Trustworthy by Astrid Amara

Author:Astrid Amara [Amara, Astrid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Dystopian, Futuristic, LGBTTQ, Science Fiction
Publisher: Loose Id LLC
Published: 2017-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

I’m No Actor

I had expected a night curled up with Mack would have been sleepless, given how much the man tossed and turned while he slumbered, but I’d been wrong.

I awoke early, surprisingly rested, with Mack beside me, motionless. He appeared boneless. The tension that usually marked his face in sleep was gone.

And there was another face beside his. Sometime in the night Carly had joined us on the floor and insinuated her way between us.

As soon as she and I made eye contact, she sprang fully awake, whipping Mack in the face with her tail.

“Goddamnit!” Mack groaned, rolling the other way.

I stretched and spent a few minutes petting the dog before getting up myself. My body was sore in places, but my shaking had mostly subsided. I walked naked through the tempcamp to get Carly something to eat, and I enjoyed the rare moment of nudity. But as I bent down to offer Carly a tray of ground soy, I watched my artificial knee bend, whirring as I moved, and I tried once again to recall the incident that had cost me my leg.

How could I not remember this? What else had I forgotten? If a person could lose a leg, an arm, and their entire past, what other secrets could be hidden in my memories? And what if they weren’t hidden, what if they were gone?

Why would Trust give us a drug that erased our pasts? Fighting was a cumulative skill that improved with practice. Erasing prior combat missions didn’t make us better soldiers.

Then again, we weren’t expected to be better soldiers. We were expected to be killers. I thought back on the few images I retained, and they were all of me shooting from a distance. That was muscle memory and practice, not thought.

And Peak made us fearless. I missed that most of all—the complete lack of concern for my own well-being, or the care of others. Life was incredibly freeing without having to worry about one’s own mortality. On Peak, the joy was in the violence, not the life afterward.

Mack moaned some more, rolled around, and finally got himself upright. I took myself and Carly outside for a piss. When I re-entered the tempcamp, Mack was up and reloading the buggy for our final leg to the Alspree Biodome.

I drove this leg, since it only required us heading due north to hit the belt of biodomes. As I drove, Mack sat in the passenger seat and fiddled with the electronic equipment he’d scavenged from the rev outpost and the back of the buggy, providing an ongoing monologue of complaints against the manufacturers of programmers, the ugliness and squirming presence of Carly on my lap, the monotony of yellow sand.

We made good time north. A storm looked as though it would bring our movement to a halt, but passed east of us.

I tuned out Mack’s rambling and instead tried to tenderly pick through images and memories in my head, desperate to figure out how much of my memory remained.

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