Strange Allegiances

Kurama rolled out the crick in his neck, pushed open the security gate with a shoulder and shuffled through the gap clutching his bag of groceries. That it only opened enough to squeeze through sideways was just another thing he’d got used to not working in the building. He stomped his shoes on the mat, carried his bag to the elevator and waited.

His mind was running riot. And his body didn’t care. All the day’s events were playing back in random sequences, offering themselves up for inspection. Only he wasn’t inspecting anything besides the numbers on the elevator readout: 240, 480…

The human brain was just another part of the body. You had to let it do its thing, stretch out after a long day’s thinking and not let whatever it threw at you bother you. Fifteen years of being on the force had taught him that much. Start getting caught up in whatever garbage it replayed and you were in trouble.

Ding! His stop. The door slid open with the sound of grating metal.

‘You got that—-’ Nakagoya, his landlord shouted up from the stairwell immediately upon his exiting the lift.

‘—I’ll definitely have it next week.’ He shouted behind him and turned away down the corridor.

‘Be sure that you do!’

‘Yeah, how about you fix the fucking ceiling…’ he grumbled. He fished around in his pocket and pulled out his reader, switching the groceries to the crook of his other arm, then taking the reader between his teeth and returning the bag to both arms. The corridor creaked under foot. The whole building creaked like a ship in some ominous storm. It was raining heavily outside. A rain that worked away at some of the tangles in his mind.

At his door, he looked around a couple of times, then hit the panel with his nose and let the reader dangle in front of it from his mouth. There was a bing-bong-bing followed by a click and the door opened a few centimeters.

‘Kurama-san, sir.’ The automated voice came from his feet, where the little wheeled butler-bot his niece had bought him stood. It was one of the most annoying pieces of technology he’d ever seen but he hadn’t the heart to drop it in the trash. ‘Welcome to apartment 865, Ikeyada—‘ it paused, and it’s eyes flashed several times. ‘Kamagasaki, Osaka.’ He should really change that.

‘Would you like—‘

‘Just, take the groceries would you?’ He left the bag on the floor and dropped the reader in a brass dish by the door.

It turned after him. ‘But sir—I compiled the <data> you requested on the <names of star systems currently registered—-‘

‘Later.’ He had thought it would keep it busier longer. Two centuries of development and most bots still sounded like they were speaking from a toilet.

He turned to shut the door and stopped, something catching his eye. The splint he wedged in the inner handle had fallen off. It was an old trick, something no one used now. He closed the door slowly, sliding his old pistol from the inside pocket of his jacket.

The apartment was mostly in shadow, the only light coming from the big windows that looked out over the hover streets behind the building. It had been a selling point when he’d taken the place. He crept slowly over to the end of the partition that separated the entrance hall from the kitchen, his pistol raised and his head up against the corner. He couldn’t hear anything. No signs of anything missing in the front room.

A bright light flashed across the room with the sound of a passing delivery truck a floor or two below. A thousand little jeweled raindrops lit up on the windows. He must have left one of them slightly ajar because the curtain was blowing slightly. He sighed, returned the pistol to his jacket and flung it over the back of the sofa before walking round and slumping down next to it.

‘You can come out now.’

There was a pause. Then a voice came from the shadows between the windows. ‘You’re quite observant for non-alter.’

Kurama flicked on the holo-set. ‘Yeah, well hard to miss a guy with a gold head.’

A v-ball game lit up the room - the set was still on the channel he’d left it on, the commentary turned down.

‘Did you come to watch the game? I hope you brought snacks.’

Salamon’s slender figure slid from the shadows beside the curtain.

‘Did you see it?’

‘You’re going to have to be a little more specific than that.’

Salamon moved slowly and soundlessly to a small table beside the other seat. He pressed a finger against the lip of the bottle on top of it, so that it tilted as far as it could without falling. ‘You ssaw it.’

‘You know,’ he snorted, leaning around the sofa, ‘you could use a little work on your manners. Some people might regard this whole breaking in and hiding in the dark all day as creepy.’

The bright points of Salamon’s eyes stared back at him from the darkness. He was standing motionless, the bottle poised at an angle at the end of his finger.

Kurama looked back to the holo. ‘Never mind.’

He withdrew his finger, letting the bottle return gently to its original position and came over to the sofa.

‘What do you think it wasss?’

Kurama sighed. ‘You could have asked me at work.’ He leaned forward, grabbed a bottle from the table and poured out a drink in one of the used glasses that stood beside it, then sat back in the sofa again. A few more cars passed by the windows, so that light flickered across the ceiling. He took a drink from the glass. ‘I don’t know. Anyway, don’t your guys have some kind of angle on it.’

‘Mmmmm.’ It came out as a deep growling noise that was hard to read, somewhere between thoughtful and irritated. ‘But you saw something?’

‘I don’t know what I saw, ok?’ He took another drink and winced. ‘Could have just been a shadow or something.’

‘It wasssn’t a shadow.’

‘Anyway, you were there. You don’t need me to tell you.’

After a long silence Salamon spoke again. ‘I sssaw sssomething. It wass… different.’

‘Right. Well, good for you.’ He lifted the glass as he spoke.

‘Wass it… human?’

There was a period of silence. ‘I don’t know.’ He paused. ‘Maybe. Look, who knows? We were right by the weeper. For all we know, it was a hallucination.’

‘Alters do not experienccce the senssory effectss of geisst expossure.’

‘Yeah.’ He leant over the couch again. ‘And while we’re at it, why is that? Always seemed pretty strange to me.’ He turned back again.

‘It wassn’t a hallucination.’

Kurama sipped his drink, and a furrow slowly appeared on his brow. ‘Maybe some transient, snuck up in the buildings.’ He flicked the remote and the match switched to another. The frown wouldn’t leave his face. Something was nagging him. Something that had been nagging him ever since the bug hunt. He’d tried to ignore it but there it was again, pulling at him, refusing to let him relax and watch the game. He sighed.

‘Anyway, who cares? We did the job. Just some hobo, or kids hoping to catch sight of one of them.’

‘Perhapss.’

Kurama sat steeped in his thoughts for some time, long enough that when his attention returned to the room, the v-ball match had finished and he realised that he was alone. The window was still open and the curtain blew gently beside it. The sound of rain was somewhat louder than it had been earlier.

The human brain was just another part of the body. Start getting caught up in whatever garbage it replayed and you were in trouble.

He got up and replaced the splint in the inner handle of the door.