Glow, p.17
Glow, page 17
He looked out through the peephole just as Hanna and a cluster of small dogs strutted past on their way out to the park. Rex ducked, pinching his nose against the perfume, but not quick enough to avoid a disapproving side-glance from Hanna.
He heard Mira shout again. He couldn’t bring himself to call her Corrine even in his mind. He’d formulated a plan as he stalked the early morning streets into work, eyes grimy and tired from lack of sleep. He’d simply call out her name, Corrine! Surely that would be enough for her to remember something. But as he drew closer to the sanctuary, even that felt like a betrayal. She’d know he’d been rooting through her past, meddling with her mind.
Instead, he decided to lure Mira to Transit Mountain with him. Sister-One claimed she had lived near there once. Perhaps being in the area would spark a childhood memory and ignite some chain of recollections. All under the guise of chasing his own past. The perfect cover.
“Fucking Christ, Rex, there you are!” Mira exclaimed, eye peering through the door hole. “Hey, you can’t hog the bog, man. I shat a traffic cone earlier and need easy access. It’s bath time out here. You helping or not?”
And then she was gone.
Rex quietly joined the bathing line. The day was too warm not to be playing in water. Frizell selected the next dog off the roster and wrangled it into the bath shed. Rex joined Mrs O at the tub while Mira waited outside in a heap of towels. ambushing each dog as it left for a rudimentary rubdown. She marked each one off the roster and corralled them into the drying pen with its motley array of shady umbrellas.
Rex’s fingers instinctively jammed into his ears as he heard music coming from the shed’s speakers. “I’ve picked some apt sounds for you, Rex,” said Mrs O. “If they upset you, then we’ll try something else.”
Rex dropped his hands and let the dangerous noises into his skull where they seemed to bounce around, unimpeded. No voices came out to meet them.
“Jazz, Rex, Dave Brubeck. It’ll really get those shampooing fingers curling!”
Most dogs reveled in the fun, some simply accepted their fate, while others resisted with a will that belied their stature. One of those was Aubrey, the Coriolian bulldog. He sat in the tub, face a jutting edifice of defiance as Mrs O massaged medicated shampoo into his fleshy folds. Aubrey sensed the nightmare was over and exited the tub like a shot from a catapult into Mira’s waiting towel.
Frizell hauled Goliath in next, bright-eyed, tongue drooping to the ground. The huge dog plunged in, absorbing half the water with his copious fur then spraying it around the shed with a series of seismic body-quakes. He leapt in and out of the tub, barking and bumbling, sending tables, chairs and people flying.
Rex lost himself in the moment, feeling the pace of the music as a driving force, rather than any deep or sinister meaning. He enjoyed the synergy with those around him, beaming out from under a crown of suds, while Mrs O became an abominable snowwoman with spectacles.
“What type of dog were you, Rex?” she asked.
He blushed. “I was quite big. When I jumped up at people they staggered backward.” The music faded and on came the terrible memories, sucking pipes, hacking saws, white masks framing eyes that were dead to his pain as they hacked away the dog and sculpted him into a man.
“Time to tackle Dolphy,” Mrs O said, wiping off her spectacles. The trembling pit-bull waited in the doorway, head bowed. Her leash hummed with tension as she tried to get as far away from the water as possible.
Rex watched the terror in Dolphy’s eyes, terror over nothing, just water. He had the power to make her face that terror. The same power he had over Mira, and almost the same power the surgeons had over the dog, Rex, that ability to change an entity into something else, to rewrite memory, reformat bodies, create something different and entirely new.
They heaved Dolphy into the tub, her feet racking the sides. After a few moments of washing, the big dog calmed down, gaze settling far away as if she’d found some inner sanctuary. Finished, she bolted through the door. They heard Mira scream as she knocked her flying. The fear was back in her eyes, nothing had changed; Dolphy would always be Dolphy.
Mrs O stood panting. “When you get to become a dog again, Rex, make sure you come back and see us for bath time.”
Mira clung to the door frame, looking tired and defeated after endless beatings from wet animals. “I need a break.”
“Rex is going to turn back into a dog and come live at the rescue sanctuary,” Mrs O said.
“And Mrs O is going to live forever and meet the Future-Lord,” Rex added.
Mira stared at them both as they stood grinning insanely. “I’m going to lie down,” she said, and stumbled away. Her Glow fix was wearing off.
Rex followed her outside, mind fumbling for the right words. “When you took me to Ridgeline, I think that helped me too.” They stopped, and Rex twiddled his thumbs. The Glow dose had made her a few inches taller, so she looked down on him now.
He gathered his thoughts. “What I mean is. I need to go to Transit Mountain. I have memories of being there. It might help me, and it would be cool if you came too.”
A sly smile eased her face. “Are you asking me on a date, Rex?”
Panic struck him as the situation went unexpectedly wrong. “No, I just–”
She slapped his shoulder and laughed, the first time he’d heard a genuine, mirth-filled laugh from her. “I’m shitting you, Rex, come on. You? Date me? But I’ll come with you, might be fun.”
Mira fell asleep in one of the sanctuary’s tatty deckchairs while Rex returned to dog bathing. He’d earned enough time credit from Mrs O that he could take the afternoon off. He stared at Mira’s sleeping face and wondered if it would look different when she became Corrine again.
Jett spied Samuel Juggler’s Glow contact, a puss-yellow cyborg, who, despite his deceptively frail appearance, cut a prominent path through the crowds of Spare Part Row.
Jett rolled Juggler’s contact card through his gangly fingers. Yellow. The name, time and location all seemed to fit. He stood watching as Yellow approached a bench and dropped down beside a bedraggled woman.
Jett eased closer. Now a towering revenant with angry eyes and jagged cybernetic protrusions, the crowds parted around him instead of rolling right over. Strangely, in a place like this, being more obvious seemed to make him less visible. Something he’d discovered through trial and error and various different body shapes.
Yellow slapped something on the woman’s knee, lurched upright and vanished back into the crowd. Jett followed, but Yellow was absurdly slippery, using hidden doorways and surprising speed to evade any pursuers.
Jett turned to the woman on the bench, hoping to extract information. She slept with her eyes open, and he poked her awake. “Fuckin’ Christ… Wa’re you ‘sposed to be?” She dissolved into a weird giggle before slumping onto Jett’s shoulder and snoring.
Jett decided there was nothing here to interrogate and headed off across town to Juggler’s second Glow contact.
He found Lazar at the intersection of Centauri and Gemini as preordained on Juggler’s card. A colorful character in a bright red suit with diagonal green stripes and a floppy felt hat. The man clearly wanted to be noticed.
Jett hung in a side alley and watched, checking for snipers and bodyguards. After a few minutes at the specified location, Lazar headed away to the next point, one not on Jett’s card.
Jett waited in a doorway as Lazar settled into a waiting stance. He dropped the revenant guise and emerged as the recruitment officer, wandered over to Lazar and handed him the card.
Lazar took one look and ripped it in two, letting the pieces flutter to the ground. “Wrong time. Wrong place. You wanna play ball you gotta prove you can deliver.” He turned away leaving Jett floundering to understand the references. Play ball? Deliver what?
“I want to buy Glow,” he said, matching Lazar’s stride.
“Fuck off and try again tomorrow. Bring another card.” Lazar stalked away.
Jett morphed into a leper and used the shadows as he followed Lazar to his next location. His timing was precise. His business clockwork. People knew him. They hurried out from offices and shops to do deals as he passed, quick and fluid, no negotiations, no chatter, just lightning exchanges of tiny phials and patches for cash.
Afternoon grew late and Lazar did one last quick exchange with an elderly couple. He removed his hat, folded his coat inside-out muting its colors, and moved away across town. No one bothered him now. He was closed for business.
Lazar was easier to track than Yellow, no warren of hidden doors. He preferred the open space, stopping once each city block to scan for pursuers. Several times he caught Jett browsing shop windows or turning into side streets. Each time, Jett morphed to a new image, careful not to repeat a disguise. But Lazar’s body language changed, furtive, angry, somehow, he knew he was being followed. Turning a corner, he reached into his pocket. A sideways glance told Jett he would be waiting. This game was over.
Jett pulled in his skeleton, forming a stout, bland, male shape while wringing space from his bone fibers, upping his damage resistance and weaving his front-torso into a bullet-proof mesh. Then, with no hesitation, he rounded the corner straight into Lazar’s ambush.
A stub-barreled pistol jammed into Jett’s face “You follow me, you die,” Lazar said, his mouth curling up on one side.
Jett cringed in mock fear. “I need Glow. I can pay.”
Lazar eyed Jett’s rotund businessman guise and relaxed the grip on his gun. “Show me the cash.”
Jett drew out the wad of notes and Lazar’s eyes did a doubletake. “Sweet!” he said. “I’ll be taking those.” He drew back his other hand, bunched a fist and launched a punch at Jett’s chin.
Jett watched Lazar’s fist. With his mind running at combat speed, human motion was slow and cumbersome. The projected point of impact rippled as he reconfigured it into a cluster of ultrathin, rigid fullerene needles.
Lazar’s fist struck, and the needles pierced flesh and bone all the way to his wrist. He squawked, body torquing away in reactive pain, gun tilting up and off aim. Jett snatched his wrist, turning the gun back and smashing the muzzle clean through his front teeth and into his mouth.
He dropped his disguise, expanding to full size, fake clothes and skin oozing and writhing back into a mass of carbon-black snakes before rewrapping into his newly favored revenant format. The horror grew in Lazar’s eyes as he lifted off the ground. “I’m going to take the gun out of your mouth now. If you make a sound, I’ll blow your head off. Understand?”
Lazar nodded, and Jett eased the gun out, keeping it just inside the lips of his mouth.
“I am going to ask you questions. If you lie, I’ll blow your head off.”
Lazar nodded, more urgently as he gasped a breath through the gun muzzle.
“What do you think happens if you fail to answer my question?”
“You… you blow my head off?” Lazar said, gagging through blood and tooth fragments.
“Correct. That was the first question, here comes the next one. What is your name?”
“Lazar.”
“Correct. Where do you get Glow from?”
The man’s mouth opened, but he suddenly had trouble speaking. Jett twitched the gun slightly as if pressuring the trigger. Lazar’s mouth loosened and the words fell out. “I get my daily quota from the safehouse. Later, I return with the money. Don’t ever see anyone. Don’t know any names. Thorne’s Empire. You fuck with Thorne and you die, your family dies, your freaking dog dies. Even your dog’s ass-sniffing pals in the park die. You get it pal? You understand what’s going to happen to you here?”
Jett considered the new information. “I don’t have a family, or a dog.” He relaxed his facial fibers, and they slipped away like oiled skin revealing his carbon-black skull and eyeballs. “I don’t die, either.” He pushed his face closer to Lazar’s, seeing it turn red and bloat as if about to explode.
Lazar managed another nod.
“If I say I won’t shoot you, then I won’t shoot you. Do you trust me?” Jett eased the gun into Lazar’s left eyeball.
Lazar blinked furiously unable to stare into the black circle. “No,” he spat hysterically. “Of course I don’t fucking trust you!”
“That was a truthful answer and because of your honesty you are still alive.” Jett dropped his arm and tossed the gun into a gutter. His huge hand circled Lazar’s throat lifting him high into the air. “One last question and then we are done.”
“Ok,” Lazar choked, his hands clutching at Jett’s massive fingers, feet treading air.
“Give me the address of the safehouse.”
“It’s… it’s on Mill Street. Trendle Tower,” Lazar gasped.
Jett pulled up a street map on his Inner-I and confirmed the place existed. He looked at the desperate man twitching in his grasp and saw hope in his eyes, a belief there was some rapport between them, an agreement that he would be freed. Did he think they’d become friends like him and Juggler? He must understand that this was a combat situation. If he released Lazar, he would warn the safehouse and compromise the infiltration.
A standard goodbye prompt scrolled past his vision. He reached down with his other hand and grasped Lazar’s dangling feet, then folded his body in on itself. Bones shattered and air and fluid pockets burst out through ruptures and orifices. Lazar let out a muted screech as his life extinguished. Jett rolled him into his own striped jacket, no mess, no gore; the thick material contained the fluids, tying the corpse into a spherical bundle using Lazar’s arms and legs like rope. Then with a casual toss, he hurled the corpse five-stories up onto the flat roof of an adjacent building.
He waited for the pain to come, for “her” to appear next to him and somehow flood his mind with sadness and loss, but nothing came. Was it possible that whoever his memories were originally derived from only valued certain human lives?
He set course for Mill Street, Trendle Tower, Thorne’s Empire. His tagger flashed as if agitated by him not speaking its words: Thank you. I have found your services most useful and may have need of them again in the future…
CHAPTER 23
A Hole in the Head
“People built that,” Mira said, stopping and leaning against a bent lamppost. Transit Mountain dominated the focus of the converging lines of roads, pavements and buildings like the focal point of an exercise in perspective. The town of Transit spilled onto the foothills surrounding the base plateau, thinning into trees and scrub that lapped up the exponential slope and on to the next plateau.
Rex paused for breath, eyeing Mira for clues about her current state of mind. The fix of Glow she’d taken had done nothing more than stir the beast, the reservoir of demons and ill-perceived passions that inhabited her mind. A maintenance fix, she’d called it. Really it was a teaser, an appetizer, and now Mira unconsciously searched for the main course.
“No, they really built that, man. They fucking built that back when we knew how to build shit.” Her head dropped and snapped alert again, eyes darting to alleys and passersby. She’d flipped consistently between two main personas: potty-mouth Mira, who Rex knew well, and drug-seeking Mira, an oily, snakelike opportunist. Rex prodded her back on course like a child by pointing at the distant mountain. He talked of dogs and salvation, avoiding the Future-Lord which had the effect of re-manifesting drug-seeking Mira. He even tried singing her song, “Dream, theme. Everything’s a–”
“Fucking Christ, Rex. Shut that noise up.” It worked, but only until her mind wandered and the drug-seeker reemerged.
His eyes turned inward, superimposing the bright, clear imagery of childhood memories over the current, dusty scene. Transit Mountain through the eyes of a teenage boy locked in the hostel common room, fixated on the TV. The fantastic utopia of Coriolis, the corporate-nation, leading humanity’s charge into space. And everyone was welcome, everyone except boys with head traumas, temper tantrums, and hyper-focused minds. He soaked up TV and books and any internet channels he could access. Learning how the GFC constructed Coriolis Island and its outlandish tower using one of their gigantic Nation-ships as the island’s core. Engineers tapped into the volcanic mountains on the ocean bed, blasting magma into hexagonal molds through variable aperture nozzles creating different densities of pumice that floated on the ocean. They glued the tessellating islets into a vast, floating structure as the central pumice nozzle grew taller, extruding the plateaus of Transit Mountain, starting with the densest, toughest pumice at the bottom, thinning to a wisp of super-lightweight material near the top. Hyper-fullerene chains, the same material as the space-elevator cable, anchored the island to the ocean floor. Seven-trillion tons of rock and six years of labor, Rex still recalled the figures, still remembered his fascination and the belief that one day, he would go there.
“You’re not even listening!” Mira slapped him across the head, jerking him back to the present. “The top’s a funny shape.”
“Nova bomb,” Rex said. He eyed her, sensing an opportune moment to covertly stir her memory. “Do you remember the Nova-Insanity?”
She shrugged and rolled on toward their goal as Rex grabbed her arm to steady her gait. “Not really. I think I’m too young.” That math didn’t compute. Even with years of hard, street living, this haggard version of Mira could not be younger than thirty, and then there was her family, husband Michel and that boy and girl, and their forever-friend Mira. No, she had buried her past, all of it, even big events like the Nova-Insanity. His frustration grew, the itch on his temple reappeared. An itch like a healed-over knife wound. Thoughts of surgery and murder in alleyways came fast and often. He felt the little machines inside of him working hard to keep his blood pressure in check, his body in one piece, even as his mind felt on the edge of fragmenting. Transit Mountain might not be stirring memories inside of Mira, but it was changing something in him.
