Fifteen sodas later you shake Susan awake again. The first time you tried, after plucking the feathered dart out of her neck, she just lolled back into unconsciousness.
Your shoulder is packed with a shirt torn off the anonymous, dead, would-be assassin at the far end of the corner. You’re still seeping blood.
“Come on,” you whisper to her. “You need to wake up.”
Her eyes snap open.
“No!” she shouts, throwing her hands up in front of her. You grab her wrists, a quick snapping motion, and look at her. She thinks she’s been captured and been taken back to ShinnCo.
“You’re okay, you’re still here in the lobby. You got one of them first, I got the other.”
She looks at you, then calms.
You’re keyed up, your body’s retooling itself, parts coming back online. She’d given you an out, a way to leave. Your body, deactivated, could have been worked over by any shitty street surgeon. There was the slightest chance you could have found a way to be free eventually, thanks to her trick.
Now the insulin is surging, the blood sugar’s up, and the teenies in your blood scurry around, revived and back to business.
You’re back. Rebooted. Tiny emergency warnings flash in your vision, detailing the damage done to your shoulder. It numbs itself and the bleeding clots and stops.
Susan hardly protests as you pick her up off the ground by her wrists with one arm.
“Do you still have time to make your launch?”
She’s dazed, but focuses.
“Yeah. Yeah. We need to move.”
Gun in hand, the other shoved in a pocket so you don’t move it, you sweep the area ahead. Nothing stops the two of you.
In the cab she asks you why you stayed with her.
You sit there, adjusting the bloodied shoulder bandage, and avoid her gaze.
“They came at me first,” you explain. “I’m a target now.” ShinnCo has spent too much time up in orbit, not enough time on the ground. You are just ants, resources to be used. And in their eyes you’ve turned on them, bitten them. It’s easier to eliminate you and find a new worker of your talents than risk something going bad. You’ve seen it before. No doubt you’ll see it again. “What good is bringing you in if they’re going to shoot me as I try do it?”
“You could still have just left me there.”
True.
You wrap your coat back around you and look up at her. “I owed you one.”
The cab bumbles on down the road while you both sit in silence for a while. Then she puts a hand on your knee.
“You rebooted. I can fix you again, so you’re free of all their machines.”
You look down at her hand.
“Take too long. You have a launch.”
“Yeah.” She pulls back away, crosses her arms over her chest, and looks out the window. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” you say. “Your trick probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.” And you tell her about the ticking bomb in you, the nano flechettes timed to go off unless they get their little code from that contact on the gyro stand.
We own you motherfucker.
“They aimed at me first,” you tell her. Kouroupas came to finish it, and they’ll get to aim at you again when you have to go back there to the cart in three days. Or you’ll be sitting, standing, somewhere, when the bomb goes off. You’ll look normal for a while, to bystanders, until your body falls down in a shapeless mass. Shredded from the inside out.
“That’s why I rebooted.”
You look out the window now as well, watching the terminals approach.
There isn’t much to say after that.
There are some things you know about memory technology.
One is that it began here on Earth. Using existing technology: superconducting quantum interferometer devices that map specific memory recalls. It was pretty much there when the Pacification happened. With alien technology brought down out of orbit it got nudged along just a little further into maturity.
Two. The memories are burned out of your head. They aren’t coming back.
Three. The same alien technology that matured memory alteration allows backups.
Four. When you figure out how to disable the bomb inside you, you will then go out and find that backup.
If there is no backup, there will be payback.
You walk Susan up to the terminal booth. Several streets behind lay the bodies of more dead ShinnCo who tried to stop you. You stand on neutral ground. Even ShinnCo wouldn’t piss off the alien launch corporation that owns Eleytheria. Overhead the floors sweep out over the road like wings. The architecture is impossible, like Frank Lloyd Wright on crack. The supports are too small. The wings too large. It’s a building designed by something that evolved on a lower gravity world and is forcing their sensibilities onto an Earth object.
The inside of the booth is filled with a light pink gas of some sort. It’s more than bulletproof; any hostile action you could take would result in vaporization.
Alien ticket takers don’t put up with shit. Too many Earth terrorists tried to take out their aggression on them in retaliation for the Pacification. The orbital corporations that own the rest of the solar system found it annoying, so they put in countermeasures.
Susan scans her ticket in.
Inside the booth, tentacles move. Half of them are plugged into the wall, the other half seem to support a globular mass. This creature looks like a cyborg octopus. It’s light years from home, trying to scrape out a living in a weird world, looking out at you with three eyes at the center of its trunk and burbling something.
“Clear. Proceed,” the speaker orders.
The security gate to the right of the booth slides aside.
Susan turns to you. She slides an extra ticket into the palm of your hand.
“In case it ever works out…” she says.
You wonder if the memory of her walking through the security gate, or the memory of her hand sliding away from yours, could easily be burned out of your head.
Not this time at least.
Several minutes later the capsule thunders out in the great above and the thing in the booth hisses at you, wondering what your deal is.
Time to move on.
You stop at a public access point near the corner of a road.
The demands you send the ShinnCo emergency contact points are as follows:
One negotiator familiar with your case, with authority to bargain. The cart, fully functional, in the usual space. And you’ll confirm the cart from a distance, making sure it isn’t a fake.
Two hours. They couldn’t get an identical fake, with heat generating machinery of the same signature inside in that time.
Or else?
Or else you have time enough to go hunting before the countdown hits the last second.
You’ll need a hatchet, for starters.
It’s a metaphorical high noon. They’re not going to back off, and neither are you. The first sign of weakness is death. You’re locked in, no turning back.
They set a nice trap. The gyro stand is up, and what looks to be a middle-aged man stands there. He isn’t putting much into the façade, half-heartedly telling interested passersby that he’s out of flatbread.
You spot the three snipers on balconies above.
Two men in doors nearby, lounging.
Four pedestrians.
One by one would take far too long, so you steal a bubble cab.
Even the new gyro guy doesn’t spot you until you swerve the stolen machine off the road and slam into the cart. Flour, flatbread, meat, and sauces explode into the air. They drip off the door as you swing it up and open, using it for cover as you knock the stunned man out with a flick of your wrist, and pull him into the car.
The shots start. Silent insect-like buzzes and then explosions of concrete. The glass windows of the cab explode, the seats kick up leather and stuffing. In addition to the glass splinters buried in your face, the concrete shards ripping your overcoat apart, they hit you in the thigh, and then again in a foot.