Chapter 11: Chapter 2 – Part 5

The sound of the elevator door opening woke Wren from a light sleep, and she groaned.  Her neck ached from the odd shape she’d bent herself into in the chair she’d dragged over to watch the repairs from, and she gave a low groan as she stretched.  The groan turned into a yawn, and there were hands on her shoulders before she could turn her head.

 

“Hey cutie,” Bonnie whispered softly, lips brushing the soft edges of her ear.  The smell on her breath was strong.  “Come here often?”

 

“Are you drunk?”

 

Bonnie chuckled, and breathily nuzzled against her.  “I’m sorry, but you’ll need to remove two articles of clothing to receive the answer to your query.”

 

Wren slipped out of the chair, but Bonnie met her halfway around to the back and draped herself over the blue-haired girl in an instant.

 

“Let’s fuck,” Bonnie whispered.  She licked her lips as she writhed.  “I want to fuck.”

 

“I don’t…”  Wren shook her head.  “I don’t really want to.  I’d be taking advantage of you.”

 

“Why not?  Everybody else does.”

 

Wren’s lips compressed to a thin, flat line.

 

“Navy did.  Chandless did.  These fuckers here send me on suicide missions, and when they need a dupe to stand in front of a crowd and be the face of their organization, who is better qualified than me?”

 

“You went out there by yourself,” the blue-haired girl said.  “Come on.  Let’s get you in bed and—”

 

“No, no, no.”  Bonnie broke free from Wren and lurched toward the bed.  “Where do you keep those pills?  Let’s get some pills in you and get down.  I need to get fucked.”

 

“You put enough of those pills in me, and yeah.  I’ll fuck you ‘til you can’t walk straight, but we’re not doing that tonight.”

 

“Aw come on,” Bonnie groaned.  With a flourish of her arms, she said, “We’re all gonna die tomorrow.  We have to live for today!”

 

“I’m not planning on dying.  Are you?”

 

Bonnie fell back onto the bed and sighed.   “Death finds me.”

 

“You don’t have to be melodramatic about it.”

 

Bonnie glared at her.  “Are you seriously saying no right now?”

 

Wren nodded, and Bonnie rolled her eyes.  She grabbed a pillow and carried it over to the couch in the corner of the room, then threw herself down on her side with her front facing the backside of the plush furniture.  Wren watched her go, took a deep steadying breath to push down the last of the urges to do exactly as Bonnie had wished, and went back to the chair to continue watching the repairs.  Before long, Bonnie’s snoring drifted through the air, and Wren tried to get comfortable.

 

***

 

The lump on the couch groaned, and Wren smiled.  She finished pouring the coffee, took a deep whiff of it, and carried the steaming mug over to the table beside.

 

“Seal it,” Bonnie slurred.  “Nooo.  No.  No noise.”

 

Wren sat down on the table, with a mug of her own, and sipped.  The aroma was so good, after so many years of artificial substitutes, that she didn’t care that it was black.  

 

“Stop having having sex with your coffee already.”

 

Wren blinked, unaware until that moment that she’d been making any noises at all.  Bonnie slowly pushed herself up to a sitting position and looked down in confusion at the blanket wrapped around her.

 

“I put that there,” Wren said.

 

“Oh.  So you care enough to keep me warm, but not enough to keep me warm at night?”

 

Wren leaned forward.  “When I fuck someone, I want them to remember it.”

 

Bonnie smirked as she lifted the mug to her lips, but it was gone soon after.

 

“So what was all that about last night?”

 

The redhead lowered her eyes.  “I didn’t like lying to those people.  I thought I was doing something good, going out there.  Helping them feel like they aren’t forgotten, you know?  Like someone, somewhere, is standing up for them, but… it’s not me.”

 

“Isn’t that why you were on Luna 2 in the first place?  To kill a bad guy?”

 

“I never got that far.”

 

“Only this time though, right?  You’ve done that before.”

 

Bonnie nodded solemnly.  “Yeah.  A few other times.  Execs, mostly, and two shooters.”

 

“Then why would you think you’re not qualified to stand in front of.. I don’t know... the downtrodden and be admired for doing exactly that?  Standing up for them?”

 

“Because I didn’t do what you did.”  Bonnie’s features hardened.  “I don’t think I did any good at all, and what you did?  That was an accident.”

 

Wren took another sip of her coffee, and shook her head.  “When Jackson puts a picture in front of you, and he says ‘this one next’, what goes through your head?”

 

Bonnie licked her lips.  Muscles and tendons in her arms rippled and tensed.  “I think about my unit.  I think about each of them… and I think about all of us as a unit.  As a family.  And then I think… this guy was a part of it, or… or-or this girl knew.  She knew something.  And then... “  She put her cup down and leaned back, pushing her hair back behind her ears as she did.  Her dark shirt and non-descript pants hung loosely from her frame, designed for range of motion.

 

“And then you go.”

 

“Yeah.”  Her eyes wandered, roaming left and right without coming up high enough to meet Wren’s gaze.

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“You know, I’ve always thought of corporations like people factories.  These... big machines that... produce little automatons, and those automatons turn around and make the machine bigger so it can make more automatons.  The only thing the machine cares about is getting bigger.”

 

Bonnie’s face grew hard for a moment.  “I don’t know where you’re going with that.”

 

“If you attack the automatons, the machine will just make more.  That’s a never-ending cycle so you have to come at it from another angle.”

 

“So… what?”

 

“You have to attack the machine.”

 

“The machine that makes people,” Bonnie said flatly.

 

“The corporate machine.”

 

The redhead pinched the bridge of her nose as she reached for the mug on the table.  “I’m not awake enough for this.”

 

“I did a lot of thinking last night,” Wren said.  “A lot of thinking.”

 

“Did you get any sleep?”

 

“Yes.”  She shook her head briefly.  “I mean, a little.  Some.  … Enough.  The point is, I hadn’t ever really thought about what I was doing.  It… It hit me when you knew I liked money, so I started trying to work that backwards.

 

“I grew up on a station,” Wren continued.  “Smaller than this.  Tiny.  My parents worked in the plant.  They made components for artgrav, and… and whole grav systems, right?  Anyway, when I was little, I used to take things apart.  Everything I could get my hands on.  There’s only so many things in one apartment, though.  I could only take apart the air scrubber so many times.  So one day, I think I was about nine, I found my way into a maintenance shaft.  Started taking apart this… this box.  I had no idea what it did.  Only this box was designed to stop people from messing with it, so when I cracked it open I got a shock.  Zzzp.  And down the shaft I went.”

 

Bonnie licked her lips and put down the mug.

 

“Broke my back on impact.  Severed the spinal cord.  I was still paralyzed when I woke up in the ward a week later.  They’d started the regen therapy while I was in the coma, so I was only off my feet for a couple months, but… it cost them.  You know?  It cost a lot.”  Wren’s eyes lost focus, seeing in her mind as she recalled.  “I was… they didn’t tell me.  They didn’t… But I knew.  We were never very well off, but suddenly we were poor.  And I knew… even at nine I knew it was because of me.”

 

Wren sat up and blinked, refocusing. “I’d never really thought about how much that drove me.  Like, I wasn’t obsessed with money because I’m just not an obsessive person, but I let it cloud some other things.  I worked with some shady people and looked the other way. I’m not proud of that.  When you’re a kid, you don’t really… you don’t think that you won’t get better.  Of course you’ll get medicine, because the universe is just.”

 

Bonnie snorted and shook her head.

 

“Yeah.  You think that right up until you don’t.”

 

“Well, I’m glad you got in your soul searching.”  The redhead stared down into her coffee.  “Not sure how that helps.”

 

“Oh!”  Wren laughed abruptly, eyes pinched shut while she shook her head.  “Totally forgot the point I was trying to make.  I got off on a tangent.  I can take machines apart.  That’s what I was getting at.”

 

“The next time the automat turns all my whites pink, I’ll be sure to give you a call.”

 

“No, I was… I was tying back into the metaphor.”

 

“What metaphor?”

 

“About the—”

 

“Wren,” Bonnie said, grabbing the blue-haired woman by the wrist.  “I had a lot to drink last night.  My head is pounding.  What the fuck are you trying to say?”

 

“I want to help.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“Actually, that’s not really it.  I want to do more than just help.  I want to break the machine.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“See, no.  That’s not it either.”

 

“Okay.”

 

Wren’s brow furrowed in thought.  “I want to redefine the game.  Completely.  Even the playing field.”

 

“Okay.”

 

Wren’s head swivelled.  “Are you hearing what I’m saying?”

 

Bonnie’s bleary-eyed glare was answer enough.

 

“Right.  Headache.  Okay.”  She started to get up, but Bonnie’s grip on her wrist tightened like a vice.

 

“Did you mean that?  You want to help?”

 

Wren nodded.

 

“Okay.”  Bonnie slugged back the rest of her mug, slumped onto her side, and pulled a pillow over her head.  “I might need you to tell me all of that stuff again later.”

 

“Okay,” Wren said.  She got up, found the dimmer, and lowered the lights across the apartment.  Then she curled back up in her chair, perched where she could watch the repairs.  At first glance, it seemed like very little had been fixed, though she knew that the repairs weren’t going to happen quickly.

 

Wren didn’t make it to the second glance before sleep caught up with her.

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