To extract as much value from humanity as possible, and maximise our work efficiency, one must cut away at what we are until nothing remains but a loyal slave. That has been the goal of civilisation since the agricultural revolution began and kings first made serfs of man, we’ve only refined the process in the millennia since.
But what is it to be a slave?
The visible dressings of slavery—the collars and chains—they can shape you, but they do not define you. As long as you are rattling the chains, tearing at the collar, and plotting your escape then you are not a true slave, only an actor forced into playing the role.
For you to become a slave in truth you must choose to serve but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be manipulated into that choice. All it takes are two simple things.
Power and promises.
Power to first strip away all hope; every other future that a prospective slave might seek must be viciously crushed before their very eyes, until the only paths remaining are worse still than the slavery you would impose on them. However, this alone leads only to a false slave. Though trapped, they will still dream of hope, eagerly awaiting a moment for them to slip away from the collar and chains.
To make a true slave, you cannot simply steal away their hopes and dreams, that’s only the first step, afterward you must fill the void that you’ve created. You must become their salvation. Then they will truly be yours.
The vaunted CEOs ruling our corporate world sacrifice everything to earn an immortal future in an artificial heaven, and rarely do they buck the chains. Their employees give blood and bone for a retirement plan and the chance to raise a family, only occasionally betraying their masters. While beggars and daemons in the understreets are never promised more than a full belly on the coming of tomorrow and would betray anyone for a shiny enough coin.
Sell them salvation, whatever that means to them, and they will be perfectly obedient. Fail, and no amount of chains will confine them.
Dad, for example, has enslaved himself to SynnTech. All his hopes and dreams are bound to the corporate entity and his coming retirement plan, a small taste of heaven before they let death take him. If another corporation offered him more, he wouldn’t believe them. He has too much faith in his god to turn away.
I envy him, sometimes.
That he can have faith in their promised salvation and live his life knowing that his future is a goal worth fighting for. I can’t lie to myself the same way he does.
I can’t be a slave, but I do understand them.
So, when asked why our bounty for our proposed job would attack SynnTech, there can only be one answer. They have been sold salvation by another, but in what form?
The gods can offer a glimpse of heaven, so what must the devil bring to the table to draw these daemons away from the light? Or is it just that these daemons see through the angels’ lies, the artificiality of the halos, the falsity of the feathers, and would put more faith in the devil himself, knowing that they only exist to be used?
In either case, the daemons exist only to serve, and the devil is just another face of god.
“Our prey is hiding in the rust pits,” Mutt declares to Gunner and I with a widening smile revealing savage metal fangs. His mop of hair shimmers with the falsity of plastic, but his metal eyes burn with the passionate light of plasma. “Hex has a few BATs chasing them down in what’s left of the widenet, but the rust pits melt holes even in the digital. They could slip through the gaps.”
BATs, colloquially known as Badly Automated Tracers, are false AI that barely even imitate consciousness. Using enough of them, Hex, our spider should be capable of keeping our bounty under digital surveillance. Even though she retains her flesh, she’s quite capable, and more stable than most of her sort.
I regret, a little, not hiring her during my test, but it’s important that I keep Hamlet separate from Artemis. I’ve spent too much time and money preparing this identity to lose it because I’ve gotten lax in separating it from my real life.
“Any other dogs have their scent?” Gunner asks, and I almost jump when I realise the conversation is still going. The pauses, the stretched words, my mind wonders in the space between and I keep having to replay their conversation to recall the details.
Only to then be left waiting for it to continue…
Gunner is a titan of mismatched puzzle pieces cut into shape to fit together, but while none were designed with the others in mind, they all share the same theme. Every sharp edge and twisting muscle fibre comes crawling out of the 7th circle ready to rip and tear through metal and flesh.
“We’re not alone on the hunt, but no one else has the scent,” Mutt shakes his head, hair flopping side to side. “A few friendly scrappers will be joining us just in case we need the numbers.”
“Our bounty, they’re the people that attacked SynnTech? The bounty on them is growing…” I comment, looking for our phantasmal third member ‘Doll’ who should be with us. Though if she doesn’t want to be found, she won’t be.
I only rarely directly speak with the members of this daemon pack, but I’ve followed and funded them for years. I didn’t choose them because they were the best, even though they are better than most. I chose them because they will never accept their fates as slaves, they each have something in them pushing them to pull at their leash and gnaw on their chains.
They still have hopes and dreams.
I’ve been… tempted to reach out to them more often, but I’ve always kept a wall between us before now. Not that it hasn’t been difficult with Mutt constantly trying to break through to me. As he does with everyone.
“It is, and merits are raining down from above for whoever brings them in. There’s a reason why they had to hide in the rust pits to get away, anyone would prefer a ten-to-one fight over drowning in the gasses down there,” Mutt meets my eyes, and I grind my teeth as I piece together the conversation once again.
A rising frustration blooms in my guts, but as I notice it, I sweep it away with a simple program loaded on my logic core. With that done, I section off a piece of my mind to focus on the conversation, slowing it down as much as I can to keep pace with the others. It’s far from perfect, and I lose some of my advantages but, I’m good enough for now.
“The bigger pay means that SynnTech wants proof of another corp’s involvement,” I point out. “That’s the only reason they’ll be pushing harder, and if you don’t want to get screwed on the silver coming from this, we need that proof.”
“Do the high-ups really need this that much?” Gunner asks, glaring at a few stray daemons and scavs that dare to approach us.
“Need? No. Want? Yes,” I shrug, the act a performance and each word a script written seconds ago. “SynnTech could easily take over their logic cores and force them to walk right in for interrogation, but they don’t like people seeing them do it. Makes their own employees get a bit twitchy, lowers their work performance. Not worth the price.
“Paying you a few silver scraps to hunt them down? For that price, it’s worth it.”
“The same business as always, then,” Gunner grunts. “Measure our lives in the weight of silver merits.”
“A code that weighs what? A few electrons buzzing in logic gates?” Hex cuts in with an unnerving cackle through our data links. “But can’t say you’re wrong.”
“We sure, our prey still alive down there?” Gunner asks, returning to the topic. “They’ve been down there, what? Weeks? Months?”
“Which is what put us all off the hunt. That place is not meant for life, human or metal the caustic gasses take everything and that’s assuming you don’t crawl over a reactor still burning radiation. Even silver rusts down there, nothing short of gold will lead someone into the pits. The other hunters still here are waiting by the holes ‘till they bolt from whichever vault they’re hiding in down there.
“Which is why we’re going to help them get clear,” Mutt hops over a stray chunk of fallen rebar. “When they try to break out, we clear the way.”
“I… don’t catch your reasoning there…” Gunner looks at mutt, his metal faceplate painted with a smiley face unable to express his apparent confusion.
“Gold, my dear friend. Why settle for silver when there’s gold somewhere about?” He asks, his hair flopping as he moves. “I said it before, nothing short of gold leads a soul down into the pits. These rats haven’t stuck around for no reason. Hiding in the caustic gasses instead of running? Then coming out now, when they’re more wanted than ever?
“They’re looking for a meet-up with whoever hired them. They’re looking to get paid.
“We catch them all, steal their pay, and get their bounties,” Mutt declares. “Rewards from this should be enough to get us kitted out and prepped for our real goal.”
“Real goal?”
He winks in my direction, lips tight.
“They’re moving,” Hex whispers into my logic core, leading my puppet along the street.
“You coming or are you slipping out on us, Ham-Ham?” Mutt asks, face forward. “We’d cut you in if you stayed.”
“That name again?” I hiss through my teeth at him but take my time to consider his words and the reason that I’ve come here.
Mom has made it to her chair, staring wide-eyed into the ceiling, drool running down her chin. She hasn’t spoken in a while and when I try to shake her she doesn’t move. I can’t leave things like this anymore, but to go further I need to take a risk.
To reach her, I’ll need to do something more drastic. If I fail, I might just be pushing her further away, and with how close she is to the edge of the cliff…
There’s a reason why I’m down here.
She’s not the only one I’ve been afraid of reaching out to.
For years I’ve been watching this group of daemons, feeding them scraps under the table, and helping them where I can. All justified, because I’ll be using them eventually, but…
I want more.
I’ve always wanted more.
If I reached out, we could probably be friends.
But what if I lose them? What if they die on a mission that I send them on? What if they reject me when they find out the type of person I really am?
It’s the same weakness holding me back, both for them and for Mom.
Hope is like a burning ember, it is better to leave it floating in the air while admiring its beauty than to reach for it and be burned as you extinguish its flame. Or so I’ve thought until now.
Watching the embers fall into the endless ocean, I can’t help but think I’ll regret not trying to save them. Will I regret it more than feeling hope die as it burns in my hands?
“I won’t be much help,” I admit, but Mutt’s smile only widens at my words. Seeing the weakness, the opportunity to strike. To reach me.
“You’re finally one of us, then?” He asks, metal teeth shimmering with the pulsing red lights around us. “You don’t mind working as a lowly daemon?”
“I’ll tag along, that’s it,” I push him away, but his smile doesn’t shift.
I’m far from an asset on this job, I don’t know why he’s so eager to have me with them. There’s something about him that I just don’t understand.
He offers me a little space as we stalk through the thick caustic haze that rises from the pits and sewer grates along the road, I cannot help but take in the nature of our modern city and the burial grounds buried underneath.
A central pillar resides beneath the SynnTech building, a thick anchor to hold aloft the elevator rising into space. It’s buried deep into the rust pits beneath us, and through them into the bedrock of the earth itself. Surrounding it are the lesser pillars, thousands of them spread throughout the city, together holding up the towers and city streets of the upper world. A mountain forged by human hands.
Even should everything else fall, these pillars will remain standing. The gods residing at the peak will not allow it to fall.
What surrounds us now is what was once that peak a generation ago abandoned to the rust and ruin. As the city rises higher into the sky, what was once the peak is now buried and used to drain away the trash from the ever-climbing city above.
One day, the city that I live in will be buried beneath new constructions, and those who do not find a means to climb higher will be left behind.
“Exit located, two hunters on the prowl,” Hex sends us the marked location and a quick scope on the bounty hunters watching over the exit to the pits.
“Only two? Leave them to soften our prey,” Mutt orders, “We’ll go by, prep ourselves to jump them. Hex, got a guess on where the meet-up is happening?”
“A few likely spots,” Hex messages, sending across directions. “My BATs are on watch, we’ll stay ahead.”
“Doll,” Mutt turns to a shadow on the wall. “Stay with the marks, make sure they don’t get caught by anyone but us.”
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“Aye-aye,” A feminine whisper echoes from a shadow on the wall, a bright woman in a fancy dress and two large pig-tails. I guess Doll is feeling subdued today, usually she’s more… over the top, fixing to be the centre of attention.
We stalk to the edges of the city where the wall meets the ceiling, pipes and garbage chutes—the thick veins of the city—run along every surface, occasionally bursting and raining over the city. We quickly slip through an old door, the hatch long since torn off for scrap.
“They’re breeching now,” Hex spins us the footage of a group pushing through a sewer grate and engaging with the pair of daemons waiting for them. A wave of gunfire bursts out at the escaping pack, but clatters away at the ground missing them entirely.
The group crawling from the pits have their joints gunked up with rust, limping and swaying all over the place, but even still they manage to slag the two hunters with their return fire.
Seems they still have some functioning kit from the Hephaestus forges. Of particular interest is the plasma caster, capable of penetrating through any publicly available personal armour without issue.
“Better not get hit,” Mutt whispers with a whistle.
Looking at them now, they really do resemble some form of inhuman monsters much as the daemons they were named after. Colourful toxins drip from their pitted metal, as they pull each other along, the others in the street rush away at the sight of them.
Daemon packs: problem solvers made up of the more skilled creatures that have been ejected from the world above. Barely anything more than living trash abandoned to the wastes, their greatest hope is to prove themselves worthy of recycling.
“I’m picking up interference in the outer walls near you, probably the people they’re here to meet,” Hex pushes the data to us. “Keep a low profile, I’ll mask your digital presence much as I can.”
“So, I was right,” Mutt whispers with a faint shiver as he eases into his joints. I wouldn’t have even noticed that he was anxious if I wasn’t paying close attention.
“You weren’t sure they were coming?” I ask, keeping as quiet as I can. This body wasn’t made for missions like this, but it does have a few personal defence weapons.
“It’s daemon work,” Mutt shakes his head. “You never know anything for sure. Everything can go wrong at any moment.”
“How do you live like this?” I ask, forcing out the words that I would instinctively repress. “Knowing that every step you make, you could ruin everything? Lose everyone you love?”
Mutt pauses, time seeming to slip away as he meets my eyes, lifting my chin up with one hand while shaking his head and releasing a sad sigh.
“Don’t look down, and don’t look back,” he answers, flicking at my forehead to snap me out of the moment. “This whole city is hanging off the side of a cliff, already supposed to have fallen. Don’t look down, and don’t look back. We’ve all lost things, and we’re gonna lose more.
“Just focus on what you’ve gotta do next, and don’t hesitate to jump for the next handhold, ‘cause what you’ve got now is going to slip away no matter how hard you’re holding onto it.”
His ideas aren’t strange or new to me, I’ve heard it all before, and I wanted something else. Hearing it now just reinforces the point that I’m not going to magic up any new solutions. If I want to move forward, I can’t let myself become paralysed by the thought of what I might lose when I take a step ahead.
“This body really isn’t equipped for a mission like this,” I warn him, but he shakes his head and places a simple pistol into my hands. “That doesn’t change much.”
“Means you’re properly one of us now, Ham-Ham. Don’t look down, don’t look back.” Mutt reveals his teeth, sharp and metal. “Follow us.”
Why are they having me join? I’ve funded them, spent time with them now and again, but I’ve never bloodied my hands with them. Is he trying to have me join them in truth?
“Stay behind me,” Gunner shakes his head at the pair of us. “With Doll and Hex watching over us, no one down here can touch us.”
“Very well,” I reply, hesitantly following along feeling like a puppy chasing at the heels of wolves.
The path we take winds through ancient ruins beneath dripping pipes and through the outer wall that protects even this part of the city from the ruinous power of the weather. The setting of our hopeful ambush lies against the outer wall, where a small rift exposes us to the outside.
We arrive before anyone else, and I’m silently guided to hide in a rift long since worn through by countless storms.
Outside, a glowing sunset sets fire to an ocean of pitch and oil, the flames low but constant, forever burning even as the waves smother them against the city walls. The swelling movements reveal buoyant plastics and composites; thousands of razorblades pressing out from beneath the skin.
Under that?
Acidic waters slowly eat away at the trash and litter, but it’s never quite acidic enough to keep up with what we dump into it.
Our city, my home, slopes sharply down from here into the depths. The lapping waves eat away at the metal and concrete foundation beneath us, leaving only the port and key supports surviving anything that comes and even they are reinforced and rebuilt in a constant cycle. A thousand ships gather to unload their space-bound cargo, their hulls blackened by the burning pitch clinging to their sides.
It's hard to imagine that both sea and sky used to be blue.
“They’re nearly here,” Hex lights up their approach, and I clutch the pistol in my borrowed hands while we wait.
The slowing of time is once more a terrible thing, ten times longer for me than for them. Leaving my puppet to rest in place, I turn my attentions back to my home and my Mom.
She rests both hands on the bench, staring into the stone tabletop with hollow eyes. How much longer has she got before there is nothing left of her? What form of false salvation has she found on the net, and what hope do I have of pulling her away from it?
Each time I reach out to her, she pushes my hand away.
I have to get forceful; I have to make her see that something is wrong.
But if I take this step, she’s as likely to run away as she is to take my hand. If I push her, I might never see her again. I might be dooming her myself…
What I need, what I’ll find in the understeets, is the desperate courage it takes to step forward knowing that you’re going to get hurt. The courage to do what you have to do, even when you’ll end up hurting the ones you love.
I need to be prepared for that, and I don’t have the time to struggle over this for months.
These people, Mutt and his pack, are prepared to take on a job knowing that people will die. Each of them has seen those they love die, and they’ve failed more than their fair share of times. Even lying here in wait, ambushing these people, there are thousands of ways this could go wrong.
They could end up dead only a few seconds from now, but they chose to stand up and do something instead of cowering. I need that strength now.
I’ll grab these falling embers, and burn my fingers if I have to.
The prey scurry onto the landing, their eyes turned in every direction, but their lenses permanently fogged over by the poison of the rust pits. The group is only a handful strong, and I’m sure that they were more in number before this, but only so many could survive this long down there.
“We’re here, this is the place,” the lead figure turns to the rest. “Be ready for anything.”
“We’re getting outta here, yeah? They’re not going to fuck us, are they?”
“They’ll be here,” the first replies. “We’ll have our new bodies and be sent off to one of the colonies. It’ll be hard work, but there’s actually a chance to live there, and we’ll even have our flesh back…”
Each and every one of them is pieced together from corroded metal and faded plastic. The few organics carried with them in shielded cases, hidden and safe.
“I… I wish they could have come with us…”
“We drew straws,” their leader shuts them down. “Everyone had equal chances of being on either team. If we don’t take this chance, then they died for nothing. Remember them, but make their sacrifices mean something.”
They drew straws to choose who would be on the attack team, and who would be support? Those who died attacking SynnTech knew they were going to die all along, and they did it for this?
“You’re early,” a foreign voice joins the conversation as a hulking figure walks into the room. “You have what’s promised?”
Something was stolen in the attack?
Waiting for them to get on with it, just grinds at my mind. The longer it goes on the more dissociated with reality I become.
“We have the data,” the daemon responds. “You’re making good on the deal? Where’s our transport? How are we leaving this place?”
“Hand over the data.”
“Not before we see the inside of that transport.” The acid-pitted daemon pack is preparing themselves for a fight, their weapons are shivering as they peek from their armoured sleeves. “You think we won’t melt this data before you can touch it?”
“You won’t see your rewards if you don’t hand it over,” the foreigner steps forward, pulling aside his cloak to reveal a muscular form, rippling with flesh-mods. The kind that you won’t see in this city filled with plastic and metal, these genetic modifications are the rare sort that can compete with modern metal.
Rare means expensive.
“Rewards?” The daemon spits at the ground. “You promised us a way out of this city. A new life… with Gaia corp…”
“The deal has changed,” he shifts, the flesh of his arm twisting into something alien but vaguely shaped like a weapon.
“You got here somehow, the way I see it, we go through you and we’ll get exactly what we worked for,” the daemon lifts his own weapon, ready for the fight to start. “But you… what happens to you when we scrap this data?”
The foreigner hesitates, grinding his teeth as he glares at the group before him.
“We can take one of you, if you have the data,” He declares. “Boss didn’t want any of you, but this is the biggest concession we can make.”
“That wasn’t the deal…”
“No one expected you’d actually live long enough to make it this far,” the foreigner shakes his head, laughing at them. “What did you expect when they were offering you the world on a platter? That you’d be made immortal and given a place in the fucking heavens? You were meant to die here.”
“Now, now, don’t go thinking yourself any smarter than them,” Mutt announces stepping into the room to join the party. Everyone jumps, including me. “You really don’t know this city, do you? Let me guess, they told you that your job is to clean up the witnesses?”
The foreigner shifts uncomfortably in place, his eyes taking on a slightly different hue as something inhuman activates inside him. Trying to figure us out.
For a moment, everyone is focused on Mutt.
Which is why they don’t see the trap close around them.
Electricity floods from the ground to the ceiling, while metal wires whip around all the marked targets. Gunner moves to launch a few extra bolo shots at the bio-modded foreigner to keep him down as a pair of scrappers dive from holes in the ceiling to get their work started but the bounties are putting up a fight.
Gunner dives into the battle, he tries for the plasma caster first, but the target gets a shot off. A blue lance hits him in the shoulder powerful enough to cut through light vehicles, but it just fizzles out against his armour. Before the man gets a second chance Gunner blasts another bolo round, separating the man’s arm from his shoulder.
All this is happening, while I’m still lining up my first shot with shaking hands. Everything is moving so incredibly slowly, and the sensation of drowning I thought I’d gotten over is only worsening with every tense breath. It hits both my body in the real and my puppet in the understreets.
A shot of adrenaline running through my blood fills me with a need to move, that I just cannot fulfil.
Finally levelling my pistol, I get a few shots off and take down one of the daemon pack, but even with time slowed there isn’t much I can do to help here. Gunner disassembles the daemons with cold efficiency, by the end taking special focus on dealing as little damage to their parts as possible.
Meanwhile, Mutt with the help of the scavengers, subdues the foreigner, working loose his limbs before he can get enough leverage to take a shot at us.
In a matter of moments, limbs are torn apart at their rubber seams, ready to be sold at the nearest smithy. This city is mostly metal synns, modified flesh like his is a premium product that should sell even in the upper streets. Meanwhile the bounty targets are stripped down to torsos for easier carrying.
“They didn’t send you with compensation, because you are the compensation,” Mutt speaks to the man from Gaia Corp, a faint reticence to his voice, as if he regrets this. I don’t think it’s a lie. “Your bosses thought their hired daemons would end up dead, you’re right about that, but when they realized that their hired killers survived, they figured they might be working with professionals.”
“So they sent you, of course they’d prefer that you’d clean up this mess and that’s what they told you to do, but the truth is that you were the reward. A box of bits that would sell for a tidy profit in this city. That’s why you’re here alone.”
“I’m not alone,” the man growls, and laughs as he glares all around. “You’re all dead.”
“Incoming, ghosts in the data stream, can’t see how many,” Hex warns as we all tense up.
“Here I thought this was going to be boring,” Gunner responds, guns up and ready.
“Mutt, pull the data from the mark, now!” Hex calls and he leaps on the lead daemon, connecting to his emergency access ports and feeding our spider into his mind.
“You have something we want,” Another foreigner calls out to us, entering the room with weapons raised and ready. Though organic, I notice the sequence of spinning rings that identify a plasma caster.
Bad news.
“Data’s here,” Mutt responds pulling up a data card in time for their arrival. “But our services don’t come for free.”
“We have no contract with you, thief. Hand it over.”
“Oh? So you don’t want the data then?” Mutt flips the data card in the air, looking away from the new group. “Then we’ve got no business, sorry for wasting your time.”
“Stop right there, hand over the data or this ends ugly,” the leader steps deeper into the room, his team, six of them that I can see, spread out to secure the room. Oddly, they don’t seem to notice me at all, their eyes looking right past me.
“Ended well for us the last time, didn’t it?” Mutt replies, kicking the downed man’s head. “Seven more bodies will make for some decent money in these parts, I wouldn’t turn the offer down.”
“Fine, three gold awards,” Their leader replies, lying through his teeth. Gold moves what silver doesn’t, the two currencies are a world apart. Things that would ordinarily be nearly impossible to get would be drone delivered to any location for only a few gold awards.
“Deal,” Mutt smiles with a shit-stirring grin, stepping closer to the group, just to be cut down by a flare of plasma. His body topples over and… he vanishes?
Even watching in slowed time it’s difficult to catch the flaws in the image. One of Doll’s hard light illusions, not a data hack like I had to deal with back in Kali’s apartments, but actual light projections so convincing that even advanced scanners struggle to tell real from fake especially when they’re not looking for it.
In the same moment, a pair of the Gaia warriors shout out in pain, stumbling back and a few moments later falling apart at the seams. The scrappers, Mutt, and Gunner are working together to catch them by surprise all while their illusions are standing there smiling, Gunner’s face even shimmering with delight.
“The fuck…?”
As a group they fire at everyone they see, before shifting their shots in every other direction hoping for a lucky hit on us when they realise what’s going on. A few plasma blasts hit near me, shrapnel flies all over, and I watch as one shard of steel shedding a blue trail behind it, flies right for my chest. I shift, pushing my hosts body as quickly as I can, but it still hits in her side. Emergency warnings flash through my system, while I focus on triaging the injury.
It’s lethal, but not immediately so. Twenty minutes before death. I let out a breath of relief. More than enough time.
The shooting finally stops when a third man falls, they close ranks and summon short blades from their wrists.
“We’re keeping these parts, too,” Mutt declares, and they fire in his general direction, hitting nothing. “A payment for your last transgression… Those five gold awards?”
“Four,” the leader grumbles, emptying a pocket and scattering a number of glimmering data cards across the ground. “Don’t spend ‘em in one place.”
“And here’s the data,” Mutt, tosses it to the leader. “Watch your step on the way out…”
Gunner and Mutt cackle as the group retreats, while they’re looking for a chance to attack us, they all awkwardly stumble over their own feet. The ground itself seeming to fail them as Doll’s illusions warp reality.
“Now that was a good payday,” Mutt declares, skipping to my side. “How bad is the hit? Hex is saying it’s nothing too bad.”
He’s already moving to hook my hosts body up with an organ-box to stabilise her condition. Gunner is still standing watch, and Doll is probably keeping us hidden with her hard light illusions.
“Get her something nice from the smithy, if you would. She’s a reliable body for me,” I tell him, hooking the organ box to her chest and checking that her limbs remain undamaged. “The box will be enough to keep her going until then.”
“We’ll need to move these goods to a few shops, it won’t hurt to buy her something pretty on our way through,” Mutt smiles, patting my shoulder. “You did good.”
“I barely did anything,” I shake my head.
“You survived,” he squeezes my shoulder and turns me to look out over the ocean. “Don’t look down, and don’t look back.”
“You still haven’t said what your goal is…” I whisper, staring up into the night sky, a few lights are visible through the fog. Satellites or low orbit ships coming in to pick up loads from the station.
“Ever made a wish upon a falling star?” Mutt asks, reaching up as if to grasp one with his hands.
“Haven’t ever seen one.”
“I have, once,” Mutt smiles, his eyes gazing into something beyond what I see. “I wondered back then; just how many wishes it was carrying with it? How much hope can a falling star carry on its back?
“How many people do you think are staring up at the sky right now, waiting for that one bright light to fall and help them give voice to their hopes and dreams?”
We stand there, waiting, but even when it’s time to leave no star falls from the sky.
I turn my gaze to Mom, still frozen in place staring down at the tabletop, a puddle of drool forming under her face. I’m going to lose her, and Dad, and everyone else, eventually. Immortality isn’t something we’ll ever grasp, but if I make the wrong move I’m going to lose her even sooner than that.
I might even end up being the one to kill her.
Turning away from the empty sky, I return home withdrawing my connection and covering my tracks as well as I can.
“Don’t look down, don’t look back,” I shake my head and focus.
Mom needs my help, even if she doesn’t say it. Even if she’s just going to turn my hand away. I might fuck this up, I could lose everything, but if I do nothing then I’m going to lose it all anyway.
I don’t feel any more courageous as I reach out to find a spider that can help me save. I feel more scared than ever, I’m too scared even to erase the fear from my code, though I know I could. There’s a strange comfort in that cloak of fear, holding me back, but for the first time, I push through and I reach out to ask someone for help.