Chapter II

Jack had never ridden a bullet train before, but as soon as he was on one, he decided he hated it. It was too loud, too fast, and so crowded that there was no room to sit. He and the homeless woman were both forced to stand sandwiched between hoards of businessmen loudly talking on their cell phones and construction workers that stank of beef, cheese and sweat. As if the woman's already putrid stench wasn't bad enough. Jack tried very hard not to breathe too much.

When they finally reached their stop half an hour later, Jack and the homeless woman set out in search of the machine repair shop listed in the phone book. After several blocks of walking, they found a small building with an old sign that read Axle's Machine Repair Shop.

They went inside, and there was the same swarthy, sweaty man Jack had spoken two in the phone booth. He was sitting at a work table surrounded by tools and examining a piece of machinery. Somewhere in the building there was a radio playing rather loudly.

Jack decided to speak up to get his attention. "Pardon me, sir. You are the one named Axle, correct?"

The man looked up and lifted his goggles from his eyes. "Yeah, that's me. Who wants to know?"

"I called you earlier, about having an arm repaired."

"Oh, yeah! The guy from the payphone!" the swarthy man beckoned him closer. "Come in, come in, let me see this arm you need fixed."

The woman dropped her severed arm on the work table in front of Axle. The man picked it up and studied it, turned it over a few times to see it from different angles, then put it back on the table with a puzzled frown.

"This thing is a real piece of work, buddy." he said to Jack. "I ain't never seen nothin' like it before. This here tech is way more advanced then the stuff I'm used to."

"Does that mean you cannot fix it?" Jack asked.

Axle shook his swarthy head. Suddenly the woman smacked her good hand down and leaned over the work table to glare at the mechanic. "Hold on a second, mister! Your ad in the phone book says you can fix any machine!"

Axle narrowed his eyes at her and raised himself up in his seat to return the glare. "This ain't any machine, lady. Like I said, it's really advanced tech. You need a specialist, and arms ain't my specialty."

The woman thumped her fist on the table and everything on top of it rattled. "Then you really can't fix anything!" she snapped, her angry voice rising in pitch. "You're just a lying, third-rate hack!"

Axle's voice also began to get louder. "I ain't no liar, lady, and I ain't no hack, neither! Now get outta my shop before I call the cops on ya!"

Jack quickly decided it was time to intervene. "Please forgive my companion's disrespect, sir. Her broken arm has put her in a bad mood. Are there any other mechanics you know of who could help us?"

Axle glared at the woman a little longer before answering Jack's question. "You should try askin' my buddy Gizmo to look at it. He's got a shop down the street."

Jack picked up the severed arm from the table and bowed his head politely. "Thank you very much for your time, sir."

"Yeah, thanks for nothing." the woman grumbled, snatching her arm away from Jack and whirling around to leave.

When they got to the shop Axle had pointed them to, the reception was much the same. Gizmo took one look at the broken arm and said "This here tech is way more advanced then the stuff I'm used to. You should try askin' my buddy Lugnut to look at it. He's got a shop down the street."

Once again the homeless woman got into an argument with the man and Jack had to quickly defuse the situation before the police were called. The same thing happened three more times, until the sun went down and all the shops closed.

By now, Jack was trying to think of some way out of the mess he'd gotten himself into. Every police drone and bounty hunter in the city was surely looking for him now. He still needed a place to eat and sleep, but he did not want to take the bullet train to find food and lodging. It looked like he would have no choice but to spend the night sleeping on the sidewalk with the unpleasant company of the foul-smelling cyborg woman.

Just as he thought that, Jack realized that the source of his problems was nowhere in sight. He looked up and down the dark street and could not see the woman anywhere. Had Fate finally decided to step in and solved his problems for him?

Then he heard her crabby voice yelling at him from somewhere. "Hey, you! Why are you just standing there? Come on, get the lead out!"

Jack heaved a deep sigh and followed her voice.

The woman was standing at the end of a dark alley. On the wall behind her was a large metal door. With her good hand she pressed a button on the wall and the door slid upward, revealing a platform inside a dimly lit shaft. Then she entered and looked back at him, expecting him to follow.

Jack arched his eyebrows in confusion. He thought about asking where they were going, but remembered her tendency to roll her eyes and insult him any time he asked a question. So he stood on the platform next to her and remained silent. There was a panel on the wall with many more buttons on it. The woman tapped one and the heavy metal door slowly groaned shut, sealing them inside the cramped space.

Then suddenly the whole thing plunged straight down. At this point, Jack realized that they were inside some kind of elevator. There were lights blinking over the door, and the numbers on them were getting bigger and bigger. When the last and largest number lit up, the elevator finally came to a grinding halt and the heavy door slid open.

When Jack looked outside, it appeared to him that they were somewhere deep underground. Instead of sky there was a ceiling made of steel and concrete. Flickering orange lamps illuminated an endless field of garbage. There was also water flowing out of a large pipe into a long, deep canal.

Jack could not help asking in a rather bewildered voice. "What is this place?"

"The city dump. Or in other words, home sweet home." There was no trace of her usual sarcasm in her tone. It was a simple statement of fact.

She stepped out of the elevator and began to walk. Jack followed her along her path through the labyrinthine cavern of junk. Broken and discarded items were piled all around them, building up to towers in places. Finally they reached a clear space where a small hut stood. The walls were built of plywood, corrugated metal and plastic, and instead of a door there was a shabby curtain over the entrance.

Jack's bewildered expression returned. "You live here?"

The woman pulled her hood off. "Nobody ever comes to visit, so we won't have to worry about cops interrupting our dinner. Have a seat out here, I'll see if there's any food inside."

She disappeared through the curtain and into the hut before Jack could ask what he was supposed to sit on. Then he noticed some old tires lying around a pile of ashes, where a cooking fire had been. This spot must be both her kitchen and dining room. By the time the woman came out of her hut, Jack had seated himself on one of the tires. She placed a pile of crumpled newspapers and cardboard over the ashes and used a cigarette lighter to start a fire. Then she went back inside, came out with a Bunsen burner and placed it over the fire, then disappeared into the hut again. When she returned again she had a can of something in her hand and held a roll of duct tape in her teeth. After she put the can on top of the burner she took the roll of tape from her mouth and spoke.

"Hope you like beans."

She then sat down on her own tire, pulled her severed right arm out from inside her cloak, and proceeded to try taping it back into place.

Jack could not believe what he was seeing. As he watched her try to tape her severed arm back on, he felt his stomach sinking with guilt. Here was a person in truly dire straits, and he had almost abandoned her. That was something a true samurai would never, ever do.

Ashamed, he lowered his head and stared into the weak flames of the cooking fire. "I … I am sorry."

The woman looked up at him, still holding a piece of tape between her teeth. "Huh?"

"I have been no help to you at all." Jack said. "It is because of me that your arm is broken, and I could not find a mechanic for you."

She dropped the tape in her lap and frowned at him. "What are you talking about? You've been helping me all day! Those robo-cops would've taken me out if you hadn't come along, and you're going to all this trouble to find somebody who can fix me. That's more then anybody else has ever done for me."

Silence fell again, and Jack took a moment to take a real look at the woman's face from across the cooking fire. In spite of the grime on her cheeks and the greasy uncombed bangs, she was really quite pretty. She seemed young, somewhere in her late teens or early twenties. He also noticed that what had looked like earrings earlier were actually screws in her earlobes.

Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but the color of her eyes seemed to match the steel blue shade of her metallic limbs. Her torso was still hidden underneath her patched-up cloak, but he could see that both her legs were made of the same metal as her arms. If not for her very human face and head, she could easily be mistaken for a robot.

Just when he began wondering how she had ended up living in a garbage dump with a body like this, the woman looked up at him again and asked him a question. "Say, who are you anyway?"

He blinked and realized that he had never introduced himself to her. "I am called Jack. And you?"

She shrugged. "I'm called a lot of things. Dumpster diver, homeless bum, walking trashcan, take your pick."

He frowned, thinking she was being sarcastic again. "I meant your name. What is your name?"

She stared into the flames for a long time before she answered. "I don't know."

Jack blinked. "You don't know your name?"

The woman shook her head, still staring at the fire. "Nope. I can't remember anything about myself before I woke up here in the dumps. It's like I didn't even exist before that day." She lifted her taped-on right arm and looked at it closely, as if it could give her the answers she wanted. "Having a name would be nice, though."

Now Jack felt less guilty with himself and more empathy for her. In a way, he could relate to her situation. Since his boyhood he had been burdened with the fate of the world. It was a lonely burden to bear, perhaps the loneliest in the world. But at least he knew who he was and where he came from, and many happy memories to look back on when life was hard. This woman had none of those things, and in that sense she was the most alone a human being could be.

Just then an idea came to him. It was a tiny thing, but it might still be of some help to her. "Perhaps I could give you a name."

The woman looked at him, very confused. "What? Why would you wanna do that?"

"So you will have something to call yourself, until you can regain your memories." He rubbed his chin for a moment in thought. "How does 'Tetsuko' sound?"

"Tet…su…ko?" she repeated, unfamiliar with the foreign word. "What kind of name is that?"

"It is a name from my homeland." Jack explained. "It means 'strong as iron.'"

The woman looked at her hands, contemplating whether it was an appropriate name or not. Then she shrugged. "I guess it's better then nothing."

Soon the beans were warm enough to eat and the woman scooped them out of the can and into two chipped coffee mugs. Their flavor was weak and they were gone quickly, but Jack ate them anyway. After that the woman stamped the fire out with one metal foot, apparently immune to the heat, and entered the hut to sleep. Jack went inside with her, finding the interior of the shack to be just as shabby as the outside. The floor was covered in layers of cardboard, which they both lay on with ratty sheets for blankets.

Again the woman gave Jack a stern warning to keep to his side of the floor. It was very dark inside the hut, so much he could not see her when she removed her cloak, pulled a sheet over herself and went to sleep. After some tossing and turning, Jack eventually fell asleep as well.

He woke up the next morning to the sound of water splashing. Somehow it seemed lighter in the hut, and the woman was not on her side of the floor. As Jack sat up every muscle in his body cried out in pain from sleeping on nothing but cardboard and concrete. He tried to stand up to stretch but his head bumped the corrugated metal ceiling. Groaning from the new pain, he knelt to pick up his sandals and sword and fumbled his way through the curtain door and out of the hut.

The underground junk yard seemed brighter then it had last night. Jack looked up and noticed some skylights letting in some sun through the ceiling. He also noticed that the splashing noises were coming from behind the hut, along with the sound of the woman humming. Curious he peeked around the corner and saw her sitting on a large tire with a bucket full of water in front of her. She was dunking a rag into it, which she then rubbed with a bar of soap. When the rag was sufficiently soapy she rubbed it against herself to clean off the grime that built up on her metal limbs.

She was also not wearing her cloak. It was hanging up on a nail, and for the first time Jack could see that her torso was very much the torso of a normal human woman. She was wearing underwear that was old and dirty, but it wasn't enough to hide all her skin.

Embarrassed and flustered, Jack backed up and bumped into the wall of the hut. The noise gave him away and the woman sat straight up and glared at him. "Hey! What do you think you're doing, you pervert??"

Before Jack could say anything to defend himself, the soapy rag sailed through the air and went splat on his face. He pulled it off and covered his eyes so not to make her even more angry. "I…I apologize! I did not know you were bathing!"

He heard her get up, walk over to him and snatch the rag from his hand. He feared she might hit him with something harder, but instead he heard fabric rustling. "Men…" she grumbled.

When Jack removed his hands from his eyes she was back in her old cloak with her body fully covered again. Her hair was damp from being washed and her face was clean, but her usual scowl was still there.

After glaring at him for a moment, she smirked. "At least now you can't deny that I'm a woman. So, what's the plan today?"

Jack was relieved that she had decided not to hit him and relaxed a bit. "We must continue our search for a mechanic. Your arm is back in place, but it is still broken, isn't it?"

She nodded and held out the damaged arm for him to see. Duct tape was the only thing holding the forearm in place and the hand flopped limply up and down as she shook it. "We should probably look for some food, too." she said. "Those beans were all I had left."

Jack felt somewhat guilty about eating her only food and decided to remedy that. "Then I shall buy our meal."

"What? Jack, you're already paying for my repairs! You don't have to--"

"Yes, I do. You fed me last night, and now I will feed you in return."

For a moment she was speechless. She definitely was not used to having someone do something nice for her. Then she pulled up her hood and muttered. "Fine, do what you want. I don't really care."

Just before she turned away, Jack thought he saw a hint of a smile on her lips. It was gone in a flash.

To be continued...