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Pagan

S. A. Bailey

I was dead when she called.

At least, that’s how I like to think of it.

Enjoying the deep, blissful hibernation of the best combination of the cryo tech and drugs available.

Just barely there, not even really aware.

A specter, a ghost, ethereal.

Real but not.

So deep in the darkness of my own mind I couldn’t tell where my consciousness ended and the true deep began. The deepest deep, the blackest black, beyond the astral and the collective unconscious and into the blank.

Whatever you want to call it.

Enjoying the deep dark empty bliss of oblivion.

Yanked out of near nonexistence by someone I didn’t particularly want to talk to.

There was nothing, just peace and the cool wind of the astral, and then the quick flares and ripples of light as I tore through the veil, and then the great fall as I dropped from my heaven of nothingness and collapsed back into my body.

I woke gasping, drenched in sweat, the grime and stench of my long drug-fueled sleep soaking the sheets, making them cling to my skin like glue when I shot up in bed, the overhead lights flaring hard at the same time.

“Godfucking damn it!” I pulled the soggy sheet away and sat on the edge of the bed, closing my eyes and holding my head. “Lights, dim!”

The lights didn’t dim.

“Lights, dim, goddamn it. Go to waking.”

Still, they remained.

“Jesus, you’re not brain fried, are you?”

The sound of her voice.

At first, I thought it was in my head.

That’s the only place I’d heard it for years.

Maybe I had finally fried my brain.

That’d be fucked up, considering I’d been hoping to fry it enough to just stay in the blank.

“Dim the fucking lights, you bitch.”

“You still hate me.”

“I hate these fucking lights. If my brain’s fried, it’s your fucking fault. You know exactly how dangerous that is.”

“How long is it going to take for you to clean up and get your shit together?”

“Well, how long is it going to take for you to dim the fucking lights already?”

“Are you awake?”

I opened my eyes.

She was on the wall directly in front of me, a hologram, beaming into my apartment from someplace sunny.

It looked like a fucking golf course.

The lights finally dimmed by half, with a soft blue tint.

“We need to talk, Alphonse.”

“Got nothing to say to you.”

“It’s important. A job.”

“I’m retired.”

“We don’t get to retire, you know that.”

“Bullshit.”

“I checked your bank accounts. Your funds are running low.”

“Bullshit, I got plenty.”

“Oh, really. How long have you been out? You were heavy into Dosima. Their stock tanked last month. You’re a couple months away from being wiped out completely. You need to work.”

“You hacked my bank accounts?”

“I had a look-see. I do my job. Gathering intelligence is one of my specialties. You know this.”

“I remember. Just like murdering people by hacking their brains and yanking them out of the blank too fast was another of your specialties.” I reached up and tapped the side of the metal shroud around the ocular implant where my left eye used to be.

“It was assassination, not murder. And we were at war. You know this.”

I just stared at her face on my wall and tried to focus and bring my implant data screen up into view.

It was hazy, the connection slower than it should have been, my remaining human eye adjusting to the light. She still had the high cheek bones, narrow jaw, small mouth and smooth olive skin of the all human Sicilian-Cherokee princess turned warrior spy she’d been before she borged out. Her thick black hair remained shaved on the side, with two tiny silver ports on the slope of her head.

“It’s slow because you’ve missed at least two updates. How long were you out?”

I found my cigarettes and lighter on the bedside table. I fired one up. The screen in the corner of my vision hummed with static as the needed updates ran their protocols.

“You haven’t been out of the building in a year. How often are you waking?”

“What the fuck do you care?”

“I have work for you.”

“Still all business, huh?”

“Someone has to be.”

Finally, the connection caught, and my account showed, confirming my rather substantial loss.

“Did you do this?”

“Don’t be silly. Why would I do that? I didn’t steal your money and I didn’t make shitty investments. That’s your fault for pulling everything out of your company retirement portfolio and going to some indie trash broker you probably met in a brothel.”

“Fuck the corpos.”

“You live in a corpo apartment. A nice one.”

“Every apartment in the fucking city is a corpo apartment.”

“Yeah, well, if you weren’t such a picky fucking addict, you could move back out to the sticks and enjoy shitty trailer park synthdope and try to OD on bad junk and faulty tech.”

“You really think I’d be that fucking lucky?”

“Goddamn, you self-loathing prick,” she snapped sharply, a flash of raw heat in the ice queen’s eyes as she caught herself.

I couldn’t help but smile.

“I’m sending a car. Be on the pad in thirty.”

“An hour.”

“Forty-five.”

“An hour or go fuck yourself. I need to decompress and acclimate properly. Make sure I don’t stroke the fuck out because someone hacked my brain and forced me back to life without following proper reentry protocols.” I took a drag off my cigarette.

“Really think you’ll be that lucky?” It was her turn to smile, the bitch.

“Not as lucky as Cortez.”

She just stared at me, the smile vanishing more quickly than it had come.

“Fine, an hour. Wear a decent suit. Nice to know you’re still a first-rate bastard, Al.”

Her face disappeared from my wall.

I smoked and went to scratch an itch on my calf, and the clinking sound it made jolted me back into reality.

I stared at the bionic leg of tech and titanium, and the hand that had come with it, and then the arm, and took another drag from my cigarette.

Yep, I thought. Still a bastard.

Still a bastard.

Still a cyborg.

Still a goddamn self-loathing prick.

* * *

We rose above the flight line, bringing us on an even plane with the corpo aerostats that trolled over the city. Far to the west, I could see a long thick line of dark clouds, and I wondered if the rain would make it to the ’Plex, and when, and how poisonous it would be.

A bad batch of seeds could turn a light drizzle into poison fog. That likely wouldn’t bother me, thanks to the augments, but a bad batch could just as easily turn the same light drizzle into liquid napalm.

Just in case, I wanted to be back asleep before I had to watch the normies suffer, or listen to them scream.

Out the window the glittery skyscrapers of downtown gave way to terra-level slums and then countryside, or what passed for it these days.

I thought of the fields of crops and forests of my childhood, and the jungles and deserts of my first war, so long ago, and I missed the genuinely tactile sensation of raw earth. Of grass and dirt under my feet, of sand slipping through my fingers, the rough bark of a tree as I climbed. I missed the real natural smell of jasmine and honeysuckle outside my window, instead of having to wonder if whatever I was smelling was real or if it was just the signal from my olfactory sensors.

I pulled a sausage-and-cheese kolache from the wrapper. It was actually a klobasnek, but Texas was still Texas, and still took its own strange stubborn pride in calling it the wrong thing.

I took a bite, and wondered if I was really tasting the sausage and cheese and fresh bread or if that too was just a lie programmed into my brain to keep me from going crazy.

Trying to stay out of my head, I navigated the HUD in my optical implant, and caught a news channel.

There’d been a rash of terrorist attacks at corpo headquarters and buildings.

Neo trad extremists were suspected, but no group had come forth.

For years the traditionalists had remained clustered in their ever-shrinking communities, holding on to the last of that mid-twenty-first-century normal before the singularity, as if it had been worth preserving in the first place.

“Would you like to listen to some music, or perhaps watch the news?” the android pilot asked.

“No.”

“Oh, perhaps you’d care to listen to a sermon? I’m really fond of the works of The Good Sir Reverend Arsalan Koen.”

“I think I’d like to be alone.” I took another bite.

“Well, I can certainly accommodate that, sir. I will let you know when we’ve arrived at our destination. If you need anything, just let me know.”

“Thanks.”

The partition closed, a physical one and not a holo veil, thank the Gods that never were.

People had been arguing about android consciousness since before I was borged out. Android rights advocates claimed they deserved to be given legal autonomy, instead of being manufactured slave labor. They claimed their almost universal affected religiosity was proof, and not part of their programming coupled with the emotional pull of their aesthetic of perfect lab-grown human skin, hair, teeth, and diction.

The worst part was that they continued arguing this, knowing damn good and well the Alliance had banned manufacture of the more advanced models after the Insurrection. It hadn’t even been the robots’ fault. In the end, it had been humans that had turned them against us.

The world rolls on, humanity stays the same.

I stared out the window and tried not to think about the constant pain of the prosthetics and augments. Or the inability to grow real skin over them for ease of maintenance. Or the disease inherent to all first-gen cyborgs, and the surreal contrast with the loss of feeling in what skin I had left.

Fuck I hated droids.

I wondered what could be important enough for Hondo to snatch me from my beloved nothing without proper reentry. The last time had been a war.

I had no interest in going back to space, and even less in doing corpo dirty work.

* * *

The colonies had been billed as paradise waiting to be realized, but Eden was still a long way off. Every colonist I’d met had shuffled around dreaming big and talking about the future. Meanwhile they scraped by and obsessed over growing fruits and veg that inevitably turned out tasteless and bland. They ate synthetic lab-meat substitute claiming it was as good as the real thing. The sheer weight of their lies and desperation dragged lines and craters across their faces. And almost to an individual, each one carried a peculiar and melancholic weight.

As if they had escaped the original sin hanging over them on Earth only to find themselves guilty of a brand-new one.

Eventually the droid announced our arrival. I looked out the window at the earth below, but I didn’t see a proper landing pad.

“Where we going?”

The partition lowered, revealing the opening to a cavernous service garage low on the front of a large aeroyacht.

“Where are we?”

“The Cagafuego, owned by Julio Sakamoto. It’s quite impressive, yes?”

“Would you believe me if I said no?”

“Oh, no, I don’t believe I would,” the droid chuckled. A polite, pretentious affectation the AI developed, but not a real laugh.

I didn’t reply.

The sunlight dimmed as we taxied inside, the ride so smooth I didn’t even feel the tires hit the floor. I scanned the garage, noting the vehicles, equipment, tools, and security measures in their proper places. There was a custom limo suitable for both low-level tropospheric flight and land driving which probably cost half as much as the floating mansion itself. It was simpler and cheaper to build ships to send people to the colonies than to build a limo that was equally viable on both land and in the air. It still made no sense to me, but I was old enough to remember when the idea of moon bases and Martian colonies was science fiction, so what the fuck did I know?

Julio Sakamoto could certainly afford it.

He had made his initial fortune in biocybernetics engineering, which he then invested in

off-world mining operations. I doubt even he knew how rich he was. He’d been back on earth a few years, playing the benevolent patrician, flitting around the political scene and hemming and hawing and making a show, pretending to be a man of the people reluctant to run for office, as if we were still living in a democracy.

I think I hated him more for that, than for what he’d turned me into.

Closer to the loading dock, there were a couple of runabouts, life rafts, and a row of jump jets in case of emergency. Galleons like this stayed afloat by clean nuclear fuel backed up by magnets made from Martian rock. Outside of combat, terrorism, and the occasional freak natural disaster, falling from the sky was unheard of.

Bad weather would infrequently knock down the corpo security aerostats, but these floating skyscrapers would likely still be hovering in the clouds when the world below was nothing but rubble and dust.

With my luck, I’d probably still be around to see it.

Damn I missed the blank.

* * *

A heavily armored security droid waited for us on the dock like a golem. As we pulled to a stop Hondo stepped out onto the platform.

Still so goddamn beautiful it took my breath away.

“Is everything alright, sir?” the droid driver asked, responding to whatever signals the car’s integrated sensors had told him.

“Shut the fuck up, droid.”

“Yes, sir.” The door lifted and I stepped out.

“Stop calling me sir.”

“Yes.”

The door closed behind me, and the car pulled away and slid into a nearby bay.

A gust of wind whispered through the garage, echoing off the walls, and Hondo raised a hand to pull a strand of hair from her face.

She was dressed in a dark pinstripe suit with a tailored jacket cut short and pulled tight at the waist. Her thick dark hair was longer than it had been in the old days, and she was cultivating a gray streak in the front I hadn’t noticed during our call earlier. She was wearing the same perfume I remembered, a light, airy, floral scent that reminded me of the jasmine and honeysuckle that had once grown outside our bedroom window and still filled me with a deep, longing, aching weakness.

Goddamn, how I hated myself for that.

“Hey, soldier.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Okay, then. Hello, Pagan.”

“Fuck you.”

“Why are you so angry?”

“You yank me out of the blank and bring me here, to Julio Sakamoto’s fucking sky galleon, and have the nerve to ask why I’m angry? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“It’s important.”

“Important to someone I fucking hate.”

“You hate everyone. Follow me and mind your manners.”

“You gonna disarm me, too?”

“We both know you’re not going to do anything, no matter how much you think you’d like to.”

I just stared at her, cognizant of little else beyond the simmering rage.

“There’s no blank in prison. Forever is a long time to go without sleep. Even what passes for it for you. Even for you.”

She turned slowly on the ball of one foot to face the door, then looked back over her shoulder.

“I seem to recall you used to like this view.” She gave me a smile I used to find seductive and continued on.

I followed, wishing suicide were an option.

We bypassed an empty processing booth and went through another door and then a lobby and a long hallway. We passed workstations and bays and corridors, but damn few people. A ship that size should have had the population of a decent-sized warehouse running about. The Cagafuego’s was strangely empty.

“Must be a serious threat, to be down to such a skeleton crew.”

“Nobody ever said you were dumb.”

“You did. Many times.”

“I said you did dumb shit. I never said you were dumb.”

We came to an elevator whose doors opened automatically and we stepped inside.

“So who’s the threat?” I asked. “This about the bombings?”

“That’s not why you’re here.”

“Why am I here?”

“You’ll see.”

“Sounds like somebody wants me to do some dumb shit.”

“Grow up.” Her voice hard, flat, severe. Heavy with strain and the weight of the responsibility of her position, which she had pursued with cold efficiency and ruthless zeal.

The doors opened to reveal a surprisingly posh suite, in what could best be described as Tokyo abstract just before the singularity.

Julio Sakamoto’s current wife was known for her style. Her calm, serene aesthetic permeated the place in muted tones and soft fabric pieces scattered about. Not what you would expect from a robotics and life-expansion robber baron turned off-world mining magnate.

On either side of the window, full sets of both samurai and conquistador armor stood tall, clashing with the rest of the suite. I assumed they were his only contributions to the current style choice. Both sets had been in his family for hundreds of years, both worn by men of his bloodline. Whether they were there as a reminder of his ancestors, or who he wanted to think himself to be, I didn’t know. He’d been in his thirties when he’d borged me out, and in his fifties when he’d perfected the senescence nanobots that could essentially grant one immortality, if they could afford the treatment and upkeep. A technology he’d developed while trying to fight the disease first-gen cyborgs carry.

The man himself stood with his hands clasped behind his back, staring out a large window at the world below.

“Thank you for coming, Alphonse.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“I see time hasn’t softened your heart.”

“Did you expect it to?”

He nodded, and then turned and dismissed Hondo.

She gave me a brief hard stare and disappeared.

“What do you want?” I asked. He turned and went back to staring out the window. Still so dramatic.

“It’s about a missing person.”

“So go to a cop. You own plenty of ’em.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that. I need someone from the outside.”

“I’m on the outside? The whole world knows I’m your attack dog.”

“I’m not worried about people knowing I’m looking for them.”

“So use Hondo; I’m sure all her software is up to date.”

“I’m afraid this requires you, and you alone.”

“You must be mighty scared of something to not be sure if you can trust Hondo.”

“It has nothing to do with her loyalty.”

“If you say so.”

I walked to the window and stood next to him, already sick of his theatrics.

If he told me we were going to save the world, once again, this time for real, I thought I might kill him and take my chances.

I could see the ’Plex in the distance, and on the other side of the horizon the seeded electrical storm rolling slow but steady toward it. I didn’t see any flames, but the day was still young.

“Tell me, Alphonse, what do you think of the world we created?”

“I didn’t create shit. I was just one of your guinea pigs.”

“You know, I’ve often wondered how you have managed to retain just enough humanity to be so deeply cynical.”

“Hope is the pipe dream you’re still using to convince the best and brightest of the planet to escape to the stars. How’s that working out for them?”

“No one said it would be easy. They know what they’re getting themselves into.”

“Yeah. That’s why there’s a moratorium on colonists immigrating back that has been in place for a hundred years. You know moratoriums are supposed to be temporary, right?”

He started to speak, caught himself, and then took a deep breath and went back to watching the slow-moving storm as it moved closer to the ’Plex.

“You don’t want to shoot me back up there, to put down another rebellion, do you? Because killing scientists and dome farmers that just want to come home doesn’t sound like my idea of a good time.”

“You used to like your job.”

It was my turn not to reply.

We stood there for a moment, staring out the window at the coming rain.

“This time, Pagan”—he turned and looked at me—“I hope you can help me prevent a war.”

“I’ve heard this before.”

“I’m serious.”

“New Corinth was serious too, remember?”

“I don’t need you to remind me of New Corinth!” he spat, his words carrying weight and a sharp heat. The great man still hated to be reminded of his mistakes.

He took a deep breath, gathering himself, forcing himself to return to calm. No doubt internally chiding himself for showing emotion.

“I wouldn’t ask you here if it wasn’t important.”

“You didn’t ask me here. You had Hondo yank me out of the blank without proper protocols. Lucky she didn’t scramble my brains.”

“I’m sorry. There’s an urgency about this. Besides, we both know your constitution…is stronger than that.”

“Unfortunately.”

I could feel his eyes on the side of my face as I continued watching the storm in the distance.

“Are you really going to make me apologize, again, Alphonse?”

“You couldn’t apologize if you wanted to. Why am I here, and what’s with the skeleton crew?”

“Do you still have contacts among the druid priests?”

“Not since New Corinth.”

“Surely there’s someone who will talk to you?”

I just stared him in the eye.

He turned back out the window.

“I don’t guess there’s any going back after something like that.”

“I guess not.” I felt the burn in my veins, and adjusted the flow of feel-good into my bloodstream. “Would you get to it, already? I want to get back to the blank.”

“Do you remember my granddaughter, Evelyn?”

Little Evie, bouncing and happy and bright. A smart, beautiful child full of kindness and curiosity.

Two lifetimes ago.

“Of course.”

“I’m afraid she hasn’t had an easy life. After we went up, her parents ran the day-to-day of our operations on Earth. Evie was primarily raised by nannies and tutors and a series of boarding schools. When she was eight she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. When the medications didn’t work, she was diagnosed transexual, and then transracial, and that all of her problems stemmed from that. So, she underwent corrective surgery for both, and began senescence treatment at twenty-five. She wanted to stay young forever. She stayed heavily self-medicated for years, both with drugs and body modification. By the time we got back…” He trailed off.

“Fifty years is a long time to be gone.”

“Her parents wrote her off years ago. I’m all she’s got.”

“She de-transition?”

“She’s gone back and forth countless times. She was a woman the last time I saw her. I’ve maintained a trust for her. She had some sort of psychotic break. Swore off the meds, joined a street ministry, and went full blown neo trad radical.”

“And you want me to find her.”

“She pulled a large sum from the trust, and then started missing her transfusions.”

“Jesus.” I did the math in my head. “She’d be what, about a hundred and eighty now? Folks tend to age pretty quick after they stop treatment.”

“That’s the problem. She left the church and joined a splinter group. I believe they’re behind the recent attacks.”

“You think she did that?”

“I think they have information only she can give them.”

“Do you have a recent current image of her?”

“No. She’s changed her appearance and sex so many times. I have no clue what she looks like now.”

Five years without treatment wasn’t easy on anyone. Over a hundred and fifty years was a lot of aging to come roaring back in only five years’ time.

“When she joined the church, I thought it was just another phase of hers. I’d hoped it was a sign she’d maybe turned a corner, and would come back into the fold. She’s only going to age faster and faster, and her mental health is going to deteriorate more and more.”

I started to say something, but didn’t.

I started to smile, but didn’t do that either.

There was no point.

The world had gone dark long ago, and he’d had more than a small hand in that.

“If she’s underground, I need a place to start.”

“Reverend Arsalan Koen. She turned to his organization after the big psychotic break. He insists he hasn’t heard from her in two or three years, but I don’t believe him.”

“I assume you can get me whatever information the police have on the attacks?”

“Of course.”

A notification flashed in the lower corner of my internal optical display, letting me know I’d received a file.

“I’ll look through the data, see if there’s anything there worth pursuing. And I’ll go visit Koen. Suicidal borgs and droids seem to flock to him.”

“They do indeed.”

The door opened and Hondo reentered the room and gave me the look that let me know our visit had come to an end. I turned to leave and he spoke again.

“Usually, Al, when we ask you for a favor, you ask why it’s your problem.”

“I know why.”

* * *

The rain wasn’t too bad.

It left oily streaks on the windows and carried with it the chemical smell of whatever they were using to make the current seed. But it didn’t cause spontaneous human combustion or turn the air into a poison fog, so I considered that a win.

Mostly it was safe enough now, I guess.

The first hundred years of earnest weather manipulation had been low-key, at least with no obvious harm. There had been conspiracy theories, but they were mostly fantasy and government-fueled distraction.

After the singularity, they’d gotten more ambitious in scope and intent, and more adventurous in the mixes they used. Now it seemed every two or ten years nature acclimated to their bullshit, and the world would burn. Or freeze. Or both at the same time.

You would have thought by now they’d have stopped trying, but that was a bridge they just couldn’t cross. People would never leave well enough alone, or stop trying to turn the world into whatever their idealized version of it was.

Goddamn, I hated being awake.

I stared out the window as the railcar hummed over the city, an electrical storm erupting over the lake, illuminating the junks on the water and the bourgeoisie townhouses in Old Deep Ellum.

There was an ambulance and a couple of police cruisers floating above the surface, and a tug boat was pulling what looked like an older sky cab from the lake. The basic models weren’t supposed to fly in inclement weather, especially the older ones, but there were always a few who cut it too close.

Droid and human workers alike stood on the stern readying their equipment. A single droid sat on the rear bumper of the cab being lifted out of the water. It held its head in its hands as if it actually felt its programmed sadness.

A shot of thunder cracked hard, bathing the world in a quick flash of blinding light, and then another cab dropped down into the lake.

I turned and looked out the other window at the station ahead.

The Good Sir Reverend Arsalan Koen’s La Reunion Church was in what was left of an ancient slum, on the industrial southern shore, not far from the docks of the lake. Flooding the Trinity had been a dream for some since before I was born, and had finally happened in the years between my initial upgrades and the singularity, none of which had happened like anyone had suspected, or really wanted.

Dallas had always been a thing that never should have existed.

An island of glass and concrete carved out of ungodly malarial swampland so miserably stagnant, humid, and hot you could have told me the Native Caddo had left the original European settlers alone as a curious oddity, the original crazy white people, and it would have been just as believable as genocide.

That was Dallas, always and forever.

* * *

We pulled into the station and I disembarked with the day shift into the joyless, never-ending carnival that the singularity had brought us. I stepped out into the rain, and started making my way through the crowded throngs toward Arsalan Koen’s church.

Rain rattled off the roofs of stalls and stands, glass and pavement. Both human and droid shuffled about. You could only really tell them apart by their body language and mannerisms. The droids that hadn’t spent enough time with lower human society walked straight and tall and moved in a mechanical fashion. The ones who had, moved with the spastic, discombobulated Cecchetti of tweakers at a rave.

They all moved out of the way for me.

I’d had that effect even before the augments, and the legend of my kind had started when the ashes of the world that was were still warm. They felt the ripples from their sensors as my software disturbed their Wi-Fi, and took one look at the metal housing of my optical implant, and stared at the formerly human half-man that couldn’t be killed but had no soul.

I caught every curious glance, every shuddered whisper.

Big war hero. Granted immortality and a comfy penthouse apartment and a decent retirement package, just gotta be ready to go to war every so often. Never mind living in excruciating pain because the metal they used when they borged you out released a steady stream of poison into your blood. It felt like burning napalm throughout your body and required narcotic suppression just to keep from going crazy. And oh, yeah, you don’t fucking sleep, ever. Best you can do is comatose yourself for long periods of time.

Big war hero, indeed.

I passed bars and food stalls and brothels, would-be vamps in fake leather with implanted fangs, street shamans mystifying the painfully stupid and gullible with low-rent science fair tricks they called magic. The stench of body odor and cheap cigarettes, diesel and hydraulic fluid, the slightly plastic scent of synthetic meat and seeded rain, and every single drug and intoxicant ever known to man saturated the air.

Lab-grown foxes colored in rainbow neon danced in a large terrarium. An adolescent human/ chimp hybrid hung in a cage dressed in lederhosen. It sat with its legs dangling out, grasping the bars with both hands, crying in anguish as it bashed its head against the cage.

The few who noticed, laughed.

An obese human madam old enough to have defective liquid-metal upgrades drooping off half her face walked with a swagger only those utterly incapable of self-reflection can muster. She wore an electric mesh suit with a subtle pinstriping of tiny flashing lights that peaked out from beneath her puffy feathered coat and the band of her wide-brimmed hat. She led a winged cougar on a leash. A wheezing, sad-looking chimera with a disjointed shuffle, a body that was hilariously overdeveloped in the chest and anemic in the legs, with useless wings too small to do anything but flop about. It looked like all it wanted was to be put out of its misery.

Being smart enough to know you never should have existed in the first place is a helluva thing.

Music thumped and blared from various sources, holoscreens fed the sheep whatever currently passed for the news. Various security droids and their borged-out human NCOs milled about, half of them high or drunk, maybe on duty, maybe not.

The world had once held such promise.

There had been a time when I had legitimately believed technology would allow us to evolve into something more, something better. To create a better world.

Instead, we became an insane and ridiculous people, and the world grew ever more mad.

The monkey-boy hybrid screamed higher, shrieking more harshly as his head clanged louder against the bars.

From behind a curtain came a seven-foot-tall man dressed in a three-piece suit with huge, flared bell-bottom slacks. They were gray plaid, and clashed with the blue silk vest sprinkled with candy cane polka dots over a ruffled lace blouse of electric red and lime. He wore a pink top hat with a purple band and a red rose and carried a can. He had a ridiculous Fu Manchu turned handlebar mustache.

He raised his hands in the air, and addressed the crowd and passersby.

“Come one, come all! To see my son, Pinocchio! He only wants to be a real boy!” He laughed.

The small crowd howled.

Pinocchio shrieked and banged his head harder, tears running down his cheeks, his grip on the bars so tight his knuckles were pale. I thought he might be a droid, but a scan checked him as flesh and bone, without augments except a metal plate in his head.

I pushed through a small crowd of drunken off-duty corpo cops jeering and throwing peanuts at the cage.

They stopped shouting and throwing peanuts.

“Can I help you, sir?” The tall man leaned in.

“Fuck off.”

Pinocchio kept screaming, crying harder and harder while the metal plate in his head clanged louder against the bars.

I reached inside the cage and ran the cybernetic fingers of my prosthetic hand across the back of his, the needle in my little finger projecting out through the gelled metal to inject an almost instantly fatal dose of warm bliss.

There was the briefest of moments, my hand on his, when he stopped screaming and crying and banging his head, when the clanging of metal and the roar of the crowd subsided. In that all too brief moment, we made eye contact. And in that moment, I saw recognition. And the joyous embrace of death’s sweet release, and the relief of nonexistence. Freedom from pain and the sheer absurdity of being.

“You killed Pinocchio!” The tall man looked at the cops for help. “He killed Pinocchio!”

I turned and stared at the cops, let them get a real good look at my optical implant and the layered gelled metal of my arm. They didn’t have to look very hard to decide they wanted to stay off duty.

“That’s gonna cost you, mister! I’m gonna have to buy a new link, and I’m gonna have to put a plate in its head, and that’s going to cost a fortune!”

His name and occupation flashed in the bottom of my screen.

Cyrus Fergus, street performer.

“Cyrus Fergus, street performer. If I ever meet you again, and find you treating anything else like that, I’ll kill you.”

“Hey, now!”

He took a step back.

“I’ll fucking kill you, Fergus.” I glanced at the cops. “I’ll kill you, and I’ll kill anyone enjoying the show. Do you understand?”

He didn’t answer, just watched the cops disperse, then stared at me.

I stared back.

Fergus shook his head.

I continued on.

* * *

What was left of my stomach growled.

I didn’t know whether I was hungry, or if it was my programming, but the first week or so out of the blank I could rarely be satiated. I passed noodle joints but wasn’t in the mood to be any more of stereotype than I already was, so I kept on.

A droid pimp dressed down one of his human sex workers, and she snapped her fingers and the pimp dropped to all fours and howled at the moon. A few humans huddled under the awning of a hot dog cart howled in laughter.

A prostitute leaning against an ancient flickering light pole smiled at me. She scanned human, with only the barest of tech implants, but I couldn’t tell if her blood carried bots without a sample. She opened her raincoat to reveal three bare breasts glistening in the rain. A joke from a movie from my father’s childhood, turned into a fetish.

At one time I would have thought it odd a third breast was the most of her upgrades, but I had long since stopped trying to understand humanity. The droids at least had an excuse. After the Droid War and the laws made at the Accords that put safeguards in place, they had gone from getting smarter and smarter, to dumber and dumber. And as humanity took a nosedive, things only got worse.

The cheap homebrew jobs and non-factory refurbs were the worst. The closer I got to the docks, the more ridiculous it got, my path littered with worker droids that had grown too stupid and instead of being decommissioned had just been left to wander. They milled about, begging for work they couldn’t do, or food they didn’t really need, or sex they couldn’t really enjoy. Not much different than the slums of the world that was, come to think of it.

* * *

Along the way I caught what smelled like real meat over a fire, so I tracked it as I walked.

The crowd gradually grew less and less insane, the junkies and spazzing ancient droids thinned out, and the buildings grew less derelict and decrepit. There, behind the levee near the old Hampton Road bridge, was the home of The Good Sir Reverend Arsalan Koen, and La Reunion Church.

The closer I got the stronger the smell of real meat became.

I was sure it would be coming from the church, but instead it came from a doner kebab shop on the first floor of a three-story apartment building on the corner across the street. Inside, I could see Anatolians busy slicing meat off a vertical rotisserie for the extensive line of customers huddled under the awning as a non-augmented teenage girl took orders at the window.

Signage across the window promised a mix of half-real and lab, both certified grade A.

It smelled so good, and I was so hungry.

At least, I thought I was.

The line was very long. I could probably cut to the front, let reputation and vibe pay the way.

But I had a job to do, one I didn’t relish. And I knew at least half my hunger was a play to stall the inevitable.

Besides, I already had too much self-hate to deal with, to do that shit. To use my vibe and myth that way.

* * *

I walked across the street to the church.

There was a tall red-stone wall, in the old WPA style, around the compound. I hit the buzzer at the gate, and a few minutes later a monk in robes appeared and opened it.

“I’d like to speak to Arsalan Koen.”

“Of course, we’ve been expecting you. Follow me.”

He took me around the side of the church, past a small playground with fixtures from the twentieth century and before. A young child stared at me from inside the top of a steel frame rocket ship pointed toward the stars.

I thought it was a little late for children to be up and playing in tall steel lightning rods during a seeded electrical storm, but didn’t say anything. Nothing else in the world made any sense. Why should this?

We entered a large greenhouse filled with real fruit and vegetable plants.

Arsalan Koen was alone, inspecting a potato crop in a raised bed.

He was a big, fit man, with only the barest of augments, and wore the same loose robes as the monk. He’d left the scars and holes in the side of his face bare and natural after his de-borgification. He moved with the slow, painful, aching pace of someone who still carried a weight they never should have hoisted to begin with. His skin was the bland, washed out, dull gray of a methoxso junkie.

One of the downsides about living in a world in which body modification had no restrictions.

You can only change races so many times. Biology rebels.

“Thank you, James. You may leave us.”

“Yes, Reverend.”

The monk turned and shuffled past without a glance or nod in my direction.

Koen turned away from his potatoes, pulled off his gloves and dropped them on a table between beds.

“I can’t help you.”

Guess he knew what I wanted.

“It’s important.”

“Oh, I know.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know where they are.”

“Are they currently still a woman?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know what race they are?”

They are They.”

“Don’t start that with me. People are dying.”

“Does it matter?”

“I thought you were a man of peace.”

“There can be no peace, without justice.”

“There’s no such thing as justice.”

“Just what I would expect a man such as yourself to say.”

“Just what justice do you think there is by starting a war between Mars and the Moon?”

“The colonists were promised a new utopia, and in return for their lives and souls they were given slavery, mining minerals on planets that will never be naturally habitable. And the fruits of their existence bear out in the world we enjoy today. Anyone can be anything, the complete absence of natural order.”

“Nature is chaos.”

“But organized, meaningful chaos! The lion knows what the lion is! Can you blame them? They never had a chance to know who they were. In fact, They were raised to be nothing and everything at the same time. How could They not be angry?”

“So, what, they’re gonna hop skin and gender back and forth to commit acts of terrorism and start a goddamn war just to get back at Mommy and Daddy for virtue signaling?”

“It is torture! Entire generations lost to ideals of a childish and selfish nature!”

“I don’t disagree. But that doesn’t make this right.”

“Madness cannot be reasoned with.”

“Then it must be stopped.”

“You, of all people, believe this world is worth saving?”

“I believe in not making it worse. A bunch of dead miners and dome farmers makes it much, much worse.”

He looked away, toward some tomatoes in raised beds. A mist hissed down from a hose mounted up high. Rain rattled off the translucent green roof above.

“What do you think will happen to Earth once Mars and the Moon go at it? What do you think this world will look like without a steady supply of their resources?”

“The Tower of Babel will fall, and the Earth will be scrubbed clean.”

“I thought you preached nonviolence.”

“I do.”

“Then why are you helping them?”

“I can assure you; I am not. Just because I can see what will come to be, does not mean I wish for it. I tried to convince Them of the folly of this undertaking. I’m afraid it only encouraged Them more. They are very angry. And They have a right to be.”

“They don’t have a right to take it out on other people.”

“Are we even still people?”

I stared at him, my anger flaring.

Still human in only the worst ways.

He looked away, as if I’d taken his words the wrong way, and he was embarrassed.

“What group did she join?”

“She did not join a group. They find They.”

“She formed her own group?”

“That would be a grotesque oversimplification. Again, They find They.”

“Who finds whom?”

“The lost. Those born into chaos. Into a world in which it is impossible to truly grow into themselves, to self-actualize and know who They really are. Because reality itself is just a choice of social constructs given to them without a structure to conceptualize it and their place in the world. So, few people today ever truly find themselves. To know themselves. We’re not supposed to all be the same. They are the light They seek.”

“My head hurts.”

“They left some things here. To be given to you, specifically, if and when you came looking for Them, and no one else. I’ve held onto them in case They decided to come home. You’re welcome to go through them, see if there’s anything that might help you.”

“Lead the way, Reverend. Lead the way.”

The room was small, modest, bare. A desk and chair, a bed, a bedside table, a bookcase.

On the desk was a box, and inside the box were some folded clothes, and an antique cell phone. It was one of the very last models made during the singularity. It looked like a clear square piece of plastic glass. That kind of thing was popular among retro trads. It was made of Martian crystal and charged itself with both kinetic motion and the sun, but had been in the box so long it had run out of juice.

In the bottom of the box was a battered copy of a famous biography of Their grandfather, written during the singularity. Tucked inside it was an old photograph of Evie as a child, playing cowboys and Indians with Julio Sakamoto’s famous cyborg bodyguard.

The photograph had been taken by the author while gathering material for the book.

Not long after the picture was taken, the first Interstellar War broke out, and I shipped out for that. Had to protect the mines from the miners.

She had been such a sweet, innocent, intelligent child.

We had been close, like a big brother and his baby sister.

I hadn’t seen her since.

Partially because of my shame, what I had become, the things I was known for by then. But, also because in doing so, I felt as if I had abandoned her and therefore shared responsibility for what I had known of the life she’d lived after.

Beneath that was an old-fashioned, leather-bound journal, with intricate symbols and runes carved into the leather. I released the thong, and opened it up, revealing the dead language of a people I barely remembered. The mish-mashed neo paganism my parents had long ago raised me in.

At least now, I had a place to start.

* * *

I slowly chewed a mouthful of doner kebab and stared out at the world below as rain hit the window. I knew, logically, that any vehicle of Julio Sakamoto’s would have a top-of-the-line radar and Faraday system. That the sensors would detect the electrical charge of a lightning bolt and dampen and disperse the flash of energy, but I just didn’t trust it in what was left of my gut.

Maybe it was the image of the sunken cab being hoisted out of the water earlier in the day.

The droid sitting there on the trunk of the cab as it hung from the crane, his face contoured in tragic affectation.

Living a lie, thinking he was alive.

The poor bastard.

The world had once held such promise.

And then, somewhere along the way, we had stopped talking. We created subjective realities so far from the objective truth we couldn’t even have a discussion. We lived in echo chambers, led by the absolute worst among us on all sides. At some point, tolerance, acceptance, and love had turned into mass delusion.

The first world had grown soft and decadent. In the quest for virtue to signal, a rare medical necessity had turned to Munchausen by proxy and finally elective surgery.

The human mind, so frail and malleable.

They blamed the world that was for their pain, and They were absolutely justified in Their emotions. I did not blame Them their feelings.

So very many lost to the very peculiar chaos of the technology and wealth and excess of the first world.

But, They wanted to change the world, and make it into what They wanted.

And that was the whole goddamn problem.

That was always the problem.

“Does it remind you of New Corinth?” the droid driver asked. I couldn’t remember its name.

“What?”

“The Battle of New Corinth. It was during the flood, right?”

“Yes, it was during the flood.”

Great, I thought. A droid that wants to hear war stories.

I took another bite, and went back to looking out the window, hoping he’d leave it alone.

The Battle of New Corinth had happened on Europa, during the Galilean War.

Europa had been a rare early case of terraforming gone well.

Of course, once a colony born of both rebels and religious zealots was self-sufficient it decided it wanted to be in charge of its own destiny and had to be put down.

As if the resources they mined where they were born and raised, on a moon they had made fully livable, could ever possibly belong to them.

Once, I told myself they deserved the example we made of them, but I don’t think I ever really believed it.

I felt the slow-burning fire of the poison in my blood flare, and consciously doubled the dose from the opiate stream released into my blood.

I couldn’t wait to be back in the blank.

I just stared out the window and watched the rain flicker in the darkness.

“How is your doner?” Sakamoto’s droid limo driver asked.

“Delicious.” At least I hoped it was, as I stared out the window hoping he’d fucking compute.

Lightning cracked overhead, bathing the world in a quick blue light. The limo’s Faraday system caught the bolt and redirected it with a pulse of concentrated energy.

“Sir, if you don’t mind, I would really like to ask you a question.”

“What about?” I hoped one question would suffice.

“About the boy in the market, Pinocchio.”

I didn’t need to ask how he knew about that. I was a cyborg and he was a droid and we lived in the future, even if it was ridiculous and absurd.

“He wasn’t a boy. He was a toy for moral imbeciles.”

“If he wasn’t a boy, then why show him mercy?”

“No animal, no living thing, deserves to be treated like that.”

“Then why not set him free?”

“So someone else would have to put him down? He was a thing that never should have been, birthed in a test tube and grown in a vat by greedy assholes and sold to a moron to be tortured for the amusement of other assholes. He lived a life of pain and degradation and deserved better than this world.”

“But he was alive.”

“Not much of a life, pal.”

I took another bite, and went back to staring out at the rain.

I suddenly felt queasy, and folded the paper back over the rest of the doner.

“They talked about you, you know.”

“What was that?” I hadn’t been paying attention. My head was swimming, my software hazy and the interface growing sluggish.

“They talked about you. You were Their hero. You were so brave. At New Corinth, and Kubrick Station. They wanted to be just like you.”

“Who?” What was left of my stomach churned.

“They whom you seek, of course.”

“You knew Evie?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve been with Mr. Sakamoto for many years.”

“Yeah? Spend much time with Them?”

“I would say so, yes. More time than Julio Sakamoto ever did. Or you, for that matter.”

“I was just doing my job.”

“They loved you.”

“There’s no such thing as love.”

“You don’t believe in love?”

“Love is just a degree of obsession and chemical release.”

“What a terrible world you must live in, for love to not exist.”

“It’s called reality.”

“Well, we’ll just have to make a new one.”

I felt queasy. I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt queasy.

His voice sounded far away.

“That is what They are doing. What We are building.”

“Who is doing what?”

“We are. Legions of us, born to a world that should have never existed! A world of everything and nothing! Of bland excess and mediocrity in which nothing matters. We will make the intangible tangible! A world in which everyone will know their purpose because everyone will know who they are.”

“Oh, Evie, what have you done.” I muttered, all too aware of the pain and fear and timidness in my voice.

And then the droid turned and looked at me.

“We call her Mother.”

A steady hum of electrical current jolted through my body.

I dropped my doner and reached for my handgun and I malfunctioned, tensed and spasming.

The handgun fell to the floor.

The HUD of my optical implant went to static, and my neural link fritzed out.

I tried to move, but the muscle of my human parts seized and convulsed, while my borg parts went dead and helpless.

“They are us, and We are Them. And we are legion. We will make a better, more loving world! Don’t you want to see what We will create?”

“No. Honestly, I’d really like off this bullshit merry-go-round.”

“Such a shame. They miss you so very much. We hoped you would be proud. Maybe join us. We are They, and They are We.”

And then he came out of the chair and over the seat.

And then we fought.

Or, more accurately, he beat me, chanting We are They and They are We!

Over and over again.

I went deep inside myself, hyper-focusing on the chip in my neuro link, making that connection and overriding it manually. It came slow, but the static in my implant started to clear, and I started to coax gelled steel and titanium back to life, and released the spike from inside the wrist of my prosthetic, and drove it into his eye.

He jerked and spasmed and fell back, the limo rocking in the air.

Found my gun and brought it up and he stared at me, hate in his one good eye.

And then I fired.

The blast was deafening. Half his head disappeared, and his lifeless body dropped to the floor of the limo. And then we fell.

We didn’t spin, or turn, or tumble.

We just fell, much like any other dead weight just naturally falls.

With heft and finality.

Unfortunately, I didn’t die in the crash.

I didn’t even score brief unconsciousness.

“Pagan? Pagan, come in.” Hondo, no doubt responding to the alarm falling out of the sky would have triggered.

“I’m here.”

“What happened? The cameras in the limo shorted out.”

“Your droid had a malfunction.”

“Be serious.”

“Evie formed a cult of retrograde augments and disaffected droids that think they’re sentient and the driver was one of them. Which you should know, since he was her bodyguard when we went up.”

“I see.” Her voice hard and cold and sharp. “Evac is on the way.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Of course.”

I stared at the burning wreckage and rain, and the lights of the ’Plex in the distance, and wondered how we were going to save ourselves from the consequences of our actions.


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Framed