The Taint
"Vi Roosky?"
The accent is terrible, the words clumsy and halting. The woman looks up into deep brown eyes. American, she decides, dark skin, standing confident and too damn tall. She twists the borrowed French accent into something more like her own. "No." She smiles.
The American sinks down into the seat across from her, and she pictures that wide All-American grin contorted in terror.
"Good thing for me, I guess," says the American."I should have learned more Russian before I came to Moscow." He laughs and pulls a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, offering them across the table. She takes one, breathing in the carcinogens as she accepts a light.
"Got a name?" he asks.
"Sadako." The good girl in her likes him, tries to take over and bring tears to her eyes. Sadako remains composed. She never lets the good girl push her around these days.
The jukebox plays something beat-driven and loud, programmed on computer but tainted by human control. Sadako loves this bright new world, and the music seems like a salute.
She remembers when she first made the leap back into the real world. Reaching out from a fifteenth-generation copy of her tape burned into a shining plastic disk. The girl watching the pictures had been sitting in a brightly-lit room, shivering despite the heat. Sadako had reached out to claim the victim, touched the girl's mind and hit...something.
A neural implant, she learned later from borrowed memories. A man- made adaptation to bring easier communion with this shining future. It ticked away at the base of the girl's brain, recording and processing.
Sadako had always been good with things that could record.
So she stayed there. She turned herself into the taint and took the girl's life in a new and terrifying way. And for the first time in who knew how long she walked and sang in flesh and blood.
She'd forgotten, all those years dying at the bottom of the well, forgotten about the light and the wind and the birds. Everything was new, everything was wonderful. She could feel the good girl revel in their newfound freedom, even as she protested what they had done. For a while Sadako had known a unity of herself that she had never imagined could exist.
But the rage stayed. When the new world dimmed in its novelty, the hate and the anger remained. She found that her taint still worked, she could pass it person to person like a virus, she didn't need to rely anymore on curisoity and videotape.
The American keeps talking, telling jokes he thinks are funny. Sadako wonders what sins he has committed. No one is ever really innocent, she tells the good girl. Everyone deserves to die for one crime or another. Maybe he stole from a shop when he was a teenager, maybe he pirated software. There must be someone out there who hunts him for revenge. And if there isn't anybody right now, then sooner of later there will be. No one escapes from justice when Sadako is near. She considers her role as avenging angel, stopping the cruelty before it starts.
She smiles. In seven days she will be a tall American who speaks bad Russian. In fourteen days she'll be somebody else, leaving a twisted body to mark her progress.
Sadako loves technology: she couldn't live wthout it.
She kisses him on the cheek when she gets up to leave. "Have a nice week," she calls as she walks under the neon sign over the door of the cafe.
And the good girl in her screams.