Chapter 35
Aryl

The Lucent City Medical Repository houses the bodies of people who’ve donated themselves to science. It’s mostly staffed by simple wheeled robots and organizationally savvy, incorporeal AIs. But there are humans too: scientists doing research, medical apprentices pursuing their studies. To accommodate grieving members of the public who aren’t comfortable chatting with AIs, those humans take turns staffing the front desk. Right now, a white-coated woman is stationed there.

“How may I help you, young lady?” she says in a surprisingly high, youthful voice. She’s around ninety, and her hair’s dyed brassy yellow. Ester wouldn’t approve. No one that age has natural blond hair, she’d say. Pick a wild color or leave it be.

My own hair is straightened and colored platinum with temporary dye, thanks to Ver. People who look at me now won’t see brunette killer Aryl Fielding. Just a blond Two-er girl in baggy farm clothes, fresh off the spaceliner.

It was comforting to feel Ver’s hands combing through my curls. When I closed my eyes, I almost forgot why we were changing my appearance.

Glancing down now, pretending to be shy, I see a full glass of steaming cacao extract on the scientist’s desk. No lid. Perfect.

I whip out my best Two-er drawl and say, “I’m looking for my great-great-great-uncle. Never got to say goodbye, you know—the rest of the family’s on Two. I came to pay my respects.”

“Oh, I am so sorry,” the woman says. “What’s his name?”

“Theodosius Tello.” Aged 138 years, Mr. Tello was a real Lucent City resident, moderately wealthy. He died of a cold last week; Ver’s dorm room AI, Charles, found the obituary in a Neb search. Scientists at the repository want to study how and why the cold virus so easily overwhelmed Mr. Tello’s aged immune system.

“This is him,” I say and pull up Mr. Tello’s image—snipped from his obituary—on my burner flexitab. The scientist bends over it to look at his face. As she does, I scan her right eye.

Mr. Tello looks, conveniently, like my alter ego. Whether the thin platinum wisps of hair on his head were real or dyed doesn’t concern me.

“Ah, yes, an interesting case.” The woman looks from the holo projection to her own screen. “Let’s see where he is . . .”

If she resents taking time away from her scientific work to handle reception duty, she’s not showing it. Probably just glad to have a job. She must be one of those older One-ers who hasn’t saved enough money to retire. Not everyone is rich, and plenty of people on One have to keep working into their eleventh decade. It’s unfair, but at least they’re not doing hard labor.

“We’ve moved the body out of the main holding room and into cryo-protection. He’s in Room 18, Bin 23.”

“Can you tell me the stats of the room?”

As she squints at the screen and reads off temperature, humidity, and construction materials, I pretend to squint with her—and pass my hand over her drink, sprinkling powder inside.

“Thank you so much,” I say and move away from the desk with a quick, stomping walk.

My burner flexitab dings with a message from Ver, who’s keeping track of my location on her own device: The iris reconstruction is complete. You should be good to get in.

I grin. We copied this software from one of the labs at the Institute hospital—one that studies iris pigmentation and open-sources their imaging platform on the Neb. With a few tweaks to the code, Ver and I got their reconstruction program to do what we needed.

The old woman’s iris scan in hand, I follow the wall signs toward the holding room, where I know I’ll find Cal and hundreds of other recently deceased people, all of whom are being picked apart by curious scientists.

“You’re going the wrong . . .” the woman says, her voice slurring. I hear a small thump, the sound of a head connecting with a desk. When I glance back, it looks like she’s taking a nap, as old people often do. The zolpidem is working.

She seemed sweet; I fight the urge to check that she didn’t hit her head too hard. Zolpidem tartrate is a gentle drug. She’ll wake up in a few hours, feeling groggy but refreshed.

I step up to the large black doors of the holding room and use my flexitab’s holo-imager to project her reconstructed iris for the scanner. The doors swing open, and I close them behind me. Wind rushes past. This airlock has a high flow rate to help disinfect me. I put on a white coat, hair net, goggles, and gloves. The personal protective equipment conveniently obscures my identity. Hopefully any passerby will think I’m a scientist or a doctor in training.

Passing through another set of doors, I enter the holding room. The stench of formaldehyde and flesh sets fire to my windpipe. And it’s cold. My breath is a vapor cloud. Every exposed hair on my body stands at attention. This place is a cramped, windowless refrigerator for hunks of meat.

Metal shelving for the corpses towers high on either side of me. I stay away, wary of accidentally touching something that was once someone. Blue-white overhead lighting casts an icy tinge over everything. In the middle of the room there’s a medical examination table. And a body on top, covered in a white sheet.

Although every instinct tells me to leave, I stand my ground and breathe in lungfuls of air. Gradually my nose becomes desensitized to the smells, though I can’t shake the sick feeling. Shuddering, I wheel a heavy biohazard waste bin over to block the doors.

I shouldn’t be quaking over dead bodies. I’ve witnessed plenty of gruesome injuries in the course of my dance career. Lots of blood, and lots of feet: callused, blistered, broken, misshapen. Nothing fazes a dancer after she’s seen her own feet. Or so I tell myself.

Each body-sized shelf is labeled with its dead occupant’s name. I try to work out a pattern so that I can find Cal faster. They’re not alphabetical by first name or last. Or by neighborhood or cause of death. Finally, I notice that all the people closest to the door died earlier today. Farther into the room are bodies from yesterday.

A soft knock sounds on the door to the holding room. Probably a staff scientist. But whoever it is doesn’t knock too loudly, in case someone’s doing an actual examination.

I’ve got a minute before I get caught, maybe two. I find the bodies from the date that Cal died. And I see it: Calyx Eppi, 04-09-2798. His bin is at my hip level.

Bracing myself, I heave the plexiglass container—scrap, I’ll call it a coffin—out of its slot and lower it to the floor.

I hear a voice outside the room, maybe asking the AI who’s in here. I catch my breath and flip open the coffin’s dark-tinted cover.

There’s Cal.

Death has drained his skin of color. But his handsome features are still there, the lips parted to reveal his overlapping front teeth. He looks like a sculpture of himself.

Thankfully there’s nothing in my stomach to retch.

The knocking grows louder. “Who’s in there?” a voice shouts.

I grab Cal’s left wrist and seize the bionic hand’s translucent, whitish fingers. They lie limp, like dead jellyfish tentacles, but only for a moment. When I touch them, the cold bioplastic fingers shudder to life and squeeze, crushing mine. The hand is chilled. The knuckles bulge, the wrist flexes, and the fingers clamp down harder, harder.

My heart leaps into my throat. I’m in so much shock, I barely feel the pain.

The pressure on my fingers eases momentarily. The bionic hand’s fingertips tap my skin at inhumanly fast speed, as if playing a keyboard. Next it grabs my wrist, grinding the tibia and fibula against each other, and vaults into the air to wring out my entire arm. I hold back a scream, try to yank my hand away. With my other fist, I pound the bionic hand from every angle I can manage. Ver will kill me if I break the screen or damage any internal components. But this hand will kill me if I don’t fight back.

Finally it beeps softly and lets me go. My fingers prickle as blood rushes back to them.

The banging at the door crescendos. I press the bionic hand to Cal’s chest, trying to boot it up—Come on, Investigator, what were you hiding? Even as its fingers continue to grab at air, I wrestle it down, grunting with effort. Whipping out the burner flexitab, I take a 3D scanning shot, moving the camera around until it’s viewed the hand from all angles. Next, I’ll need to fish for files.

As soon as I loosen my grip, the hand clenches into a fist. I duck down and to the left; it mirrors my movements. I go up and to the right; it follows me. Even as I jump back, it pops me in the chin. Galaxies appear in front of my eyes.

Forget the files. I need to get out of here!

Biting down hard on my lip to hold in a yelp of pain, I flip the lid back over Cal’s body—and his terrifying hand—and deadlift him back into his bin.

I careen out of the holding room. Breathless in the airlock, I’m facing a middle-aged scientist with white hair and a black goatee.

“Stop! What are you here for?” he demands. “You know, we remove all valuables from the dead before we examine them. There’s nothing here for you to steal.”

My whole body is shaking.

“Let’s see who you really are,” the scientist says.

He reaches for my goggles. I block his hand, but he uses his shoulder to push me back against the door. My upper back takes most of the impact; I’m able to stay upright—barely.

Faking a concussion, I clutch the back of my skull and let my body loll. When the scientist reaches for my goggles again, I kick his shin as hard as I can.

“Auuugh!” he shouts in pain, jumping back.

I sprint out of the airlock, out of the repository, back into the daylight—just as an alarm shrieks inside. On the busy street, I slow to a walk and duck into a shaded alley full of trash receptacles. It’s not pleasant, but it’s private.

When I’m sure no one can see me, I clamp my teeth around my forearm and scream into it silently.