Jesse and her machine stood off stray of the rest, the torso of the Calico rotating slow right to left then left to right. In the cockpit she smoked and the EW box whirled next to her shin. The scrub nets were coming back all but clean. She leaned down and twisted the spring loaded reset knob and broadcasted out again, to be sure. She ashed on the leg of her coveralls and rubbed the ash in. Jesse was the sole Information Officer on duty, a position usually held by two pilots, sometimes three on larger teams. Theyd lost Calebs three months back and thered been no replacement yet. They’d not seen any combat in twice as long – one day Calebs had just vanished.
At morning check-in he was gone. They figured he deserted because what else could it have been. To where is another question. Maybe he decided hed rather wander the desert. Nobody knew what to think about it. No one wanted to check the logs for convoys going out or ships Offworld to make sure. His Calico was gutted of usable equipment and everything was grafted onto the other machines.
Jesse got the worst of it. Her legs were entombed by bulky electronics. She took when she could to stretch what she could. She had both suites of IV Busses under her seat, one set to short and the other to long stroke, the indicators run then soldered up in free mounts above her head. And now she had the other Feedkill box too, which was her new left armrest. The toggles faced away so they wouldnt dig into her side. The box usually sat beside the Busses but there wasnt room with the second unit under there. Shed only used a Feedkill box once, when she was getting her certs. She was laid up in medical for three days. Other trainees longer. Theyd all heard about the guy who killed himself after, and apparently there were always a small number that did, so different names of who did what were cycling into the stories over time. Jesse kind of didnt blame them. It was one of the worst feelings shed ever had. She was afraid of using one again. Harris and Julian were sitting eating by the fire while Nick laid and looked up at the suspended wreckage of a battle platform, the platform blown to millions of pieces and in a hundred years old orbit. They had the floods of their MCs on and the light cast long beyond them. Aarons was already asleep on the ground, no pillow or blanket. Jesse in her Calico, the cockpit canopy up. She was laying long ways, her legs danging out. She’d flip the EW box after each broadcast, mostly for something to do. It had picked up two signals hours ago and they hadnt moved.
‘Stop it with that thing. Theyre prolly dead.’ Nick hollered again. She figured that too. Probably got hit before they could switch over the Busses. Maybe they didnt even have any. Sometimes militias got a hold of some Cavalry, a bunch of smaller machines, a couple of Partisans or old Growlers. Especially Growlers, they were everywhere. A lot had been made and Jesse had seen them in the hands of all sorts of teams. But so usually by the time an outcast unit got a hold of some armor, stuff like IVs and Feedkills had been stripped and sold off. Shed even seen some retrofitted to be all manual. Sounded, to her, like a good way to be killed. Nick hoisted himself up to a squat and wiped desert off his palms onto his pant thighs.
‘Jesse, come eat or something. Come down.’
‘Were still on duty.’
‘Are we. Maybe just you are. Harris, you on duty.’ Julian gave a smile to Nick and Harris shook his head.
‘They say no Jesse. My hands are tied. Theyre saying no they aint.’
‘Come tomorrow we should check out the signals. We should be going now.’
‘Maybe theyll come to us. Maybe theyll go away. Theres no telling. Warzone and all.’ Nick grinned back at Julian.
‘How you figure he sleeps like that.’ Nick stood and pointed his dull boot tip toward Aarons.
‘He says he doesnt like sleeping in the pit. Says it gives him bad dreams.’ said Harris quietly like not to wake him.
Nick scrunched up his face and shrugged. Nick didnt have dreams or couldnt remember them. He hadnt decided yet.
‘Nick sleeps rigged up, like a fucking psycho. He likes being In Between. Like a fucking psycho.’ Julian nudged Harris, smiling again.
‘I dont like or dislike it. Its nothing. Better to be ‘in the In-Between’ then be caught unready.’
‘Guys who spend too much In-Between go home and kill their whole families.’
‘Good thing I dont think I got anyone back there anymore.’ He spat for effect and turned to look off into the desert like there was something to see but there wasnt. No living thing was on this planet besides people. Not this or any other planet. No birds or snakes or anything.
‘Scrub Nets dont come back like this over and over without whatever its pinging knowing.’
‘Telling you, theys dead. The fact that weve been picking them up for so long is proof of that.’ Nick spat again and leaned toward Julian.
‘You ever got caught in a Scrub Net. Nose bleeds. Ear wont stop popping. Even your teeth start hurting. You get caught in that sucker and youll either run away or towards it. You either run or try and stop it.’
‘I know that. You act like youre the only one who knows something.’
‘Im not talking about knowing it, Im asking if youve been caught up in one. I can tell you aint and no slight intended about that. Its good you aint. You dont want it.’
Nick looked back up at Jesse and stretched his back with his hands on the small like handcuffed then yelled up at her.
‘You dont stay put for five hours, thats for fucking sure.’ He blew air out his mouth and put his hands on his waist.
‘We’ll see tomorrow.’ Harris said soft.
‘Hey Julian. You know what they do, Julian.’
‘They make you feel bad.’ Julian scuffed his heels uselessly in the dirt where he sat, souring.
Nick did a cruel grin and pointed it at him and then to Harris who gave back a small smile of a tender paternal pity and then this to a long sad and clownish frown at Julian who just looked down at between his legs for awhile, then shook his head.
The smile on Harris returned. ‘We all have memories. I have memories, you have memories, no matter about what, we have them.’
He raised one hand in a shrug and showed his palm.
‘We dont need to know them, yours or mine, thank you no thank you.’
Julian hadnt looked up.
‘So what we have are these little pinpricks of time or of experience, these moments where a piece of the world pierced through to the world that is you. Think of them like marbles. Imagine your little life and your little brain a sack for these marbles and there is some reacting substance or angle to existence that has a foil to it where we all threw out our sacks to a floor at once and all those pinpricks clattered and scattered off across each other. Now think of them all having residue on them, unique and individual, and like sticky sap or a wad of gum. And each one of these collisions these marbles make with each other leaves a string of that substance and then onto each other.’
‘Jesus fucking christ Harris. Dumb it down for us backwater boys in the crowd.’
Harris laughed deep from his stomach, sounding truly tickled. ‘And so thats just a moment. We pick up our marbles, now with all these tethers and threads and strings and trails, we gather them all up to cast out again. Over and over again we will cast them, even that just a moment.’
Julian groaned and held his head, looking irritated and disgusted.
‘Dont make me get Jesse to tell it. Do a better job. Do a good job.’ Nick warned and Jesse looked down at them from the Calicos cockpit, the carapace now still and no longer rotating.
‘Dont look on down here. Dont look down here at all.’
‘Harris, do the Paint one for them’ she shouted down. She was now actively paying attention and Julian didnt know what that meant as far as how he was going to be treated next.
Harris straighten up his posture and tidied his crossed legs positions, all with a small touch of the jovial.
‘Imagine you have, like you have unique fingerprints or unique dna, imagine you have a unique residue.’
‘What the fuck cmon, man.’
‘Okay, so. So like a special paint that is a special color that only you have. Thats your color. Its all over your body. No one can see it but its there. Like how with a black light or a sensor or whatever. But so yeah your paint. And everyone is like that. We all got our special paint that you cant see. You understand, yes.’ Julian nodded still looking down. ‘So whatever we touch, any place in the world and any person, we leave some of our paint. And we collect paint thats there. You can picture this in your head, yeah.’ Julian nodded again. ‘That paint though, that paint is everything. Our paint is all of us, all our memories, all the things we feel and ever felt or ever thought. What we have done. That paint is that – or accurate to say a tag or representation of that, the compression of that into a symbol or an inscription into information. Data, you know. Data. That color. But so, anyway. What a Scrub Net does is scrubs all that paint off you. So now you can be seen. You. You, without any paint. But everything else has paint.’ Now Julian was looking at him and made up a face of puzzling out a riddle. ‘Theres more to it but its not important.’ and Julian looked almost grateful to hear so.
‘Now youve got no paint. And it hurts to have no paint. A lot. Its all mental or better say emotional, but it quickly starts manifesting … physical … symptoms … Anxiety attacks. Migraines. Stress rash. Heart palpitations. Um, lets see … labored breathing, as well.’
‘What is that you mean with emotional, like.’ asked Julian finally. Like he was guessing something.
‘Well, think of what that means, to have no paint. Thats every single connection youve ever had and ever will have unplugged from you. Again, more to it, but its like that. All the cables have been cut. And no, you dont forget your family or like your name or something. Or like what you did for your seventh birthday. Or First Love. But you feel like you have, sort of. Husks is a word that comes to mind. All you have is all this meaningless shit, you know.
MAROONED MY BROTHER ! Marooned from this world, no tether between you – between your world – and the world. COMPLETE HORROR MY BROTHER ! Ha Ha !’ roared Harris bobbing around the shadows and lights from the fire and flood lamps.
Julians brow fell and tighten to bewildered. He quickly shot looks to everyone, even Aarons down there sleeping.
‘I dont get it.’
This got a laugh from all of them that trailed out and the night wound down until no one else said anything. Within the hour theyd turned the chem fire out and went to sleep in their cockpits with canopies open to the sky, all except for Harris who posted up as watch. They let Aarons where he was.
Aarons was still and pale when Harris kicked to wake him, feeling no give when he did and Aarons toddered back and forth a little like an overturned figurine. He knew it was a dead body before he went to shake him but still, when he touched him and felt how he was so cold and rigid, he recoiled back anyhow.
They all except Julian stood around him, saying he didnt want to look at it anymore. Only Nick had seen a dead body before. Theyd killed but never saw it. It was different now, with Aarons down there like that. They were all careful to make sure their shadow didnt touch Aarons body.
Jesse was smoking another cigarette. ‘Audits should of caught this.’
‘Well they didnt.’ Nick shook his head though no one would see.
‘Horrible.’ said Harris.
‘I dont know. He looks like some baby or kid or something, curled on his side like that. Though I guess thats horrible in its own right.’
Harris said low, ‘Think its too late. To kill the feed.’
‘Hes prolly already back there at the Kernel.’
‘And if hes not.’
‘Well.’
‘Youd want us to try if it was you.’
Nick paused and before looking back up at them said ‘Yeah. I guess that I would.’
Jesse flicked to ash and ash drifted down and dotted across Aarons face. They all looked at another and shared a shameful face and then Harris bent and wiped it and instead it smeared, so he wet his finger and cleaned it off like a mother would have. Julian had come back to them and this was what he saw first.
They stood around askance looking up at the Jetty. Aarons was back of them and under the small pile of silver mountains of a mylar blanket, each end twisted up so he looked like a big candy mint, and they weighed each end down with Aarons boots – theres not been wind at all since theyve been posted here but theyd rather not risk it start up now and they have to look at him all over again.
‘So what we losin.’
‘On my end, long range tracking, another Band channel – which I sure as god dont know what that will trip. Down another Overflow. And a Compressor. All together though, as a unit...I dont know. Mobility. Pursuit protocols. Cant run screens.’ Jesse bit at the inside of her mouth andlooked up at the sky and then back at everyone else. ‘Cant directly engage either. Or not easily.’ Jesse scaled the Jettys side and poked her head into the cockpit then back out again.
She sat between the open canopy and the top front plates. Nick threw up her cigarettes.
‘Harris you got ah damn a like plug or something to plug the, what is it. A stop-gap. A stop-gap measure.’
‘We need to kill the feed sooner rather than later. We can at least do that. Should do that.
Then I will think and tell you. After.’
‘Yeah.’ said Julian.
The two looked up at Jesse, Nick at them before joining their gaze. She had the cigarette pack in both her hands and she turned it over like she was slowly washing it, it catching the sun and throwing off little glimmering blinks, then she stopped and looked down at them.
‘Okay. Lets do it.’
She came back with a khaki pouch the size a deck of cards and the rest were still just there looking up dumbly at the Jetty or at the sky or down at the ground but not back at Aarons. Or of course at each other. Jesse gathered some sort of fight had broke out while she went back to her machine. She thought, for a moment, of the surface tension on a drop of liquid and then discarded the thought and dug for the plastic ampules and handed them out.
Julian held his up to one eye like a jewel and shook it. Something swooshed around in it that just looked like water. He sighed with heavy sincere drama. Everyone else tensed up. Julian solemnly looked back and forth at each of them, almost like a dopey dog.
‘The Taste of Death.’
Screams broke out immediately. Even Harris. This had been a well fought over and often settled point of dispute between them all. It was, in a way, unbelievable to the rest of them that Julian would, with supposed earnestness, bring it up again.
‘It taste like nothing it never fucking tasted like anything.’
‘No, almost like licorice and almonds. Black licorice.’
‘Shut the fuck up Harris.’
‘Jesse its Julian gettin everyone started up.’
‘Fuck Julian. We call it what its called. Like we all agreed we would.’
‘Did we agree. Which time was this one.’
‘God Harris shut the fuck up with her.’
Harris began a played up but warm chuckle and rolled his eyes and head to the side theatrically, only to catch the roiled flashes of light off mylar and Aarons back there before he could close his eyes to it. They all noticed his stillness and turned without thought back at Aarons until there was all of them standing eyes closed toward him and silent.
‘Lets take the stints. Jesse, get the box. Or I guess we go over there. Lets get away from this for a second.’
They waited until Jesse got up to the cockpit with the boxes before all nodding to each other with gravity. They broke the ampules in their teeth, careful to catch the liquid in their mouths. Harris put his empty ampule into the breast pocket of his coveralls and the rest threw theirs on the ground.