“Why don’t you just kill us?” Tasha screamed. “Kill us! Why don’t you kill us?”
I could not kill them. After all, we had loved together, dreamt dreams of riches and power, tasted the sweet sweet taste of victory with each other’s tongues. My feet rooted and my limbs spread wide as my small crown of green began its climb toward the top of the forest. There I watched my mother lose her crown and then fall to her rest.
If my children do their tasks well, it will be a long time before I am allowed to rest. I plan to bring the humans into my awareness every thousand years or so to relive those feelings of love, power, and success before I put them away again. I tell you about them, my children, for I cannot keep them in my awareness for very long at a time. Even though I love them dearly, I confess that after the first three hundred years Curt’s and Tasha’s screaming became quite annoying.
So, children, always remember:
There are:
creatures of root and leaf
creatures of flesh and stench
creatures filled with slime
we are of root and leaf
we are the green
Chimaera
That night I was in the dead zone on the unpaved end of 97th at Keegan’s warehouse. I was looking for a particular kind of work. It was illegal work, since my andy psych tech ticket had been pulled. It was also illegal for anyone to hire me to hunt bugs in their andys for the same reason, which is why I was job hunting in the dead zone. Business and professional law didn’t often reach down to that part of the city. For all that mattered, neither did any other kind of law.
I’d gotten a line on Keegan from a snatcher named Molls. Molls said Keegan was a head knocker making ends meet by snatching and reclaiming illegal junker andys. He also said that Keegan’s last ferret had mented out trying to reclaim an unreclaimable andy that had freaked and had begun killing and stacking humans. I slipped Molls a few to arrange a meet with his fellow snatcher.
Eddy Keegan was built like a wild pig, short, solid, and with bristles for hair. Instead of tusks, however, he had short gray teeth that looked like they’d been ground down by a perpetually tense jaw. “You the ferret?” he asked as his forehead wrinkled above eyes that never seemed to move.
“My name’s Shannon.”
He studied me for a second and said, “Somebody broke your nose, Shannon.” He cocked his head toward the warehouse. “Come on. I’ll show you the shop.”
The interview was over. He was a pig with a paycheck and I was a ferret with a broken nose. We made a perfect couple.
Once inside the warehouse, Keegan threw on a light revealing a makeshift bio bay and corpse cooler mounted on the bed of a truck. The bio bay was a bassinet for androids designed to bring them up or down from temp and to hold them during things like operations and mental pipe cleaning. It’s opaque plastic screens needed cleaning.
Next to the bay was a table where I’d be stretched out to do my work. In between the bay and the table was an ancient D-11 meld and PS unit, the psychosurgery modules missing from their ports. It was set up strictly for becoming and communicating. “Okay, Shannon,” said Keegan. “That your real name? Shannon?”
“For now.” I pointed at the meld unit’s dull green plastic case. “How old is that D-11?”
“It was made in the thirties, but the power unit and main boards are only a couple of years old. Don’t worry about it. It works.”
“Who’s going to operate?”
“Me.” Keegan grinned. “I been doing this stuff for a long time. I can find my way through the knobs.”
I faced him and folded my arms across my chest. “I heard the last ferret that plugged that unit into his head is still singing Mairzy Doats and yanking out his scrotum hairs.”
Keegan shrugged his shoulders and held out a hand. “It’s a dangerous business. You want job security and a health plan, Shannon, go uptown and peddle life insurance. You want fast coin, you come down here. Let me see your plug.”
I turned around and pushed the hair up off my neck. I could feel Keegan’s fingers pull the plastic protector off the connection port, along with a hair or two. “Easy,” I said.
“Good. This unit’s got an adapter that fits a DX connector. How come you still got your pins? I thought when they pull your ticket they snip your pins.”
“Not always,” I answered. There was a long silence as Keegan waited for an explanation. I leveled my gaze at his reflection in the bio bay screen. “If your license is suspended for mental reasons,” I said, “they don’t remove the connector.” I smiled inwardly at the irony of my next statement. “Just in case they need it to fix your own head.”
“You’re a ment?” Keegan’s eyes squinted as he chewed on an unlit cigar. “Don’t know about a psycho ferret in the shop, Shannon. You could freak or something, right?”
“You can bet I’ll freak if you smoke that cabbage and run the board at the same time.”
“I ain’t foolin’, Shannon.”
“Neither am I.” I smoothed down my hair and turned back. “Sure, I could freak. In fact, I could do that right now, Keegan. I might be teetering on the brink of a psychotic episode. You turning me down could be just the thing that finally drives me over the edge.”
“Funny.” Keegan thrust his hands into his jacket pockets as he forced a chuckle. Maybe he hoped I was joking. Maybe I was. I wasn’t so sure myself. I pointed toward the corpse cooler.
“Look, if what you had in there was clean, you could hire a ferret with good papers and a threaded head, if you had the money. Instead you got an andy with a bad smell, I’ve had a few tics in my world plan, and I work for a percentage of sales. Now, are you going to let my emotional health stand in the way of your money?”
As always with honest criminals, the appeal to economic reason prevailed. He climbed the stairs to the back of the truck, took me into the cooler, and showed me the racks designed for holding biodroids in near stasis. Four of the twelve racks were occupied.
“You need to know where I got ‘em?
I shook my head as I shivered in the cold. “What I don’t know I can’t tell. I need to know diags, though.” I nodded toward the occupied racks. “They look in pretty good shape. Are they just mented out?”
“One of ‘em needs his guts sewed back together. This one.” He pointed to the one andy in a body bag, his bandaged middle visible through the clear wrapper. “When he freaked and killed his boss and half his gang, he got stitched across his guts. It’s just plumbing, but fixing it’s going to cost a pile or two. I been holding off on the operation to see if someone can get his head straight first. The other three are strictly ments. The bodies are top grade.” He pointed toward the back of the cooler. “Look at this one, Shannon. A hooker. Maybe you heard about her on the news a couple months ago. Her name’s Meyla. She killed three men and a woman in a hotel on Flag Street.”
He walked over to one of the racks, the ice mists in the cooler swirling about his legs. He bent over and pointed at the naked form in the rack, its skin glistening with vapor block and ice crystals. It was a race neutral female on a standard Holt bio frame. When the folks at Holt tossed her code into the vat, they were building a whore.
What must it be like, I thought, to be born a whore. The shape, the look, the attitude. Born to do it; born to be fulfilled by it. I’d find out soon enough when I walked the hiding places in her mind. Keegan ran his fingers up the inside of the android’s leg and I automatically jerked his arm away from her.