Survival Tactics Page 9

  Which made us all laugh. “You don’t actually believe that shit, do you?”

  I’ll never forget that kid’s eyes: deep gray like a dead ocean, usually full of confidence and violence and fuck-the-world-ness. He looked at us one after the other, and he said, “All of this? Set before you were born. You really want to know what happens next?”

  I laughed with the rest of them, and he went back to being an asshole. But I never forgot that question.

  I wonder how long Bunny thought about it before she hooked herself up.

  * * *

  Been a long time since I’ve slept really well. Not because of prison—you learn fast how to get people to leave you alone or you don’t survive. But they say the body needs less sleep when you get older, which must mean I’m fucking ancient, because I can’t get more than four hours anymore. Something about missing the sun. Fucks with your brain. We’re evolved for sunshine, that unique Sol spectrum. I hear some folks on Earth can’t even cope with shorter days.

  But it’s way before four hours when I wake up.

  For three of us, The Box Starstation is fucking luxurious. My room, Bunny’s room, Godot’s room. The other former staff rooms have been converted for clients to sleep off Contact or—if they’ve paid—stay for a few days. Besides quarters there’s the power room, Monitoring, a small kitchen that doubles as a med center, and a room containing The Box itself. My room is next to The Box room.

  Bunny was weird about that when I arrived, and I had to learn about her bugfuck craziness before I understood she was worried about me sleeping so close to it. I like it, though. Both she and Godot are superstitious, which means they never wander down my way, and I get some quiet. You’d think after forty years inside quiet would freak me out, but I love it. I’d inject it like Lukos if I could.

  Tonight it’s not quiet. There are sounds, metal on metal, as if someone’s shoving things around on a table top. And there are tiny human noises, little squeaks, as if someone is trying to swallow a cry.

  None of my business. Godot and Bunny have been here a long time. Tech controllers like me come and go. They have each other: the one who sees fairies in the starshine, and the one who kisses paying client ass. You have to rely on someone out here in the middle of fucking nowhere.

  There’s another sound, as if something’s been knocked onto the floor, and this time I get up.

  Most people don’t know The Box isn’t an actual box. It’s some weird-ass irregular polyhedron, and I guess symmetry is a human thing because it has none. It’s as high as my knee, more or less, and I don’t think anybody’s ever done anything to it since Doctor Skyscraper all those years ago hooked up an AI prosthetic to the maze of alien-ass wires coming out of the thing. The wires aren’t copper or fiber or anything I know, and all Bunny’s tech manuals say about them is DO NOT TOUCH THE WIRES. Like I’m a fucking idiot.

  They built a room around it, and then the starstation. There’s a chair for clients to sit while it tells them their futures, and the space is kept comfortably warm. Clients can choose music, too, if they want; some of them paid all the fucking money they had to get here, so why not?

  Godot logged the client out six hours ago. There should be nobody in The Box room. But when I approach the door, the sounds get louder, and the human noises don’t sound so tiny anymore.

  I stop and shrink against the wall, then peer around the doorframe.

  Godot’s face is visible through the window into the power room, only he’s not watching the panel. He’s staring at Bunny, who’s in the Contact chair, and she’s naked with the AI piece on her head and a fucking gag in her mouth while she goes rigid over and over like she’s getting electroshock. Against the opposite wall is the client, and his pants are on the floor but he’s still wearing some custom-made non-wrinkle silk shirt and he’s got his dick in his hand, and every time she moans he jerks harder, and while I’m standing there Godot hisses over the intercom “Keep quiet, you crazy bitch. If you wake the old man, I’ll fucking kill you.”

  Oh, Godot. Not if I see you first.

  But it’s Bunny who sees me, who meets my eyes with her mad ones, and I didn’t think you could see anything when you were in Contact, but what the fuck, Bunny’s special. And when she’s sure I’m looking back, she shakes her head once, twice: No.

  The client braces himself against the wall and yells, and Godot doesn’t have the balls to tell him to keep it down, and this rich asshole must not do this much because he’s sloppy as a teenager about it, and some stunned part of me is wondering who gets to clean the fucking floor. When he’s done, his dick is limp and curled like a slug, and I think there are five or six pairs of wire cutters in the kitchen that could take care of that pretty fucking fast.

  Bunny keeps staring at me, and she shakes her head no again, and through the window Godot looks down at the controls. A moment later, The Box shuts down, and Bunny convulses and passes out.

  No. No to what?

  Godot steps into the room to personally hand the client his pants, his usual obsequious grin on his face. I back up and head for my room.

  Not one to shake things up, me.

  * * *

  Bunny and I have breakfast together.

  I want to ask her about the night before, but she’s in full humming mode, and she hands me the power room manual. “You need to test on that in a week,” she tells me, and smiles. She leaves the room backwards, seeing fairies again, passing Godot as he enters as if he were unimportant scenery. He doesn’t bother looking at me, but heads to the cabinet for his usual cereal.

  The thing about prison is you get a lot of time to practice. Nearly anything, really. They had a piano in our cell block, and damned if some of the guys weren’t too bad. But it was easier if you were practicing something that didn’t need outside supplies. Most of my practice was self-defense, but I got too good too fast, and I got bored. So I started learning offense as well.

  Forty years is a long fucking time.

  I’ve got an arm around Godot’s neck before he even thinks to drop his cereal, and I learn I had him right on this at least: he knows fuck-all about fighting. I can feel his throat working under my forearm, and I tighten my grip, holding the point of a pair of wire cutters under his jaw, right where the nice soft bits are. “What the fuck are you doing to Bunny?” I ask him, because it seems more reasonable to let him try to justify himself before I have him bleed out in our common kitchen.

  He makes a squawk, and I loosen my grip just enough for him to be able to rasp out “—her idea! First day we got here! I do it, too, I swear!”

  Which is some bullshit. I’d bet my papers out of here Godot’s never been in Contact. “Difference is,” I growl in his ear, “you’re not fucking nuts.”

  “I give her the money, for fuck’s sake!” He struggles a little, and I tighten my grip. “You think I’m forcing her into it? Ask her, dammit!”

  Fuck if I don’t believe him. And fuck if I don’t think about Bunny, watching her own life over and over again, layer over layer over layer of bullshit.

  I put my mouth closer to his ear. “But that would require me not to kill you right here and now.” I mean, fuck. I’m serving life for murder already. They owe me a corpse.

  “No! No! Wait!” He manages to sound frantic even though there’s nothing but weak puffs of air coming out of him. “You want a cut? Fine, you can have the money! I have enough anyway! You won’t even have to do anything for it!”

  I knocked a guy out once in prison. Didn’t mean to, but the shitbag kept coming at me, and eventually I just held on to him until he dropped. I could drop this fucker, too, and decide later whether to kill him. Assuming I didn’t make an unfortunate mistake and crush his windpipe, or accidentally snip his carotid with my wire cutters.

  “You’re lucky,” I tell him. “You won’t make nearly as big of a mess as Doctor Skyscraper.”

  And then something heavy hits the back of my head, and everything goes dark.

  * * *

/>   dark

  dark and

  bright and warm and red

  blood

  against the floor the walls my hands my arm

  those wire cutters in her hands as she takes his fingers off

  humming

  pretty so pretty so kind

  even crazy she’s so kind to me and i want to save her and

  she takes off his shoes and it’s his toes this time

  less blood because his heart his heart has stopped his heart

  my heart

  my heart is beating so fast so hard and i am alive not my blood i am alive and she hums

  and she smiles at me

  and there are so many so many so

  young and old and pain and war and

  love and

  hearts so many so many hearts i am full i am dying i am coming apart

  everything is bright, fire, heat, consumption, apocalypse

  and when the flame dies when the flame dies

  when it dies

  i take a breath free and clear in the sunshine

  * * *

  Contact leaves you with one hell of a hangover.

  I’m on an unfamiliar floor, flat on my back, blinking out at the stars, millions of specks of bright dust against that soul-swallowing nothingness. My breath sounds deep and heavy in my ears, and I struggle to sit up, only to find I’m wearing something heavy and stiff that makes it hard to move. On the wall opposite that window to the stars I see the words WARNING: DO NOT OPEN WHEN LIGHT IS RED.

  I’m in the fucking airlock.

  “Hey!” I yell, and my voice sounds flat and echoes close to my head, and I realize I’ve got a full helmet on. All dressed up for a trip outside into the fucking vacuum. “Hey!”

  I hear her humming, then, and it’s the same tune I heard when I was in Contact. I press myself against the interior window, so small I can’t see much, and when the faceplate bounces off the door I remember I was fucking unconscious, because my head starts to throb in a deeply unpleasant fashion.

  When my vision clears, I see The Box, and on the floor in front of it is Godot, lying on the floor staring at me, only not really. His eyes are wide and unblinking and starting to look a little desiccated, and I wonder how long I was out, how long he’s been dead. His head seems to have sunk below floor level, but after a moment I realize that’s because his skull has been bashed into pudding and is oozing out onto the metal plating. Even so, she couldn’t have killed him here; there isn’t nearly enough blood. I blink once, and things are blurry, but when I blink again I look down at his hands.

  Those wire cutters left clean wounds.

  Bunny is behind The Box, and I can see all those alien wires lying on the floor, disconnected, even though I can’t see what she’s doing. She must have heard me bash into the door, but she doesn’t look up, doesn’t acknowledge my presence at all.

  “You put me in Contact, didn’t you?” I ask. When she doesn’t answer, I add, “Just guessing, because I’ve had concussions before and this was way fucking weirder than they were.”

  She still says nothing,

  “I’m not crazy,”

  The humming stops. “No.”

  Relaxed and tranquil, like there isn’t a dead guy in the floor with no fingers and toes. “Is that a myth, then? That people go crazy?”

  “No,” she says again. She hasn’t looked up, and I still can’t see what she’s doing. “The myth is why.”

  I don’t know what the fuck that means.

  “What are you doing?” She doesn’t answer, just starts humming again, and I claw at the airlock controls, but even though the LIGHT is not RED I can’t do a fucking thing in these vacuum gloves, and my sluggish fingers can’t even yank them off. Maybe I can knock the door down with this smooth-ass helmet. “Godot was a dick, Bunny. I say we flush him with the rest of the organic waste, scrub the place down, and tell them he took a wrong turn one night and sucked vacuum. Nobody’s going to miss that ratfucker, not even his own mother.”

  But it seems Bunny’s not interested in Godot’s grieving relatives. She sits back from her work, still humming, and cocks her head to one side, looking it over. After a moment she gets her feet under her and stands, looking past me at something on the other side of the room. Stepping over Godot like he’s a wrench someone forgot to put away, she heads into the power room.

  I watch as she bends over the console, and the light dims to that fucking useless blue. “What are you doing?” I shout, but she won’t fucking answer me. I see her hands moving, swift and sure, and after a moment the light turns from blue to red.

  “Bunny?”

  “Airlock cycle initiated,” says the station voice calmly.

  Jesus fuck, she’s going to space me. “Bunny!” I start pounding on the door. “I won’t tell anyone! You know I won’t! Let me out of here!”

  Bunny leaves the power room, stepping over Godot again, and walks up to the door, staring at me through the small window. I hear a klaxon begin to sound, and the station voice says, “Power overload. Automatic shutdown failed. Please initiate manual shutdown.” And all at once, I put it together.

  Bunny doesn’t want to kill me.

  “You don’t need to die,” I say, looking down at her through the window. She’s so small, and her face holds such innocence. I have no idea what crime she committed to end up in the system, what favor she did to get a ticket here. Maybe she’s some kind of killer revolutionary or some over-idealistic rich kid from Iobe. Maybe everything she’s ever done for me was faked, but I don’t think so. I don’t think the madness is faked.

  “Airlock cycle 60 percent,” says The Box Starstation.

  I’m running out of time.

  “What did it show you?”

  The red light shines through her hair against her skin, and it’s not blood it reminds me of, not the congealed mess on the floor around Godot, but sunset, all those orange-and-red videos shot over oceans long dead, organic and perfect and eternal in a way none of us are, not our memories or our lives or anything we ever touch. They always dress angels in white in the stories. They get it so very wrong.

  “Everyone,” she tells me. “It showed me everyone.”

  And she reaches up, and puts her palm against the window, and instinctively I do the same, the big glove of the vacuum suit making my hand look like some massive robotic paw. I never touched Bunny, never even shook her hand when we met.

  “I should have gone in anyway,” I tell her. “I should have stopped them.”

  She shakes her head again, just like she did before. No. Only this time she smiles, and she looks sad and happy all at once. “Live,” she says, or I think she does, because the alarm is filling my ears. She drops her hand and turns away.

  After that it’s all so fast.

  The outer airlock door opens.

  The rapid depressurization shoves me out of the station, which grows smaller at an alarming rate.

  When it blows, the light fills my vision and I squeeze my eyes shut, expecting to be immolated.

  Vacuum being vacuum, though, the flash is brief, but the percussion wave isn’t. I’m punched again, and I am tumbling, and I spend a few moments looking for something to grasp before I realize I’m in the middle of fucking nowhere with nothing coming at me but bits of station debris.

  I wonder if I’ll be able to grab any of it. I wonder why my mind thinks that would help. I wonder if some debris will hit me and tear my suit or just carve its way through me.

  All of it misses me, by quite a distance.

  And then I’m alone.

  * * *

  Five days of air in this suit. Has to be a leftover from when the station was staffed with science shitbags they actually cared about. Or maybe Bunny put me in one of the ones meant for clients. Either way, it’s fucking high-end lifeboat shit.

  Won’t save my life, though. There’s fuck-all out here. They put The Box here for a reason.

  Been thinking about what Bunny said: It showed me everyo
ne.

  Kinda thinking it showed me everyone, too.

  If Contact shows you not just your own future, but everyone’s—every fucking shitbag ever born to our sad, narcissistic little species—shit, bugfuck crazy seems like a pretty sensible response. None of which explains the rich assholes who head home with a spring in their step, but maybe they only see themselves. Or maybe they see everyone, and they just don’t give a shit.

  But that’s not the only thing she said, there at the end.

  The Box Starstation is—was—in the middle of fucking nowhere, but it’s not completely abandoned out here. Apart from the tourist transports for the shitbags who paid to have their lives demystified, there are cruise ships full of rich fucks who seem to think you can’t see stars and nebulas out of the window of every decent colony out there. I figure I’ve got a shot at getting picked up, although it’s maybe just as likely I’ll smack into their hull before they see me at all.

  Still, I’m feeling pretty optimistic. Because I was fucked up when I was in Contact, but I remember a few things.

  Like sunshine. Like breathing fresh air.

  The Box is never wrong.

  Maybe it’ll be a hypoxia-induced hallucination. Which wouldn’t be bad, you know? If this is my time, it’s A-OK if my brain goes ahead a bit and finds me a nice slice of paradise to drift off to. Hypoxia’s not the worst way to go, after all.

  But what if it wasn’t showing me a hallucination?

  The thing is, hope doesn’t lose me a fucking thing. I’m stuck here, me and this vast fuck-all, and I’ve got five days of air and my own head.

  So I think it was the real thing. I think I’ll be rescued, and pardoned, and find myself some shit-paying job on an underpopulated colony with a breathable fucking atmosphere. I think, after all this, I deserve some real sunshine. Might as well hope.