Free Luminarium by Alex Shakar Page B

to get it over with. Fred had stood with him before the bathroom mirror, marveling over the transformation. The proportions seemed off, less cranium up there than either of them had expected. Fred was spooked by the alienness of it, one more step in an ongoing metamorphosis of which the physiological changes were only a part. Yet the physical exposure seemed to bring George back to Fred a little, too. Since the trouble with the company had begun, Fred had felt George gradually walling him out of his life; but in that moment, his brother surprised him, taking his arm and guiding his hand up to feel the dome. Fred was surprised how silken and warm a bald head turned out to be. “Gives me a whole new insight into skinheads,” George remarked, the two of them still facing the mirror. “They try to look so hard and tough with those bald heads.” He grinned. “But they must be feeling so bare-ass naked.”
    Still staring down at Little Sam’s corpse, Sam rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “Looks decent so far, huh?”
    Decent , said Inner George, with dark emphasis.
    “Decent,” Fred repeated, unable to help himself.
    “Real. I mean real.” Sam’s mouse hand darted and clicked the window shut. An angry gesture, though its main effect was to reveal his incongruously placid desktop wallpaper: palm trees on a beach, with ocean and sky beyond.
    “Sounds like … work,” Fred said, a half-hearted attempt to repair the damage. But he’d worded it too ambiguously, and Sam decided to hear another slight.
    “Work, yes. That’s what we tend to do here.” Sam brought his nonmouse hand down protectively over his stomach. He had irritable bowel syndrome, and made no effort to hide the fact from those whose presence exacerbated it.
    “Right. I guess I wouldn’t know too much about that. I just loaf around in the hospital these days. Oh,” Fred held up a finger, “almost forgot. George says hi, by the way.”
    Sam’s reflected, melted-together eyes in the lamp hood had looked up to meet Fred’s as he’d raised his finger, and Fred now had to watch them liquefy, and slink back off to gaze at the palm trees. He couldn’t quite bring himself to apologize.
    “I hear I got canned,” he said instead.
    Sam brought up another window on his monitor, this one containing a tactical overhead view of the Empire State Building surrounded by a flat, gray street map. He moved the terrain north, east, south, west, causing the building to churn in a slow circle.
    “Word came this morning, Fred. You didn’t give them much choice.” It figured, Fred thought, Sam would take their side in this. “What choice did I have? It’s been one emergency after another.”
    “Right. Dad told me about your crime spree.”
    Now it was Fred’s turn to smart.
    “And your magic shows. You still smell like flash powder, by the way.” Vartan had won out, dropping Fred off here directly, Fred changing out of the tux in the back of the van. He now regretted not stopping in the hall bathroom to wash up.
    Sam opened another Urth window—a side view of the skyscraper. The level of realism didn’t yet approach that of the Iraq sims, but the building was recognizable. The structure was right, the windows all correctly placed.
    “So now it’s off to the mother ship, eh?” Fred said, after a moment.
    Sam took his time to scan the statement for explosive compounds.
    “Off to the mother ship,” he allowed. “It’s going to be a busy three weeks. We’ve got a deadline to meet and can’t even stop working while we pack.”
    “So they won’t even let you stay here, huh?”
    “What makes you think we’d want to stay here?” He swung his head around at his dim little alcove, the still dimmer back area with all the other workstations, and by implication, the city beyond.
    It shouldn’t have, but the conviction in Sam’s voice surprised and stung Fred. He thought of that single day six months back when Sam had come to the hospital. How