Beyond Belief

Jinx looked down at her fists and laughed a little.

"Huh. You tagged out."

"Yep." Peter stood in front of her with his arms folded.

"It must be my charming personality." Jinx smiled at Peter in mock flirtation.

"I'm immune. Type 350 clones have extraordinarily low sex drives. Anyway, you ripped out my larynx with your -- uh -- sharp thing." Peter was a little taken aback, and rubbed his throat.

"It's a war spork. A weapon developed from a very old tool for skinning fresh kills." Jinx pulled the war spork from the inside of her jacket, and pointed to the parts of the weapon as she continued. "The spike penetrates the carcass, then you run it along the side to separate the skin and fat from the meat. You can then use the spoon part to scrape fat and muscle off the skin for curing."

"That was totally educational. Creepy, too."

"M-Seven, at your service. We're all about the old creepy stuff. There are some neat sword and spear-breaking techniques you can do with it." Jinx demonstrated a few quick strokes with the weapon. Peter kept his arms folded in front of him as Jinx stabbed the air.

Peter looked at Jinx. "Would you put that thing away?"

"Don't be scared -- it's just a tool. I put a whammy on it that attacked your nervous system. It's hard to defend yourself when you can't think or move -- not that that stopped you from trying."

"I did my best. It's hard to keep your balance when you can't feel anything."

"That's what I told the judge at my last drunk and disorderly trial." Jinx nodded towards the exit of the living area, and tucked her weapon back into her inside jacket pocket. "Let's take a look while we still have some time."

"Yeah, let's do that. I'm curious."

They walked into the courtyard, where a hole filled with ashes marked the location of a former fire pit. Peter looked into the hole filled with ashes as Jinx picked up a battered piece of colorful cardboard from the ground.

Jinx gestured to Peter. "Come here! They must be shutting down the training program -- this is one of the lottery cards they used to select new recruits."

Peter looked over Jinx's shoulder at the battered piece of cardboard marked with purple numbers. "A lottery?"

Classical lotteries, where prizes are simply given to those who had the dumb luck to have a certain number of matches to the randomly drawn numbers, were extremely uncommon. The most popular games were cumulative lotteries, where players collected matches from daily drawings and tried to place them in winning "hands" to claim prizes from the pot.

The lottery card was printed with a gaudy holographic pattern to discourage forgery and changing made bets. Based on a small section of the card, a lottery operator could uniquely identify it and its corresponding series of bets.

Jinx looked at Peter as he examined the matrix of numbers marked with stamps. She found that she could still read his face and imagine what was going on in his head simply by examining his expression. Discovering that she could, she did -- until she realized with a start that he was now looking at her with the same probing gaze.

They broke eye contact, and each took half-a-step away from the other in an attempt to re-assert their personal spaces. There was an awkward moment. Jinx's gaze sank to the dusty ground as she imagined for a moment what Peter must be thinking. Peter briefly seemed stunned, uncertain what to say or do next.

When he broke his silence, Jinx felt suddenly sad and ashamed. "Were you trying to do something to my mind?"

"No. Not anything paranormal, anyway." She stopped for a moment to push the shame from her mind. "I fed on your essence. I took into myself what makes you the person you are. This has some side effects. Right now, I feel a connection to you because we are looking at the same things, and responding to them in similar ways. This creates a context of shared feelings that--"

Jinx stopped, and was relieved when Peter continued her thought. "That enable us to connect emotionally? Have a relationship?"

The absurdity of what Peter said made her laugh a little inside. "Yeah. That's what normals feel when they fall in love. I told you that you shouldn't have come back."

"It's not voluntary, and that wasn't the first time." Peter seemed to relax a little. "I've been coming back from the dead pretty regularly since I discovered I had powers."

Jinx briefly considered the implications of what Peter said. "Does anyone know you're an immortal?"

"They must know. No one has ever asked me about it, though."

"Immortality really screws with people's heads. With a savings account and a couple of millennia you could end up owning the Corporation."

Peter looked at Jinx carefully. "What about you? You must be older than you look."

"It's complicated. This body was born about a century before the Last War on the Home-world."

"That's... three hundred years?"

"As long as I find souls to consume, I won't age or weaken." She felt ashamed. "It's not the same as immortality. Demons are parasites. As soon as the last sapient species goes extinct, our kind will perish."

Peter looked at Jinx's face and his mind wrestled with unaccustomed concepts. "Why do you look so sad?"

"This isn't how things are supposed to work. I hurt you and exploited you and--" Jinx discovered that talking about it made it worse.

Peter walked to her and took her hands. She looked into his eyes, and felt... something. She was having trouble giving it a name.

"They grew me in a vat, Jinx. I've been exploited since I was an embryo. It stopped hurting a long time ago."

His words comforted her, and she wondered why that was so. "We should go back to my ship, get drunk, and have meaningless sex. It's the only way to nip this in the bud. Discover the idol has feet of clay..."

"I have a better idea. Let's figure out where the fleet is going to attack, lay in a course, and then have drunken, meaningless sex."

She looked at him and they both smiled. "Gold star for robot boy..."