The Story
Jake combed his hair back with his head still on the pillow. He smoothed his mustache without looking in the mirror, despite the one mounted to his ceiling right above his bed. It was more habit than anything else, a nervous tic some might say, but Jake was never nervous.
Jake flinched to the sound of tapping and rustling outside his window. Nothing but the black of night between the blinds.
The servos in his mechanical arm whirred. A wakeup call Jake never needed. But old habits and all, a dark history stemming from his youth to get up in time for school all the way to the near-present when he had been an on-call pizza delivery driver, which is how it all started. Hydroplaned, they’d said. It rained like hell that night, they’d said. Rolled the truck, and his arm had punched through the glass to be pinned once it settled on its side, they’d said.
But he’d been the one in the damn truck, and though his brain pan had been abused over the years, the biological wiring most people had replaced with synthetic, still trundled along more or less just how nature had intended. No matter how quick tech evolved, he’d put his money on millions of years of evolution every time.
His arm whirred again. “But now I have to bet on you.”
He flexed its fingers. It, because it wasn’t technically his. Still had a few jobs left to do to clear the debt.
He slung himself out of bed, grabbing his jacket that looked like it belonged to a mechanic and read “Jake” on the breast patch, because what the fuck else would it say? He slipped it on, tucking the shorter sleeve behind the piston because the damn cybernetic arm was too bulky with all kinds of form-over-function bullshit fanning from the forearm and elbow. They’d assured him those things had their uses, but he wouldn’t have full access until the debt was paid.
The only thing left to don were his shoes, because Jake always slept in his clothes. He’d learned the hard way when the junkhead in his old apartment building torched the place in three minutes flat from a psycho-stim cook gone wrong. Jake had ended up on the street with nothing to hold onto except his fun bits to not offend the crowd gathering to watch the fire.
Jake stood in the entryway of his apartment, which was really just the two square feet in front of the door, and pressed the wall with his shoulder, which opened a small panel to eject his gear, all cased, all good.
The cybernetic arm took it. Jake wasn’t a weak man, but he liked the weight of his debt to be a metaphor tied to the thing that had yet to become his.
The mirror on the door showed him a man who looked damn good, and the case that could have housed a violin or an assault rifle or a nuclear bomb, because they were small these days. Near the back of the out-facing side, three white crosses were stickered with a scratched-in one beneath. He wasn’t a religious man, hell no one was anymore, so they were essentially meaningless, but he liked the way they looked. Down further near the orange strap below the handle stretched a torn length of silver tape that read FRAGILE. But he wasn’t about to reveal what lay inside, though if it was housed in a case like this, how couldn’t it be fragile? Unless it was a ruse, but Jake never lied. Further down was a blue dot sticker some little girl slapped on there while he waited for job instructions in the food district. She told him he looked blue at the time. Maybe he had been. Flanking that dot was a shred of white tape with JAKE scrawled in black on it, because that was his name, and he never lied or was afraid of people knowing his name, because he was the embodiment of DOPE-NESS, which was the final sticker of interest on his case, and that didn’t need an explanation.
Jake listened at the door, because they were always looking for him. Light foot traffic, then gone. A death-bed cough, then chatter, then gone.
After a trek through the corridor and stairwell maze, Jake was on the street, struck by a puddle on the evening asphalt still simmering from the day. It showed him the neon tangle of the buildings above. The image felt off. The patterns weren’t right.
He didn’t risk a look up. They couldn’t know he knew.
He swore he heard the flex of bulletproof fabric. Jacket sleeves adjusting the rifle trained on him?
He stepped onto the street, and someone yelled, “Watch out!”
Jake watched as a white-hot streak seared the sky. It hit his abdomen, and down he went. His case lay open to the sky. Almost had his gear out. Almost.
He felt no pain. Must be his adrenals firing. Feet shuffled behind him, and his cybernetic arm lashed out.
In his grip, and in his sideways view of the street stood an old woman with rainbow filament hair. It cycled through ten colors before he let go of her.
She smoothed her purple synth-fur trench coat and her glowing hair. “No harm done, young man. That one got you good.”
He followed her pointing finger to his boot. A spatter of white dashed the leather. Bird shit.
“Used to feed them from my window back when I was a girl,” she said, the memory caught in her eyes.
Drone pigeons didn’t shit. Old world pigeons did. Nearly extinct. Extremely expensive. And it was assuredly flying back to report coordinates.
The old woman’s eye glittered. “It’s crossing six and fourth. Jake, before you kill it, will you give it this?”
She held out a square of cracker.
Jake made his fingers into a gun, and pointed it at her. “You got it, lady.”
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