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My Partner, the Cyborg

As I entered the dank room it occurred to me that I'd been there before. That's impossible, I thought. In all my 268 years I've never been near this asteroid. Of course, there was that 5 year period after my first big procedure when I'd have the blackouts, but they only lasted a few days at most, and I could never have made it this far out into the belt in less than a week . . . especially in those days.

But the deja vu clung to my brain. I couldn't shake it. I had to dismiss it, though, for now. We had a job to do.

"You gettin' anything yet?" I asked, turning to my cyborg partner.

"Nope", he said through synthetic vocal cords. What he really meant was, "Nothing significant." He had several processors analyzing every detail of that gross little room simultaneously, and they were hardwired to his actual brain which was several decades older than mine. I don't know how he managed to keep all his thoughts in order.

"Wait," he said, echoing off the dirty, low-budget wall paneling. "I've seen this before." He was pointing at a stone sculpture that was sitting on a shelf in the corner. I felt like I'd seen it before, too, but I kept my deja vu to myself for the time being.

"Where?" I asked. "What is it?"

He slapped one alloy/composite hand to the top of his translucent head and started snapping his fingers with the other, trying to recall the information. This gesture was so human . . . such a personality animating a body made mostly of thin rods of clear blue plastic. The cyborgs that didn't attempt to look at all human were the strangest to look at. Deacon still had his real eyeballs, and that added a spark that androids just hadn't gotten quite yet.

"Late twenty-first century," he said after a few moments. "It was made by an artist that I met on Europa. It's one of my actual memories, that's why it took so long to bring it up. Guy by the name of umm . . . Burnside. Yeah, that was him."

Deacon was amazing. He could still remember the guy's name . . . after having his brain taken out and remounted.

He walked across the greasy tile floor and picked up the statue with nimble rubber fingertips.

"This is definitely it," he said, turning it over in his hand. "See, look here." He pointed the base of the sculpture at me and there it was. "Burnside" carved meticulously across the bottom.

"So what is it?" I asked again, a little impatient. Our cruiser could only sit outside for so long without being noticed.

"It's an abstract bust of Yembulin, the first Lord of Jupiter." Seeing my confusion, he elaborated a little. "You know, Yembulin. You took modern mythology, man; he's the one that formed that weird little cult that got busted for espionage in the twenties."

Suddenly it made sense. I knew why we were there, and why we had to leave immediately.

This little cult that Deacon had referred to was known as "The Order of the Red Storm" and they were closely tied to the woman that had been trying to have me killed for the last sixty years.

The espionage that they "got busted for" was the theft of a technology that they should not possess. And neither should anyone else. It was a method of thought and memory projection, imposing ideas and memories into a person's head over long distances.

It was how they lured me here, and it was why this damn room felt so familiar. It was trap.

"We gotta get outta here right now!" I said through clenched teeth, grabbing Deacon's cold arm and turning toward the door.

"What's wro. . ." he started to say, then noticed the seven-foot beast standing in the doorway. The creature wore a blue-collar jumpsuit over a grotesquely muscular frame. It was grinning with sharp, yellow-brown teeth, and its fingers were twitching as it looked me dead in the eyes.

There was a flash in my peripheral as Deacon drew his blades.

His speed was unbelievable. Too fast for any response from the monster in the doorway. The beast's eyes were still focused on me when its throat was wrecked by Decon's polymer blade. A second shank inserted in the heart made for a quick and noiseless death, other than the unmistakeable sound of an enormous body hitting the floor in Gravity.

It was only then that I got a good look at the thing. I recognized the features at once. It was the same type of goon they'd been sending after me for years. The crazy, patchy hair sticking out of thick, platelike skin and the sharp, horny growths all over. It was a rough-and-tumble. These guys were low-budget genmen with mainly one purpose, and that was to go into hostile environments and come out alive. This one didn't seem to be working quite right.

Deacon was searching its pockets. He half stood up and threw a card to me, with the perfect spin so it sailed through the room in a gentle arc. I caught it between my thumb and forefinger and examined it. The side facing me had a decent 3D likeness of my head floating a quarter inch in front of the surface. I pressed the little triangular gel button on the corner and the image changed to a full figure in motion. It was obiously copied from an actual video of me in action, though it was very outdated, maybe by twenty years.

Flipping the card over, I saw just a single gel button in the middle of the other side. I pressed it, and a screen came up with different instructions on where and when to look for me, my habits and personality traits, and specific questions to ask before crushing my head.

"Ooh, I haven't seen one of these in awhile", Deacon said, rummaging through the satchel that the creature had been wearing over one shoulder. "We used to use these back in the corps. It's a body bag," he said. "You ever seen one?" He held up what looked like a crumpled piece of cellophane with a rubber strap around it.

"It's a body bag?" I said, answering his question.

He threw it on the floor and it quickly unfurled to the size of a sleeping bag. It looked like a giant transparent cocoon with a short tube and a little bottle sticking out of one end.

Deacon pulled the bag open where I hadn't been able to detect a seam. He hooked one end of the opening over the thing's boot, and the bag stretched easily to accommodate the monster's entire body. He manhandled the beast, tucked its head into the bag and rolled it over. Patting down the back pockets, he pulled out a small electronic device and dropped it in the satchel.

"This dude's got all kinds o' gadgets," Deacon said as he sealed up the bag, which vaccuumed itself around the carcass. "Okay, now check this out. I met the guy that invented this thing at a banquet once. Real twisted cat. He got a lot of government grants and such." He pushed the little button on the bottle which was now awkwardly jutting from the monster's toe. then stood up and stepped back.

The creature's skin started shriveling up around its bones, and the clothing frayed and disintegrated. The bag kept shrinking, squeezing the mass inside ever smaller. Flesh melted and oozed around bones that were crumbling like cornstarch. Gases and liquids were being pumped into the collection bottle which bubbled quietly. The bag continued to shrink and roll itself up while the creature's horns protruded at odd angles, twisting and eroding inside it.

As the bag returned to its original size, the bottle swelled to hold about a liter of juice that had once been my intended assassin. Deacon picked up the contraption and walked through a doorway at the other side of the room, disappearing into a hallway. Just when I was about to ask- the sound of the flushing commode interrupted.

My cyborg partner emerged from the doorway again, putting the shrinking bottle into the satchel which was now hanging over his shoulder.

Pulling out a tiny spray can, he crouched over where the monster had fallen and sprayed the pool of blood. A pink foam swelled up and receded, leaving no blood or stains whatsoever.

"You ready to blow this crackpot creep fest?" Deacon asked. I looked to my left and he was standing much closer to me than I'd realized. His eyelids were fully retracted and his pupils were huge. I looked at his real teeth that were bent into a smile in his bluish, stylized skull and wondered who was he to talk about a crackpot creep fest. I nodded silently.

"Let's burn," he said, straightening his vest and nodding in return. As he was about to head for the door, he stopped. Stepping quickly over to the shelf in the corner, he picked up the Yembuline sculpture and stuffed it into his new satchel, then turned and passed me without a glance on his way out the door. I followed him, thinking about what had just happened and shaking my head. I needed a drink.

My clear plastic friend and I tried to blend in as we left the shanty cluster. A few street kids were nosing around the cruiser, and they backed off when they saw Deacon striding toward the captain's door. One of the kids pointed at him, "Hey, man, your brain is showin'!" and the rest of them exploded into laughter. Deacon leaned over the kid, looking him in the eyes, and reached into his satchel. The smile left the urchin's dirty little face as he realized that he was pinned between the cyborg and the vehicle's side panel.

Deacon jerked his hand out quickly, making the kid flinch, then opened his fist, exposing a dull metal disk with green digital numbers on it. It was a casino token that claimed to have a couple of hundred bucks left on it.

"Where's this place at?" Deacon asked, reading the coin, "Checker's Cave?"

"Give it t' me an' I'll tell ya'," said the kid in a practiced tone of bravado.

"Tell me and I won't shove this shank in your ear," said the cyborg in an experienceed tone of murderous calm. One of the other kids snickered, then realized that Deacon was probably serious.

"It's at Port West," said the one with the blade in his face, "three levels down . . . right under the old hangar." He shifted and looked at his buddies, as if they should help him. Then, at Deacon's silence, he defended himself, "Serious, man . . . I ain't lyin' to ya'!"

The cyborg nodded at him and slid the token back into the bag. "Good," he said. Then he cocked his head sideways, signaling the kid to vacate. The little punk scurried out of arm's reach and was visibly relieved. I could hear his friends razzing him as I eased into my seat and the car door slid closed.

I looked at my friend in the captain's seat and he looked at me. His eyes were scanning my face, as if he were disappointed in what he was seeing. As the car lifted off the street, he reached into the console between the seats and pulled out a duffle bag. Taking the wheel with this left hand, he searched through the contents of the bag without looking, and steered the cruiser over a run-down park and up toward traffic level.

"Put this on," he said, handing me a shrink mask.

"Man, I hate these things," I grumbled. "They always make me itch." I glanced over at Deacon and wondered when was the last time he felt what it was like to itch.

I held the mask up in front of me, disapprovingly, looking at the inside of it and reliving bad memories. I took a deep breath, preparing myself for the odd sensations I was about to experience, then stuck the thing to my face. Though I hated to put it on, the process was neat to watch, so I pulled down the vanity mirror and looked at myself.

The mask was adhering itself to my face, finding the prominent features and hiding them, building up the ones which were less noticeable, changing to look as little like me as possible. I pulled the skull cap back over my shaved head, and it sprouted a healthy crop of reddish-blonde hair. Maybe it was psychosomatic, but I was itching already.