Free Severance by Chris Bucholz

vulnerable to people like Bruce. Using his own terminal, Bruce
made a copy of the contents of Redelso’s before returning it to its hiding
place.
    That done, and satisfied he’d seen everything interesting in
the apartment — at least everything not in a room occupied by a sleeping woman —
he examined the application he’d set running earlier. It was an image–recognition
and logging program that scanned the apartment as he searched it, identifying
and cataloguing all the objects within. Then, using a database created from
publicly listed recycling values and estimated uniqueness, it calculated an
estimated value/weight ratio for each object and presented a ranked list to
him. An efficient way of deciding what to steal, though it had a hard time
determining the value of items it had no record of. Which wasn’t that big of a
problem; those were typically the items rare enough to be worth stealing. Bruce
scrolled through the list, then retraced his steps, picking out the fifteen
pounds he felt confident would make it back across his sideshow of an escape
route.
    Ill deeds done, Bruce carefully stepped outside the window
and closed it behind him to do the second–stupidest thing he’d done that day:
return across the street. With an exhalation of relief far more audible than was
appropriate to the current level of subterfuge, he alit onto the neighboring
roof for a minute or so of shaking before he detached and reeled in his
apparatus, and retreated into the shadows.
    §
    Stein stayed up late that night, hoping that Bruce might
spring up with some fantastic news about what M. Melson was all about, solving
the mystery without her having to get off the couch. But her terminal stayed
resolutely silent. She kept an eye on the news feeds in case the headline “Fat
Man Arrested for Horrible Activities” cropped up, but that also didn’t happen.
    Crawling into bed, but not yet tired, she began hurling
general searches at the network, looking for clues about what she’d seen in the
bright blue light. “Bright Light + messages” mostly returned tips about
advertising, mixed in with a handful of stories about near–death experiences.
Stein was pretty sure that wasn’t what happened to her, as to date, no
theologians had identified any greater powers claiming the handle ‘Vlad.’
    A search for ‘eyeball messages’ uncovered a lot about
corneal tattoos, which had gone in and out of fashion at various points in
Argosian history, usually by people whose idea of a message worthy of being
permanently branded on their eyeballs was “Fuck the Police.” That was decidedly
not what Stein had, but she amused herself for a few minutes with images of people
who had gone down this road. This search led to the history of tattoos, from
the painful early methods with burning charcoal, through the ink and needle glory
years, and up to the genetic tattoos of skin cells manipulated to form what
were essentially artificial birthmarks. That article came with some pretty
upsetting pictures of lab mice and other test animals, and she turned off her terminal
before she saw too much.
    Had she imagined it? It all seemed a lot blurrier now. She
closed her eyes and rubbed her knuckles into the sockets, sending flashes of
lights up her optic nerve. There. That was kind of a shape. A shoe–shaped shape.
Was that then a secret message about shoes? That seemed just as plausible as a
message about Vlad, which was to say, not plausible at all. She checked the
time, decided that it was past even Bruce’s bedtime, and reached the lights.
    As she was drifting off, another image appeared, this one
deliberately, as she imagined a mouse with “Fuck the Police” emblazoned on its
back. She laughed herself to sleep.

     
Previously

    “There’s no way you’re getting 850 babies a year out of your
bakery.”
    Harold exhaled and looked at the curved ceiling of Kinison’s
office. He couldn’t stand Kinison when he was lecturing. “I know that,