He finished his assignment and went to the center of the block to wait with the other guards. Most of them had gotten the point that the sour, green-skinned man wasn’t worth talking to. And only mildly worth talking about, in hushes.
The chief came around eventually, asking each to check-in with a report. “McManus,” she said about halfway down her list.
Runstom’s face grew hot. “With all due respect sir, would you please not call me that?”
The chief was as young as the rest of them, a tall B-fourean with short-cropped pale hair. She crooked an eyebrow at him. “Um. Well. What do you want to be called?”
“My name is Stanford Runstom,” he said through gritted teeth, tapping at the name badge just left of his sternum. “The chief of the watch should know that.”
“Oh.” She flicked at her pad for a moment, then looked back at him. Pointed a finger in the general direction of his chest. “Sorry, Runstom. Your badge says McManus.”
Runstom frowned down at the name affixed to his left breast. He hadn’t noticed it when he put the uniform on. A simple detail. Did he even care that he got stuck with McManus’s uniform? No. The disappointment came from missing the detail. He was drifting away from the goal of becoming a detective, both in title and in spirit.
“All prisoners checked in,” he said softly.
As soon as she dismissed them, he strode toward the door as fast as his legs could work in the half gravity. He could hear the voices behind him, a traditional pre-Xarp celebration being planned. The guards would be required to tube-up, but the sleep would be in shifts; a fraction of them would be in a semi-stasis, half-sleep, ready to be jolted awake if necessary. Whatever the shift, most of them would get as many drinks into their system as possible in the next hour. Xarping sober was reserved for the highly disciplined or the self-torturous. Runstom was one of those; which didn’t matter.
Back in his room he went through his own pre-Xarp ritual: programming his entertainment module to scoop up any transmissions of bombball games as they came within range of sportscasting relays. There were always a few hours of post-Xarp downtime and he liked to use that time to catch up on the season. It was something to look forward to. Something trivial. But one of the few rewards he gave himself.
As he prepped his tube, exhaustion pulled at his bones. He shrugged off the oppressive uniform and frowned one last time at McManus’s name staring him in the face as he tossed it aside. Missing details. Amateur. Like a rookie. What else had he missed?
*
Accelerate. Accelerate.
The human mind wasn’t meant to travel this fast. So fast, light can’t keep up. How can a brain that spends most of its day trying to decode visual signals into something meaningful cope when it’s moving faster than light?
The human mind wasn’t meant for a lot of things it’s been subjected to.
Speaking – or thinking – of which, Jax pined for Delirium. D-G, the little vacation he’d taken a few times before. The Wasters had a new kind called D-K that was supposed to be more potent. He knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help but be curious. Not that it mattered; no drugs were available to him in this damned ship.
It was his fourth and final trip between stars, and his eighth time experiencing faster-than-light speed. Each time it happened, his mind rewound to the beginning, replaying each memory in slow motion. As though he were traveling so fast that he lapped himself in a loop of time, and now watched only the moments where he broke laws – natural laws – not meant to be broken.
The first was his escape; from a prison barge, and from certain death. Some military dropship that Space Waste had repurposed, and Jax and Runstom had commandeered. Runstom piloted, Xarping in one direction, stopping to turn, Xarping again, and again and again. Multi-routed hops, like a hacker covering tracks on a network. Not that Jax had ever known any actual hackers. Well, except the ones that hacked him and framed him for murder. Fortunately, the original gangbanger pilot that they restrained in the cargo hold had a cache of Delirium-G. He’d revealed it to Jax on the condition that they’d both get a dose. The drug made the jagged trip bearable as Runstom tracked down the superliner that they would dock with and board.
The second was thankfully shorter, though drugless and sleepless. After weeks on the superliner investigating the murder that Jax had been accused of, they took the dropship for a hop across the Barnard system to the moon Terroneous. Runstom and Jax had survived the trip, but the ship had not, crash-landing into an empty field of grass. It was the first time Jax laid eyes on plant-life that had not been gardened or engineered.
Then he took a third trip, a long haul out to the Sirius system to chase the last of their clues. It was an interstellar commercial flight, which included stasis pods. Sleep was inescapable in the warm dark tube that droned with a soft, enveloping pulse of white noise that obscured binaural beats designed to quiet the mind. A light hypnotic gas ensured the sleep would hold for the duration of the trip, slowing his breathing and heartbeat. Most people wouldn’t dream, he’d been told, but some did. Jax dreamt of his flight from justice, replayed over and over and over, an inescapable loop.
And then only a few days since he’d arrived on Sirius-5, they’d found their killer, Runstom had made his arrest, and Jax needed to go. They’d solved the crime, but were under no illusion that Jax would be immediately exonerated. So he was back on one of those same commercial flights, returning to Barnard, in another sensory-depriving stasis tube. Upon boarding, his last and final companion was fear. He was alone, more so than he’d ever been in his life. His only ally gone off to make things right, with Jax’s remaining responsibility to stay out of the light.
Trip number five was a hitchhike, a soulless ride from the interstellar port back to Terroneous, but Jax drew few memories from those days. A shell arrived on that moon – a destination that some distant part of his mind desired, but once his body arrived, such desire was difficult to rekindle. Nevertheless, he trusted his inertia and slowly began piecing together a new life.
The sixth Xarp flight was when he was stolen away from that freshly planted home by this same sonova bitch, Jared McManus. They’d tubed him so again he’d gone into sensory-deprived sleep. Thinking back, he knew it’d been a short trip, but in those endless moments his frightful dreams of fugitivity slammed into fresh nightmares over the loss of his new home and his new friends. Lealina. She was not some true love, some mindless magical romance. She was real. She had made him feel real in a time when he’d forgotten what that was. She was what his life could be.
He’d been thrown into the tube by ModPol – by McManus – and when it opened, he’d been in the hands of Space Waste. Maybe it would happen again. When it happened before, he’d been given no choice but to join the gang’s ranks. They were planning an attack, and they needed his so-called hacker skills. And so the seventh Xarp trip Jax had taken was another leap between star systems, from Barnard’s Star to Epsilon Eridani, for the purposes of assaulting a lonely ModPol transport. He’d expected the Wasters to distribute Delirium-G or even the harder D-K for such a brutal trip, but their leaders were strict about limiting narcotics use before a fight. Instead, the Space Waste carrier had Xarp lounges: virtual rooms where passengers could congregate and take in limited forms of entertainment, such as storytelling or gambling. Breaking the laws of physics the way Xarp does, the mind can’t handle much input, so the data that flowed through those lounges was limited in bandwidth. It was the equivalent of a text-based chatroom, similar to the kind that Jax and his fellow operators frequented to pass time during long shifts at the life-support terminals back on Barnard-4. Although in the case of the Xarp lounge, the signal was a bit different, spiked into the brain through a helmet, in a way that made input and output seem like a spoken or typed conversation.
He had tried to play games with his fellow Wasters on that seventh Xarp trip, but the rules were usually not in the system, and instead only known to the participants who would send requests to bots to manage virtual decks of cards or random number generation as necessary. Most of the games seemed to Jax to be rooted in either luck, deceit, or both. They’d let him play as long as he was losing, but his first win had made them suspicious, given his role as a hacker. Again, their label, not his. Again, he’d never even known any hackers in his life, except those that were involved in murdering a block of domers and framing Jax for the crime.
So this was trip number eight for Jax. It would be his last, either because he would be thrown in prison or killed when he arrived to see the light of Barnard’s Star. And when this final trip started, all the others came flooding back, just like they always did. All the memories, the prison barge, the superliner, Terroneous, Sirius-5, Terroneous again, the arrest, the Space Waste base, Xarping to Eridani. The whole string kicked off by the haunting tragedy of those suffocated souls, Jax too concerned with his own false imprisonment to remember to mourn them. Damn Jenna Zarconi for her blind revenge streak. And damn Mark Xavier Phonson for driving her to it.
The thought of X was something Jax didn’t want in his head any more. The corrupt bastard had his come-uppance when Runstom arrested him back on Sirius-5. But nothing had stuck, and Jax never heard word of what became of him. He pushed the thoughts away.
The ModPol intersystem patroller had a similar lounge system to the Space Waste carrier, and Jax hadn’t noticed the apparatus that had slid around the back of his head until the interface spiked through the black clouds of his mind.
They could have left him in the blankness of Xarp. Days, weeks – endless nothing. Body slowed but not stopped. Mind useless but not asleep. It would have been torture. But they didn’t do that. They plugged him into the lounge. A shred of compassion from these thugs with badges.
The cops had lounge games of their own, which Jax had no choice but to play in order to keep his sanity. Most of these games were conducted by Ayliff, the pilot, and Granny, the gunner, as McManus managed to grumble his way through the text-like interactions and drifted in and out of the exchanges. After a while, Jax switched to some of the other channels that were available. These were one-way inputs, some of them being obsolete news broadcast recordings, others fiction. He sampled a few of these, but they all seemed to be poorly-written drivel about adventures through space.
With enough probing through the system’s help interface, he figured out how to open a private channel with McManus.
“Whaddya want?”
Even through the pseudo-text, pseudo-voice, mind-fuck interface, Jax could detect the cop’s disdain. “You said you’re not taking me to ModPol.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
There was an infinite pause. “Don’t remember.”
Jax wondered if the spike would pick up his exasperation somehow. “What’s going to happen to me?”
“Look, man. You might as well forget about what’s going to happen and just let it happen.”
Jax boiled. He wasn’t going to let the cop off that easily. “It’s a long flight, Sergeant, and we’ve got literally nothing to do for, what, days?”
“Ten days.”
“So talk to me. Obviously I’m not going anywhere.”
“You just don’t get it, do you Jackson?” the reply snapped back. “People like you and me, we’re just tools, okay? We’re not in control. They are. We do their will. Most of the time without even knowing it.”
“Speak for yourself—”
“No, I’m speaking for you, domer. You were born to work and eat and sleep. Part of a herd. Like an animal from Earth.”
“You’re from Barnard-3, aren’t you?” Jax said, but it felt like a desperate comeback. “You’re as much of a domer as I am.”
“I was,” he said. “I started to see it, when I joined ModPol. Getting out of the domes. Seeing the world from the outside.”
“And now I see it too,” Jax tried. “I’ve been out for—”
“Sure, yeah. You’ve been a fugitive for a little while. Bouncing around the stars, making a big fat mess wherever you go. But you don’t know what a real life outside the shelter is like.”
But Jax did know. He didn’t know from his own experience, but he became close with people who grew up on Terroneous. He tried to understand, tried to feel what it was like for them, how hard it was, and yet their ability to push through. He needed to understand that drive, that hope in the face of hopelessness. “It’s survival,” he said. “Survival above everything.”
Another infinite silence, then McManus returned. “Yeah. Sometimes to survive though, it means someone else doesn’t.”
