“Tough.” The printer began spitting out documents. “Heather Anne Jilson was the name of the girl whose mother was being beaten up by Darson, the one saved by an enforcer. The one who supposedly died in the Battle of Seattle.”
His brain didn’t work on every level all the time, but Mateo was thorough about security. Sometimes scary thorough. I paged through the thin brown hemp-docs on the printer. Heather now had a full ID, background, and history, all documented. I stuffed the docs into my personal storage area and pulled out my kutte. I hadn’t looked at it in ages and it was way too small to fit now. I’d been spider-monkey small at twelve and had put on a quarter meter and a few kilos since then. I pulled off the old sensors, found the one that was activated when the Crawler crossed over the property boundary, and ripped it off. I put them all into a box. I added some older sensors and a few ancient digital camera parts. Some early EntNu Coms, earth-to-space hardware. The box now looked as if I stored small electronic scrap in it.
I placed the box on the cabinet, knowing that the decision on how to proceed had been made for me the moment Jagger started to serve me. It was a damn shame. He was interesting. But he’d live or he’d die. Either way, I couldn’t keep him around and I had to make sure he remembered what I wanted him to.
I set the table for two. Which was really weird. I had never done that before. I checked the power levels on the office weapons that Jagger didn’t know about yet. Stirred the soup. Realized I was nervous. There were little pinpricks all over me and my wrist was all but buzzing. My system was flooding with battle pheromones and mating chemicals and my breath rate and heart rate were increasing. I fought to push my reaction down, to control my anxiety and my need, to decrease the secretions of chemicals and nanos through my pores.
I was never around people for long. I made sure that I never had to deal with this part of me. I didn’t have the control I might have if I went into town more often.
“So. I’m Matt?” Mateo said, making sure I had chosen.
“Yeah. Matt,” I said flatly. “I didn’t mean to transition Jagger.”
“You never do.”
“A transition is better for him than being dead. If I can alter his memories enough to keep us safe,” I amended.
“If he lives through the process, maybe,” Mateo said, his metallic voice managing to convey both doubt and mockery.
I rubbed my wrist and said softly, “That was mean.”
But Mateo was right. Surviving the transition was no sure thing. Yet I had lived through it twice.
The first time was when I was twelve, near the end of the first year of the war. I was swarmed by deadly genetically-engineered male ants. They bit off parts of me and stung me full of poison. Then the queen got me, depositing her DNA-based bio-nanobots. The bio-nanos entered my bloodstream and attacked me on the genetic level—just as they had been designed to do to the ants. When I somehow survived the initial transition, the bio-nanos continued to modify me.
In the second incident, I got exposed to a different kind of nano when a bigger, newer model Chinese Mama-Bot crawled out of the bay and attacked what was left of Seattle. I’d been the only OMW small enough to get inside the Mama-Bot in an attempt to disable it. Once inside, I’d been attacked by Puffers, and their mechanical nanos—mech-nanos—got into a cut. The bio-nanos already in my system adapted and modified them too.
I’d survived the two transitions but they had left me what I was now—not superhuman, but no longerjusthuman. With abilities that humans didn’t have.
Eventually the half-bio/half-mech-nanos began to secrete through my skin, driven to seek out and modify others. All but one of the people I’d accidently or purposely touched after that had died in their own transition process. Including my father, who I had tried to save from the disease that had been sucking the life out of him.
And now I’d gotten sloppy and let a human into my space. Jagger was already showing signs of the transition, bending to my will, becoming what I called a thrall. And he didn’t even have the fever yet.
Sloppy. I’d gottenbloodysloppy.
I got out playing cards and checked the Chrono because it felt as if my visitor had been in there a long time, but ten minutes wasn’t long unless I was nervous. Then it felt like forever. The music switched to Frank Sinatra singing “Fly Me to The Moon.” The music was changing again when I heard the PTC hatch open.
I didn’t turn around. I stirred the soup, my toes tapping to Aretha Franklin belting out “Rolling In The Deep.” When I did look over, Jagger was sitting at the dinette, dressed in Pops’ clothes, his eyes on me, a fresh beer in one hand.
“Gomez. Music volume down. Matt,” I said over the office speakers, pushing with my blood slightly, accepting Jagger’s transition, preparing for enough mind-altering to allow him to leave us alive. “Update, please.”
“Twenty-four Puffers accounted for. Jagger’s bike is fine, to this point, Heather. What are you and Jagger having for supper?”
Small talk. Baby steps, using our fake names to overwrite Jagger’s short-term memories with new ones. We chatted about the cats. We mentioned the imaginary boss a few times and his imaginary trip into Charleston, West Virginia, on business. Jagger didn’t take part. I brought the stewpot to the table and ladled chowder into the bowls. Jagger didn’t ask about the name changes. Didn’t seem to notice. He’d touched everything I had touched in the toilette. The beers. The ladle . . . everything.
We’d had a guest once before, the first year I was here, Grant Zuckerman, a nice man who showed an interest in me and who I liked. A lot. He and I got close. Very close. It seemed like an okay thing, since Grant lived in the nearest town, Naoma, and had Internet access and wanted to do business with the scrapyard. Mateo and I had done great with the mind-altering, giving Grant his freedom, keeping him coming back, or so we thought. Unfortunately, Grant wanted more. It had gotten ugly. Mateo had been forced to end him. The bones were out back, buried beneath a pile of rusted-out John Deere tractors, his flesh long since eaten by rats.
Transitioning the cats had been a mistake. I hadn’t known the bastardized nanos could pass from human to another species, but it had gone better once we figured out that Tuffs had become mine, and a queen. The cats didn’t seem to get sick. They just got better, smarter, faster, and had the ability to communicate mind-to-mind.
I brought spoons to the table and sat. We ate, and the fish stew was delicious.
“So. While we wait on Matt to clean out the Puffers,” I said, “tell me why you’re here.”
Jagger frowned.
“You said there was a tracking sensor?”
“On a kutte,” Jagger said, sounding uncertain.
