Glow, p.11
Glow, page 11
He pushed the dumpster lid open, poked his head up through the filth and blinked at the waning sunlight. Evening quiet had settled across the city as he eased out, feet-first, and left the side street, cloaked in nature’s odiferous security blanket. People veered around him as if he possessed a magical shield, his own special superpower.
He remembered wandering through the Tellus District crowds, unsure if he was stalking Mira or just letting the dogs pull him back to the rescue sanctuary. He recalled leaving them in the yard and tugging the wire gate closed as he turned and fled. The world became a distorted tube, morphing around him like some celestial cylinder. The voices yelled and clamored inside of his skull.
Black circles falling through black circles. Overwhelmed, he fell…
And emerged as…
Nothing… No memories at all, no rapacious dealers, no murderous addict, no angry, shrieking woman or bawling child. He’d been them all at some time, but not this time. Had the Future-Lord silenced those demons, removed their power to take Rex away?
He wandered on, using the Sisters’ cathedral spire as a reference point. As the Moon, stars and faltering neon lit the city, the cathedral loomed close. A great black rectangle that the Sisters kept in darkness. Rex thought it added a sinister air to the building. A subliminal message proclaiming: Behold! The Future-Lord is here.
Over the years the hostel had spread like an alien growth, absorbing nearby blocks, cloaking them under roof sections and the poles and cables of its own infrastructure, binding everything into a singular, machine-controlled hive.
He paused on the grand entrance stairway, some of the stonework still bore the original Christian symbols from its past. Rex knew nothing of its history, only that it had been moved from somewhere in Europe back before the Insanity when money was no object. Now, it was a homeless shelter run by robots. Robots that promulgated a new faith. Dog-eat-dog even applied to religions, Rex realized. Odd that it had never really applied to dogs.
Heavy-legged, he trudged up the mountain of steps into a cloistered courtyard ringed with reinforced doors and giant donut-shaped security scanners. He nearly made it to the hostel entrance before a voice called him to a halt.
“Hello, Rex,” Sister-Zero glided soundlessly out from the shadows. The features of her translucent plastic face arranged in a stern, but compassionate expression befitting the hostel’s security monitor.
“Sister-Zee.” Rex nodded her way. He usually hated these interrogations, but felt fine with it tonight. Next to the lich, Sister-Zero was more of a comforting presence than a threat.
“You’ve been missing for three days, Rex.”
“Three–” He swallowed hard, suddenly feeling new bruises on his head and body, ones that couldn’t possibly come from fleeing the lich. He stared down at his palms that suddenly smarted, seeing chaffed, raw flesh where skin should have been.
“Have you been in trouble?” She slid closer, silent and sinister.
“No… no Sister. I’m good. I must have… fallen over.” He felt his deceit boiling to the surface, impossible to hide. The Sisters could read minds. He knew that and hung his head. Silence was the best course here.
“You’ve been sleeping in the garbage again,” she stated.
“Yes, Sister. I was scared, so I hid–”
“You had a decoherence incident, Rex?”
“Possibly, Sister. I mean… I don’t remember.” Memories of bounding through streets on all-fours suddenly washed through his mind.
“Should I remove your outside work privileges, Rex? Confine you to hostel duties?”
He dropped to his knees, shuffling close to the soot-black hem of the Sister’s cloak. “No, please… I love the dogs… love my work. It won’t happen again. It’s just that I met–”
“You met someone new?”
His confession tumbled out. “Mira. She’s homeless. She was lost on a bridge, and…” He caught himself falling into the trap of babbling and clamped a hand over his mouth. Then realizing how incriminating the gesture was, he dropped the hand back to his side, knowing it was too late.
“Was there any trouble, Rex?” Her slim, white hand reached out and gently clasped his shoulder. The touch was tender, but hinted of a machine strength that could knot girders.
“She was running from a lich. I saved her and we ran and–” a moment of inspiration clicked inside his head “–and we hid in a garbage dumpster until it was gone.” He knew from previous interrogations that giving the Sister a little of the truth worked best, and that outright lies usually resulted in further, more penetrating interrogations.
She paused as if processing this surprising information. “You are safe from liches here, Rex. You should have come immediately home and brought your friend with you.” Her hand pulled back with a gentle whir of motors.
“I tried, Sister, but she didn’t want to come.”
“You will be attending Salvation class later?” Although phrased as a question he knew he didn’t really have a choice.
“I look forward to it.” A small lie, but his near-perfect attendance record allowed some wiggle room.
“Go clean yourself up, Rex.” She turned away, and headed back to the cloister like a smooth, jet-black sculpture gliding across ice.
Rex stepped through the scanner, straight into the food hall. An automatic dispenser delivered a generous blast of disinfectant and odor neutralizer that followed him like a sentient cloud.
The stadium-sized food hall echoed with the sound of a thousand plastic knives, forks and plates. Sisters directed the flow of people with signs on top of sticks, barking orders through loud hailers attached to their hands. In the background was the music, always the music, funneled down from ceiling speakers so people could cluster and listen to whatever genre helped or pleased them most. Without his music-cancelling headphones, Rex felt the personas inside stir, latching onto the sounds and melodies that coalesced them back into whole beings with promises of childhood, teenage memories and loves.
Why don’t I have music? The answer snapped at him in Mira’s voice: Maybe because you’re a fucking dog and dogs don’t do music!
Fingers in ears, he rushed through, ignoring the pull of food odors and the drag of hunger in his gut. He’d been decohered long enough, couldn’t risk it happening again, not with the Sisters watching his every move.
Safe and silent in his room, he scratched three new Xs on the wall, bland and straight, his encoded equivalent of question marks. Head buried in his pillow, stomach growling like an animal, he tried to sleep. But the lich was coming and the Sisters would take him away from his dogs if he screwed up again. And then there was Mira, that lost and weird woman with the green eyes…
Why had the Future-Lord led him to her? And why had she just left? Was there some meaning to the encounter that he’d missed or was she right: the Future-Lord was just another big, fat glowworm burrowing holes through his mind? And if that huge presence wasn’t the Future-Lord then who or what was it? Some heinous beast just waiting for the right song to cohere and wriggle free from its shell to take over his body and wreak havoc while he watched, a pinned and powerless spectator trapped in his own life.
CHAPTER 15
Infiltrator
“What the hell’s wrong with your head?” yelled the grim-faced, square-headed recruitment officer, sending spittle and fetid breath into Jett’s face. “Someone paint a face on your skull?”
“I lost my face in combat,” Jett said.
The officer went silent, raised an eyebrow, and recruited Jett on the spot. The Broken hired dozens of thugs every day. Most didn’t last. The pay was terrible, working conditions worse, but the bar to entry was low: a thick head, Amp-addiction, and proclivity toward violence were ample qualifications.
“You can use your own gun or rent one from the weapons pool,” the officer growled, showing Jett a cupboard full of motley armaments. Jett picked out a well-notched composite baseball bat and a wide-bore shotgun with old-fashioned explosive shells duct-taped into a shoulder strap. He didn’t really want or need the weapons, but they completed his Amped-thug image nicely.
His designated patrol was a corner of the North Welkin District, a single block from the Broken’s headquarters building. He traversed his new beat, moving from corner to corner, reporting to his starting station every ten minutes. Loitering and ambushing were encouraged, anyone not showing a broken-skull security badge was to be interrogated and optionally endowed with a real broken skull.
Jett used patrol duty to study the safehouses spread in rings around the HQ, each with a barracks of quality troops. A drifting cloud of thugs, like Jett, formed a cheap and effective early warning system. If rival militias came calling, the Broken could bring considerable muscle and firepower to bear down on any part of their domain in just seconds.
People came and went from the safehouses delivering goods and collecting payments. At day’s end, the senior officers in armored cars carried the takings back to HQ. After his working day, Jett collected a small roll of currency which he added to his ample stash acquired from pickpocketing businesspeople in Welkin. Off duty, he vanished into a side alley, climbed up the inside wall of a disused warehouse into a hidden loft, where he cached his cumbersome weaponry and reconfigured his body.
Jett had no mirror and although his proprioception built a good mental view of his body configuration, it didn’t do well with details. Instead, he pulled on one of his eyeballs, stretching the fullerene retinal cable and turning the orb back on himself. He scanned his body, forming a composite image before snapping the eye back in place and examining the mental image of his newly crafted recruitment-officer disguise: a skinnier version of the Amped-thug with fewer tattoos. He replaced the scars with facial hair, something he hadn’t considered an option until seeing it for real. Wisps of black fuzz were easier to replicate than bare flesh.
Jett waited for full darkness then wandered back toward the Broken’s HQ, slow and confident, mimicking the motions of the very officer who recruited him. A group of halo-thugs drifting around the perimeter snapped to attention as he passed. He didn’t acknowledge them, didn’t know how.
The rear of the HQ dropped down into an underground loading bay. Trucks and soldiers fussed and labored under floodlights and the watchful gaze of their commanders. An image replayed in his mind, recorded the previous day, of the building’s outside: a man in a lab coat standing, smoking on a fourth-floor balcony, the door behind him ajar. Zoomed vision revealed computer servers, possibly the information hub for the organization. If any records existed of Xell Vollarer’s demise, his corpse, and the Star-River, they should be in there.
He shouldered past the outer guards and down into the loading bay. Someone called after him, but he kept walking, through a door, up a flight of stairs, footsteps drawing closer behind.
Office.
Storeroom.
Bathroom.
He turned inside, bolted the door, and listened as the stalker hovered outside before leaving. He dropped his disguise, flopping around the toilet bowl, becoming a coil of tendrils with a skull poised on top. He pushed up through ceiling panels, smooth and silent like snakes, easing through wall gaps, crawl spaces and air ducts. Anywhere his skull passed through, his body could follow. His limbs rewound into tentacles that flowed ahead, prying apart obstacles, widening gaps, moving ever upward to the fourth floor.
An alarm sounded. Maybe his stalker had grown suspicious and tripped a warning. Jett curled into a dark alcove between the floors and let the noise rise and fall around him, burning no energy, emitting no sounds or heat signatures, he simply became his surroundings as night turned to morning, the shifts changed, people left, and new, sleepy voices appeared.
He approached the server room, flowing around and over security cameras, eyes tuned to the wavelengths the militia used for trip lasers and lidars. The server room door was a heavy chunk of metal ringed with sensors. Before he could examine it closer, footsteps echoed up the stairs accompanied by a curious whistling sound.
Jett blanket-changed the refractive index of his outer fibers, turning them an iridescent white. He merged into a rack of lab coats, hanging limp from a peg, a single eye peering out from a discarded ballcap.
The technician came around the corner whistling a tune and twirling a tiny handgun. He dumped his muddy city shoes, hung the coat on the rack and picked up one of the white coats before slipping into a pair of soft, pale lab shoes. Standing in front of the door, he dropped the whistle and broke into an operatic chorus, waving his arms as he punched fingers at the door security pad. The door popped open and he stepped inside, oblivious to the bizarre linen skeleton that stepped silently out of the coat rack behind him.
The tech walked forward allowing the door to spring shut. Jett loomed over him, extending his skeleton to normal height, fibers coiling and binding into thicker, combat-ready cables of arm and shoulder muscle.
The tech tensed, sensing some shift in the air. He turned slowly, face freezing into a mask of utter terror. Jett had no model for this situation; no memory of fighting lab-coated technicians came to mind, just endless combat training against his fellow voidian. The numbers were there on his tagger: human stress limits, G-force tolerance, temperature ranges, atmospheric pressure requirements… but none of that translated into how hard to hit someone to disable them.
The tech’s mouth dropped open forming the start of a scream. He turned away and lunged at a fat, red alarm button on a nearby desk.
Improvise!
Jett swatted the tech across the back of the head, a swift backhand that sent him spinning across the room in a mist of blood globules that left a radiant, fan-shaped splatter pattern across the room’s pristine white floor.
Jett checked the door, crushing the handle with his fingers, preventing anyone else from opening it. He stared down at the tech, still radiating heat like any normal human, but motionless, no breath, no muscle twitches. His head lay sideways on the floor, an expression of surprise on his face, or perhaps he was sad, or disappointed. Fragments of skull had broken away. He saw brain material, skin flecks and hair mushed together.
Human sleeping. Possibly inebriated, said his tagger. Jett felt unsure. He decided the technician was healing, and until then he was no threat.
The server was simplistic post-Nova-Insanity technology: arrays of chip-based Von Neumann processing units attached to magnetic storage disks. Jett’s fingers hovered over the circuits, unwinding his fingertips into their most basic threads. The millions of tiny fullerene snakes caressed the components, pushing through lacquer coatings and plastic shells as the squirming monofilaments mapped out the bus-systems and information highways within the machine.
He channeled the mass of new information into his Inner-I. Orders of magnitude more powerful than anything in the server room, it modeled devices and circuits, decrypted the data and bit by byte scoured every shred of information from the server’s disks and memory caches.
Software viruses streamed outward, checking for connections to other machinery. Nothing. There was no internet on this post Nova-Insanity world; large networks of any sort were feared, even banned, as dangerous technology that had created and spread the horror of the Nova-Insanity.
He scanned the nearly two million files, finding only a single reference to Xell Vollarer and nothing about the Star-River, the manufacture of Glow, or where it came from.
Confirmed as deceased, Xell was identified from his Inner-I registration codes. An attached picture showed a snapshot of a dead man lying in an alley, surrounded by rubble. The corpse was oddly bent out of shape, as if someone had tried to force it through a narrow constriction. A robotic construct known as Sister-Eleven had called in the body and then vanished from the scene. Minutes later, a reclamation van had collected Xell. Jett found a breakdown of the useful items extracted from his body: blood, various barely functional organs and a tiny quantity of the biomech Glow. Xell had a tattoo on his forearm, a ring of stars with one star larger than the others with the words Free-Meridian underneath. The rest of Xell’s body had gone for disposal, rendered down for fertilizer.
Jett withdrew his infiltration tendrils leaving the machine undamaged and turned back to the fallen technician. The question mark from his tagger flashed up the usual options:
Human, possible technician, doctor or other medical professional.
Asian, possible age twenty-eight to thirty-five years… the list scrolled on until it settled on one last tag:
Deceased.
Dead and gone just like Xell. The word seeped into Jett like hot poison making his imaginary human nerves convulse. All those uncomfortable feelings he’d experienced by proxy: fear, the ache of loss, the anger of victimization, rushed to the surface. He saw her again, the same young woman who had saved him from the bullies, now grown-up, her eyes smiling but full of water… tears. Why did humans cry? Did painful emotions leak out in the flow of water from their eyes?
But Jett had no water, no tears. The pain stayed bottled and trapped inside. She knew someone who died. Jett felt a need to make those tears stop, to help her, but she wasn’t here, just a memory, a reconstruction of a memory. No… not her… me! I lost someone once and she’s sad for my loss. He struggled to find that memory. Who did I lose? But nothing came, those mental lines had all been severed.
He felt the loss of companionship, of hope, the future and all the intentions. All those things they were going to do together. A massive swathe of history now rendered useless. So many questions he wanted to ask, but the recipient was gone, not just gone in the sense of distance, but completely gone, forever.
The waves of loss crushed the strength from him crumpling his body into a fibrous ball on the blood-smeared floor.
“Open up!” Someone shouted, bashing on the lab door. A gunshot blew the lock away, but the door stayed jammed closed.
