Authors: Andy Futuro
A clunk rang through their plane, and it dipped with the force of an impact. There was a horrible clanging of stressed metal. Saru grabbed at her jeweled sword and then laughed at herself, knowing it was useless. The radio crackled, and a pleasant female voice came through:
“Welcome to Hathaway Security’s Sky Defender Service: Keeping the Skies Open for Business. You have been selected for a random security screening. For your safety and convenience, please do not resist.”
The message repeated. Saru gawked at the radio and then tried to shut if off, but none of the buttons worked. The aircraft carrier loomed larger; Saru could make out the curve of its hull disappearing into the clouds, the individual towers rising up from its decks. A face appeared in the window, a metal arachnid face with lots of who-the-hell-knows mandibles. It clamped onto the window with two suckers and brought a drill to the forefront. There was a screech as it bore through the glass, and then a tube shot through the opening, and she heard the hiss of gas.
“…for your safety and convenience, please do not resist… please do not resist… please do not resist…”
It smelled sweet, like baking cookies, and…cinnamon? Saru’s head felt woozy, and the blackness began to carve around her periphery again, vision dimming to a wobbly circle.
“John,” she croaked. “Do somethin’ ya jerk.”
John was turning into a fish. His eyes were rolling and his lips were flopping between open and pursed. Ha haha ha. Wake up, John! Do I look like that? There were vague thoughts of alarm, wild escape plans, a few regrets, but mostly just a warm and fuzzy feeling, spreading with that lovely hiss of gas. It was so nice, so comfortable, her arms were made of pillows, bright, fluffy-cloud pillows…
*
Saru awoke in a jail smaller than others she had known, but it was a jail for sure, no mistaking. There were bars straight up and down, hard walls, harder floors, hard cots, and toilets like thrones for all to see your business. Everything was gray and black and beige and the other forgettable colors of the bureaucratic rainbow. The air felt stale, air that had made its way through other people’s mouths and assholes a thousand times before reaching her own. A hum clamored in her ears, a band-practice stew of engines and machinery, slammed hatches, and boots on metal. John was nowhere to be seen.
Someone was sobbing, gentle, upper-class sobbing; Saru could tell right away from its daintiness, its disbelief at the existence of misery. She smiled at this, couldn’t help herself. Of all the jails or prisons or tied-up, not-allowed-to-leave places, she’d never found herself in finer company. The prisoners in the other cells were wrapped in luxurious clothes—patterned caji suits and dresses with pearls and ivory and jewels. Their wrists and necks and ears hung with adornments, gold and silver, ruby and diamond, sparkling in the fluorescent glare. Even the techies in their casual slacks and shirts decorated with whatever cute bullshit they thought would get them laid showed wealth—so soft-looking, tightly woven, so many threads. What had John called these people? The hidalgos. The crust of the power pie. The millionaires and billionaires who one way or another could vex or threaten a scion.
“Hey, asshole!”
Saru stirred at this, propped herself up on an elbow to watch the show. A man in a dragon-swirl (real silver woven in?) caji suit in the cell across from her had his hands around the bars and his face stuck between them. He was tall and soaked in wealth, with the bearing of a man who always gave orders, and demanded answers, and patronized his underlings with red-faced, bourbon lust.
“You want to tell me what I’m doing in a cell here? Hey, you, hey, I’m talking to you!”
A guard wandered into view and Saru sat up, cross-legged, on the cot. The guard wore all black, with pads of armor on his shins and knees and thighs and chest, and a helmet with a black fabric mask that covered all but his eyes. On his chest and back was the bald-eagle emblem of a Hathaway Security contractor. The guard smashed the butt of his rifle into the prisoner’s jutting face, causing a scream, and a spray of red and teeth and bits of tongue. More screams, from the wife and kids. The cell door swung open and the guard whipped out a telescoping combat baton. He strode inside and swung the baton around like he was hacking away at a growth of weeds, more screams and cries and sick, spattered crunching. Then nothing but sobs and moans, and still forms, and barely moving chests, up up, a wheeze, and down, and a pause, and at last up again, to suck in just so many more minutes of life.
Saru lay down and closed her eyes. It was quiet now, no more sighs of exasperation, no more whispered conversations, no more demanded answers. She could feel the fear, a heavy, low-fog stink, as it wrung out of her fellow prisoners, dripping from their pores, staining their fancy clothes. This was all new to them, the plane people. It was a safe guess these people had always been on top in their worlds, always made the rules, always been clucking and talking down on the shit like her that walked the streets and knew the cops and the security contractors as nothing but bastards and thugs and jackals. These rich fuckers had only ever known the people with the uniforms and guns as servants and protectors. Welcome to the real world, starring
you
—unimportant, unimpressive, unarmed, and useful mainly for your holes and labor. No one to suck your self-important dicks. No one to listen to how hard you’ve got it. No one to give a shit about you.
The slurping was annoying her, scratching at her concentration, the syrup sound the bold man’s wife made every time she took a breath. Saru could see her pretty face in her mind’s eye, ruined with the pendulum swings of the baton, smeared skin and crumpled bone, a warp of cuts and bruises, and the
schluck slurp schlcuk slurp
of almost drowning in her own blood. Saru grit her teeth. Not your problem, honey. Focus! A million plans for escape flashed through her mind, all of them worthless. She’d seduce the guard, steal his gun, find John, and the two of them would fight their way to the flight deck, where they’d what? Steal a plane? They’d tried that one already. Or should they go to the bridge or the cockpit, or whatever this flying fortress used to steer, and point their guns at the captain and make her take them back to Philly? Maybe have her drop them off somewhere? Thanks, and so long! Or should she demand a lawyer—ha! Think! There had to be a way to escape.
Bribery was out or one of these hidalgo clowns would have done it. In fact—why hadn’t they? Surely if these people owned their own aircraft they had enough green to bribe some contractor. What was preventing it? A brand? A loyalty implant? Brainwashing? She opened an eye halfway and studied the guard, trying to decipher his secret. He was big—no surprise—and he stood funny, leaning forward, stooped. His breath was deep and wheezy, one long, filthy groan, rising and falling. The more Saru observed him, the stranger he seemed, just still, stupid, not pacing or sitting, just standing there. A doppelganger? A temporary clone squirted out for guard duty when the prison was full, half-baked and dumb?
The guard turned as if he could feel her staring, as if he could see her eye half-open in the shadows of her cell. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. She focused on his eyes. They were all pupil, no iris, huge and black amidst a nest of thick, red veins. The skin around them was too wrinkled, too pink, too thick. A body mod? No. A trumman. A half-human. A pig-person: dumb, strong, loyal when trained, and without any of the ethical downsides of a human being. They were cheap at scale, no implants to maintain aside from a tracker and a shock chip, no healthcare, no death benefits, you could pay them in slop. A shiver of disgust ran down her spine. She’d always hated trummans. There was something about the dumbness, about that animal amorality. He/it had gone in and beaten that rich asshole and his family just like a chore, just like a trick that would bring him praise. Shake! Roll over! Kill! There was nothing he couldn’t do, no moral spectrum—torture, rape, murder, cannibalism, all just checkboxes on whatever twisted to-do list his masters programmed.
Rationally, Saru knew there were worse creatures out there—hell, hadn’t she seen ‘em all at this point? There were people who actually enjoyed those types of things, did them for pleasure, did them just to get off on their own evil. But the thought of those eyes, those dead, dumb eyes coming towards her, of the trumman opening the cell and beating her bloody, the eyes still dumb, forcing himself into her, not comprehending, just obeying…
The trumman grunted and lumbered towards her. He opened her cell door, and in a flash Saru darted for the opening, hands grabbing at his holster. A fist slammed into the back of her head, and her vision winked out for a second. When her eyes worked again, she was staring at the ceiling. The trumman had replicated—no, there had been two all along, his friend just out of sight. How had she missed his grunting? Rough hands grabbed her, yanking her up, dragging her in a fist-grip of hair. Plastic cuffs snapped around her wrists, and her arms jerked at awkward angles. More kicks landed, up and down across her body, and all she could do was constrict herself, curl up and hide the more sensitive targets. They dragged her out, banging against the bars, past the cells of the other prisoners, hollow-eyed, staring, looking away, sparkle of tears or stain of blood on their faces. The woman with her face caved in lay still. Her husband was shaking, hands shaking, body shaking, cradling her, his hands darting away at the touch of blood.
The trummans dragged Saru along, bumptity bump, across the tread-plate metal, and the jags added new portals to her tattered robe and skin. They kicked her, and stepped on her wrists and hands as they tumbled in the way of their boots, her blood squirting onto their pant legs, leaving wet bands of rust on the floor. Bump! They dragged her over the threshold of a bulkhead, just a sack of crap, as much a person as cornmeal or potatoes.
The room was small and bare, a metal coffin, with a metal cross like a multiplication sign. A body dangled from the cross like a leg-spread Christ. It was John. Black rivers of caked blood flowed from the boreholes in his skull.
“You sons of bitches!” Saru screamed, flailing against the trummans’ hold, more blows falling across her. “Motherfuckers!”
Two other trummans were arguing with each other, shoving each other, barking unintelligibly. They peeled John off the cross and dragged him away, as Saru’s trummans dragged her forward. John’s head banged against the doorway and flopped to the side, and his bloody eye sockets fell on Saru.
“John,” she sobbed. “You fuckers…I’m so sorry, John…”
The trummans stripped her down, ripping away her robe, kick-rolling her to the base of the cross, where they dragged her up and strapped her in. She felt John’s blood, slick against the metal. Her body lolled forward, head hung, gravity straining against her wrong-bent joints and muscles. The door slammed, and the trummans left, grunting, and the light left with them. Saru hung in the dark. It was very cold. There was sound, at least, to keep her company, the hum of the engines, the echo of distant boots and cries, the rattle of loose parts in the air vent. She wrapped herself in the noises of the airship, sending her mind out far, as far as it would go from her body, because there was only pain.
A trumman came in, goggle-eyed. A rectangle of light grew with his entry and then slammed gone. Dark again, except his eyes, twin circles of red. His breath was a mechanical rise and fall, like some steam-powered beast. The eyes advanced, growing closer, with the rattle of a cart, squeaky wheels and instruments. In her swimming vision the trumman appeared like an elzi or a feaster, but there was no song, no background
uausuausuau,
and she knew this was just a creature built by humans, and his evil was the common, punch-clock evil of a person just doing her job. Then, a voice, the pretty, perky voice crackling from some unseen speaker.
“Welcome to Hathaway Security’s Easy Confessional: Justice, Delivered. You have been convicted of TERRORISM. For your safety and convenience, please confess now.”
Words jumbled out of Saru’s mouth, a confession, maybe? Yes, I punched her in the face. I’d do it to you too, you fucker, if I could. Say, you feel like letting me down from here? How about you just untie one hand so I can scratch my ass—you bastard! Let me down! Let me go! I’ll fuck your mother with a brick, you fucking shit bastard cunt mother…just words, out like froth, like a dumped-out chamber pot. Yes, I let the girls die, I let Jojran die, McCully die, Ria die, John die, I let them all die. I wasn’t good enough, couldn’t figure it out, didn’t know—just untie me and I’ll kill you too!
The trumman picked up a drill or a needle or some bastard hybrid of the two—Saru could see its metal holding the light, the red glow from the trumman’s eyes, bright in the so-much-dark. It was a thought probe. He was going to drill into her head and steal her memories, and after that…? She struggled, shook and squirmed in her chains, so that with his first stab at her temple, the needle broke. There was a muffled, mechanical
fruck,
like a man just trying to get through his day, who didn’t need this shit right now. He cuffed her with a heavy hand, metal glove, nausea traveling up from the mush of her broken nose, and she puked, a dribbly white bird-shit slurry, all over his brand-new torture suit. He swore-grunted again, and this time he hit her until the dark wasn’t just in her eyes, but in her ears, her mouth, her skull, her brain, and she felt like maybe it was going to settle down in there and just about stay dark forever. Then there was the hornet prick of the needle drill in her temple, probing deep, and a hot pressure as it blew its chemical load. Faint sensations of more pricks, scratches and scrapes, more mandibles of the thought probe being bolted and screwed and drilled into her…the darkness thick and strong and deep and drowning…