Jon Grimwood - redRobe

The voice that broke through his tumbling memories was patient, soft and understanding. So kind and rational Axl wanted to scream. It was asking him a question. Something he thought it had asked him before.

‘Can you remember your name?’

Axl looked at the doctor who smiled gently.

‘If not, we can always try a DNA match using the composite Red Cross database for Europe. But you know it was logic bombed…’ She caught herself and blushed. When she spoke again it was to say exactly the same thing, but more slowly and using simple words. Which told him all he needed to know about how convincing he looked in his new part.

Axl grinned sourly.

‘ Name’s Jack,’ he said, ‘Black Jack Hot. Hell, you’ve probably heard of me?’

Too young to have watched the series first time round and too grown-up now to be interested in the revival, it was obvious she didn’t get the gag. All he saw on her face was pity. Which wasn’t enough to stop Axl pasting the patented shit-eating grin onto his hollow face.

‘ Well, too bad, ‘cos you‘re about to…’

For a second, Axl had the hideous feeling she was about to lean across the desk and take his hand.

‘I’m Jane, your doctor,’ she said gently. ‘We’ll be working together to get you back on your feet. Get you back to full health.’

‘Nothing wrong with Black Jack,’ Axl said. ‘He’s fine.’

‘No,’ Jane shook her head. ‘You’ve been beaten up, starved, blinded, tortured…’

His mind only made it to item two on her list.

Starved? Axl stared at his wrist. Sure there was a scar from the implant but what he really noticed was just how thin his wrist was. Paper-fine skin stretched over protruding bone.

‘What’s the date?’ Axl demanded.

‘Thursday 1 September...'

Eight days were gone walkabout. Axl examined his fingers, suddenly realising what he saw. Starvation. Skin pulled so tight over sinew and bone that his knuckles belonged to someone else.

‘Bastards,’ Axl said suddenly. ‘Fucking bastards…’

‘Anger’s good,’ the doctor told him.

He ignored her. That bloody toy on the shuttle… Axl stopped feeling angry, stopped feeling anything and finally listened to his body. His teeth were chattering, muscles strung tight as violin strings in his jaw. All the way down his spine went shivers, syncopated cold waves. He stank so bad he didn’t know how the girl could stand to be in the same room as him.

Not starved, Axl realised, wired to fuck and back. He could taste the residue of cheap amphetamine in his sour saliva. Smell the crystalMeth oozing from his pores. He’d just done the Bollywood Diet. A week asleep while his metabolism ran white hot and his shuddering body rehydrated through feeds in his wrist. The little bastard had burned out his muscles to leave bones rattling in a skin sack.

‘You’ve been chemically tortured,’ Jane said.

‘No,’ Axl said firmly. ‘Beaten up, drugged up, nothing more.’ Hell, he’d been tortured by professionals and that little bastard wasn’t even…

When the small room came back into focus Axl’s hands were shaking and his teeth chattering worse than ever.

Silently the doctor stood up and walked round her desk, heading towards a basin behind him. ‘Water,’ she said, seeing his suspicious glance, ‘run-off from the mountains.’

It was cold enough to bite into the back of his throat and make his already aching head hurt even more. Silently she refilled the glass and gave it back to him. He drank that one down too while she watched. And then, surprisingly, Jane did nothing; almost as if she’d forgotten he was there.

Axl watched while she tapped the top of her desk, elegant fingers dancing over its glass surface to wake icons. Soon the whole surface flickered with floating frames that filled with ever updating lists. It took Axl a minute or so to realise she was checking inventory and ordering fresh drugs for her surgery, something that even the most basic smartbox could have handled in fifteen seconds without anyone being aware it had run the routine.

When she was done, Jane started over, rechecking she’d got her figures right first time round. Then she started rechecking the recheck. Without meaning to, Axl shifted in his seat.

‘Through there,’ the woman said without looking up.

Through there featured a small chrome toilet, the first piece of obviously modern equipment he’d seen since landing. But Axl didn’t have eyes or need for that or the matching glass basin with built in sonic dryer. He was too busy looking at his face in a looking glass, hollow cheeked and flayed by the unflattering glow of a striplight overhead.

It was as well the mirror was dumb. Because Axl could imagine only too well what the one back at his flat in Day Effé would have said had he ever presented himself looking like that. Refried shit was the least of it.

And if the bruising had been only half as bad he’d still have looked worse than terrible. He could have signed on as a Voudun zombie in some horror Sim and the living dead would have complained. Hell, Black Jack would have said he would double no trouble as a drug warning to kids not to ski Ice…

But that was busking it. Deep down inside, Axl knew he just looked ‘fugee-bog-standard issue, from his razor-cut three-millimetre crop designed to keep lice at bay to the standard Red Cross tag punched through his left ear, its hologram shimmering in the overhead light.

The artificial eye feeding him the information stared out from one bruised socket. His other socket was crusted black. And if he’d got back his cheekbones to die for it was because almost dying was how he’d got them back. A ring of puncture wounds ran in neat circles round both temples where someone—read that little shit—had punched SQUID needles through to his brain.

It wasn’t a pretty sight but then Axl was beginning to realise that it wasn’t meant to be. As for that foamBone repair in his forehead ... He could be running straight chips, a half-real/half-augmented splice or even be packed with nothing but the wetware he was born with. Christ alone knew what that little fuck had been doing inside his head up there on the shuttle. Rewiring everything in sight probably.

Jane gave Axl ten minutes of being in front of the mirror by himself before she hit override on the door lock and came in to get him. Her patient wasn’t standing in front of the looking-glass anymore. He was hunched on the floor, legs pulled up and hugged tight to him with his arms, head buried against his knees.

She knew without looking that he was crying. And experience told her he wouldn’t thank her for noticing, they never did. All the same, she pulled Axl to his feet, gave him a sterile tissue and led him back to her tiny surgery.

Jane was twenty-three, six months out of Tel Aviv medical college and this man was the six hundred and thirty-second torture victim she’d seen since arriving. At most, she gave him a forty-sixty chance of surviving as was. Sixty-forty if she took time to patch him up.

So far, she’d cared about each broken human presented to her but common sense and the clinic AI told Jane that her compassion would eventually cut off, though there’d been no sign of it yet. She was exhausted with waiting.

The material on her couch was self-cleaning and the couch itself doubled as scales and most other things besides. Jane read off his weight and made a note to herself with a quick pass of her fingers over the desktop before helping him out of his blood-encrusted shirt and trousers.

Three Spanish coins, a cracked credit chip and three soiled hundred dollar notes rolled together so tight they could be pushed into almost any orifice. There was nothing in his pockets that didn’t fit the standard ‘fugee profile.