The words came up again, then faded out. I tried to place the weird memory, but I couldn’t. It was snowing, I thought. Nico was there. When I turned to look for the little weirdo, she was gone.
I shook it off, and followed the strays off the platform. The station was like the land of the dead. One guy stood out, though—an old black dude in a long coat and a hat with a brim. He was parked on a bench next to a bum with shaky hands and a big scar on his face. He talked, and the hobo nodded.
The old guy raised his head. With the hat out of the way, I saw there were a lot of miles on his face and his kinks had gone gray. There was a Second Chance pin on his collar. When he saw me, he smiled.
“Excuse me for one moment,” he said to the bum, who dug at his scar with a yellow fingernail. It looked like someone had cut him a long time ago.
“Corporal Flax?” the old man asked as he got up, and held out his hand.
“Cal,” I said. His skin was like leather and his grip was strong.
“Cal it is,” he said. “I’m Leon Buckster. I’m with Second Chance.”
He gave the bum a pat on the arm, then gave him his card.
“You go ahead and call that number,” he said. “Or just come down, and I’ll get you set up.”
“Just like that?” the bum growled.
“We can get you to the minimum requirements. After that, we can get you a whole new level of help. Understand me?”
The guy nodded.
“I have to go now,” Buckster said. “Don’t lose that number. Take that first step. It’ll get easier after that, I promise.”
The bum stared at the card. Buckster turned back to me. “Thought maybe you weren’t showing,” he said. “Shall we?”
“Sure.”
We left, and when I looked back at the bum, he was still looking at the card.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Recruiting.”
“You recruit bums?”
“Indigent,” he said. “Or homeless. Don’t call them bums. We don’t recruit them for ourselves; we help get them rehabilitated enough to qualify for Posthumous Service.”
“You talk bums into getting wired?”
“PS is an automatic upgrade to tier-two citizenship. At tier two they have access to better aid, better facilities. We can get all kinds of help for them we can’t manage for a tier three.”
“They’re okay with that?”
“Did that guy look like he had anything to lose? The homeless are quickly becoming the largest percentage of posthumous servers, above even your educated service-duckers.”
“If you say so.”
“We recruit quite a few from Bullrich. I grew up there.”
“Yeah, well, no offense, but fuck Bullrich.”
“Give it a few years. You may feel differently,” he said.
“You serve?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
It was hard to guess how old he was, but old. Had this shit been going on that long?
“I’ve got a car outside,” he said. “Come on, I’ll take you where you want to go.”
“Thanks.”
I followed him out. Up on the street it was pouring out, but it was home, and it was good to see. Neon was lit up all over, and no matter where you looked, there was a TV screen. It looked great.
We headed to the pickup entrance, then down three flights to the lot. He walked up to a piece-of-shit micro-bus and pulled the driver’s-side door up.
“You can put your pack in the back.”
He leaned inside and popped the trunk. I stowed my pack and climbed in next to him.
“Where to?” he asked.
I fired the address of the storage place to him over the JZI as he backed out and started up the steep ramp toward street level.
“Actually, we were contacted by an old associate of yours by the name of Eddie, from the old Porco Rojo. He provided a bunch of muscle who helped move your things to your new place. It’s all in boxes, but it’s waiting for you. All you have to do is move in.”
“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t expecting that. “There, then, I guess. Thanks.”
“You got it.”
He flashed his ticket at the scanner, then pushed his way out onto the main street.
“How long were you in for?” I asked him.
“Six years. You?”
“Signed up for four. Got two.”
“Wounded?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You don’t have to call me sir.”
“Habit.”
“What happened, if you don’t mind my asking?”
I took the glove off my left hand and held it up so he could see. He looked over, and I thought he’d make a face, but he didn’t.
“I’ll be damned.”
I was glad to have it, don’t get me wrong, but I hated the thing. The new hand was a good match. The skin was about the right color, but it had that gray look and the dark veins stood out.
“It’s revivor tech,” he said.
“Watch the road. Yeah.”
“I heard they were doing that.”
“You heard right.”
“It beats a prosthetic, trust me.”
I looked over at him.
“Left leg,” he said. “Below the knee. Even with the nerve interface, it’s not the same. You have full feeling? Full strength? Full range of motion?”
“Yeah.” The dead hand was stronger, actually. It could crank twenty PSI more than my right hand, which was my good one. The one thing it didn’t have was body heat.
“You were an EMET Corporal …What was it like leading a team of revivors?” he asked.
No one ever asked that before. It was kind of a tough one.
“Quiet,” I said. It was the first thing I thought.
“Quiet?”
Every outfit used them to fill out the ranks, but there was still a chain of command, and the ones on top had pulses. The EMET rank went to grunts who were two things: good with revivors, and bad with people. I’d never seen a jack in the flesh until I went over, but it turned out I had a knack for messing with their heads. I drove them through my JZI, and it was fun—at first.
When I got good at it, though, they moved me so I could specialize, and I found out most of the grunts picked for that honor had screws loose. When I got my last upgrade and hit EMET, I was glad to get out of there and far away from the rest of them. When you were put in charge of those things, they were your squad. You ate, shit, and bunked in front of them. They were with you twenty-four/seven, and they never talked.
I didn’t say that to Buckster.
“Driving jacks was easy,” I said instead.
“Jacks?” I shrugged.
