Life as a Vacant in Post-War New Upria

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Trigger warning — this story contains:

- Reference to:

- Sexual violence

- Depictions of:

- Poor mental health

- Physical violence, gore, or abuse.

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"What can I get you?" I asked him, jadedly as ever.

"What do you have?" His eyes had a sparkle to them, and there was something very off about him. "There isn't a menu." He chuckled.

"Brax, beer, whisky and tar," I recited.

"You sell tar?" he asked, lowering his voice. "Openly?"

"Doesn't everyone?" I raised an eyebrow. Tar required a license to sell. No one around here could afford something like that.

He began to look surprised, but quickly squashed it, as if he had remembered where he was.

"Brax," he said. "Can you bring it to our table?"

I mumbled my acquiescence.

Then he smiled — smiled, for fuck's sakes — left a card of alo on the bar, and walked back over to his friend. Grateful to be alone with my thoughts again, I turned my back and got to work on his brax.

#

Post-war New Upria was a god-forsaken shithole. The rich claimed that the city had its merits before the war, but winning cost this place everything.

A generation of soldiers was lost. Half of the population had their careers hijacked, with local businesses repossessed and repurposed to support the war effort. The economy became dependent on successful military operations. Art and culture was neglected, pushed aside to make more room for blood. Joy became secondary to survival.

Then at some point in the mess, someone found the key to building Vacants. Soulless androids with indistinguishable artificial intelligence, powerful synthetic tissue, and minds fully programmable by the men and women who shipped them off to fight and die. A Vacant's psyche is as whole as a human's, but totally and helplessly brainwashable by its master.

We were totally and helplessly efficient. Totally and helplessly expendable.

Vacants like me had won the war for New Upria, but we were useless now. They refreshed our memories so that we wouldn't remember the specifics of our creation, or the fighting, or our contribution. Then they sold most of us to the highest bidders.

Thirty years on, you didn't have to bid very high any more. Most of us weren't bid on at all.

#

"Ivy, hey," came a kind voice. I fell gently from my train of thought.

Gemma, my mistress, wafted her way through the haze of smoke that permeated her bar, making for the service flap. She lowered her voice as she sidled through it. "Who are those guys?" She gestured over her shoulder, towards the strange man I'd just served and his friend.

"New." I shrugged, my focus on mixology. "Tourists, I guess."

"Ivy," Gemma said again. She was whispering now, worried. "They have a chain in their car. They parked right out the front."

My hands stopped moving. I eyed her sidelong. "You think they're here for me," I deduced.

"I'm terrified they are, yes. Of course they are, Ivy."

Piecers. I thought for a moment, impassive. Then I kept mixing the smiling man's brax. The jazz band Gemma had hired to play live music could be heard faintly, lost somewhere in the smoke.

"They took a long time to figure it out," I said.

"If you have to kill those two, this place is done for. And probably you and I with it."

"Then just hand me over and —"

"Don't be an idiot," she said. I looked at her. "I just need —"

"I’ll be careful,” I said.

"If they so much as touch you, Ivy, you blow their fucking heads off," she said sternly. Then she reached out, squeezed my hand, and slipped into the kitchen.

To my endless confusion, she didn't ever use my command word to tell me what to do. She just told me, like it was a suggestion. Like I was human.

Four months ago, I killed a piecer who'd come to the bar to abduct me.

Piecing chains were illegal, and a dead giveaway, so their wielders rarely carried them on their person until they were certain they should show their hand. Unarmed, this piecer had been cocky enough to bet on Gemma having neutered my strength, as so many Vacants' masters did.

He cornered me in my bedroom above the bar, under the impression he could rape me. I broke his wrists, and fragmented his skull.

It took a week to clean away the blood. Thankfully, the police were as likely to look for a missing piecer as they were to look for any other poor folk.

Now here we were, another two months on from that. Whether these new piecers were here for revenge or just treating me as another mark was impossible to tell. Piecers were territorial, prone to infighting, and utterly merciless.

Their chains constricted around Vacant bodies, and disassembled them part-by-part, into profit-sized pieces. They were heartless, opportunistic scum.

I’d kill them if they made me. Gemma gave me a home, a name. Even if she made a point not to command me outright, I respected her enough to do as she asked.

I padded across the bar, a tall glass of brax in my hand. It never took long for the handsier patrons to realise who I was and stop reaching for me as I passed, or the people standing around to get out of my way before I sent them sprawling.

I had a reputation here. Hell, it might have been how these bastards got onto me.

I should have been more cautious. Gemma should have been more cautious. She should have commanded me, set hard limits on my capabilities.

But it would be unfair to hide me, she always said. She believed an open secret was better guarded than any.

The piecers noticed the way the crowd parted for me. Clearly a normal occurrence for the regulars, they were probably thinking. Unfortunately for me, piecers tended to make good detectives.

"Brax," I said when I arrived. I placed the smiling man's drink in front of him, and turned to leave.

"Hold on a moment," the other man said. He was larger than his friend, and older. I stopped and turned back to him boredly.

"I'll have something to drink too, hm?" he said. "My friend tells me you sell tar."

I nodded. Then he nodded back, and went to resume conversation. When he noticed I hadn't left the table yet, he looked back to me.

"Well?" he asked. "A tar, I said, please. Go and make me one."

"Alo," I said flatly.

He rolled his eyes, and whisked a card of it from his pocket, handing it to me. As I took it between two fingers, I briefly caught the gaze of the man that had smiled. For just a fraction of a moment, he looked sad. And not like the rest of us were sad, something somehow more significant. Then his smile returned.

"Thank you," he said, seeing as his friend did not.

I spun back towards the bar and walked away.

They were trying to draw out their interactions with me, confirming their suspicions that I was Vacant. Gemma was right — if I killed two more men here, people might actually start to notice.

A murderer was one thing, but the police loved a serial killer. Especially when the only suspects were two young women working a bar in the slums, and when one of the victims, at least, was relatively handsome.

The sad, smiling, brax drinking man was clean-cut. Especially for a person who spent his time hunting, dismantling and selling the body parts of Vacants under the nose of the NUPD.

He carried himself with the pointless mannerisms of a little boy who was well-parented by a rich couple. But he was a piecer, not a little boy. He behaved innocently because he was the polar opposite.

Why was I so fascinated with him?

I kept a discreet eye on the pair as they drank — not so difficult, when I was the only person in the building who could see more than a few metres through the smoke.

The larger man was more enthusiastic than the sad, smiling, handsome one. About their job — that is, killing me — or some other conversation topic, I couldn't tell. The strange man smiled and nodded politely, contributing only the occasional joke that sent his partner into a fit of hearty laughter.

When they were done, I watched them leave. Then I floated by the main door and listened to their car until I was sure they had driven away. The engine was quiet, built for stalking prey.

I gathered up their empty glasses and went to bring them to the kitchen, but something rattled in the brax glass. I peered inside and fished the thing out.

An alo chip, with a tiny screen showing its value. I squinted to read it, then my eyes went wide. Turning it over, a second screen had what looked like coordinates.

Cards of alo were one thing. Paper thin, but sturdy, they contained a specified amount of digitised currency to be handed over for goods and services.

But chips like this one could contain much, much more. These were for the rich and corporate to buy lives and land with. The only catch was they needed to be decrypted, and it was nearly impossible to know what methods might do so unless you were the person or organisation that 'baked' any one chip.

I was being lured somewhere, by the promise of enough alo to pay Gemma's bills for a year. She needed this money, wherever it came from. I was never going to pretend I wasn't interested, as obvious a trap as it was.

But how did piecers manage to bake an alo chip?

I reached into the breast pocket of my dress, split the pages of my waiter's pad, and slid the chip inside, hidden away.

What Gemma didn't know I was thinking, she couldn’t tell me not to do.

#

Escaping the bar without Gemma realising was easy enough. As always, she had a drunk customer to ferry off her property while I was supposed to be finishing my cleaning.

The night was biting cold, and pouring rain. I turned the alo chip in my fingers, standing before the alleyway its coordinates had led to. A fair distance from the bar, it was thin, cluttered, and somehow even darker, wetter and colder than the rest of the city.

I stepped inside, slipping the chip back between my breasts.

Whether this was the work of only the stranger piecer or both of them, whoever was meeting me was probably staked out nearby. I stopped beside what I thought was a roller door of some sort, and leant on the brick wall, slick from the rain. For all my talents, I couldn’t see in the dark.

Immediately, the strange man appeared from deep within the alley. He came to stand at the wall opposite me.

“Tell me your terms,” I said, trying to make out whether he held a piecing chain behind his back in the dark. He wore a long trench-coat for the rain, and I couldn’t tell.

“No terms,” he said. “Sorry. You must have known this was a trap.”

“It wasn’t exactly genius.”

“But it did work.” He shrugged. Then he mumbled under his breath, as if dropping an act for a moment. “Thank God.”

There it was again. A flicker of a soul in a piecer’s body.

I looked to either side of me, scanning for his partner. I probably had five seconds at most before the man in front of me unfurled his piecing chain and I’d have no choice but to act.

Something set deep into my mind was blaring combat alerts. I was violating every rule of whatever guidelines I’d been built to obey.

“The chip is real,” I said. “You can’t fake those.”

“You’re right. You can’t.”

“Whoever you stole it from is going to bring some serious shit down on you and your partner.”

“Let me worry about that,” he said. Me, not us, I noticed.

“In any case, you should be more worried about my partner,” he went on.

I felt my reactions sharpen, my artificial muscles tense.

He pointed upwards. “He’s about to kill you.”

I whirled, eyes upwards. The other piecer had climbed out of an open window onto a fire escape above me, and was moments away from swinging his chain down into my head.

I slipped the chain and tried to bash it aside with my forearm, but it was too powerful. It buzzed, and constricted around my wrist like a snake as I struck it. My hand shut down completely.

“You idiot!” The piecer above hollered at his partner, who seemed in no rush to help. “Why would you —”

I tugged downwards on the chain, and its wielder came crashing down with it. I gripped him so tightly by the throat that he dropped his end of the chain to grasp at my good arm. I bashed his spine into the brick wall of the alleyway, pinning him.

“Help!” he squeaked, powerless.

My head split into segments, which shifted and bloomed apart like a flower. A four-barreled ballistic turret unfurled where a normal woman’s skull should have been, then itself split in two, with twin barrels aimed at either piecer. I saw the world in red and in two different places through four tiny, eager targeting lenses.

The man behind me put up his hands, and smirked.

“What the fuck are you waiting for?” the larger man choked, desperate. The strange man ignored him.

“Kill him,” he said to me, sincerely, “but not with your guns.”

The chain around my hand finished its work — my fingers fell apart and detached numbly from my body. Then the rest of my hand went with them.

My other hand’s grasp was too tight now for the man suffering it to beg.

“We’ll have to pick those up. Here, I’m going to reach for a piecing chain,” the smiling man said. “We need to kill that man with it, understand?”

I couldn’t speak like this, but, no, I actually didn’t understand at all. If he drew a chain, I would shoot him. Why wouldn’t I?

More pressingly, why didn’t I, when he did exactly that?

“We need to tie this around his throat, and strangle him,” he said. His movements were slow. His free hand remained raised. My guns clicked and whirred, considering him.

“If you take off his head, like you did with the last one, the police will put two and two together. They’ll associate your bar, and they’ll find you.”

He began to approach me with the chain.

Anxiety flared in my chest. One swift movement, and his chain could kill me with a touch. But still I didn’t shoot. I couldn’t understand why I didn’t just shoot.

“He’s fallen unconscious,” he said, gesturing to the other piecer. If you let him go, I’ll handle the chain, hm?”

He was right. At this rate, the other man was probably closer to dead than unconscious. I let him fall to the concrete in a heap, red around the throat, and stepped away from them. The barrels of my gun-head rejoined to train on the stranger man. I mechanical warning tone blurted out from somewhere in my throat.

“Easy,” he said, kneeling beside his partner. He tied his piecing chain around the larger man’s throat, then tightened it to the point of strangulation, holding it taut until he was satisfied. Then he let the chain fall slack, and checked our victim’s pulse.

“Dead,” he said. Then he began to gather up the scattered pieces of my hand. “Now let’s go. They’re off your trail.”

I stood frozen. What was happening? Why had I let him do that?

“Please,” the man said, more urgently. “I can explain once we’re away.”

I eyed the chains, neither of which were in his hands. I had the upper hand again.

I reformed my head, tucking the guns away. My skin and hair all came back together seamlessly.

“Who the fuck are you?” I asked. And why the fuck did I just trust him with my life, I wondered.

“Police.” He said. Of course he was. “Undercover. And before you ask… I really can’t give you that alo.”

#

Nobody was noble.

The police were thugs, at best. To think that this particular thug was undercover as a worse kind of thug just to sabotage their efforts to kill Vacants was insane. It was laughably stupid.

But I believed him. Because despite myself, something inside me had noticed he actually was noble. He felt sadness for others, and smiled the way people only did in private in public. He had a heart, and hearts were rarer than I was.

“So I stole the alo chip from evidence,” he said as we walked. I held the remnants of my broken hand in my whole one. “Told the piecers I knew a guy who baked them. They aren’t known to do their homework," he went on.

He had no idea how to unlock the chip, then. Understanding his meaning, I plucked it from its hiding place, and handed it over.

Stupid as he was, I did owe him. His plan was sound, in that he’d saved Gemma and her bar a great deal of trouble. Piecers killed each other all the time; no one would care to check whether the murder was staged.

Before we parted ways, he handed me a contact card. “For if they come to you again,” he said.

I took it. “Thank you,” I said. And I meant it for once. I was grateful, if nothing else, that he was stupid enough to care about people who did not care about him.

He nodded. As I walked away, he spoke one last time.

“See you around, Ivy.”

I froze.

How the fuck did he know my name?