Article: 261346 of talk.bizarre
From: page@logrus.itribe.net (d.)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: "walking a mile in your moccasins"
Date: 1 Dec 1995 15:35:24 GMT
Organization: iTribe, Inc.  <URL: http://www.itribe.net/>
Lines: 111
Message-ID: <49n7bs$are@athos.itribe.net>
Summary: fiction, FTSD submission
Status: O
X-Status: 



"Need help?" she asked, false concern coloring her smoke-laced breath.

"No."

"Whatever, then."

He grunted in exasperation at her verbal hide-and-seek.  A breeze from
the ventilation system ruffled his sandy-brown hair, giving him a
sudden cold-chill.  He shuddered and tried to turn his attention back
to the wires in front of him.

"I can't believe you killed them all," she commented.

"Do you care?"

"Not really.  A few dead researchers stopped bothering me back in
graduate school."

"Ok, then."

His lifepod had drifted in orbit around the station alone for hours
while he had ranted and raved inside, literally bouncing off the walls
of his tiny prison.  He had long ago taken off the panel holding the
five deadly buttons he had used to kill his co-workers earlier, and
had attempted to tamper with the wiring while still in a state of
mental shock.  The results had left much to be desired: he had cripped
his remote lifepod's navigation controls and could no longer return to
the main genetics station.

"You were control?"

"Yes."

"Your whole thing was to watch, report and kill?  What a cushy job!"

"Only kill if necessary."

"Well you fucked that one up, didn't you?"

He ducked out of the lifepod's wiring to give her a full, dangerous
glare.  She lounged on a crate in the cargo bay of her trading vessel,
a half-amused smirk on her face and a cigarette in one hand.

"You only kill them if their genetics shit fucks up real bad then, is
that it?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"Paranoid motherfuckers, weren't they?"

"Not them.  NASA."

"Oh, well, that goes without saying."

A careful twist of his ansen screwdriver put the last button into
place, the cat's.  He couldn't believe he had killed the cat too, what
had happened to him in that tiny lifepod before this annoying woman
and her merchant vessel had rescued him from dying in a tiny,
spherical coffin.

With head down in the lifepod's wiring, his mind filled with the fear
of his homicidal mania being discovered and the desperation involved
in trying to tamper with the lifepod in an attempt to make it all look
like an accident.  His hands worked surely among the electronics
inside.

"So what happens if you become contaminated?"

"What?"

"What happens if you become contaminated.  There's five buttons,
you're number six."

"Nothing, I guess.  We're never on the station when the experiments
take place."

"But what if.  You could be contaminated right now, and not know it.
They could have been putting you in that lifepod to isolate you to
experimented on you."  She laughed.

"That's bullshit."

"Is it?"

What if they had experimented on him like she said?  Had they 
turned him into a murderous monster?

With a sinking feeling, he felt the rage boiling up in him again, and
had her blood on his hands a split second later.  The screwdriver
stuck out of her eyesocket, an LED on the handle indicating a full
charge boiling off into her brain.  He stood over her shaking and
filled with self-loathing as he stared at his hands.  It seemed as if
he could see the chemicals racing through his veins, tearing through
his DNA.

"Whatever," he said.  Genetics could wait, his humanity could wait.
His freedom couldn't.  Carefully he drew the screwdriver from her head
and wiped off the blood and brains on his shirt.  Time to get back to
work, everything else could wait.

He ducked his head back into the exposed panel of the lifepod, feeling
more angry than human.



d.

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