Chapter 10 #3
So they took me from my mates and hid me in a strip club for three years until my mates found me. That fills in almost all the blanks. Almost.
But there’s a little more.
The time I came back having stolen their ship. That wasn’t that long ago. A few months, max. I guess they scooped me up as I came in and handed me over to my handler for a lecture and another brain washing.
“You’re getting to be quite the problem, Agent Mills,” Mr. Brown says. “Every time we turn our backs, you’re fornicating with the aliens again and attempting to stop the human trade. It’s a billion-dollar industry. We would appreciate you not disrupting it.”
“But it’s wrong.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Do you work in the ethics division?”
“No,” I say. “But…”
“You have never been paid to discern right and wrong. You have been paid to bring those three aliens into our control. You’re going down to the ground. And if you’re unlucky, we might have you picked up and taken into the system.”
“What? No. You can’t ground me!”
“You’re being grounded,” he says, his tone somewhat mournful. “I didn’t want to do this to you, Agent Mills, but you’ve disappointed us at every turn. You’re lucky you’re not being more forcefully retired.”
“So that was about killing me!”
“We have gone a rather long way out of our way not to kill you,” he says. “You have no idea how close you’ve been to elimination multiple times. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you have a death wish.”
“Okay. So.”
“So now you’re grounded. A third, and I hope, final memory wipe is going to be undertaken. If you’re smart, you might be able to live your life out down there without anything horrible happening to you. If you’re not, well… let’s hope you are.”
“Please, Mr. Brown. I’m in love. I might even be pregnant. You can’t send me to Earth. People down there live like animals. They’re hunted by actual creatures, and there’s…”
“Yes. I know. Terrible. Anyway.”
And then my memories were gone again.
But now they’re back.
And here I am. In the same place I’ve been so many times before, and been entirely unable to remember. The liminal space of my nightmares is a conference room. That feels fitting somehow.
But this time I am not in trouble. This time I am the prodigal daughter, finally having delivered the alien mercenaries to the grasp of my corporate overlords.
“Melanie!” I exclaim. “My name is Melanie!”
Mr. Brown smiles. “Yes.”
“You have no idea what it’s like not being able to remember your own name. It’s like an itch you can’t scratch, but the itch is inside your brain. I don’t recommend it.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” he smiles.
I can’t let him know how I’m feeling about this situation. There have been so many lies, in a way. There’s been so much confusion. And I’ve effectively lived three separate timelines.
But one thing hasn’t changed. I’ve fallen for my mates every single time, and I’ve tried to save women every single time.
I wonder if that occurs to Mr. Brown. I really hope it doesn’t, or the next thing that happens will be some kind of projectile in my skull.
They wouldn’t have given me all my memories back just to kill me, I tell myself. If they want me to know everything, then there’s a reason for that.
“You’re being promoted,” Mr. Brown says. “No other agent has ever pulled off an interstellar mission of this magnitude. You’ve sacrificed your body and your mind for the company. We want you to know that will not be forgotten.”
“Wow, thank you. What will my new role be?”
“Agent Plus,” he says proudly. “You will receive a five percent discount on your essential subscriptions, including cleaner air and potable water. Your corporate apartment will be returned to you, minus a cleaning fee for the men you killed.”
“Shit. I really killed them?”
“Oh, yes. The cleaning fee was substantial, I’m afraid. But don’t worry. We know you deserve a real raise. So from tomorrow onwards, you are getting an exclusive fresh vegetable subscription, delivered to your door once every two weeks.”
“That’s what… that’s what I get?” Vegetables? I like tomatoes, but that’s about it. All these years of service, all this being ripped out of my own consciousness every five minutes, and I get veggies?
“Also, you’ve forgotten to pay your subscriptions while you were under the memory effects, so you’re actually technically several years in arrears, but don’t worry.
We’re prepared to offer you a payment program.
You’ll pay off your arrears at a rate of thirty-three percent interest. Very fair, I think you’ll agree. ”
I do some quick mental math. By my reckoning, I’ll have minus two hundred credits every week. I guess I’m going to have to really stretch my vegetable subscription. Or I could just kill the man in front of me.
“Go ahead,” Mr. Brown says, clearly reading my face, or perhaps just directly listening into my thoughts, for all I know. “I’ve been waiting for someone to do it. It may as well be you. Then it will be over for the both of us.”
Hard to kill a man who doesn’t mind if he dies. Just feels… wrong. Like I want to talk him into wanting to live first, and then kill him so I know he wasn’t suffering from poor mental health.
“So I’m fucked.”
“You’re no more fucked than anybody else,” he says.
I’ve betrayed the mates who loved me, and I’ve gotten nothing for it.
“I want the chip out,” I say. “I don’t mind the debt, but I don’t want to stay your little… creature anymore. I want my own mind back.”
He gives a shrug. “It’ll only add to your debt, but if you’re happy with that…”
“Fucking delirious,” I say.
“Alright. Down the hall, to the left. Ask for the brain surgeon.”
“It’s that simple?”
“When you’re dealing with corporate funding, anything is possible, Ms. Mills.”
I do as he says, and before I know what’s really going on, I’m being prepped for brain surgery. They don’t sedate you, because it’s the brain, so it turns out to be a pretty easy process compared to others.
“Being decommissioned, are we?” the brain surgeon says. “Have a seat. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
I take a seat in the chair.
“Can I keep the chip once you take it out?”
“It’s proprietary,” the surgeon says. “Sorry. I can give you a smiley face sticker, though.”
“Cool.”
The surgery doesn’t hurt. They whack me full of painkillers, shave a patch of my head, drill a hole, and retrieve the chip. From what I understand it’s on the surface of my brain, not deep in the folds or somewhere in the actual brain… flesh? Goo? Material?
“What are you giggling about?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“We might be stimulating a mirth center. Make a note,” the surgeon says. “Alright. I’m going to restore the chunk of skull we took and glue it down. Then we’re going to put a foam helmet on. Wear it for the next twenty-one days at least.”
I look goofy.
But that’s the least of my problems.
I’ve betrayed the three mates I love for a vegetable subscription and a lifetime of corporate debt. That’s not a good deal no matter how you slice it.
I have to get to my mates before they are gotten to by Zeal.
I have to save them from my treachery, and I have to… it’s too much. I can’t think about everything else I have to do.
First things first. Got to get off the island. That’s going to be hard. We’re not really supposed to get down. There are airships and things that travel between the islands, but not many that go off the side.
Got to go to an illegal dumping point. To the place the fridges fall.
That’s the part of the island where there are warehouses and technicians.
There’s a lot of machinery involved in keeping a city this size functioning in a generally pleasant way.
The people who work in this part of the city are actively encouraged not to go to the sides of the island where the people who like to think of themselves as sophisticated live.
I catch a few strange looks on my way down there. Could be because I’m dressed a little differently than most. Could be the big foam bauble keeping my skull intact. I guess we’ll never know.
I go toward the edge and walk along it. In the richer parts of town, the edge is very well barricaded off in ways that are designed to look sleek. Kind of like a whole border of scenic lookouts. People go there to eat lunch or date or brush their hair or whatever.
That’s not what people here do. Here the barricade is just big slabs of metal riveted together and decorated with Edge signs.
But there’s a breach in the edge, where the wind is blowing through, and there’s a man sitting on a chair that looks like it is on the precipice of collapsing completely.
He’s wearing a dirty old hi-vis vest, and jeans that look stained with oil and paint and dozens of other working chemicals.
He’s got a bristle brush mustache, a twinkle in his eye, and a stack of what I mistakenly assume to be backpacks next to him.
There’s a sign, too. It reads: Jump For Free!
I walk up to him, hardly believing someone is actually doing this. I shouldn’t be surprised. If there’s one thing being alive for all these years has taught me, it’s that someone is always doing something.
“Jump for free?” I read the sign out loud as a question.
“Mhm. Costs nothing to jump,” he says. “Might be the last real free thing we have.”
“That’s dark,” I murmur to myself.
He chuckles. “You want to jump?”
“I need to get down to the ground,” I tell him. “Not sure how to do that except by jumping.”
“Want me to push you off?” He stands up and stretches. I take a big step back, in case he’s got some kind of insanity. The kind that makes him push people off the side of the island. People used to get that kind a lot. That’s why the barrier was built in the first place.
“Is that safe?”
“I mean, not particularly,” he says. “I could sell you a parachute that would help.”
“Oh, you could? Yes. Why don’t you do that,” I say, playing along at first, until I look at the stack of bags next to him and realize that he actually does have parachutes.
“Oh, they’re real?”