Prophets

“Do you really want to get into more trouble then you’re already in?”

Flynn stopped speaking out loud. “If you got some other option in mind, let me know.”

“I might be able to hack us out of this box—”

“Damn it, Gram! We’ve been locked up here for weeks. Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

“I need you to give me our body.”

“. . .”

“And stop calling me Gram.”

On some level Tetsami didn’t blame Flynn for being pissed. When she had been young and stupid, she had the same problems with people trying to do what was best for her. She knew, on some level, the kid never really understood it when she told him how lucky he was. When Tetsami was his age, she could only wish for the kind of stability Flynn had. Back in the bad old days when she was a software hacker on Bakunin, she had barely scraped by from job to job, the last one nearly killing her.

No one ever shot at Flynn Nathaniel Jorgenson. His job didn’t carry a risk of frying his brain on the wrong side of a black security program. He was able to take things like food, clothing, and shelter for granted. Until the damn Protean egg-thing showed up, all the kid ever had to worry about were the occasional stare and harsh language. Even those were low key compared to what Tetsami had gotten because of her ancestry from Dakota.

For all his angst about being the oddball, he didn’t understand that just the fact she was here meant that his society accepted him. He might not be a model citizen by the bizarre rules that had evolved on Salmagundi, but he wasn’t really an outcast.

Not yet.

She was still regretting opening her big mouth when she felt Flynn withdraw. She blinked, and it was her body that was blinking. She reached up and touched the restraint collar with Flynn’s hands.

“What are you going to do?”

“Get you more trouble than you deserve,” she said, her voice now sounding like the one in her head. “Now shut up, we don’t have a lot of time.”

Fortunately, she and Flynn had traded off enough that wearing his body wasn’t nearly as disorienting as it could have been. In her own mind it had been seventeen years since she had a female body, or had been shorter than Flynn’s 200 centimeters, her 150-year-old mental image notwithstanding.

She felt around the edge of the restraint collar and found the hatch on the control panel.

“What’re you doing? You force that thing, it’ll zap us—”

“Sonny, zip it.”

She kept her finger on the panel as she walked over to the bathroom. She would have liked to run, but the collar would zap them if she moved quicker than it wanted her to. She wasn’t planning to give the thing the excuse.

In the bathroom she faced the mirror. She had seen Flynn’s lean face, tattooed brow, and sandy hair often enough—but it still was startling to her when she was actually in control. When she was just along for the ride, somehow the reflection wasn’t her.

The restraint collar was a thin toroid wrapping their neck, just loose enough to slip a finger underneath. Buried inside were some sophisticated electronics, position sensors, and a little Emerson field generator; the kind that, when it activated, interfered with human neural impulses enough to knock the victim out.

Fortunately, since bio-interfaces were universal on Salmagundi, she didn’t have to worry about the damn thing being lethal. Back in her days in the Confederacy, some people didn’t bother to calibrate these things to accommodate folks with wired skulls—a badly adjusted one could’ve cooked their brain. Techs here knew better.