On today’s episode of things that are awkward: being stuck in an Aerodyne patrol cruiser with your ex-girlfriend who cheated on you with the prettyboy that would go on to kill your next girlfriend. I look out the window at the neon reflections on the waves, tapping my finger to a beat in my head, because she wouldn’t let me turn any music on to ease the surreality of the situation. I glance at her in the rearview mirror but she catches me and I quickly snap my eyes back.
“So… do you think they’re gonna find any brainbugs?”
“Sure hope not.”
A few more minutes pass. I keep hoping she’ll turn on music or something herself, but, nope.
I can hear myself breathe. Worse, I can hear her breathe. Ugh. I wonder if her breath still smells like Chad’s cum.
“You’re going to have to say something eventually, Charles.”
“Something eventually.”
“There we go. I’d rather you be a smartass than just sit there silently stealing glances at me like some kind of killer.”
“I am a killer, after today.”
“That’s true of every field agent on this force. It only counts as murder if it’s not by accident or in self-defense. You really think I put down that anti-ART rally last weekend with zero casualties?”
“You didn’t!?”
“They had fucking grenades and flamethrowers, Charles. A dozen ARTs and half as many human civilians were killed. I would’ve been if it weren’t for the old LUPIN-Z back there.” She motions to the stationary Pneumat battle suit in the back. “Had to kill the ringleaders to keep anyone else from dying. Final death toll was four at my hand and eighteen at theirs.” She takes a deep breath and finally, FINALLY switches on the radio with her NeurOS, playing some very soft melodic prog-grass-fusion-metal in the background. “Crimson Flag is getting more of a stronghold in Ocean City. They had almost thirty ARTs rounded up by the time Mike and I got there. I don’t like having to deliver final judgment, but do you think the other fifteen or so ARTs would’ve made it to safety in the Colonies if I hadn’t? Do you think their lives were worth more than the counter-protesters that would’ve kept getting mowed down?”
“I don’t think anybody could blame you in that situation, Nat–”
“One of the masked Flaggers there was a fourteen year old girl, Charles. I didn’t know that when I toasted her, of course–only that she was a radical terrorist with a semi-auto and explosives.”
“How do you manage to push through shit like that?”
“Well, in this case, I kept myself from losing sleep over it when I found the bodies of the two much younger kids she’d blown to scraps before I got there. It’s not a pretty world we’re in, Blake. People are scared of the ARTs still, the bloody Rights Wars are still fresh in everyone’s minds, and poverty and wealth disparity are the worst they’ve ever been. People are angry, people are desperate, and there’s a million cults and triads out there happy to give them an outlet. Killing sucks, but it’s them or us and the legions of innocents in their crosshairs. I’m more worried about the fact I’m still trying to get by doing it in one of these old twenty year old air-powered relics. We don’t have the budget we need to keep up with the current state of affairs here–”
“You’d never guess that, looking at the new cruisers.”
“The new cars were a gift from Aerodyne Auto as advertising. I can’t remember the last time we purchased anything as a department. Telecom’s stretching too thin, expanding too far and too fast. That’s the shit I’m most worried about--whether or not we’ll be able to continue keeping the peace at all, to prevent this city from total anarchy, not what we have to do in the process.”
“It’s scary, Nat. It’s all going to shit. No offense but I didn’t sign on to be hired muscle in a mini-Gundam. I’m a detective–I’m supposed to find out who killed who and why, not decide who lives and dies. I’m not fuckin’ cut out for this.”
“Do you realize your hand is doing that?”
“Doing what?” I glance down and realize my right hand is subconsciously trembling, my fingers contorted like I’m holding a flask. “Oh.”
“It’s none of my business, but I’m worried about you, Charles.”
“You weren’t worried about me when you slept with Chad.”
“...look. You can’t just keep avoiding your own problems by deflecting them at other people, no matter how shitty we are. I can be a cheating whore, Chad can be an arrogant prick, and you can be a suicidal drunk who needs serious help–those three things aren’t mutually exclusive. We need the strong, charismatic, genius detective who took down the Wild West Syndicate here, not the edgy angry alcoholic suicidal misanthropic manchild you seem to have adopted as your new persona.”
“Does the fact that the love of my life was graphically murdered in front of me at my own command just not register to you people?” I snap round to face her finally, trying rather unsuccessfully to maintain my composure and shake less instead of more. “My first fucking instinct was to blow my own brains out--”
“I knew it would be. That’s why I had them confiscate your Glock first thing.”
“--you said that was policy.”
“The policy was that I was the senior officer on the scene so whatever I said went, and I said that you couldn’t keep it. I wasn’t about to lose our top Detective to the psychological aftermath of a freak limiter glitch.”
“Well, the only way I could get rid of that urge for real was to just numb it all. Full stop. If I can’t think at all, I can’t think about how badly I want to die. I just needed to get past it, but you assholes had me taken off the force for it--”
“Six months, Charles!” She snaps, “Six months we waited for you to recover and offered and tried to get you help, and two months you just got worse and worse and got to where you couldn’t even make it through a meeting without falling out of your chair plastered. It got to where we couldn’t cover for you! Do you know what Telecom would do if they knew? If you-if you ran over someone drunk off your ass driving a patrol car or something, and they found out we’d kept you through two months of it!?”
“It was NOT six months, a week or two, maybe, max--”
“You didn’t even have any concept of time, then, see!? You think I haven’t been through shit, Charles!? Have you forgotten what my life was like!?”
“Nat, it’s not... a fucking... contest--”
“I didn’t see myself strapped in a mechsuit kicking ass for a living, either. You think I don’t understand what it’s like to lose people I care about? I was a fucking orphan, Charles! Being adopted by ARTs is fucking awesome until Red Flag “resets” the town and slices them into cross sections with a ZPE-katana while they make you watch--I was eight, Charles!--Eight!--when I had their white blood literally splattered across my face! Your dad was a cop who died at work when you were already old enough to drink and smoke and watch all your disgusting snakegirl porn. Look--my point isn’t that you haven’t had a shitty time, or that you shouldn’t be upset, or that my pain is worse. My point is that I didn’t just give up on life and throw away everything I had and everything I had worked to become. It inspired me to train to be a Pneumat as soon as I was old enough to do so, instead of dreaming of being an astronaut or a fairy princess or whatever the fuck a non-traumatized little girl wants to be, but--Charles, you had so much. You have so much. Even in your half-drunk stupor you managed to become a millionaire just telling other people your fucked up story in a charming and genuine and funny way. You’re exceptional, and you’re being exceptionally stupid to throw it all away like this, Blake.”
“I can’t turn my mind off. I can’t sleep through the existential horror and guilt and dread unless I’m so hammered I can’t stand up, and even then I’ll wake up to flashback dreams half the time, vomiting so hard I can’t keep any more booze down to try to knock myself out again–”
“You can pull out of it, but you’ll have to want to. It’s easier to just be bitter and angry and never have to face it, I know. But you’re better than that. You have to be.”
“I’m so glad to know you think that. If only I had been better then, maybe I at least wouldn’t have to pass out every night in a bed I know Chad cucked me in. Guess he wasn’t good enough either since he’s back to MeetMormonManbabies.com.”
She turns and stares right through me, tears streaming down her soft, scarred cheeks. “You used to have such sweet eyes. Such deep, sweet, dark eyes… now I don’t even recognize them.”
“Well, I used to have two, so–”
“I mean the feeling behind them...”
“I’m sorry I don’t look at you as lovingly as I did before you shattered my heart and left me for dead.”
“I’m just worried about you. It’s like you’re not Blake–”
“Amazing what happens to a guy when ya’ kill his new girlfriend, fire him, bring him back under threat of death or exile, make him kill the front desk lady, make him work with the man who killed the love of his life and fucked his girlfriend before that, and then make him work with the cheating bitch herself--point taken?”
“Yeah,” she replies softly, lowering her head and looking away. “Point taken.”
The uncomfortable silence returns. I glance down at my hand--it’s shaking even faster. I go to force it still with my other hand but it’s doing the same shit. I take a deep breath and look out the window again. The scruffy, one-eyed, overweight, shaking, dead-eyed murderer in the reflection isn’t a man I recognize either. I reach instinctively for a flask and in a panicked frenzy realize they’re all gone. No easy road out this time. A tear makes its way down from my single intact eye as my vision unfocuses into a surreal dance of neon.
Nat turns the music up louder, and my thoughts are mercilessly drowned in the sea of keys and horns. For the first sober moment in years, I’m able to indulge in sweet, dissociative nothing in my mind.