Crowe and Coyote

"No way. I've never seen her sick before."

"Well, we got lucky with this apartment. It's in a pretty good pocket of air." Bobbit flipped a few slices of Flava bacon onto a plate and passed it to Moll, who had poured herself a bowl of stale-looking Frooty Soopy SoyOs and covered them in the barest glaze of soymilk. She crunched her way through them halfheartedly.

"'Course," Bobbit continued, making herself a plate and settling her immense bulk opposite Moll, "We weren't so lucky with the place before this. Elaine only has a few sick days left before she's canned at the factory. Ain't it just like the rich--make all the safe spots so expensive most Sensitives can't afford 'em, then give 'em only a few sick days so they keep getting canned and can't ever work up to affording 'em anyway. Prejudice. Pure and simple."

"Mm," said Moll, who hadn't been keeping up to date on the Sensitive situation (having deleted most of her newscasts as soon as she got them for the past ten years), but knew better than to cross Bobbit on anything having to do with Elaine. Personally, she doubted he was much pure and simple about it. While it was illegal to discriminate against Sensitives in the workplace, Moll could understand an employer not wanting to make concessions for someone who was going to spend up to half the year sick anyway. If she were an employer--which she had never exactly been, as far as she knew--she might act the same way.

Moll broke off a piece of almost-bacon and put it in her mouth. It was salty, smoky, silky with fat. Only the texture was off--and that only barely. Real bacon wasn't quite so chewy. Or maybe it was, and Moll just didn't remember. How long had it been since she had bacon--or any meat, for that matter? Fifteen years, she guessed. Maybe twenty. Maybe more than that.

"It's good," she said to Bobbit, remembering that the big woman liked to be complimented.

"Course it's good," Bobbit grumbled, unable to stop a little smile from creasing the corners of her mouth. "I cooked it."

The two women ate in companionable silence, watching the people in the street below through the grime-streaked kitchen window. Mostly lunch breakers, Moll thought. Poor souls barely better off than her scrambling for a soydog or sub before heading back to their dull, dingy jobs and their dull, dingy existences. The whole city was dull and dingy, even if the United States of Utopia had decided to name it Sunrise. Even the upper levels, where the rich folk sat in sidewalk cafes and grew their genetically re-engineered houseplants, were dingy.

Moll had not always lived in a city like this, and it got to her sometimes. She felt trapped mostly, and when she didn't feel trapped she felt like she was sleepwalking through her own life. Sometimes employed, sometimes not, sometimes with a place to live and sometimes not. It didn't make much difference to her either way, any way.

She was haunted sometimes by the knowledge that she had once known something grander, something--for lack of a better word--freer. She had not always lived in this city, had not always drifted down to the kitchen at noon and spent her days walking the streets and drinking soy vodka wherever she found it cheapest. She had a vague memory of movement, swift steel and a black sky.

It was all she remembered.

Whatever it had been--whatever, for that matter, her life had been--she no longer remembered it.

She must have sighed, or frowned, because Bobbit took her hand in one of her own and squeezed it gently. "I'm sorry, my dear," Bobbit said gently. "I know it gets to you this time of day. "

"'S not your fault," Moll said distractedly. She had almost forgotten the bigger woman was there. "You didn't do it."

"I know. But fuck the bastards who did." She shrugged. "It's inhumane, if you ask me. That erasure proceedure. Putting those machines in you, letting them eat around in your brain like it was cheese. I don't care what it is you did, you seem like a sweet girl and I can't imagine it was anything bad enough to deserve this. "

"Maybe it was." Moll shrugged. "I could be a mass murderer--I could've killed children, for all I know. But that's all gone now. Eaten away, as you put it, like cheese. Maybe it's for the best. Maybe I did something horrible."

But it wasn't Moll who said this--or not exactly. Moll's mouth formed the words, Moll's tongue and teeth pushed them out of her mouth. But the words themselves were a reaction only, a phrase left behind perhaps by the same machines that had removed some of her memories and left others clear as day. It was what Moll was supposed to say.

What Moll wanted to say, but simply could not, was:

"I wish they'd blown a hole in my head. I wish they'd hung me, or electrocuted me, or all the shit they used to do to criminals in the Days Before. I'd rather be all the way dead than half alive. Even better, I wish they hadn't caught me. I wish I'd gone on murdering children or raping grannies or whatever it was the rest of my natural life. At least then I was me."

And what she wanted to add was:

"I wish I could take the shotgun you and Elaine keep over your bed, walk down to the police station, and shoot every one of them. I wish I could keep shooting until there was zero probability that anyone involved in doing this to me was still alive. And when that was done, and their bodies were all heaped together, I'd squat down and piss on every single one of them. Every. Single. Fucking. One."

But Moll's traitorous lips and teeth and tongue, working again of their own accord, said:

"Thank Christus the police did this instead of just killing me. Maybe this way I'll have time to make up for whatever it was I did."

Bobbit patted her hand sympathetically. "You poor brave thing," she said. "At least you don't bear any grudges." There was a brief silence as Bobbit's eyes unfocused, doubtless consulting her own percomm system. "I transferred you fifty credits, Moll. Have a few drinks on me."

The numbers blinked through her own vision field, along with the disclaimer PROVENDER MUST HAVE RETINAL SCANNER FOR TRANSFER CREDIT ACCESS.

Like a child with an allowance, she had been given her daily money and dose of pity.

Moll wondered, not even for the first time today, if she could bypass whatever had been done to her for long enough to grab the shotgun, kiss the barrel, and pull the trigger.