Crowe and Coyote

Crowe and Coyote III

Through some power, and some passage of time, Moll must have made it home. She woke up on the ratty vinyl couch in the living room of her own dim apartment, wearing her green shorts and a different sweatshirt from the one she had left in. Someone--probably poor old Bobbit--had drawn a blanket up to her chin. She was suffocatingly hot. She felt--and was--both sticky and filthy, coated in so many types of nastiness that the smell failed to register on any level other than ugh.

Someone had left the windows opaqued, and Moll hit the switch until they became relatively transparent. It looked like midmorning outside--a time she hadn't seen in years. Men and women in work uniforms and cheap synthfiber suits hurried to and fro below, skirting the occasional ragged lumps of bums and other unfortunates as though they were nothing more than rocks in the road.

Moll wondered, idly, how many of those ragged lumps also bore the small circular tattoo of memory erasure she had at the base of her neck. She had seen enough people like her to know she had adjusted to the proceedure better than some--than many. The machines hadn't eaten away her motor skills, any of the processes of higher thought--or she assumed they hadn't. She wasn't tortured by glimmers of a past no longer achievable, fragments of something that had once seemed precious and was now reduced to a series of numbers, a face, the sound of a name being called across a streetcorner. She had once met a man who, in the erasure proceedure, had lost every trace of human language save for the words horror, bother, and fuck. He had no idea what his crime had been--of course he didn't--but even if he did, he couldn't have told a soul.

They called it humane in the newscasts. 'Erasure--a humane solution to crime'. Moll would have rather been crammed in a prison with ten million other felons. She would have rather languished the rest of her life in a home for the criminally insane. Only one of those fakeass silicone augmented cookies-and-children newswhores could ever think of what had happened to her as humane. Horror, she thought wryly. Bother. Fuck. 

It could've been worse.

Either she was extraordinarily lucky, or someone in Sunrise PD had seen fit to do a very thorough job.

She kicked off her blanket and sat up, hangover wrenching an untidy tsunami into her guts and head as soon as she became vertical. She barely noticed it anymore--expected it, in fact, in the same way her body expected a cup of coffee and sometimes a shower.

On the coffee table, in fact, was a thermaplastic cup of instant coffee, Soyful Noise Special Roast. She popped the tab and waited for the cup to warm, thanking fat old Bobbit from the bottom of her heart.

She debated watching the daily newscast and decided, as she did most mornings, against it. She sat in silence for a while, listening to the drippings and creakings of the empty economy-grade apartment. Bobbit and Elaine must both be off to work already, she thought. A little early for it, but not out of reason.

The face of the man from the day before flashed through her skull like a bolt from a magnetic stunner.

Crowe.

He was a stranger, his face as unfamiliar to her as thousands of others she remembered from similar alcohol-fueled walks downtown.

Yet he had known her.

And, even if she hadn't known him, the hardware in her head certainly had. And it had flashed a big red warning flag, complete with warning klaxon and sirens. She had known him before.

He was dangerous.

Moll smiled grimly, sipping her coffee, which tasted just as much like watery tar as it always did.

Klaxon or no, she would find him again. Because nothing--not even the prospect of extreme pain or death--was enough to put her off the idea of beating erasure.

Not for fixing her tangled life or finding her place in the universe, oh no. Moll was not a deep thinker, nor was she cosmologically inclined. What she was, in fact, was mean.

She would find the man Crowe for the pure and simple pleasure of throwing a sizzling fuck you in the face of USU gov and Sunrise PD. Many of the erasure victims she had met--those who had still been able to speak coherently, at least--had dreamed of this particular fuck you, had told romantic and elaborate daydreams involving plasma grenades and one man armies and renewed purpose that would have done better in a holosoap than real life.

And, because she had the unthinkable luck of having met a figure from her own past, she now had a chance at it.

Moll became suddenly conscious of a creaking rusty noise emanating from her own body, one she hadn't heard in a very long time. That noise was laughter.