Ghosts of Punktown Read Online Free

happens spontaneously?”
     
         “Yes. If I look at a person or a picture of a person for too long...or too intensely. It can happen in a matter of minutes. Faster, if I’m trying to get it to happen.”
     
         “But why do you look like a Ha Jiin now?”
     
         “The effect can last until I look long enough at another person’s face to trade for theirs. Or, for lack of another subject, sooner or later I’ll revert back to...me. Under normal circumstances, I try not to stare at people too much. I’ve been watching your face more than I normally would. I should have begun looking like you by now.”
     
         “So why isn’t that happening?”
     
         “I don’t know,” Stake admitted. “This has never happened to me before. I’m...stuck.”
     
         “How long has it been?”
     
         “Three weeks now. Three weeks since I took on the appearance of a man I killed in my last field mission.”
     
         “But you really don’t know why that is?”
     
         Stake swallowed. “I, ah, I can’t say for sure.”
     
         She nodded, and gazed at her computer system. Stake guessed that she was studying a picture of his own, natural face. He knew it would appear subtly unnatural to her. In his default mode, as he called it, the mutant had an oddly unfinished-looking appearance. Too bland, too nondescript, like an oil portrait that had been roughed in but never completed. She had probably seen androids that were more life-like.
     
         “I can schedule an appointment with one of our doctors at the VA Hospital,” she said. “Or maybe it would be more helpful if you spoke to one of our counselors...”
     
         “Mm,” he grunted.
     
         “In any case...do you have a family, Corporal? Anyplace to go?”
     
         “My mother is dead,” he told her. She had been a mutant, too. They had lived in the Punktown slum called Tin Town; it held the highest concentration of mutants in the city. As far as he knew his father was still alive, if his drug-addicted state could be called that. “No family,” was all the further elaboration he would give.
     
         “All right, then I’ll extend your temporary shelter in the VA Hospice until you can find an apartment. And of course you have a ten year pension, but frankly it’s limited in nature and you’re encouraged to make use of our resources here in searching for employment.”
     
         “Yes, ma’am.”
     
         “The mask, Corporal Stake. It’s because you’re afraid to upset the other returnees?”
     
         His stolen face – the face of a dead man, as if grafted on to replace his own obliterated countenance – gave her a sickly smile. “It’s to prevent the other returnees from wanting to lynch me.”
     
     
     
    2
     
         “What are the goggles for?” She had smiled nervously when she asked it.
     
         “I damaged my eyes in the war,” he’d lied.
     
         The Blue War. The light of twin blue-white suns beating down through the jungle canopy, a jungle where every plant from tree to flower to the grass itself was a shade of blue. Blue like the flesh of the Ha Jiin themselves.
     
         The military surplus goggles were like those Cal Williams and many other soldiers had worn for night vision, or to see distantly, or to gaze through the walls of Ha Jinn structures. But when it had come time to shoot, it was through the lens of his sniper rifle’s scope that he had peered.
     
         Right now, he had adjusted the spectrum filter on his goggles. Right now, everything he saw was tinted blue.
     
         Cal paced the tiny apartment where he had been staying since his discharge from the VA Hospital. He had been returned to his own dimension a few months before all these others who were flooding back now, but it was being badly wounded that had won him that head start. The last treatment had erased the scars on his chest. They had