Valerie

         Her skin was cold under my hands; I remember tracing her hard and generous lines with my fingertips.  Her sensors and relays clicked under her metal skin, telling her what was pleasure, telling her how lightly I touched her; how much I turned her on.
         I pack the cigarette against my palm as a gentle breeze sweeps the long coat around me; I work the ornate little lighter and take the first drag.  The smoke is warm on my lips; the death-stick is a spicy and exotic blend of old-school Terran tobacco and some kind of green-man shit grown god-knows-where.  I exhale the smoke and gaze out over the falling dusk from my vantage point on the rooftop of my hotel.  Tiamat is the kind of planet where you can find anything, that is, except something that someone like me might actually look for.  In the street below thousands of beings walk and drive, all with somewhere important to go, dressed in whatever the celebrities dress in.  They’re locked in their own frantic little minds, craving the next best thing, the next product from the newest store, the latest and greatest lifestyle.  High above them, lost in my own thoughts, I’m so far out of their little boxed worlds I may as well just leave the planet. 
         The cigarette turns in my fingertips and I wet my lips.  My mind swirls around my first night with Valerie, about the way she made me feel, about the glimpse of a world beyond what I thought I knew.  I remember the way the dim lights of the dive gleamed on her silver skin, as she descended into my miserable corner and swept the darkness away.  Valerie…
         I was tracing the lip of my smeared glass, watching her move as she waited the tables.  She was a bright spot in the miasma of smoke and grime.  It wasn’t her looks that drew me; I had seen automated humanoids before, though before I knew better I might’ve said ‘robot,’ and she was similar to the ‘female’ models that tended to be common in places where the ’tender was too cheap to hire a person.  Yet Valerie walked with an attitude I had never seen in even a biological woman.  She was vibrant and expressive, alive even.  And ten minutes after meeting her I’m in the alley on a world I can’t remember the name of and the oppressive violet sky made her metal body shine.  I wanted her.
         In my mind’s eye my hands belong to that steamy night on the ass-end of nowhere as I trace her perfect and cool breasts and the little bumps the metalworker had supplied as representation of her nipples.  Her hands kneaded my back and pulled my body into hers.  And then we were against the wall and grinding and her voice was modulated to be breathless, if not a little canned, and she moaned softly in my ear.  Under her skin the false synapses fire; she hums and clicks as she processes everything I’m doing to her, everything she’s doing to me.  And why not?  If that is what Valerie is, then that is what she does.  The person behind her photo-sensors is worth so much to me that everything else that comes with her spirit is simply more for me to explore.
         I exhale the last of the smoke and flick away the butt of the cigarette, and looking out at the stale plutocracy of Tiamat I ask myself the question I’ve been avoiding.  I ask myself, where do you draw the line for someone you love?  My thoughts touch the weighty item tucked away in my coat, a thing that was handed to me wrapped in a greasy towel.  It was provided along with a picture, a name, an address.  The thing also came with a promise that when the person listed at the address and who appeared on the picture was dead I would receive a substantial sum of money in a hidden account.
         Naturally, the money wasn’t for me.  I do fine with the things I have, and I’ve never asked for more.  But Valerie…
         Tiamat’s solar is setting behind me and the city begins to take on a blue cast.  I’m mulling over a second cigarette and I hear footsteps behind me.  It’s not Valerie, the steps are too measured, too precise.  I lift a second cigarette and hold the pack up to be seen from over my shoulder.
         “You know I don’t smoke,” the clipped voice answers the gesture, so I shrug and light my second.
         “Do you have any idea how hard it was to find you,” the voice continues.  It is the voice, of course, of my parole officer.  Without looking I can already picture him smartly standing with hands clasped behind his back, crisp crimson uniform.  His species is bald with mottled green skin and black ovoid eyes that tend to bulge. 
         Turning to glance at him, I’m disappointed only on one imagined detail.  I’d pictured the posture all wrong.  His funny little police-issue sidearm is squarely on my back.
         “Couldn’t make it too easy,” I say, and I exhale the spicy smoke in Clavo’s face.
         Clavo’s eyes well; his sinuses are easily offended by things like smoke.  Pussy races, these green-men.  Goody worlds and spineless fucks like Clavo here make the galaxy a shitty place.  Nine times out of ten, it was the humans that found the alien, not the other way around.  Part of me can’t help but wonder why they’d bothered climbing out to meet us.
         “What the hell are you doing,” Officer Clavo continues.  “Where are you going?  You realize I chased you all the way from New Guderian?  All the way to Tiamat!  Are you alone?”
         “Val’s with me,” I say.
         “Jesus,” Clavo hisses, running a webbed hand over his head.  “V-241 is stolen property, Jack, we’ve been over this a thousand times.”
         “Her name is Valerie,” I say, “and she wanted to come with me.  She quit the shit job and left with me.”
         “Jack,” Clavo says, and the frustration of a tired argument is creeping into his tone. “Jack, she’s not a real person.”
         “More real than anyone I’ve ever met,” I counter.  “She’s got you beat, anyways.”
         Clavo glares at this and we regard each other for some time.  Finally, he opens the flap on his holster and slides the reedy pistol in.
         “You’re crazy to think you can stay here,” he says.  “Especially with her.”
         And now I have to laugh at him.  I sweep the half-burnt cigarette at the city around us, now alight with more advertisements than sand on a beach.
         “Not my kind of place,” I say, and I mean it.  “I’ll be gone in nineteen hours.”
         “Goddamn it,” Clavo rasps, “you’re not going anywhere!  You’re coming back to New Guderian with me.  We know you made a deal, we know everything!”
         I study him hard.  Two things are running around in my skull right now, the fact that he might know what I’m up to and the buzz-word: we.
         He’s wearing a wire.  They’re watching, and they’re waiting for me to spill some vital clue.  That’s good, in a way, because that means Clavo isn’t going to take me in just yet.  He wants to see what I’m going to try.
         So I say, “you don’t know shit, Clavo.”  Then I flick my cigarette butt against his chest and turn toward the rooftop door.
         “Damn it, I’m trying to help,” Clavo says.
         “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say, and then I’m through the door and walking the zig-zag of stairs inside the building, and in my mind’s eye I see Officer Clavo in his smart red uniform sputtering alone on the rooftop.

                                                                                * * *

         When the door opens to our room I am greeted warmly with a cold metal kiss.  Valerie’s arms are around my neck and her shapely body is pressed against me.
         “I missed you,” she says against my neck.
         “It was only twenty minutes,” I say.  Then, “but I missed you too.”
         She lets go.
         “I was about to take a shower,” she says.  “Care to join?”
         “I’ll sit this one out,” I say.
         “Your loss,” she coos, and then she’s walking away with a whole lot of very un-robotic hip movement that shows off her round metallic ass and makes me re-evaluate for a moment the decision to stay behind.  I sit down on the big hotel bed and pull my boots off.  In the bathroom, the shower starts and I catch a glimpse of Valerie in the bathroom looking at herself in the mirror.  She twists this way and that way, craning her neck around to look at her hips and ass.  She’s framing her face and running her fingers through imaginary hair.  She touches her breasts, her eyes, she feels her lips.
         I know what she’s doing.  I collapse on the bed, and with arms behind my head I stare at the ceiling.
         What would you do for someone you love?
         I made the deal I made because Val wants desperately to look and feel like a biological woman.  In her eyes Valerie isn’t an automaton with a body hammered out by a horny toy-maker.  She’s a woman.  She has warm skin and her chest rises and falls with her breaths.  In Val’s mind her tits jiggle, her hair is unruly and her eyebrows need plucking. 
         I have to chuckle, but quietly, and I think, ‘women.’  If there were one woman in the entire universe she’d still probably want to look like someone else.  Thing is, Val’s dream was just a dream until I found a mechanic on the paradise world of Edin that could perform the procedure… for a hell of a price.
         With Valerie behind the shower curtain and out of sight I slip the towel-wrapped package out of my coat and set it in the nightstand.  I never told her how I expect to come up with the cost of the procedure, and I don’t want her to know. 
         Valerie comes back toweling off before long and is soon nestled against my side.  I can feel her electronic gaze boring into my skull as her segmented fingers trace my chest.  I catch her fingers in mine and they interlace - brushed silver on my own tanned skin.  I’ve tried to tell her she’s beautiful like she is, but women don’t hear that, not even the metal ones.  I like that she stands out; I like that I’m the only one hand-in-hand with a silver goddess, and the odd looks we tend to draw.  Valerie will never see it that way.
         I can feel her watching me.  Her receptors are fixed on our hands, and in a small voice she speaks.
         “When I look different will you still love me,” she asks.
         “I will always say that you are beautiful like you are,” I answer.  “But as long as you’re still the same person in here,” and I tap her forehead, “yes, I will still love you.”
         Val’s mouth doesn’t move but I get the sense of a smile and her hard face buries into my chest.  Soon she’s powered down, mimicking sleep and I continue to stroke her shoulder absently as I stare at the dark ceiling.  Hovercars are zipping past outside the window, the sky glows as it reflects the millions of lights below.  And tracing my fingers along her curvy side I think, would you kill for the one you love?  Would I kill for my Valerie?

                                                                                * * *

         Morning solar-light is painting the cityscape of Tiamat orange and yellow; I’m already up, slipping into my day clothes.  Val’s still asleep, but she has her instructions.  I take the wrapped item from the night stand and slip it into my coat.  I kiss her cold temple lightly, and then I’m leaving the hotel room
         They’ll be watching, so I’m quick in the hallway and thinking all the while.  I can almost see Clavo’s dumb face lit by a screen somewhere, studying my every move as I follow the halls to the stairs and wind them down toward the floor.  And all the while my palms sweat, my skin crawls like a thousand eyeballs are roving all over me.  I think of Val, asleep not far above me, I think of who she wants to be, and my pace quickens. 
         I leave the hotel through a maintenance exit and step into a dank alley.  The hotel’s dumpsters are an arm’s reach away, piled high and stinking, and I have to smirk at the irony that on a world as beautiful as Tiamat, there are garbage-strewn alleys the light of day never sees.  Or perhaps, in a people as beautiful as the human race there’s still room for shit like me.  Were it not for Valerie, were it not for the feeling that someone somewhere loved me, someone somewhere thought it worth the trouble of making me happy, my one ray of sunshine, I might still feel the alley walls.  I might still feel like I belonged among the garbage.
         I’m walking faster now, following the long alley as I unfold the address and directions hastily etched onto some weird kind of green-man parchment and glance up and around, checking my location.  It’s then that I notice the maintenance man on the roof of a building I’m walking under isn’t doing much maintenance.  He’s watching me closely, holding some kind of common tooling.  And when I glance back up he’s whispering into his collar, and stops as he catches my gaze with a guilty look.  So I wink, and I keep walking.
         Then the next alley way I’m ducking fast away and out of his eyes and double back in the other direction, and there’s the feeling of being caught off-guard and running feet scraping on the rooftops.  So I double again, looping wide around onto a crowded sidewalk surrounded by storefronts and the rich, busy people of Tiamat.  For a moment, I’m lost in the crowd and noise.  There must be hundreds of these dickless, mindless and boring beings of all species crowded around me, all scurrying in one direction as they piss away their lives.  Up till now I’ve never been in the middle of a crowd and still felt so alone.
         The building I’m headed to dominates the skyline ahead of me.  On ground zero now, I can’t believe how tall it is.  It’s an engineering marvel, thick and dark with tinted glass and it’s built at an odd-ball angle to show off the latest in architectural ability.  Seeing it now, knowing what I have to do inside, I wet my dry lips as the building grows with my proximity. 
         Then I’m noticing the eyes again, eyes over news-papers and staring garbage men; an air-taxi is crawling along the street, pacing me.  And I think, what am I going to tell Valerie when this is all over?  Because in my mind I’m already drafting the story, I’m memorizing their faces and trying to inject some humorous spin to make her think I wasn’t scared shitless.
         So at the next alley I duck into the steam and trash and vagabonds again, and I hear the furious scuffle above and around again as they move to adapt.  And I loop and double until I know they’re hopelessly off the trail and I emerge at the rear of the enormous black building.
         I’m crossing a little concrete platform smeared with tire-tracks and thruster burns from any one of a million different kinds of garbage skips and two enormous dumpsters sit not far from a filthy maintenance door.  Strange, though somehow fitting, to emerge at the shittiest part of this grand building.  But, I suppose, even fashion models have assholes.
         Once in the door I’m pulling out the little picture viewer given with the wrapped package and with a few strokes bring up the picture of the target.  On the alien parchment the directions end with a floor and a number.  No name.  So I slip the stuff into my coat pockets and climb the stairs, and now and then I check the green-man paper again to check the numbers I already know, because I want them to change.  I want them to keep going up and away from me and everything that will happen there in just a few short minutes, but the numbers arrive too soon and I’m prowling down a hallway.  It’s bright and clean with smart furniture arrangement and all the expensive alien plants and weird bullshit art from all corners of the galaxy you could ever want.
         It’s silent in the hall and I’m counting down the numbers and reaching for the wrapped object.  I roll the towel open and the metal is heavy and warm as it lands in my palm.  The pistol is an ugly out-worlds job, green corroded to yellow.  The muzzle is huge.  I fit the coarse grip to my sweaty palm, check the battery for the green light, and stop in front of a door.  I check the number again.  And I knock.
         There is movement inside and a moment later the door opens a crack.  I jam my hand in and shove hard, shouldering in fast with the pistol first and I realize even as I bring the pistol in hard across the woman’s face that she is not the target.  It’s too late to arrest the motion and she collapses on the floor in a flash of auburn hair and flailing limbs. 
         “Fuck,” I whisper. 
         The room inside is white and very, very bright.  And in the middle of it is the heavy-set man in my picture in a white robe, one meaty hand still clutching an exotic glass, and he’s staring at me with wide, confused eyes.  I feel like the only black rock on a beach in this place, like shit on some priceless painting.  Like I’ve never belonged less in my life. 
         And I extend the gun and I don’t have anything to say.  I don’t tell him why, I don’t tell him who hired me or how much, I don’t tell him that I’ve never even held a gun before, much less taken a life.  I don’t even say sorry.  I just yank the trigger back and I watch this perfect stranger’s chest explode in red and steam as the beam lances him and he tumbles back into a priceless glass something and they bleed away their lives together.  His woman, whoever she is, is still out at my feet and I think of my Val, I think about how she would feel if she’d just watched me die.
         And two minutes later I’m charging down the perfect hallways and back to the stairwell.  I’m out of breath and I feel sick, and behind me, the screams begin.

                                                                                * * *

         I’m halfway down the stairwell when a maintenance door opens and I stop myself just in time and Clavo’s body is half through the door with his little brass pistol up and coming at me; it’s all fluted and finned and it looks delicate like a fucking toy.  And I crash hard into Clavo and slam him back against the door jamb with my hand on his green wrist.  His alien fingers on his other hand claw at my face and I wrestle the hand back over his head and slam his gun-hand against the open door one, two, three times and the gun spins off into the dark stairwell.  Clavo comes back at me now, switching tactics with the loss of the sidearm but I ram a knee hard into his gut.  He doubles with a whoosh of green-man breath and I sink a fist into the side of his head.
         It’s a bone-head move, I know, and I feel a knuckle pop out of place and a spike of pain shoots up my wrist but Clavo goes down like a sack of wet shit and then I’m running again, taking the steps two and three at a time.  There’s a part of me that sticks to Clavo, out cold behind; after all, the guy let me go once already, but I’m not fighting for me anymore.  Val deserves to be happy.

                                                                                * * *

         At the bottom of the stairwell I stumble breathlessly to the maintenance door that got me here.  My hand is swelling and going purple and waves of pain wash over my arm.  In the liner of my coat is a weight that screams guilt, it screams murder weapon and it hangs on my heart.  Somewhere above my head Clavo’s swearing and thumping around as he groggily gives chase.  And I know he’s called backup and I know the others are already here.  And there’s the reports of shots fired, meaning more law enforcing fuck-heads than before.  I smile, and I grit my teeth as I lean against the door.  It’s never performing the caper that’s hard.  Getting out, however, that can be a bitch.  Clavo’s footsteps are getting closer and now I can tell he’s not alone.  There’s only one place to go.  I check my watch.  Outside there’s a jumble of curses and the engine of an air taxi howls.  I jam the door control with my good hand and it shoots up into the wall with a pressurized hiss.
         There are cops everywhere, but they’re scattering and cursing as a bright yellow air-taxi cuts through their blockade.  Some are turning to point and yell at me, then my pistol is up and I cut a few wild beams loose over their heads.  They, too, take cover, and the air taxi swoops down again, this time screeching to a halt in front of me with a door opened vertically for me. 
         Right on time.  It’s my girl, my Valerie, and as I hurl myself into the cab she closes the door and hauls the tub into Tiamat’s crowded sky.  I have just a second to see Clavo emerge from the maintenance door I had just vacated, his teeth bared and his eyes glassy.  His red uniform is dusty and rumpled, and his skin is blotching weirdly with dark green-man bruises.  Then he’s lost in the details of the distance and I’m alone again with my Valerie.

                                                                                * * *

         Her skin is warm under my hands; I trace her soft and generous lines with my fingertips.  Her sensors and relays click under her false flesh, telling her what is pleasure, telling her how lightly I touch her; how much I turn her on.  She breathes hard; it’s barely audible over the crashing waves.  I trace her perfect and warm breasts and her hard nipples.  Her hands knead my back and pull my body into hers.  Her voice is breathless and she moans softly in my ear.  Under her skin the false synapses fire, but absent are the hums and clicks as she processes everything I’m doing to her, everything she’s doing to me. 
         We’re lying spent on the beach, dozing and soon she props herself up and says she‘s going for drinks.  I kiss her soft lips and I’m almost surprised to feel her kiss back.  She walks away with a whole lot of very un-robotic hip movement that shows off her shapely ass; her bikini top is over one shoulder, and she smiles when she catches me staring.  Her teeth are bright and new.  My beautiful girl; my Valerie.
         I wait till she’s gone, then I speak to the jungle behind us.
         “For a green man in a red suit you’re a sneaky bastard,” I say.
         “Is that Valerie,” Clavo asks as he steps from the tree line.
           “Yes,” I say.
         “He did a good job.  I almost didn’t recognize her.”
         “Is this it for me, then?”
         Clavo’s quiet for a minute.          
         “Edin’s out of my jurisdiction,” he says, staring off into the surf.  “Is she happy?”
         “Yes,” I say, “and I’ll keep her happy.”
         He nods, deep in thought.
         “Word of advice, then.  Stay out of the core planets,” he says.  “You’re a wanted man, Jack.  I can’t promise they won’t come looking.”
         “Thanks, Clavo,” I lay back on the hot sand and Clavo’s booted footsteps fade into the distance.  It’s a beautiful day on Edin; my girl can finally smile.