Jak woke in the transfer pod, and finding himself alone, cracked open the lid, slid to his feet, slipped off his robe, and stood naked in the center of the full-length mirrors which lined the small room.
He hadn’t been feeling 100% himself since his last assignment—a memory which made him laugh, because not being 100% himself was what he’d been hired to be in the first place, right? It was an unfamiliar laugh, somewhere between a bark and a snicker, and that made him laugh all over again. He shook off his grogginess as best as he could, and began to do what was demanded of him.
He stretched, and twisted, and as he imagined the client who’d come in for this latest assignment of his doing the same in a much better-appointed room on the other side of the warehouse complex, he wondered—
What am I this time?
No, not who—but what. The who of it didn’t matter. It never did. That wasn’t what brought in customers desperate for a treatment which was still experimental and, as far as Jak was concerned, a bit shady, or what caused them to cough up the fee which would make his discombobulation over the next week worthwhile. He’s never get to meet the man—though sometimes it was a woman—whose body he wore, and so tried his best not to think much about him, only the cleansing to come.
So he raised his arms, spread his toes, lifted his eyelids, and pulled at his lips, examining the unfamiliar body which seemed to repeat forever in the mirrors, looking for track marks, stretch marks, pock marks, yellowing teeth, dilated pupils, the physical clues which allowed him to do his job. But he also listened for the internal and the invisible—the hungers, lusts, and desires—any and all of the other signs he’d come to know so well.
He was a professional after all.
And being a professional, he was puzzled by what he found—or rather, didn’t find—in the aftermath of his latest procedure.
He was taller than when he’d arrived that morning, the floor seeming farther away, and he was wiry in a way he knew was stronger than anyone looking at him would see, unless and until he was tested. And the world around him seemed sharper somehow, too, even though Jak had always thought he already had perfect vision. Plus the room smelled…different. Though perhaps that wasn’t the room, just the scent of his own unfamiliar pheromones.
All interesting observations, but none of it helpful for what would come next. And so in the end, pointless. He grunted, then smiled again at the strangeness of the sound, as alien as his earlier laugh.
Jak didn’t like being puzzled. He wished he could have taken more time for self-inspection and introspection so he could sense the true nature of his assignment before joining the others for the day’s first check-in. He knew, though, that if he dragged it out, Bailey or one of the others would come checking to see what was holding him up, and he didn’t need that. After his slower than usual recovery from the last couple of withdrawals, he suspected he was already being watched closely. Too closely. And he didn’t want to have to go back to a normal job, not after discovering he was so good at one that paid so well—and off the books at that.
Satisfied of nothing more than that he remained unsatisfied—he couldn’t remember ever being this ignorant at the start of a cleanse about the work ahead—he dressed in the familiar—too familiar—company-provided boring grey slacks and T-shirt. He wished they’d take the advice of those who did the hard work and let them each choose their own colors, their own fabrics, something with a personal style so they could continue to let their old selves, their real selves, shine through, differentiating what had been transferred from what they’d become. But there was always pushback.
Bailey thought allowing that kind of choice would cause Jak and those like him to pay too much attention to the bottle rather than the wine, whatever that meant. Jak was never quite sure where Bailey was going with his metaphor, because people were flesh and blood, and souls could not simply be decanted. That wasn’t at all what was happening here, and if the man in charge thought it was, he was a fool. Though, well, if he was a fool, he was one that paid the bills, and so Jak found his irritation easy to shrug off. He’d never seen the point in pushing back. Life was too short.
Neither garment looked as if it would fit. Each did, of course. They always did, no matter how much Jak would doubt on first glance. The technicians always made sure of that. Jak would habitually start off during the initial moments of settling in still thinking he wore the body he’d been before, the body he was born with, the body that currently housed a stranger taking a vacation from their addiction, so all the world around him seemed ill-fitting. But that would change, he knew, as the moments passed. Once he left the room and joined the others, he’d surrender to what he was meant to be, what he needed to be to do what he’d been hired to do.
But what was he meant to be? For the first time ever, he had no sense of that, and it irked him. No, not irked. Angered him, actually. An anger that was more of a surprise than a body which so far refused to reveal its secrets.
But he’d delayed long enough. Better get on with it.
He took one long, last look at the stranger’s face, his face for now, then stepped out to learn which friends had turned into strangers with him this time.
“I think I’m an alcoholic,” Jak said as he sat in a circle surrounded by others also newly awake and attempting to come to terms with the addictions of the bodies they wore. But however they struggled to interpret the impulses they felt, he doubted any of them could be as confused by their burdens as he was. And not solely based on what any of the mirrors had told him either, but what he felt in the moment.
“You always think you’re an alcoholic,” said Inesh, with a voice an octave lower than his natural intonation, spilling from lips which belonged to another, but in a bouncy tone which was too Inesh to be denied. When fully himself, he was a slim man, but he now appeared to be a body builder, one so muscular his elbows were barely able to scape his sides. Jak hoped his friend wouldn’t accidentally break anything—or anyone—by not properly judging his own strength during the week ahead.
There were nine others curved around Jak this cycle. Bailey, the man in charge, was still Bailey, looking as he always did when he sat in to babysit the group rather than leaving it to one of his assistants—a grumpy walrus in a wig, though it was the man’s own hair appearing so fake. The others, however, were not immediately recognizable by the flesh they wore, only by their movements, their gestures, their expressions, whatever evanescent urge animated the meat puppets into which they’d been slipped. It took Jak but a few brief moments of study before he saw through each of their shells, and then everything snapped into place.
Jayne always sat with one leg tucked under her, whether or not the body she inhabited was designed to bend that way. Jak was surprised there’d never been complaints from the customers about unfamiliar aches and pains because of that after their returns to themselves. Armando—surprisingly shy for someone willing to dance through the bodies of strangers—would blink and look away if you stared at him too intently. Egon always tapped a foot when others spoke, as if rather than listening to what anyone else had to say, he was grooving to a song only he could hear. This time around, he wore a body that presented as female, which made the tic even more attractive than Jak usually found it.
Tics. That’s all Jak and his coworkers were, a collection of tics and tells—but wasn’t that true for everyone?—and they always carried them from body to body. But the most important piece of baggage the workers here brought with them to their temporary homes—the ability to resist the immediate gratification of their desires. Not all of those who’d applied and tested were found capable of such willpower. Jak was relieved to have been one of the lucky ones. He could resist. The question they each had to answer for themselves in their initial hours after insertion was…resist what?
One after another they tossed out their guesses, and those with enough history of detox behind them were usually right. Jak tilted his head back and closed his eyes, listening through the unfamiliar voices to find the friends within.
“I think I’m a heroin addict. Again. I’m not looking forward to this one. That’s a rough gig.”
“Me, I’m a smoker, but man, this one, she waited too long. I’m gasping just sitting here. I don’t think I’m going to be able to get through the assignment without oxygen. What was she thinking? What was the point?”
“Getting paid is the point.”
“Sugar for me. And once this is all over, some dentist somewhere is going to make as much as we do. More probably.”
“Alcohol here. And for this guy, I’m pretty sure it was always the good stuff.”
Jak found comfort in the overlapping voices, but Bailey, as usual, tried to get them to share one at a time. Also as usual, none of them paid him any heed. What was unusual, though, was that this time Bailey’s attempts to rein them in pissed Jak off. He normally simply ignored the man’s officiousness the same way all the others were doing, and let it go. But this time Bailey’s familiar tiresome demeanor struck a nerve. One Jak didn’t even know he had.
Jak let the conversation wash over him, enjoying a rhythm and language known only to those willing to sign on for such a job—and who survived their first attempt. But a part of him wasn’t connecting to that music, because a part of him was still missing. Something seemed wrong. He chalked it up to the hangover from his last job not having fully faded. When he first got this gig, that never happened, but lately, the residual afterglow once he got back to his body would take several days to dissipate. He should have reported the psychic bleed, waited another couple of days before tossing his name in the queue for a new insertion, he guessed, but the pay was simply too good to turn down.
He’d only said at the start of the circle he felt like an alcoholic because he was required to say something, but that was a guess, made primarily because he couldn’t detect the itches he’d grown to associate with all the other addictions he’d experienced. He was sure he’d have had no trouble figuring it all out if only he’d waited a few more days. Whatever the reason for the unexpected hole in his knowledge, he didn’t like not knowing, didn’t want them to know that this time he didn’t know.
He wished the company would just tell them the details of what each client was seeking recovery from while they lounged several hundred yards away at the other end of the complex, but he’d learned quickly that was another losing battle, for they felt Jak and the others would be better able to fight back against their piggybacked urges if they had no idea what they were. So he’d let it go, and stopped asking. Life always went more smoothly when he could do that.
And yet, that day, he found he couldn’t stop picking at it. The psychologists had come up with that theory, but what did they know? Had they ever done what Jak had done? No. The more Jak thought about it, the more it bothered him, making him far more upset than he ever usually got, until he found himself trembling, and had to take a few deep breaths to calm down.
He knew he had to say something, couldn’t get away with being silent for long, but didn’t want his agitated tone to give any clues as to how unusually worked up he was. So he forced himself to take yet another deep breath and then—
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s alcohol for me, I guess,” he said.
After that, he said as little more as he was able to get away with until it was time for lights out.
Jak lay in the dark listening to Inesh snore, surprised by the sounds he’d never heard from his friend before, even as he knew—it wasn’t really Inesh snoring. That noise was of the body, not the spirit. Or, as Bailey would put it, the bottle, not the wine. But that didn’t make the rumbling any easier to endure, as Jak, on the other side of the room, tried and failed to join his friend in sleep, regardless of who or what was responsible.
He remembered when it didn’t have to be that way, when his nights could belong to him alone—him and whatever borrowed addiction he had to ignore until he could conquer it. The company used to allow them to sleep in singles—until Dallas ruined it for them all by sneaking in drugs and selling them to a couple of his peers who decided their own spirits weren’t tough enough and they needed their withdrawals softened. Now the employees were forced to room together so they could keep watch over one another, as if that was really any kind of solution. Because, hey, what if the both of them decided to feed rather than starve the addictions they’d been saddled with?
Besides, you’d think the company would just punish the tech who was willing to accept bribes rather than the ones who were assuming all the risk. Theirs was merely an understandable slip, considering their unusual circumstance, and not a crime. But what he’d learned during his year doing detox was that this organization was no different from all the others—they’d always choose to do what was easy over what was right.
Which meant—because Inesh’s snorts and burbles kept derailing Jak’s train of thought—he was finding it difficult to dive more deeply into the mystery of what he was supposed to be this time.
His mind wandered to the clients on the other side of the complex who were sleeping in softer beds after having eaten a more luxurious dinner, all the while thinking their stay there would kickstart a cure. The contrast between what he imagined and the reality of his own hard mattress made him add a snort of his own.
Though once the paying customers swapped with Jak and the others, they were also in bodies not their own, this wasn’t a job to them. They weren’t working. Their time in the facility was a vacation, as if they were at a spa, one where they could tell themselves lies. They pretended to themselves this was the first step in being cured of whatever ailed them, and that once given their bodies back clean, renewed, refreshed, they’d be able to—what? Go out and lead a good life?
Jak knew better.
Though they all made such promises on the entry paperwork they signed, the only reason most of them bothered getting cleaned up was so they could head out and do it all over again, their drug of choice now feeling fresher and stronger, their highs much more intense. More than once he’d seen bodies he’d worn before returned to the facility to be inhabited by another, so…he knew. The whole project was a farce.
He was usually OK with that—or as OK as his bank balance allowed him to be—but not that night.
His heart raced, and he found himself gasping for breath in the dark. He was glad none of the others could see him then. He usually had better control of his anger than that. He usually didn’t even have that much anger to control. He was sure not knowing the cause for his itch—one present in the background, but undefinable—was responsible for his edginess. He’d never coped well with uncertainty—not out there, where he hid it well, and not in here—and being unable to figure out what had brought his latest client to the facility irked him. Though at the moment, he wasn’t sure which irked him more—that hole in his knowledge or Inesh’s snoring. He didn’t care it was Inesh’s temporary body responsible for it, and not Inesh—he still wanted it to stop, almost found himself shouting for it to stop, as if the darkness was giving him permission to vent.
He dug his fingers into his mattress to prevent himself from rushing over and shaking his friend awake. He knew it would be wrong, but still…the feeling was there.
He calmed himself by taking inventory of the unfamiliar body he could not see, the kind he always ran through in the mirrored rooms after intake, moving his mind from the top of his head to the tips of his toes, slowing his breath until he fell into a dreamless sleep.
Which only lasted until he was woken by the blare of an alarm and flashing red lights.
Jak was stunned by how quickly he found himself across the room and jerking at the door handle. He’d experienced quicker reflexes than his own several times during earlier assignments, though he’d never really put them to the test. Nothing more than catching a knocked-over coffee cup before it could spill, a situation in which his real body would have failed to stop the contents from completely soaking whatever was on the table. The few split seconds gained in this instance were useless, though, because the door was locked, tripped by the alarm, he presumed.
As the room strobed red and his eardrums protested, Jak put all his strength and the full weight of his body into pushing down on the handle, but it refused to budge. He wished Inesh and his borrowed muscles were beside him adding his own strength, but a turn of his head showed his friend still impossibly asleep, somehow managing to continue dozing through the alarm.
As far as Jak knew, the door had never been locked before. Not that he’d ever snuck out of one of his assigned rooms at night, he wouldn’t risk a paycheck that way, but the sketchy nature of the operation did have him try the door during his first few assignments, and it had always opened. He kicked out, cursing at his rising sense of claustrophobia, at anyone who’d dare lock him up like this, at the universe which seemed to have it in for him that day.
Which finally woke up Inesh, who seemed remarkably blasé for how they were being treated.
“Will you knock it off, Jak?” he said groggily. Only after he stretched and yawned did he appear to become aware of what was happening around him. He squinted in time with the pulsing light “Um…what’s going on?”
“They’ve locked us in here!” said Jak, kicking the door one more time. “Can you believe it?”
“Hey, take it easy. I’m sure there’s a good reason for it.”
“Good reason?” Jak shouted to be heard over the alarm, feeling a sense of exhilaration at being given permission to do so. “Why are you making excuses for them? Why are you so calm all of a sudden?”
“I’ve always been like this, man,” said Inesh, pushing himself up on his elbows. “This is just me. You’re the one going off the rails. What’s gotten into you?”
“I can’t believe you.” Jak found his fingers curling in an unfamiliar way. “We can’t let them get away with this. Come over here and help me—”
The siren cut off then, the lights stopped flashing, and a voice came over the loudspeaker. Jak expected Bailey—it was usually his voice when something important needed to be said—but Bailey had gone home, he guessed, so no, it was one of the other clipboard men. Amman, maybe. He couldn’t be sure through the tinny speaker echoing his voice. All that money churning through, and you’d think the company could do better than that.
“Stay calm,” said Amman. “Stay in place. We will be with you soon to speak with you each individually.”
“Stay in place?” said Jak. “Of course, we’re going to stay in place! We have to stay in place! We’re locked in! I don’t like this.”
“I’m sure everything will be fine,” said Inesh, his eyes wide as if looking at a stranger, which Jak found aggravating. Inesh had never looked at him like that before, regardless of what body each of them wore. No one had ever looked at him that way.
“Fine?”
Jak almost slapped Inesh—for when was everything—everything?—ever fine—but instead kicked the door once more, then returned to sit on the bed and wait. Inesh dropped back off his elbows and was soon snoring again, seeming to have no apprehension about what would come next. Jak watched his chest rise and fall, and when the snorts and whistles started up, knew that if Inesh didn’t stop soon, he would make him stop.
Luckily, before that moment came, there was a knock at the door, and a technician entered the room. Jak had thought he’d met them all, but this was a stranger, perhaps because with every room being visited, they were stretched thin.
“So I’m Elijah,” the man said, looking away from them to his finger running down his clipboard. “It’s Jak and Inesh, right?”
He then looked from one to the other of them, and Jak could tell he was uncertain which was whom. It always bothered him very few of the technicians could ever see through the skin to the person within the way he could. The way all of them could. Maybe it was just in the nature of those who’d volunteer for such a body-swapping job, but the invisible was always visible to him.
“I need you to go back to the Transfer Room, Jak, while Inesh and I have a chat,” Elijah said, turning between the two of them, trying, Jak knew, to not let on to them he didn’t know. Jak was so irritated that for a moment, he almost stayed put to show what he thought of that, forcing the man to admit his ignorance. He’d certainly have deserved his embarrassment. But seeing how nervous Inesh was, he pushed down that urge and stepped out, leaving them alone.
But he didn’t go far. The Transfer Room could wait.
He remained out in the hallway, an ear pressed to the door. Even though this body’s hearing was as sharp as his own, he couldn’t make out what either of the men were saying, picking up nothing more than the sounds of murmuring. But then Inesh emitted an incoherent wail, after which came a thud, followed by further screaming and the splintering of wood.
Jak pushed back into the room and saw Inesh on his knees by what had once been his bed, pieces of the frame shattered around him in a way which could never have happened in his own body. He slammed his fists into the mattress, wailing with each punch.
“Inesh, what did this bastard say to you?”
“Get out!” shouted Elijah. “What did I tell you, Jak? Go! This doesn’t concern you.”
Jak took a step into the room toward Elijah, and it was only with great effort that he resisted ripping the clipboard from the man and slashing it against his neck. If not for his need of a payday, he probably wouldn’t have been able to resist at all. He called out to his friend in a voice unfamiliar to him, and from more than just the unfamiliar vocal chords.
“Phone me please, Inesh, OK?”
He stepped out in the hallway and headed where he’d been told, alone except for his unaccustomed rage.
Once back in the Transfer Room, no one would answer any of his questions, instead hurrying him back into a pod with a speed and unwillingness to talk which riled him even further, and soon, too soon—he’d never before been returned to himself in less than a week—he was back in his own body again.
The only information any of them would drop was to say that his assignment had been cancelled, but he’d still be paid as if he’d seen the job all the way through. As if money was the only thing that motivated him. Which Jak had to admit it kind of was, or else why get involved with such an unproven procedure, but he still didn’t like them making that assumption.
Once they’d scurried off—a little more quickly than usual—he went through his usual re-entry routine, checking that all was in order and no damage had been done by whoever had briefly owned him. All seemed fine…at least superficially. He had no headache, no aches or pains of any kind, and found no cuts or bruises anywhere on his flesh. He felt satiated, not full, not hungry, so his temporary inhabitant had neither stuffed nor starved him. His head was clear, so he hadn’t ingested any substances he shouldn’t have. All seemed as it had before he’d begun the assignment, except—
Except—
Except…
Jak had no idea what the “except” was, only that there was one, his understanding of it just out of reach.
Something was off.
Something had been off before, while he was with the others in the midst of the interrupted procedure. And something was off now, even though he was back to being who he had been before.
And the only reason he was so very good at this job was that he was never off. That’s just who he was.
Well…he’d felt slightly off after the last couple of transfers. Still.
He stepped into the street and looked around for the others, even circled the building and paused for a few moments at the separate private entrance for the customers he was told to avoid—because now seemed a special case and he was willing to risk a lecture—but they were all already gone.
He knew where to find them, though.
By the time Jak arrived at the gang’s usual hangout, the others had already pushed a few tables together and were circled around it. It didn’t seem to him their aspects had been helped by the coffee and pastries, for after their unexpectedly early returns, they looked more dazed than they usually were. But he figured he had to at least give the caffeine and sugar a shot, and so he grabbed a cup and a donut and joined them to slurp and munch away.
He didn’t know which stimulant he needed more. And no, not because he was an addict—he’d cured enough of those obsessions he knew what that very different kind of hunger would have felt like. It was simply that after his yo-yo turnaround, he needed a boost of some kind to help sync him back up with his own true self.
“So what the Hell was that?” he asked his unusually silent friends.
He scanned the faces of Egon and Armond and Jayne and the rest, flashing back to when they’d last sat in a circle, though in different bodies—had it really only been the afternoon of the day before? No one usually ever got pulled out that quickly. They normally stayed settled into the bodies of others for at least a week, and sometimes months, whatever it took to rid themselves of whatever addiction their customer feared. Two transferences timed so close together was dizzying. He was surprised the company would risk it. But not so surprised after all. That’s just what companies did.
“I don’t know,” said Jayne. “And I don’t want to know. I just don’t want to ever have to do it again. My headache’s so bad I can barely see.”
“I’ll take a headache over having to spend another week going through withdrawal,” said Rachel, chewing on a coffee stirrer. It had been awhile since Jak had seen her do such a thing, her own bad habit broken long ago. But the mess of the day had brought it back, Jak figured. “Plus I got paid and now can have the whole week to myself.”
“It’s not worth it,” said Jak. “This job is hard enough.”
He looked around at the weary faces which looked back at him, their somewhat sullen expressions showing clear signs of their minds’ rough reentries, and realized…one of them was missing.
“Where’s Inesh?”
The blank looks which were his answer hit him like a fist. Did none of them care?
“Did any of you see him leave the building?”
Shrugs. Mumbles. Jak couldn’t believe it. Inesh was their friend. What if it had been him?
“I’m sure he’s fine,” said Egon.
“He’s not fine,” said Jak, pounding his fist on the table the way Inesh had against the mattress. The cups jumped, and so did his friends. But if they cared so little about one another, were they really his friends after all?
On any other day, Jak might have continued to sit there. He might have waited to see what happened. But not that day. That day he was angry. For Inesh. For all of them. For a company which treated them like cattle.
But mostly, he was angry for himself.
“I’ve got to go,” he said. On the way out, he tossed his cup and half-eaten donut toward a trash can.
He missed.
And didn’t care.
Jak stepped up to the facility’s employee entrance without breaking stride, swiping his ID card against the rectangular scanner mounted to the right. But instead of walking through as usual, he banged first a toe and then his chin against the unmoving door. He bounced a few steps back to the center of the sidewalk, wincing as he frowned at the still-locked entrance.
That door had never been locked to him before, not since his first day on the job in the hours prior to being issued a pass. Which meant things had to be worse inside than anyone had been willing to let on. He rapped at the door, and when no one came to let him in, punched at the door, and finally—using the foot which didn’t still ache—kicked at the door.
“What are you doing here, Jak?” came Bailey’s voice from a speaker by the scanner. “Your presence here is unnecessary.”
Jak craned his neck to looked at where he assumed a camera would be.
“I need to see Inesh.”
“Inesh is not here. Go home. We’ll call when we need you back for another job.”
A click ended the conversation. Or attempted to, anyway. But Jak, gritting his teeth, swore no one was going to end this conversation but Jak.
“Let me in, Bailey,” he shouted, then hammered against the door with his fist, once, twice, again, slowly, rhythmically, pounding out a beat which he knew he would continue forever if he had to until the door opened.
Bailey finally peeked out, his hair even more askew than usual, looking as weary as the others Jak had just left behind, even though the man hadn’t jumped bodies, only supervised others doing so. He looked both ways along the empty street, then sighed.
“You’re lucky no one caught you causing a scene, Jak. That wouldn’t have worked out too well for either of us. Please do as I asked you and let us take care of this.”
“I’m not going anywhere, not until I can talk to Inesh.”
“And I already told you—Inesh isn’t here.”
Bailey began closing the door, which made the blood pulse in Jak’s ears. Once he would have accepted such an insult, but this time he pushed forward, knocking the man to the ground. Jak stepped over him and looked down, his hands finally made fists.
“You’re lying to me, Bailey,” he said. “He’s in there. I know he’s in there. And you’re going to take me to him.”
“What’s come over you, Jak?” said Bailey, crawling back from between his feet, which he was only able to do because Jak let him. “This isn’t like you.”
“You might be right. Maybe this isn’t like me. But that doesn’t mean you’re not going to do what I tell you to do. So take me to Inesh.”
Bailey got shakily back to his feet, never taking his eyes off Jak.
“There’s something off about you today. How about we both go over to—”
Jak was having none of Bailey’s attempts at misdirection, and took a quick step forward, to which the man yelped and backed away, his hands raised. He pointed over one shoulder, then turned and walked deeper into the complex. Jak followed him through familiar halls until they passed through a door and arrived at an area he did not recognize—was this where the customers were housed? After a few more twists and turns, Bailey paused by a door. The man raised an eyebrow and tilted his head, then took a few quick steps back, out of Jak’s reach.
Jak knocked a few times, and before his final rap, a muffled voice came that was and wasn’t Inesh.
“Go away!”
“Inesh, this isn’t Bailey. It’s Jak.”
Jak held his breath through a long moment of silence, during which he looked over at Bailey, who retreated even further. Jak wished he could have seen whatever was displayed on his own face which caused the man to do that. He suspected it was an expression which would serve him well in the future.
He blinked, and wondered for a moment if it was his own face.
“You can come in then,” said …
“Inesh?”
Jak placed a hand on the door, slightly afraid to turn the knob, already suspecting what he would find, and hating all who were responsible for it. That deep yet familiar voice which had replied—it was both Inesh and not. Jak’s momentary delay at the door caused his friend to call out again.
“Jak?”
And with that one syllable, stretched out so it was cracked with sadness, Jak knew exactly what he would find. Without turning toward Bailey, he said to the man, his eyelids pressed so tightly closed they almost drew tears, “How could you have let this happen?”
And then he entered, slamming the door behind him.
Inesh’s room was much nicer than any he’d yet inhabited at the complex, or been allowed to see. The carpets were thick, and the air smelled fresh. Modern art hung on the walls. A massive screen glowed with a beach scene, but whatever calmness it was meant to impart didn’t connect with Jak where it mattered. A large comfy chair was angled with its back to the door, which meant Jak could only make out the top of a head peeking over the top, shaved to the skull. It bore not a trace of Inesh’s curly hair, which means Jak’s fears were true.
“Inesh?”
There came a sob, and then the head dropped away. Jak rushed forward and found his friend’s head cupped in his hands, but it was also not his friend, for Inesh was still in the body from when Jak had seen him last. Jak knelt by his friend, fighting down the urge to rush back out of the room and confront Bailey. Punish Bailey.
“What’s going on? Why are you still like this? What happened?”
Jak hoped if he kept speaking, if he tossed out a string of words, his friend would grab one end and turn to look at him, but he did not, and apparently could not.
“I’m dead, Jak. I died last night.”
“How did it happen?”
Inesh shuddered.
“They don’t know. They think it was natural causes. That I just died in my sleep. But how can that be? I felt fine. How can I be…dead? How could I be dead?”
“Are you sure?”
“Do you mean…did I see? Did I see me? Did I look into my own face? I did. And I hope you never have to do that, Jak. It was horrible.”
“I’m so sorry, Inesh. But I don’t understand. Why are you still here?”
“Where else would I be? Home? You and the others might have gotten sent home last night, but me—I don’t get to go home. I don’t even have a home anymore.”
“Of course you have a home. You’re Inesh. You’re—”
Inesh leapt up so suddenly, Jak had to leap back so as not be knocked down.
“Am I Inesh? With this body? Am I really? This face? Somebody loved this face. Somebody I don’t know. And Amaira—she loved the face which used to be mine.”
“I’m sure she would come to—”
“And legally? Who knows who I am? This has never happened before. This isn’t supposed to be happening. We’re not even supposed to be doing this, not really. And when people find out—”
Inesh dropped back into the chair, all energy gone.
“I’m not me. I’m not him. I’m something else. Who am I really, Jak? What am I?”
Jak leaned down to place an arm around his friend’s shoulder.
“We’ll fix this,” he said.
“There’s nothing to fix,” replied Inesh, his voice flat.
Jak knew…no matter what he could possibly try to comfort his friend, Inesh was right. His words were just words. And that made him angry.
Angry enough to hurt someone.
And feeling that anger course through him, greater than any he’d ever felt before, anger blossoming into an unfamiliar, irresistible flavor which seemed so wrong and seemed so right, so alien and yet at the same time so intrinsically a part of him, he knew who that someone would have to be.
Jak hadn’t seen Dallas in months, though from what changes he could make out on the sliver of face visible through the barely open door his former coworker allowed him, it could have easily been years. The man was unshaven, unwashed, and most definitely unhappy. Jak also caught a trace of surprise on the man’s face, a surprise which embarrassed him a little that it had taken something like this to bring them together again. But only a little.
“Huh,” said Dallas. “I didn’t expect to ever see you again.”
Jak, on the other hand, if he’d ever thought of Dallas at all, had always expected he wasn’t ever going to see him again.
Why risk staying in touch with someone who’d been pushed out for selling drugs to other employees? No, Jak had never taken part in that scam, but still, he couldn’t help but worry some of the stench might land on him, resulting in the loss of the best gig he’d ever had. And from the small slice of Dallas he was able make out, he now knew what losing that gig could do to a person. It hadn’t worked out, not at all, which made Jak feel justified in having avoided him.
“So now you’re seeing me,” he said. “Let me in, Dallas.”
He was only going to say it once.
“I thought you didn’t do this kind of thing,” said Dallas, pulling the door inward a bit. “You made that clear.”
“I don’t,” said Jak, leaning in to push it further open. “Not the kind of things that got you fired anyway. But there are other things you and only you can do. And tonight, I need you to do them for me.”
Dallas raised his hands and took a step back, letting the door swing freely.
“Hey, hey, hey, I don’t hurt people,” he said, jerking his head from side to side.
Jak wasn’t sure what Dallas thought he saw in him. He’d never been the kind of person anyone looked at and imagined somebody would end up getting hurt. But he’d changed. Bailey had been able to see it. And now Dallas, too.
And that was the whole problem.
“No one’s going to be hurt,” said Jak, amazed at how easily the lie slipped out of him. He stepped into the room and could tell by the smell from the scattered clothing and numerous empty takeout food containers the place hadn’t been picked up in months. “I just need you to pull up the body scans of the company’s most recent clients.”
“What are you looking for?”
Jak didn’t answer.
“OK, so who are you looking for? Someone you’ve been?”
“I’ll know what I’m looking for when I see it.”
“None of this is legal, you know.”
Dallas glanced over to the bank of computers in one corner, but made no move toward it.
“I know. And I don’t care. I need you to do it for me anyway.”
“I could do that, sure I could. For all the scientists and technicians they’ve got over there, the company has the least secure computer system I’ve ever seen. Well, least secure for someone like me. How do you think I knew which of you needed what in the first place? But it won’t come cheap.”
Jak shrugged.
“I’m paid well.”
What he didn’t say was—it probably wasn’t going to be for very much longer.
“Enough stalling,” he said as Dallas continued to stay frozen in the center of the room. He stepped over to the keyboard himself and pulled back the chair. “Let’s get this done. Now.”
Dallas sighed and dropped into his seat. After fewer taps of the keys than Jak had expected, the first images and intake reports popped on the screen. Jak leaned forward, studying the bodies, staring into the faces, muttering “no” over and over again until—
“That one,” he said, his hand dropping to tighten around Dallas’s shoulder.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s like looking in a mirror.”
He read the information in the address field, first to himself, then aloud, making sure it stuck. He tossed a few bills on the desk—this had to be untraceable, not that he expected it would matter much after what was going to happen happened—and turned to go. Dallas picked them up and folded them into his shirt pocket.
“If you ever need anything else—” he began.
“I won’t,” snapped Jak, spinning and slapping out at Dallas, who before the hand could connect pumped his legs to roll his chair quickly to the other side of the small room.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he shouted, holding up his hands.
Jak looked at the trembling man who’d never done him any harm, his hands in the air, and felt himself angrier in that moment than he’d ever been before. He’d never been someone for whom people put their hands up. And that made him even angrier.
He forced himself back out of the room so he wouldn’t go deeper into it, a place from which he knew once he entered there would be no return, and headed off to find the man he’d been that morning.
As Jak hurried over to the address he’d gotten out of Dallas, he played out in his mind the possible scenarios to come. Most of them started with shattered glass or broken wood, and though what came next went many different ways, all paths ended with blood on his hands, an image from which he recoiled even as a growing part of him relished it. None of those paths, though, included the front door of his destination not only being unlocked when he arrived, but wide open as well.
Discovering that as soon as he stepped off the elevator and onto the apartment building’s sixth floor, he paused at the entrance to the unit, unsettled by the invitation as he peered down the long, dark foyer. No lights were visible at its end, no clues as to what waited other than what he felt within.
“Come in,” came a soft voice, low and almost beyond hearing.
It was one he recognized.
It had been his own the day before, borrowed for barely a day at the beginning of his assignment to cure an addiction the nature of which he could back then only guess, but now understood far too well—until the alarm went off and sent them all home back in their own bodies.
All but one.
Poor Inesh. Stranded in a way no one had ever been stranded before. Stranded by a stranger with whom Jak was unfortunately becoming familiar. And because nothing could be done about it, something had to be done about it.
Jak moved slowly deeper into the apartment, wondering whether a blow would fall before the voice spoke again, uncertain which of the two was more likely to happen first. The walls he passed were bare, as if the apartment still waited an occupant. When he reached the dim room at its end, he saw it was also bare of anything personal, nothing to give a hint about its inhabitant. It might as well have been a hotel room. A bed, a desk, a table…and then his eyes finally found, lit only by the light from the street slipping in through a window, yesterday’s face.
And yesterday’s face found him. Seeing it across from him, its affect born of another, felt odder than to have seen it on himself when he was in charge of its movements in the Transfer Room’s mirrors.
“Ah,” said the man, his voice barely above a whisper, but whether out of fatigue or an attempt at menace, Jak could not tell. “There I am.”
“And there am I,” said Jak. If the man was weary, he was weary, too. But it was an entirely different weariness, for he wearied of fighting what he now carried within him, and was ready to stop. He wearied of…inevitability. “The question is—what am I?”
“Do you really have to ask?”
He nodded, only because if he spoke, he knew too many words would come.
“Oh, surely you know what you are by now,” said the man. “Though why you are what you are, that’s not on me.”
He did not rise. He did not move. He left his hands visible on the armrests of his chair.
“That’s not what was supposed to happen. But it has happened. Surely you can feel it. Looking at you, I can tell you can. Would you take a seat? It will have to be on the edge of the bed, though. I don’t get many—any—visitors.”
“I don’t think I will. I don’t think I can.”
The man nodded.
“You see? You do feel it, too. You can’t rest. Your body, your brain, is telling you to act, just as mine did. I’ve felt the urge to act all my life. But at the same time, I came to want to stop as well. I really did.”
“But not stop doing what you told the company you wanted to stop, right?”
Saying those words, Jak knew—if only he had stopped and taken some time off instead of rushing back too soon for another assignment even after sensing all had not been not well, he wouldn’t be standing where he was right then.
“What was it you said to them? There’s no way you told them the truth. I know they’re not ethical. But they’re not that unethical.”
“No, not the truth. But a truth. I told them no lies. Cigarettes killed my mother. Really, they did. I explained I wanted to stop smoking before it got to the point where they killed me, too.”
“Those lies may have fooled those who worked intake, but they never fooled me. I couldn’t tell exactly what was up with you, but I knew immediately you weren’t that kind of smoker. If you were, I’d have felt it.”
“You’re right. Cigarettes were never going to kill me. The only killing, well…that was going to be on me—again and again and again—if I didn’t do something to change. It’s not that I wanted to live that way. It’s that I couldn’t stop. There was something in me which looked at the world and found it…irritating. I hoped you could help me the way you’ve been helping all the others. But we never even got started.”
“That’s on you. You killed Inesh.”
Saying his friend’s name caused Jak to take a step forward, but he forced himself to take two steps back.
“Did I? I understand his new body might even be an improvement.”
“You killed the man he was supposed to help. So how did you do it? We were told he died of natural causes. But that’s another lie, right?”
“Oh, you do this long enough, and you figure out ways. Ways that can’t be spotted. I woke in that bed in the middle of the night and…and just couldn’t stop myself.”
“If you hadn’t done that…”
“I had to do that. I didn’t plan to, I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t not do it.”
“I could have helped you.”
“Could you have? There was already something broken inside of you if you knew to find your way here.”
The man lowered his head, his shoulders slumping.
“You don’t know what it’s like to have to do things you don’t really want to do.”
“I don’t?” Jak looked down at his hands, watching the flexing of his fists. “Maybe I didn’t. But I’ve been learning.”
“I truly did want to stop, you know,” said the man, lifting his head so Jak could stare into eyes which the day before had been his own. “I don’t want to kill any more.”
“Don’t worry,” said Jak as he stepped forward, a vanishing part of him wishing he could say he felt the same way. “You won’t.”
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Scott Edelman has published 135+ short stories in such magazines and anthologies as Lightspeed, Analog, Apex, The Twilight Zone, and MetaHorror. Many of these have been gathered in collections such as These Words Are Haunted, What Will Come After (which was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Memorial Award), Tell Me Like You Done Before: and Other Stories Written on the Shoulders of Giants, and Things That Never Happened (about which Publishers Weekly wrote, “his talent is undeniable). A new collection, 101 Things to Do Before You’re Downloaded, is forthcoming from PS Publishing. He has been a Stoker Award finalist eight times in the categories of Short Story and Long Fiction. Additionally, he is the host of the Eating the Fantastic interview podcast, which since February 2016 has allowed listeners to eavesdrop on his meals with creators of science fiction, fantasy, horror, comics, and more. Further information may be found at www.scottedelman.com/wordpress. |