He stares at the reflection of his bandaged face in the piss-colored glow of polished metal above the dingy sink. He stares only a moment before stepping away from the mirror to the grimy porthole where Mars glowers like an angry red eye.

The planet doesn't look happy to see him. But does the planet ever look happy? Even after all these decades since colonization, all the chemicals injected into the atmosphere, all the engineered flora, and all the construction, the red has never gone away. It always seeps through like blood on a bandage.

Back at the mirror, he removes the wrappings from his face and finds a wider jaw, a cleft in his chin, dark green eyes, and thinner, darker hair. He touches his face. Its lines, its contours, naming each feature as his own, affixing it in his mind.

His face.

He can't afford any surprises from this point forward. He couldn't chance walking up to his former client, pulling the gun from his coat and catching his reflection in the mirror and suffering prosopagnosia, face blindness.

The gun.

He picks up his bag and checks for the gun he purchased on Akihabara Station.

It's still there. Still big and heavy and all dull metal. It feels awkward in his hand, as it should—it's an antique. They stopped using metal years ago. The design now is nothing similar to this. Weapons small and compact and ergonomic with nothing to load. Weapons that show up on scans.

Unlike this...yes, this...and it feels better. It feels like a fucking weapon. Full of weight and purpose. Like a thing you'd use to kill someone.

Only, he wishes he could have bought more shells. But the gun and the six rounds cost him a shitload of credits and the last of his personal stash of DNA. This was fine, because this last rewrite, this final burn, would be his last.

The twin helixes could only withstand a finite number of changes before it began to break down into its base components. By his own reckoning, he had only a matter of days before he died.

All because of a blonde from Alpha Centauri.

She hadn't even been his first choice.

The first had been an exotic dancer from the slums of San Angeles, but her DNA was too degraded from knock-off designer add-ons, viruses, and previous burns to make even a shoddy copy.

After that, he scoped out a transport driver hauling commuters back and forth to the ore mines on the dark side of the Moon. It had taken him all day to prick the back of her neck with his DNA Ripper only to discover her genetic code was copy-protected. Either she had a wealthy lover or the company had recently stepped up their security precautions against genetic theft.

He had given up for the day and caught the next shuttle back to Deimos and the Burroughs Slums rusting away in the Voltaire Crater, when he spotted her. She fit the general description his client had given him: pretty, blonde and thin. She was traveling alone. Her smooth skin had the flawlessly pale tone that came only from off-world living. And she looked young, maybe late teens, though anymore it was hard to tell.

She took a seat by herself on the far end of the shuttle. When she leaned back and her eyes glazed over with the HD-stream broadcast, he moved closer to her, waiting by the nearest exit.

She stayed on through the Swift Crater; one baby step up from the Burroughs slums, it was a working class neighborhood full of general laborers and swelling with non-native Martians. When she departed, he fell in behind her; waited for the crowd to swell around her and pfffittt...it was done. A simple scratch and he had stolen her DNA.

He had done it a thousand times.

Not once had it ever bothered him. He never considered what he was taking, who he was taking, or why. He usually avoided asking any of those questions.

Until the damn blonde.

Everything started going wrong, when he agreed to grow her. Usually, he just handed over the code and the client found someone to incubate the theft. But this guy couldn't be bothered with that.

"Oh, no, you do it," he says. "I'll triple you're fee."

"I don't do grows."

"I'll triple your fee—"

"I don't—"

"I'll throw in some restricted samples. I work...I can you get you things you could never acquire on your own."

"If that's true, why don't you grow your own blonde?"

"Let's just say I have particular tastes..."

He should have known better. He'd heard how the whole thing was horrorshow back when he worked as a kicker, employed by one of the big security agencies to prevent the theft of genetic code.

Back then, the field operatives always came in with stories. The tubing, they said, is thick and ropy. A little wet even, like intestines. The fluids bubbling in the dull, rusty vats stick to your skin like snot. Everything moves slightly, almost like it's breathing. And the smell, the stench burns your nose and triggers the gag reflex.

It was bad.

But no one prepared him for the long wait, watching the cells begin to coalesce, seeing the body form and move and swim in the nutrient soup. No one told him about the feeling he'd get in the pit of his stomach when the eyes opened and stared at him.

He wasn't prepared for afterward. The fluid belching out of the tank. The hatch opening and the body sloughing out, landing on the cold grating in a quivering mess, naked except for the thick gel covering her body. The dark, warm lamps hit the goo and it catches the light and shines and sparkles, throwing off a glow both comforting and strange.

Walking over to her, but she tries to stand, head cocked at an odd angle, eyes wide as if sheer diameter alone brought understanding. Her mouth opening and she is trying to speak, wanting to speak, he can see that much on her face, yes I know this thing speaking...but...concern. How do I speak? Trying to reach for her, but she's already falling and doesn't know how to catch herself.

He stood in the cellar of a building on the corner of Brackett and Kline. Darkness filled the room, except for a flickering light that burned too hotly just above his head. He didn't know if he was alone. The darkness played tricks with both his sight and his hearing. The pain in his joints, the dull ache in his bones was making it even harder to think, and his left hand was starting to shake. Only the reassuring weight of the gun in his pocket kept his thoughts from drifting totally—

"Why?" A deep guttural voice asked from the darkness.

The cellar was thick now with a scent, no a musk. It stung his eyes. Hesitantly, he wiped them and said, his voice cracking, "Does it matter?"

"Yes," the voice said, now somewhere to his far left.

"It's none of your business. I will kill him, shouldn't that be enough? Isn't that what you people want? The John Carters dead?"

He could feel something move suddenly in the blackness, the outline of a large, bulky shape. "We want our freedom. We want our own planet," the voice boomed.

He sighed and took a deep breath despite the stench. The act hurt his lungs and even with the cold metal gun brushing against his fingers, he felt a panic rising.

"Why should we do this for you? We don't know you. We don't know if we can trust you. It would be at great risk to get you close enough."

"I can pay you."

"In what? Money? Credits? Pilfered DNA?"

"Weapons," he offered, sinking his hand deeper in his pocket, grasping the handle of the firearm tightly in his fist. "I can get you Black Smoke, ICE-9, Grey Goo..."

"I am my own weapon," the Martian said, rushing out of the darkness. A huge massive man-shape, his green skin rippled with thick corded muscle as he grabbed his prey with his four arms. "I do not need Black Smoke," he continued, raising him to his hideous, tusked face.

"What do you want then?"

"Answers."

Then he told the Martian about the day the client came to pick up the blonde from Alpha Centauri.

On the way to the rendezvous, she wouldn't let go of his hand.

"Is this her?" John Carter asked.

"Yes," he said while she cocked her head from side to side, her eyes racing from him to John Carter as her fingers fluttered in his sweaty palm.

"She's exquisite," John Carter cooed. "Where, may I ask, did you find her?"

"Does it matter?"

"Yes, it does. A little." Carter's eyes gleamed with longing.

His hands had begun to sweat. He looked up at the bodyguard looming to the left and slightly behind his client. "On a transport. Traveling alone."

"Alone," he said and licked the corner of his mouth where his moustache curled against his thin lips. "From Alpha Centauri?"

"Yes."

"I can always tell those things. And her, it's the shape of her cheek bones, the cast of her eyes...Come here." He reached his hand out toward her. She stared at it and cocked her head as if this angle brought more understanding. "Come here," he said again.

She turned her head sharply, clutched his hand tighter and looked up at him, but he just looked away.

"Come here," Carter said again, the bass rising in his voice.

She didn't move.

"Come here!" John Carter snatched her hand and tugged her forward. As she fell into him, he started to move but the bodyguard shook his head.

The blonde from Alpha Centauri made a wounded noise in the back of her throat. Carter touched her hair and his nostrils flared. He stared at her like an ill-behaved child who finds himself unsupervised and is surveying for the next thing to break.

"Oh, yes, she'll be wonderful. Most wonderful. You do amazing work," John Carter said, he voice rising and cracking. "I'll definitely remember you in the future."

He unfocused his eyes. Trying not to see, but not wanting to look away. He wiped the sweat from his palms, but they still tingled with the ghost of her touch.

"Pay him—"

The bodyguard reached out a gloved hand, a credit chip between his thumb and first finger and a realization hit him then. Something so simple, but full of more magnitude than any other thought he had ever rolled around in his brain, any thought he had dissected and debated, wondered and weighed.

A credit chip. A small little chip of metal stamped and scanned. No different than the megatons of scrap cluttering the atmosphere from here to Ceti Alpha V. Only different because everyone had decided. Given it a value. And it was only in the continued agreement that the value was maintained.

Only by a decision.

A choice.

"No," he said.

"No?"

He nodded. "No."

John Carter laughed. "It's been decided."

"No. I decided now. Just now. And its no."

John Carter didn't signal the bodyguard. He didn't speak to the bodyguard. The bodyguard just acted.

The bodyguard's first punch splattered his nose. The second popped his chin back, clattering his teeth together as his attacker stomped on his instep. The third...

"I watched them leave," he told the big Martian. "Afterward, I ran. But I don't want to run anymore."

Getting close to John Carter was disappointingly easy.

An exchange of credits. A uniform. A series of scans. A rear entrance and a walk through cramped, back corridors filled with pipes and tubes and wires.

No one spoke to him. No one questioned him. He looked like he belonged. Belonged here out front in the corporate offices, just another manual laborer with a meager cut of a government contract.

The wait lasted only an hour.

When John Carter left the tube, bodyguard in tow, he crossed the atrium and pulled the gun from inside his uniform.

The boom of the first shot shattered the calm and the recoil snapped his hand back to the right. The bullet missed Carter, but struck the bodyguard in the chest, punching through the armor designed to disperse energy and sound weapons.

Everyone froze. Stunned by the messy display of loud, bloody violence. All thunder and splatter and gore.

Confusion filled John Carter's eyes.

Prosopagnosia, he thought. Face blindness.

He steadied his hand and fired again. The bullet struck John Carter in the hip, spinning him to the right. The third shot punched through the center of his left palm.

Carter fell to his knees. Quickly, he tried to stand, but managed only a stuttering ululation before the fourth shot banged into his back, exploding out the front in thick, bright, Martian red.

The last two shots he saved for the head.

Two quick finger movements and Carter's skull asteroid-belted into a jagged mess of blood, bone, and brains.

No one stopped him when he walked out.

Out of the building, out of the city and out into the red, desert sands. Spasms rocked his body. His flesh bubbled and rolled. His bones grated against each other as some thickened and others thinned, starting to shatter and splinter.

He walked until his feet would carry him no more.

Finally, he collapsed in the shadow of a refinery that churned away, belching blue smoke into the sky, struggling to shape the dead, red planet. His knees popped as he fell. Looking down, he caught his reflection and the swirl of stars beyond and above in a pool of blue coolant. The face staring back at him brought him no comfort.

I don't recognize my face, he thought as he tumbled onto his back, still gripping the cold metal gun. He looked up at the twin moons staring down at him with full, silvery eyes, and said, aloud, "But I know who I am...for the first time.""

-END-

Copyright © 2009 by Chad Eagleton