ds_flashfiction | for the Space challenge: Real Boys (Part 3), by Salieri

troyswann.livejournal.com posting in

Chapter Four: You Were Lost and Gone Forever

"Jump complete," the pod said. Something sharp poked him at the base of his skull, releasing sizzle into his veins.

"Aw," Ray said. "Crap." For a long time, like, maybe two weeks or a minute or ten seconds, there was just a swirl of twisted space behind his eyeballs as the sizzle worked its way down his arms and legs.

Then someone pressed what felt suspiciously like the muzzle of a pulse pistol to the middle of his forehead.

Ray didn't bother to open his eyes. "Hello, Wailer. Worked your way up from shooting junkies in the back to takin on the semi-conscious, huh?"

"Get out."

"Make me."

The Wailer did. Still not quite connected to his brain, Ray's arms and legs didn't work too good. So much for Ray's plans for heroic resistance. The Wailer hauled him out of the pod and dropped him onto the deck. Ray grunted when his shoulder connected with the edge of the pod on the way down. Everything sort of greyed out at that point and when it came back, it was like he was looking down the wrong end of a telescope. With his face pressed to the deck at the Wailer's feet, Ray scanned as much of the bay as he could see, stopping at the sight of a familiar pair of tall boots.

"Fraser?"

"Yes, Ray."

"You okay?"

"Yes."

"Brains?"

"Not inside out, if that's what you mean."

"Good. Dief?"

Fraser didn't answer, but the silence had enough crackle in it to make Ray heave himself up so he could get a look into the pod. Dief was out cold. Breathing, but out.

"They sedated him before he could recover from jump shock." Fraser's voice was matter-of-fact on the surface and vibrating underneath. For a whole half-second Ray considered feeling sorry for the Wailer.

"They?" Ray let himself slide back down the pod so he could lean on it and get a read on the situation.

"That would be us." The guy was a tall string-bean with hair slicked back from a receding hairline and a skinny mustache under a big nose. Ray had been right before: the suit he wore was worth at least a month's salary. His eyes were the bright blue of artificial enhancement.

While Ray slouched against the pod, the other thug--a shifty little guy with a 330 pistol that was clearly making up for a deep-seated sense of sexual inadequacy--patted him down, but he missed the needle that, fortunately, had bitten through Ray's pocket and slipped into the lining of his coat. Ray kept his hand away from it, just in case their boss's eyes weren't just standard aesthetics and could actually see through his clothes.

"Langoustini," he said to the string bean. "I hear you're a diplomat now."

"Today I'm a diplomat. Tomorrow, who knows?" Langoustini looked smug and mean. "Bring 'em," he ordered as turned and headed down the row of crates. His voice was low and smooth, like he never had to shout or give an order twice.

The Wailer lifted Ray by his bad shoulder and shoved him after his boss. Fraser moved ahead of them, his hands held out from his sides; the pistol settled nice and cosy at the back of Ray's neck was enough of a threat to keep Fraser in line. Ray's hands closed into fists. He'd have to talk to Fraser about this guardian angel complex he had. As they moved past the first of the crates, a fourth guy fell into step with them. Ray recognized him from his mug shot. He looked like a grampa. One of those grampas who drank a lot and threw the empties at kids in the street.

"Worsley."

"Detective Kowalski, right?" He had more grey hair now after a couple years water-digging on Europa, and a stoop that said he'd spent most of that time in a waldo, mining way, way down where the dark was darkest and the pressure highest. Ray could see the ugly concentric rings of the rig implant gleaming at the base of his skull. When he turned and raised an eyebrow at Ray, his eyes flicked to the right, following the ghost, probably. Two years in a waldo rig and guys started seeing themselves, ghost reflections floating around in their peripheral vision. Alienation effect, the doc called it when he was pointing out all the ways Ray was so lucky for being too queer for implants. After a second Worsley focused on Ray. "Still walking around, huh? A smart man would've taken the hint and laid down by now."

Ray shrugged. "I guess I'm not a smart man." The pain in his shoulder lanced down into this fingers and up into his head, leaving a sharpness behind. He showed some teeth. "Smart enough to find you, though."

Worsley chuckled, a sound like gravel on sheet metal. "Got us right where you want us."

Before Ray could come up with a witty response, Langoustini stopped at the end of the row and tapped a code into the pad on the side of the first crate. There was a shimmer and the face of the crate dissolved. Inside was a man.

"Holy Jee on a pony," Ray said.

For the first time since he'd known him, Fraser looked surprised.

Langoustini tapped his comm. "Nero, the rest, please."

A second later the faces of all the crates dissolved and Ray was standing between rows and rows of bots. All standing still, eyes closed, not a breath, not a twitch. Hundreds of them.

"Fraser. It's you."

Fraser's expression hardened. "It's an army."

Maybe it was the lifeless stillness of the Frasers, or maybe it was Worsley's self-satisfied laugh. Either way, Ray's hair stood up on his neck.

"That's right, Constable. An army of colonial emancipation. Your AI-Robert Fraser knows how to make a good bot." Worsley slapped the side of the nearest crate. "Damn good bot."

Fraser's eyes narrowed. "No," was all he said.

"Oh, yes." Worsley leaned on the crate and folded his arms. "You were the prototype. The buyer wanted something smart and durable. From that template came these. Problem was, AI-Robert Fraser was a bit too good at his job. Like him, you have too much autonomy for our purposes." He hooked his thumb at the bot in the box. "These ones won't have that drawback." He chuckled again. "Dumbed them down a little."

"My father would not have--"

"Your father followed orders. What else could he do?" Pushing himself away from the crate, Worsley aimed a finger at Fraser. "Like you, though, he was a little too slippery. Had this tricky way about him. Learned how to follow orders without following orders." He stepped up close to Fraser. "He embedded an activation code into their programming."

Fraser smiled. "And he wouldn't give it to you."

"No."

"So you killed him."

Fraser didn't even blink when Worsley barked a laugh right in his face. Ray's hand twitched against the hem of his coat. "No." Worsley wagged a finger at Fraser and turned away to inspect the bot. "No. Not quite. You know, Fraser, these colonists, they're the children and grandchildren of terraformers. If there's one thing you can say for terraformers it's that they're a patient bunch. Your Governor Metcalfe's waited thirteen years for her army. The design, the manufacture--that's my specialty--components farmed out to five different planets, assembled on Pixie in a sex-bot factory, all the right people greased, diplomatic seals for transport. A pretty plan. Elegant. The bitch built her revolutionary army right in the heart of the Empire." He shrugged and reached up to run a finger along the bot's cheek, almost lovingly. Ray's fingers flexed and his vision narrowed again, seething red. "We would have extracted the code eventually. Patience. Except the damn AI self-terminated before we could crack the encryption."

Langoustini snorted. "AIs can't self-terminate."

"I think AIs can do a lot of things."

"So what do you need us for?" Ray asked.

"You? We'll see. Him?" Worsley came back to peer closely at Fraser again. "AI-Robert Fraser launched a data squirt right before the system blanked. That could only have gone to you."

"Dear Diary," Ray muttered and clamped his mouth shut when Fraser shot him a look.

"We want the activation code, Fraser. Give us the code and you can go. Both of you. The dog, too."

Fraser raised his chin. "I can't do that."

Worsley decided to go for folksy grampa, chummy pal, good ol' guy. "Come on, Fraser. This is your destiny. You're a colonial man. And if you won't do it for the colony, do it for them." He took in the whole cargo hold with a sweep of his arm. "These are your brethren. You can give them life."

Taking a deep breath, Fraser stared at the bot across from him, then turned to look down the long row of crates. Ray didn't even want to imagine what it must be like to see himself like that, dead and crated up, over and over and over again.

"Mr. Worsley," Fraser said, "if these are indeed, as you say, my brethren, then you also know that I must decline."

Worsley cursed and stepped closer to Ray, hands in his pockets, shaking his head like he was disappointed his grandson had decided to be a flick star instead of going into the family business.

"You see," Fraser continued, "I would rather that these 'brethren' never awoke than that they should live their lives in servitude to the base ambitions of the corrupt."

Worsley turned on him, a bad storm waiting to break. "Your father--"

"My father never wanted to wage war on humanity."

"Your father made an army!"

Fraser shook his head. "You made an army. My father made a son."

Worsley chuckled at his shoes, like he was indulging the charmingly dim-witted. "I could kill you."

"Yes, you could, but you'd be no further ahead, and I suspect that you'd kill me anyway, once I gave you what you want."

"Alright. If you won't do it for the colony and you won't do it for the cause of bot fellowship, maybe you'll do it for him."

Gramps was fast for an old guy with rig palsy, or maybe Ray's reflexes were still sludgy from his time in that piece-of-crap cheap-ass emergency jump pod. Whatever. Before Ray could move, he'd kicked Ray behind the knee, dropping him to the deck, heaved him upright again and rammed a pistol against his temple.

"Give me the goddamn code," Worsley growled.

Fraser shifted his weight; the Wailer shifted his aim. The little weasel thug let out a high-pitched giggle and stepped back, pistol wavering between Fraser and Ray.

"Fraser! Don't you do it. Don't you give it to them." Ray forced himself not to shout when Worsley reached down and ground his fingers into the wound on his shoulder.

"Ray--" Ray couldn't tell if Fraser was asking for something or apologizing or what.

"Don't."

Worsley shoved the pulse pistol harder against Ray's temple. "Give me the code or I will show you the inside of his head."

Again, Ray's vision narrowed, everything gone but Fraser standing there in Ray's wrinkled shirt, his face blank but his eyes dark and maybe even a little wild, shiny. Anger. Sorrow. Tears. "Don't let them use me against you, Fraser," Ray said evenly, suddenly calm, like he'd already stepped out of himself, ready to go... wherever he was gonna go. "Don't let them use you. Nobody gets used. Not anymore."

"Last chance," Worsley said and Ray could practically feel the muscles in his fingers tensing on the trigger.

"Ray."

"It's okay." As last words went, they didn't suck too bad, he figured.

Still, he had something better, and Ray opened his mouth, but he never got a chance to say it because Langoustini pulled his own swank little piece and tucked it in behind Worsley's ear.

"I say who dies on my boat." Langoustini plucked the gun from his hand. He looked at the Wailer and the Weasel. "If you don't want your boss ventilated, you'd better drop your weapons and kick 'em over here."

Big surprise, the Wailer was not the brightest bulb in the marquee. He didn't drop his gun. Instead he swung around and aimed it at Langoustini.

And then everybody moved at once. There was probably a lot of heroics going on, but Ray was focused on slapping his hand down on the needle to force it through the lining of his coat, then scooping it up, twisting on his knees, and ramming the needle as hard as he could into the Wailer's thigh. "That's for Skeezer!" Ray snarled as he hooked the Wailer's ankle and toppled him. Fraser was a blur in the corner of Ray's eye, and a pulse shot melted the side of crate where he'd been standing. Then Ray was scrambling up the Wailer's body and bringing the needle down so that it rang against the deck a hair's breadth from the Wailer's right ear. He yanked the needle out of the deck plating and brought it down again, through the fabric of the Wailer's coat, pinning him at the shoulder but missing the flesh. He reared up again, and this time he wasn't playing. But before he could bring the needle down to skewer the Wailer through the eye, a hand gripped his wrist and stopped him.

"Ray."

Panting, Ray shook his head, leaned hard against Fraser's resistance, but it was no use. The guy was made of steel. Finally he opened his fingers and let the needle fall. Beneath him, the Wailer had his eyes closed, lips moving like he was praying. Ray shoved himself off of him and sat on the deck with his back against Fraser's legs and hung his head. "Sometimes it sucks being the good guy."

"Tell me about it," Langoustini said with a chuckle as he keyed his comm. "But some days, it's sweet. No, not you," he sneered at whoever was on the other end. "This is 327, like you didn't know. Your pigeons are in the basket. You guys want to get over here and take them off my hands?" He was sitting on Worsley's sprawled body grinning and rubbing his knuckles. Leaning forward toward Ray, he held out the unbruised hand. "Vecchio. Royal Bureau of Investigation. Welcome to my triumphant retirement."

^^^

Within two minutes The Margaret Trudeau was crawling with Royal agents, all in identical black suits and dark lenses, all muscling around and posing while subvocalizing into their comms.

Standing in the middle with his hands on his hips, a satisfied grin on his face, Vecchio was saying, "First thing, I get my own eyes back. You know what it's like looking through a gangster's eyes for two and a half years? Sure, the retinal scan gets you into any exclusive club you can name, but knowing where they came from--" He shuddered. "It messes with your head." Then he remembered that he was ticked off and frowned. "Of course, now I don't get into any exclusive clubs. No more Billybong. No more top-floor anything."

"Billybong, huh?" Ray was interested, but Fraser interrupted before Vecchio could spill.

"Agent Vecchio, what will happen now?"

Vecchio shrugged. "Depends. Now we know you're not in on it, and we've confirmed the Governor's involvement, I say we make the rendezvous down here on Clementine and see who shows up to collect the goods. If it's Metcalfe herself, or somebody we can flip to get to her, then I go home and have linguine with my mother."

"And the bots?"

Vecchio shrugged again. "Demo'd, prob'ly. Turn 'em into toasters." The way he couldn't meet Fraser's eyes confirmed what Ray suspected: maybe a couple would go in the masher to make a show for the press, but on the whole, the bots would be disappeared.

"I see," Fraser said, his face betraying nothing.

Ray followed him over to the melted crate where Dief was swaying a little woozily and staring up at the bot inside. It was undamaged, almost peaceful there with its eyes closed except that it was too still, too empty. Ray leaned to the side a little so that the back of his hand brushed Fraser's. Fraser's hand turned out and his fingers curled for just a second around Ray's.

"How's your shoulder?"

Ray rolled it a little and didn't bother to hide his wince this time. "Sucks, but it'll be okay." He nudged Fraser with his good elbow. "Maybe you can spare a couple million of those nanite thingmies, fix me up."

Fraser nodded. "I would if I could."

"Prob'ly wouldn't take to me anyway."

"Because you're queer."

Ray laughed. "Yeah."

Behind them, medbots were hauling Worsley and the Wailer and the Weasel out on stretchers. The agents were gathering in a knot, murmuring like distant machines.

"They believe I have the code," Fraser said softly.

"Do you?"

Fraser reached into the crate and lifted the bot's hand, turned it up to the light. It was seamless. No lines, no calluses. "My father knew, as I know, that we have no right to the contents of our minds. Would it have been wise of him to send me the code?"

The bot in the box wasn't sleeping. It wasn't anything yet. Ray wondered what he'd see in its eyes if they opened. He shifted uncomfortably and winced again against the pain. "Love makes people do weird things."

"Very true." Again, a brief entanglement of fingers. The murmur from the agents got louder. "They're coming." They turned to face them.

The blandest, blankest of the agents stepped forward. Ray noticed that Vecchio hung back, his face clouded.

"Artificial life-form Benton Fraser, you are in contravention of Armistice Statute 15. Please come with us."

As the rest of the agents came forward, Dief growled and Ray stepped in front of Fraser. "Whoa, hang on! He just stopped a fucking war. This is what he gets?"

"Ray, please." Fraser held firm when Ray tried to shrug his restraining hand off of his shoulder. "We knew this would be the outcome. I gave you my word, remember?"

"Shut up, Fraser." Dief's growl was vibrating against Ray's legs.

He could feel Fraser crouching down, and turned to watch him take Dief's head in his hands. "Stand down," Fraser said distinctly. "Stay with Ray."

Dief whined, but lowered his head. Doggy resignation. Ray didn't feel so much like following orders.

"Fraser--"

Fraser straightened, came a step closer. His hand came up and brushed the side of Ray's face, then fell away. "It's okay."

It was not okay.

The agents closed around him, and then Fraser was walking away.

It was absolutely not in any way okay.

Ray launched himself after him, but two more agents materialized out of nowhere and yanked him back, lifting him right off his feet. As he struggled against them--catching one of them real good with a boot-heel to the instep--two more jumped in. Then Vecchio was there, shoving them aside and at least getting Ray's feet on the ground again, shouting, "Hey! He's one of us, you morons! Let him go!"

They did, but they didn't move aside, and neither did Vecchio.

"Get out of my way, Vecchio," Ray said, low and dangerous as Armando Langoustini on his worst day.

"You can't help him like this," Vecchio said. It was hard to read his freakish blue eyes, but Ray thought he saw something there, something like a promise. Vecchio pulled open Ray's jacket. "And you're bleeding."

Yeah, because that's what happened when you ripped a guy open down the middle.

"Don't just stand there, knucklehead," Vecchio said to the nearest agent. "Go find a medbot."

Over Vecchio's shoulder, Ray could see Fraser way down at the end of the row near the door. Softly, because he knew bots had good ears, Ray said, "Fraser."

In the doorway, Fraser turned, flanked by his escort.

"You're a good man."

Ray couldn't make out Fraser's expression, but he saw him nod before turning away and following the agents out the door. If he said anything in reply, Ray's ears weren't sharp enough to catch it.

At his feet, Dief tipped back his head and howled. The sound rose up and rolled around and around the cargo hold until the agents lifted their hands to their ears. Ray didn't tell him to stop.

Chapter Five: The Memory of All That

The transport kicked up its own snowstorm as Ray spiraled down in front of the Quonset hut that passed for a space port in these parts. Above him, the sky was a blue so deep he had to be careful not to look at it too much because it made him feel like he was falling upward. A jump ship hung like a shard of glass in the centre of the view through his canopy, reflecting the sunlight in a skinny orbit. On the ground, a hopper hunkered down, a shiny-backed bug twice the size of the hut. Beside the hut a woman was gazing up at him. Her dark hair whipped around her face, and she held up a gloved hand to catch it and to protect her eyes from the blowing snow.

She waited until his transport dropped with an ungraceful lurch the last couple of meters, then turned and headed for the door, kicking her boots against the doorjamb before going inside. Ray sat in the pilot's seat and breathed through his nose until his blood stopped throbbing so hard in his neck. In his gloves his hands were clammy with sweat. "Okay," he said, closed his eyes, and counted to ten and back. "Okay."

Sunblind, he stumbled at the doorstep and Thatcher caught him by the shoulder of his jacket, then let him go.

"I'm sorry. Did I hurt you?"

"Nah." A month ago he'd've felt it. Today there wasn't much pain. Just stiffness, a hinky reluctance like his brain was willing but the body rebelled. He tried not to read too much into that.

"Alright, then." She stepped over to the counter and talked to Sven, who turned and headed into the back where Ibtihail and Wolf were offloading the cargo from Thatcher's hopper.

Ray drummed his fingers against his thighs.

"I thought maybe you'd ask for a medal," Thatcher said after awhile.

"Already got a medal."

"Or maybe a place in a 'liner."

"Already got a place."

She huffed out a not-quite-derisive laugh and shook her head. "If you can call it that."

"I can." Ray deliberately kept his eyes on the scuffed surface of the counter. He didn't want to see the crate when it came off the hopper.

"I give you six months," Thatcher said, not too unkindly. "If the weather doesn't kill you, the boredom will." She paced from one side of the room to the other, clapped her gloved hands in front of her and then behind her back, impatient to be going. This was, Ray knew, her last task to complete in the colonies before taking up her cushy job at the consulate. "Believe me, I know. All that emptiness. It creeps into you. And before you know it, you're hollow."

Ray could go for a little hollow just then. Anything but the heaviness he was dragging around inside him. "I suppose I should thank you," he said with a slight jerk of his chin toward the back room and the cargo he wouldn't let himself look at. There was a hiss as the crate opened.

Thatcher shook her head. "Not me. It's Agent Vecchio who has the long arms and the friends in high places. Thank him." She paused on her way to the door to look up at him. "If I had my way you'd be in prison." Then she smiled brightly, all white teeth and sparkling eyes. "Good luck, Mr. Kowalski. We'll be watching."

If that was true, Ray resolved to spend more time walking around in his underwear.

Then she was gone and Sven was calling his name, and there was no avoiding the moment anymore. He kept his head down, though, only raising it to let Sven confirm receipt of the cargo with a retinal scan.

"02212955BetaFRA2Abbot," Sven recited from the manifest, and squinted up at the shadow beside Ray's elbow like there was any chance the cargo could be mixed up with, say, a case of dried veg flakes. "S'all yours."

Ray finally turned and looked at him. It. "Um," he said.

"Hello," the bot responded. Its pale grey eyes stared at him, interested but not curious, something mechanical in there taking his measure.

With a sound like an avalanche, the certainty hit him, knocked him over, and buried him: he'd just made the biggest fucking mistake of his life.

"Let's go." He turned and practically ran out of the hut. The bot paced after him, its little silver case dangling from its hand. Ray tried not to think about what it would have in there. Screwdrivers? Spare parts? User's manual?

Outside there was a mini-blizzard as the hopper lunged up into the blue. No going back now. Ray ducked his head and hunched his shoulders as he slipped on his sunglasses and headed through the whirling white to his transport. The bot got in on the passenger side, buckled up and looked at him, waiting.

Ray concentrated on getting them airborne and turning them away from the sun. Their shadow ran ahead of them like a dog, getting lost in the dark green of the forest and then scurrying across the folds of the glacier before sliding up the face of Angle Mountain. Staying as close to the black rock and ancient snow as he could, following the blade of the ridge, Ray turned them north. Way down in the valley, a river was a silver ribbon or maybe a snake writhing between the Angles and the Bright Range, racing them home. The bot looked out the window like he was mapping the route on a graph, then went back to watching Ray.

"Mr. Kowalski," it said.

For half a second, Ray thought the bot was talking to Ray's dad. Then he remembered that was him, now. "Yeah."

"Would you detail for me the nature of my duties?"

The familiar voice, the not-quite-right politeness made Ray's fingers tighten on the stick and the transport slipped sideways on a sudden updraft. He corrected before answering. "Basically, what I know about surviving in the colonies is about--" He squinted into the blue like he was calculating. "--three-quarters of nothing. So you're here to make sure I don't kill myself by accident."

The bot nodded, once. "I'm well-versed in wilderness survival."

"Yeah. Also." Ray stopped, wondering why he felt embarrassed to talk about this part. A bot wouldn't pass any judgment on Ray's stupid aspirations. It would just do as it was told. "Also, I thought maybe I'd get into sheep."

"Sheep?"

"Yeah. You know, start with a couple and breed 'em and then you can take off the hair, or the fur or whatever--"

"Wool."

"Yeah, the wool. You can take off the wool and...."

The bot waited patiently.

"And you don't have to kill anything."

"I see. So we'll be shepherds."

Ray laughed at the image that brought to mind. "Yeah. So maybe I'll call you Bo Peep."

"Understood."

"No. No Fra--" Ray slipped between The Two Sisters, dropped the transport low into the shadow of the mountain and followed the river down into the wide, flat-bottomed valley. Tucked in against the rocky ridge on the sunny side of the river was the homestead, smoke twisting up from the chimney. "That's a joke. The Bo Peep thing."

"I see."

"I doubt it." He set the transport down next the barn. "Anyway, sheep. We got a barn here. And I got a partner who thinks he's pretty good with herding and stuff." They got out and Ray led them across the yard toward the cabin. No Dief in sight, though. Probably out chasing moosibou.* Or was that carimoose? He could never keep them straight.

Inside the door, they stomped snow off of their boots and Ray hung his coat up. The bot didn't have a coat. It stood on the braided rug with its little silver case in its hand and waited for instructions. Ray edged past him and pointed to the cot against the back wall.

"That's you, for now, anyway. I, uh--" He scrubbed at the back of his head. "I got you some clothes. Warm clothes. Because. Anyway."

Now that he looked at them--the thick jeans, the red flannel shirt--the clothes folded on the cot brought that feeling of embarrassment back in spades, and he wanted to scoop them up and hide them, maybe throw them out the window. But the bot had just a jumpsuit on, like it was straight from the factory, and somehow that was worse than the thought of seeing it wear Mountie red.

"Thank you," it said and went directly to the cot, tucked the case under it, and stripped off the jumpsuit.

In the silvery light through the window, Ray could see the circle of shiny, puckered skin on the bot's chest, the matching entrance wound on its back, and that's when his legs went watery and he sat down hard on the foot-stool in front of the stove. He pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth and closed his eyes, willing his stomach to stop heaving. "Nobody gets used," he muttered, and he supposed the bitter, broken sound that he made was something like a laugh. "Kowalski, you chump. You goddamn stupid fuck."

"Are you all right?"

Ray opened his eyes to find the bot standing close, its feet bare, the red shirt on and only partly buttoned. It twisted one of the buttons with its fingers. Ray looked away and opened the stove, started feeding kindling onto the coals. "I'm good," he answered. "I'm great."

"If there's a problem, perhaps together we can--"

"No. Perhaps together we can not." In the silence the fire crackled and ate more kindling, even though it was already raging, now, and there was nothing more substantial for it to eat once the kindling was gone. Ray fed in another stick and thought about crawling in after it.

"This is an effective house."

"What?"

The bot was still standing there, twisting the button and checking out the single room, the bookshelves, the ladder up to Ray's loft. "Your home. You've made a pleasant home."

"I didn't make it. I belongs--belonged--to a friend of mine." Ray slammed the stove door shut and latched it. He needed to go out to the woodshed and bring in some bigger stuff or they'd be freezing in half an hour.

"I see." The bot adjusted the flue and the fire settled from a roar to a mumble. "Where is he now?"

"Who?" With the heels of his hands pressed to his eyes, Ray didn't have to see him. It.

"Your friend."

Ray opened his mouth and then closed it. Finally he didn't have the energy to talk around it. "He's gone. He's just gone." He wondered how long it would take him to go from being unstrung about the bot--what it was and what it wasn't--to just hating it. Too long, probably. He got up and hooked his jacket from the rack by the door. "Gotta get--for the stove. I'll be back."

When he came back into the house half an hour later, the bot was still standing in exactly the same spot on the rug. Ray dropped the wood he was carrying into the box and shrugged out of his coat before stuffing a log into the stove. The bot stood there looking at him with that flat, empty gaze. "What are you doing?" Ray demanded.

"Waiting."

"For what?"

"Instructions."

"For Jee's sake!" This was it. This was his life. He thought of Worsley's snaky smile. Dumbed down, he'd said, smacking the side of the crate with the pride of ownership. Don't want any of that tricky autonomy. Ray's fingers knotted into fists so tight his shoulder twinged. The bot waited. Ray relaxed his fingers one by one until his hands were hanging empty and useless at his sides. "For Jee's sake," he said again, wearily, and rubbed his forehead. "Can you split wood? We need more wood."

"Yes." The bot turned, put on its boots and headed for the door.

"Take your coat," Ray reminded it, pointing to the one hanging next to Ray's on the rack. He didn't know if the bot would get cold like a regular person or not. Either option made his stomach lurch again.

"Thank you."

When it opened the door, Dief was on he porch. The bot stepped back, his face showing a shadow of uncertainty.

"It's okay. This is the partner I was telling you about. His name's Dief."

"Dief," the bot repeated. It held out its fingers for Dief to sniff.

Just the tip of his tail twitching, Dief looked at Ray, then back at the bot. He whined and looked at Ray again and then back at the bot, who had crouched to get down to his level. It took the dog's head between its hands and stared into his eyes.

"What does 'Dief' mean?" it asked.

"Short for Diefenbaker." Ray spelled it out. "I dunno what it means. You'll have to ask him."

"He chose it," the bot finished with him.

"What did you say?"

The bot looked up at Ray. "I said, who chose it?"

"Oh. He did. Dief did. That's what I heard, anyway."

"I see."

When the bot left, Dief went with it, following in its footsteps, but keeping his distance. He stopped once on the way to the woodshed to look at Ray over his shoulder. Ray nodded. "Yeah, I know."

Ray closed the door and lit the burner on the hotplate to make coffee. He pulled a chair out from the dinner table and straddled it while he drank. He got up and did a circuit of the single room, then did one in the opposite direction. "The way you wear your hat," he recited tonelessly. "The way you sip your tea." On the third lap, he stopped by the desk in the corner and with his arm swept the photographs off the top of it and into the middle drawer. Three of Dief, one of the members of the Clementine RCMP detachment (All four of them. For a whole planet, for Jee's sake), Fraser in his red tunic at the far right, looking at something out-of-frame. After a few moments, Ray took one of the Dief pics out again and set it up carefully in the middle of the desk. Then he closed the drawer and wished he'd asked for a lifetime's supply of Smartos when he was choosing his reward for helping to avert an interplanetary war. Smartos were like gold out here. Somewhere in the core somebody was eating Smartos right now. Blue ones, too. Ray could go for a few blue Smartos. It was that kind of day.

He didn't realize he'd been staring out the frost-painted window until he saw the bot coming back along the path, carrying an armload of split wood. Dief was still behind it, like a security escort or something. It took Ray a second longer to realize something was queer.

The bot had stopped walking and was staring at the cabin. It took a step, but when it put its foot down, its knee folded and it fell. Wood tumbled out around it, the logs disappearing into the softer banks beside the path, leaving holes in the snow. Ray had one boot on and his arm in the sleeve of his coat before the bot got back to its feet, tried to walk and fell again. It crawled a little way and then collapsed, face-down. It was still like that when Ray got out there.

He could hear it talking before he got it rolled onto its back. It was saying, "System--system--system--" Its eyes were open, but so far as Ray could tell, it wasn't seeing anything.

"What system?" Ray said, first to himself, then to the bot, and then to anybody who might be listening and interested in helping. But there was nobody, not for five hundred klicks in any direction. "What?" Dief tilted his head and whined. "You're no help."

The bot had a little motor control, so Ray was able to get it back on its feet so he could half-carry it back to the cabin. "System--system--system--" it droned in Ray's ear, and each time Ray replied, "System what? System what? System what?" until it became some kind of nursery rhyme they chanted in time with their stumbling steps. When Ray finally dropped it less gently than he'd meant to onto the cot, the bot wrapped up that song and started to recite numbers. It seemed completely random to Ray's ears, but it probably meant something in bot-ese.

Pushing Dief out of the way, Ray knelt beside the cot and reached under it for the silver case. Inside there was only another jumpsuit. No manual. No spare parts.

Dief sat down and put his chin on the pillow next to the bot's head.

Ray jogged out to the transport.

"Well," Sven said. His voice was a scratchy ghost against static. Ray tried to adjust the frequency on the transport's comm and managed to lose Sven entirely. When he got him back, he was saying, "--techbot due over at The Soo next month. The fifteenth, I think. Otherwise, you'd have to arrange a special packet, send the thing inbound to Midway Station for repairs."

Ray smacked the console. "Okay. Yeah, okay. When could I send a packet?"

"Next jumper's not scheduled until the 21st." Static filled the cockpit of the transport like snow. "Listen, Ray, if you need a hand, I got an ox you can use. It's mostly just a toolbox on feet, but it's got enough brain to keep basic systems going. It's actually pretty good with solar panels."

"Nah. Thanks." Ray signed off and sat in the pilot's seat, one foot on the snow, and watched the sun go down behind the barn.

Inside, Dief still had his head on the bot's pillow and the bot was still reciting numbers. Ray paced and chewed his thumbnail. After awhile, he wrestled the bot out of his coat and managed to lie him flat under the covers on the cot. After midnight, Ray climbed the ladder to his loft and crawled into his bed. He pulled the blankets over his head, but he could still hear the bot's voice. It followed him into his dreams, counting backward and never getting to zero.

So, it was probably the silence that woke him. He lurched into the early morning darkness, his heart pounding like he'd taken a near miss from a needle. His shoulder throbbed in time. Dief was at the bottom of the ladder looking up at him. "What?" Ray skipped the last four rungs, landing in his bare feet on the rug. The stove was out and he could see his breath.

The bot wasn't talking anymore. Its eyes were still open and still blank. Standing as far away as he could, Ray reached out and laid his fingers against the side of its neck. It didn't have pulse, but Ray had no idea whether it had one before so that was not useful information. Its skin was cool, but so was Ray's. He wrapped his arms around himself and stared at the bot for a long time. Then, he leaned down and closed its eyes.

The light filled up the room eventually. Ray stoked up the stove, made coffee and eggs. He went up to the loft and made his bed. He fed Dief and let him out. The shadows of the Two Sisters crept across the valley bottom, from dawn to noon to suppertime. After dinner, he dropped his plate in the basin of water warming beside the stove and went to stand over the cot again. He started to lift the sheet up to cover the bot's face, but found he couldn't do it. It wasn't dead. But it wasn't sleeping, either.

"Broken" he said out loud, and jumped at the sound of his own voice. Behind him, the sky in the square of the window was darkening, the cabin floating between day and night. Ray floated too, suspended. He stood there until all the light drained away, leaving just the glow through the window in the stove. Dief crawled in under the cot and wouldn't come out for his late-night trip outside to see a man about a horse.

Finally, Ray pulled the rocking chair over and sat down. "Fraser," he said into the dark. "Constable Benton Fraser of the no-yankin-me Royal Colonial Mounted Police." Even he didn't know if he was apologizing or cursing or what he was asking for. Either way, the name tasted like a eulogy. He knew then he wouldn't be sending the bot by special packet to Midway Station. He came unspun for real then, and when it was over, he felt hollow and tired and weirdly peaceful and ready for sleep.

He woke at the sound of his name. Swearing at the crick in his neck, he leaned forward with his elbow on his knee and rubbed at the knotted muscles. They got like that a lot now, after the needle, and it served him right for sleeping in the freebin rocking chair half the night. Giving up the massage as fruitless, he let his hands hang between his knees and almost drifted off again right there... following someone... a shadow turning the corner at the end of the alley... a footprint left behind and filling with silver rainwater... 'liner light slithering on the blank faces of the 'scrapers...

"Ray."

Ray lifted his head and looked at Dief, who was peering out from under the cot. "What?" It took way too long for Ray to wonder when Dief learned to talk like a human, but when the penny dropped, all the hairs stood up on his body, like the jump drive in his head was spinning up. He gripped the arms of the chair and slowly raised his eyes to the cot.

The bot was looking at him, eyes gleaming in the dim light of the fire. "Are you okay?"

"What?"

The bot sat up, and Ray leaned way back in the rocking chair until it started to tip over and then he rolled out over the arm and stood. He pointed. He couldn't make his mouth say anything so he pointed again, more emphatically.

The bot got out of bed and stepped toward him. In its eyes was a real-ness, a seeing-ness. It stopped at the end of Ray's pointing finger. "Really, Ray, you don't look well."

"What the," Ray said. "Who the."

"It's me." It held its hands out like it was trying to soothe a skittish animal, which made some sense, because Ray felt pretty fucking skittish.

"You."

"Yes."

"Fraser."

"Yes."

"How?"

Fraser tilted his head and tugged at his earlobe, squinting a little as he thought about it. "I guess dad knew a few tricks the technicians haven't seen before." He gave up with a helpless opening of his hands. "I don't really understand it myself, except that--" He grinned, the corner of his mouth curving up and making crinkles around his eyes. "--I was in the snow with my father and I saw Dief, and then I heard you say my name." He shook his head, looking baffled. "I don't know. All I can say for certain is that I'm me."

Ray narrowed his eyes at him. "How do you know?"

Seemed like that was a stumper because he cocked his head again and gave it some thought. "I remember--"

"A childhood. A mother."

"You." Somehow he was closer than before and Ray's hand wasn't warding off now. It was spread out on his chest. Ray's fingers slipped across Fraser's skin--it was warm; not weirdly warm but just regular warm--to touch the scar. "You're a good man, too, Ray."

Jump complete, Ray thought, and a sizzle started in his brain and coursed down his arms and legs and out of his mouth like a laugh, disbelief and belief colliding in a single bark of surprise.

Fraser smiled at him again and his expression was somehow both fierce and gentle.

And it was too much. So Ray did what he always did when he was squaring off against someone with a longer reach: he got inside it. Stepping in, he grabbed Fraser's head and kissed him, and Fraser kissed him back, and it was fierce and gentle, and in Ray's head there was a sound like something snapping into place, jacking-in, a direct feed.

At some point Ray's sense of self-preservation kicked in, because maybe Fraser could survive a month without air, but Ray couldn't. He leaned back, but didn't let go. Fraser was grinning at him, looking a little smug.

"Crap," Ray said.

The smile faltered. "I'm sorry?"

"They're watching."

Fraser's eyes went left then right. "They are?"

"Well, not here. I don't think." Ray had to let go of him to wave at the world outside the cabin. "Out there."

"Ah." Fraser's fingers were working their way under the hem of Ray's sweater.

"They can't know you didn't get retasked. They'll make you into a toaster."

"Well, Ray, I'm sure they were speaking figuratively," Fraser said, his mouth against Ray's ear.

"Figure--? What difference does it make? Toast is toast. Out there, you got to act normal. Can you do that?"

The grin came back as Fraser's fingers drifted up Ray's back and Fraser's lips drifted away from Ray's ear to his neck. "I am acting normal."

Ray leaned back and looked Fraser in the eye. "I mean normal for a bot."

"Ah. Understood." Fraser's smile didn't change one bit.

--the end--

*moosibou, cf

agentotter

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

celli

Oh, wow. I had just finished reading the first bit of this off of

thefourthvine's rec, and was really, really wishing more would magically appear, and then--more! Magically appeared!

This is fantastic. Great worldbuilding, or I should say world-fusing, fantastic Ray characterization, a good, well-paced plot, and the end broke my heart and then fixed it again all in two paragraphs. I *loved* this.

From:

for the Space challenge: Real Boys (Part 3), by Salieri

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