Glow, p.21
Glow, page 21
“I think he must have been crazy, leaving you.” That boyish smirk again.
Please try harder Trabian.
Hope sprang back into his eyes. “I have another idea. Try this…” Her room wobbled as if about to disintegrate. The lavender smell grew distant and something new swam into focus. Something new, but exactly the same. She was still in her room but no longer webbed to the bed. Trabian sat facing her in an easy chair, wearing just a silken tiger-pattern robe.
“Clever,” she said, carefully arranging her knees and gown for modesty. There was even gravity, something that felt excitingly wrong in her own apartment.
“I took scans from pictures you sent me over the years and recreated your room in VR.”
She eased off the bed, allowing herself to fall fully into Trabian’s simulated world. She felt her hair appear, tumbling down her shoulders. The aches and twinges of age vanished as her mind received its signals from her ARG and not her real body.
Testing her balance one foot at a time, she found a decanter and glasses on a side table. Red wine, excellent vintage. Drinking in VR was usually a subdued experience. Things never smelled or tasted quite right, but the biomech neural lace did an adequate job of fooling the brain into thinking it was drunk and lifting any inhibitions.
She poured him a glass and sat next to him, clinking her glass against his. “Nice, Trabian. Now, I need to figure out a way that I can trust you. I want us to be allies. Times are dangerous. No one should have to face this future alone.” It wasn’t quite the speech she intended, but Trabian’s surprise location and confident poise had thrown her.
“I know a way,” his hand shifted to his robe tassel.
“I don’t think that will make me trust you, Trabian. It’ll just make you want me more. In real life.”
“Isn’t that how things work, Ellayna? I become hopelessly besotted: a puppy dog unable to resist?” He leaned into her, but she rolled playfully to the side enjoying the illusion of being young and flexible again.
She had to admit, that didn’t sound so bad: Puppy Trabian, her loyal retainer. Easy votes. She drained the wine, smiling into the heady feeling that swamped any guilt lingering in her gut. Those years of silent, personal penance, of sending anonymous gifts to Trabian and his father, poor bereaved Mensar. She’d worked hard to let them keep Cloud8 as their own family orbital, private and alone with a tiny cemetery clinging to its outside. Despite being a GFC founder, Mensar turned out to be a weak man, unable to function without his wife, Lyn. He soon collapsed into despair and ruined his mind tampering with experimental Simmorta variants. And with that valuable mind went much of the GFC’s proprietary knowledge about genetics and biology. Joselyn did the physics, Del, the nanotech. Ellayna did the finances, the venture capital, publicity, and Mensar was all about genetics. He put the G in the GFC.
More wine. But the guilt returned as she reached a mental barrier that mere fake alcohol couldn’t breach. She should be trying to replace his mother, not trap the boy into service. But this was no game, survival required tough decisions. It was for his good in the end, and the survival of the GFC.
He sensed a softening in her mood and rose from the bed, making a point of wandering her tiny room, examining her picture frames and trinkets, working his way slowly around the bed behind her. When she didn’t turn, showed no sign of resistance, he reached out and stroked her hair, long and red on this version of Ellayna. His touch simmered through the virtual strands and down her back. He knotted braids around his fingers and reached around her waist, moving up and cupping her breasts.
“Trabian–” But his cheek on her neck silenced her objections. Blood rushed to her face, the room grew dark, details merging into a soft void, like space. “Where are you taking me now?”
“Somewhere special.” His hands moved down, parting her gown, stroking the soft flesh of her thighs.
Careful… don’t slap his hand away. Mustn’t trigger the kill-switch. Not right now.
She felt his robe drop away, warm pressure on her back spreading as if he was growing wider, wrapping gently around her. Another set of hands curled under her arms and up around her neck.
“Trabian?” The room was dark now and turning cold, wrapping them both in icy shadow. “Trabian, stop!” More hands crept to her breasts. Trabian’s youthful skin seemed to age under her gaze, crisping like charcoal and splintering away. His bones divided, splitting into more bones, thinner bones. Not bones… fibers.
She screamed. Raging against the growing number of appendages, twisting in their oily grip to face her attacker. Trabian’s face sagged and split, dead and rotten. It peeled away revealing the carbon-black skull with eyes like obsidian beads.
Her mind fumbled messages into Inner-I emergency protocol buffers as her body convulsed in pain. But no sounds or transmissions escaped the cage this monster had erected. She searched for the escape icon, knowing it wasn’t there. Mind-state passcode. She knew that wouldn’t work either. It hadn’t stopped the bugs. “I’m just an old fence cat, strutting my line. Along, along the garden wall, taking my time–” She saw her old cat, Sirius, smelled Mother’s lavender, yellow sunflowers, insect hum… Nothing.
There’s something else I’m supposed to remember, something, but–
Gale’s appendages writhed and churned like saw blades, carving her flesh apart while wringing the breath and the life from her. She choked, told herself that her real body was safe, that she could breathe, she could survive… unless one of those shadow ghosts she’d seen in the corridor was actually inside her room.
Kill-switch.
“Buzz!” she gasped. Her new codeword, one she’d made Jesh program into her ARG. A second simulation began, small, unnoticed by the main algorithm that was clearly under Trabian’s control, or whoever controlled Trabian.
From the darkness the bee came, nothing nasty, not like those bugs that tried to kill her, just a bee, like that time when she was a small girl–
A small girl sitting on the grass, smelling mother’s lavender. Where was that old cat? The bee seemed huge now, hovering off the end of her nose, checking to see if she was a flower. Who knows what goes through a bee’s mind? Maybe it was damaged, broken, maybe she did smell like a flower? It landed on her knee, legs like prickles moving up her thigh where it positioned its abdomen for the sting. The sting that would send her into an agonizing coma for days. Anaphylaxis. Such a big word for a little girl, a word she’d learned the hard way, long before, when she was even younger…
Her horror was instant, a programmed reaction: she swatted at her thigh, smashing the tiny carcass into her flesh. The darkness and pain vanished, and she was back, wallowing in wet bedsheets and her own bodily filth. Webbed and secure but with one hand free, the hand that smacked at her thigh with enough force to reset her ARG unit and the invasive simulation.
The wine was gone, the gravity was gone. Trabian, now gone. She tried her Inner-I, but it was rebooting.
“Martin,” she gasped as its emergency comms function blinked alive. She had a few seconds before all its functionality reappeared and the attack resumed. “I’m under attack, someone’s inside my Inner-I.”
“Security will be there in thirty seconds, Ellayna.”
She ripped the webbing free and flailed through the air to the door and out into darkness. “Lights!” she yelled, but nothing happened. A figure loomed ahead, a shadow… Gale?
Is this a trick? Am I still inside a simulation? She smacked her thigh again sending the Inner-I into reboot. Suddenly there were lights, and a security detail pounded toward her. She shrank backward, expecting them to turn into something horrific.
“It’s okay, Ellayna,” the medic’s calm face didn’t seem attached to his body. She felt the prickle of a dermal sedative. The near instantaneous calm.
“Thank you,” she muttered and slumped into the medic’s arms.
Riding the gurney to the medical wing, her Inner-I restored to full function. Color and nuance returned to her world as the corridors flashed by. Her inbox lit with messages, many from Trabian.
“What happened, Ellayna? We were playing and you went offline?”
“Ellayna, I hear you were attacked?”
“You know that wasn’t me… right? Someone hijacked the sim, Ellayna–”
She ignored him.
“Martin, I’m sure you’re running network diagnostics trying to pin down where this attack came from.”
“Yes, Ellayna.”
“Send a search detail to Cloud8. I was attacked by Trabian Folley.”
“Now, let’s all just calm the fuck down and act like business partners, shall we?” Yellow eased backward down the corridor, away from the pair of tanks fronting the thrust of angry dealers, Amped-thugs and workers who crowded the corridor. They tried to peer around Yellow to the lurking figure in the side doorway. Jett made sure they could see one goshgun but kept the other hidden in reserve. An Inner-I hack of the corridor’s security camera gave him a useful view across the gathered crowd. A single goshgun blast would clear most of the unarmored humans out, but the tanks were problematic and plenty of others lurked on the levels below.
“Who put you in charge?” demanded the lead tank.
“Not in charge,” Yellow continued. “Temporary CFO until we get the new finances, and corporate positions finalized. You’ll all get paid, plus a handsome bonus for your loyalty through these… difficult times.”
Jett saw the crowd relax. Yellow relaxed as well, caught in the middle as he was, his survival odds were miserable if a conflict erupted.
The crowd grumbled, and conferred, and then as a single unit they retreated to the elevator. It took three trips to get them all back down, and only then did Yellow let out a gasp and turn back to Jett. “I give them three days. They don’t want a fight until they know who’s in here. They’ll form groups, make new alliances, and then come to take us out. Three days, mark my words.”
“It’s enough,” Jett said, eyeing the damage reports on his Inner-I and routing priority repair to his eyes and neck. Vison was everything. Without high-resolution, high speed image processing, his mission was hopeless. His eyes were essentially separate biomech organisms trapped inside his non-biomech skull. The retinal cables held all the information needed to regrow eyes but shunting viable material up through his damaged neck and face was proving difficult.
Thorne’s antique computer was an easy hack, the same technology level as the Broken’s computer system. Within seconds he was privy to Thorne’s entire empire: funds, weapon caches, personnel names, numbers and wages, plus a very long list of clients. He sucked the data into his Inner-I and secured the computer against Yellow or anyone else gaining access.
He kept a firm sonar lock on the treacherous little man. Yellow was only dangerous with a loaded goshgun. Jett made sure one of Yellow’s arms remained non-functional, making any stashed weaponry he happened to stumble upon difficult to load and fire.
Money! Jett understood humans well now. Juggler, Yellow, those businesspeople striding the streets day and night to and from jobs they hated; it was all about money. The singular effective way to control seemingly all of humanity. He flashed the balance of Thorne’s business account on the screen, noting how Yellow’s forehead crinkled and twitched as he watched from the side.
“I have no interest in running this place,” Jett explained. “I need information about where Glow comes from and who makes it.” He remembered his infiltration of the Broken’s HQ, the image of dead Xell and the tattoo on his arm. “What is the Free-Meridian?”
Yellow shrugged, an awkward, crunch of damaged machinery and arthritic bones. “I can ask around.”
“Once I find Glow’s manufacturers, I will move on and you can take over here.”
Yellow tore his gaze away from the screen but kept on licking his lips. “You won’t find what you need on Thorne’s computer. Glow is delivered by Scylla. I’m scheduled to do a pickup this evening. You can go in my place, maybe have a little chat with her, or it, or whatever the fuck Scylla is.” He winked and nudged Jett’s upper arm with his pointy metal elbow. “Seeing anyone but my good self will automatically terminate our trade agreement, but you’re a persuasive guy. She might reveal her sources to you.”
“That will be acceptable,” Jett said. He checked his Inner-I clock, possibly enough time to force-regenerate his eyeballs.
“I need eyes,” Jett said, sinking into a more relaxed pose. “I need to focus on regeneration.” He drifted into the mental map of his body, rearranging tubules and resource stores, all while keeping a sonar lock on Yellow. He was aware that the little man was just standing, staring, eyes flickering up and down Jett’s body as if dismantling it, piece-by-piece, turning it all into cash in his head.
CHAPTER 26
The Battle for the Sanctuary
Rex hated himself for hurting Mira, hated the Sisters for making him do it. In the end her own strength of denial spared her any real pain. In his mind it was possible that Mira was right: none of it really happened. Perhaps the Sisters’ own agenda prompted them into sowing false memories in his mind. It seemed unlikely. The Sisters claimed they were created for the salvation of mankind, to guide, repair, and cajole the reluctant simians into a good, machine-oriented future, to Haven, to the Future-Lord. Lies and deceit seemed a faulty method of achieving such an end.
“We’ve got us a tail,” Mira said, suddenly alert. Her alternative, streetwise persona awakening from its latest slumber. A group of thugs followed them, casing their prey. Vulnerable without any militia protection buttons.
Exhausted, Rex and Mira played dead in a doorway in full view of people striding back from their work, umbrellas wide and high, eyes conveniently diverted away from any vagrants.
The thugs kicked them awake. Acting crazy gained them a head start, but the run-like-hell part fizzled as Mira’s glowworms tripped and buckled her into a stumbling mess. They wanted her caught, beaten to death, so they could worm their way out and into a more receptive host.
The fight was short and brutal. Rex learned some new words as Mira cussed, screamed and clawed at faces. She stayed upright longer than him, head hitting the pavement as a boot jarred his front teeth from his skull.
He fell into darkness, concentric rings flying past as the bitter voices yammered and complained. He spoke to Xell who watched from the shadows. “What is the Star-River?”
“You’ll find out,” he grunted, uninterested in being alive anymore.
“Why won’t you just show me?” The darkness in his head changed, angling into a splash of stars flowing across his inner gaze. The vastness of space felt like a tension, a tortured web of forces holding eternity together. He saw worlds around those stars, shining motes, each a microcosm of civilization, vast in culture and history. In the vastness of the Universe, the light of consciousness was but a delicate sprinkle of seasonings.
Staring up at those stars, Rex ran over blackened hills and charred valleys, bounding feet throwing up soot and ash. Saliva sprayed back into his eyes and splattered the ground. The bacteria from his sweat and drool lingered in his fossilized footprints. The only things left living.
Above him, the lights winked out as the universe died and turned cold. He felt it still out there, but unconscious now, mindless processes churning through simulations of life, simulations of itself, nesting within the unbreakable bonds of infinite loops and quantum tautology.
There was nowhere to run or hide. Nothing left. “Did I cause this?” he asked.
“You did,” replied the vast presence inside his head, “and it’s up to you to stop it.”
Rex awoke and looked straight into the eyes of a dead woman.
“Mira?” He sobbed, cradling her battered face, thumbs lifting her eyebrows, searching for that same mote of life he’d seen winking out all across the heavens of his dream.
“Fucking Christ, Rex. Stop trying to make out with me.” She spluttered alive, spraying bloody spittle over his face. They laughed and cried, unable to tell the difference between the two. The streets were quieter now, and the soft evening darkness had vanquished the rain. The night passed unnoticed and dawn crept into the east like a distant inferno. They huddled in a heap of bloody refuse, frisked and beaten. Mira’s remaining coins were gone, along with their shoes.
Nothing made sense. None of this was fair.
Distant thunder rumbled over Transit Mountain as they entered the yard of the Forever Friends Rescue Sanctuary and pushed the gate closed. Rex saw his bloody footprints left behind, slowly dissolving in the rain.
“We can crash here,” he said. “Mrs O will be up soon. She can help us.”
The dogs watched from their kennels, afraid of the storm. A few tails wagged a sorry welcome as thunder cracks reverberated across the Ring Hills. Rex led Mira across the yard and lowered her into a canvas chair under an awning, like an elderly grandmother after a walk down the garden.
Despite his pain, sitting didn’t feel right. He stood still as the rain gathered force, water running down his neck, through his pants. It drained into his socks and out to the ground.
Silence, just pattering rain.
He felt the prickle, an alert, sixth sense; something came, something that wasn’t the storm. Act dead? I am nearly dead.
He recalled his dream of Xell’s apocalyptic vision. The end of all consciousness. Somehow all his fault. Suddenly that didn’t seem so bad. What, realistically, were his options? Live a short miserable life, die and end up an eternal glowworm, a mere thought inside the heads of an endless chain of addicts, monsters and murderers, witnessing their horrors, helpless, choiceless? Is that damnation? Eternal life with eternal torture? If the universe ended, then at least he’d be spared that. The algorithms of destruction lived, in the sense that a car lived or a clockwork musical box lived, he’d become part of that, another cog, an unconscious cog as the machines ate consciousness, turning chaos, uncertainty and creativity into order and precision.
