The Technician

The Technician

He hates Talkers. 

But he has to put up with them once a week, every week. It’s a necessary evil in the job description, and his job isn’t easy. 

“So, Mr. Caige, what brings you in today?”

 The man in the tattered necktie smells of cheap aftershave and egg salad. Jareth Caige hates both of those things, another reason these visits are so galling. It was all so much simpler, back before the Flood. Nowadays, nothing is simple, not for anyone who still lives in Typhoon. 

“It’s been a long week,” Jareth says, an unlit handrolled cigarette clamped between his teeth. “Care if I smoke?”

“In point of fact, I do. It says here that before you became a Technician, you were a free agent. Can you tell me what that means?” The Talker waits for a response that never comes, at least, verbally. Jareth shrugs, leaning back in his chair, and triggering a hidden lighter held in his sleeve. 

“Why don’t you tell me about your long week?” These sessions with the Talker were growing steadily more tedious with every visit, but as Jareth takes a particularly deep drag, he decides to indulge the pathetic little canker.

“Sure, I’ll humor you,” Jareth answers, with another pull on his smoke. “As you know, I spend my time and energy being a good Citizen and earning my keep going around and fixing Glitches, lots of those these days.” 

“You don’t say,” the Talker replies, while looking down at Jareth’s file. 

“Of course, I’m the best there is at fixing Glitches. I can’t see my own, mind you, but that blind spot somehow makes me better at fixing things for other people.”  

“I know that already, Mr. Caige. It says right here in your file you’re the type to trump yourself up.” 

Jareth grins. ‘I’ll get to the point then.”

*

On Monday, Jareth had responded to two calls. Orders were orders, and orders were in: a man on Westona Avenue needed his faulty cybernetic eyes sorted out. Jareth obliged by ripping them out before putting the man down to stop him howling like a wounded animal. Then an intern at the home office’s handscanner (embedded in the hand) imploded. As if that didn’t cause the intern enough suffering, Jareth was forced to remove the other hand and finish the intern off with it. 

Defective technology couldn’t stand in the way of human life, and that was the official Party line. This was not to say that Jareth was a hardcore Party member by any stretch of the imagination – all told, he was pretty indifferent to political fervor – but he wanted to stay at the top of his game, and if he didn’t keep his Quota numbers up, someone on a higher tier was bound to be out for his blood. 

On Tuesday, six more orders came in. He couldn’t remember any names or faces. He rarely did, if ever. On Wednesday, three more, and then it was at this point, during a break in the action to smoke his way through five handrolled, unfiltered cigarettes cut with cannabis that he realized perhaps this wasn’t worth it anymore. The scotch calmed his nerves and the smokes eased his mind, but only for a little while. 

Thursday was the real gut-punch. On Thursday, only one order came in. 

Hanna Caige

So far as he knew, Hanna was one of the blessed few to have no Glitches. There were none attached her name on the order, so Jareth racked his brains for other reasons she might have drawn the ire of the Party. 

Nothing occurred to him. 

He checked his liquor cabinet: the scotch was down to its last bottle. He shouldn’t have been surprised. He would need some cognac or brandy soon, whenever his next paystub was deposited into his digital account. He would like to think he had built up enough credit with the Party to not have any wants, for whenever he lacked his sidelines, but evidently that wasn’t the case. 

Orders were orders, and they were for being carried out. 

So he went to her apartment on the east end of town. Hanna hadn’t spoken to him in four years, not that this was an issue for him, though it might as well have been. He was older, so he should have been looking after her. But his little sister had an incorrigible independent streak, and being too busy with work, Jareth thought it best to leave her to her own devices.

The lights were off inside when he palmed the lock-sensor and slid in his access card. Duly surprised his sister hadn’t changed the entry parameters since his last visit, Jareth went in. Hanna was asleep on the futon in the day room, her curly red hair tousled around the pillow. Her vivid green eyes snapped open when she heard the door close behind him. 

“Hi, sis,” was all Jareth was able to say, before an uncannily strong pair of arms seized him from behind and threw him through the shielded window glass. Hanna’s apartment was seven floors up. Jareth was about to make for one fine mess on the plaza below. Had his sister taken a brawny lover? He couldn’t be sure, not when they had been mutually incommunicado for so long. On the whole, Jareth considered during his plummet, that being defenestrated was not too far from the norm. 

“Well, shit.”

 Not one to simply roll over and die, Jareth had a solution in mind before he could further panic. Pressing a hidden button on his belt clasp, tiny rockets in his boots flared to life. As he braced himself against the wind resistance, he straightened up. Pressing the button a second time he pointed himself back towards the shattered window he had been ejected from. Once he was close enough to the ledge, he removed a grappling hook from his coat and flung it, watching it catch on the windowsill. 

Jareth heaved himself back in, relieved to find his sister was fully dressed. He had no earthly idea who her friend was, but he figured it was the friend who had tossed him through the window.

“Oh good, you’re alive,” Hanna said, keeping her voice light, as if her brother had not just been the victim of attempted splattering. “We need to tell you about Project Reboot.”

“And what the bloody hell is Project Reboot?” Jareth parried, not even miffed he had almost gone splat on the pavement outside. 

“No, Han, he doesn’t deserve to know,” his sister’s companion spoke for the first time, and moving into the light that was now streaming in through the gaping hole in the wall, Jareth got his first good look at her. 

She had jet black hair that went down past her shoulders all the way to her lower back and peculiarly hollow hazel eyes. More importantly, she was ten feet tall. This impossibility had barely registered before Jareth realized her features were too monotonous and her movements too mechanical to be human. She had to be one of the last remaining androids in existence. He knew, back from basic training, there was a difference to distinguish between cyborgs and androids. That distinction was lost on him right that moment. 

“He’s a Technician, he works for the enemy.”

Hanna let out an exasperated sigh and said, “Which means he can help us out even more, Ajax.”

Ajax, evidently her companion, said nothing further. 

Hanna turned her head to stare at the crevice above the doorframe. 

“Let Big Brother listen in, cause he’s not getting jack shit from me,” she said, loud and plain as day. Jareth was even more confused now. His sister strode over to him and wrapped him in a tight hug. She whispered four urgent sentences in his ear, and then kissed him on the cheek. 

“I think that’s your cue to leave, unless you’d like Ajax to do the honors again?”

Jareth took the hint and left. 

*

As he finishes his story, Jareth stubs out the lit cigarette. The Talker crinkles his nose with ill-graced disgust. 

“So, what’s your diagnosis, Doc?” Jareth says, reaching into the pocket of his coat. He never takes it off, not even to hang it on a peg when he first entered the Talker’s office. Too paranoid by half, rationalizes the Talker.

“My diagnosis, you ask? Well, for consorting with insurgents, there’s only one logical conclusion.” The Talker makes to press a hidden button under his desk, but Jareth was too quick for him, swinging an electrified stun baton into his face. 

“How shocking,” Jareth quips.

He gets to his feet, straightens his coat, and goes to the door. Lighting another cigarette before he opens it, he looks over his shoulder and says, “I wouldn’t want to be you in the morning.”

Indeed, when the Talker regains consciousness sometime later, he finds himself seated in the same chair that Jareth had previously occupied. The only difference being that the Talker is strapped in at wrists and ankles. A man in a long black coat, with scars all over his hands and neck, sits facing the opposite wall behind the Talker’s former seat, his back turned to the Talker at present. The Talker gulps. He knows the man to be Jareth’s superior, Goren Vore.  

“Let me ask you,” Goren begins in a stentorian voice, still with his back turned, “How did Caige escape? More importantly, why were you unable to incapacitate him?”

“With apologies, sir, he was too quick-”

The man in the black coat swings around, his face an impassive mask but for the cybernetic orb that serves him for a left eye. The cybernetic eye is an ominous, glowing red. 

“Yes, quickness is not one of your attributes, I’m afraid.”

A beam streaks out of the eye and strikes the Talker in the forehead. A second beam strikes the Talker in the heart. He crumples forward, clunking onto the desk. The man with the cybernetic eye speaks one last time as he stands up.

“Failure, however, seems to be.”