Ironclad

By César Esparza

Conrad’s last body had been a Crixus javelin unit and he expected to jack into a similar gear after awakening from death. He had been swapping bodies for so long that he communicated through numbers, the remains of his soul stored in a hard drive somewhere in the asteroid belt.

Darkness peeled away like paint off weathered walls. Snapshots of mechanical slaughter composed brief moments of consciousness. He knew something was wrong when he tried to access the javelin’s status. Try as he might, he could not move, yet he felt a strange weight all the same. He heard a strange sound. A scream, a man’s voice. His voice.

Water splashed over his face. Conrad could not turn, but his eyes found an old man sitting by his side, stuffing meds inside his pockets. “Welcome back, kid. How does it feel being human again?”

“Hurts…” The sound was alien, its vibrations off.

“It’s just the shock. It’ll pass if you stop twitching.” The man smoked the minutes away while Conrad struggled to breathe. “Okay, the speech processor works fine. Now, we need make sure the transfer didn’t scramble the black box. Doctor left to grab a smoke, so I’ll do you the honors. Basics first: Who am I?”

The hoarse cough mixed with cigar smoke, a callback to forlorn memories. Conrad’s voice saying, “Petros?” The one who took him out of prison, the one who entombed him. The rest was an ensemble of kodachrome snapshots.

Petros smiled. “You fought the good fight. Winner’s share shaves twenty-five years off your sentence, less five for the maintenance and for my service, ten for the gear and another five for the repairs and taxes for a total of five years. How’s the other side?”

The void was a place hostile toward consciousness. People waited to become Lazarus in a dark, formless cave, strings of numbers on a screen. Static crawled under Conrad’s skin. His naked body moist and throbbing. Sweat dripped down his forehead. He closed his eyes and awaited the numbness.

Petros slapped him. “Breathe, kid! So much iron must’ve messed with your wiring.” He lit a cigarette with tar stained fingers. “Can you smell that?”

“I don’t… I can’t…”

“It’s the sensory inhibitors. They’ll keep your synapses from burning up while you adjust. You ain’t even half the drooling mess I expected. When was the last time you wore a meat bag?”

“Twenty years ago.”

“After we left Ceres?”

“Yeah.”

“Thirty then. Your golden years have come and gone.”

“Right.” Data could be lost or misplaced after cheap transitions. Memories fermented like wine in an abandoned cellar. How he managed to recognize the wavelengths left by his past iterations was a mystery he often chose to ignore.

His movements were stiff and groggy. Fingers stalled between motions. “How long?”

“Six months, the time it took me to get here.”

Conrad struggled to make sense of his surroundings, as if stuck in the REM stage of slumber. The room was like a workshop and a clinic combined. “Where are we?”

“Philadelphia, Earth. You wouldn’t believe all the customs officers I had to bribe to get you here. Even with our sponsorship, your serial number smells rotten wherever you go.”

“Why am I awake?”

“Biz. New gear, new job. I booked you another fight, a special pay per view. You are going into the pit against a javelin in this suit. One round. Ten minutes.”

Conrad had forgotten all about nightmares, but he figured this could have been one.

“There are regulations,” he managed to say.

“You were a smuggler. You made a living out of giving ‘em the finger! Where there’s an audience, there’s a loophole.” Petros licked yellow gums. “The reward’s worth it: Your criminal record erased from every planet and station’s database. You’ll be free. They’ll even let you keep the suit.”

“Petros, who are they?”

“Nameless Samaritans who have enough money to say the sky is purple and make it a fact. Trust me, the deal is solid.”

“But this suit sure ain’t. What’s the tax for losing?”

Petros hid his wrinkled brow behind a curtain of smoke. “Everyone’s paying good money for real danger. If that thing gets a hold of you… Well, it’ll be the coda to a good career.”

“You’re going to let them kill me.”

“Kid, folk like us have an expiration date. Steel Hands Toney, Atomic Beck and the rest are footnotes in someone’s ledger, data mixed in a churn for video games.” Petros’s crooked smile widened. “But this is your chance to show ‘em you’re built different. Your chance to become a legend.”

Conrad searched for a semblance of friendship, some comradery or pity, but found nothing. If Petros felt remorse, his performance was outstanding.

“I won’t play a rigged game,” said Conrad. “I don’t care how much they paid you, I won’t do it. Put me back in the freezer until another fight comes through.”

Petros’s smile faded. “Do you have some kind of jet lag? Interplanetary detention has your ass marked as an asset followed by a long line of numbers that don’t mean much save for one thing: You can’t refuse. They’ll erase you if you do and you’ll go to hell with a blank slate.” He expected a reply, found resigned silence instead. “Let us start with the memory test again. What’s your name?”

Conrad looked at the stranger in the mirror and hesitated. A gruff beard outlining wrinkles. Above, small and dull eyes lacking recognition. An ordinary face, the kind that avoided second thoughts. The past was like a petroglyph and when he searched for a semblance of property, the stranger frowned at him. This ain’t it, chief, he seemed to say.

“Conrad,” he said. “My name is Conrad Penrose.”

Someone once described the javelin as ‘the baddest piece of equipment in the system.’ Its origins as industrial support for deep space mining were lost to public memory. Back then, a dozen people could use the same gear in a day to carry out the Sisyphean task of ice hauling.

No one knew how the fights started. Some attributed it to Venusian cartels and others to the Jovian prison colonies. Whatever the case, the next bit of news was that there were hundreds of agencies poaching convicts for the pits. Fighting networks grew around the idea like mold. They got some papers signed, gave some concessions and broadcasted the first legal fights in the States, Russia, and the Tharsis region.

Javelins were quick and slick despite their size. Their bodies a modular contraption resembling an offshoot of anthropological evolution. Progress turned to carnage. The bouts often lasted five minutes.

Conrad had to survive one, or die in the attempt.

He collapsed on a post while breathing spikes of cool air. Bulging eyes, an aching chest. He told Petros that he wanted to keep the inhibitors on, but Petros only shook his head, saying, “If I dull your senses, then next thing I’ll know is you died of starvation. Adapt.”

Although the order was simple, his mind still reached for the javelin’s mold. This suit had some augments, but nothing that would even the battle. If anything, they would only stall the inevitable.

Conrad continued jogging through a dry harbor. Factories exhaled smoke into an already ashen sky. The mourning doves were long gone. The buildings were sprung out of a pharaoh’s dream and they bludgeoned the landscape like tumors. Philadelphia kept growing for the sake of it. It had the looks of a city that thought about a tomorrow that did not exist.

He came across a murky pond and studied the man reflected in it. “Don’t give me that look,” he said. “I like this as much as you do. It’s your skin and my wits on the line.”

His life on lease was devoted to training. He spent the remaining time relearning the basics of being human. He quickly caught up with fear. He would sleep dreading the morrow and wake afraid of nightfall. He regarded the face without seeing what was there.“My name’s Conrad,” he’d repeat, trying to conjure a life to fit the name. The stranger did not seem to care.

He ran out of the harbor, ran some more then, until he stood outside a bus station. The crowd seemed to pass through him. He stared at the destinations as if expecting one would blink at him.

Someone tugged at his shoulder, a man who had ‘hustle’ written all over his face. “Mister Penrose.” He put his hand inside his coat as if holding something. “Come with us.”

Three other men approached him from different directions. Conrad grunted. He shoved the hand away, followed the stranger to a car parked by the entrance.

Inside, a man offered him a smoke and some whiskey, smiling with perfect teeth. He seemed artificially retrofitted to look like the archetype of neoclassical beauty.

“What is this?” said Conrad.

“A favor. I’m taking you back home.”

“Did Petros send you?”

“Someone sure did,” he said. “What do you make of the suit, tin man?”

Conrad tried to look outside, but the windows were dulled. He shrugged. “It’s functional.”

“Sure is. It was taken from a freezer in Baltimore and loaded with the best augments the market could offer. People pawn them all the time. It’s their loss and your win, you lucky bastard. How does it feel to wear meat again?”

Conrad paused. “Out of place, like I’m always forgetting something.”

The man laughed. “Hellfire, there must be a reason why we’re still using the damn things. You have any idea?”

“I just fight.”

“It’s familiar.” He took out a knife and made a deep cut in his palm. The crust formed almost instantaneously. The grin remained. “Pain inhibitors and quick coagulation. Should anything happen to this one, I have three other suits waiting in orbit. However, some people were not built to swap so often. They tend to snap and go rogue. What about you? What are you?”

“Just a man.”

“No, you’re an asset. Private property. We are free to pluck the data off your black box and feed it to our network as food for other javelins.” He smoked. “This fight is something special. Important people are putting their skin on the line for this. We should not disappoint them.”

Conrad pictured that perfect face bloodied and bruised. Three other suits waiting in orbit. He released the tension from his knuckles. “Guess we shouldn’t,” he said.

The man tapped the glass and the car stopped. “This is the material from which legends are born. Fate’s been a good mistress with you.”

He almost laughed. Luck had forsaken him, not fate. Petros had revealed during a drunken soliloquy that he was chosen at random. He might have struggled against fate, but the plight of a voiceless mind was like white noise pummeling the walls of an anechoic chamber.

Outside, the street was unremarkable, a portrait of neglect. Conrad was about to walk when the man snatched his arm and squeezed.

“You better find a different route if you want to stretch those legs. I don’t want to see you near any sort of transport again. Don’t think I won’t find out, because I will. You’ve been given a golden ticket, do a good job and maybe you’ll own yourself again.”

Conrad caught the door as it closed, heard himself say, “Do you know my name?”

“Should I?”

The car rolled and disappeared around a corner. Conrad walked away when it did not return. The streets echoed his silence while he prepared an obituary in his mind. He stared at the shadows, expecting to find someone looking back. His heart’s rhythm was wild, a reminder that he was no longer ironclad. It had always been quiet inside the machine. Existence was bound to the eternal instant, no past to ponder about nor future to imagine. Out here, he existed through the vestiges of a shade on a board.

He found a woman smoking outside his apartment. She looked at him and her eyes reflected the kind of knowledge you were expected to know beforehand.

“Do I know you?” said Conrad with the stranger’s voice.

She paced back and forth, tugging at the edges of her coat, cracked lips half-open to mutter something. He heard her say, “I’m sorry, who are you?”

“Who’s asking?”

Whatever mask she had been holding on to fell apart. Her eyes became watery and she spun to hide the fact. “I thought… When I heard that the body was missing from storage, I thought… I’m sorry, I should go.”

As she started away, Conrad raised his voice. “Do you want to come in?” The impulse surprised him, as if the suit knew better. As if aware that the winter nights floating in bourbon would kill him faster than the javelin.

A pause. “Okay,” she said, looking at him without actually seeing. He could almost see the ghosts lurking in the slipstream of her shadow. It did not anger him half as much as it made him jealous. His shadow was empty. He only had a name as the answer to questions taken from him.

Inside, there wasn’t much to look at. Old tiles, older dust. He did not bother to furnish the place. Outside, the faint lulling of cheap advertisements.

They sat at the table opposite to each other. “My name is Marie,” she said.

“Conrad,” he said. A machine would know how to follow that up. “Are you the former owner?”

“No, it was Joe’s, my husband,” she said. “He iced to become a javelin fighter. We, uh, we owed some money. They told him he would fight a few times to repay our debt. I haven’t heard from him in years. I… I believe he’s dead.”

“If it’s worth anything, it wasn’t my choice.”

“It’s okay,” she said while staring at the mist rising from her coffee. “What do they want you to do anyway?”

Die, he thought. “Fight,” he said.

“Oh, aren’t there regulations?”

“Nothing that hasn’t been changed already. Strictly speaking, my name is corporate property. I signed a contract. I still owe them seventy years of service for pulling me out of the mines.”

“You were in jail?”

“Ten years. I used to smuggle ice off a private sector in the asteroid belt.” That was what his dossier said. In truth, the life surfing the edge of space was a vision he often chased in dreams. He always fell short, turning instead to the solace of simulations and searching for that pattern recognition that never came.

“I could’ve spent the rest of my life digging tunnels in Ceres. I should have.” He was the only one who volunteered. Fight and reclaim your life, a simple promise. He thought the others were fools for not stepping forward. But there are no free tickets, no way to cut corners.

“Do you miss it? Your real body?” Marie said.

“I don’t remember it. It’s almost surreal, like trying to fit in the wrong puzzle. Over time though, the original suit seems more alien than the jav’s steel and you get used to the distance. You expect to recognize the flesh when they pull it out of the freezer, but I’m not holding on to it.” He shrugged. “I’m just a revenant, lady. What about you?”

“I teach geology. My father worked marble, but had to stop after his suit developed arthritis. Simple life, simple problems, I’m afraid.” Marie paused. “What happens if you lose?”

“You’ll get your husband’s suit sooner rather than never. What’s left of it anyway.”

Marie nodded. She took out something from her pocket and slid it toward him. A red rock. “It’s Martian. Joe bought it for me. Take it. You don’t have to keep it, throw it away once I’m gone if you want to, just take it now. Please.”

Conrad tasted rejection in his mouth before deciding against it. He put the rock inside his pocket, shaking his head. “You’re wasting a memory on me. This whole show is a glorified slaughter.”

“Then why fight at all?” she said.

“Because it’s the only thing I know is real.”

Marie looked him in the eyes and Conrad felt, however brief, that they had reached a silent understanding. She rose, slightly turning to say, “He was a fighter, my Joe. They never took that from him. They took his body, his mind, but not his spirit. He’ll take good care of you. Take good care of him.”

Conrad remained silent.

Her eyes betrayed a blank expression, revealing a snapshot of grief beneath the surface. Then she walked out the door.

The Shambles had the unique charm reserved for a dumping ground. It bulged in the middle, slightly tilted to the right. Chains hung from the ceiling like an inverted jungle. The tiles sank under the surface and rose with lumps of adobe that morphed into a ruined cityscape, each piece snapping together in complete synergy, like watching history press forward at high-speed toward entropy.

Conrad stepped forward, clenching an anti-tank rifle. The combat suit was an awkward fit, a made-to-measure exo-skeleton atop a Kevlar overlay. The idea that he might be better without it festered somewhere in his prefrontal cortex. He felt the pressure of the Martian rock against his being, and called forth the power bestowed upon the amulet to steady his breath.

The rumble of the crowd resonated beyond polarized curtains. Conrad tried picturing the kind of people lying on the other side. He imagined a crowd of Roman equites and revolutionary Parisians bellowing in prehistoric tongues for a display of absolute violence. As if to answer their demands, a siren’s scream filled the arena.

Across, a steel curtain rolled up, shrieking. A slow tap, then a thud bouncing off the walls. A large fiend emerged from the dark, its body a twisted communion of arachnid and human forged through steel. From its head emerged an x-shaped stem attached to arthropod eyes.

The siren screamed again. Ten minutes.

The javelin lunged forward, a red stain blinking across the arena. It was crawling on four out of its six limbs, the remaining two turned into scythes.

Conrad’s exo-skeleton shot a cocktail of drugs that granted him aim at the javelin and a program inside his head calculated when he should take the shot. He ditched the rifle instead.

The strike was precise, missing him by an inch or two. He ducked low, countering wild swings and then running for cover.

“What are you doing? Pick up that rifle!” boomed Petros’s voice inside his head.

The javelin jumped and swung from the chains. Conrad lunged to the side, weaving away as it dented the ground in an effort to reach him. Its landing sent pieces of the platform flying, splinters stabbing the Kevlar. He circled its frame and made it stumble on itself before the upper frame turned around.

He smiled. The showrunners made a mistake when they let him keep memories of his time inside the machine. His mind was used to the rhythm of the javelin and he used that edge to direct Joe’s suit away from danger. All the same, he was one mistake away from death.

Up close, the screeching stunned him. The sound was halfway between thunder and the wailing of a man. Someone was inside, another has-been like Conrad with a background in mistakes, thinking in numbers about a strange concept called freedom. No way to tell how this would work for that codified soul.

He shut the thought, tapped his instinct and dodged. He pivoted away as gushes of wind cut through his outer skin. The javelin had already scratched parts of the exo-skeleton away. His body felt heavier, as though he were running on sand.

Another slash had half his vision drowning in warm red. He missed the landing of his next step. He managed to block a swing with his forearms before the ground disappeared. He felt sharp pain across his chest. Something broken in his torso, a rib or two.

He rolled and limped toward some cover. The javelin stood on two limbs and picked him up from the waist, bug eyes droning around him. Conrad groaned and hit its face but stopped when the fiend started squeezing.

It wasn’t the first time he died, but chrome was numb to the pain. He never felt the steel twisting or the wires being cut, the pressure of the suit being compressed. He spat blood, felt himself drifting. The edge of space, he could almost see it if he closed his eyes.

A distant echo, then the pain stopped. The javelin dropped him and withdrew. It was a fuzz inside his head, no logic nor sense. Spit and blood. He managed a smirk, feeling the last push of adrenaline. Then feeling nothing at all.

The reports said Conrad Penrose died that evening from a ruptured lung, on a stretcher surrounded by doctors unacquainted with death. No next of kin was identified.

He discovered the afterlife mirrored the backwater clinic he’d first woken in. The Charon was a lanky man wearing the uniform of a Turkish healthcare center. He said he’d fixed Conrad’s ribs and the fractured skull. The dizziness would fade over time. Then Conrad was dumped in Istanbul’s alleys, in one pocket a Swiss credit chip processed in the name of an Ulrich. In his other pocket, a Martian rock.

Istanbul’s skyline lit up like a firmament full of dying stars, the markings of existence in its becoming. Conrad watched them through a motel’s window, a ticket in his hand and a drink in the other. He finished the drink and left.

A young man dressed for a funeral sat in the lobby. They stared at each other. “Petros?” It was a gut feeling, but the more he looked the more he trusted it. “Expensive suit, if it’s worth a life.”

“You’re an idiot.” The voice was melodic, as if designed for an opera single. “Like a needle in an ocean too. Man, that scar looks terrible.”

“What do you want?”

Petros’s perfect teeth gleamed when he snarled. “Do you have any idea what you did?”

“Should I?”

He fidgeted for a smoke that wasn’t there. “Your circus stunt cost a lot of money. Folk died for real.”

“I told you I wouldn’t play.”

“After everything I did for you.”

“You seem to be doing well.”

“Oh, they paid all right, money’s not a problem for them, but it will be for us when the well runs dry. I promised them a fight, kid, now I’m out of business. All my associates pretend I’m dead. I might as well be the fucking ghost of Christmas Past.”

“Devils should read the fine print too.”

“Listen. Conrad Penrose is gone. They own the name, the face and they own the life and they won’t give anything back to you. That chip is your last lifeline.” He paused. “But I can lift you back up.”

“Meaning?”

“You reached singularity but took a step back,” said Petros. “Now you’ve got a belly to feed and stones don’t turn into breath. You are a fighter, always have been. If you were to trust me, I would give you everything. What do you say?”

Conrad regarded Petros. He threw the credit chip at him. “I say you find another job. That one will dry up too.”

He walked out the door and took a cab to the spaceport. The shuttle crept up the sky, leaving a blazing trail in its wake that pierced the outer gloom, into the artifice of eternity. In the darkness, he deposited everything older than man, things he knew and things he did not, and he imagined what was to come to keep a drowsy mind awake throughout the journey over yonder.

César Esparza lives in Mexico and studies History at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He has been attending writing workshops for years now and hopes to put good use to his learning of English by delving into the myriads of futures science fiction can offer.