Sam and the Dead

Chattel 4

Jo didn't know what day it was, nor has he ever. Black paint on the windows warped his perception of time. He was sure he hasn't slept in days, but he felt better than ever – sleep deprivation was feeding his mind a euphoric numbness and making his fingers all the nimbler.

He was so brilliant, and smart, and delightful. The copper cylinders around him sang his praises. As they spun on their rotaries, their grooves and notches and valleys and trenches passed over the coding pins, creating a symphony of ticks and scratches that oscillated around his desk.

Each cylinder was a maiden, oiled and shining; his diamond blade was the very finger of the Lords Below, biting into the sheen of their skin with flawless precision. With each cut a new groove was made, a new whispered note was struck and recorded in the tapebox, and his greatest routine – the culmination of his life's work – moved one step closer to completion.

Though his heart railed like a steam engine, and his crotch a swamp of itches and burns, his hands were perfectly steady, each incision of his blade flawless.

He worked in the dark. He has worked by touch for a long time. The workshop was lit by a single yellow bulb, just enough to ascertain the location of the chamber pot, but he wore dark goggles anyway – to focus. Light was a distraction. Seeing was a distraction.

The cylinders spun and spun, so neat, so unspoiled...but there was a wrongness. A tick slightly delayed. He turned on his chair, snarling. Where? How could he have made a mistake?!

The chair broke. About time, really, since he weighed three times as much as when he first sat down. Metal screamed, joiners popped. Jo fell to the floor ass-first, flailed, knocked over the chamber pot, kicked the tape box, kicked it again, and cringed as two hundred spinning cylinders began to desynchronize.

He flailed. His hand slipped in the brown. A jagged piece of metal poked against his back, buried beneath the spill of his stomach. He couldn't reach it. A thin wheeze ran from his teeth. Pain. How primitive.

The erratic cylinders grated into his inner ear like sawblades.

'JOY!!' He screamed. Lords Below, how feeble he sounded, like a gutter choked with trash. 'JOY!!'

Silence. He tapped his left forefinger and thumb together, furiously, the way Maestro Cowen had shown him. Like clicking fingers. His fingernails luminesced with Green. What a feeble tool the slave-tether was – barely functional, never relayed commands the way he meant them, and more often than not, did absolutely nothing.

Maestros, renting out their dead but keeping the real tethers for themselves. Despicable.

The door to the workshop banged open. A shaft of light illuminated the love of his life. Joy was pale, so very lovely and pale, her eyes black-on-black, her hair a supple blonde, her figure slim yet bulging at all the right places. Weekly maintenance worked wonders for the flesh, and for strength too – strength enough to carry ten times her body weight.

The situation was deceptively delicate. The room was cluttered beyond sense: cylinders, tools, clothes, boxes, copper lodes, wires, spools, a rumpled bed, six workbenches, seven cabinets, the entire floor littered with jagged pieces of who knew what. Every step could start a cascade of disasters.

Still, it would have been a trivial task for Joy if not for her new tape box. Baseline routines behaved oddly during calibration, the application of strength erratic. One ill-adjusted move, and Joy could break him by lifting too fast, grabbing too hard, letting go too soon...

He needed the manual override – with the damnable slave-tether.

'Joy, listen to me. Are you listening?' A nod. 'A garden of Green, a pit of purple, a jilted house, with a broken steeple.' His fingers tapped in spasms. Damn Cowen and his stupid rhymes! 'Do you understand?'

He swore he could hear it – the soft spooling of the tape box inside Joy, inside the cavity of what was once her stomach. The sound was smooth as silk, quick as sand.

Another nod.

'Forward, two inches.'

Joy dragged her heels on the floor. Gone was the grace of the walk routine he had agonizingly implemented; the slunk-shouldered, slack-jawed stumble of the ambler has returned. Tears rose to his eyes as Jo forced himself to look on.

'Left, five inches.' More shuffling. 'Front obstacle, manual detect.' Joy lifted her left leg with perfect balance, probed around until her foot struck the overturned lockbox, then stepped over it.

Jo was out of breath by the time Joy made it to him. The metal was really digging into his ribs now, a bruise at least. Pain inspired urgency, and urgency was never good.

'Get rid of this, hurry up,' he gasped, fumbling at his side. He couldn't reach, couldn't –

Joy tore the crooked chair from under him and threw it across the room. Screeching, it knocked the door free from its hinges, tumbled into the corridor beyond, and stuck itself into a wall.

No no no. Too vague. Phrase better, with qualifiers, quantifiers, or it would be him flying into the wall next. 'Quarter strength. Quarter. Query...will you help me up?'

Her hand found his shoulder, her grip cold and gentle, then painful. Jo screamed...

...and stood on his feet. The room wobbled. It has been days since he last got out of that chair; his hips felt like they carried a boulder.

'The routine...the routine...'

The cylinders spun in disarray – pins out of alignment, tape sliding crookedly through the box. Three weeks of hard work stood on the precipice, and Jo was...tired.

He looked for a chair, realized he had none, stumbled, lost his balance, then landed on his bed with an earth-pounding crash. Before he could catch his breath, Joy's hand was on his shoulder again, gentle. She was still trying to pull him up.

'Resume nominal routine,' he gasped.

Joy froze for a split second, then rubbed her index finger against his lips. Sensual. Lovely. Another subroutine flawlessly executed.

He was a master of his craft. This little show of playfulness sold for ten thousand seeds on Floor of Twenty. It was all the rage in the Admin Houses...but even the richest of buyers only received his poorest iterations; the best work he kept only for himself.

His heart calmed a little, and the stink of brown assaulted his nostrils. The chamber pot. 'Joy, how many times have I told you?' he patiently explained. 'This is our shared space, and we must, must maintain it together, that is the responsible thing to do. Clean this up. It stinks. Oh Lords Below it's on my hand. Fetch water. Wash me.'

Joy turned to leave, her hips swaying at the most temptingly exact angle, her backside a pair of supple, rippling hills, the gap between her legs perfectly dimensioned at exactly quarter of an inch – a window for the soul, if there was such a thing.