Berto sighs. “Are we back on that again?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Are we?”
“It was two years ago, Mickey. I said I was sorry. I let you punch me in the face.”
“Oh no,” I say. “You didn’t let me.”
He leans forward, and one corner of his mouth twists up.
“Yeah,” he says. “I did.”
That hangs between us, until finally Nasha heaves a sigh and says, “Are you two done now? Because if you’re not, you need to either start throwing hands, or else bang each other and get it over with.”
Berto’s eyes shift to her, then back to me.
“Your call,” I say. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re both good choices.”
“Okay,” Berto says, and gets to his feet. “You guys are nasty, and I’m out. I’ll see if Dani wants to grab lunch. Maybe I can get some more details out of her. In the meantime, I guess you need to figure out who you’d rather roll the dice with—Marshall, or the creepers.”
After he’s gone, Nasha elbows me in the ribs. “Dang, babe. That was some first-class deflecting you just did.”
I lean into her. “Thanks. When you know what buttons to push, Berto’s actually pretty easy to deflect.”
She cups my cheek with one hand and kisses me. When she pulls back, though, her grin has faded. “We still need to decide what you’re going to do.”
“I know. Unless Berto can get something definitive out of Dani, I need to…”
“What?” Nasha says. “Did you just have an idea, or are you having a stroke?”
“Not a stroke,” I say. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea, but … I think I know what I need to do.”
THERE ARE A lot of profoundly shitty things about being an Expendable. Start with the way people treat you. The Natalists are bad enough. They think the whole process of memory uploads and bio-printed bodies is an abomination, and that anyone who’s come out of the tank is basically a soulless monster. In a way, though, they’re easier to deal with than the rest of the general population. With the Natalists, I know where I stand. Take Marshall, for example. He wants to kill me. I know it. He knows I know it. It lends a certain amount of refreshing honesty to our relationship.
With the others, though?
Everybody knows what Expendables are for. We die, over and over, so you don’t have to. You’d think maybe folks would be grateful for that, but that’s not how the human brain works. Watching someone else run into a fire while you stand safe and sound on the sidewalk outside doesn’t make you feel grateful. It makes you feel guilty. Nobody likes feeling guilty, so on some level you convince yourself that your Expendable deserves what he’s getting.
That was easier back on Midgard. We didn’t use many Expendables on the surface, and the ones we had on the orbital stations were mostly conscripted criminals. Plenty of people here on Niflheim still assume that’s how I wound up with this job, and they mostly treat me accordingly. Even the ones who believe me when I say that I volunteered to be here tend to keep their distance, because, really, what kind of nutjob would do that? Back on Midgard, I had friends. Here on Niflheim, outside of Nasha, Berto, and Cat Chen, I really don’t.
I know what you’re thinking. Boo-hoo, right? Jamie Harrison doesn’t have many friends either. And you’re right, of course. The worst part about being an Expendable is not the social isolation. It’s all the dying.
That’s closer to the truth, but still not quite right. Everybody has to die. We’ve figured out a lot of neat stuff on the science side, but we still haven’t managed to get around that one. The worst thing about being an Expendable, the thing that separates me from everybody else, is that I have to die over and over again, and more importantly, I have to remember all that dying. When an Expendable goes down, his handlers make every possible effort to make sure he uploads the experience. Because of that, I know what it feels like to be ripped to shreds on a cellular level by high-energy subatomic particles. I know what it feels like to go through the end stages of infection by brain parasites, and lung parasites, and gut parasites. I have nightmares about those things, but the nightmares are nowhere near as bad as the actual memories.
Which makes what I need to do now absolutely terrifying. If I’m right about what’s happening, there’s only one person who really knows exactly what’s going on in the reactor core.
It’s me.
If Marshall has really been throwing Mickeys into the core, he’s probably been forcing them to upload before they die. I need to see what they saw. I wish there were a way to do that without also feeling what they felt, but …
Yeah, there’s not.
Fuck me. This is gonna suck.
“QUINN?”
Quinn Brock, Medical Technologist Grade II, glances up from his vat steak, a look of annoyance on his face that fades into confusion when he sees who I am.
“Barnes? Aren’t you…”
He trails off and takes a quick look around. We’re on the early side for dinner, and the caf is mostly empty. I step over the bench and take a seat across from him. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him other than passing in the corridors. His hair is longer now. He’s dyed it blond and parted it down the middle so that it hangs down like a pair of limp, oily parentheses on either side of his narrow face. It’s not a good look for him, but this is probably not the time to point that out.
“So,” I say. “Long time, huh?”
“Uh,” he says. “Yeah. I guess so?”
The door to the corridor slides open behind him, and two Security goons enter. They glance our way, and I’m pretty sure one of them shoots me a look before turning away. I spend about a half second wondering what his problem is, but not more than that. I’ve got bigger fish to fry at the moment.
“You seem confused,” I say. “Two years, right? That’s the last time I uploaded. Pretty sure that’s the last time we talked.”
His eyes slide to the side, then back up to mine.
“Yeah,” he says. “That sounds about right.”
“Two years. That’s crazy, isn’t it? What have you been doing with yourself? Not much work for an upload tech when nobody’s uploading, right?”
His face hardens. “I’m a MedTech, Mickey. Just because all I ever did for you was uploads and downloads doesn’t mean that’s all I ever did. I’ve had plenty of work to do since you went AWOL.” He takes a bite of his steak, chews, and swallows. “Unlike you, from what I hear.”
My head snaps back as if he’d taken a swing at me. “Ouch! Sir, you wound me.”
He glances around again, and his face twists into a scowl. “Look, Barnes, I’m really not in the mood for banter right now. What do you want?”
This is where I remember that I’m here to ask him for something, and that I probably should have been nicer from the jump. Time to backpedal.
“Right,” I say. “Quinn. Friend. I was wondering—”
“No.”
“No? I didn’t even say what I wanted.”
He leans back from his tray and folds his arms across his chest. “I don’t need you to tell me what you want. I already know that I don’t want to give it to you. You’re visibly nervous, Barnes, and you’re dancing around the topic. That tells me that you’re about to ask for something big. Also, we’re not friends, and you haven’t spoken to me since the last time you came in for an upload two years ago. That tells me that whatever you’re going to ask me for isn’t personal. Ergo, you’re about to ask me for something related to my job, and it’s definitely something that’s going to get me into serious trouble.”
“No, I’m not … wait, why aren’t we friends?”
Quinn tilts his head to one side and stares at me for an uncomfortably long time. Finally, he says, “Do you remember what happened the last time you uploaded?”