Afterglow, p.1
Afterglow, page 1
PRAISE FOR TIM JORDAN
“Reminiscent of the best space opera mixed with the gritty, violent dystopia of cyberpunk. Recommended for fans of Alastair Reynolds and William Gibson.”
Booklist on Glow
“Running beneath the violent tangle of identity and memory is a fascinating exploration of how people cope – or fail to – with adversity.”
Publishers Weekly on Glow
“Dynamic prose, cutting-edge science, and thoughtful ruminations on the future of our species – Tim Jordan’s Glow is a terrific read from a major new voice. A first-rate novel; I was enthralled.”
Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of The Oppenheimer Alternative on Glow
“A deftly written debut jewel of cyberpunk; an ode to transcendent humanity. With the immortal angst of Altered Carbon, Glow heralds a capable new voice in the genre.”
Terry Madden, Award-winning author of the Three Wells of the Sea series on Glow
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Glow
ANGRY ROBOT
An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd
Unit 11, Shepperton House
89 Shepperton Road
London N1 3DF
UK
angryrobotbooks.com
twitter.com/angryrobotbooks
Another one bites the Glow
An Angry Robot paperback original, 2022
Copyright © Tim Jordan 2022
Cover by Tom Shone
Edited by Paul Simpson and Robin Triggs
Set in Meridien
All rights reserved. Tim Jordan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Sales of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.
Angry Robot and the Angry Robot icon are registered trademarks of Watkins Media Ltd.
ISBN 978 0 85766 987 2
Ebook ISBN 978 0 85766 988 9
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Ltd.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Joanna.
This one is all for you, my love.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 The Scrap Dealers
CHAPTER 2 In Hiding
CHAPTER 3 Perfection
CHAPTER 4 Dog in a Poker Game
CHAPTER 5 The CyberSea
CHAPTER 6 All That Remains
CHAPTER 7 Jorben
CHAPTER 8 Nevis
CHAPTER 9 The Gaia Bar
CHAPTER 10 Hex
CHAPTER 11 Confessional
CHAPTER 12 The Psycho Switch
CHAPTER 13 The Star-River
CHAPTER 14 Storm
CHAPTER 15 Qinghai Lake
CHAPTER 16 Leal
CHAPTER 17 Leaving Home
CHAPTER 18 It Moves
CHAPTER 19 Flies
CHAPTER 20 The Can
CHAPTER 21 Solent
CHAPTER 22 Hostage
CHAPTER 23 The Insider
CHAPTER 24 Run Free
CHAPTER 25 Confinement
CHAPTER 26 Reassigned
CHAPTER 27 Del
CHAPTER 28 Back Stab
CHAPTER 29 Dead Man’s Hangover
CHAPTER 30 Capgras
CHAPTER 31 Conflation of the Unlikely
CHAPTER 32 Terminal Velocity
CHAPTER 33 Plague
CHAPTER 34 Shuttered
CHAPTER 35 The Imaginary Imagining the Unimaginable
CHAPTER 36 Cyborg-Sickness
CHAPTER 37 Leaving Home… Again
CHAPTER 38 The Pointy End
CHAPTER 39 Breakfast in the Head
CHAPTER 40 Reconnection
CHAPTER 41 Regen
CHAPTER 42 Seer
CHAPTER 43 The Legend of Rex
CHAPTER 44 A Smile is Still a Smile
CHAPTER 45 Ghost in the Wrong Machine
CHAPTER 46 Find a Way
CHAPTER 47 The Wild, Wild West
CHAPTER 48 The Delegation
CHAPTER 49 The Way Home
CHAPTER 50 Fullerene Dreams
CHAPTER 51 A Ship in a Storm
CHAPTER 52 Sinking
CHAPTER 53 Pink Cadillac
CHAPTER 54 Flight and Fight
CHAPTER 55 Incarceration
CHAPTER 56 Born Again
CHAPTER 57 Hidden Bliss
CHAPTER 58 Lament
CHAPTER 59 Mass Driver
CHAPTER 60 Funeral
CHAPTER 61 The Enclave
CHAPTER 62 The Secret Life of a Gurney
CHAPTER 63 Basic Training
CHAPTER 64 Nosebleed Seats
CHAPTER 65 Shoal Awareness
CHAPTER 66 Migration
CHAPTER 67 Soul Transcription
CHAPTER 68 Meltdown
CHAPTER 69 Mind Game
CHAPTER 70 Waypoint
CHAPTER 71 The Battle Home
CHAPTER 72 Bunkered
CHAPTER 73 Obliterate
CHAPTER 74 And Obfuscate
CHAPTER 75 Nathan
CHAPTER 76 Disintegration
CHAPTER 77 The Bridge
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CHAPTER 1
The Scrap Dealers
A cool, salt breeze whipped in from the South China Sea, picking up a cocktail of scents from the Pearl River Delta and the city of Macau. It surged over the rolling hills and farmlands nearby, borrowing fragrances of country life and dense, sweltering humanity. A particularly feisty gust passed through one of the open windows of Keller Morten’s pickup truck, leaching a little moisture from his brow before exiting out the other side. With a sigh, it carried on its epic journey across Guangdong Province, taking a hint of Keller’s chemical essence, his fear, joy, and hopes, along for the ride.
Through his monocular, Keller saw the smoke from Honneck’s truck long before the actual vehicle slewed around a distant corner and into view. “An hour late,” he muttered, “not bad.”
He thumbed the starter and his pickup’s electric motor hummed to life. The vehicle rolled forward and off the dirt road, nosing into the forest of tree-high soybean plants. Out of sight of the road, he u-turned and sat waiting, fingering the pistol, snug inside his jeans’ pocket.
An old fear surfaced as a prickle at the base of his skull, oozing like melting icicles down his spine. That fear of first contact. Of conflict! He looked at his hand, the one that used to hold the scalpel, how it shook uncontrollably and then froze, useless.
No, not here. Keller relaxed his focus, seeing through his fingers and the towering bean stems, to the distant hills and clouded skies. The fingernails of his other hand dug into the steering wheel as he imagined having cyborg strength. Her strength! Crushing the wheel and taming the fear.
He conjured her face, her smile, those magenta eyes, and the panic receded.
The honk of a truck horn snapped him alert. Seconds later, he watched the tar-black smokestack ease off the road and onto his newly flattened soybean trail. Honneck’s ancient diesel vehicle labored and gasped across the rough terrain before grinding to a stalling halt face-to-face with Keller’s.
Honneck rolled out of his truck cab and dropped the considerable height onto the dirt, noticeably touching his own concealed weapon in his pocket as he landed. “Keller! Long time… long time.” A smile peeled easily from his flat, bronzed face as he stretched out a grossly oversized hand for an obligatory businessman’s shake.
Keller tipped his baseball cap with his free hand. Though he towered over the man, he was easily the lighter of the two. “You are a long, long way from home, my friend.”
Honneck patted his truck like a revered steed. “Hunt. Drive. Sell. If God is good, then I go back home a little richer.” The truck’s rear end resembled a mobile yurt, an elongated lattice dome of wood and mesh covered in layers of skins and tarps that flapped angrily in the breeze.
“Show me what you’ve got,” Keller said, feeling a cool wash of relief as initial contact passed uneventfully.
“You’re my best customer. I always give you first pickings.” Honneck gave a nervous laugh and looked around as if expecting Alliance police to come surging out of the bean crops. “You’re gonna wanna buy it all.”
“We’ll see.” It was over a year since their last meeting. Back then Macau had been an independent city, one of the many local dictatorships that comprised China following the Nova-Insanity. Trade was easy, rules were few, but the Alliance came, crashing the party in one of their colossal embassy-class warships, to press their laws and rules onto the skeptical community. Increased patrols and new high-tech surveillance made trade transactions like theirs less frequent and far more dangerous. Honneck could have been bought. The whole thing a trap. But that easy smile reassured him.
Honneck hauled a plank ramp down from the truck and climbed up into the dimly lit space. Keller followed, pushing past dangling cables, chain-linked plates of metal, and swathes of fabric. A row of limbs rattled like grisly wind chimes as he shouldered through, smelling burnt plastic, machine oil, and wood rot. Cockroaches scuttled under his feet while the shells of their other, less fortunate cousins, crunched into a fine powder as he shuffle d deeper into the truck’s interior.
“Arms.” Honneck ran his hands lovingly over the suspended appendages. Keller perused the collection: mostly broken fragments, electric drive units, no micro-pile power supplies, no electro-polymer muscles. Nothing pre-Nova-Insanity – the real good stuff.
“That it?” Keller tried to sound even more disappointed than he truly was. It was a long day’s journey out here for just ordinary scrap.
Honneck dismissed the limbs, sweeping them aside like a macabre curtain to reveal racks of Inner-I units, processor blocks, and smaller, more intricate robotic fragments. “Nice ball-joint, look… good price.” He jabbered on, thrusting a severed plastic hand at Keller’s face.
“Not bad.” Keller flexed its fingers; smooth, clean, probably still worked if hooked up correctly. He picked up an Inner-I block. A glass eyeball dangled from a single connecting wire. He grimaced noticing a smear of dried blood on the component. The eye was nice work, a self-contained unit with an internal ball-drive and pre-processor. “Where’s the other eye?”
“One eye’s plenty.” Honneck winked and doubled the width of his grin. “But the best stuff’s here.” Honneck hovered theatrically over a filthy black tarpaulin at the rear of the truck. “They pay big money for this in the city.” He whisked aside the tarp and Keller found himself straining into the darkness trying to see what lay underneath.
He gagged. Staggering backwards as he saw a human corpse, just the top half, severed at the waist and charred beyond recognition. “What the fuck!” He shoved a hand into his mouth. The other fumbled into his pocket seeking his gun. The dark, dank world of Honneck’s truck spun around him, a prison, a crushing hell, that just had to be escaped.
“No,” Honneck said, seizing Keller’s arm with an alarmingly strong grip that assured Keller that even if his hand found the gun, he’d never get to use it. “Look. That’s not a dead man, just a robot. A robot good enough to look like a dead man.”
Keller’s deep sense of curiosity thrust his fears aside. His world stopped spinning, and the visions of white rooms filled with dead and dying people faded, returning him back to the interior of Honneck’s truck. Leaning in closer, he saw the body’s arms were broken away beneath the elbows, no visible bones, the limbs just trailed off into thinner and thinner fibers. He tilted the chest cavity up with his foot and looked inside. It was empty, a few lumps of black material hung from a mesh framework that was clearly not a vitrified human ribcage.
Running his fingers up the longer of the arms, he felt no drive units or actuators. No power modules hiding in the chest, just a lightweight hollow shell. “All the good bits are missing. This is just a clod of fried carbon fiber.”
A skull leered through tatters of knotted black fiber, translucent and crystalline, definitely not bone, metal, or even plastic. He grasped one of the carbonized cheeks and tried to pull the charred material free, but it was tough and sharp, ripping the skin from the tips of his fingers.
“The head’s made of crystal, very tough.” Honneck rapped on the skull with a knuckle. “I tried to crack it open with a jack-hammer, but it wouldn’t break.”
“Nice job. If there was anything useful inside, then you probably busted it.” He noted the empty eye sockets, a thin retinal cable dropped out of each one. A tiny bead on the end of each strand looked like it was growing into a new eye. Probably a new type of eyeball connector – might be worth something.
“Where did you find this?” Keller was on his knees, suddenly intrigued by the find.
“Herdsman up in the mountains somewhere. It left a crater in the ice.” Honneck grasped his hands together as if in prayer. “After it dropped straight from outer space.”
“Yeah… right, freaking space robots.” Keller recalled the recent war between the GFC and the Breakout Alliance. TwoLunar ripping apart. The Cloud9 orbital exploding. Looking at the charring on this machine, it really could have fallen from orbit.
“There’s nothing left… just a head.” Keller said, deciding that he wanted the piece. If he could drill open the skull, there might be some high-end electronics or data modules, perhaps some useful AI software in there. It would be a gamble to spend the last of his money on such a piece of junk, but if he were right–
“I can get a thousand for it in the city.” Honneck was a poor liar, but great at getting interesting robot scrap.
“A thousand?” Keller hopped down off the truck and began the obligatory walk-away-in-disgust routine. “One-twenty for the robot, that Inner-I and eyeball unit, and throw that spare hand in for free.”
“You’re killing me man. Two-fifty, then I can feed my family for a few more days.”
“You should eat less,” Keller patted Honneck’s rotund stomach and pulled his truck door open. “I can’t go higher than one-fifty. You’ll have to go to the city with it. Good luck getting past the Alliance patrols. They just love aging Tu parts traffickers, you know.”
“Two hundred.”
“One-sixty,” Keller countered again, feeling the small, inadequate wad of his remaining two-hundred dollars scrunched inside his pocket.
“One-ninety.”
“One-sixty-one.” There… he saw that nervous tick on Honneck’s face. He wanted to unload this piece. Maybe it really was from space, maybe military or Alliance, hot property, valuable but too dangerous for this old-school trader.
Keller started his engine and began turning the vehicle around and up onto the road. He pointed it back at distant Macau, believing his gut instinct that Honneck would run after him all the way to the city border for a few extra bucks.
As the truck lurched back onto the road, his glovebox flopped open and a clump of crumpled notes and old cyborg magazines he’d picked up along the way tumbled out onto the floor. “Come on man!” Honneck yelled as he jogged alongside. “Give me something to work with here.” His face was rapidly turning from healthy bronze to a flustered purple.
Keller hit the brakes and reached for the fallen papers. “I might have something for you.”
In the end, they transferred the merchandise in a different produce field, a full kilometer from where they started. Keller handed over one-hundred and sixty-five Macau dollars and an antique copy of Augmented Magazine. Once the cash was in hand, and Keller was back in his truck, Honneck dropped his smile and grew serious. “Be careful, Keller. The herdsmen say that robot of yours is haunted.”
Keller’s foot hovered over the accelerator. “Haunted?”
“Yeah, it moves in the night when no one is looking.”
Keller’s heart sank. The robot probably wasn’t valuable, just junk those superstitious herdsmen had attached some mythical nonsense to. “It can’t move,” he said, choking back his disappointment. “There’s no power supply.” He punched the pedal and Honneck vanished into his dust.
CHAPTER 2
In Hiding
The prickling sting of a scanner singed Rex’s skin. He ran, but the weight of the corpse zip-tied to his arm dragged him down, down into the dark, wet mud.
“Rex? You okay buddy?” The voice cut away the night and his eyes sprang open. No dead man. No zip-ties. A rectangle of light above resolved into a skylight window. The corpse was now bedsheets wrapped around his arm, and the cloying, wet mud just his own sweat and drool.
“Rex?” The knocking on the cellar door grew more insistent. “Come on buddy, snap out of it.”
But the feeling of being scanned still prickled his scalp, a focused beam of energy working its way up and down, lingering over specific spots: his brain, his heart, drilling through his skin to the network of tiny machines inside. I am Glow. I am the plague!
The door latch jangled, opened, and somebody stepped inside, framed by the artificial light from the basement stairs. “Rex. For goodness’ sake.”
He tried to grab back control of his thoughts before they wandered back to him, the name he couldn’t bear to mention. Even thinking his name brought him closer to the surface, gave him more power, and one day he’d take over again and Rex’s life would no longer be his own.
“Look at me… my eyes… my face. Come to me, Rex.”
“John?” Rex looked up at the concerned old man; a lifetime of worry scored his leathery skin. From down low he was radiant, godlike: my Master. As Rex sat up and stood, suddenly looking down on him, he became just a man, just John. A friend whose dog was buried in the back garden. A dog who somehow, through an unlikely chain of events, still lived inside Rex’s Glow-based mind and applied the force and motivation to his very human body.
