Tommy Two-Pair #3 — Tales from the Rails
My head was still friggin’ spinnin’, but I wasn’t gonna let that slow me down. And even if I did slow down, what was I gonna do? Huh? Nothin’, that’s what. I had to keep movin’ forward. I had to find her.
…
I went home after beatin’ that hoity-toity Gauthier creep and throwin’ off his goons, ready for some peace and quiet, only to find there was already some kinda shady punk sittin at my kitchen table.
Or, I mean, he was standin’ in my kitchen in the place where a table would be if I had one — the point is this long-haired, smug lookin’ John was in my house.
“So that sore loser sent you to bloody me up in the comfort of my own house, huh?” I said to the guy. I was rollin’ up my sleeves, tryin’ to look real intimidatin’. You know? Scrappy. The guy didn’t hardly have any muscle on him, so I thought I could knock him down, send him back to his boss with a message.
“I’m not here to fight you, Thomas,” he said. Thomas? Who did he think he was? My mother?
“Oh, well, in that case — ” So I teach the guy about my favorite element in the Periodic Table: the element of surprise. I jump the guy. But he doesn’t flinch. Instead, as I’m winding my fist back, he pulls out a pocket watch and starts winding it. I swing at his face, but I hit open air.
The guy is gone. Poof. Vanished.
I look around, and I’m standing in some kind of lab. A couple of lab-guys in their coats are standing in front of this poor, gray-lookin’ sap. He’s starin’ straight ahead at me — or through me.
“Where the hell did my house go?” I shout at the lab-guys. But it doesn’t look like they hear me. “Huh? Hey, lab-guys.” Still nothin’. I walk right up to ’em and they don’t bat an eyelash at me. “HEY!” I’m practically screamin’ at ’em. My throat hurts, and everything. Nothin’. They just go on talkin’ about the gray-lookin’ guy and about if they can sneak away for a few brewskis.
And then they leave, and it’s just me and the weird gray guy. And at this point, I am spooked, you know?
The gray guy hasn’t moved at all. Not a twitch. It don’t even look like he’s breathing. But for some reason, when I look at him… I know that he’s alive. And I know that he’s hates it here. And I know that he’s going to escape. I reach out to touch him, to try to wake him up, or something, but some kinda mist starts to come up from the ground, like rain turning to steam on the hot concrete.
The lab fades away in the mist, and then I’m outside. It’s dark and the ground I’m standin’ on is wet and squelchy. I know my shoes are gonna be ruined.
But then I see the gray guy. And he’s escaped, just like I knew he would! I even let out a cheer.
“Oh, that’s right, freaky gray guy! I knew you’d get outta there.”
The gray guy looks at me — or looks through me. And then everything about him starts to change. His hair. His facial features. His skin tone. He collapses on the ground and gets real still for a second before he wakes up and rubs the back of his head.
And I remember what he does next.
I don’t need to see it happen.
He stands up, starts walking, trips and catches himself, turning his wrist when he lands on the ground. I feel my wrist throb with the memory of the injury. And after that, he’s going to walk into the night and not stop until he finds the neon glow of a sign that says BAR, then drink until he passes out.
“I’ve brought your memories from the past into the present,” I hear a guy say. I blink and I’m back in my kitchen, standin’ in front of the long-haired creep with the pocket watch. “They’re a lot more tangible than people realize,” he said. “Memories, I mean. If they weren’t, I wouldn’t be able to pull them through time.”
“How did you…” I start to ask. But it feels stupid to try to finish the question.
“Do you remember, now, Thomas?” the guy asked.
All I can do is nod my head.
“Good,” he said. “Sit down and catch your breath. We have much to discuss.”
…
When I finally arrived, it didn’t take long to find the woman. The Stranger had given me perfect directions. It was creepy. He said to go to a certain train station in Pemberton on a certain day at a certain time and I’d find a woman with long, black hair, wearing a conductor cap, trying to break the padlock on an unmarked boxcar.
“You Paloma Haulita?” I asked her. She froze.
“Never heard of her,” she said without looking at me.
“That’s a shame,” I said. “Stranger told me I could find her here…”
Paloma finally turned toward me. She looked me up and down and blew a strand of hair outta her face. “I can’t imagine what kinds of strangers a guy like you might talk to, but I promise you, I’m not your girl.” Then she went back to bashing the lock with a rock.
And here, I’m confused, because the Stranger told me I just had to find this gal and she’d know what to do. Said that she had a beef with the Johnson Group, just like he did, just like I do, and that if I found her, she’d be able to help me out.
“What, is there some kinda secret freakin’ code I need to say, or somethin’?” I said. “C’mon, girlie, help me out!”
“I am not your girlie,” Paloma spat, hoisting the rock over her head, bringing it down hard. The lock cracked and fell to the ground.
I have to say, I was impressed by her tenacity.
“Now can you scram, pal?” she asked. “I gotta help these people.” She pulled open the boxcar door, revealing dozens of folks with gray skin and plain faces. That’s when I started to put the pieces together. Stranger knew I could be of use here.
“Plains…” I said, scanning the faces in the train car, all of them identical.
Paloma heaved herself into the car and looked down at me like she had a funk in her eye. “What do you know about Plains?” she asked.
“A thing or two.”
She stared at me for a few seconds then stuck out her hand to help me up into the car.
“All of them used to be people,” she started. “Or… All of them are people. But they had their identities stolen. Their features, their personalities, their memories…”
I stood in front of one of the Plains and stared straight into its eyes. Poor bastard must’ve been in standby mode for weeks, judging from the looks of ’em. I put my hand on the back of its neck — mostly for show, for Paloma’s sake. I knew I didn’t need to make physical contact with ’em to interface with their systems. Just needed to make eye contact.
“Memories are more tangible than most people think,” I said.
“What are you — ” Paloma said.
The Plain in front of me drew in a sharp breath and blinked its eyes wildly. “Where am I?” he asked. He sounded panicked. “What am I doing here?”
“Relax, guy,” I said. I could sense his parameters scaling back to a more relaxed state. “You’re safe. It’s okay.”
“Who are you people?” he asked. Paloma and I introduced ourselves.
Paloma was at my side. “How did you do that?” Her eyes sparkled with energy.
I shrugged. “I can talk to ‘em,” I said. “I mean, really talk to ’em. The beeps and boops in their heads. I know their language.” She looked me up and down again, this time apparently seeing me different than she did before. And I realized it might be easier to just show her.
I switched my appearance settings back to the defaults, and in a few moments, I looked just like all the other Units standing in the box car — but dressed better.
“Sometimes we look like this,” I said in my default voice. “Sometimes we’re programmed to look like hired thugs,” and I transformed into one of Gauthier’s goons I stopped on the train that day. “And in special cases,” I continued, restoring the settings that turned me into Tommy, “we get to choose who we want to be.”
Paloma blinked her eyes, mouth pulled into a tight line. “And you chose this?”
…
Paloma had with her a number of data chips and the de-identification tool the Researcher had used to destroy the lives of so many people. She’d figured out she could load the chips into the gun, but hadn’t been able to successfully reintegrate any of the Plains she’d met so far. I shook my head.
“A chip can only be reintegrated with a suitable host,” I said.
“So, it has to match with the body it was taken from?” she asked.
“That sounds right,” I replied. She looked around the boxcar and sighed.
“There are more of them than I have chips for…” She held out her hands and I counted twelve of them. “And even then, there’s no way to tell what chip belongs to which body…”
I took one of the chips from her.
“This is Tracy Hutchinson,” I said. “That one’s her daughter, Ella,” I added, pointing to a chip in her hands.
Paloma looked at me, then at the chips in her hands, then at the room full of blank people.
“Are they in here?” she asked, bouncing on her toes a little bit.
“Let’s find out,” I said.
We worked our way through the car. I woke up each of the Plains in their default state, giving them consciousness — and for the first time since their fate was chosen for them, the chance to make a new choice for themselves.
For the few whose chips we had, the choice was between reclaiming their old lives, or starting a brand-new one. Tracy and Ella reintegrated and left as mother and daughter, reunited, with their memories of the entire affair and their Plain Unit programming completely erased. Two other men reintegrated, and one Unit chose the path of freedom.
“If you ever change your mind,” Paloma told her, placing the other woman’s data chip into her hands, and folding her fingers shut over it. The woman nodded.
When we had no more matching pairs to reintegrate, Paloma turned to me.
“What about you?” she asked.
“What about me?”
“Your original identity,” she said flatly. “Do you want to track it down?”
That was a question that had been haunting me ever since I met the Stranger.
“I already know who I used to be,” I said. “Man named K.C. Jones. And I have an idea of where you’ll find his data chip.”
Paloma squeezed my arm. “Tommy, that’s great! We can find it together, and then we can…” She stopped when her eyes met mine.
I tried to smile and shook my head. She let go of me.
“I want to live, Paloma,” I said. “But I don’t want him to not live because of me. He didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No, there has to be a way,” she said. For half a second, I thought I saw tears welling up in her eyes. She turned away from me. “There has to…”
…
We made a deal.
I rounded up all of the Plains Paloma had rescued and formed a community of sorts with them, on the outskirts of Pemberton. Some of them created new identities for themselves, some of them stayed plain, but all of us worked hard to support our ragtag little town.
Paloma continued looking for lost Plains and hunting down data chips, bringing them with her whenever she returned.
It was a good arrangement. A happy life. I found myself reshaping who I thought Tommy Llewinson was, settling into new routines, watching over the others like a shepherd with his flock. I hardly thought about my old life of gambling. I even dropped the slick, cool guy accent at some point.
And one day, Paloma returned with a serious look on her face.
“I found him.”
