Outlier Read online

  Contents

  Dedication

  The First Interview

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  The Second Interview

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Third Interview

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  An Excerpt From SYNTHESIS

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Thanks to the world-changers, to the closet-destroyers

  Gayspeed

  and never holster your middle fingers

  An Interview

  At least there was a fucking cigarette.

  Chaz took a seat and grabbed the pack, rubbing her thumb in slow circles across the embossed Pall Mall logo. Old, comforting habit.

  Mrs. Rothschild slid a Bic across the scratched-up plastic table. Followed by an ashtray. The incensed air coming out of the vents smelled of apple cinnamon. The scent was on a timer—between 4 and 7 P.M. it was freshly baked cookies; after 7 P.M., apple cinnamon.

  Mrs. Rothschild asked, “More restless nights?”

  Chaz lit up.

  “I looked into your condition since our last conversation. So awful to think that something as simple as the position of the sun can dictate sanity. From what I read, it feels like a constant discord. But I also read that some people can’t function in society because of the anxiety and mood swings. You’re lucky it isn’t worse.”

  Chaz said nothing, and she stared at nothing.

  “Something also caught my eye when I was reviewing your file.” Behind Rothschild, on the mirror-screen, an identification form appeared. “You filled out everything. But when it asked for a gender, you didn’t check any of the three boxes. And you wrote an S off to the side. Do you want to tell me about that?”

  Silence.

  “I brought it up to Sarah—You remember her? She did your admittance cognitive exam. I thought she might have seen something like that, but she didn’t know either.” Rothschild turned in her seat to look at the file. “S. What does it stand for?”

  Chaz chipped away glossy flakes from the WEHRLEIN INDUSTRIES logo on the ashtray. Two civvies patrolled by the window. Utopian models.

  “Wheeler is a facility that is very tolerant of transgender patients. This isn’t a place where you have to hide, Chaz. We can even offer hormone regimens.”

  “You’ve already seen what’s between my legs,” said Chaz, quietly.

  “I have. But that doesn’t answer my question.”

  Chaz looked up from her cigarette. Since this was a conversation about defects, Rothschild should’ve acknowledged her own: a reversed digestive system. Normal people had the mouth upstairs and the asshole downstairs, but with her it was the opposite. Her mouth even puckered like an asshole when she smiled, as if it were about to squeeze out a hot, steaming turd.

  This was already a shit show.

  “I have a nephew who’s like you,” said Rothschild. “He’s only twelve, but he doesn’t want to be a nephew anymore. He’s already begun his transition, wearing dresses, that sort of thing. And when he’s old enough, he’ll have surgery to be complete.” She folded her arms on the table. “Do you have any advice I can pass along to him?”

  Chaz watched cigarette ash get steadily longer. She said, “Tell her to kill herself. It’d be easier.”

  “I thought someone in your situation would be more supportive, Chaz. Coming out can be very stressful, as I’m sure you know. So many families aren’t receptive to transgender children.”

  Chaz said nothing.

  Rothschild shifted in her chair—sitting straighter and taller, like it was a reminder of her authority. She grabbed the empty Pall Mall pack and moved her thumb across the logo. “If you have the right attitude, twenty years can fly by,” she said. “I want us to be friends. Do you want that too?”

  She was wasting her fucking time.

  “In here, you can get the care you need—pardon me, the care both of you need.” She set the pack down. “You should know how lucky you are. This ward doesn’t usually admit teenagers who commit a violent crime, and never with such royal treatment. Compared to the juvie closets up on the Nova Atlas, your cell must feel luxurious. And you’ve been allowed to keep your legs, even though policy states otherwise for inessential prostheses. You’re very lucky.”

  If you keep saying how lucky I am, my foot is going to sock-puppet your uterus.

  “Consider this my good faith in your behavior.” She reached into two pockets and then held both hands open over the middle of the table. In the left palm were two light-blue lozenges of diazepam; in the right, a tasker. “Choose one. And down the road, if your positive attitude continues, you may have the other.”

  Chaz instinctively reached for the lozenges. They would help her sleep. She hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since…

  No. If she slept, she would only dream, and she was afraid of what she might see. She would accept the fucking anxiety and the jitters for the rest of her pathetic carbon-based life if it meant never closing her eyes again.

  She took the tasker.

  It would come in handy.

  “It must stay in your cell at all times, or else we will confiscate it right back,” cautioned Rothschild. “And all communication in and out of this building is blocked. That means no internet.”

  Chaz nodded. The network castration was expected.

  The cigarette was down to the filter—she stubbed it out.

  Staring at the screen, they came again. The little memories. Like thieves storming into her brain to steal what little tranquility she could cling to.

  “Save me,” she whispered.

  “That is not under my power,” said Rothschild, rising and taking the lozenges and empty cigarette pack. “Only you can save yourself.” She went for the door, then her footsteps stopped. “You know. There are fewer religious girls who enter this ward than religious girls who leave. I think pain makes us look beyond ourselves, so that we don’t feel alone. I’ve seen it help. Just a thought.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  The girl had the kind of tits Chaz would like to slide her dick between and cry Hallelujah!

  She also looked a little bit like Beverly. Not in the rack category, though. Even a preteen’s training bra was too large for Beverly’s bug bites. Other than that, same hazel skin, same dark eyes. And the angle of her face—that coy look the model had rehearsed—looked like something Beverly would do all the time.

  But the fashion model did have one up on Chaz’s old girlfriend: her mouth was shut.

  Incoming.

  The zinger smacked her in the jaw. Lights and shadows spun. Her body suddenly had an urge to take a seat—her ass slammed down into a puddle of murky water beside a dumpster.

  Garry Ziegler, renowned blackjack ace with a pastime of abusing his wife, socked her in the nose next. The pain wasn’t so bad—her face was already swimming with it—but now there was blood. He hit her again, though not as hard. She was already down and not returning blows. The fight was settled.

  “You got any sense now?” he barked, panting like he’d gotten a good workout. He spat on her cheek. “Yeah? I think so too.”

  Chaz felt him rifling through her pockets, outers before the inners. Across the alley, a heavyset cook with a food-stained apron poked out from a door, observed the commotion, and ducked back inside. The scent of cooki
ng meats momentarily dominated the odor of weeks-old trash.

  “Aha,” announced Ziegler, victoriously. He fished out his barkskin wallet from Chaz’s pocket. Then he checked the contents to make sure nothing was missing. Nothing was. “Good hands, kid. But you’re not too fucking bright, are you? When you steal a wallet, you’re not supposed to stand around. The hell were you waiting for? This ass-whooping?”

  Chaz wiped the blood off her face with the back of her hand. She opened and closed her mouth to check if anything was broken, but it hurt too much to tell. Probably not, because Ziegler threw limp-armed swings a drunk bitch.

  “I have a tip for you, kid.” Ziegler removed Chaz’s hat and threw it on the ground. “The queer shit makes you stand out. Maybe wear some girl clothes, huh? That’s what they’re for. Girls. Like you.”

  I have a tip for you too. Mouthwash.

  “I need the money,” whined Chaz. “I need to eat.”

  Ziegler shook his head and stood up. “Here.” He dropped a five-dollar bill into her lap. “You happy now? Get some warm noodles. And maybe someone else will fall for your stupid sob story.”

  After he left, Chaz made only the necessary movements to light a cigarette. The fat cook poked his head out again. Seeing that the beating was done, he hobbled out with a dish towel and wordlessly gave it to her. She used it to plug her bleeding nose.

  “Should I notify someone?” he asked. Either she was still reeling from the punches, or his top-heavy body looked like it was teetering.

  She shook her head. “I’m peaches and cream. Thanks.”

  “That was Garry Ziegler. Blackjack champion for two years straight.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What caused him to do this?”

  She looked down at her reflection in the dirty puddle water between her legs. “I tried to steal his wallet. He didn’t take it so well.”

  “Oh.” The cook shuffled back into the warm casino like he didn’t want to be seen hanging around a criminal. Fine by her.

  Chaz smoked her cigarette alone, thinking.

  She’d once known a beggar who had maintained an odd philosophy about cigarettes: he claimed that if he asked himself a question when lighting one, he would know the answer when he was finished. Any question. Like a fucking fortune-teller. Of course, his theory had needed some trials: How many people are taking a dump at this exact moment? (Fifteen thousand something); How many kilometers is it from here to Earth, to the third decimal point? (Too fucking long to recall); If all the men in the world chopped off their dicks, what would the collective weight of those dicks be? (680,000 kilograms).

  But the dooziest: Does God exist?

  She’d never found out, because the poor old fuck had croaked with the cigarette in his mouth. Just slumped over, no warning, like a great divine entity didn’t want its secret loose in the wild. Or, huffing two packs a day had caught up with him in old age—probably likelier.

  Rest in peace, Homeless Nostradamus.

  Finishing her cigarette and dropping the filter into the water, Chaz stood up, her mind no more enlightened than before. She checked the dish towel. Her nose remained a leaky faucet, but the pain had lessened.

  On the advertisement, Beverly-but-with-big-tits was gone. Instead, Chaz saw herself in a red ball gown, specs popping up in bubbles: 95% SATIN, BOW SASHES, FIGURE ENHANCEMENT. It looked like someone had stitched together a tube top and tacky window drapes and called it fashion. The software had also curled her short hair and applied a light foundation to her face, along with eyeliner and dark lipstick. The background came into focus: dance footage and a stone balcony under the stars. Glittering smiles.

  Text above her head said: A NIGHT TO REMEMBER.

  “Charlene, light up the party with our after-dark selection,” said a woman’s voice.

  It was the ugliest fucking thing she’d ever seen. She raised a hand to her temple, bending the fingers to make a pistol. Her evil twin emulated the gesture.

  Do it. Save yourself the pain.

  Chaz grabbed her hat, brushed it off, and placed it atop her head again. Her tasker chirped out an urgent alert.

  No time to change into a fresh set of clothes; she had a train to catch. She gave Ziegler’s donation to the first beggar she came across and then set off to the nearest station.

  With the smear of flashy colors coming from the mega-screens above, the dome-walk almost looked like a safe street.

  “Can you hurry up with that shit?”

  Behind the food cart, the Case-brand civvy—with a tacky label that said TRAN-WONG FOODS—had a janky arm. Their plastic bearings were notorious for wearing down from repetitive tasks. Easy enough to swap in a new one; didn’t mean someone would come along to do it, though.

  “It better be smothered in soy, metal brain. And you keep that chili out of there, or I’m sending your boss a Ziploc of my toxic farts.” She leaned over the cart and fetched herself a broken-off chunk of fishcake, warm out of the fryer.

  “Stealing from Tran-Wong is prohibited,” declared the civvy, in the midst of its food preparation. “This incident has been recorded.”

  “Yeah, you always say that. Still waiting for the handcuffs.”

  In the meantime, Chaz pulled out her tasker. Facial-rec had him pegged at forty-nine meters away, distance falling at walking pace. Still heading in her direction. This time of night the dome-walk was thronged, but the density of Civic Watchdog System lenses kept a stable tether. She didn’t have to do a damn thing, besides wait.

  The civvy handed her the food: char kway teow. The soy and rice noodles needed more stirring, and most of the prawns were lumped on top. Lazy robot asshole.

  And, of course, there was fucking chili.

  Chaz snapped up the largest chili with her plastic chops and flung it at the civvy. It glanced off its temple, leaving behind a splat of soy. The robot didn’t notice, or if it did, it didn’t care.

  The quality of the food around the dome-walk had gone downhill ever since Tran-Wong had rammed their dick in. You’d have to go a kilometer in any direction to find a different vendor company, farther if you wanted human service. Chaz didn’t mind the civvies; they were fine when they didn’t bungle orders. Quicker too, and less chatty. They didn’t mumble politics or give out unwarranted fashion tips. So that was all right.

  She stirred everything and dug in. She couldn’t tell if the prawn meat was real or artificial. Law-abiding vendors were required to display signs saying which it was, but she’d never been able to taste a difference. Couple years back, some asshats had thrown fits over the vat-grown stuff and demanded the signs. To them it wasn’t enough that it tasted like meat; it had to be the actual flesh from an oxygen-sucking animal, like the satisfaction of its murder was included in the meal.

  Fucking mammals.

  Dolphins swam on the screens above her, and Chaz ate her food while standing next to a mostly empty jill-recharging station. The jill nearest to her was a full-bodied redhead with breast milk variants: standard, chocolate, or strawberry. Flavored lips, flavored saliva, now flavored breast milk—What next? Flavored pussy?

  Tether at twelve meters and closing. She rubbed her aching jaw.

  Looking didn’t pay as well as it should, and she figured expectation had to do with it. Some lousy sack of shit who suspected his wife was cheating on him could hire a private investigator, and he’d tail her for days or weeks until all the evidence kept her from wiggling out. But that was pricey. Maybe another lousy sack of shit didn’t have that much money but still wanted to know if his missus was heading out to play the high-payout fan-tan games every Tuesday between 8 and 10 P.M. He might deserve to be cheated on, might hit her when he saw the evidence, and might do a lot worse.

  But she wasn’t paid to give a shit about that. Looking was just looking.

  The tether beeped: 4.4 meters and holding, now increasing.

  Patrick Letts, face like a sad bulldog with graying hair, was alone. During his stroll in the dome-walk crowd, the tether ha
d filed three suspect conversations that might involve acquaintances. Chaz reviewed them: the first was an apology to someone with whom he’d had a collision, the second was a refusal directed to a zealous snack vendor, and the third was a brief chat with a jill. Nobodies. She nulled them.

  What are you doing out here so late?

  When he was ten meters away, she started after him.

  Chaz had spent the morning reviewing Letts’s file over an energy drink and cold rice, and her assessment was that he was just another chump. About the only interesting thing in his Earth file was an eighth-grade choir video of him puking on stage during some national competition. The blast radius had included five or six other performers. After that, the photos and videos were equally as tedious to flip through as the alphanumerics: he had arrived on Trident with his wife and extended family in 0030, got hired in construction, lost his job to a robot, got lucky when his rich aunt croaked. A then-close friend had suggested he might’ve murdered her—intriguing plot twist but, sadly, there was no evidence.

  He’d been in a gambling hole for a couple years, exchanged it for drinking, quit that, worked a few oddball jobs. She had enough info to write his biography, but the assignment was to find out where he went on Thursday and Saturday evenings. That’s it.

  His sister’s stripper phase was more interesting—she’d taken out a loan for implants. Nice ones too. And her lap dances weren’t so bad either.

  A refueled gambling addiction was her first hypothesis. The dome-walk had about as many quarter eaters as it had people, and it was a standoff between the betting kiosks and the clubs about which could blind you quicker. The upscale shit had holograms—dancing girls, mostly. The age-old formula of tits and ass made a sucker out of any decent man.

  Ha. Decent man, funny oxymoron.

  But Patrick Letts didn’t seem to have his eye on gambling. Chaz observed him on the tether-feed and waited for him to peel off from the crowd, but it didn’t happen.

  She followed him for ten minutes. Seagulls replaced the dolphins on the screens, and the crowd thickened.