Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 7, October 2014 (10 page)

Stephen opened the door and unplugged the oxygen hose. He maneuvered himself outside and onto the rungs. "Thank you, Mark. I feel better already. See? I
can
feel."

"You promised me information."

"Yes." Stephen searched the heavens as he climbed away from the ship. Adjusted to the lit airlock, he could only see a small percentage of the stars he'd seen before. "I'm glad this will be our last conversation. I value clarity, and your insanity clouds my mind. I cannot think with you spouting irrational gibberish."

"You promised me information!"

"Of course." With his vision limited, Stephen estimated direction as best he could. "Listen carefully, Mark. I'm going to die alone and at peace, under the light of thousands of stars. But I think you'll die alone and crying in this ship. And I'm as likely to reach our destination as you."

Stephen cut off Mark's yell with a sharp twist to the module on his chest panel. He unscrewed it and set it adrift next to the hull. Now Mark could not track him. Stephen took a rung in each hand, bunching his legs under him. Looking up, he found the Dark Horse Nebula.

Stephen jumped.

###

Jeff and his wife live in the woods of northern Minnesota, where he divides the seasons into canoeing, cross-country skiing, and those few weeks in between when his writing output improves. His fiction has appeared in
Daily Science Fiction, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Jim Baen's Universe
, and the UFO Press anthology
Unidentified Funny Objects
.

Sympathy for the Download

Matthew Lyons

Quinn knows this is going to be a bad one the second he opens the window. Standing on the fire escape in the dark, he can smell her already.

Alma Pearsson, age 91. Great-grandmother. Terminal. Pancreatic. Client number whatever-it-doesn't-matter-anyway.

The smell of it is overpowering. The smell of
her
. Only one thing in the world smells like that. It's the rotting-meat-and-sour-milk dumpster stink of months—maybe
years
—of unwashed flesh and too many
uh-ohs
in her pants.

But her money spends as well as anyone else's.

He pulls the window the rest of the way open and silently drops through.

These late night extractions always give him the willies, play hell up and down his nerves. These people who want it in their sleep, don't want to see it coming. The ones who go to sleep waiting for it with a bottle of wine, a fistful of Xanax, and a fragile little hope for a better life in a better world.

Weirdos.

The apartment's dark, but Quinn can mostly see where he's going thanks to the light-bleed from the city outside, beyond the windows, casting every shape and shadow in here into sharp chiaroscuro relief. He steps carefully, moving silently across the ruddy old carpet, through the living room and toward the hall. Takes mental stock of the counterweights in the pockets of his jacket—hand-length folding knife in the left, SCED in the right. Everything in its right place. Presses himself against the hallway wall and listens.

Silence.

Perfect.

According to the file, Missus Pearsson, a heavy sleeper, lives alone in this apartment and has for years and years—ever since her beloved husband died long ago. She made it clear in the file; she wants to
go
in her bed, while she's sleeping. Doesn't want to feel any pain. The Director had told her home service, especially one as immediately scheduled as hers, costs a whole lot more than doing it in the office, but she'd ponied up the scratch then and there. That was that. They'd booked Quinn to pay her a visit two days later. Quick, clean, quiet.

The file hadn't said anything about the smell, though.

If Quinn didn't know better, he'd think she was dead. But she's not. When clients sign the contract, they're implanted with subdermal chips that monitored their vitals and alerted the company of any and all medical emergencies. If Missus Pearsson had kicked off before her scheduled extraction, Quinn wouldn't be here tonight. The phone in his breast pocket would start to vibrate and buzz with a call from Management calling him off.

But he's here. Nobody's called him. Business as usual.

Quinn sweeps down the hallway like a shade, following the instructions Missus Pearsson had given them in the file.
Main bedroom, last door on the left
. Pauses outside the door, hands in pockets. Left drumming fingers against his thigh. Right curled around the SCED.

He doesn't know why he's waiting. Why he's not just going in and doing the job. He's done this two hundred times, easy.

He doesn't want to admit it to himself, but something feels wrong here.

He wants to think that he hasn't had a feeling like this since he was in combat, but he knows that's bullshit. It feels like every kind of bad trouble he's had since his deployment in the desert. Like staring down the barrel of a gun. No way out but the mercy of whoever's behind the trigger. Like your own personal Armageddon, except it doesn't feel like the End Times. It just feels like the end.

His pulse races. Things speed up and slow down. Everything in his mind spools out and back into a single moment of panic. Everything happens at once. He reaches out for the doorknob and he can feel the bad vibrations burning off of it but it doesn't matter and he opens the bedroom door anyway and he nearly screams and turns tail when someone inside turns on a light and whispers
"Come on in."

But he goes inside.

Because that's the job. Because the job doesn't care about your clinically diagnosed stress disorders, and neither does your landlord. Your creditors. The fancy psychotherapist with the expensive bills that the VA won't cover.

He goes inside because her money spends as well as anyone else's, and right now, that's enough.

#

She's staring out at him from under the covers, her eyes huge and bloodshot and curious.

She's the oldest, frailest little old lady Quinn has ever seen, and yet he's the one pressed up against the wall, his nerves blowing themselves to hell as he tries his best to just breathe. He tries to not think about the words
combatant, casualty, insurgent. Enemy
. They have no place here, in this room, but refuse to be banished.

"You're him, aren't you? The operator? My operator?"

Quinn manages a slow, careful nod. Breathes deep through his nose. Regrets it.

"Of course you are," she says. "Well, come in. Relax. I won't bite. Nobody's going to hurt you." She looks at the clock on her bedside table. "Two thirty AM. You're right on time."

Quinn checks his watch and looks back at her. "You're not supposed to know that."

She smiles, almost wickedly. "I know," she says. "But I asked your Director
really
sweetly, basically I insisted, and what do you know? Here you are, and here I am. Who could be asleep for this sort of thing, anyway?"

He makes a noise like
hrmmm
.

"You do this sort of thing a lot?"

Quinn nods.

"Do you do other things, besides this? Or just this?"

He thinks about telling her about his barren studio of a home. The bare mattress and the exquisite collection of expired condiments in his fridge. The six years since he's spoken to his sister. The legion of bottles in his medicine cabinet.

He tells her none of this.

"This exclusively," he says. Another series of deep breaths. Through his mouth. Easier.

"And do you like what you do? Operating?"

"It's interesting," he replies honestly.

"I imagine that it is. Shut the door, would you?" He does. "Do most people who do this at home like to be asleep for it?"

"Most." He doesn't tell her about the man who paid to be extracted while quietly weeping in his dead daughter's bed, or the woman he'd extracted, per her specific instructions, mid-orgasm. Doesn't tell her about all the things he's had to forget. All the things that he's buried. The things that have rotted him from the inside out.

"Why do you think that is?"

"Dunno."

"Do you want to know what I think?"

He raises his eyebrows at her, gives the slightest of nods. A cautious go ahead.

"It minimizes cognitive dissonance," she says. "It's so much easier to become someone else if you go to sleep one way and wake up another. You can pretend that other person had just been a bad dream."

She's probably not entirely wrong, he thinks. He's sure there are people like that out there, people he's extracted, even. But he hasn't talked to them. Hasn't talked to any of them. Not like this. Every other client has just been dumb customer service. Like jockeying a cash register. Or going to war. Aim the equipment, press the button, collect the check. Easy enough.

Still. She might be right. "Maybe so," he says. "Why not you?"

She smiles at him—the kind of knowing, forgiving smile forged, he can only assume, by nine decades spent walking the earth. Maybe she thinks it'll help his nerves.

It doesn't.

She nods to an upholstered little chair at the foot of the bed, avoiding the question. "Do you want to have a seat?"

He doesn't. "Why?"

"You're rewriting my entire life on my dime, the least you can do is walk me through the process," she says.

He sits. Waits.

She looks back at him, her eyes big and tired and wet and red. But thoughtful. No, wait. Not thoughtful.

Calculating.

"You had questions," he says. She rolls her shoulders and shakes her head as if waking. He stays still.

"I did. I do," she says. "Let's get the big one out of the way first: does it hurt?"

"Not if you do it right."

"And do you?"

"Yes."

"Every time?"

"Yes."

"How'd you get into this line of work, anyway?"

He looks at her. Considers lying. Doesn't.

"Military service. Few arrests for breaking and entering. Couple more for assault. Needed the money. Answered an ad. Here we are." He doesn't say
: anger problems, substance abuse, six months homeless post-discharge.

PTSD.

She seems to consider his words. Then:

"What did you do in the military?"

"Medic."

"Hmm," she says, the smile on her face growing sadder. "So you do have some qualifications to be doing this."

"Seems so."

"How is it done?" she asks. "I've heard ghastly rumors, all of which seem to contradict each other and, somehow, themselves. So, tell me, Mister...?"

He almost tells her. He almost says it. The words, first and last, are on his tongue, but he bites them back. There's no rule about this in the Operator Handbook. No regulation against telling the client your name. But he holds back. Because doing otherwise feels wrong. Compromising. Vulnerable.

So he shakes his head firmly, once: no.

"Mister X, then. Tell me, Mister X: how is one extracted?"

He considers the question. Pulls the SCED out of his coat pocket. "With this."

"And what is that?"

"It's a SCED." He says it like
skid
. "Subcranial Cerebral Extraction Device." Holds it up so she can see. It looks like an oversized click-pen, complete with plunger at one end and aperture at the other. An array of buttons along the side for calibration. Its chromed body glints in the low light.

"How does it work?"

He takes a breath. "Calibrate it for the subject's age, gender, whatever you need. Press it up against the base of the skull, the sweet spot, right where your neck meets your head meets your brain stem. Press the button. Needle comes out, acts as an interrupt for all neural activity. Freezes it all in place. Downloads everything onto onboard storage, to be reintegrated into a brand-new, vat-grown body: memories, habits, personality, everything. Your body goes comatose, shuts down in about twelve hours. Collected and disposed of by the company, or it gets farmed out to the city coroner, depending on how busy the day is. You wake up in a brand-new body, tailor-made to your specifications. Total cerebral transplant, almost zero surgery. Total, extraction takes maybe five seconds." He thinks:
been a long time since I've said that many words in a row.

"It's that fast?"

"That fast."

"Did they tell you about my new body?"

Quinn shakes his head no. "Why would they?"

She nods. "Fair enough, Mister X. Fair enough."

Her eyes refocus on the SCED. "Can I see it? The, ah. The...needle?"

He doesn't see any reason why not. He holds the SCED out again and punches the button. There's a noise like a faint digital
screeee
and the needle jumps out of one end, hard and fast enough to punch through flesh and bone in one go. Keeps it out long enough for her to get a good look, then takes his finger off the button. The needle disappears.

"It seems so easy," Missus Pearsson says.

"It is."

She shifts underneath the blankets. All he can see of her is her face, piled inside a hillock of heavy bedding that only faintly defines the form underneath.

"What about weaponry? Do you carry a weapon, Mister X? Seems like your job might be sort of dangerous, from time to time. A gun?"

"No guns."

"A knife, then?"

He doesn't say anything, but then, he doesn't have to. She lights up with self-satisfaction.

"Fantastic," she says. "That's fantastic." Smiles like a floodlight. The brightness hits him full-force and makes his stomach turn. He keeps looking at her as her expression shifts. Sours, somehow. Grows cruel. It's not something he could explain if he was asked—just a series of miniscule shifts underneath the skin. Impossible for him to say what changes in her face, but it's undeniably there. He moves to stand, to get on with the work, but she holds out her hand, staying him for the moment.

"Before you do what you came here to do, you have to understand something, Mister X: this is not a life I ever wanted. Not one that I was ever once interested in. It was thrust upon me. I was
conscripted
into it the moment the moron I thought was my loving husband guilted me into keeping a child I never wished to have."