It was still unnaturally dark and blissfully cold but the air was as sweet as a woman’s caress. All I wanted to do was cling to the wet earth and keep breathing, but my rescuer had other plans.
“It’s a cave, but I can see light ahead,” he said, helping me to my feet. We waded through a stream, bending every few steps to wash the gunk off our naked bodies. Eventually we emerged into sunlight and collapsed on the bank. For a while all I could do was lie on my back, feet submerged in the water, arm shielding my face from the sun. Then I got thirsty. I turned on my side, came up to my knees, and turned around on all fours. When I lowered my face, the water felt cool on my skin, soothing, and when I opened my mouth it tasted pure and cleansing. I knew it for a fact. I knew it was pure as I tasted it and even knew the temperature of the liquid. I just didn’t know how I knew it. The water was refreshing, but I had the knowledge of its effect more than the actual feeling. It was unnatural. It was strange, but not as strange as my reflection in the water.
The face, the bald head, the eyes, the lips. I was staring into the reflection of someone else’s face. Only at a second glance did I realise what I was not seeing and managed to stifle a yelp with a hand to my mouth. My eyes were clear blue, but the thin black symbols which had appeared overnight during my adolescence were gone.
I sat back, dumbstruck, and looked around. My rescuer must have been going through the same revelation regarding his body. I saw him sitting on his haunches several yards away, staring at the water. Sensing my gaze, he turned his head and looked back at me.
“Maybe you can tell me what this rust bucket is all about?” he called. His voice was unfamiliar, but now that we were out of the deathtrap we awoke in, I recognised the dialect and it warmed my heart. Like me, he was bald—no, completely hairless, loins and all—but that was where the similarities ended. When he stood up I couldn’t help but envy his physique. It was perfection. Strong, long limbs, a lean but muscular body, and his skin as pure as a baby’s—which was more than odd, it was simply impossible. No one could be that strong, carrying me all the way up from the abyss to the surface, without having been touched by the curse and further amplified by a Tarakan device. This was a Tarakan combat vessel—he looked nothing like the man I used to know, but I didn’t care.
“Hello, Galinak,” I said.
“Who are ya?” He eyed me suspiciously as I walked towards him. “And what was that rust below?” He gestured at the cave. “And if you can answer both those questions, how about telling me why we are standing butt naked in the middle of the rusting wilderness?”
“It’s me, Twinkle Eyes,” I said.
“No, you’re not, and that’s far enough.” He took a half step away from me. I stopped.
“It’s me, Twinkle Eyes. We just have different bodies, both of us.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re rusting me, and patience was never one of my virtues. I’ll ask you for the last time. Who are you?”
I sighed. “You have a signature hip throw. You are terrible at cards. The odds in the fight we had in Vincha’s shack was five to two. You and Vincha had a weird sexual tension between you but you never actually got to …”
I watched his suspicion turn into a broad smile with every word I said.
“Well, rip my wires. Is that really you, Twinkle Eyes?” he finally asked.
I nodded and pointed at my eyes. “Just without the marks around the twinkle, I guess.”
“Bukra’s balls.” Before I could react, Galinak stepped forward, grabbed me in a crushing bear hug, and lifted me in the air like a little child.
“Galinak, put me down, you crazy Troll.” I tried to struggle, but it was like pushing against metal.
“It’s rusting Twinkle Eyes,” Galinak called out as he spun me around in his arms.
“Damn it, we’re both naked.”
“Who gives a silver wire?” Galinak shouted but eventually plunked me down on the ground and put a steadying arm on my shoulder. “I thought we were both goners,” he said. “I mean, I heard you over the Comm, negotiating with those Tarakan arse rusts when we were surrounded by those Lizards, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘Twinkles has some Salvationist spirit in him after all.’ But then the Lizards began breaking in, I heard you screaming over the Comm and …” Galinak’s eyes darkened.
“Push those memories back,” I said quickly. “They are not good to dwell on, believe me.”
“Aye, you’re probably right.” Galinak looked at himself again. “This is going to take some getting used to.”
“I know.” I looked, fighting the urge to cover my loins with my hand. “It’s as if this body is not yet my own. I wonder if we’ll sort of settle in with time.”
Galinak turned around in a slow circle, saying, “Right. Care to explain what’s going on?”
“I assume you were not briefed.”
He completed the full circle. “No, last thing I remember was what I am trying not to remember right now. Since then, completely blank. Did they speak to you?”
I nodded.
“Those smart-arse Tarkanians knew better than to wake me up for a chat,” Galinak grumbled. “I would have said several things they would be sorry to hear.”
“My conversation did not take long,” I said carefully. There was no use in agitating my only protection. “We were supposed to get more information and, you know”—I indicated both of us—“clothes and equipment and weapons.”
“Where, down there?” Galinak pointed at the cave.
“Yes, something must have gone unexpectedly wrong, some sort of malfunction or … a sabotage. But we need to get back and retrieve them.”
“That rebirth must have crossed your wires.” Galinak shook his head. “Because this new body of mine told me we were going to die down there, and that a normal human would have already been convulsing on the floor. Whatever was in that air was nasty, rust, I can still feel the sting on my skin.” He made a point of moving his hands around his naked body, brushing the invisible particles away.
“But we are naked, weaponless, in the wilderness,” I protested. “We’re alive, healthy, and there are no Lizards that I can see.”
Galinak raised a hairless eyebrow. “I’ve been in worse situations.” When he saw the look on my face he added, “I would tell you to grow a pair but that would be an inappropriate comment at this time, Twinkle.” His laughter was short-lived. I guess he wasn’t used to the sound of it, either. “You know what they want us to do, right? So just fill me in on that, but first let’s find out where we are.”
He drew my attention to an elevated boulder with a flat top. “You told me your eyes still have that special twinkle in them. I’ll give you a leg up.” He crouched into position and lifted me up with such force I almost missed the boulder and barely stopped myself from falling to the other side.
“Sorry,” Galinak apologised when I peered down at him accusingly. “I guess I am stronger than I look.” He crouched and jumped up, landing next to me in an impossible feat for any nonaugmented human. “I am starting to really like this new body,” he said, grinning.
I shook my head slightly, trying to hide my jealousy, then turned my head and began scanning the horizon. When I’d woken up in the poisonous bunker, I’d tried to use my night sight on reflex and had been unable to control the shifts in perspectives. This time I was more careful, but just to be on the safe side, I steadied myself by grabbing Galinak’s shoulder.
And like magic, it happened. I zoomed. I could see for miles in each direction. “There is a farm. Over there.”
Galinak squinted. “Where?”
“Hard for me to judge, looks like several miles.” I checked the position of the sun. “East … seems deserted. The windows are shut and the barn doors are open.”
“You can see that far?”
I turned to face him and had to steady myself as my sight shifted again. “I guess they gave us abilities that we are familiar with.”
Galinak ignored the bitterness in my voice. “Right,” he said, “we’d better start tracking while the sun’s still up, so we can get a nice tan.”
“I still think we should go back.”
“Look, Twinkle Eyes.” Galinak was starting to lose patience. “If you’re lucky, you’ll have a moment or two down there. Definitely not enough time to listen to your Tarakan friends, so all you can hope for is some gear, and rule one in the unwritten Salvationist rule book says ‘no gear is worth dying for.’ I would have been long dead if I hadn’t obeyed that rule.”
I wanted to protest further, but Galinak simply grabbed me by the waist, lifted me over his shoulder, and jumped down from the high boulder.
4
Peach
I only let myself cry once, that very night. I found a secluded ruin and with a little reverse engineering, managed to spark a fire from the power sword, although it did cost me too many energy cells and I promised myself to try and do it the old-fashioned way the next time around. Then I cleared the bone and skewered the meat on several sticks from the broken bow so the meat would cook faster. I’d only resorted to cannibalism three times before, and it was never a cherished culinary experience. This time was no exception. As the human flesh sizzled and cooked, I moved away from the circle of fire and found a dark corner, where I curled into a ball and sobbed quietly.
I was only a toddler when the Paralytic Plague, known as the Purple Plague, struck our town. Victims lost control of their bodies, then their respiration systems, and they fought to breathe until they died. My father and three brothers were gone in less than forty-eight hours, and I still remembered my little brother’s body being wheeled away to the local crematorium. My mother was not affected, but I was already developing high fever and had lost control of my arms and legs. The doctors moved me to a large hall where many lay waiting to die.
I’ve heard the story from my mother so many times, I’m sure my memory is as false as it is vivid. But I remember a group of men and women walking into the hall. They wore thick bio suits and blue facial masks even inside their helmets. Each carried a temperature-controlled medibag imprinted with the glowing logo of Tarakan. They quickly dispersed among the sick and dying. One of them, the only one who was also wearing old-fashioned spectacles inside the protection of his helmet, came and sat by my bed. He spoke in a soft tone of voice, almost a whisper, to my mother and told her he was from Tarakan University and that he had an experimental vaccine for the plague, but that it was not fully tested yet. The vaccine could kill me or it could cure me, and my mother had less than a minute to decide whether he should administer it to me or move to the next patient.
After watching her three sons and husband die, my mother didn’t hesitate. She told me years later that she had made a pact with herself that if I died, she would take her own life. The Tarakan doctor administered the vaccine by touching the fevered skin of my stomach with a metal object. I remember sweet coolness spreading quickly through my body. The next day I was on my feet. Out of 822 patients who got the vaccine, 645 survived.
My mother, a tax consultant by trade, applied for Tarakan residency the following week. Luckily, Tarakan was still accepting ordinary people back then. We moved to the City of Towers within a year, even though her trade was not needed there. She took any jobs they assigned her to, all below her skill and pay levels, but she never complained. Her sole ambition was for me to become a full Tarakan citizen.
I tried. I really did. But the shock of losing my family was too great. My mother worked hard and tried, without success, to compensate for the trauma we’d both endured. On the brink of adolescence, I became notoriously short-tempered. The puzzles and riddles were especially infuriating to me, and one day I threw a puzzle box at my teacher’s head, and someone came to speak to my mother. I was sure we were going to be sent away, but the Tarakan talent scout had a different idea. I was sent to the newly formed military academy and became a professional Tarakan soldier, eventually rising to the rank of colonel major.
These were pre–Guardian Angel days, when Tarakan still followed the international treaties forbidding them from using clones as soldiers. Keeping Tarakan assets safe meant biological humans had to do the soldiering. That was my job, more or less. I worked my way up the ranks not by solving odd puzzles but the old-fashioned way; killing Tarakan’s enemies.
I watched as Tarakan expanded and flourished, but I also saw the looming shadows and growing threats as other countries’ jealousy turned to fear, which festered to deep loathing and eventually hate. There were terror attacks, acts of sabotage, cybertheft, and even the danger of direct hostilities to many Tarakan assets around the globe.
When the decision was finally made, I helped train the first Guardian Angels. Well, trained is not the right word for it, as they knew how to fight from the moment they were created, but I did make them march in beautiful formations and sent them on countless black ops. It did not take me long to realise they were the future and I was becoming obsolete.
Eventually, it was my time for an early retirement. I never married, never had children—never had the urge, frankly—and was not big on friends, either. I had seen enough of the world to satisfy my need to travel without those endless boring vacations retired people take. So, it was either sit around in an undistinguished two-bedroom flat somewhere in the Eastern Spires till I died, or accept a second offer from the Tarakan security agency and become a hibernating agent, or a sleeper. When the offer came, I didn’t hesitate.
I thought I’d already seen it all, but the training to become a sleeper was a whole different ball game. You left everything and everyone behind, your body included, and uploaded your consciousness into Adam. You would wake up in different vessels, on different continents, countries, and cultures, knowing only who you were, what your alias was, and, most of the time, your mission. Despite what the name suggests, you didn’t actually spend your time there sleeping. The downtime was filled with training and briefings, teaching, virtual vacations, assignment preps, and a few more activities designed to keep you from losing your mind.
Once in the physical world, I could never recall the full details of my past operations, a needed security measure should I have fallen captive, but I did know the missions were getting significantly more aggressive as time passed. From simple data theft or blackmail to high-risk sabotage, kidnappings of major political figures, and high-profile assassinations. I even lit the spark, via a well-placed chemical bomb and several misleading fingerprints, to a major war in the Middle East, causing seven figures in casualties and the breakup of two regional powers.
Was I always on the just side? Hell if I knew. Many of my missions were on the shady side of the moral scale, and in my reports, as I remembered them, I mentioned more than once that aggressive subterfuge and iron-fist diplomacy led only to shortterm gains at best. We were becoming the bad guy for too many global players, and although they were weaker and far behind us on the technology scale, their combined force was a real threat.
Now I sat among the ruins of mankind. From what I gathered, they … well, we, as a species, seemed to have somehow survived Armageddon only to continue to fight and kill each other over and over again. Tarakan, the shining-bright gem of humanity, was destroyed. All I’d worked for and risked was for nothing. Billions of people had died, and those who were spared simply picked up a gun or a sword or even a club and kept at it.
Yet here I was. Someone had downloaded me into this vessel and given me a mission, so there must be some hope. I wiped away the tears and walked back to the fire, where the meat was slowly turning black, then sat down, picked up a stick, blew carefully on the meat, and chewed off a mouthful. The taste matched my mood.
Tomorrow would be a new day. I would find a way to reach the City of Towers and find out what my mission was. Tarakan was defeated, but perhaps it was not dead yet.
5
Twinkle Eyes
It was a much longer trek to the farm than anticipated, even considering our condition. The land was hilly and hard. Only bushes and an occasional low, twisted tree grew. Coming down the hills barefoot left the soles of my feet bleeding from countless cuts. As before, the pains were a little distant, and I stifled the unmanly yelps and cries I made after several amused glances from Galinak, who bore his pain in stoic silence. At some point, he found a hefty chunk of wood which in dire circumstances could perhaps be used as a club.
“You won’t knock out a hungry bear with that,” I half joked, filling the silence.
“No offence, my sharp-eyed friend,” he said, waving the chunk of wood at me, “but if we meet a bear I am planning to knock you out with this and run for it.”
That shut me up for a while. Normally I would have dismissed that kind of talk as Galinak’s rough sense of humour, but he was in a foul mood. I filled him in on the details of our mission as I knew it, and that caused two major tantrums and several more outbursts.
“No wonder everyone hated those rust fuckers,” he exclaimed, his unfamiliar face turning red. “They are playing us again.”
“They kept their word, and kept us alive.” I knew it was a mistake to try this argument as soon as I said the words.
“Did they short-circuit your wires, Twinkle Eyes? Tarakan only brought us back because they need us to do their dirty work.” Galinak waved his finger at me. “I ain’t gonna play their game again. You might have struck a deal with them rusters, but no one asked me to chase no little girl.”
“She’s not a little girl anymore, she’s probably seventeen by now.” If I thought that such a fact would cool Galinak’s temper, I was mistaken.
“I don’t care how old she is,” he bellowed at me. “I ain’t doing this again. They can kiss my naked, hairless arse, if they ever find me.” He began walking faster, leaving me behind.
I stiffened a yelp as I stepped on a sharp stone. “Wait, Galinak.” To my surprise, he actually stopped and turned, and I hopped closer.
“Remember what Rafik said. We’ll die in less then three years, and not in a nice, quick way.”
He looked at me. “Sometimes living a short, free life is better than a lifetime of bowing your head to a master.”
I could sense there was no point in trying to convince him of anything at that point. “Look,” I said, tuning my voice to sound calm and reasonable, “let’s find something to wear, food and water, and perhaps a weapon that is better than a branch. Then we’ll talk about it.”
“Fine.” Galinak nodded. “But there ain’t nothing to talk about. I’m done with those rusters.”
We continued to walk at a slower, careful pace. Galinak brooded in silence while I took my mind off a possible encounter with a bear by playing with my sight. It was similar to the power I had in my old body, but tenfold. It was as if I’d attached a Tarakan artifact to my eyes. I could see ants crawling on the ground or a bird of prey far up in the sky as if it were up close, but despite looking all around us every chance I got, the seemingly abandoned farm remained the only man-made structure I could detect. It was no surprise, really. The Catastrophe had left behind only remnants of the human race and a lot of empty land. Many survivors instinctively congregated in hamlets, villages, or towns, but there were others who moved away, or simply stayed where they survived, choosing to brave the elements on their own.
We reached the farm as the sun disappeared behind the mountains. Despite its abandoned look, we didn’t take any chances. I stayed low outside the premises and Galinak snuck in solo. After a while he came out and waved me over. It was indeed abandoned, from the look of the unkempt vegetable garden. We were in no condition to be picky, and we found several vegetables to nourish us. Eating for the first time in our new bodies was an odd experience. Like before, the feeling was duller than the awareness of the effect. I could tell that my body was being recharged by eating the rotting tomato, but thankfully, the taste was distant enough for me not to gag.
The barn had been emptied out long ago, but Galinak did find a butchering cleaver, which must have fallen when the owners were packing. It was a lucky find, since metal was priceless in these rural parts. It had some spots of rust, but the edge was true. Galinak kept it for himself and gave me the wooden club with a sly smile and a meaningful wink. I chose not to protest.
The living structure was only one story high but spacious enough to contain an extended family, perhaps even several generations, and it was almost completely cleared out. We found a few pieces of wooden cutlery near the cold hearth, too used and chipped to be worth taking. There was no food anywhere, and the wild ferret we discovered in one of the rooms wisely escaped via a hole in the wall before Galinak could make dinner out of him.
“Galinak, I found something,” I cried out. Despite the lack of alarm in my voice he arrived, quickly brandishing the cleaver. I nodded toward the closet.
“The door is stuck.”
He shrugged, lay the cleaver gently on his foot, placed one hand on the handle, and braced the other against the twin door. He looked at me.
“Why the gloomy face?”
“Because I can see what’s inside.”
He considered my words for a few heartbeats before pulling hard enough on the handle to yank it out of the door.
“Rust,” he swore, and without preparation he simply punched through the wood, pulling back to break it into several pieces. Once the dust had settled, we peered inside. There were only two items of clothing hanging from the rack by a wooden hook: a farmer’s blue overalls and a farmer’s wife’s dress.
Galinak looked at me again.
“Oh,” he said. “Now I get it.”
6
Peach
Clearing the ruins of the Radiated City took several days and a third of my nourishment pills. As I walked through the empty streets I realised why, despite the dangers of contamination, the looters still came to plunder. The city was destroyed probably within hours, not weeks or months. Missiles rained from the sky, and power rays carved the ground, destroying everything in their path. The nature of most Tarakan weaponry was such that tens of millions died within hours, but a lot of their items survived. I know this because I had been in charge of security when those weapons were mounted, piece by piece, on the Star Pillar and smuggled up to the hub to be assembled in space, then sent on long orbit so they could not be shot down by antisatellite batteries on Earth. At first, I did not know what we were carrying up. Even with my security clearance, I still shouldn’t have known that we were breaking several international treaties by secretly carrying missile parts up the Pillar, but all the secrecy in the world can’t stop a drunken intelligence officer from blabbing while trying to pick up a woman at a local bar. We had surprisingly good sex that night, but the next morning, I got him fired.
Aside from the awfulness of the world I woke up to, the trek was a long way from the worst situation I’d been through. I remembered having to survive twenty-seven days in a Bangladeshi sewage system while an army of assassins hunted me down. Compared to that, walking in a ruined city, even in the rain, was almost a relaxing affair with the added bonus of casual looting.
Of course, by now, clothes and delicate items were long gone, but I still managed to find neo-flex plastic material, and with the help of my power sword, I cut and wrapped it around the soles of my shoes and made a cover for my head. There was also enough material for a crude sack. Remembering Malk’s debriefing on currency, I filled it with pieces of junk, mostly metal. I even found a cracked porcelain cup, which somehow had survived all this time. I wrapped it carefully in the last remaining piece of neo-flex plastic and walked away, feeling somehow more optimistic than before. The sword belt was too large for me to tie around my waist, so I threw it over my shoulder and under my armpit, bandolier style, making sure the hilt behind my back was within easy reach.
