

Sam sneers at the man draped over the arcade machine. He's limp as a dead goose, wheezing loudly through a bloodied nose. Oblivious as Jake takes his wallet and hands it to her. Sam frowns, shakes the kink from her wrist, and counts out the fifteen hundred owed. Star Racer's green logo flashes on the arcade screen, neon light making her wince until she remembers the goggles hanging from her neck and snaps them over her eyes. The saturation of the room dims as the display turns on and adjusts to her scarred retinas, bringing cold relief. She runs a hand through her tangled hair, squints with rheumy eyes as Jake slides the man onto the ground.

“He unconscious?” she asks, folding the bills into her back pocket.

“Yeah, he’ll be out for a while.” Jake peers at her, grimaces. “Shit, Sam. You want ice for that?”

His eyes shine bright blue and white, tugging Sam's gaze like fishhooks. Implants from Masai Corporation, harvested in Saigon. Sam looked them up last month. A nice model. They hold her weary gaze long enough that Jake quirks his head in concern.

Sam sighs, touches her face. It's a soft, puffy mess. She clicks her tongue ruefully, fumbles through her leather jacket. It had been a long time since she'd taken a punch. Funny how the body forgets something as simple as ducking yet remembers how to throw a wicked hook. A drop of blood falls off her lip and smacks against her left shoe, too fast for her to catch.

Jake looks disturbed, puts his hands in his pockets to take them out again. “Standing there, eating his punches . . .” He shakes his head. “I didn't think you were tough like that.”

Sam looks at him from the corner of her eye and pulls a homemade cigar from her sleeve like a magic trick. “Lucky, Jake. That's all.”

Jake shakes his head and turns back to the machine, pulling the rag from his belt to wipe away dots of blood. A tendril of odorless purple smoke spirals from Sam’s lit cigar toward the ceiling. It reminds her of the incense sticks burned on summer holidays, and of the Confucian priests who solemnly carry them. A familiar memory unwittingly fills her mind, of a summer shrine and a dead snake, and her brother carrying her piggyback. A long-past scene from her childhood. She sucks in a cloud of smoke and holds it in her lungs. She does not want to remember.

Mutated opiates flood her bloodstream and tug Sam's lips into a pitiful addict's smile that she long ago stopped trying to hide. She feels a tightening, like a mesh stretching across her face, as the drug quick-heals her collection of scrapes and bruises. Endorphins follow, a soulless, undeserved joy trickling down her spine. Sam accepts the seduction and falls into chemical bliss, breathing the drugs in and out like a mantra. The sinful act calms her and keeps her face scar-free, as if warding away time. And the memory is gone.

The zoning machines rumble awake and Sam turns to the window, savoring a lingering taste of blood. She has seen the machines' nighttime feeding many times, yet still she watches, fascinated, as they rise into the grunge of low-income high-rises and security-barred strip malls. They always come the same way at the same time: crawling out of the ground at the witching hour.

After a minute of ominous stillness, one of the machines screeches a warning siren and they all latch on to a crumbling brick house. The first rips away the cracked driveway while the others tear down the walls, suck out the insides, and leave the rest an empty carcass for the cleaners, who hover nearby.

Sam's daily canvas had changed to this melancholy four years ago, the day she left the shining towers of Laishan. By the time she turns from the window, her lip wears an ugly scab and the skin around her eye has faded from black to yellow.

“Anyone else around?” she asks, swaying unsteadily.

Jake furrows his brow, pauses sliding a tumbler back and forth across the plastic counter long enough to reply. “Not any gamblers. Why? Are you leaving?”

Sam had paid two hundred to play her last match, and still Jake worries that she'll leave without spending more. “Well there's no one else to play, is there?”

“It's not that late. People will come when the soaplands close.”

His whining voice makes Sam turn away in discomfort. He's wrong, and they both know it. The sad businessmen will go from soaplands straight to hajal lounges, drunkenly wondering and never discovering what lies beyond Jake's unassuming door. And if by curiosity or mistake they do wander inside, they'll quickly leave. Jake's is a small place, a shadowed nook in a wall of hypnotic laser shows and plexiglass. There is no lasting comfort here, only the songs of arcade machines and the desperate tension of a barkeep avoiding eviction.

Sam buttons her jacket and shifts from her stool to leave when an unidentified call blinks up on her display. She checks the number of credits in her account and decides to answer.

“This is Felix. I want to set up a match with you.”

The caller's voice sounds Ivy League polished and faintly nasal. Sam pictures him sitting with his feet up on a desk, grinning at someone across the room.

“You won your last few games, so I think—”

“Fifteen hundred,” Sam interrupts. “When do you want to play?” She ignores Jake's interested stare and waves for him to pour her a drink.

“My client has ten thousand in mind.”

Ten thousand. Far too much for a single game. Sam hasn't heard of a bet that big since the old tournaments. She laughs scornfully and covers her glass before Jake can pour.

“I've never heard of you, Felix, so don't fuck with me. Fifteen hundred, yes or no?”

Felix hesitates, seems taken aback. “Look,” he says, finding his words carefully, “my reputation is easy to find, and so is yours. I'm taking a risk here. Are you still playing at Jake's?”

Sam hears the smirk through his words and rubs her tired eyes in frustration. She imagines the microscopic tendrils in her irises fraying, burning to the milky white of a shirt left too long in the sun. Her pipe is at home where she left it on the coach, waiting to ease the lingering hurt circuiting her head like an electric hum. Meanwhile, this conversation has already drifted far from where Sam wants it to be.

“It's quarter after twelve,” she says, stepping off her stool. “Give me a good reason not to hang up on you.”

Felix makes a sound as if he's about to say something, but pauses, and Sam hangs up. She sighs, blocks the number, and waves goodbye to Jake as the bar's metal door shooshes open onto the sidewalk. A gap is made for her and she slips into the crowd, leaving the bill on her tab and Jake alone behind the counter.

Far down the street, the zoning machines snake back and forth on their treads, flashing red-and-yellow emergency lights through the smog as they spin layers of fifty-square-foot cages. Sam makes a thin smile as she deactivates the magnetic lock on her hover bike. “Cages” is the colloquial term. The mainstream news outlets call them “micro-apartments,” a buzzword that sounds progressive and follows the charade that they're part of a wave of urban renewal. In reality, they're the shithole nighttime refuge for Shenzhen's rampant underclass. A booming business modeled straight from Hong Kong's concrete jungle.

“It worked well in Kowloon,” the experts say, “and it'll work well in Shenzhen.” Well, they'd said that about privatized police too, but no one seems to remember.

Sam swallows a sigh and checks her bike’s battery charge. Nine percent remaining. Enough to get home. She moves the cash from her back pocket to the bike's security box and wishes that all of it could go toward paying off her student debt. She swallows through a lump in her throat and absently wipes a spot of wet from her cheek. Heavy raindrops begin to patter loudly off her jacket and soak her hands; cold, numbing kisses on her stiff knuckles.

As she waits for the lane to open, a red hover car shaped like a football pulls up ahead of her and lets out three men in tailored blue suits. They swagger onto the sidewalk, pushing each other playfully and talking loudly in Korean. Sam makes a che sound between her teeth and eyes them balefully. Rich kids slumming in a tier three district, the sort who've bored of Seoul. Only trouble.

They walk closer and Sam can't help but give the tallest a moment of slack-jaw appreciation. Rich or not, the man has the flawless face of a model. He's smoking a needle-thin cigarette, and as he passes, he reaches to take it from his lips and Sam notices the tattoos covering his hands.

Their eyes meet and in that moment he smiles and grabs her arm with a thick hand, holding her firmly still. Pheromones overwhelm Sam's sense of smell as he steps toward her and leans over the bike, close and intimate enough to make them look like a couple. The two other Koreans stop in front of them on the sidewalk, continuing their conversation and blocking the view of the late-night revelers milling past.

Before Sam thinks to say something the handsome one releases her arm and presses a phone into her hand. He gestures, Sam raises it to her ear.

“Forgive me if I seemed callous.”

Felix sounds unconvincingly sheepish, the voice of someone forced to apologize. Sam glances at the Koreans. Her tongue is thick from fatigue and she has to swallow twice before answering.

“Your persistence worries me,” she rasps.

“I was less aware of your district than I expected, but I assure you, my client is very serious about arranging a match. She asks that you accept Sun Hyun-sook as amends for my lack of etiquette. He will be your escort for the next twenty-four hours.”

Sam glances at Sun, who smiles back. He's not quite the man she's dreamt of bringing home on holiday, but there's a thuggish charm in the way he moves, and in the indigo tattoos covering his square-tipped fingers.

“And I will personally give you five hundred right now if you return to Jake’s and meet Yao Su. She's the one who wants to play.”

Sam doesn't recognize the name, which means Yao is a player from out of town. It also explains why she's been peculiar about setting up a match. District 3 is Sam's stomping ground, and while she doesn't exactly have friends in high places, she's met enough gamblers over the years to know they don't tolerate foreigners making trouble.

“Alright, make the payment.” Whatever Yao is planning, she seems to want a genuine match. For five hundred Sam is willing to sit in the same room and listen.

The deposit blinks onto Sam's display and she swings off her bike next to Sun, who has an umbrella open and waiting. The other two Koreans wedge into the stream of sidewalk traffic, water running cleanly down their hydrophobic suits as Sam and Sun follow close behind.

Sam tries not to think about Sun's lips, or the heat she can feel radiating from his body when they press close. A ten thousand-credit game has no room for distractions. She chews absently on her bottom lip, wishing she hadn't put out her cigar.

#

Back in the bar, someone—Yao Su, Sam presumes—is sitting on a stool at the counter, talking to Jake. Yao turns to the door and Sam sees the gear work attached to her head, an expensive halo of dreadful wires and black, plant-like tubes that make Sam's skin ripple with goose bumps. She rolls her shoulders back to shrug off the chill and walks after Sun, who's already at Yao's side, pressing his lips to her hand.

Yao smiles at his touch and gently smoothes the hair pinned above the nape of her neck; a strangely feminine gesture that reminds Sam of a geisha, or an elder woman being doted on.

“Nice to meet you, Sam.”

Yao's voice is slow and unconcerned, thin like a fine piece of pottery. The organic half of her face is smooth and unwrinkled. Sam wonders which drugs she's taking, and if they might be legal in District 3.

“I don't have ten thousand,” Sam says, sticking her hands in her jacket pockets.

Yao nods. “You would owe me.”

Sam hides her surprise with a frown. Yao's face is unreadable, yet squarely serious. It seems that she trusts Sam's word, meaning she's as ignorant as Felix. Almost certainly unaware of how hard it would be to track down Sam and force her to pay.

“Ok,” she says, pulling her goggles down. “Let's go.”

#

The alcove is a concave of smooth, seamless plastic, curving like an open baseball glove around a high-back chair. On Sam's command it alights with a flawless 3D display of open space: the view from the cockpit of her digital starship. She grabs the handling sticks as they emerge from the floor and blasts to hyper speed, feeling the music from her goggles vibrate against her chest. The familiar thrill stirs her blood and pushes her steadily to greater speeds, past stars and ancient gas clouds, until she catches sight of a lone planet, smaller and further separated from the rest.

Time slows with the speed of the starship and describable shapes begin to form: the outlines of coasts and mountains, and there, ahead of Sam, a patch of freezing white. To her side a great, brown river burrows through a landmass of velvet green, and on the other a storm churns, hiding the ground below.

When Sam reaches the tree line of the tallest mountain, she levels off and passes over the landscape in a silver blur. Her red-rimmed eyes twitch and dart in their sockets, straining to keep her as tight as possible to the mountainside without crashing into it. When her control of the ship feels sharp and right she pulls off the planet in a single, upward blast and slingshots to a star cluster four thousand light-years away. Yao appears beside her en route in a porcupine ship of narrow edges and sharp angles, matte as a blot of ink and moving silently, as Sam imagines a fish deep in a sunless ocean might. The ship’s compact shell is fully opaque, hiding the bloodless metal eyes that Sam knows return her gaze unobserved.

They stop near a solar system mothered by a small green star. A track of transparent blue light shines into existence beneath them, arcing far and down through an indiscernible layer of clouds to a planet's surface. A sliver of the track turns red and the two ships swoop after the changing color, down through the membrane of atmosphere, and into the planet's womb of air and rain.

Under the curtain of cloud, night is thick and smothering. The lights on Sam's ship flash on and bring fire to the darkness, illuminating a frozen landscape of ice and snow and naked rock, blazing with the light of the two ships.

Sam follows the track into a narrow canyon and turns her ship vertical, hugging the inside wall and edging into the lead. By the moonlight she lilts and sways a hair above the frozen rock, gripping her handling sticks with the lightness of spiders' webs. Her finest touch.

From a glimpse of shining snow she sees the canyon's exit and pulls up to block Yao's path, flashing first out into the open sky. The track leads her down to an ocean shore caught in the fury of a storm and Sam has to divert her thrusters to stay balanced in the sudden gusts of wind. Giant forks of lightning crack in the distance, giving Sam strobe vision of the track, which turns out over the water. She steers a low, curvy path in the lee of mountainous waves, cockpit shaking from the thunder like a wounded bull.

For the past half hour it has felt to Sam as if someone has been pinching harder and harder on the back of her eyeballs. Pain flares again and she quickly wipes at tears, chasing the track out of the storm and back into space, toward the green star. As it grows in Sam's vision, black spots appear where planets should be, then she sees nothing at all. The stars vanish. Only a black as deep and certain as the sea remains.

Tears stream from Sam's broken eyes and she veers sharply to her left, smashing into Yao. The two ships spiral off course and Sam's vision momentarily returns, showing her a burning emerald light looming in trajectory. Warning sounds that Sam knows accompany blinking red lights fill the cockpit, communicating imminent death. She flips two switches by memory and jerks the handling sticks to the side, in time with her stuttering vision to glimpse Yao's ship return to the looping track.

The game ends the moment before Sam's ship is destroyed and immediately disconnects both players from their alcoves. Star Racer's 8-bit theme song begins playing in the background. Sam pulls on her goggles, setting them mute and fully opaque.

“Jake,” she calls, “lend me your arm.” The old cigar relights with a flick and she sucks in a cloud of numbing relief. The pain in her eyes dims from bonfire to pile of embers in an instant, yet a peek confirms that she still cannot see. Only grey outlines in a colorless world. Sam knows better than to keep trying and closes her eyes again, wishing she had something to wrap them with. She sends urgent messages to Jin and Sara, her closest friends, and slides out of the alcove, groping for the door. Her adrenaline's spent, already left and told her to go home for the night. She should have listened.

Sun catches her as she stumbles out of the machine, guides her to the counter. Once she’s seated, he says something terse in Korean and firmly grips her chin. Sam senses a hand moving toward her goggles and bats it away. “Where’s Jake?”

“He went out.”

Yao's slippery voice is surprisingly close. Sam stiffens, tries to appear calm, but the thought of Yao's smile hovering inches from her face forces a grimace.

“Such a painful expression. Let me see your eyes.”

“Not now,” Sam says, turning away. “Let's talk rematch.”

Yao clicks her tongue. Sighs regretfully. “There will be no rematch. I really do need to see your eyes.”

Sam hears two sets of approaching feet and flips up her goggles.

“Open them?”

She does, briefly, and the Koreans mutter under their breath.

“It's quite bad, Sam. How are you going to pay me if your eyes don't work? This is the problem.”

“I have enough for a new pair,” she says, flipping the goggles back down.

“Show me.”

Sam clenches her teeth. “I can't exactly use my goggles, can I?” she explains. “I’ve been saving. Eyes don’t stop working without some warning.”

“I leave for Seoul in one hour. That does not give you enough time, I'm afraid. I am sorry.”

Two of the Koreans grab Sam on cue, easily handle her thrashing, lay her flat on the countertop. They take her jacket and goggles then thump something square and heavy next to her head.

“Lung or kidney. Your choice.”

Dread fills Sam's stomach. Felix and Yao's odd naivety had pulled her in like a fish. Their purpose in a tier three district is obvious now. But had Yao known about Sam's eyes? How did Felix get her number? Only close friends and well-known gamblers have it, and they know to stay away from gear heads. The cold realization kills Sam’s last hope.

“Jake.”

Yao doesn't reply, but Sam knows. She swears fiercely in Cantonese, the most hateful, ancestor-cursing line she knows, then hisses through her teeth in resignation.

“Kidney."

Yao's fingers slide under Sam's shirt, prod below her rib cage.

“Only one, right?”

“Only one. I don't want to kill you, Sam.”

The machine clicks twice and Yao slips a crumbling pill into Sam’s hand.

“Take this, quickly.”

Sam swallows it and the chemicals gallop across her mind, pulling down the curtain of sleep.

#

Sam wakes to the sound of morning traffic and the medicine smell of balm. She moves the hand resting limp on her shoulder onto the counter and slides, with a groan, until her feet touch the rubber floor. Her side hurts, but not nearly as much as she'd expected. And she isn't dead, which is something. She probes the air with her hands until they touch the fabric of a suit, then moves them down a sleeve to Sun's callused knuckles.

“Sun.”

Her voice can’t go above a whisper. She steps closer, one hand gripping the counter, and cups the side of his face. How is he so warm? She leans forward and kisses him on the lips, on his closed eyelids, on his nose. He wakes slowly at first, and when he smiles she feels it with her fingers.

“Do you remember where I parked my bike?”

#

Sam cuddles with Sun in the last minutes before sleep, floating in barbiturate comfort. Her new eyes will have to be cheap, yet last through a few months in Laishan. Long enough for Sam to make the money she needs to visit a clinic in Saigon, or Bhopal. But returning to Laishan…. Her thoughts drift back to the summer shrine, to the smell of incense, the snake, and her brother’s scream. The rest melts into a haze and Sam falls deeply, and numbly, asleep.

###

Spencer Wightman enjoys ancient history, podcasts, foreign films, and all manner of speculative fiction. "Shenzhen Blues" is his first published story.

Bastion Science Fiction Magazine is an imprint of Bastion Press, releasing original works ranging in length from 1,000 to 5,000 words on the first of every month. As a new publication, our success rests on you, the reader. We do our part to put together the very best stories we can find, and continued growth and stability depends on the support of our readers. If you enjoyed this issue, please consider purchasing copies of additional issues. Word of mouth is also vital, so please tell your friends about us. Finally, donations are welcome as well and go directly to funding payments for our authors. You can read about all this and more at http://www.bastionmag.com.

Questions, comments, suggestions, and concerns should all be directed to editor@bastionmag.com. Thanks again,

- Bastion Science Fiction Magazine

Table of Contents

- Editorial

- R. Leigh Hennig

- Good Times

- Alexander Jones

- The Ticket-Taker

- CJ Menart

- Us or Them

- B. Brooks

- The Vestal

- Rob Steiner

- Playing in the Skeleton on Riot Day

- Jedd Cole

- Mayhem at Manville

- Michael Andre-Driussi

- Shenzhen Blues

- Spencer Wightman