Chapter IV

One bullet train ride later, Jack and Tetsuko found themselves on the opposite side of the city. After some walking, Jack worried that perhaps they had taken a wrong turn somewhere. He had asked Tetsuko about it, but she was sure that they were following the map the aliens had given them correctly. Jack had no other choice than to follow her lead and glance around to make sure there was nobody following them. This neighborhood made him very uneasy. Here the buildings were smaller and much older. Many of them were in ruins or boarded up, and there were no cars or people in the streets

They finally stopped in front of what appeared to be an abandoned apartment building. Jack studied the aging structure with a critical eye. The walls were covered with peeling paint and the dirty windows were barred and locked from the inside. There was an electric sign above the door, but the lights were burned out and the letters were in a language Jack did not recognize. If anyone had ever lived here, it looked as though they had moved out a long time ago.

He turned to Tetsuko, who was standing beside him on the sidewalk. "Are you sure this is the right place?"

Tetsuko looked at the piece of paper in her hand with some confusion. "I think so. It's the right address, anyway. Let's see if anyone's home."

She climbed the steps that led to the front door. There was a small speaker box in the doorway with all the buttons removed except for one. When she pressed it a crackling buzz came out. She waited a moment for a response, but none came. Again she pressed the button, holding it down a bit longer. Again there was no response. Growing irritated, she pressed the button repeatedly in a series of short and annoying buzzes.

Soon she was interrupted by a very deep, hoarse voice yelling through the speaker. "Go away! I'm not home! This is a recording!"

Tetsuko was about to yell back a few angry words of her own, but Jack stopped her just in time. "Excuse me, sir, but are you a mechanic?"

The speaker box gave a disdainful grunt in reply. "Humph. Who wants to know?"

"Please, sir," Jack went on in the most polite manner he could. "My companion is a cyborg, and her arm is in grave need of repair. All of the other mechanics we have seen have turned us away. You are our last hope."

"Humph. I don't do business with strangers." the deep voice replied.

Jack was not ready to give up so easily. "We are not strangers. We were sent here by waiters from a noodle shop on the other side of the city. They told us you were a master of your craft."

The speaker box was quiet for a moment. Then it gave another grunt. "Humph. Fine. I'm unlocking the door now. Take the stairs to the seventh floor. I'll meet you there."

The large iron door gave a noisy creak and groaned in pain as it dragged itself slowly open. Jack and Tetsuko stepped into a drab, dimly lit lobby and walked towards a flight of stairs. Behind them the door slowly and painfully dragged itself shut, and the metallic echo rang for several seconds before fading back to silence.

Except for the wooden clacking of Jack's sandals and the steely clanking of Tetsuko's feet against the stairs, there was no other sound anywhere in the building. When they reached the seventh floor there was only one door open at the end of the long, empty corridor. A single bright light cast a huge black shadow on the opposite wall, the silhouette of a very big man. Jack and Tetsuko approached the open door cautiously. When they got there they both stopped and stared at the person there.

Standing in the doorway, with a bright light shining behind him, was a little man barely more than six inches high. He had a large round face and a pair of little horns growing out of his head. His face was a wrinkled, vinegary brown and his strawberry nose looked like the moon through a telescope. His head, with its stubby horns, was bald as an egg. He wore a faded set of red coveralls and dingy black boots.

Jack immediately recognized what the small creature was. He had never actually seen one before, but he had heard tales and descriptions of them during his travels, mainly from people who used flying machines. Before he could stop himself, words were coming out of his mouth. "You … you are a gremlin!"

The little man's face took on the expression of someone who had heard that reaction too many times before. "The name's Gus." He had the same deep, hoarse voice from the speaker box, which did not fit with his tiny body at all. "And yes, I'm a gremlin. You got a problem with that?"

Jack stammered, trying to find the least offensive way to put his thoughts into words. "I-I do not understand. I have always heard that gremlins were best at damaging machines, not repairing them."

"Only idiots believe everything they hear." Gus retorted. "I've made an honest living for over fifty years fixing other peoples broken stuff, an' if you want me do it for you you'd better watch your mouth!"

Feeling very embarrassed, Jack knelt down and bowed his head to the gremlin's eye level in apology. "Please forgive my rudeness, sir. I did not mean to offend you. I only hope you will still consider assisting my companion with her repairs."

The gremlin regarded him sternly before giving another grunt. He then turned his attention to Tetsuko, who had bent down to get a closer look at the odd little creature. Unlike Jack, she was openly gawking at Gus and did not seem to realize this might be rude. The gremlin looked back at her the way a professional art critic might study a very amateurish painting. "Humph. Come in here so I can take a better look."

Gus turned around and walked into the brightly lit apartment. The two humans followed him very carefully, not wanting to step on him by accident. Both of them were feeling rather bewildered as they took in their new surroundings. The walls were decorated with images of various different kinds of flying machines and portraits of other gremlins. There were some normal-sized furnishings, but most everything else was scaled down several times, and many of these small furnishings were mounted on shelves about three feet above the floor. It was like stepping into a very disorganized dollhouse.

There was a low coffee table with no chairs in the center of the room. When they neared the table they saw a miniature stepladder leading up to it and certain gremlin-sized items on the surface. As the two humans knelt on the floor, Gus climbed a stepladder and walked to the middle of the tabletop as if it were a stage. "Okay, miss, what seems to be the problem?"

"This." Tetsuko placed her severed right arm on the table in front of him.

Gus walked right up to the damaged end of the limb and eyed it closely. He pulled a pair of gloves from his pocket, put them on, and began handling the broken bits of wire and circuitry. "Humph. This is a fine mess right here." he muttered aloud. "Leaky oil an' exposed electrical systems, fire hazard just waitin' to happen. Nasty scorch marks, maybe from a laser. An' what's this stuff? Duct tape? Humph."

He clicked his tongue and shook his head from side to side. Finally he looked up at his customer. "This is a highly sophisticated piece of technology you got here, miss, the most advanced I seen in years. How long you had these parts for an' where'd you get 'em?"

The question caught Tetsuko off guard. She looked down at her lap, dark bangs concealing her eyes. Gus waited for her to answer him but she remained mute. Kneeling at the other end of the table, Jack cleared his throat to get the gremlin's attention. "Er, Gus … Tetsuko has lost much of her memory. She cannot remember how she came to have these parts."

The gremlin arched his wrinkled brows. "Amnesia, huh? Humph. That's pretty typical for a lotta cyborgs. Well, it doesn't make much difference. I can still fix it anyway."

Tetsuko's head snapped up again. "You can?"

"Sure, no sweat." Gus said, tucking his thumbs into his pockets and proudly raising himself up to his full six-and-a-half inches of height. "But if you ask me, it ain't just your arm that needs lookin' at. When's the last time you got any basic maintenance done?"

She blinked in confusion. "Maintenance?"

"Yeah, you know. Oiling your joints, polishing, weather-proofing, that kinda stuff."

Again she went mute and stared down at her lap. She fidgeted nervously with the edges of her tattered cloak with her only good hand.

"Humph. Thought so." Gus pulled a tiny digital tablet from his pocket and began writing on it with a stylus no bigger than a pin. "Arm repairs, plus basic maintenance, we're lookin' at about … five, maybe six hours of working time."

Tetsuko balked at this. "Six hours?!"

Gus arched his wrinkled brows at her. "What? You think fixin' bionic prosthetics is like puttin' on a Band-Aid? This kinda meticulous operation takes a lotta time an' hard work, not to mention money." He tapped his chin thoughtfully. "Let's see now… I'd say somewhere within ten thousand credits, if you're lucky."

"Hold on a second." she said. "What exactly are gonna do to me?"

"It's pretty simple." Gus said. "First I'm gonna have to run a full body scan on you to see how much wiring is attached to your nerves. Then I'll open up your forearm here and get rid of all these busted electrical systems. Next, I'll disconnect your upper arm from your shoulder so I can install new biosensors to your nerves and muscles, and then hook those up to new wires. I might need to give you new controllers and actuators, too. When that's done I can put all the metal back on and reconnect your arm, and move on to the basic maintenance service. Or we could do the maintenance service first and deal with your arm later, it's up to you."

Jack did not find the tiny mechanic's explanation simple at all. Besides the part about money, he understood very little of what Gus was talking about. For all his time spent in the world of the future, his knowledge of its technological advancements was still very limited. However, Tetsuko seemed to grasp it and all the signs that something was wrong were going off. Her mouth was set firmly in a deep scowl and her steely glare was back. After Gus had finished speaking there was a prolonged and weighty silence at the table. Tetsuko's hard expression remained the same. Then, without a word, she got up from the floor, picked up her broken arm, and started walking toward the door.

Jack and Gus both stared confusedly at her retreating back. "Hey! Where do you think you're goin'?" Gus yelled after her.

"Er, perhaps I should speak with her." Jack said to the tiny mechanic. He stood and caught up to Tetsuko just as she was going out the door and into the hall, but she quickened her pace when she heard him. "Tetsuko, wait! What are you doing? Gus has not repaired your arm yet."

The woman stopped halfway down the hall, her back still turned to him. "No."

He became even more confused. Here at last there was a mechanic who could finally help her, and suddenly she did not want it? Something was definitely wrong. "Tetsuko…"

She whirled around to face him, her steely eyes flashing in the dim corridor. "No! There is no way in this or any other world that I'm gonna let that little quack take me apart!"

Jack studied her angry face. She looked very much like she was truly upset, but there was something else there. Her voice had a slight tremor in it, and her eyes were open wider than they should have been. "You are afraid."

Her voice rose up in volume several notches and she began waving her good arm in a wild frenzy as she spoke. "Of course I'm afraid, stupid! Didn't you hear the way he was talking about me? This is my body he wants to mess with! And he's a gremlin, Jack! You said yourself, those guys break machines!"

Jack looked back at her with absolute calm and seriousness. She was overreacting, and the only way to calm her down was for him to remain calm. "I do not think Gus is like that." His tone was much quieter than hers. "We would not have been sent to him if he were untrustworthy."

She became defensive and jabbed her finger at his chest accusingly. "Why are you taking his side? He could be swindling you! A complete overhaul is gonna cost you a fortune!"

Jack's serious expression did not change. "I am well aware of that. But I believe it will be worth the price."

"How could it possibly be worth it to you? You're not getting anything from this! Why are you doing all this, anyway? You've wasted all this time trying to help me, and you don't even know me!"

She paused, as if she had just hit upon some revelation. The volume of her voice went down several notches, but the emotion in it was still burning hot, if not hotter. "That's it, isn't it? You feel sorry for me. Well, guess what, pal? I don't want your pity. I never asked for you to save me from the cops, or fix my arm, or feed me, or anything! So go find yourself some other charity case, 'cause I'm out of here!"

She stormed away and stomped toward the staircase, but before her foot could touch the first stair, a strong hand suddenly grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her back around. Jack's face was less than a foot away from hers, and the look in his eyes had gone from serious to intimidating. She became acutely aware that he was a full head taller than her, and the way he was looking at her made her feel even smaller.

"Tetsuko." The name almost seemed to weigh as much as the iron in its meaning from the way he said it. "Listen to me."

Her mouth would not open even if she tried to speak. This was a side of Jack she had not seen before and had not known existed. It felt like he was looking straight into her soul. Her shoulders were made of steel and she had no sense of touch in them, but his grip on them remained firm.

"You and I are not so different." Jack said. "I am alone as well. I have no home or family in this world, and each day I must fight for survival." He seemed to actually grow calmer as he spoke, and his expression became more sad than angry. "It is a difficult and dangerous life, one I would never wish upon another human being. That is why I want to help you."

It was Tetsuko's turn to feel guilty now. She averted his gaze by looking down at the floor, one clenched fist trembling at her side. Her thoughts were a jumbled mess, and several seconds of silence passed as she tried to pick out what words to say. "Jack, I … I can't do this. I … I don't know what'll happen."

Jack loosened his grip on her shoulders. His tone became more reassuring as he attempted to reason with her. "Try to think of it this way. If Gus examines you, he may uncover some evidence as to who made you this way and why. He could find out truths about your life that you have forgotten."

Surprised, she looked up at his face. His expression was still very calm and serious, but there was much more compassion in it. Somehow it did not make her feel quite as small as before and her resolve began to weaken. More than anything she wanted to know the truth about herself, and she had thought she would take any chance to find it. Now here was a chance, but she was too afraid of what could go wrong to seize it. The image of a strange, possibly wicked little creature touching her body in certain places made her very uneasy. Her gaze fell back on the small space of floor between them and remained fixed there.

Jack sensed her uncertainty. "Do not be afraid, Tetsuko. I will not leave you."

Tetsuko looked back at him with wide, anxious eyes. She placed her small, steel hand on top of his and gripped it tightly. "Jack … you promise you'll stay?"

Jack smiled warmly and nodded. "I promise. I will stay for as long as you need me, and I will not let you come to harm."

Tetsuko looked back at him very seriously to make sure that he was telling the truth. She looked down at the floor again and heaved a heavy sigh, then looked up again with determined, brave face. "Okay, then. Let's do this thing."

To be continued…