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Infinity Smashed: Best Laid Plans
Best Laid Plans
Series: Infinity Smashed
Summary: Biff and M.D. decide to jailbreak, getting closer in the process than they ever wanted.
Word Count: 3100
Notes: Winner of this month’s Patreon poll! Takes place immediately after Best Enemies. Content warnings include spoilers so are in the comments.
That night, after cuffing Biff to the bars, the pinheads came to collect the dinner trays, call lights out… and unbind my hands, which was a relief. The moment I got the okay to move, I started stretching, trying to work the blood back into my aching arms and shoulders. Then I went to the toilet (the only source of water) and got to work washing the dinner remains off my face and clothes.
After getting unbound himself, Biff returned to his bunk and sat facing me, a shrewd look on his suet face. He seemed in a much better mood, and I wasn’t sure I liked it.
“I don’t like you,” he informed me.
“I don’t like you either, Georgia boy.”
“Cool. Come here.”
I squinted at him. My telepathy was unreliable and haphazard, but it had yet to be wrong, and it’d said crystal clear that Biff wasn’t that kind of creep. “…why?”
“Why do you think?” He held out a hand, looking none too enthused about it. “Shake on it.”
I stared at him. Then I got it. I braced myself and took his hand.
He’d braced himself too; he was clearly doing his best to drown out all the idle mental chatter and focus only on what he was thought-bellowing at me: “LET’S—TEAM—UP.”
“(Ow! Not so loud, buddy, I can hear you!) (Incredulity) Team up? You swiped my (lackluster) dinner!”
“(Sneering) It was shitty.”
“It was mine.”
He didn’t apologize, just nonverbally shrugged and said, “’kay, see you in hell then,” let go of me, and laid down on his cot to stare at the ceiling.
I glowered at him, which he ignored, then got to rethinking. Biff had been here longer, knew the place better, had attempted at least one jailbreak already, judging by the way the pinheads treated him, and he hit like a city bus. Sure, he was a mullet-wearing, knuckle-dragging bridge troll, but at least he wasn’t the kind of guy who insisted I pretend he wouldn’t punch a kid. That was refreshing, and besides, he was here and offering.
It was that or sit, twiddle my thumbs, and wait for Bobcat and the other respectable adults to bail me out. Because if there was one thing I’d learned about respectable adults, it was that they were reliable, gracious, and totally worth waiting around for.
It wasn’t like Bobcat hadn’t almost given me up to the PIN once already.
When I stirred, Biff turned to look at me.
“Okay,” I said.
We spent the rest of the night in each other’s heads.
Neither of us liked it. But Biff’s talent was limited to the visual spectrum and there was no way to know whether the security camera took audio or not. We could either keep our mouths shut and minds open, or doom ourselves.
That first night, we circled each other like hungry dogs, waiting for any sign of weakness or backstabbing. We’d only make it a few seconds before flailing away at each other’s psychological instrument panels, smacking at big red buttons and mentally screeching like enraged baboons, and the only thing that kept major tussles from breaking out was the sure knowledge that if we did, the PIN might intervene. Still, we smacked and flailed like fourth graders, trying to jab each other without making skin contact. Our attempts to not think about certain things just made us think about them more, so we unavoidably brain-barfed all over each other. Here’s what I learned:
Biff was nineteen, a walking stereotype of guys named Biff, and go figure, he was nothing but true-blue corn-fed American swine. As far as either of us could tell, neither his citizenship nor his species were in question… but due to reasons he refused to think about, his legal documentation was nonexistent and he could get “disappeared” without fuss. Despite the accent, he’d been living in Vago for years; he’d tried to rob the PIN in an act of drunken stupidity and got a car set on fire in the process. (That he achieved this by accident, I admit, did sort of impress me.) He’d been here ever since, and whatever they planned to do with him, he was sure he wouldn’t like it. Me, my best guess was that he’d gotten thrown into legal limbo; nothing gummed up bureaucratic gears like an edge case.
He didn’t think like me… or Bobcat or Raige either, for that matter. Bobcat’s thoughts had always been precise and linguistic, about as close an analog to normal talking as someone could get, while Raige’s had been overwhelmingly sound, music if not language. Biff, though, communicated in mostly proprioception, space and touch and (e)motion. He could think in language of course, and had to sometimes because it was clearer, but it took longer. His mind was a minefield of rage trip-wires and empty places he didn’t like me looking at. And his spatial and visual memory were astounding… probably had to be, with his skillset.
As long as we stayed focused on the task at hand, we didn’t hemorrhage personal details all over each other too badly, but as we tired, leakage was inevitable—a weird sense of being immersed in each other, like our minds and selves were becoming permeable. It was a creepy sensation, and at first, Biff was positive I was doing it on purpose; only my own revulsion convinced him otherwise. When we finally agreed we were too exhausted to get anywhere further, we hadn’t accomplished as much as we wanted, and we went to bed (or cot) grouchy and snappish at each other.
My dreams were weird, and not in the way I was used to. They were intense, colorful bubbles of space—a cave filled with candles, a creekbed, a house of broken windows, a hospital room, light glass metal—
I woke up with a gasp, heart pounding, and got up to walk off the adrenaline. I’d made a few laps crossing the cell when Biff thrashed and sat up, panting and covered in sweat.
“Oh hey, you too?” I asked.
He glared at me, wild-eyed. “You! You did this!”
“Sure, guy, I intentionally give myself nightmares just to spite you.” I rolled my eyes and kept pacing.
“No, fuck you, that was you, I don’t—” he made a slashing motion over his forearm.
I froze.
“So you fucking quit that shit, okay? Jesus.” He turned over and put his back to me, which was the closest he could get to stomping off.
I came over and kicked his cot as hard as I could, making him jolt upright. “You think I did that on purpose?” I snarled. “You think I want your stupid— your stupid things about your stupid Kristallnacht house?”
Biff made as if to lunge for me, and I dragged up electricity, feeling my clothes crackle and my hair fluff from static.
“Try it,” I hissed. “Just try, now that I’ve got my hands free.”
For a tense moment, we glared each other down. Then Biff reached out and grabbed my forearm.
I zapped him on reflex, but he wasn’t trying to hit me. He was ransacking my head… to figure out what I’d seen, I realized. He didn’t seem to care that the connection was two-way; he’d apparently just relived some of my more sordid adolescent habits, nothing of import.
Weirdly, knowing what I’d seen calmed him down. “’Kay,” he thought.
Since we were in each other’s heads, I didn’t have to worry about watching my words. “What is all that?”
He looked pointedly at where he was gripping my arm. “Why you hack your arms up?”
I yanked out of his grip, tugged my sleeves down as far as they would go. “None of your business,” I said verbally.
“No,” he said, giving me a look. “It ain’t.”
Then he turned over and went back to sleep. I decided he had the right idea.
When we got up come morning, we were calm. It was like things were settled: we knew far too much about each other, there was no undoing that, so we might as well get on with it. Now we freely dove into each other’s heads, trading and mixing, ignoring the outskirts of history. We didn’t need each other’s life stories; we needed each other’s skills.
By PIN parlance, Biff was a “hallugen,” whatever that stood for, meaning he could build visual illusions—“vanishes,” he called them. He neither knew nor cared how they worked, and seemed baffled and weirded out by my reaction.
“(Raw incredulity!) How can you not want to know?”
His response was a nonanswer of raw mental discomfort, then a snappish, “Well, how your shit work then?”
“Bioelectromagnetism.”
He sent me a proprioceptive ghost of a gesture that meant, “yes, and…?”
“(uncertainty) Uh, I leech electricity, I think? (dubious) And have a weird electromagnetic field?”
He just smirked at me. “(smug relief) You don’t fucking know either (yeah, that’s what I thought).”
For a moment, I almost said that unlike him, I had a decent excuse, having only known about my abilities for a few months. But then I realized that wasn’t true. Vandorsky and I had been working around my issues for years, not fully understanding them but adapting to them just the same. We’d learned to keep me away from anything electronic, but not why. I’d learned not to touch people and to avoid them touching me, but it wasn’t till Bobcat that I’d learned all those creepy-crawlies was due to getting brain-barfed on, and it wasn’t until right then with Biff that I’d tried doing it on purpose, or had a decent reason to.
(We were holding hands like five-year-olds. The only reason I could do it was because I knew he hated it just as much as me.)
So we had both made it this far in life without ever discussing our shtick in detail with another person. At least it put us on even footing. It took us a while to figure out our flow, but once we did, we grilled each other to drag all that tacit muscle memory into conscious awareness, and then helped each other organize it. And by explaining it to someone else, we ended up learning.
As far as Biff knew, he could only hold roughly two illusions at a time, and they came in three types, which I called shells, stands, and maps. (I had to call them something, since he had no words for them at all.)
The bathroom curtain had been a shell; it went over reality like a projector screen, static and simple, and it was the only kind Biff could decently maintain out of eyeshot. (And even then, the more complex it was, the harder it was to maintain.) Stands were basically shells on wheels. They could move, but they had to be in eyeshot; movement required a closer eye, lest they warp or break.
Invisibility could be a stand or a shell, but the type Biff had used upon my arrival was a map. Those were tighter, more flexible, and conformed to his movements, which cut down on errors like I’d encountered popping in and out of the curtain. Unfortunately, he could only use them on himself or extensions of himself—the car he was driving, the spork he was holding, stuff like that.
“You’re sure?”
“(cranky) ‘Course I’m fucking sure, I can’t tell how it gonna move (stray animation images), I ain’t psychic—”
Pause. We went, “hmm.” We’d come back to that.
I pulled from Biff’s atlas of spatial memory to learn more about where we were. Unlike me, he’d regained consciousness outside the cell, which had shown him more of the building, and his prior attempted breakout (made soon after) had taught him some of the security protocols.
He hadn’t gotten far. Back then, they’d made the mistake of only cuffing one of his wrists, and at meal time, he’d managed to finagle the vanish to fool them into thinking he was bound when he wasn’t. When they opened the door, he disappeared, bulled his way past the guards, and kept running, only to discover that this place was modular and all the doors were locked; he couldn’t leave this pod of four cells, and the others were empty. He’d tried to double back and rob the guards for their keys, only to find that they’d locked themselves in our cell, intending to wait him out. They knew as well as Biff did that he could only run a vanish while conscious, and he still had some sedative left in him from his capture; eventually, he conked out.
If anyone else was held here, he didn’t know about it. Presumably the whole place was rigged up like this, with locked modules of small groups of cells. The individual cell locks were mechanical, but the greater doors used electronic key cards, and for all Biff’s illegitimate skills, lock-picking wasn’t one of them. And while he could create an illusory ID card, holding something like a bar-code steady enough to fool mechanical eyes required having an ID card for continuous reference, thus negating the point.
Biff’s skills weren’t up to the doors, but mine were. (And I don’t even mean lock-picking—though I had done house locks before, with the right equipment and immense patience.) After all, I was a walking electronic disaster—and no government building worth its salt would have electronic doors that, in times of crisis or power outage, stuck closed. Though I hadn’t tried it before, I felt confident that I could force the electronic doors open, given enough time and effort.
Biff disagreed and insisted we’d be better off sticking with his original idea, which I had to admit seemed the simplest and most elegant: near mealtime, fake out the camera (or have me break it), lie in wait for our mealtime guards, somehow overwhelm them, steal their keys, and leave them in the cell wearing our faces while we wore theirs. Since all the pinheads we’d seen towered over us, Biff’s vanish would have to be the less-adaptable shells, and we’d have to try not to get too close to anyone or talk, but if we pulled it off, we could just walk right out of there on cigarette break.
And what then? Here, Biff’s knowledge failed us; all he knew was that we were somewhere in the Vago Desert within earshot of the highway. Our best hope was finding a car to steal (which Biff could do, stereotypical Vagan he, even if the pinheads weren’t carrying car keys). If worse came to worse… well, there was always hitchhiking.
The only problem was how to beat the guards. They’d learned from the last time, and now they always made good and sure that Biff had both arms and one leg bound to the bars before they opened the door. Biff had been stumped on that one… but now we had a solution.
We never did finish it, but it was shaping up into a pretty good plan, if you ask me. It might’ve even survived first contact with the enemy!
We never got to use it. The PIN came and took him that day.
There was nothing I could do. I ate my glop without competition, tossed and turned on my cot, and finally managed a restless, itchy sleep full of dreams that weren’t mine.
I woke up to a pinhead banging on the bars. “On the floor.” Her voice was flat. She and her buddy had Biff out cold and slung between them.
I got on the floor.
The PIN didn’t chat around me like they did Biff—I guess because I was visible and not good at emptying my eyes. But they weren’t just quiet now. Something had happened, something that’d… upset them? No, that wasn’t quite right.
Whatever it was, it’d involved shaving part of Biff’s head. They put him on the cot (surprisingly gently), locked the door, and left, avoiding my eyes. That was what made me realize: shame. They were ashamed.
At the very edge of the hall, I heard the guy mutter, “I hate this.”
“Sh!” hissed the woman. Then they were gone, and I got up to look Biff over more closely.
Well, he hadn’t been in any fights, at least; the only mark on him was sticky tape residue on the inside of one elbow. They’d sedated him, presumably. Other than that, who knew?
He smelled like hospital. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t even smell the cigarettes on him anymore.
I went back to my cot to wait. Whether I slept or not, I couldn’t tell you; night in the cell was timeless, without windows or light changes or people.
I heard Biff wake up before I saw it, because he groaned, rustled, and slithered off the cot, scrabbling for the toilet.
If I hadn’t spent the past twenty-four hours in his head, I wouldn’t have known what he was doing. As it was, I scrambled to grab the back of his jumpsuit and help (drag) him.
He didn’t like that at all, kept flailing at me and mumble/snarling, but he had no coordination, and we got him to the toilet just in time for the vomiting. There wasn’t much of anything to come up, but his body clearly didn’t believe it. It was pretty bad for a while.
For a while, Biff was too consumed with retching to care about me, but eventually he had enough of a break to glare at me.
He looked awful. His skin was clammy and gray, his mouth crusty, and the eye on the shaved side was bloodshot. I also realized that his image had changed. Only subtly—skin a slightly different shade, hair a different kind of frizzy, facial features a smidgen different. I wasn’t sure why he’d bother with such minor changes, or even exactly what I was looking at.
I didn’t have time to think about it, either, because he glared at me and snarled, “what the fuck are you?”
I froze. Absently, I said, “I’m a Martian.”
“You think this’s funny? Fuck you!” Then he had to retch again. “Where the fuck is this?”
“Biff…”
Now he sounded panicky. “Who told you to call me that? Who the fuck are you?”
Up until that moment, I had still kind of sort of maybe considered waiting for Bobcat and his red tape cutters. But now I knew better.
“You did,” I said, and held out a hand. “My name’s M.D., you hate my guts, and I hate yours. Let’s shake on it.”
I didn’t know if I could fix whatever had been done to him. But I did know that I was never getting out of here without his help.
Series: Infinity Smashed
Summary: Biff and M.D. decide to jailbreak, getting closer in the process than they ever wanted.
Word Count: 3100
Notes: Winner of this month’s Patreon poll! Takes place immediately after Best Enemies. Content warnings include spoilers so are in the comments.
That night, after cuffing Biff to the bars, the pinheads came to collect the dinner trays, call lights out… and unbind my hands, which was a relief. The moment I got the okay to move, I started stretching, trying to work the blood back into my aching arms and shoulders. Then I went to the toilet (the only source of water) and got to work washing the dinner remains off my face and clothes.
After getting unbound himself, Biff returned to his bunk and sat facing me, a shrewd look on his suet face. He seemed in a much better mood, and I wasn’t sure I liked it.
“I don’t like you,” he informed me.
“I don’t like you either, Georgia boy.”
“Cool. Come here.”
I squinted at him. My telepathy was unreliable and haphazard, but it had yet to be wrong, and it’d said crystal clear that Biff wasn’t that kind of creep. “…why?”
“Why do you think?” He held out a hand, looking none too enthused about it. “Shake on it.”
I stared at him. Then I got it. I braced myself and took his hand.
He’d braced himself too; he was clearly doing his best to drown out all the idle mental chatter and focus only on what he was thought-bellowing at me: “LET’S—TEAM—UP.”
“(Ow! Not so loud, buddy, I can hear you!) (Incredulity) Team up? You swiped my (lackluster) dinner!”
“(Sneering) It was shitty.”
“It was mine.”
He didn’t apologize, just nonverbally shrugged and said, “’kay, see you in hell then,” let go of me, and laid down on his cot to stare at the ceiling.
I glowered at him, which he ignored, then got to rethinking. Biff had been here longer, knew the place better, had attempted at least one jailbreak already, judging by the way the pinheads treated him, and he hit like a city bus. Sure, he was a mullet-wearing, knuckle-dragging bridge troll, but at least he wasn’t the kind of guy who insisted I pretend he wouldn’t punch a kid. That was refreshing, and besides, he was here and offering.
It was that or sit, twiddle my thumbs, and wait for Bobcat and the other respectable adults to bail me out. Because if there was one thing I’d learned about respectable adults, it was that they were reliable, gracious, and totally worth waiting around for.
It wasn’t like Bobcat hadn’t almost given me up to the PIN once already.
When I stirred, Biff turned to look at me.
“Okay,” I said.
We spent the rest of the night in each other’s heads.
Neither of us liked it. But Biff’s talent was limited to the visual spectrum and there was no way to know whether the security camera took audio or not. We could either keep our mouths shut and minds open, or doom ourselves.
That first night, we circled each other like hungry dogs, waiting for any sign of weakness or backstabbing. We’d only make it a few seconds before flailing away at each other’s psychological instrument panels, smacking at big red buttons and mentally screeching like enraged baboons, and the only thing that kept major tussles from breaking out was the sure knowledge that if we did, the PIN might intervene. Still, we smacked and flailed like fourth graders, trying to jab each other without making skin contact. Our attempts to not think about certain things just made us think about them more, so we unavoidably brain-barfed all over each other. Here’s what I learned:
Biff was nineteen, a walking stereotype of guys named Biff, and go figure, he was nothing but true-blue corn-fed American swine. As far as either of us could tell, neither his citizenship nor his species were in question… but due to reasons he refused to think about, his legal documentation was nonexistent and he could get “disappeared” without fuss. Despite the accent, he’d been living in Vago for years; he’d tried to rob the PIN in an act of drunken stupidity and got a car set on fire in the process. (That he achieved this by accident, I admit, did sort of impress me.) He’d been here ever since, and whatever they planned to do with him, he was sure he wouldn’t like it. Me, my best guess was that he’d gotten thrown into legal limbo; nothing gummed up bureaucratic gears like an edge case.
He didn’t think like me… or Bobcat or Raige either, for that matter. Bobcat’s thoughts had always been precise and linguistic, about as close an analog to normal talking as someone could get, while Raige’s had been overwhelmingly sound, music if not language. Biff, though, communicated in mostly proprioception, space and touch and (e)motion. He could think in language of course, and had to sometimes because it was clearer, but it took longer. His mind was a minefield of rage trip-wires and empty places he didn’t like me looking at. And his spatial and visual memory were astounding… probably had to be, with his skillset.
As long as we stayed focused on the task at hand, we didn’t hemorrhage personal details all over each other too badly, but as we tired, leakage was inevitable—a weird sense of being immersed in each other, like our minds and selves were becoming permeable. It was a creepy sensation, and at first, Biff was positive I was doing it on purpose; only my own revulsion convinced him otherwise. When we finally agreed we were too exhausted to get anywhere further, we hadn’t accomplished as much as we wanted, and we went to bed (or cot) grouchy and snappish at each other.
My dreams were weird, and not in the way I was used to. They were intense, colorful bubbles of space—a cave filled with candles, a creekbed, a house of broken windows, a hospital room, light glass metal—
I woke up with a gasp, heart pounding, and got up to walk off the adrenaline. I’d made a few laps crossing the cell when Biff thrashed and sat up, panting and covered in sweat.
“Oh hey, you too?” I asked.
He glared at me, wild-eyed. “You! You did this!”
“Sure, guy, I intentionally give myself nightmares just to spite you.” I rolled my eyes and kept pacing.
“No, fuck you, that was you, I don’t—” he made a slashing motion over his forearm.
I froze.
“So you fucking quit that shit, okay? Jesus.” He turned over and put his back to me, which was the closest he could get to stomping off.
I came over and kicked his cot as hard as I could, making him jolt upright. “You think I did that on purpose?” I snarled. “You think I want your stupid— your stupid things about your stupid Kristallnacht house?”
Biff made as if to lunge for me, and I dragged up electricity, feeling my clothes crackle and my hair fluff from static.
“Try it,” I hissed. “Just try, now that I’ve got my hands free.”
For a tense moment, we glared each other down. Then Biff reached out and grabbed my forearm.
I zapped him on reflex, but he wasn’t trying to hit me. He was ransacking my head… to figure out what I’d seen, I realized. He didn’t seem to care that the connection was two-way; he’d apparently just relived some of my more sordid adolescent habits, nothing of import.
Weirdly, knowing what I’d seen calmed him down. “’Kay,” he thought.
Since we were in each other’s heads, I didn’t have to worry about watching my words. “What is all that?”
He looked pointedly at where he was gripping my arm. “Why you hack your arms up?”
I yanked out of his grip, tugged my sleeves down as far as they would go. “None of your business,” I said verbally.
“No,” he said, giving me a look. “It ain’t.”
Then he turned over and went back to sleep. I decided he had the right idea.
When we got up come morning, we were calm. It was like things were settled: we knew far too much about each other, there was no undoing that, so we might as well get on with it. Now we freely dove into each other’s heads, trading and mixing, ignoring the outskirts of history. We didn’t need each other’s life stories; we needed each other’s skills.
By PIN parlance, Biff was a “hallugen,” whatever that stood for, meaning he could build visual illusions—“vanishes,” he called them. He neither knew nor cared how they worked, and seemed baffled and weirded out by my reaction.
“(Raw incredulity!) How can you not want to know?”
His response was a nonanswer of raw mental discomfort, then a snappish, “Well, how your shit work then?”
“Bioelectromagnetism.”
He sent me a proprioceptive ghost of a gesture that meant, “yes, and…?”
“(uncertainty) Uh, I leech electricity, I think? (dubious) And have a weird electromagnetic field?”
He just smirked at me. “(smug relief) You don’t fucking know either (yeah, that’s what I thought).”
For a moment, I almost said that unlike him, I had a decent excuse, having only known about my abilities for a few months. But then I realized that wasn’t true. Vandorsky and I had been working around my issues for years, not fully understanding them but adapting to them just the same. We’d learned to keep me away from anything electronic, but not why. I’d learned not to touch people and to avoid them touching me, but it wasn’t till Bobcat that I’d learned all those creepy-crawlies was due to getting brain-barfed on, and it wasn’t until right then with Biff that I’d tried doing it on purpose, or had a decent reason to.
(We were holding hands like five-year-olds. The only reason I could do it was because I knew he hated it just as much as me.)
So we had both made it this far in life without ever discussing our shtick in detail with another person. At least it put us on even footing. It took us a while to figure out our flow, but once we did, we grilled each other to drag all that tacit muscle memory into conscious awareness, and then helped each other organize it. And by explaining it to someone else, we ended up learning.
As far as Biff knew, he could only hold roughly two illusions at a time, and they came in three types, which I called shells, stands, and maps. (I had to call them something, since he had no words for them at all.)
The bathroom curtain had been a shell; it went over reality like a projector screen, static and simple, and it was the only kind Biff could decently maintain out of eyeshot. (And even then, the more complex it was, the harder it was to maintain.) Stands were basically shells on wheels. They could move, but they had to be in eyeshot; movement required a closer eye, lest they warp or break.
Invisibility could be a stand or a shell, but the type Biff had used upon my arrival was a map. Those were tighter, more flexible, and conformed to his movements, which cut down on errors like I’d encountered popping in and out of the curtain. Unfortunately, he could only use them on himself or extensions of himself—the car he was driving, the spork he was holding, stuff like that.
“You’re sure?”
“(cranky) ‘Course I’m fucking sure, I can’t tell how it gonna move (stray animation images), I ain’t psychic—”
Pause. We went, “hmm.” We’d come back to that.
I pulled from Biff’s atlas of spatial memory to learn more about where we were. Unlike me, he’d regained consciousness outside the cell, which had shown him more of the building, and his prior attempted breakout (made soon after) had taught him some of the security protocols.
He hadn’t gotten far. Back then, they’d made the mistake of only cuffing one of his wrists, and at meal time, he’d managed to finagle the vanish to fool them into thinking he was bound when he wasn’t. When they opened the door, he disappeared, bulled his way past the guards, and kept running, only to discover that this place was modular and all the doors were locked; he couldn’t leave this pod of four cells, and the others were empty. He’d tried to double back and rob the guards for their keys, only to find that they’d locked themselves in our cell, intending to wait him out. They knew as well as Biff did that he could only run a vanish while conscious, and he still had some sedative left in him from his capture; eventually, he conked out.
If anyone else was held here, he didn’t know about it. Presumably the whole place was rigged up like this, with locked modules of small groups of cells. The individual cell locks were mechanical, but the greater doors used electronic key cards, and for all Biff’s illegitimate skills, lock-picking wasn’t one of them. And while he could create an illusory ID card, holding something like a bar-code steady enough to fool mechanical eyes required having an ID card for continuous reference, thus negating the point.
Biff’s skills weren’t up to the doors, but mine were. (And I don’t even mean lock-picking—though I had done house locks before, with the right equipment and immense patience.) After all, I was a walking electronic disaster—and no government building worth its salt would have electronic doors that, in times of crisis or power outage, stuck closed. Though I hadn’t tried it before, I felt confident that I could force the electronic doors open, given enough time and effort.
Biff disagreed and insisted we’d be better off sticking with his original idea, which I had to admit seemed the simplest and most elegant: near mealtime, fake out the camera (or have me break it), lie in wait for our mealtime guards, somehow overwhelm them, steal their keys, and leave them in the cell wearing our faces while we wore theirs. Since all the pinheads we’d seen towered over us, Biff’s vanish would have to be the less-adaptable shells, and we’d have to try not to get too close to anyone or talk, but if we pulled it off, we could just walk right out of there on cigarette break.
And what then? Here, Biff’s knowledge failed us; all he knew was that we were somewhere in the Vago Desert within earshot of the highway. Our best hope was finding a car to steal (which Biff could do, stereotypical Vagan he, even if the pinheads weren’t carrying car keys). If worse came to worse… well, there was always hitchhiking.
The only problem was how to beat the guards. They’d learned from the last time, and now they always made good and sure that Biff had both arms and one leg bound to the bars before they opened the door. Biff had been stumped on that one… but now we had a solution.
We never did finish it, but it was shaping up into a pretty good plan, if you ask me. It might’ve even survived first contact with the enemy!
We never got to use it. The PIN came and took him that day.
There was nothing I could do. I ate my glop without competition, tossed and turned on my cot, and finally managed a restless, itchy sleep full of dreams that weren’t mine.
I woke up to a pinhead banging on the bars. “On the floor.” Her voice was flat. She and her buddy had Biff out cold and slung between them.
I got on the floor.
The PIN didn’t chat around me like they did Biff—I guess because I was visible and not good at emptying my eyes. But they weren’t just quiet now. Something had happened, something that’d… upset them? No, that wasn’t quite right.
Whatever it was, it’d involved shaving part of Biff’s head. They put him on the cot (surprisingly gently), locked the door, and left, avoiding my eyes. That was what made me realize: shame. They were ashamed.
At the very edge of the hall, I heard the guy mutter, “I hate this.”
“Sh!” hissed the woman. Then they were gone, and I got up to look Biff over more closely.
Well, he hadn’t been in any fights, at least; the only mark on him was sticky tape residue on the inside of one elbow. They’d sedated him, presumably. Other than that, who knew?
He smelled like hospital. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t even smell the cigarettes on him anymore.
I went back to my cot to wait. Whether I slept or not, I couldn’t tell you; night in the cell was timeless, without windows or light changes or people.
I heard Biff wake up before I saw it, because he groaned, rustled, and slithered off the cot, scrabbling for the toilet.
If I hadn’t spent the past twenty-four hours in his head, I wouldn’t have known what he was doing. As it was, I scrambled to grab the back of his jumpsuit and help (drag) him.
He didn’t like that at all, kept flailing at me and mumble/snarling, but he had no coordination, and we got him to the toilet just in time for the vomiting. There wasn’t much of anything to come up, but his body clearly didn’t believe it. It was pretty bad for a while.
For a while, Biff was too consumed with retching to care about me, but eventually he had enough of a break to glare at me.
He looked awful. His skin was clammy and gray, his mouth crusty, and the eye on the shaved side was bloodshot. I also realized that his image had changed. Only subtly—skin a slightly different shade, hair a different kind of frizzy, facial features a smidgen different. I wasn’t sure why he’d bother with such minor changes, or even exactly what I was looking at.
I didn’t have time to think about it, either, because he glared at me and snarled, “what the fuck are you?”
I froze. Absently, I said, “I’m a Martian.”
“You think this’s funny? Fuck you!” Then he had to retch again. “Where the fuck is this?”
“Biff…”
Now he sounded panicky. “Who told you to call me that? Who the fuck are you?”
Up until that moment, I had still kind of sort of maybe considered waiting for Bobcat and his red tape cutters. But now I knew better.
“You did,” I said, and held out a hand. “My name’s M.D., you hate my guts, and I hate yours. Let’s shake on it.”
I didn’t know if I could fix whatever had been done to him. But I did know that I was never getting out of here without his help.
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