Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

When he opened them, he saw the freezer, high-vaulted and surfaced in stark white composite. It made him think of cathedrals, and the cloudy cryopods lining the walls of sarcophagi. Boniface went to the end of the row, footfalls echoing. He could dimly hear the clamoring inmates from the other side of the door, but only just.

At cryopod 114, he stopped. It was identical to the others, a slick white cylinder with blue-green vital displays splashed across its glass top, spare nitrogen canister and the emergency override tucked away exactly where the schematic had shown.

Boniface’s long breath unfurled in a slink of steam. He gathered himself, and pulled the handle.

Emergency resuscitation flooded the bloodstream with an adrenaline cocktail, jumpstarted the muscles and hotwired the heart. It could kill. But his brother had been certain that it wouldn’t kill Capricorn. Vacuums sucked away the suspension gel in thick slurps, and when he peered Boniface could see the faint silhouette of a tall thin man.

The pod gave an electronic bleat; Boniface pulled it open. The man inside was gaunt, black-browed, and his naked body was covered in constellations, in an inky starmap that covered him to the neck. Above cobalt blue tracery, his face, the one Boniface had paid the cosmosurgeon to match, was lean and pale. Capricorn twitched once, and then his eyes sprang open, a deep cold blue that matched his tattoos.

With one atrophied hand, he seized the tube snaked down his throat and pulled. It came free with a wet rasp, and Boniface took an involuntary step backward at the spray of fluid.

“You’re me, now,” Boniface said. “Boniface Morrow, brother to Nicholas Morrow, sentenced to life term on the asteroid by clerical error.” He began peeling off the orange jumpsuit. “And I’m you.”

Capricorn’s eyes tunneled holes in him. Boniface couldn’t be sure he could even hear.

“The inquiry goes through tomorrow. You’ll be transferred to a minimal security gravity prison.” Boniface shook out the empty jumpsuit. “Nicholas will explain things. Nyx. He says you pay your debts.”

Capricorn’s eyes flickered. He moved one hand to the edge of the pod, and with a fierce twist, hauled himself over the edge. He grunted; Boniface could see the man’s limbs shaking as he pulled the canister of liquid nitrogen out of its cradle beside the pod.

“We have to reskin you,” he said quietly, looking again at the ink constellations webbed across Capricorn’s pale body, an endless night sky.

Capricorn nodded his pale head. When Boniface offered him the bunched sleeve of the jumpsuit, he ignored it, clenching his teeth instead. The nozzle turned with a hiss, and Boniface set to work, quickly, methodically.

The man stayed silent as the nitrogen burned, peeling away his skin with a wet sizzle that crept the nape of Boniface’s neck. He moved from Capricorn’s ankles upward, watching tremors run through the muscle with every spray. When it was finished, his body was flayed raw and glistening.

“It’s chemical burn,” Boniface said. “From a cook gone wrong in Nyx’s cell.” He helped Capricorn into the jumpsuit, zipping it all the way up. His shiny pink skin was so cold it stung. The fabric stuck at it. “Can you make it back to the door on your own? The lock is going to reset in three minutes.”

“Yes.” Capricorn’s voice was like bone shards.

Boniface stepped backward into the pod, feeling the cold like a hot iron on his calves, his ass, his shoulder blades. “If you would tell him something from me.” He leaned his head back and the automated arms positioned him in the pod. “When he puts in the request for re-identification, in ten or twelve or however many years, if I’m braindead, I don’t want them to send me to my wife. Tell him to kill me. He’ll find a way.”

“I’ll tell him.”

Then the lid slid shut. Boniface fed the tube down his throat, slowly, slowly, willing himself not to cough, easing it past the gag point with his toes clenched against each other. Gel seeped back into the tube, creeping up his ankles. The last thing he saw was Capricorn crawling on hand and knees, jaw set, eyes fixed on the door. Then he was a smear of orange jumpsuit and white wall, and then there was only the dark.

Boniface slept.

Nyx was flat on his back, watching tendrils of tranq gas descend in ribbons from the ceiling, momentarily disconnected from the stunstick jabbed under his ribs. Then the sweeper flicked the power high, and Nyx howled as it scorched him.

“He told you not to fucking move,” the sweeper said, half-snarling, half-weeping.

Nyx couldn’t speak, but he wanted to apologize, to explain that he had never intended for the medroid’s needle to find a soft puncture point in the webbing that let Dirk turn his helmeted head. He liked repeat customers.

Through a tangle of legs, Nyx could just see the sweeper’s corpse, faceplate blotted with vomit, and further on the medroid’s scattered carcass. The inmates had been tearing it to pieces, using the limbs as clubs, but now the gas was taking effect.

“You fucking piece of shit.” The sweeper punctuated it with another jab, this one to Nyx’s thigh. It felt like a circle burned clear through.

Nyx convulsed. He saw, dimly, the stunstick come up again. He rolled, caught it on his shoulder. As his eyes watered and blurred he saw, past the imploding crowd, a tall thin man standing, swaying, against the freezer door. His shoulders sagged; his head was bowed. His cold eyes sliced back and forth through the chaos, sharp as scalpels.

“Long live the king,” Nyx breathed. His ribs shook around a laugh. The sweeper gave him a final kick and moved off as the inmates began to domino against each other, toppling with lungs full of gas. Nyx held his breath as long as he could, watching the Sixers and the Woadskins and all the rest of them drop to their knees, then prostrate on the floor.

When he finally succumbed, Capricorn was still standing, still watching, lips peeling back in a frostbitten grin.

For some reason I thought Wyatt would look different after getting Edited, but when he steps out onto the porch of his parents’ summer reefhouse, swilling a Corona and swiping my we’re here message off his phone, he’s the same as ever. Still tall and bony with gray eyes and pale blonde hair that looks like it’ll stick to your hand but doesn’t.

He stuffs his phone into the pocket of his chinos and gives us a wave. “Boys.”

Dray springs past me and up the porch in three lanky strides, wrapping Wyatt up like it’s been a year instead of a month, then snapping off a slick twisty custom dap, because Dray has a custom dap with everyone and the motherfucking mailman.

“Wyatt, bru, look at this place,” he says, rubbing his hand along the organic coral railing, mottled purple like the rest of the reefhouse, everything grown from some big name designer geneprint because Wyatt’s parents only ever get the best. Dray wraps his hand around the back of Wyatt’s neck and sticks foreheads with him. “We are going to bang some bitches here, bru.”

Wyatt grins, catching my eye in a way that makes me not think about bitches, but more about the last time me and him smoked his mom’s ponic and fooled around in his room with the beats up.

“Yo,” Dray says, going serious. “You got scars?”

Wyatt wriggles away then, muttering like no, no it was all nano, of course there’s no scarring.

By this time I’m up the steps and acting fully glacial even though it’s good to see Wyatt again, like really good. “What’s doing, Y,” I say, cookie cutter dap, precise half a hug, stepback. “You still remember me?”

Wyatt grins again. “It’s vague and shit. But yeah.”