Lightspeed: Year One

Your chest is wet with blood and your left arm can hardly move, but with your right you feel around the inside of your overcoat as Susan falls to the ground. Unconscious, not dead.

You drape the coat over the good arm to hide the Astra and wait.

It’s Kouroupas that turns the corner.His wild hair makes a halo around his head, bathed and filtered in the light of a flickering fluorescent overhead. There is no waiting, he looks down at the overcoat hanging over your right arm, hesitates for a second, and you fire four times in a row, blowing a hole in the overcoat that the muzzle sticks through.

“Damn it.” Kouropas looks shocked as he slumps to the ground.

You crawl over to him and lean close.

There are no last words, no apologies or explanations, just his creased eyes looking up at the ceiling, his flour covered hands holding his bloody stomach, and then he stops breathing.

With some effort you retrieve his gun, pocket it with your Astra, and slump with your back against the soda machine.

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.