Every memory he could recall began not more than a year before the shooting. They all began when he woke up on the surgery table one day, at twenty-six years old, with a brain like a newborn.
Now he lay in a similar hospital, on an actual bed, in an actual room, even if that room was only three meters wide, three meters long. Two other patients, in identical, thin beds, white sheets, with mattresses like upholstered Cryboni lay on either side of him. A square meter was all you were allowed in this city, and less after death. The floor was dark and fuzzy and made of medicinal substance a group of lobbyists got congress to force all hospitals to install a decade prior, subsequently creating more than a few trillionaires in the process. Between the beds, dusty with the concrete-footprints betraying the true nature of this goop, this strange, gluey substance threatened socked feet.
What's worse, the room stank of mold. In the grout between the blue wall tile, grew black mildew which extended in dark veins over parts of the white ceiling, and those veins expanding out in grayish blobs, as if infected by some poison.
Oblong and spherical machines hanging from the ceiling like robotic balloons made whirring noises, or they clicked at intervals, every three seconds. The noise of the patients in the hallway, just outside the room, sometimes groaning, coughing, crying for help, often just talking to each other in voices devoid of the spark of life, was all that could overpower the noises of machines. There were no windows. A sense of stuffiness, heat with nowhere else to go, dominated the hospital room.
Just as Five, waking in a morphine hangover, felt this all too much for him to bear, a nurse entered with the swiftness of a worker bee. She did not look at him or address him. She adjusted dials. She pressed buttons and replaced empty IV bottles with ones filled with fluid so clear it only became visible by a single bubble, floating to the top, when she turned them over. Her helmet was white with a red cross on it.
Five said, "Can I get another breakfast?"
She glanced at him for a moment, before returning her interest to a machine made of little more than three polycrystal readouts, tubes, and several motors. "Looks like your appetite's returning, big man. We'll have you outta here in no time, don't cha worry."
"Be a sweetie, I'm starving here, hun. Can't you just sneak me one more?" He winked at her.
"Yeah, okay, you got it, big man. I'll be right back with your waiter, or do you have any special requests now I could help you with?"
"Damn, now you're messing with me. Okay, fair play. But help me for real, lil' sis. I don't expect any better treatment than anyone, but c'mon, I'm an agent. Have some sympathy, I just got shot in the line of duty, protecting your Amino."
"I'll see what I can do. Anything for my big man. Gotta get you agents back to work, ain't it? Protecting us and all that. But I gotta tell ya, I don't think it's gonna happen. You should just be lucky you got a breakfast at all, and you're in here at least. How'd you like to be out there?" she said, nodding to the hallway, where the sound of a man screaming in small yelps was enough to curdle blood, and the weak voices telling him to shut up, for the love of the Greaterberg, shut your mouth, certainly did no one any good.
While she finished her work, changing the bags on one of the machines, Vander entered the room, peering back out into the hallway with a look on his face. He nearly walked into a metal cart with empty basins on it that seemed to have been shoved into the room due to want of storage space. "Oh, and here's your lil' partner. You guys are like a big ol' family, ain't ya? I'll go fetch your steak. Your friend want one too?"
"Ha ha," Five said. "Can't a blame a guy for trying, ain't it?"
Vander watched the slender brunette leave, straightening out his hair with five fingers, blushing not a little. "She's pretty condescending."
"Huh? Yeah, she's pretty."
"Never mind. How are you? Looks like they're treating you well. You got a room, at the very least. Better than can be said for the poor souls out there. Looks like you got some fine company in here, too." Vander eyed the elderly man on the bed next to Five, a bandage over one eye. Things pumping in and things pumping out of his rice sack of a body. The beds were so close Five could have reached over and smacked the man in the face if he were thrashing too much in his sleep.
"I'd be a helluva lot better if you woulda listened to my orders in the first place, sappersteenii."
"That's—well." Vander hadn't looked Five in the eye once since he entered, and only now made brief eye contact.
"I hafta talk to with you, Van. Now, I'm serious. This is a closed-door kind of meeting, you understand me?"
Vander again only offered a glimpse of eye contact before looking away.
"I'm not writing you up, don't worry. I consider us a team, equals and all that. But I am the senior agent. And there's no way we can continue to function if you don't follow my orders. Look at me, Van. Is this how you want it? Things can't keep goin' on like this, with you being subordinate all the time."
"Insubordinate."
"Even worse," Five said, trying to gesticulate with his hands but unable to move them more than a few inches. "And the Authority wants my full report on the whole incident. What do you want me to write? I don't wanna throw you under the bus here, but at this point, alls I know is you were MIA, monkeying around with some nonsense when I got plugged. Tell me what you were up to. I gotta voice something about it, or the inquest will be asking me. They know you were there."
Vander coughed, though the cough didn't seem real, not involving any phlegm, but as if it were a reaction to being around sick people. His eyes were large and dark and had a liquid quality to them which was maybe the only truly attractive thing about Vander. "Yeah. I know. Do you seriously think I haven't thought about this?"
"Thought about it?" Five said, nonplussed. "You don't gotta think about shit when you're tellin' the truth, ain't it?"
"I just know if I tell you the truth—forget it."
"Stealing again?" Five shook his head. "I thought you were over that."
"It's a mental disorder. I'm a kleptomaniac. I can't help it. It's a sickness. Don't you think I want to stop? No one wants me to stop more than me, but my therapist says it's a disease, something only my meds can stop. But my meds give me diarrhea and anxiety, and the meds for that make me hallucinate, and the meds for that give me seizures. The GSA knows all this, and if they try and stop me, or fire me, for my medical condition, I can sue them back to the stone-age." For the first time in the interaction, Vander betrayed some passion. "Besides, you think the Authority wants headlines about coderunners stealing from targets? Just make something up and Internal will be happy it doesn't cause a scandal. Damage control and covering their asses is all they're concerned about."
The long bolster of silence following this speech proved Five understood everything Vander laid out but was not happy about it.
"This place is driving me crazy, Van. You shoulda seen the breakfast they brought me, can't even get a liquid steak in here."
"This smell is making me ill."
"Sit down."
Vander had a sick look on his face. He glanced around but saw no chairs.
It appeared, from his expression, something else picked at Five. As Vander was not one to pry, or seem at all interested in the problems of others, he simply stood quietly, as if searching for some platitude to break the silence.
Finally, Five spoke out. "You know what gets me hot though? I been thinking about this plenty. In here I got nothing but time, so maybe I'm thinking too much. But what gets me about the whole deal is we woulda never found that guy. We woulda never found him. What could make someone just come outta the wall like that, after all was said and done? He coulda made it out alive if he just stayed put behind that screen. And that's something new. I never seen that before, that type a wall. If he just stayed in there like that. But it was like something caused him to get out of there, like he wanted to protect something."
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
"That's what I was coming here to tell you," Vander said, eyes shifting uneasily. "I'm still off duty for the rest of the week so I decided to go through the archives. I learned some curious things about him. His name was Walden Statkus. Unemployed and unemployable from what I read. Thing is, the GSA ran the guy's DNA. He's a recom, but no genetic association to the old woman."
"I thought it was his mother—"
"That recom wasn't his mother. Not his aunty. Not a relation at all. Not even a friend from as far as any of the records can tell us. As far as we know, there's nothing connecting those two mods to be in that apartment together. So what is this young guy, a transient, doing hiding in this recom's unit?" Vander showed a true interest in this, his expression showing some emotion.
"I could see in his eyes, like he was angry with me." Five stared at some ovoid machine, pensively. "I don't know, Van. He knew that woman. Why else was he there? You had her in binds, stunned, looking shabby enough to make anyone pissed. Don't try to make it like there's some other reason this guy was out to get me, don't pass the blame. You disappeared off to some place. And I mean you stunned his friend hard."
"A lot of coderunners stun. We already talked about this. They give us the pen for a reason. Usually it's actually a pretty effective way of keeping the humanoids docile. After the intense waves of panic, the endocrine system shuts down and they almost go comatose. Using the pen is actually a really good method of arresting mods, and I'm not the only coderunner who does it."
"You are the only agent who calls us 'coderunners.'"
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"It's just kinda weird. What the heck is a coderunner? You say it, and people don't know what you're talking about. Use the words the rest of us agreed on."
After a few moments, Vander shrugged in a stiff way, as if his body were covered in a layer of rust. "Fine, then I'm weird."
A machine clicked rhythmically.
"Fuckin' Greaterberg, this place is driving me crazy. I'm alone here with nothing but my thoughts. Wallreader don't even work. The readers get no reception." He glanced up at Vander. "Hey, thanks for coming."
"I'm off duty anyway, till the reports come through." Vander had his back up against one wall, holding his helmet. He never seemed to want to wear his helmet like a normal person.
"Some guy visited me, earlier, dressed real important," Five said, almost dreamily. "Never seen this guy before in my life. Not that I remember at least."
"Probably just internal, seeing how you are. They send in their goons to make sure it's all legit, and you're not faking an injury for the benefits. You think they actually care if we're getting good treatment? It's always about their bottom line."
"Yeah, great benefits. Free lead. This is what I get for protecting this city."
"Is Five Glass actually getting jaded about the Authority? Wow. I never thought I'd see this day. Welcome to the fold. Maybe now you could loosen up those straps a little bit and we can be like normal coderunners."
"I just do my job is all."
"It does happen, believe it or not. Guys shoot themselves, get paid leave, insurance money, a settlement. What're they giving you?"
"I don't know," Five said. "Do I get something?"
"If you don't know, then probably not."
"I didn't get shot to get a handout. It just happened. Don't matter. They say I'll be alright, couple weeks."
"That's right, I forgot you don't have your own personal insurance. Stupid, real stupid. You should always be insured, if only to get your MI replaced. I'm on a nice plan. I can pass you the number."
"I got no money, you know that," Five said. "Maybe I'll start saving, like you say."
Vander paused for a moment. "Well, anyway. So what about this guy that visited you? Did he say anything?"
"Nothing. Just snapped some photos. I never seen him before. Real old too, from what I seen. I was barely conscious, they had me on all type a drugs."
As Five was speaking, the nurse returned with a large orderly holding a wheel chair. The man set it down and pressed a contact on its side, making it expand to full operability.
"Wow, sooner than I thought."
"Hold on, hun," the nurse said, fixing IVs to the wheelchair in some complex, baroque way. The chair proved to expand in more ways than one, poles telescoping from it and secret compartments unearthed by orderly and nurse alike. They worked quickly, and when they were finished, she said, "Okay, hop on, big man."
"I thought doc told me another week in bed."
"Don't worry, you're not leaving us that easy." With the orderly, she helped Five into the wheelchair. Vander didn't seem to know what to do with himself, but acted as if he did, pulling out his reader and searching through it, his finger zipping up and down the polycrystal screen.
"You're not taking me in the hallway, are you? I'm with the GSA, darlin', ain't they tell you? I got a good medical plan. Right, Van?"
Vander shrugged, and before Five knew it the orderly was pushing him between a maze of hospital beds of NCBiii composites, filled with the writhing sick. Five saw sunken eyes and collapsed cheeks. Some patients sat on the floor in their backless smocks, with blue veins and pointed spinal columns exposed. One of these patients, a woman in her middle ages, hair thinned out on her head to expose her scalp, scratched all over her body in a way so uncomfortable it resembled a type of primitive dance, something associated with evil spirits and the cleansing of the soul. It was improbable the orderly could maneuver between these patients so deftly, but Five had only his eyes to believe. When the orderly managed to get them into an elevator, after several cars packed to capacity would not let them on, and not for a want of trying, Vander managed to squeeze his own skinny body along with them.
They took the car down to the second basement, and when the doors opened Five couldn't believe they were in the same building. Perhaps this was one of the elevators which moved laterally as well, bringing them through some subterranean tunnels into the type of hospital he imagined only the wealthy could afford. The four of them got off, stepping into broad hallways devoid of patients or noises of any kind aside from the hollow draft of an air conditioner. The floor was so clean it reflected the light from the wall sconces.
"Where exactly we going?"
"Almost there, hun. We got orders to move you down to the second. B2. You must be real important with them in the GSA."
"Am I?" Five shot a look at Vander, which Vander, in an affected way, failed to return.
The nurse opened the door to B218, revealing a room with a single, queen-sized bed, the floor as spotless as that of the corridors. "This is bigger than my flat."
"You're moving him into here?" Vander said with a pinch of disbelief in his voice.
"Orders. Who're you anyway? You family? Otherwise you gotta leave, can't be in this sector."
"I'm his partner."
"We're like family," Five said, jabbing Vander on the shoulder.
Five could almost smell the jealousy in Vander's eyes. He looked around at the huge wall reader, the minibar, the window as long as the room, overlooking the underground courtyard planted with actual trees and ferns, while the nurse pulled open the curtains.
"Maybe that guy wasn't from internal, like you say, after all. Maybe he was more like corporate."
Vander turned to Five, not looking at him directly, "Get well soon. But not too soon." And he left.
"Just set me here," Five said after the orderly wheeled him to face the window. He peered out into the lush beauty of an artificial nature which absolutely intoxicated him. He loved trees. He loved flowers and shrugs. Anything green. It wasn't entirely true to say he had no memories which predated the operation. He did have a memory from his childhood. It was of a ferns. It was of plants tropical. It was of fruit trees, filling the space of a courtyard. He remembered sitting in a room not unlike the very one he found himself in now. He remembered through smell.
iCrybon: Name brand producer of Crystalline Boron Nitride, the strongest man-made substance by tensile strength. (See Appendix C for a detailed list of substances.)
iisappersteen: Colloquial term for miser. The etymology supposedly originates from the surname of the mayor Hoboken, NJ sometime in the late 21st century, which, at the time, faced dire economic troubles. Mayor sappersteen, though possessing a substantial personal fortune himself, took the city's entire budget for that year to Atlantic City, where he put it on 21 black. He lost. The city went bankrupt. In order to simply pay off city workers and keep Hoboken running, New York City annexed it. For the few decades in which the system of fifty states continued to exist after this incident, New Jerseyites vilified sappersteen. By the time the walls went up, the word became part of common American vernacular (CAV), though by them was used as a broader insult, mostly devoid of its original meaning.
iiiNon-carbon-based.