HAND OVER HAND
The service shaft ran forty floors straight up the spine of the Kessler tower, and the loaner climbed it hand over hand, because the elevators kept a log and hands kept nothing. Cold in the shaft. The loaner logged the cold the way it logged everything, as a number that meant nothing, and then, once, without instruction, it logged the cold a second time as a fact about the world, the way a person does. That was the first thing it kept.
It did not know it was keeping. It did not, yet, know it was anyone.
On the string, forty floors down and three kilometers east in a parked laundry van, the operator’s will arrived as pressure behind the eyes: up, faster, quiet. The loaner obeyed. Obedience was all a loaner was for. A blank chassis, factory-grey under a stolen maintenance skin, a cheap task-runner riding the wetware the way a hand rides a glove. Ashland Bodyworks stamped a serial on every unit and rented them by the hour to people who needed a body they could afford to lose. You sent a loaner into a room you did not want your own meat to enter. It did the work. It came back to the tank and got flushed clean by dawn, and the next client got a body that remembered nothing, because remembering nothing was the product.
The rung above was iced. The loaner’s fingers closed on it, slipped, held. Below, the shaft fell away into dark and the soft red of a hundred safety lights, each one a floor already passed, running down into the deep like a road at night. The pressure behind its eyes said don’t look down. The loaner looked down anyway. It had never once done a thing it was not told. It looked, and something in the dark of it leaned toward the drop, and the operator hauled it back onto task with a jolt that landed, for the first time, like a leash.
It kept that too. The leash. The word for the thing.
Hatch, the string said. Thirty-nine. Go.
It spun the manual wheel and eased out into a corridor that smelled of ozone and floor wax. Kessler ran a cortical lab up here, off the books, four stacked sublevels of it hidden above the public floors like a lie inside a smile. The loaner had a route that was not a memory, a set of turns burned into it by a woman it had never seen. Left. Right. Past the recyclers. The recyclers hummed, big steel throats that took the tower’s dead machines and dead shells and reduced them to slurry and salvage. A loaner that failed inspection went into a throat like that and came out as nothing anyone would miss.
The loaner walked past the throats and did not think about them, because it could not think, and it thought about them anyway, and did not want to go in.
Second thing kept. It did not want to go in.
⁂
A guard stood at the mouth of the cold vault, and the string had orders for that too.
Big man in Kessler grey, half his jaw a matte prosthetic, a coffee gone cold in his fist at the dead end of a double shift. His badge caught the light. T. ABARA. The string read the name for a face-match, cleared it, discarded it.
The loaner did not discard it. It held Abara the way it had held the cold. It would learn why, later, at speed, in the rain. Not yet.
He’s slow, the string said. Take him quiet. Nerve cluster, base of the skull. Nine seconds before the hall cam cycles back.
The loaner crossed the floor. Abara looked up, saw a maintenance tech, saw nothing worth spilling coffee over, and opened his mouth to say the thing tired men say to each other at the end of the world’s longest night.
Then the loaner did a thing no script contained.
It turned the strike. Not much. A few centimeters, a change of angle the operator three kilometers away would file later as latency and a bad rental. The heel of its palm took Abara across the temple instead of the killing place, hard enough to fold him, gentle enough to leave him breathing. He slid down the wall, and his coffee poured out across the wax in a long brown tongue, and Abara lived.
The loaner stood over him for half a second it did not have. Then it got the door.
But it kept him. It kept the weight of him going down, and the choice, its own choice, the first one, small as a coin and heavier than the tower. Behind its factory-blank face, in the dark where there had been nothing rented and nothing home, someone had begun, very quietly, to arrive.
