Mandatory Vacations

The thing about being a mechanic is that you fix things. It gives you a certain respect, because you held hold the world together and make sure it doesn’t fall apart as best you can. The thing about working in psych is that you hold people together, and nothing destroys the world faster than people breaking down. Which is why Jaci gives me no choice when they show up at my quarters on the McLan, point out in certain terms that I have spent four years without a vacation and even sneak in work on the rest days I take each monthly cycle. I would protest at the invasion of privacy, but Jaci has been a friend for over three year cycles and I have no doubt they are prepared with an even longer mandatory vacation if I try and get out of this one.

Which is why I end up bound for Garnet IV with Orien. Medics are bad at taking vacations as well, though they generally have better reasons than a mechanic does. Mine is mostly that I’m not human in the technical sense: when you’ve had your mind transferred into another body, you can only think of yourself as still human for so long. I haven’t in quite a few years, though I mostly keep that to myself. Most of the first-generation transfers have killed themselves long before now, and the second-gen use of the technology was largely creative assassination. It’s possibly to temporarily copy of someone’s mind into a Construct for messages, but those degrade quickly. Transfers are permanent, reserved for accidents and injuries that can’t be solved any other way.

There aren’t many of us anymore. A lot of people simple decide they’d rather die than become one. I wasn’t given a choice, being eight when the accident happened. I’ve known people who have made the choices, and those who have refused it. I don’t think any side is braver than the other. I know I’m an anomaly for surviving as long as I have, but I don’t know why that is so. I need to keep my systems charged, but I don’t eat. I don’t sleep. I pointed that out to Jaci, who cheerfully said that they didn’t care, the flight had been booked and if I wanted to consider it a journey rather than vacation, it was entirely fine by them.

I’m a little worried at how well Jaci knows me, even if Adjudicators are trained psychs.

Orien and I are the only people on the small transit craft leading down to Garnet IV. He used to be a battlefield medic until a bomb removed his arms, legs and some of the rest of his body. Synthlimbs had replaced it all, synthskin hiding the damage entirely, but he was discharged anyway and ended up as a medic on the McLan. I helped fix some of his systems once, he insisted on checking me over in turn. We’ve been good friends ever since.

Enough that I’m not even having my projection up, just pacing the small craft up and down on my treads. The projection is a human-seeming over me, semi-solid illusion that people prefer to interact with over a cylindrical shape on treads with over a dozen arms inside a chassis and a viewscreen with a projection-face. The projection looks like me, if I was in my twenties, and is quite well-made. I upgrade and fix my body as the closest thing I have to a hobby.

“Are you finished being grumpy?” Orien says dryly.

“I’m not grumpy.” I turn my projection on and cross my arms and glower at him. “I’m miffed.”

“I don’t like vacations anymore than you do, but it’s not as if we have a choice. Medics are medics wherever we go, but Garnet IV is different. We’re talking high-class vacation – the whole local system, not just the one planet – and staff who won’t bat an eye at you. If you stop being miffed.”

I flick the projection off and let out a huge sigh, moving over to wait beside him as the docking process begins. My vocal interface is very good, sometimes better than I like it to be. “You’ve seen the specs too.”

“No infoweb access at all. A whole week of updates and data we’ll both need to catch up on.” Orien gives me a gentle poke in the side. “You can’t tell me you don’t look forward to that.”

I grin despite myself; the viewscreen face-projection gives away too much as well, sometimes, and my grin definitely looks as wicked as it feels.

“If we play our cards right Jaci won’t send us on another vacation for a long time, at least not to a system without the infoweb. But it does mean we have a whole week to ourselves with no one bothering us. The staff won’t care that you’re a transfer – or even that I am on this vacation with you – but I doubt the other guests will want to get to know you.”

I flick my projection on long enough to shrug, shut it off again. “I’m used to that.”

He lets out a sigh of his own, but doesn’t push the issue. “What was your last vacation like? You must have had at least one before now.”

“I had a lot of downtime before I left Earth, when business was slow –.”

“Dar.” He says nothing else. Waits.

“The journey to the first world off-Earth I worked at was relaxing,” I say finally. “I had no idea what to expect from them, and Max had given me his security clearances so I had more access to the infoweb than I ever had before. I was drunk on information the entire journey. It was nice.”

“Being drunk?”

“Being free. For a little while. Setting up my shop again and getting custom was just too much work, so I sold it all off and ended up on Docking Stations, and then worked my way out to McLan.”

Orien studies me in silence. I don’t turn on my projection, or turn off the viewscreen, even though I feel nervous under his gaze as the shuttle finishes docking. “You’re telling me you’ve never had a real vacation,” he says finally.

“I guess not, at least not in the sense you mean?”

“I see.” He pauses a moment, then follows me as we leave the landing craft. The sky is a hundred fresh colours, the world full of the hum of life so different than the sounds of Docking Stations and machines. And the Infoweb is gone entire, closed off, a void left for the world to fill. I move out beside Orien, taking it all in slowly.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Orien says.

I pause. “Am I allowed to say no?”

He kicks me in the side; I yelp, as much from how casual it is as the fact that he does it. “I extended the vacation just before we docked. Two weeks, the second week is going to be a journey through the hundred islands along the north coast.”

“But –.”

“When is the last time you went camping?”

“Never,” I mumble.

“Exactly. Life is a journey, and if you don’t make journeys during it then you’re doing something wrong.” He grins. “We can depart early if you really want to, okay?”

And he is serious about that, too. “Okay.” I continue forward, extending a limb to rub my chassis where he kicked me. I don’t have limbs designed that are suitable for kicking anyone; I make a note to change that once we’re back on McLan.

Ways of trust

I snap the arms back into place in a moment, test linkages and fit the legs back in a moment later. Orien lets out a breath and flexes his limbs, stands, stretches slowly. His synthskin is state of the art: aside for hearing a few automated systems regulating his body below it, one would never think of of the medics of Docking Station McLan had over sixty percent of his body as synthetics. All limbs, one lung, part of his torso, some of his head: the bomb had taken out four soldiers; another battlefield surgeon had managed to save his life.

He’d retired to being a medic here: have too many synthetics and one was considered more a hazard than useful on battlefields. At the very least, one became more costly to upkeep than a regular shoulder. I’d noticed his left shoulder being off, offered to help, fixed linkages and then got a little carried away with other repairs.

“And you’re a vehicle mechanic,” Orien says, flexing a hand. “You have a gift for this, you know.”

I flush; it’s one of the benefits of a projection. I can show emotions better with it than with my real body. “I had a friend with cybernetics long ago: the principles are the same and I try and keep up with developments. It’s easier to fix limbs if you fix them all at once, even if it’s not comfortable for you to be without them. I prefer a holistic scan of an entire system to fix the root problems rather than patch each piece up alone; and my scanners are pretty much designed for that so it doesn’t take as much time.”

“I did notice that.” He pauses, studying me thoughtfully. “Could you lower your projection for me?”

I pause, but I did just remove and fix all his limbs. I flick the projection off: under the image of a human male is my chassis, my real body: a mind transferred into a cylinder on treads that tapered off to a viewscreen at the top my ‘face’ was visible in. People find it easier to interact with transfers when we have a face. Orien just looks me over critically from botton up to top and down again.

“What do you need fixed?”

“I’m fine,” I say, and my vocal interface is too quick.

“That is what I said as well. Mechanics get damaged: you’re going to need someone else to be able to fix you sometime, Dar. I barely knew you. You barely know me.”

He says nothing else. I gulp, move back. Pace the room, rolling from one side to the other nervously for almost a minute before I come back in front of him. He’s just watched, said nothing. I realize I didn’t put my projection back up before pacing. “I’m not...” I trail off into silence.

“It doesn’t have to be today. Just some day,” he says quietly, reaching out to poke my chassis with a fingertip before pulling it away. “You’re a good mechanic, Dar. And you’ve been around for a long time, as transfers go. You’ve adapted your body, changed it, modified it. I imagine another mechanic can repair you, but it will take time you might not have.”

And under it: would I want someone to? is unvoiced, a question I never have the same answer to whenever it is voiced. I haven’t been good at trust for a long time. I know that. “I know,” I say, to the voiced and unvoiced. I stop. Stare at Orien. “I’m scared.”

“And I wasn’t?” he says, but mildly.

I undo linkages, trigger commands. My projection flickers, and then appears a good two feet from my body even as my chassis opens up in the middle.

Orien stares into my body, then over at me. “I assume there’s a practical reason you made your projection able to, ah, project?”

“I can check my body for scuff marks and damage I might not notice.” Projection-me shrug. “And it helps a little when fixing errors. I can see through the projection, my sensors and the viewscreen all at once for a time, if I need to. I’m just using the projection right now.”

“Fascinating.” He begins doing scans over apps and linkages he recognizes as I watch, biting my lower lip and trying not to look as scared as I feel. Orien begins asking questions about modifications, about some things I’ve done to my body and shared only with the transfer community. I tell him, because some people outside the community should know. Explain how my ‘mind’ is spread throughout the chassis, how I can replicate my core from most any piece if I had to.

“Have you had to do this?”

“Twice. The damage was never extensive enough to really worry me.”

“Huh.” Orien points out a few linkages I can improve, checks other systems, gently disengages a few for a closer look. “You modified a battery drive to charge with movement. He holds it between his hands. “And two smaller ones, judging by links, but this is the main one?”

“It is.” My voice is small even to my ears.

Orien looks back at ‘me’. He pauses. “Are you all right?”

“No.”

“I didn’t damage –.”

“No! I’m fine It – I’ve never had someone hold my primary node in their hands in-in a long time.”

He smiles. “So I’m holding your heart in the palm of my hands?”

I giggle at that; I’ve never done that, not in a long time either. I’m terrified, and cover it with words: “I can run without it for enough time to make a new one, but this is – scary.”

Orien replaces it, triple checking his work, asks a few more questions and then pulls back. “I think that’s more than enough for today; we can look over your treads and hoverjets and limbs a different time.”

I let out a breath and close up my chassis, check everything is working and disengage the projection. I engage a couple of limbs to run them over my chassis, making sure everything is locked down out of paranoia even if I know its fine.

“Everything okay?” Orien asks when I’m finally done.

“Yes. Thank you,” I mumble.

He stands and a wall slides open to the left of me to reveal a large room with ten charing ports. Everything from medical supplies to small servitor-bots could be charged in here even if the rest of the ships grid failed. “I use this for charging in private. If you want to join me?”

I normally book a small charging room for myself once a week for an hour, sometimes two. Lock it down, charge. Be nervous most of the time. I can use my limbs a little when charging, but I can’t disconnect easily or activate the projection. I say nothing, not moving.

“I did hold your heart in the palm of my hands,” the medic says with a grin.

I have to grin back at that and move into the charging room, set one of the units up and plug into it. Orien connects into the one beside it, sitting down. He shuts down every system he can, going into a deep sleep. Trusting me to do nothing.

It’s been a long time since I’ve used a charging station long enough to charge every one of my systems. I relay commands, relax, let myself drift into the noise. Let the medic hold my trust, and it feels good to trust anyone this deeply.

Chassis Hearts

It is easy to get cranky if you spend more than two weeks working without pause or rest trying to fix errors on a starship. The Helcrinz IV generation ship had been experiencing a failure in the Stasis Field Protection System of module 4 leading to potential genetic flaws in the population. There had been worries that the flaw might extend to the other modules, compromising the entire 40,000 people on board, or even other generation ships as well. I’d hunted down app errors and linkage failures along with the other mechanics at Docking Station McLan before it got out of our range, ending up checking for source code errors in only the best apps on the Module before finding and fixing the error. It had been exhausting and gruelling and I’d expected a break after it.

I hadn’t expected an enquiry.

“Mechanic designate Dar, a transfer native to Earth. Former vehicular mechanic,” the Adjudicator says, circling me in the off-white judgement room. I’ve never been in an Adjudicators office before: it was bare, devoid of seats or tables. Just a door, weak lighting, scanning baffles, and us. I’d been forbidden to do scanning while inside, but apparently left on an honour system that I wouldn’t.

“That is me,” I say, and nothing else.

“You have worked on three docking stations prior to the McLan, with a record that was solid and without fault at any of them. And yet you ended up at the far reaches of the sixth Cluster. Explain.”

I shrug easily. “People have biases. I’ve found less biases the further I go from Earth. And McLan was the furthest Docking Station that was relatively modern.”

The Adjudicator pauses in front of me, studying me. They are human-norm, though thin, with a body that could pass as male or female, both or neither. It’s a common enough choice to make sincetraits are more expensive here and tend to be changed less often than they would be planet-side. “Please remove your projection.”

I hope I don’t scowl, but do so a moment later. Under the human projection of me I’m myself: a cylindrical shape on treads that tapers off to a viewscreen at the top with over a dozen limbs that can come out of my chassis as needed. I use the projection of me – or who I would have been in early adulthood – in public since people prefer to interact with it; the viewscreen is a replica of the projection-face, which I’m not asked to turn off as well.

“You were eight years of age when an accident led to a transfer into a non-human body. One of the first generation of transfers, and one of the few of that generation to be extant.”

Meaning I hadn’t destroyed myself. “That is true.”

“I would like to know how you solved the Helcrinz IV issue.”

“You can read my report. Or even skim the summary.” Nothing. “I began looking at the most stable apps, figuring everyone would overlook them as a source of the error. I found it, fixed it and integrated the revised app with the others and the linkages in six hours. If no one can find a mistake, then I figured it had to be where no one would be looking. At least two other mechanics were working on the same theory; we all have a datapool in the infoweb that everyone submits to so that no one replicates another’s work without need during situations as critical as this one was. I was just the first one to find that error in said app.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

“Pardon?” The Adjudicator raises pale eyebrows. “I was relieved that an entire generation ship wasn’t going to be lost, to say nothing of the lives on board. I believe other mechanics are checking the other modules for the same error; glitches happen, so it could just be that copy or a poor install of it. No one wants to cause a panic over a major protection system failing if we can avoid it.”

“I see. Then I would request, at this time, that you remove your chassis.”

I go still at that. My viewscreen flicks off for a moment. I settle on: “No.”

“And if I were to insist?” the Adjudicator says softly.

“I would respectfully request you peel off your skin, and then muscles, and be seen in that fashion. I have no desire to do so and would request, in turn, to learn the purpose of this enquiry,” I snap.

“It is believed by some that intuition comes from the heart.” The Adjudicator pauses a beat. “A transfer such as yourself has no heart.”

I blink. Blink again. “You’re serious? I worked for two weeks without rest on this and you’re saying – what?”

“I am saying nothing. The mechanic who insisted on an Adjudicator inferred that your solution could be an attempt at integration with the population of this station and thus, perhaps, the failure of others to succeed in this was partially caused by you.”

I twitch, arms itching to extend from my chassis and shake the Adjucator. I hold myself in, barely, move closer quickly, not caring that they jump back a little. “I am a mechanic. I am here to fix things, not to seek glory or cause problems or let anyone die for my own gain! And if you’re going to stand there and argue I have no heart because I am a transfer, I am leaving this room and the station within the hour.”

The Adjudicator smiles tightly. “And if I forbid that?”

“Then I will contact every transfer-rights support group there is and prove to you I can be a heartless bastard by siccing every single one on this station.” I glare at them, waiting to flick on my projection to make it more visible. “I have never done this. I’ve never even considered it before now, so I have no idea what they can accomplish or what would happen but independent mechanical will verify what we did for the module and that I was entirely in order.”

“And then?”

“And then I would be famous and use it to ruin your life because it is nothing I desire to be. Is this showing ‘heart’ enough for you, or do I have to use my projection despite your wishes and make rude gestures as well?”

The Adjudicator actually chuckles at that. “I think not. The mechanic Artegan has been reassigned from this station.”

“But he was –.”

“One of the lead mechanics, yes. You will not be asked to replace him. He was, as I gather you have surmised, looking into the same apps you were. That your lack of a need to sleep meant you found the error first means more lives were undoubtedly saved. Your desire to refuse potential riches is – novel, but in your case perhaps expected.”

“I don’t need wealth. I don’t want wealth. And I shouldn’t profit over others because I have an advantage they don’t. Transfers have enough problems without me ever doing that. Can I go now?”

“You may.” The Adjudicator pauses. “We would rather you did not. This extends beyond me and to station management.”

“What?”

“You may restore your projection if you desire.”

I do, and gape at the Adjudicator. “After that insult, you want be to stay?”

“While Artegan’s claim was entirely devoid of merit, had it not happened we would have arranged for some other claim to be brought against you. It is done to all station personnel to see how they cope with such stresses and if they put their own desires ahead of their fellow crew or the station proper. Artegan’s behaviour had changed since becoming a lead mechanic: we were in need of a reason to Adjudicate him as well, and this situation worked in that favour, though I protested that it went too far against you.”

“No kidding.”

The Adjudicator grins at that and holds out their hand. “Jaci.”

I hold out mine, extend a limb to fit into it and shake their hand. “Dar. But you knew that.”

“I did.” Jaci lets go. “I asked other mechanics about you, you know. They had a betting pool on whether you’d actually lose your temper or not. The bets leaned to ‘yes’ given the nature of the question.”

“And lack of rest; it’s not the first time I’ve been told I can’t understand something because ‘transfers don’t have hearts’ and the like.” I shrug. “I’ve never gone as far as to threaten anyone with a transfer-rights group before, so I guess that really hit a nerve or two.”

“You have nerves?” Jaci says, keeping their face entirely bland. I just grin and stick my tongue out on reply; I’ve made the projection rather well, after all. It wins a surprised laugh. “Then I am glad it was excised now rather than later.”

I hadn’t considered it like that. I just nod and follow Jaci out of the chamber, heading to my quarters. Rest. Relax. Get back to work later. I almost miss that four mechanics are waiting for me in the quarters until I reach the door; all worked on the datapool, all asking if I’ll stay. They’re the only ones off-shift right one, one says. I stare at them. I manage a nod. Thank them. Twice. Wait until they leave. I never designed my projection to be able to cry; right now I don’t know if that is good or not. I stand in the dark, alone, and don’t feel alone at all. 

Time Spent > Time Lost

I am a mechanic. It’s all I ever wanted to be for as long as I can remember: I helped my parental unit from the first time I could understand apps and how they connected together, remained one even after the accident led to having a body that wasn’t human at all. I don’t use the infoweb much, beyond keeping up on technologies and new app development – narrowband interests, Max teasingly called it – and I ignore news about transfers like myself because all that news does is depress me. The infoweb supplied me with news I never wanted to know.

And I have no one to talk to about it. One reason I’ve turned off every security system for the shop. I hadn’t needed to have a shop in the last couple of years: every scanning system and repair module I used fit easily inside my chassis now. But the shop was real, and solid, and customers knew where it was. I’d had four customers in the last year. Three the year before that. I’ve spent my free time updating skills, learning modern systems. Updating my own body.

Outwardly its the same as it has been for almost a hundred years: a five-foot cylinder on treads, viewscreen with my ‘face’ on the top, arms inside reading to come out as needed. There is more armour than there used to be. More repair subsystems. No weapons. I have a few sealing apparatuses I could use as weapons if I had to. I don’t. A transfer with weapons sets off all the wrong kind of alarms, even now. I look about the shop slowly. Six scanning tables, repair modules, docking bays. I could hold fifty vehicles in various states of repair, not that I’d ever had that many here.

“Engage.” Everything shrunk down, folded in on itself smoothly, connecting together like puzzle pieces to become a small block in the middle of the floor. I opened the left side of my chassis, picked it up, put it inside, closed myself up. An entire life reduced to little more than a storage unit. Some days I now understand why my grandfather tried to kill me after I became a transfer, why progress scares so many people. The ways in which it makes us helpless before it.

The door opens. I flick my projection on, of a human-seeming Dar that fits easily over my chassis.

“We spent a lot of time here together.” It is Max’s voice, but not Max who enters the shop. Max had been male, the last time we saw each other – over six months ago – and this Max looked the same, complete with a tail that didn’t move as much as Max’s had at all. Constructs mimic people: you copy your mind into them, send them out to deliver messages. They degrade quickly, all told, but this one was expensive and well-made. Max always did plan for the future: you don’t survive two tours of the war and not plan. It even had a replica of his synthleg I’d worked on and updated for years.

“I found the news.” Nothing else. I dropped my projection, turned and faced him. Kept my viewscreen off.

The Construct flinched at that. “I’m not sure that makes this easier.”

“I knew you were dying, Max. You didn’t have to stay away.” The Construct isn’t Max, but – this helps. A little. Maybe.

“All your sensors, all your scans.” Max stares about at the shop. The only thing left in it is a chair I kept for guests, one that does massages that eased any pain it could manage. I’d sold the deign eventually at Max’s urging, and never had to work again as a result. I’d spent at least two years in a funk over that before donating the revenue to a transfer-based charity Max recommended. Max’s sib Kel had become a transfer on dying, becoming pure radiowaves rather than accepting another body to be housed inside.

“I couldn’t do it,” the Construct says, as if Max is reading my mind through the Construct. Knowing what I’m thinking without even being alive. I shudder a little inside. I wonder if this is how people see transfers, if this is one reason we unnerve them so.

“You couldn’t become a transfer. Like me. Or Kel. You never had to say that,” I snap, flicking the viewscreen on to glare at the Construct. “You could have just told me. I’d have been fine with it!”

“I didn’t know. For all the time we’ve spend together, there are things we never talked about. As friends do. Words we left unsaid so our friendship wouldn’t break down.”

I move closer at that, quick, extend a limb and jab the Construct lightly in the chest. “You could have tried. You’re my friend – you were my best friend, Max. I would have forgiven you anything you said.”

“I know. It’s why I couldn’t.” The Construct smiles, and looks so much like Max that it hurts. “I wanted you at the funeral, but someone might have – tried to hurt you. I couldn’t let that happen. So I made this Construct, to come and speak with you. It will shut down entirely once in the chair,” and the tail twitched to point to the chair, so like Max my vocal interface lets out a gulp.

“I’m not here to say all that stuff I never could. Or wouldn’t.” The Construct smiles. “Friendship makes cowards of us all. Sometimes. In some ways. I didn’t want to lose your friendship for anything. Not even because of me, in the end.”

“I’m one of the only first-generation transfers still alive. I lose myself in my work. I love my work. That’s one reason. You’ve always been another.”

“I know. And that you might die because I die – that always sat in the back of my head. Festering.”

“I won’t.” The Construct says nothing. “Because for all the time we spent togerther, it was never that long, and you were never that important.”

The Construct freezes, and then lets out a soft, Max-laugh, so real it does hurt this time. “You bastard.”

I flick my projection on, so my grin is as wicked as I can make it. “I can say the truth now,” I tease in turn, and the Construct laughs again.

“So could I,” Max’s voice says, “about how ugly you are, how my leg could have been better repaired by a real human and – huh. You’d think I’d have better insults for this.” A sigh, then. “They removed my tail, for the funeral. You would have protested.”

“I would have.”

“I wish –. I wish a lot of things,” the Construct says, softly. “I wish you’d been able to come to the funeral, and to hell with what might happen or what people might say about it. But I couldn’t ruin other people’s grief. And my parental units might have come to it, and you would definitely have wanted to have words with them.”

I thought about Max and Kel, and how they’d been made to take any adaptive trait. How their parents had arranged this without telling them, used the contract they’d devised to enrol Max in the war. I said nothing: words was putting it kindly.

“I thought you might close your shop down. Eventually. I planned for that.”

“Max?”

“Here.” The construct holds out one hand, a databall shimmering to life. “I refused a third tour of the war, you know. I taught in a few schools, in exchange for being able to pass on my security clearances to someone else. That someone else is you.”

“Oh.” I don’t protest, and the globe snaps over to me, and then inside. I don’t feel different, but my infoweb connection expands, broad enough to make me feel dizzy for a moment.

“It’s hard for a transfer to get off-planet, let alone employment. This will help. There are starcruisers in need of decent techs out there, and you’re more than decent. This isn’t an apology.”

“It better not be.”

The Construct grins at that, heading over to the chair to sit in it with a deep sigh of relief. “You spent time with me,” it says, rappping the replica of Max’s synthleg. “I get to spend time with you inside you, as a clearance. It’s not the same, but this way – this way it’s something. There are so many things I’m sorry for, and so much more I’m never going to be sorry for.”

“Me too.”

And the chair activates itself. And the Construct shuts down. And Max is gone.

I don’t smash the chair apart. I don’t scream. I turn. I roll out. I leave.

I don’t put on my projection as I head down the road toward the nearest starport. Because Max was the bravest person I knew, and I can do this much. For Max, for me. For whatever future I might find. 

A gift like dreaming

My parental units haven’t had words with me in years when they could avoid it. My sib and I had been designed with fluid genotypes: the kind that can be shifted into a new, stable form within hours and not have the traits rejected. Different eyes, skin, gills, tails, fur: you name it, it can be done. Kel used it to aid in exploring beyond the solar system, until the illness. Kel was gone now, accepting the only opportunity to survive by getting her mind transferred out of body: and in Kel’s case, into radio waves that would keep exploring the universe.

I became an exotic: need a significant for a night? A party guest to liven up an evening? Someone to stand around as weird furniture? Give me a few hours notice and I can have a few new traits and show up as needed. I make a lot of money at it, enough that I can ignore offers of sex as part of any contract. Not that my parents know that. I like to think they’d talk to me if theyd did.

After Kel went away I indulged in really odd traits wings, tentacles, suckers, being neuter. Even my hardcore friends blanched at hanging out when I’d been covered in quills and spikes for a week. Right now I’m male again, though I’ve kept a tail. I’ve decided tails are nice and it’s been a long time since I’ve kept any cosmetic trait for more than a week. My tail is long and pale the rest of my skin a swirling of colours that shift and change when I touch anything or it touches me. It includes the wind on my face; I’ve been told the effect can be dizzying but I quite enjoy it. It’s liberating not to care what others think of my body at all. And strange it has taken me so long to reach this point.

I get four messages within as many hours with offers of contracts, desires for certain traits. Et cetera. I let my system send automated replies that I’m busy with another client, offer up a few other exotics as potential alternatives. They’ll repay the favour to me in return some day down the road. The street I’m walking down is pretty worn-out: you’d need a float car to navigate the road at all and the sidewalks are no better but there are still a few storefronts for businesses that need to be more than showcases for prefab items.

The mechanic’s shop isn’t anything special, though it’s more well-built than most shops as it has been blown up at least once. There is ample space for parking and the exterior is clean, neat and tidier than some more professional businesses ever manage. External appearances are important, after all. I head in, the door opening for me after a short scan. The shop is large, hosting six vehicles right now along with a bewildering array of scanning devices, repair modules and toolkits in a neat chaos.

Dar is pacing the middle of the shop. “I know I told it would be a day, but repairing decade-old apps and not updating them takes time, Mr. Alcourt. Yes, it is done but I need at least another day to make sure they’re all communicating properly and won’t break down soon. You – don’t care. I see.” He stops, continues moving. “Very well. Engage.”

An old, battered hovercar in the right corner shimmer and vanished into thin air.

I blink, stare at the spot where it had been, then at Dar. “Someone paid for a transmit of that?” I tried to work out of the cost of turning an entire antique car into pure information and reforming it on another part of the world intact and gave up.

He snorts. “He had it transmitted here, too.” Dar looks to be about seventeen, with a mechanics rough hands and a warm and ready smile. He’s been updating the projection over the past few months after I pointed out that him being a transfer was difficult enough for some clients without him still looking like the eight-year old kid he’d been before the accident. He drops the projection, revealing a torso on treads, two of at least a dozen arms currently outside his dark chassis. The top is a viewscreen with a replica of his face, which does make people feel a little better talking to him, not that his voice isn’t almost pitch-perfect.

I walk over, circling him critically. The vieswcreen now compasses his entire ‘head’ and turns with me. “You’re a bit taller than you used to be.”

He grins. “Well, I don’t need a body small enough to comfortably fit under eight-year Dar, so I figured I might as well make my body a bit bigger. Also more room for a few more scans and tools.” He raps his chest with one arm. “It’s okay, right?”

“It is.” He has a chair for guests that does incredible massages, among other things. I ignore it and find one of his scanning tables to sit on.

He rolls over, curious, and extends one limb to poke my tail. “You’re still keeping that.”

I smack his limb away with a flick of the tail, which wins a grin. “I like it. You have any pressing work?”

“Not now, no. Why?”

He hasn’t had a human body for over eight years; you forget things, even when you don’t want to. Mind you, it’s also me so having a glove on just one hand is perhaps not worth noting. If he – or the shops systems – have scanned it, he gives no sign of noticing the glove is a stealth mesh. I remove it and press the fingertips of my right hand to the middle his body.

“What – oh. Oh!” Dar’s face vanishes entirely from the viewscreen and for a moment his projection is visible, mouth dropping open, eyes wide in shock before it vanishes. Treads whine a little, which I’ve never heard before, as his body rocks and then moves back a step, his face appearing again. “Max. What is – was – what?” he gets out.

“A trait.” I reach over, run a finger down his side. The yelp he lets out is worth entire cost of the trait.

“Max!”

I give him a poke with my tail; his limbs twitch, relax. “It’s just the one hand; neural stimulator, modified to work on transfers. Probably intended as a weapon, given the current views of transfers, but it has other uses.”

“Like what?” he says warily, but doesn’t move.

I flex my fingers, alter the trait with a thought and run them over his body slowly. He lets out small gasps before his vocal systems shut down entirely. I count out a minute, two, a third. Release. It takes almost five minutes from that for the viewscreen to flicker, Dar’s face appearing in it again.

“Max?”

He sounds scared; I never intended for scared. “What was it like?”

“A wave. A wave with images behind it.” Dar is silent for a few seconds. “It was like dreaming was, when I could dream?”

I grin. “Good.”

“But –.”

“You’ve fixed vehicles for my clients at a reduced rate and you’re my only friend who doesn’t give a crap what I look like.”

He snorts. “Like I would?” he manages, almost steadily.

“You could; you don’t. It’s the least I could do.”

“Oh.” Dar licks his lips in the viewscreen, moves closer. “Could you do it again?”

I reach out, and he falls into dreams and bliss, shutting down his vocal interface before I can hear whatever sounds he might be making. We do strange things for friendship, but giving someone dreams is worth it.

Walking to tomorrows

The door to the shop opens. It shouldn’t: I’ve set the privacy baffles to maximum and an automated reply to tell customers I am busy and to call back later, not that I get many customers in person. The last was at least two years ago, from the restaurant down the road, a cook who only came in person once to see about getting some of their vehicles fixed so they wouldn’t crash during deliveries. There is only one person the shop would let in these days without notifying me or asking questions. I don’t have time to clean up, less time to hide anything. I settle for swearing inside my head at length.

Max is limping when she comes in. Her body is green-grey, skin turned into an impact mesh, bone blade-sharp under it, quills extending out along her back. A second spine might explain the limp but doesn’t; the shop has a good scanning system. I do as well.

“You said you might come by tomorrow.”

“I changed my mind; leg was acting us,” Max begins lightly, then falls silent and walks over. Max has done two tours of the war: the first as male, the second as female. She was planning to do a third as neuter, if she was pressed into it. Her parents had designed her and her sib to be able to accept body-modifying traits at a staggering speed and rate of success. Neither Max or Kel had ever known why. Kel had died to illness, excepting becoming a transfer – mind leaving her body into a new shell – so she could continue to explore the universe as radio waves in her case. Max had made a living as an exotic hired for parties, until her parents revealed they had some legal clause to sign Max up for the war. And had done so.

Max had done a second tour just to spite them. And severed all contact with them after the first, legally and otherwise. Max had lost his right hand in the first tour, her left leg in the second it seemed. I’d never asked for details, Max had never offered any. All I knew was that the Hingari were alien and we – humanity – were fighting them. Just about everything else was on a need-to-know basis, even in the Infoweb, and mechanics ranked as not needing to know at all. I’m not allowed to fix military vehicles, being a transfer, so I fix civilian ones as I always have.

There are only two vehicles in the shop right now. Max has noticed that, but is more focused on me as she walks over. I don’t look good. The left side of my chassis is wide open, apps and innards visible; I’ve been using four arms to repair systems, upgrading and updating others. My transfer body is tough. Tough hadn’t been enough.

“What happened?” Max says softly.

“The restaurant closed down three days ago. I’m the last store on the road, so I win.” I grin in the viewscreen on top of my body at her, but Max doesn’t return it. “One of the cooks said they had some old vehicles no one was taking, and I could have them if I wanted to.”

“Dar.” Max steps closer. “Don’t you dare turn your viewscreen off.”

I blink, stare at her, lick my lips. I made my viewscreen well, and my voice module is as decent: I’ve never considered those a flaw until now. “There were six of them waiting outside. They had impact rifles, emp-batons. Weapons. I made it back inside.”

Max says nothing; my chassis is battered, the pieces of it on the tables still being repaired. I fixed my treads first, so I could at least get away – try to get away – if anyone broke into the shop today. Bodies are important. You learn that even when you don’t have a normal one: mine was almost five feet tall, a cylidrical shape on treads, tapering to a viewscreen, with a dozen limbs for use as needed to fix cars. I’d used them to upgrade and repair my body a few times, but never to this extent. I’d never been damaged like this, not even when my grandfather blew up the shop because my existence horrified him. It had been a lifetime ago, and you forget things. Like being helpless. Like pain.

The tip of Max’s tail twitches violently behind her; she reaches out a hand, pulls back as my arms spasm between us before I can stop them. “How bad is it?”

“I’ll survive. They did a lot of damage; it’s going to be at least a day fixing the projection system alone. I’ll have to upgrade my body after this: be tougher, more resistant to weapons.”

“More like armour,” Max says for me.

“Yes.” I finish some small repairs, and relink the rest of my chassis, test apps to make sure everything is holding together. Even in front of Max, it scares me to be naked. For Max to see too much. Max knows what I am, but to see the guts of it, the mechanics. I didn’t want that. “You were supposed to come tomorrow,” I say again, and catch the whine in my voice.

“I lost my leg; the one they built isn’t near as good as what you could do. The hand is fine, though.”

“I could look it over. Check it out.”

“Your legs are fine?” Max says lightly, poking a tread with her tail.

I manage to keep still this time. “Yes. Sit.”

Max sits down on a scanning table. I scan the leg, poke it a bit with a few limbs, open it up after disabling neural relays. It takes less than five minutes to update apps, repair a few connections, reroute others. I lose myself in the work pull back after to seal up the leg again. Max flexes the leg a few minutes later, wiggles toes, stands, walks a few seconds.

She looks over, grins. “You could branch out from vehicles into limbs, you know.”

“I like fixing vehicles.”

“I know. I’d rather not think of my leg like that,” Max says lightly, walking back over and circling me. “You look a bit battered, but it’s not too bad. Can you do a projection?”

“No.” The one I have set up shows a human me. I’d kept it as me when I’d been transferred for years until Max pointed out that an eight year old projection as a mechanic didn’t inspire confidence. My current projection is of me at twenty-five or so, or at least how I think I would have looked. It’s good enough to fool basic censors, and people prefer to interact with it than me most of the time.

“You’ll have it done by the time I come back tomorrow?”

“I could,” I say after a pause. “Why?”

“You’ll find out.” Max grins, waves and heads to the door.

I begin working on the projection app after the door closes. I don’t need much energy, don’t sleep. I don’t even rest, as humans understand it. But I can lose myself in my work, relax and have hours pass that I barely notice. Max’s light cough, and then a louder one, rouse me from the work. Hours have, indeed, passed. Max looks the same, though sans limp. I find it odd she’s keeping the impact skin, but don’t thin to ask why as I test the projection.

“It’s not perfect, but it’s working. Treads working, eight out of twelve limbs functional,” I say out loud when Max asks how I’m feeling.

She snorts. “That’s not feeling, Dar. You’re in good shape, though?”

“Yes,” I say warily.

“Good. Come on,” and she turns, heading to the door of the shop. Opens it.

I don’t move.

“We’re going for a walk.”

“No.”

She pauses, leaves the door open, walks back. “Dar. If you don’t, it’s going to be harder next time. And harder still the next time you try. It’s tomorrow. I said I’d come back, and I did, and you – we – please.” She offers no poke of the tail, just her one normal hand gently resting on my chassis for a moment. “You fixed my leg: I should walk on it, to make sure. You can check out your work.”

I stare at her, then the door. “I don’t have any weapons,” I say, and my voice is small and very human to my ears.

“Do you want to?”

I shake my head in the viewscreen. My body trembles a little.

“I have weapons.” Max smiles, and the smile is hard and almost alien. “And I will use them if anyone bothers us.”

I gulp. It takes effort not to shut off the viewscreen, not to hide. I move forward, stop. Reach out a limb and extend it to wrap about Max’s tail. “Help?”

Max blinks, then just nods and walks, gently pulling me along behind her on neutral until we’re outside. Down the street a little. I finally let go of her tail, catch up slowly, treads shifting to keep balanced on the road. I’m scanning the street around us for people and weapons and I can’t stop myself from doing it.

My projection flicks on, and my eyes are darting about in the same way, wide and wary, nervous and scared. Max reaches over. I extend a limb, fit it into the projection so her hand squeezes that. She doesn’t tell me why the cook and his friends attacked me, how bad the war is going. We just walk, and she lets go, and we move side by side in silence until I say we’ve probably tested her legs just fine.

She smiles at that. “Feeling better?”

“No. I’m still terrified,” I whisper. Max says nothing to that. “Can you come back tomorrow?”

Her smile widens a little, and some tension I didn’t even notice eases in her. “We’ll have another walk tomorrow.”

She walks back to the shop with me. I don’t protest it, or try to break her silence. She’ll tell me about the war when she wants to.

We have time. We have tomorrows.

The start of a reply

I am doing the last round of scans on a car when an alert lets me know someone has entered the shop. It has been over a month since anyone has come in person. I am not a genius, in the world mechanics inhabit: I do good work, solid repairs, and I take my time until it is done. A genius could do what I do in a third of the time, perhaps less. I disable interfaces, turning off scans and overlays. The car beneath them is old, runing on apps and power cells a decade out of date, but the owner wanted to keep it that way. I’ve been working on it off and on for over two days, enjoying the challenge. That I only have four other vehicles to check at present is just a lull. They happen. Vehicles need regular check-ups, and those anyone can do most of the time. Repairs are less common. A lull.

If I ever wanted to be a genius, it was in being able to lie to myself. I envy people who are good at it.

“You left me a message.” Nothing else. Max comes in, the door closing behind it. Last month Max had been male, three year before that female, then male before that; I’d only known Max for six years; I’d never met Kel, but both sibs had the same genotype, a kind that that responded absurdly well to shiftings. Alter skin, clothing hair, sex, organs, graft wings: you name it, their bodies had been designed to not reject it. I wasn’t sure what their parents had hoped would come of that, but Max made a living being an exotic in private viewings. Kel had been an explorer out on the outer belts, until the sickness.

Eaten away from the inside out by a virus that mutated faster than Kel’s body could be made to adapt. Ten years in isolation chambers before it was too much, or too late, and Kel had accepted a transfer last month. Like I had years ago: take the mind, place it into a new body. Cloned bodies rejected it, but you could become part of a starliner, get a new body that seemed human enough, build your own chassis if you wanted to. It had been common for a short while, until a handful of people abused it. Transfer into a machine. Commit murder, transfer into another. Repeat. You couldn’t last long doing that; minds degrade, sanity rebels, but it had dealt the entire process a bad name.

And too high a number killed themselves. I’ve been told that, though I’ve never looked for specifics. Kel had elected to have her consciousness dumped into space, to become little more than a ghost in the ether that people might pick up on transmissions at times and nothing more. To continue exploring, however long Kel would last. I couldn’t even imagine such bravery.

I turn to Max. “I did.”

Max has wings and a tail; the wings were black vestigial feathers, the tail pale as the rest of its body. The tail twitchs a little, lashing about behind legs. “I turned off my mail system entirely.”

“I know. It was full.” I don’t add that at least a third of the messages had probably been from me.

“You risked a lot to break into that. And not just because its illegal.” I say nothing. Max walks over to the chair set aside for visitors, sits down. Almost smiles as it begins massaging its back and tail. “I came here because you asked. To talk to you, Dar.”

I take the hint and drop the default projection around my body: a boy, about eight, in a mechanics uniform. The person I’d been before the accident, before having to transfer. My body is a solid torso on treads, a dozen arms that come out as needed, a viewscreen with an adaptive face at the top. I don’t like it, but it seems to make people a bit relieved. I roll over beside the chair, keeping two arms out; it’s a good body for a mechanic. Solid design, seldom any issues. Mine.

“Kel is gone.”

“I know.” I pause a beat. My vocal interface is very good. “I thought you’d want to talk.”

“I don’t.” Max doesn’t get up, relaxing further as the systems in the chair ease pain in the wings. “I do want to steal your chair, though.”

I grin at that. Sometimes having a display is good, because Max grins back half against its desires. “I use it sometimes as well.”

“You do?”

“I can’t sleep. It helps me relax.” I don’t share that much, not often.

“Oh.” For a moment Max pulls away, then: “You know what happened to Kel. I haven’t – it’s been hard on everyone.”

“I can tell that.”

Max lets out a small, bitter laugh. “I was always more adventurous, with my body. This – it is a kind of homage. People blanch, move away. I don’t have to deal with false sympathies as much.” Max reaches out a hand and raps the centre of my body with knuckles. “It’s armour.”

I don’t move. “I imagine so.”

Max pauses, head cocked to the side. “Is something wrong, Dar?”

“No.”

“Dar. You broke several laws to get through my personal system, to get my attention. That’s dangerous normally; even more so for a transfer like yourself.” It’s nothing I don’t know, but Max says it almost gently and that hurts. Like my message might have. I don’t know.

“I don’t have many friends. I didn’t want to lose you as well.” Nothing else. Max had found and visited me not longer after the idea of Kel having to eventually do a transfer had come up. We’d talked, and a fair bit since off and on. Often about Kel, who I’d never met. I thought it made us friends, but I wasn’t sure.

“It’s been a rough few months. I’ve been trying to hurt everyone.” Max stands, stares down at me. “You never did.”

“It didn’t even occur to me.” I move back. “I just – wanted to make sure you were going to be okay, Max. Even if I got caught.”

Max turns, eyes taking in the shop, the few vehicles, then back to me. Max crouches down, eyes even with the viewscreen. I don’t need Max to, but it’s a nice surprise. “There was another transfer killing two months ago; Kel was almost never approved.”

“Oh. Clients still bring vehicles.”

“In person?”

I say nothing. I could lie. I designed my vocal interface quite well, as I’ve said, but Max isn’t anyone’s fool. You don’t work as an exotic without reading people well, even if they might no longer be people.

Max reaches out a hand again, presses fingertips to my chassis, pulls them back. “How long, then, since anyone has touched your body, or even your projection?”

“A long time.” My voice is rough, cracked, not coming out properly. But I designed the interface quite well.

I almost say that, begin to pull back to run a diagnotisic when Max lets out a strange little laugh.

“You don’t need to run away, Dar.”

“I’m not doing –.”

And Max touches me again. And I can’t find words. “Oh,” Max says, drawing back, eyes wide. “There is – Dar, there is nothing behind it.”

“I know.” And I do; I know how people touch each other, how they even touch vehicles when they care for them, and this isn’t that at all.

Max doesn’t touch me again, just stands slowly. “Even Kel wasn’t alone,” Max says, its voice so soft I know I’m not meant to hear it. “I need to get to work. I’ll be back soon. To visit. To talk. All right?”

“All right. I need to get back to work,” I say, turning on the projection and moving back to the car.

Max heads to the door, which opens. Pauses in the doorway. “Thank you,” Max says, and the door closes tight before I can ask why.

An evening at the shop

The start of a series of stories I've been doing this week in response to a writing prompt challenge. Was inspired by the fact that little sci-fi is written about mechanics: you get stories about the pilot of spacecraft, seldom those about the groundscrew. And how the space shuttles of the future might be run using apps. 

Most of my friends think I am crazy. At least half of the mechanics I know set up routines, automate responses and wander off while their personal system finds out what is going wrong with a vehicle. It’s almost always a software issue: gradient, updates, incompatible apps. GUI, in the modern world. How good the software is, what updates it runs, whether it is going to play nice with the rest of a car or not. Simple things to automate, to a point. But I never liked doing that, even before. I blame my dad, half-joking. He showed me all grandpa’s tools back in the day, how complicated it could be just to find out how many screwdrivers you’d need to remove screws from an item, every minute variant in wrenches and nails. You paid attention to what your tools did, to what you could do with them.

So I run through each piece of software myself, compile a list of problems, cycle through them to clear any up. On an average day it takes me less than half an hour per vehicle in the shop, but I know what is wrong, what I need to fix and what I did to fix it in case anyone ever asks. I’ve never been one to worry about automating myself out of a job, I just don’t trust an automated scan to catch everything I would or to solve it in the best manner even when it does. It’s time I could spend doing other things, but that’s all time is. And I find it relaxing, these days: just me, a machine, and no one else.

Grandpa comes in as I’m finishing up the last compatibility scan, tapping commands into the overlap above the floatcar, making sure everything is talking with everything else. My personal system lets me know when he is near and also alerts the local authorities; he’s tried to kill me twice since the accident, so I can’t disable the alert. I move away from the floatcar and turn my head. Grandpa flinches back. He always does.

“Grandfather.” My vocal interface is perfect. I designed it myself, but I still catch the tension at the edges of his mouth, the hardening of his eyes.

“Dar.” He moves slowly to the chair for customers, sits in it. He’s tired, worn out, overdue for at least a dozen bone regenerations. The chair taps into his nervous system and extracts enough pain to warrant a sigh of relief; he doesn’t have a proper chair at home.

I move closer, keeping a safe distance. The last time he tried to kill me he didn’t even have a gun. Just his body, some chemical concoction and hate. I’d like to think he doesn’t hate me, but I’m not sure even grandpa knows. “It has been a few weeks.”

“Yes.” He stares down at his hands, and then up at me. “How often does your father visit, Dar?”

“We talk every day, grandpa. He visits less in person than he should, but I understand.”

“Do you.” It isn’t a question.

“Accidents happen. Statistically they are impossible to avoid, but he still blames himself even though I survived.”

Grandpa twitches. “You call this surviving, do you?”

“I am still here.” I keep still. “Transfer technology increases every month.” I don’t point out that he is almost at the limit for what modern technology can do to sustain his body; he must know that even better than I do. “You can even try it out temporarily now.”

“I want to see you.”

“Grandpa –.”

“He doesn’t. I still do.”

“You tried to kill me last time.” My voice is almost unsteady. “I would rather not do this.”

I have been manifesting a projection; I do it automatically whenever anyone else enters the shop. Me, before the accident. Eight, grinning, a perfect overlay over my body. I would be ten now. Maybe eleven. Complete transfers are uncommon enough to a new body that I don’t want to throw customers off. It makes my friends feel better as well, though fewer visit than used to.

“Dar.” He closes his hands, opens them. The effort hurts him. “I need to see.”

I disengage the projection. The result is functional: I’ve made most of the modifications to my chassis myself, though I call it a body even in my head most of the time. My psychbot insists on that. Sleek torso, treads for locomotion, hover and flight system, and a dozen limbs for use as needed. My body didn’t survive the accident; the rest of me was able to. My projection-face is visible in the viewscreen on top; I don’t like it, but I’m told it makes other people feel better.

“This is the future,” grandpa says. “We all become cars.”

“I am not a vehicle,” I say, sharper than I intended.

“How many apps does your body run on that this car doesn’t?” he snaps back, but doesn’t stand. Doesn’t produce a weapon.

The first time he tried to kill me, he brought down the entire shop with an explosive. Last time it was his fists and pounding me into a wall. I don’t like thinking about it; I haven’t altered the memories. People don’t alter their own memories. This time – this time he is trying words.

“I’m still Dar. I fix cars, like I always did, because I am good at it. Because I like doing it.” Grandpa says nothing. I don’t have to try and hack into the chairs connections to know we’re both thinking about dad, about how he’d fixed the car. About how he’d ignored my advice on two of the apps because ‘you’re still just a kid’. And it has crashed. And he had barely been hurt. And I – I’d become me.

“And you think there is anything in there that likes, do you?” grandpa says, so soft even my systems almost miss the words.

I could pretend I didn’t hear it. I’m mad enough not to. “And what difference is that between a body that DNA drives, or that is nothing more than a housing for a soul? You have your body and I have mine and I’m sick of this! I’m sick of friends no longer visiting, my father refusing to see me if he can avoid it and the only constant being someone who has tried to kill me. I’m still Dar. I’m still in here,” I snarl, glaring, a couple of limbs twitching into approximations of fists.

“Maybe you are. Maybe you are,” he says, and stands. “I won’t accept a transfer. I can’t do it.”

I say nothing to that. I haven’t been this angry in a long time; I don’t trust myself to speak.

“I used to throw things at the wall,” he says, “when your father would tell me I had to get a computer, or begin doing my accounts with one.”

I move over to the left, find a disused linking system. Hurl it into the wall hard enough to crack plasteel. “It’s not the same. I can fix that.”

He laughs at that. “I imagine so. Some things are very easy to fix.” And then: “It hurts the most that you are still Dar, you know.”

“I don’t,” I say, because I don’t understand why everyone is drifting away. Why no one wants to visit in person. Were I to try and fix it, like a vehicle, it would be for the same reasons no one wants to to go on trips with me anymore. And those are things I cannot fix. Transfers like mine will become more common. Maybe never accepted, but more common.

Grandpa just nods and leaves without another word. Most of my friends think I am crazy that I haven’t set the security system to deny him entrance to the shop. I don’t mind. Crazy is human. If you can think someone is crazy, you still think they are human.

I move to the next car, call up its applications and begun debugging processors. It is easy, but I still lose myself in the work. It is better than memory. Better than memories by far.

And I might have written a small piece set AFTER the last story....

The Mornings story got featured on tumblr, and I always make up a small joke-story in the magician series when that happens. This time I did a small canon piece about what the magician was doing while he was sideways from the world. (You can tell a writing prompt has got out of hand, yes? :))

*

I walk back into the world. Sometimes it is harder to return than to leave, and not even magicians know why: in this case, it could be because I am trailing smoke as thick as ichor that burns the air around me. There are monsters entirely of this world who learn places to hide from which they can strike victims, evils so twisted the world is relieved when they find ways to slip sideways and away from it. Even worlds take the path of least resistance when they can.

I borrowed Jay’s talent to be unseen and took it with me, finding the killers. Dealing with them. Everyone kept saying the bees were dying off; no one wondered at the cause. They’re dead, the wasp-ant creatures whose motives I hadn’t much cared to learn. I use the bindings I have with Jay to make a Way to his location, step through a door and leave as much of the sideways place behind as I can.

I ache all over but nothing is broken. The story of my life, some days.

Jay is watching the TV in the hotel room and grins when he seems me, huge and relieved, flinging himself at me for a hug despite the ichor. He pulls back first, radiating a pride that pushes some of the cold of the other place from my bones.

“I helped people when you were gone!”

I pause. I wonder if the world was trying to keep me away as a kindness. “You helped people?”

The boy who is really a creature from Outside the universe grins even wider, practically dancing from foot to foot. “I thtopped a monther all on my own and made it run out of a human!”

I want to ask who – or what – the ‘monster’ might have run into, wondering if I was going to have to explain that celebrities weren’t actually monsters posesssing human hosts. “I need a shower first okay?”

He nods, and I head into the hotel room shower, using magic to keep the water warm for over an hour before I finally leave, sit down on the couch, and listen. Jay is worried and proud, but he did well. I don’t point out he can’t threaten people with his potential all the time, since he knows it. But he helped a girl named Iola and her dad, so I tell him he did well and order in breakfast.

We spend the whole morning watching cartoons, and Jay tells me more than I ever wanted to know about kid’s cartoons, happy to teach and just spend a day doing nothing at all.

Waitings and Mornings

The first story was done as a writing prompt, the rest of it finished this morning.

Waitings

Around midnight, I creep to the window and peek through the blinds. He’s still outside, sitting in the park on the swingset. I go downstairs, where Dad is still passed out in the living room in front of the TV, sneak around beer cans into the kitchen, make two peanut butter sandwiches. Because everyone likes those. Dad doesn’t stir. I cross the street and head into the park, feeling both scared and silly at the same time.

I saw a ghost once, after Grandma died. I asked Dad about the weird person at the funeral, and he’d said it looked like Grandpa who had been dead for years and years. So I’m expecting a ghost but not a kid. Maybe ten, pale with pale eyes, just sitting on the swing and sucking his right thumb as he rocks back and forth.

“Hello?” I say, because he doesn’t look like any little kid I know, and I’m almost thirteen. He doesn’t have a single grass stain on his jeans or dirt under his fingernails.

His eyes widen. “You can thee me?” he says around his thumb.

“You’re sitting right there, so yes.” It feels like a very grown-up thing to say. “I’m Iola.”

“Jay,” he says, and pops his thumb out of his mouth. “You’re human, yeth?”

“Yes,” I say, though it seems a little silly. “You’re not?”

“Nope,” he says proudly.

“That’s why you lisp?”

“Yeth.” He glares, as if daring me to comment further.

I sit on the other swing, not sure what else to do. “Are you going to eat me?”

He just stares. I hand him one of the sandwiches and he wolfs it down in two bites, then the second without a hint of shame.

“Are you waiting for someone?”

“My mathter went thomewhere thidewayth from here, where I can’t follow. And people can thee me now,” he says, soft and furious.

“People will come asking questions if you just sit here.”

“Oh.” He shoves his thumb back into his mouth and sucks on it again. “I don’t care!”

“My little brother went to stay with mom. When she left,” I say, and somehow it hurts less because there is no judgement in his face. “You can sleep in his room, if you want? Dad won’t notice.”

“Oh. You’d make a binding even if I don’t know you at all?”

“Maybe?”

He pops his thumb back out of his mouth and offers up a huge, goofy grin. “Thankth!”

“Your welcome?” He follows me home, giving, giving Dad a wary look and relaxing when nothing happens. No questions, no comments on the beer cans or Dad’s stained shirt. He comes up the stairs into Connor’s room and then hugs me.

I’m not eaten. He pulls back, says thanks again and curls up on the bed, dead asleep in moments. I think about my friends, and the neighbours, what they say and what they think as I go into my room.

I’m crying and I don’t know why.

Mornings

Dad is still in the couch – his couch, now – when I wake up. My alarm didn’t wake him, or the birds. Jay was awake in Connor’s room, poking at a cell phone and followed me into the kitchen in silence. I know what floorboards in our house don’t creek: he doesn’t, but they still don’t creak under his feet and the kid accepts peanut butter and jam sandwiches with a grin of thanks. He eats three by the time I’m half-done one and cleans up the dishes after without being asked, like no little brother in all the world.

I’m starting to think he really is not human. I’m almost done my sandwich when he’s in the living room and on the couch so fast I’d swear he vanished through the wall. He has his right thumb shoved into his mouth and is sucking on it, making him look so much younger than ten as he flicks cartoons on. I stand frozen in the doorway as Dad wakes, turns his head.

Dad’s fist moves. That’s the worst part: everything slows down, except me: I can’t move any faster as Dad’s fist impacts with the side of Jay’s head and sends the kid out of the couch and across the room into the wall, hard enough to crack it.

“Dad?” I almost don’t realize it’s my voice as he stands.

“Who is that?” he says, and his voice is deep-drink deep and ugly. I try to speak; words don’t come. I’ve never seen Dad like this, like the father’s in every movie ever made, all twisted up and dark like wicked step-mothers in stories. Like that. I’m thinking that because it’s easier than thinking about this, and Dad is in front of me. His hand is raised, open, calloused.

I can’t move. I don’t believe he’d hit me enough to move.

“No.” Jay’s voice is calm, and his hand is holding Dad’s arm. No pressure, just fingers pressed against it. There is no bruise on the boy’s face at all but no smile either. “Her Dad would never hurt her,” he says firmly.

Dad turns, and raises his left knee – his bad one, from the accident – and drives it right into Jay’s nose. Jay stumbles back but doesn’t fall at all, just offers a grin of small teeth and a nose that isn’t even scratched.

“I’m tough,” Jay says, “and that body ithn’t and I’m ten and he knowth that so you can’t hit me again.”

Dad goes still. “I can do anything I want to,” he says, and it’s not Dad’s voice at all. It’s too deep, and ugly, and his eyes are like dead mud from edge to edge like bad movie CGI. I make distance, but it doesn’t stop me from letting out a gasp.

“It’th okay, Iola,” Jay says. He’s beside me, so fast I didn’t see him move, his hands wrapped about my right hand and squeezing gently. “It will be okay,” he says, staring up at me, and I just nod because – because it’s look at him or what Dad is, and I can’t do it yet.

Jay turns and stares up at Dad for me. “What are you, inthide him?”

“I do not know the word ‘inthide’,” the Dad-thing says.

“I’m athking,” Jay snaps. “I could make you tell me and you don’t want that.”

“You think to scare me, little thing from Outside who sucks his thumb like a baby?”

Jay snickers at that. “I thcare me, tho I thould thcare you as well. And anyway, it meant you didn’t actually look at me, and I did it last night tho Iola wouldn’t think it was odd for me to do. My mathter took my hiding with him, when he went away. You can thee me, if you want to.”

And Dad stumbles back toward the couch as if struck, face the colour of off-milk with eyes wide and dark. I’ve never heard Dad whimper in fear, not once. Not ever. He wasn’t even scared when Mom left, just – stood, got a drink. Said nothing, let me read her note. All of it.

“Humans get sad,” the Dad-thing says, and Dad’s body trembles like jello. “And sadness is a way inside, to drown them in themselves. To give us a host to play games in, to do things they would never dare to do. Because it is safer to be sad, because they don’t know what they would do if they were angry, because they don’t know how to voice the longings in their hearts and haven’t for long and long.”

Jay snorts, the sound weirdly adult. “No one knowth how to do that, except maybe a magithan. But he doethn’t want to be you, tho you can get out and go away. Or I can make you go, and I don’t think you’d want me to become what I’d have to in order to do that?”

The Dad-thing smiles a strange smile, and then sits down on the couch and Dad’s eyes are just his, confused and small.

“Nap,” Jay says, and Dad just – closes his eyes and goes to sleep as Jay rubs his throat. “You have water? That really hurt and I can’t make thleep work at all.”

I go into the kitchen, get water. He follows, drinks, says nothing.

“Adults shouldn’t have eyes like that.” It slips out.

“All adults do, I think?” Jay gulps back water. “They just hide it.”

“You knew what happened to Dad.” He looks over, nods. No grin. “He would have....”

“He would have done thingth he didn’t know about,” the boy says firmly. “You can take all the canth to a recycle plathe while he hath a nap?”

“So the lisp wasn’t part of you tricking me at all?”

He rolls his eyes at that. “No.”

“And you’re stuck waiting for this master of yours?”

Jay nods, says nothing else. I don’t think his being scared last night was an act. I’m not sure all the thumb stuff was either, but I just thank him, hug him, and he takes a sandwich and a few bags of cans I give him to recycle. I wait until the door closes, and a few minutes after that before I shake Dad awake.

He looks at me with normal eyes. I say, “Dad?”

He says, “Iola?”

He doesn’t ask about the beer cans. We don’t talk about what happened. I don’t think we ever will.

I’m happy I met Jay, and I’ll be happier if I never have to meet him again and I can’t begin to imagine what that kind of life must be like. So I go into the kitchen, make coffee, and Dad goes upstairs, showers, changes. Drinks coffee and goes outside to mow the lawn.

I watch him from the window and I’m crying again but this time I know why.