Afterglow, p.17
Afterglow, page 17
Out past the hidden weapons vaults and the movable walls, down the stony steps and into the night air, away from Solent and along the grey beach under the shadows of the massive cliffs. The beach extended out under the water, sloping gently down, forming a shallow shelf around the island, a small concession to ocean ecology; the creation of a whole new ecosystem that hadn’t existed out here in the middle of the deep ocean before Coriolis was constructed. Seeded with corals, the shallow water shelf became a giant reef swarming with fish. Nubs of coral protruded from the ocean like the petrified corpses of sunken mariners wading ashore. Rex swore that sometimes, when he wasn’t quite looking, they moved.
He’d seen the Sisters’ maps and knew that further out to sea the slope dropped off much faster, down to another underwater cliff leading to a deep-water haven where sharks and squid patrolled. Another cliff lay beyond that, the very edge of the artificial continental shelf that was Coriolis Island, down through the miles of darkness that made up most of the great ocean’s volume. There resided things with no eyes, hunted by slow moving sharks that lived hundreds of years without ever meeting another of their kind. Worms as old as forest giants and creatures still unknown to science lurked. For a moment it all existed inside Rex’s head, the whole system of living things, oblivious under a shroud of human-created perils like plagues and supernova bombs!
The half-moon cast a doubtful shadow across the beach, just enough light to see things with many legs creeping out from the water to scuttle across the grey pumice sand. The sky was lit with stars and the orbiting vehicles of mankind. They grew in number every night, a billion unblinking eyes forming new bands of stars swaddling Earth’s girdle. Most were Alliance orbitals and satellites, but the Convolvers were out there too. Rats fleeing the sinking ship, arks containing DNA and the memories of that broken culture Sister-Zero had spoken of. The culture that never forgot and would take its own destruction with it, wherever it went in the Universe.
He lay down, drifting, numbing to the hard rock beneath his back as voices came into his head. “Why am I here? My legs walked me here, but my mind just wanted bed.”
I need to work. The voice seemed to drift down from the sky like stardust.
“I saw what you did to that family. Experimenting on them like… like cockroaches. I was there, in the background, watching you. Like a bad dream, a really bad dream.”
Come on, Rex, plague victims are already lost. Their sacrifice gives us the knowledge we need to save billions.
He felt calm, unusual for him beneath all those watching eyes. But the stars seemed more alive, more real than the ever-present cameras and white faceplates of the Sisters. Everything watching everything else, back ad-infinitum. Observers all the way down. Unpicking that knot created reality, light, music, some great self-referencing tangle of the imaginary imagining the unimaginable.
He fell into the darkness, tried to come awake, but it was no use. You got me, Del! But falling was different now, lucid falling, unlike in those days past when he just barreled on down through hell. The yammering void. He could watch for a while, shrug, and look away to somewhere else, dream, think, even go find the Star-River. But no, he was not Del, not going to get lost for years in that warren of possibilities.
He popped awake, back but feeling oddly uncomfortable as if he’d only just lay down on the rock.
A full moon crept up from below the horizon. “You can’t fool me, Del. How long was I out?” He looked out into the stillness and for a second touched all the life around him, every single mote of awareness, joined in some global network that had existed for billions of years. “Take the body, Del, save the world. I’m busy sleeping.” He turned over, rolling off the rock and onto the grey sand. Crabs skittered across the beach like tiny robots as he faded into another dream. A dream where he was many different people walking across the sands, kicking a ball to himself as he went, practicing coordination, experimenting with how far from the others he could go and still maintain control.
He reached for the surface like a hand grabbing waves out of the shallow waters. “Are you finished with that family now?”
I’ve learned everything I can from them, Del said. The Sisterhood will grant me more experiments but in return they want picoforms. They’re crazy, you know.
“I know,” Rex said, running handfuls of grey sand through his fingers. “How did I get back out here, Del?”
I asked the Sisters to carry you out here, same spot each night, and then take away the magnetic suppression units. All my idea.
“Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”
Not really. I just wanted to fool the Sisters. Make them think we weren’t talking yet. Takes the pressure off you to spy on me.
“Can I ever learn to trust you, Del?”
How do people ever trust each other? They see inside each other’s thoughts and intentions, resonate with their ideas, and take a leap of faith. That should be easier for us; we’re overlapping minds sharing the same existential substrate.
Rex chuckled. “What should we do, Del?”
Leave. Put our destinies back in our own hands.
“Will they let us go?”
There’s only one way to find out.
“I can’t endanger John and Millie.”
Let’s try leaving. Maybe stop by and visit some old friends, and then we come back here and see how that sits with our robotic overlords.
Rex felt the prickle of sadness. He wanted nothing more than to see Mrs O. again and the dogs, maybe walk in true freedom one last time before Del immersed them inside the plague. “You’d really let me go there again?”
He felt Del’s virtual smile. I want you to go there. A quick stop and then… then maybe we go to work.
CHAPTER 36
Cyborg-Sickness
“She needs to leave. Needs proper medical attention.” Keller paced angrily before ducking back down next to Casima and planting a palm on her forehead. She was burning hot, and the real flesh and blood parts of her body were turning an awful, jaundiced yellow.
Gale paused his tinkering. “Casima is cunning, and I don’t trust her.” After quickly absorbing Keller’s small phial of liquid fullerenes, he’d spent a full day and night combing their possessions for any useable forms of carbon such as Keller’s stash of electro-polymer limbs, carbon fiber patches and clothing. Even rods of graphite and the fake diamonds from Casima’s jewelry collection were taken. Having no way to directly absorb or repurpose such objects, he simply strapped them over his grotesque body like bejeweled bandages and let his auto-repair systems chisel what they could from the materials.
“It’s her liver,” Keller stammered, feeling his old panic return at the very thought of a surgical procedure. “She’s on her third one and it’s under a lot of pressure now her cybernetics are all out of tune.”
“I’ve offered to help,” Gale said. “I can infiltrate her cybernetics, rebalance things, add new software.”
“You… don’t touch me,” she slurred, her eyes opening and swimming into focus on Gale.
The Gale-Grimace hybrid clumped over and adopted the now familiar squat position in front of her. “Keller will never betray me. He’s terrified of what I’ll do. You, however, have a rebellious streak. I think you like danger. That’s why you provoke me.”
“Come on, Casi,” Keller pleaded, “let him try and help.”
“No, never! I don’t know what he’ll do to me. What software viruses he loads me up with. You’ve seen how he infiltrated Grimace with those freaky tendrils. I just need a doctor, some suppression shots, and a liver-booster, and then I’ll be fine.”
“Fine,” said Gale, much to Keller’s surprise. He stood and plucked a handful of small boxes linked together by straps and chains from the workbench. “I made something for you.” The device looked like a safety harness. “You can leave here if you wear this. It has cameras and microphones and if you try to remove it or say something inadvisable to anybody then I will know, and Keller will pay the ultimate price.”
“I’m not wearing your stinking wire,” she protested, but after an hour of Keller pleading with her, she agreed.
Gale spot-welded the belt around her middle. Straps looped up over her shoulders and another under her crotch and welded to the back of the belt. The whole contraption was concealed under her coat with the main forward camera poking out the front like a large, unstylish button. “Keep the camera out at all times. If it goes dark–” Gale let the threat hang in the air.
She said nothing, just a sad backwards glance at Keller as she left.
He trembled as the door closed. Gale was probably right; she was going to do something reckless. Gale’s words rang inside his head. “What would you do to save your own species?” It took a particular kind of bravery to think like that, something Keller lacked, but Casima didn’t.
Keller lay watching the screens as Casima hopped from barge to barge heading for the main Nevis mall. The sounds of her deck shoes on the metal clacked loudly. A smaller screen held a view down the front of her coat, showing the coat buttons and the main camera. It looked down past her waist to her legs and feet.
Gale stared, as fixated to the screens as Keller, as she walked the shops, found a doctor, booked an appointment, and went back to the shops assumedly awaiting her allotted time. Keller sank into a fitful slumber before awakening with a start as Gale resumed his destruction of anything plastic that could contribute to his repairs.
Gale’s eyes left the monitoring screens, but Keller’s were now fixated again. Casima had been gone a long time and this was the second time she had visited in the same shop. He wondered if Gale noticed. Willing his hands to become steady, he rolled carefully out from under the bench. If this was to be the end, then he should go down fighting. Whatever Casima was doing he had to back her up, or at least create a distraction. A real fighter would make the sacrifice, cause a commotion so Nevis’s security came and disposed of Gale before Casima became aware of what he’d done. His hand curled around a wrench; voice choked in his throat. I can’t. Just can’t.
A different, more sane idea came to mind. “How did you survive crashing into the GFC ship and freefalling back to Earth?” He shuffled closer trying to make Gale turn away from the screens.
Gale ignored him and carried on with his work.
“I would love to know. I’m sure it will make a great story.”
Gale looked carefully at the screens. Keller cursed himself for trying such an obvious ruse.
“Fascinating!” Keller said, mustering as much sarcasm as his petrified voice box could convey. “Please… tell me more.” His eyes widened as he realized Casima had hovered in front of a row of cosmetics for an absurdly long time. Her feet remaining stationary.
To his surprise and relief, Gale suddenly started talking. “I escaped destruction by climbing out of my ship moments before impact with Cloud9. My plan was to let momentum carry me into a higher orbit and then use a small drive unit to maneuver to a safer location amongst the abandoned GFC orbitals. A distraction delayed my exit and I clipped the Cloud9 debris field. That changed my trajectory and destroyed the maneuver drive I was carrying.
“After many spins around the Earth, I skimmed the atmosphere and headed for a crash-reentry. I feathered my reentry vector as best I could by adjusting my aerodynamic profile, aiming myself at a remote region of Asia. I used my burning limbs to create turbulent airflow and steer myself towards the snow-covered downslopes of a mountain. My last memory is a frozen image just inches above the snow.”
“Headfirst! I knew it,” Keller snapped his fingers, pleased with his earlier deduction.
Gale stared down at Keller. His shiny, bead eyes jittering in their sockets. He caught Keller’s furtive glances at the screens and went over to examine them more closely.
The images still hadn’t changed, but as Gale moved closer the view turned and moved along to the next stand of goods. The motion was awkward, a single staggering step at a time, not the flowing natural motion of real walking.
“Something’s wrong,” Gale muttered. “Is she trying something?” He turned up the sound level and the lab filled with the buzz of people shopping, their footfalls became explosions.
“It’s okay,” Keller stammered. “She’s got her fancy legs on. They don’t work that well on the ship, so she’s probably in pain… you know… limping along.” Keller eyed the door. Gale kept it barred with heavy crossbeams locked together with chains and padlocks. Even with tools it would take minutes to break through, something he had spent hours rehearsing in his mind.
Gale turned knobs and pushed buttons on his camera control pad. The main screen panned fully left and right and then back to center. The cosmetics were moving along at a steady pace as if Casima were shuffling sideways along the row, but her hands never came into view, they never reached out and touched anything. “Fancy legs?” Gale sounded confused.
“Yes, the ones I made for her.”
Gale turned to him. “She can change out her legs?”
“Of course–” Keller clamped his hand to his mouth as his words betrayed them both, and suddenly the scenes on the screen made a lot more sense.
Gale lunged, careening through the benches and equipment racks, grabbing at Keller as he fled. Keller leapt for the door, hurling everything that came to hand behind him. He snatched at the cluster of locks, heaving with both hands in a futile attempt to snap them free.
He felt Gale’s fullerene claw snag his shirt and jerk him backwards. A moment later, Grimace’s mechanical arms folded him into a deathly embrace. He pondered with sadness how fast he’d moved, purposeful, no, decisive! How fluid, how unobstructed by thoughts and hang-ups from back then. Casi would be proud. He hung limp waiting for his neck to snap.
“What has she done?” Gale bellowed from the small speaker now right next to his ear.
Keller shook his head and felt it slip down into the body of his shirt. Maybe he could wriggle free and leave his clothes hanging in Gale’s grasp. “I don’t know. She has her own plan,” he said, playing for time.
Grimace’s arms tightened around his waist and hauled him off the ground. “We’re leaving. Now! How do we detach the barge from Nevis?”
“You can’t. We’re locked and loaded. Not going anywhere.” His head slipped farther down the shirt, and he heaved his shoulders, shrugging the fabric free.
“So be it,” Gale said, his voice oddly soft and resigned.
And suddenly Keller was free, sprawling across the lab floor while trying to find an exit hole in his shirt big enough for his head. As his face tugged free, he saw Gale gazing down at the floor, clearly sizing up the best place to bore a hole down to the ocean beneath.
“You’re… not… going to kill me?”
Gale’s voice blared at him, and he toppled backwards. “Why on this confounded Earth would I kill you?” Gale reached down to the floor just as an intense thump jolted the barge.
“Casi!” Keller yelled, as the ceiling exploded above them. Debris crashed down as a massive metal claw reached through and grabbed Gale, swallowing his entire upper body and head, and hauling him upwards through the hole in the ceiling.
Keller lay there in shock watching Grimace’s sturdy, metal legs treading air above him. Other faces peered down through the shattered deck. One was Casima. She had no legs and was perched on the rim of the hole using just her arms to hold herself upright. “Kell?” she asked, eyes frantically searching the wreckage below.
“I’m okay,” his words came out in a hysterical laugh.
“Thank god, I’m so sorry Keller. Forgive me.”
She looked up at Gale dangling in the grip of the vast longshore-bot. His head bent hard around, crushed inside the claw as his single arm grappled futilely with the hunk of engulfing hardened steel.
“Not so clever now, are you?” she spat at him as he lifted up past her and out into the gusting pacific air.
The boat was a sleek wedge of colored stripes endowed with overly large outboard engines. A blond hunk of a man in a Hawaiian shirt, sporting sunglasses and a grin that only the son of a billionaire could maintain, manned the helm. He gunned the massive engines and spun the boat through a series of donuts, delighting the bathing beauties that clung to the boat’s rail and dousing Nevis’s starboard pleasure dock with water. Those sunbathing along the dock shook off the drenching. Some waved, some clapped hands, others cheered or waved derogatory finger gestures from many different cultures at the boat’s retreating rear end.
The engines gunned again, and the boat roared away, performed the nautical equivalent of a handbrake turn and sat, bobbing in the waves facing the Nevis, revving and prepping for its next pass.
Hidden below the party boat’s deck, away from any hope of fun, was a very different scene. Sixteen Burns crunched shoulder to shoulder inside the tiny hull. They all stared down at their boots, deep in meditation, preserving their pristine new combat bodies for the coming mission.
Every few hours, Steelos stirred and looked around, raising his pulse a few beats to push some extra blood through his sleeping limbs. He sat at the rear of the boat. As the group leader, he got a handspan of extra shoulder room. Glancing along the row of slack faces, he saw soulless, empty eyes. Just the tools of some larger algorithm to be bent and ruined for a cause he could never understand.
A viewing screen opposite Steelos came alive, emitting a gentle alarm tone that stirred the rest of the Burns to life. He watched their eyes refocus, remember their last missions, and register where they were and what they were doing. Dour, slack faces lit with grins as they looked across at their opposite numbers, then along the line to Steelos, nodding recognition as they rolled shoulders and massaged knees back to life.
The screen changed, showing the view outside, blurred and grainy from the camera’s extreme zoom. A huge docking machine strode across the Nevis. Something black dangled in the grip of its immense claw, something that still struggled despite the colossal pressure the claw exerted. A timer ran down in the upper left of the screen, and right on cue came the bang as one of the party boat’s engines developed a sudden and catastrophic fault and exploded sending parts hurtling across the open water and a puff of dense and very noticeable smoke up and across the watchers on board the Nevis.
