Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

Anton nodded solemnly. So, thinking maybe it would give his brain a bit of reboot, I swung. Anton was gone, blurred off to the side like a screen glitch, and as I went for the left cross on instinct he squeezed off from that one, too. Anton did a lot of things well, but he didn’t box. The last punch was a lazy drifter, as I was flabgasted, but it was still way too weighted for Anton to pluck it out of the air, as he did, and stop my fist.

“Godshit,” I said, looking down. The thing had sent tendrils down his arm, red cords of twitchy muscle. Like an exo, but meat.

“Smart little brute,” Anton said, barely breathing hard. “Finders, keepers, yeah?” I knew he meant the both of us, because we always say that after we find something really big.

“Yeah,” I said. “Verily.”

The brute took up residence between Anton’s shoulder–bones, clinging at him like a starfish. First few days, we tried running tests and such, poking the thing with probes and once putting the pair of them into a scan tunnel. It looked to be alive, certain, and the scan showed electrical pulses running through a sensory suite and also through a fleshy nub that Anton thought might be a crude sort of brain stem.

“Paramilitary,” I said. “Some mad prototype. Who buys?”

“Nobody, until we know how much it’s worth,” Anton said.

“Fucking thing’s going to eat you in the night,” I said, even though the tests showed no damage being done.

Anton’s laugh sent a quiver through the knotted red, the rippled silver.

He said it was like being on phencyclines twenty–five–seven, everything jacked up, everything quick. He was always juggling things, seeing how many bolts or airpens or tangerine oranges he could keep in the air at once, plucking and throwing too fast to see. A few times he tried to lift the old boat chassis, knees popping, red–swathed biceps shivering, and I thought it budged a bit, but didn’t tell him.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said to me a day later, tossing a spanner up and down behind his back. “We don’t need to tell anyone about this thing. The salvage claim went through, yeah, but something like this doesn’t get flood–dumped purposefully.”

“Think some brain team is crying over it in a labo somewhere?”

“Think it got lost,” Anton said, looking thoughtful. “As you do, in floodland. Think some transport fuck–up. Never got where it was meant to.”

“Have a look at the new scans,” I said, flipping him a sheaf of hardcopy.

He peered at it, squinting for the dimness, and suddenly I saw a little red filament reach around from his collar and wriggle towards his eye like a fucking water snake. I unshuttered my jaw to tell him such, but Anton had noticed. He tugged it closer with one finger and let it branch a tiny membrane over the white of his eyeball.

“Helps in the dark,” he said. “No big issue, Hume.”

“New trick,” I muttered, and once he shrugged his way through those scans the tests stopped. The brute was mysterious; the brute stayed that way.

Aweek on, the cockroaches that scuttled through the cracks in Anton’s apartment wall were all but gone and the brute had grown hard little keratin nodules on it.

“Osmosing,” Anton explained, pulling his coat on. “Everything needs fuel, doesn’t it. Little fucker climbs off me and waits for bugs to crawl close, then snags them. Looks like they go into its underbelly. Really something to watch.”

“So’s a film,” I said, still in the doorway, fidgeting a bit. Anton’s workshop smelled a touch different, maybe because I hadn’t been in for a while. The little AI paddlers we bought up in YK and set to trawling floodland hadn’t given a peep since finding the crate. Business was mostly on the selling end, not the finding or repairing, which suited me alright. Wetsuits itch me more than they do Anton.

“Let’s head, then,” Anton said. A red–and–silver worm slid up from his collar and he tucked it out of sight, smiling to the mirror.

The film was supposed to be a livefeed, bounced and woven by some pirate satellite sailing over our heads, and they were throwing it up against the big stucco wall of an unfinished church. We were meeting the woman from Tiber Street on the way. The three of us had done beers a few times now and I knew her name was Marina, like the marina, and that she had prehensile toes from an impulsive biomod in her youth. She was clever, deadly pretty; Anton said he was done with her soon.

“Does she know about the thing, then?” I asked on our way.

“Biblically,” Anton said, and I couldn’t be sure he was joking. There was a stray cat winding along with us, whining and sneezing. Anton had been looking at it, sort of frowning, and as it darted ahead into an alley, he stopped. There was a big grimace on his face. I was going to ask, right, inquire as to why his eyes were all bulged, and then I heard a sucking sound.

The brute peeled itself away from him and slapped to the pavement like a dropped newborn. The little stubs on it telescoped, waving cilia.

“Godshit, that hurts,” Anton sighed.

The brute flipped itself over and scuttled into the alley.

“What’s it doing?” I asked.

“Don’t have an inkling, Hume.” Anton rubbed at his spine as the skeletal cat scampered back around the corner, sneezing soot and meowing all agitated–like.

A knotted red hook snatched it out of sight. Then a screech. Then a quiet, and I felt tingling up my vertebrae. We started after the noise simultaneously, no words, following it around the corner. I almost vomited.

You couldn’t call it a cat anymore. What was lying there, bubbling and gouting, was processed meat. The brute was drawing thick red ropes into its underbelly, patches of rank fur accompanying. Anton plucked his scarf up to his face for the smell.

“Oh, damn,” I said. “Oh, fuck.”

Anton’s eyes were watering. “She does know about it,” he said. “Marina. She, ah, she fucking loves it, Hume.” His smile was shaky, not convincing how it usually is. “But we don’t tell her about this. Alright?”

“Alright,” I said.

“Still want to see her tonight,” Anton muttered, but his eyes were sort of cloudy as the brute crawled back to him, up his leg and then his waist and then clamped in again.

We didn’t talk about the cat, so I forgot about the cat. Business went on. We got some beeps from deep floodland, down past Old Vancouver towards Sunk Seattle, and took the boat out for a few days. Some of the border buoys tried stopping us on our way down, but they haven’t been repaired in about a decade so they can’t do much but moan and sputter.

Anyway, we ended up dragging a good five yards of ferrite cable up from a derelict fabricator. Anton dove without his wetsuit. It was eerie. The brute stretched thin over his pale body like a second skin, and when he swam he thrashed like a fish, body oscillating through the cold water at unholy speeds. It was eerie and it was beautiful, and when Anton came up dripping, naked, to sit in front of the heater, I couldn’t laugh at his jokes.

Later, as we were looping the cable, a band snapped and the length suddenly whipped around like a punctured balloon, hard and blinding fast enough to crack bones. Even Anton couldn’t duck it, and from my spot treading water I saw it lash right into him, enough force to carve him open. When I scrambled my slippery way up on board, he was lying winded on his back. The brute was hard and raw and shiny around his stomach, with just the slightest gouge where the cable had struck.

“Invulnerable,” Anton said, when he could speak.

“Fucking chancy,” I said. “Should have waited for me to help with it. Fuck.”