Transference, p.1
Transference, page 1
TRANSFERENCE
Book One of the Narrator Cycle
Ian Patterson
Copyright © 2024 by Ian Patterson
All rights reserved.
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Book Cover & Illustration by Barış Şehri: https://baris.editionstilemizon.com/
Editing by Melinda Crouchley: https://www.melindacrouchley.com/
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9909170-0-2
eBook ISBN: 979-8-9909170-1-9
— First published edition, 2024 —
To my wife, for always encouraging me, and to my daughter, for being the catalyst I needed to start.
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
Friedrich Nietzsche
Chapter 1
From darkness, I emerge. The world is shining, impossibly bright. I clamp my eyes to shut it out. Discomfort bleeds in no matter how hard I close them. I itch and ache all over. A pile of thin blankets covers me. They’re a white so pure it hurts to look at. I have to move. I have to stand. I'll die if I don't.
Like a newborn again, I take my feeble first steps, testing the strength of my legs. I’ve lost coordination, certainly lost muscle. I shake my head, thick with drugs and sleep. How long have I been out? I make it to the door before some small nuisance tugs at my arm, and I tug back. Thin wires fall out of a machine on the far side of the room, and a mild beeping fills my head. Is that just in my head? I look around the room, bracing myself on the cool metal door frame to stay upright.
Some sort of hospital. It’s cramped and smells of disinfectant. Not the nice kind either, the kind they use when they think you’re not waking up. It’s full of white and silver machines that whir and blink and spin and pulse, and they’re screaming in my skull, and it’s too much I can’t fucking take it.
I squeeze my eyes shut as nausea washes over me and threatens to take my legs. My heart thrums in my ears. I grip on to the door frame with the meager hand strength I have left. I breathe in deeply, hold it, and then exhale. Eventually, my heart rate drops back down, and the nausea settles.
Thoughts force their way into my brain like needles into a formless wad of yarn. Someone will know that I’m awake, someone will come. They’ll have information, and I’ll pay them and then leave.
At the thought of payment, I panic. If you live long enough on the edge, the terror of an unknown bill can make you spiral. Adrenaline shoots through me, bringing with it some much needed clarity, and I flip my left wrist and navigate the screen installed there until it displays my credit balance.
I can feel my eyes bulging as my legs go weak again and threaten to collapse under me. How big of a job had this been? Holy shit, how much did I gamble? It’s more money than I’ve ever seen. Breathe, just breathe.
The door to my room swings open behind me, and I lock eyes with someone who looks familiar. He’s tall, wearing a white lab coat with a short graying beard, and has a very stern look on his face. He’s handsome, in a grizzled, fatherly way. His face tugs at my memory, but nothing surfaces from those murky depths.
He breaks my gaze, and shaking his head, sighs. “Sit down before you give yourself a heart attack too, Nicholas.” He motions back to the bed. I mechanically make my way to it, and sit.
Taking a stool across from me, the man adjusts his lab coat and then continues. “Here’s the story, you took a big one, a real fucking nasty one, and I was pretty certain you weren’t coming back. Now I expect that you’ve got some short term amnesia so I’ll fill in some blanks. Stop me if it starts coming back so we can talk about more interesting things.
“Your name is Nicholas, my name is Brian. We’ve known each other for a decade, we’re friends, but some days I really wish we weren’t. You’re a Sicko.” The name stirs something in me. “That means you make a living trading money for taking on other people’s diseases. It’s a fucking stupid existence if you ask me, but you hire me to look after you and keep you alive, and I get a cut of your earnings.”
With a sudden anger, he grabs my wrist and flips it over and taps his pointer finger against my screen. “Did you see how much coin is on this thing? That’s after you paid me too, I wanted payment before the procedure because your odds were pretty bad. Now that’s enough to quit, so stop fucking doing this. I am tired of piecing you back together.” He accentuates each of these last words with a finger thump on my wrist, and after a long pause he says, “I don’t want to see you die on my gurney.” He looks away.
Scattered memories start to flood back in. A handshake in a dark room with someone smoking, sitting in a sterile room with my body plugged into a disease transfer machine, Brian yelling at junior staff and shaking some images, a machine showing erratic vitals, and then absolute darkness.
“How long have I been out?” I ask, slowly. Talking is difficult. My tongue feels alien, too thick, too rigid. I have to concentrate on each word. They come out heavy and wrong, like my mouth is full of cotton.
“Three months in a medically induced coma, one month of treatment before that. At first, you were heavily drugged to keep the pain levels low. And when—” He makes a small choking noise, and then continues after a pause. “And when we knew you probably wouldn’t make it we had to put you under so your body could focus on healing.”
I’m stunned. My eyes find the mirror behind Brian and it’s painfully clear what the time has taken from me. There are bones visible through my hollow, pale skin. My already angular face is sunken now, outlining my high cheekbones, sharp nose, and narrowed green eyes. My head is bald except for a few long straggles of black hair. I don’t remember being an attractive person. Now I’m terrifying. Shaking, I ask in a small voice, “What the hell did I take on?”
“Cancer, a particularly nasty lung cancer. The bastard you traded with lied. I fucking told you he would, but you saw the money and went for it anyways. Stage one he said. Hah! No, it was fully metastasized. He showed you old scans, hired fake doctors to convince you. He probably figured you’d die, because that’s what Sickos do. You bite off something too big and it takes you out, and those rich, smug fucks get to keep on living lavishly.”
“Can I report him to anyone? That kind of shit’s got to be illegal–”
Brian interrupts me. “What, did you lose your brain while you were under? Illegal?! No one gives a shit what those cats do. You report him and the best you could hope is that the Inquisitors ignore you, otherwise you might wind up in a gutter at the bottom of the Boroughs. Just be happy you woke up from this one, that’s the only thing you’re going to win today.”
Brian stands up and walks towards the door, but something gnaws at him. He pauses and turns back. “Look, kid, you’re going to be fine. Your cancer markers are back to baseline, and somehow you even woke up from your coma. I’d say it was a miracle if I believed in anything like that. Now, you’re going to rest in this bed, I’m going to send down some really shitty hospital food, and you’re going to eat it all and think about what you’re going to do with your time now that money’s not tight. And you better not tell me you’re going to take on another job, or I’ll kick your skinny ass.”
“Do you mind bringing the food back yourself? I might have some more questions by then.” Memories have started to come back, images through a haze of smoke, and I know a lot rides on what moves I make next.
Brian rolls his eyes, turns, and shuts the door behind him without responding. Smiling, I lay back down and close my eyes. I like Brian, he’s a good sort.
The Disease Transfer Machine, or the Box as we call it down here, was invented some time before the city. It’s always existed here, the primary thing shaping our lives. It sounds noble at first, the elimination of disease, until you realize it only works that way if you can afford it. For those of us in the lower levels, it’s the thing killing us. It’s the only job we can find. It’s the poison that we can’t stop eating.
Do I know how it works? Not a fucking clue. One person sits on each side of the giant metal box, various tubes extend from it and connect to each of them. There’s a giver’s seat and a receiver’s seat, and no one else in the room when they turn the thing on. It’s a strangely intimate thing, sitting across the room from your destroyer. There’s a feeling of great suction all over your body, and then the misery sets in. The symptoms start like a bucket of ice water dumped on your shoulders. I’ve always wondered what a great relief it must feel like on the other side.
The backbone of our economy is built on it. The very rich trade their diseases to the very poor for appropriate compensation agreed on by both parties. But realistically, when you re poor enough you’re too constrained to know what appropriate compensation is. Some people have tried to create laws around it, establishing contractual requirements and base pay for different diseases. They don’t mean much though, there was always someone willing to go under the base pay, there was always someone that needed the money badly enough to take the risk. Laws just give the illusion that what’s happening is fair. Of course, it’s not.
This new caste of people, the perpetually ill, were lovingly nicknamed Sickos. The working poor hated them for the ease they got their money, the middle class decried the horrors of rampant capitalism they represented, and everyone tried to buy their services when their own bill came due.
I know some that only take on petty viruses. The money’s shit, but it’s consistent and it won’t kill you. Most people start small though, and then slowly work their way to the more serious stuff as they get older. We’ve all got plans drawn up for who gets the money when we kick it, and everyone just hopes they can set their family up to get out of this existence. But almost no one does. Sometimes, very rarely, someone would gamble big and win, and the promise of that kept everyone else trudging on.
I was sick of seeing it. Watching families get torn apart after someone took on that one, big job and lost. Watching the money from it run out. It was never enough to sustain those left behind. And then watching the youngest of them start down the same path, perpetuating this never-ending cycle of shit and death. Most of us didn’t live past 35, less than a quarter of what the wealthy elite live.
When I was 10, I watched my father waste away from a cancer he took to set up our family. In the Boroughs we’re taught to honor the sacrifice of our family. They die to give us a better life. Fuck that. When he finally passed after months of pain I didn’t feel pride in his death, I just missed his presence. Glorifying his death felt cheap. He didn’t sacrifice himself so I could live, this world ate him up until there was nothing left, and then tried to feed me some hero’s tale. I refused to eat that bullshit.
I knew two things then. The first was that I wasn’t going to bring a family into this meat grinder. The second was that if I was going to sacrifice myself, it was going to be to put an end to it all, not to continue the cycle. My father’s death made it clear to me—it has to stop, someone has to stop it.
I knew it would be rare though. The cost of transfer goes up exponentially as a disease progresses, and finding someone willing gets less likely as the survival chances dip. There’s still a market when life expectancy is discussed in months or days, but there are only a few people ready to make that sacrifice. People like my father. Still, it can take precious time to negotiate after that, and not all deals close in time. I needed to find someone willing to pay almost anything, but with a disease I might actually survive from.
I met my chance in a smoke filled bar. He told me about his early diagnosis, about the positive outcomes that were expected. All the while he smoked rollers from an ornate, silver case. But I saw the flash of rust red that he buried in a napkin after a coughing fit. And I saw the lie behind his eyes every time he said, Stage 1. I stared at the burning tip he held between yellowed fingers and imagined the flame growing to consume me. Then I told the man what he was going to pay me.
A few hours pass before Brian shows back up, the promised tray of hospital food in his left hand. They print the whole thing in the mess hall upstairs out of nutrient blocks. It turns the tasteless cubes into something resembling meat and vegetables, but they still all taste vaguely similar. I’ve had some time to think, but in that instant all I can remember is that I’m a living thing that’s been starved for four months. Brian hands me the tray, and I attack the slab of nutrient meat without stopping to grab cutlery. Somewhere in my brain I know it’s terrible, the same old shit I always eat, but at that moment I’ve never tasted something so wonderful. At least it looks like real food.
“Slow down, you’re going to make yourself sick! Shit, if I knew I was feeding an animal I would have just thrown raw blocks at you.” Brian’s voice sounds rough, but he’s smiling while watching me eat.
I pause, set down the food, and wipe my hands clean on a napkin. I motion to the stool opposite me and he sits down. I break off the printed knife and fork from the side of the tray and cut off small, measured bites. We don’t talk while I eat, and when I’ve cleaned the plate I set it to the side and look into his eyes.
“Brian, thank you. I knew this was going to be a terrible risk going into it, and a lesser friend would have abandoned me while I was comatose. You’re a good man, and a better friend than I deserve for sticking this out.”
He nods, waiting pensively for what is coming next.
“I’ve got to ask for help again though—” Anger rises in his face so I put up my hand to pacify him. “Not with another job, I’m done with that. Look, I went into this taking the biggest risk of my life, and knowing damn well that I’d either die or get a chance to make a difference. And thanks to you, I get that chance. Now what comes next may not be to your liking, but this is why I took on that cancer. I had a plan going into this. You can’t stop me, I need you to understand that. But I’m going to give you the option, do you want to know and help me willingly, or do you want me to tell you what I need and leave out the why?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, so let’s just start with what it is you think you need,” Brian says, gruffly. Smart man, there’s enough bullshit in this world that it’s good to not entangle yourself.
“Tell everyone I died here, including your staff. Fake the reports, take one of those stiffs out of the morgue, say it’s me, and burn it. Then get me out of here without anyone seeing.”
He stares at me blankly, an endless stream of questions formulating behind his eyes.
“Look I gave you the option here, that’s what I need, and if you want to know why, I’ll tell you. But if I tell you, you’re involved. And you know what that means. I’m heading down a road, and it would be great to have a friend with me, but I won’t take that risk for you.”
Brian opens his mouth, and then shuts it several times. His glasses have slid down the bridge of his nose, and absent mindedly he pushes them back up. Resolve builds behind his eyes, and when he speaks next I already know that he’s in.
“Fine, Nick. I’ll bite. Why do you think you want me to fake your death? What’re you planning that you need to be dead to do?”
I breathe in, I’ve been prepping these next words for the past few hours, feeling their flavor on my tongue. I lean forward on the edge of my bed and stare into his eyes. “I’m going to tear the system down, the whole disease transfer system. All the remote units work with guidance from some central processing station in Sun Gate, and I’m going to cut the cord. I’m talking about maximum possible destruction, scorched earth, nothing standing afterwards. Maybe they’ll rebuild it, or maybe they don’t even know how to anymore, but it will give us the time we need to break out of this cycle. I’m going to take the fight to those fuckers, make them pay for what they’ve done to us. I’m going to burn it all down.”
Brian erupts in laughter. He throws his head back and roars, and when he’s done there are tears streaming down his face. I was prepared for anger, but not this, and my face sours. “I’m afraid to say you’ve lost the plot, Nick. You’re one man, and you can barely walk right now you’re so weak! You’re going to infiltrate Sun Gate and tear down the system. Fuck, that’s rich. So tell me, Nick, how in the hell do you plan to pull that off?”
I flip my left wrist out and show him my screen. I show him my credit balance, and his eyes widen in terror. It’s a sum that even breaks his concept of reality. “Brian, I knew the cancer had metastasized. I knew it, and I made that fucker pay for it. I knew it would set me up to change things. People don’t take jobs like that unless they’re ready to die and leave the money for their kids. Finding someone is rare, and he didn’t have the time. So I took the gamble. I bet on you—”
Anger flushing his face, Brian stands suddenly and slaps me across the face. I reel from it, my body is too weak for abuse, and for a moment I go limp across the bed. My head pounds. Slowly, I sit back up, and seeing what the blow did to me, Brian sits back down. He’s still furious, but he won’t hit me again.
