Chapter Forty-Four

Marek

After waiting across the street for almost half an hour, Marek decides he’s going to have to risk being arrested. It shouldn’t be taking Tey this long to incapacitate a single damn shitizen bitch. Something must’ve happened. Apartment security is already on the lookout for him, so he’s going to have to find another way inside without being noticed. The building is nothing but glass, metal, and concrete on the outside. The structure itself is smooth, with no way for him to climb it either.

He figures the fire escape must be inside, but it has to still be accessible somehow. He remembers seeing a stairwell in the back, leading down to the underground parking level. He runs around the block to where he recalls seeing it. At the bottom of the stairs, there’s a fire door, like he was expecting, but it’s locked from the inside. There’s no tumbler to pick, or even a reader to break into.

Pissed off, he tries kicking the door as hard as he can a couple of times but it doesn’t budge. He rakes his hands through his hair while trying to think of another way in. The only other thing he can think of is the parking garage underground, but it’ll likely only lead to more locked doors.

As soon as he turns around, the metal door behind him clicks open and slowly swings outward. It’s Tey, and he looks to be in bad shape. The entire side of his face is badly bruised and he’s grimacing from the effort of simply opening the door. He rushes back down the stairs to help him, taking up most of his weight by pulling his arm up over his neck. One of Tey’s eyes is all bloodshot and looks like it might even pop out of the socket if he leans far enough forward. Whatever hit him, hit him real hard.

“What the fuck happened to you man!”

In a soft voice, Tey does his best to talk, while only taking shallow breaths. “It was this guy, thought it was a guy anyway. I remember him. I’ve seen him around town here and there. Just a nobody.”

“This is the guy that did this to you? Why?”

“It’s not him anymore Marek. They replaced him with a robot. That thing was wearing this dude’s face man! I didn’t even know until it was too late. It was a fuckin’ bad machine man. It’s got to be the one that bludgeoned those people out there.”

“It must be the new one that the fat guy mentioned. Son of a bitch, he said the black female was supposed to be the dangerous one!”

“I didn’t even see ‘er, but I’m pretty sure she ain’t got nuthin’ on this bull. He didn’t even put his weight into it when he hit me. He just smacked me to the side like I was nuthin’! Hell, all I did was startle ‘im.”

“Well, it’s a good thing we’ve got that bomb then, huh, now that there’s three of em.”

“They could all be robots man! The whole building could be taken over by ‘em!”

Marek takes out his phone and calls back to the hideout. Tey is in too bad of shape for them to make it back on foot. “Brent! We’re in bad shape man, we need a ride.”

“Location.”

“Were at the place, just outside. We can walk, but I don’t think we’re gonna make it very far.”

“If you fucked up, Marek, this is on you. Get a cab. You’re not helpless. It’s the middle of the day, it’s your op, you take care of it!”

He knows it’s going to be a long shot waving down a cab, but it’s their only chance. No one likes to pick up people like him. It’s not that they’re afraid of getting attacked, but they do get ripped off sometimes, and they hate having to go into the shitty part of town.

While they’re making their way to the curb out front, he figures that if he stands on the right side of his friend, they might have a chance. Tey is wearing normal looking clothes and he can stand mostly behind him. The bruised side of his face won’t be showing that way either. He helps his wounded buddy hobble out to where they might catch a ride and helps him stand up as straight as he can.

By the time a cab shows up, Tey’s condition is becoming more worrisome. He’s afraid there might be internal damage. Tey can hardly hold himself up now, and it’s getting hard to keep supporting him. Luckily, A cab drops a tenant off out front and rolls on down to them at the corner.

The driver doesn’t notice Tey’s bruised face until they’re already in the car. Tey is barely alert, but he takes swift action in dispelling the situation before the driver gets mad. “This fella here was kind enough to save me from a group of thugs. He probably saved my life.”

The driver falls for it. “Son, you’re a good chap for sticking your neck out for this guy.”

“People usually know to run when they see someone like me coming in hot. Hey, thanks for stopping for us, man, really appreciate it. Can you just drop us off at his apartment? He said he lives at the Hifumi En, you know where that is? We’ll give you a couple of extra bucks.”

It’s a dumpy-ass apartment only a few blocks from their camp. It’s about as far into the hood as a cab will go. By the time they are dropped off and he’s able to help his friend make it to their hideout, it’s dark. The others have to help in getting Tey down the stairs and into the main electrical room. It’s risky with all of them scampering around in plain sight out front like that, but they have to do it.

They lay him on his back in one of the bunks and give him a good a grip of painkillers. They’re always available on the street for addicts, but sometimes they are handy to have around. They can count on at least one member of their group getting injured on any given week. Most of the time, they have to learn their lessons the hard way, but no one wants to listen to Tey moan all damn night. They give him enough to be comfortable and then some. Over the next five hours, they take turns watching him to make sure his condition doesn’t get any worse.

While Marek waits around for midnight to come, he tells everyone about the big male robot, and how it beat his friend senseless. It riles them up and they all want a piece of the action now. The senior members agree amongst themselves that it’d be best to watch the robot group for another couple days, so they can come up with a safe plan and a time to strike. They can’t afford to jump in all willy-nilly again. It’s already cost them their best infiltrator.

Having grown up wealthy, Tey still has a real legal identity, no criminal record, and the ability to blend in wherever he goes. He had thrown his cushy lifestyle aside and found a new one on the streets. He had explained to Marek, that one day, he just decided he was done following all the rules. Every aspect of his life was monitored and put out on the internet for everyone to see. His fame was inherited, and he hated every bit of it.

It seemed the entire world knew his name, where he lived, and where to find him at any time of the day like he was there for their amusement. Every time he would walk into a place, facial recognition software would pick him up and splatter him all over the place. “Good morning Mr. Almansa, welcome Mr. Almansa, would you like the usual Mr. Almansa.” Everyone’s phones would go off and they would all look up at him. He was never able to escape it.

All he ever wanted, was to go somewhere without his internet search history constantly dictating every bit of stimulus surrounding him. Without any privacy left in his life, he eventually found himself seeking anonymity above all else, but his money could not buy it. The only place he could find the peace he needed was with the homeless, in the shadow of the city.

Marek had been told that Tey was so desperate to shed himself of his identity that he was discovered by some of the others in the group, trying to disfigure his face. He had soaked a rag in a strong solution of lye and was going to burn his face and fingerprints off. The ones who found him had stopped him just in time. He was high out of his mind, babbling about the system watching him. They taught him how to live by the old-ways, and to shift about like a phantom. The group gave him his new name without ever asking what his original one was.

When Gabriel jerks awake in his recliner at home, he nearly dumps the bag of potato chips in his lap out on the floor. He quickly swipes for the bag as it slides away, accidentally smashing it flat. He shrugs and tips it up in the air so that the crumbs slide down and funnel into his mouth. After shaking every last salty crumb out, he flings the bag out onto the floor with no intention of picking it up any time soon. He turns the hologram projector back on and checks the AMF security feed he’s logged into.

He had fallen asleep watching Evan take what seemed like years to prep Aaron. He had planned on pulling another body for Paul earlier, but they screwed that up and stole one of the blanks he needed. Now that they’re gone, he’ll have to hurry like hell to get everything done tonight. He looks at the time and then tries to aim his feet into his shoes when he wriggles out of the recliner. Even though he’s wearing sweats, and stained ones at that, he doesn’t care. Only robots will be working the night shift over at the factory.

Since his SUV is still at the shop, he has had to borrow one of the Werker vans to drive over there and back. All he has to do is get the new brains from the printing lab and install them in the bodies. Since Valerie stole one of them, he’ll have to salvage the one that Mikel shot in the head. It’ll look like shit, but it’ll serve its purpose just fine. He wonders if the others have any idea what’s coming for them. There’s no way they could have remained completely oblivious to all the printing he was doing, or the three missing reels of synapses.

Every time he thinks of Paul, he remembers how much he looked up to him. Paul didn’t treat him like shit like Barry did. He may have become a bit spiteful, or outright mean in his old age, but he understood that. He was a handsome bear of a man in his youth, and it must have been hard for him to be cut down to nothing in the end. He used to have fun talking to him about what he would do with his second life as if it was always a for sure thing. The confidence Paul had in his work did mean a lot to him.

Every time he got Paul to smile, something would come over him, and then his mood would change. It was like the man could not bear being happy, or felt that it was wrong. Something must’ve happened between him and Barry too because they were not as close over the last couple of years as they used to be.

He wonders if it had to do with where the bodies of the two women came from. By the looks of their hair, one of them was surely a derelict. It was perfectly clean and combed, but also uncut, at least not in a way a civilized woman’s would be. Barry said that one was a little rat whore, and brushed it off, he didn’t say anything about the other and told him the less anyone knows, the better.

At AMF, Gabriel wanders around the storage area looking for acceptable attire for the duplicates. In the consumer portal, he saw that there were tactical looking black uniforms available. The chances they will fit are slim, but he figures it’s worth a try. It takes an hour, but he finally finds them in another section. Some idiot put them in the rack out of order. He grabs three of the packs and lays them in his cart as he rolls it down the aisles. He’s quite relieved to find that they already come with black facemasks. The blanks will be rather disturbing to be around, having such unformed faces as they do.

When he drags Paul’s original body out of the van, he’s too lazy to bother fetching the crane to lift it into the prep station. Instead, he rolls it over on the floor and cuts the skin off the back of its skull with a box cutter. After removing the destroyed brain that was left inside, he puts the new front gel pack in, clips the communication harness to the base of the fresh brain, and stuffs everything right back in.

Not planning on ever removing the brain, or refinishing this particular body, he crudely glues the skin back on the rear of the skull. He doesn’t feel like waiting for the glue to dry either, so he goes ahead and puts a couple of staples around the seam to hold everything in place for the time being. He needs Paul, but he sure isn’t looking forward to facing him either. As soon as the boot module runs its sequence, he runs away to hide behind one of the steel beams in the room.

Paul will suddenly wake up, thinking he was just about to step into the scanning station, back from a couple of weeks ago. He’ll wait to make sure Paul is stable before getting close to him. He woke up in a shitty mood last time, after having just been murdered. Now he’s going to have to hear about being killed yet again, and then some.

Paul wakes up with his face on the floor and takes a moment to get to his feet. “What the hell just happened Gabriel? Did you forget to strap me in?” The back of his head feels kind of numb, so he reaches up and rubs it with his hand. “What the fuck? Aw!” he looks at his hand and it’s got something sticky on it, like sap. “What’s all this shit?” He glances around and spots Gabriel cowering behind a column. They are not in the processing center anymore. “Where the hell am I? Did you molest me or something? What’d you do you little bastard?”

“Don’t touch that! It’s just glue. You had a… an accident.”

Paul’s eyebrows only raise slightly, in amusement of his poor luck these days. “I know I said I wanted to be brought back, but I did not mean to be going through this kind of shit every time.”

When Paul finally cools down, Gabriel has him change into the new clothes and stay out of the way while he works on the next two. He grabs the control pendant for the spares carousel and has the automated system send out one of the brand new indexed bodies on the crane. From there, he loads it into the work station while it’s convenient.

He peels back the unsealed rear of the skull and puts in another new brain. Again, he haphazardly bonds it back together like he did the first time. While the first Paul runs interference for him on the newly angry clone, he goes right for the third one with the crane. This time, he lowers it down to the floor far enough for its knees to touch the floor. The other two are rushing him along and their tempers are burning short.

While he’s patching up the last body, he suddenly remembers Marco having ordered pizza and leaving it in the fridge there. He looks down at the body hanging from the crane and hurriedly uses the boot module on it. “Things are getting better already!”

After the third copy is awake, he fills them all in on the rest of what has happened. They’re very disappointed in him after hearing that Barry is now dead and that his remains were never salvaged. Even more so when he mentions that Valerie has assumed his position on the board. The only thing that stops the other two from spiraling into a destructive rage is the first one that he brought back. He has assumed the claim of original and convinces them to follow the hierarchy.

“Gabriel is the only one on this planet that can keep us moving forward. Now shut up, fall in line, and focus on what has to be done.”

“Oh, you’re the big shot then?” They don’t care that he wants to take point, but they still have fun razzing him about it.

“Ha, well, he’s a something shot. Look at his stupid head!”

Paul turns away and feels for the still-gaping gunshot wound on the side of his skull. It’s all goopy with drying glue too.”

“Ah! Haha! Oh, and the staples! Nice touch Gabriel. We won’t even have to run anyone off. They’ll scram at the mere sight of this guy.”

Paul is not impressed with the other two of himself, not in the least. He tosses them Evan’s hand mirror from off of the cart and grumpily starts heading out to the van. “You two are just plain hideous.” It is a condescending remark, to put them in their places.

Their faces are smoothed over like that of a snake, and with only a seal coat over their underlying muscles and skull. Their eyelids and mouths have merely been slashed open with a scalpel and look disgusting. Together, they all berate Gabriel as being a worthless hack and threaten to make his face look like theirs if he pulls this shit again. The two are so disgusted by their faces, they have to put their silly black face masks on.