“Don’t you have drinks to serve to real humans?”
“It’s a quiet night. Most people are sick or just plain lazy,” she says pretending to wipe the counter.
“Too lazy to get drunk? Impossible!”
“Well it’s not the economy stopping people.”
Rennin would have rolled his eyes if it wouldn’t make him sick, “You have a theory.” It is not a question.
She nods, “I think the rumours of those scientists being shot and that truck being blown apart have something to do with it,” she says changing her mock cleaning to re-cleaning the cleaned glasses.
“That’s great, but I didn’t ask,” he says winking and grinning while swaying lightly on his stool.
“You are the guy though, aren’t you?”
He takes another swig of his Siege. Another fireball greets his insides. “Yes. I’m Rennin Farrow,” he straightens his posture and puts on a pompous accent, “of the East Brighton Farrows.”
“From Melbourne then?” she says knowingly, but feigning it as a question. As if his alcoholism is explained because of the destruction of the city.
“Before it beat Hiroshima for world’s hottest town.”
“The press have painted a pretty bad picture of you in front of that burning truck.”
“That’s okay, my drinks are paid by their taxes,” he says slurring heavily now.
“It must be frustrating.”
In Rennin’s fuzzy state of mind something inside him thinks this woman is trying to relate to him. Perhaps she thinks he’s in some kind of trouble, either way Rennin feels a little insecure about talking.
Though, as always, the severe effects of the alcohol have removed most of his inhibitions, “It is a little. My job isn’t exactly easy, or nice,” he says managing to remember he cannot say anything about being an executioner of sorts.
“What is it you do?”
Rennin turns to his left on the barstool and points out the front window of the bar, across the street to the front wall of the Godyssey lab compound, and to his tower on the right hand side, “That clock tower is my orifice.”
She looks at him for a moment waiting to see if he’s joking. But no, it’s a Freudian slip, “How long are you up there for?”
“About ten hours a shift. Of course there’s a ninety-minute lunch break, two ten-minute tea breaks and three two-minute urinary cossets between them.”
She laughs, “Got it all, haven’t you?”
“Almost, except the scientists obviously aren’t allowed to bathe.”
“Is that so?”
“Probably bacterial experiments going on under those clothes. Judging by their personal aroma I imagine they wear NASA-class diapers to cope with those long shifts.”
“You imagine that, huh?”
Rennin takes a moment to click, “Oh I see what you did there. Kudos to you,” he takes the rest of the drink down in one fell swoop and everything else evaporates.
3.
Project Outreach
Rennin wakes up late for work. He knows he’s late but the hangover is exploding in his brain so badly that he doesn’t care. He’s never even missed one day of work so they shouldn’t exactly fire him.
Any monkey could take care of his duties, except the ones with extreme prejudice. His head feels like someone placed a Nexus Armaments Particle Annihilator grenade inside his skull and set it to maximum range. He opens his mouth and rotates his jaw a little trying to ease out some of the tension.
He is on his back staring at the ceiling with crust-filled red eyes. He wipes them with the backs of his hands before noticing something odd draped across his chest. A third arm? Rennin’s face turns to dumbfounded surprise and he looks at the skinny arm that is, at least, a woman’s. The last time he woke up with a man he couldn’t get the taste out of his mouth all day.
He pulls the covers up slightly and gets a look at the sleeping face of the bartender. Alarm bells are ringing in Rennin’s mind even louder than the hangover headache. With amazing dexterity he slips out from bed and lifts the covers more to find that she’s still fully dressed and her pants haven’t been touched. That is a good thing.
A very good thing.
Rennin is in the bathroom in moments to retrieve a needle from his bathroom cabinet before returning to the bedroom. She is still asleep, lying there in a serene way that sets off a mild pang in his chest. He pushes the feeling aside and locks it back in its box. He steps over to her and, holding his breath, pricks her arm in one perfectly precise movement.
She grumbles lightly and rolls over and Rennin is already out of the room.
Back in the bathroom, Rennin removes a gadget from the medicine cabinet that looks like an old style calculator. He slips the needle with the blood sample into the slot at its base and awaits the reading, fidgeting and clicking his teeth. The machine beeps and he looks at the display: ‘Result Negative’.
Rennin sighs in relief. They didn’t have sex.
Early in the war Rennin and some others were hit with a GA biological weapon called Indigo Reign, named as such because the victim’s veins would turn purple, and permanently stain the eyes.
It was a weapon that was specifically designed to attack the organic and mechanic cohesion of the CryoZaiyon android. It would shut down the parameter that tells the body’s organic nerves to ignore the mechanised intruder system. The android would go into a violent convulsive fit.
Inside the toxin itself was a nano-virus code that told the android mind to release the pain receptors from the blocking buffers. The android then could feel the pain of the conversion surgeries with no programming to stop it, and also no automatic shut off when the pain became too intense.
The result was catastrophic. Unbearable to witness. Contaminated androids went down very quickly, and within minutes were reduced to a screaming ruination too horrendous to be left alive.
It was never meant to affect humans, but it did. Thousands died, though the effects were far more protracted. The first hour was uneventful. The second was when the affects began. Rennin remembers feeling dizzy and a strange pain, like mild sunburn being scratched, spreading across his body from the spine outwards.
As with the androids, it attacked the nervous system in people too. Within three hours his entire body was aflame with pain like he was on fire himself. Another hour after that, all he could see was white flashes and hear sporadic waves of his own screams inside the rushes of agony.
Rennin was saved by the timely arrival of a rescue unit, led by an android Medtech trooper, Nexarien Decora, who had synthesized a cure for it. Or at least it suppressed the effects of it, but you would always carry the bioweapon inside you wherever you went for the rest of your life.
There is a bitter irony in the use of Indigo Reign by so-called humanists. When a human is infected, the pain becomes so intense that they die from shock. In an android they would scream and thrash until their power core hit zero percent power, then they would shutdown to recharge, only to wake up screaming and thrashing again. They would do this until they were cured, or put out of their misery. The irony is that the GA said the androids had no souls, were inhuman. No one whom dares to say they ‘fight the good fight’ would design something that thoughtlessly torturous, so inhumane.
Rennin throws the needle away and puts the device back in the cabinet. He was told he wasn’t contagious; that every man, woman, and child in the system had been vaccinated for Indigo Reign but he never trusted the word of a doctor or what he can’t see.
Even all these years later the scars of it still mark him. His pale eyes are shot through with spokes of magenta. There is a faint purple ring around both his irises. The hue of his lips are also darkened to a colour more like maroon than pink. His skin is also unnaturally pale and darkened veins snake up the sides of his face. His reflection is a constant reminder of that atrocity.