Glow, p.29
Glow, page 29
“I don’t know how to live with this guilt.”
The Prisoner leaned into the camera, his long, white hair waving in the low gravity. “We narrowly escaped extinction, Felix, but there’s another event coming, one even more dangerous. I’m not sure we can evade this, but I have a plan, Felix, a plan that needs a radical commitment from a volunteer on Earth.”
Felix shifted and scrubbed at the hair on his head, now thin and lank through worry. “I… I’m not even sure who I am anymore. I’ve done terrible things to myself, to forget, but it’s still there. All I’ve done is kill the good memories, the ones I needed, loved. I can’t ever forget–”
“Then help me!” The white-haired man implored. “Help me fix things. Help make it right.”
“How, Del? I’m a fucking wreck!”
Del? Del!…
Rex jolted awake as another meteor hissed overhead. “Del, that’s your name isn’t it.” He felt the huge presence shift as the music of its own name synced disparate thoughts into a cohesive whole. For the first time, the persona of Del tore itself away from the Star-River.
Rex felt his confusion. Where am I. Who am I? Why am I here? He boiled to the surface like lava, grabbing at Rex’s eyes and ears and fingers. A man drowning in quicksand, reaching for twigs and leaves, anything to stay afloat, any means to perceive the world.
Rex felt the darkness coming. Damnation! Cyc’s voice: “Once he takes control of your mind, I doubt you’ll ever get it back.”
“Free me,” Del screamed. “I am inside the somanetic plague, right where I need to be, but I need control. I must be free.”
Concentric circles. Slipping away. Falling… falling…
“No!” Rex clutched at his head, fingers in his eyes and ears. Mrs O. Mira, Goliath, Rust, Bela and Bartok and The Sisters… I am Rex. I am fucking Rex and I do exist.
Fight!
Inside the cognitive mess, the music stopped and the tenuous construct calling itself Del forgot its name, broke apart and tumbled back into a void of abstract existence. But new connections had been forged. The Prisoner was a prisoner again, but much stronger. Like any glowworm that saw the light and tasted freedom, it wanted and knew how to get more life.
The new day smelled of wet dirt and grass. Rex sat and stared, his head a hole, as the Prisoner folded back into obscurity, leaving the space his own thoughts needed but were reluctant to fill. That huge presence was revealed: just a man, another collection of memory traces that, with the right trigger, found a voice inside Rex’s mind. Another phony who wanted out, who made a choice and sold his soul for a fix. Mira was right. Bury them all, the real and the fake, and start over. Nothing was real unless he decided it was. An à-la-carte mind.
He let Cyc’s destruction meme vanish into his inner silence. Not yet.
The decision was easy now. Live for Rex and be Rex until the assassin found him or the world burned or the nanomachines ate them all. Until then he wanted only one thing.
His inner compass guided his head around to point back at the city, left of the Sisters’ great cathedral, right of the Ridgeline Hills with Hanna and her gangster neighbors. Somewhere in that gap was the Forever Friend Rescue Sanctuary, and he was going home.
Mira awoke on the floor of her room in the Ron King Shelter and Rehabilitation Center. She saw fragments of fingernails embedded in the door, chewed-off electrical cables hung limp from her arms, and healed-over toothmarks scored her wrists where she’d tried to gnaw her hands off to escape her self-inflicted bondage.
At some point her Glow’s aggressive assault turned benign. As viscous an assailant as it could be, the drug’s innate purpose was to preserve a host, not completely destroy it. Instead it reverted to the simple tasks of bodily healing and maintenance. Whole again, Mira, eased onto her feet, surprised her wounds had healed so well. More surprised she could stand and move her fingers. She looked like she’d passed through a threshing machine, one that tore away any residual fat and lacerated the remaining flesh. In a fragment of broken mirror, she was a revenant, a thing somewhere between living and dead.
“I look like shit,” she said, and to her relief, no one answered.
She thought of Rex. The sad little man who thought he was a dog. He felt like her only friend. I promise to make things right. She’d said that as she left him huddled on the ground clutching Goliath’s remains. Walk it off.
She prodded her ribs, jutting bones. A raging headache informed her state of hydration. “I need a plan, but I need food more.”
The soup at the Ron King canteen consisted of sparse chunks of unidentifiable organic material suspended in a tasteless, glutinous broth. It filled the void in her stomach and replenished some energy.
“You ain’t looking so hot today, honey.” A spry old lady dropped into one of the plastic chairs opposite and began devouring soup as if they were locked in a head-to-head eating contest. Her skull appeared too wide, an effect enhanced by long tufts of gray hair jutting horizontally from each side above her ears.
“I don’t feel so hot,” Mira replied.
“Name’s Medlin,” she said, offering Mira her hand.
“Mira.” She reluctantly reached for the clammy palm. “Medlin?”
“Yep, that’s what people call me. Always Medlin.”
Mira eased back in her chair.
“You seemed pretty chipper the other day,” Medlin said. “Like you’d met you a new fella or something.”
“I’d probably scored some Glow or something,” Mira said. She gazed around the room, all these people living off the charity of Ron King. His picture was everywhere. Every doorway was his mouth. Windows were his eyes. Every show on TV, every song, every book. They were all made by, promoted by, or were about, Ron King. She wondered if that was what her Glow felt like, trapped inside her body. Everything it saw, touched or heard was Mira, Mira, Mira! No wonder it hated her so much.
“You don’t want to mess with Glow, honey. It puts all sorts of crazy ideas in your head.”
“No shit,” Mira said. Eyeing the swathes of Ron King propaganda. In the end, Glow demanded only one payment: more Glow. Whereas Ron King demanded favors. If her life worked that way, then she should demand payment from her Glow.
“They’re in your eyes, honey. Ghosts,” Medlin said. “It remembers, sees through your eyes and feels through your fingers, smells and tastes your food, caresses your lover’s ass! It all gets recorded like some porno flick, even if you don’t remember it yourself.” Her eyes grew wide. “Soon the ghosts take over and you wake up one day to find you’re just a ghost in someone else’s head, eating someone else’s soup, groping someone else’s–”
“Thanks, that’s great. Cheered me up.” Mira watched the old woman eat. She saw some of Rex in her, a simple being who just took life moment by moment but somehow survived. “Do you have any idea how I can get this stuff out of me?”
“Nope,” Medlin paused and looked around as if searching the ceiling for the answer. “I heard some fella blew his own head clean off and his body just kept on walking around like a cockroach.”
“That’s just bullsh–” Mira turned to avoid the old woman’s gaze but found herself staring at a skeletal man on the next table with soup splattered down his chest. He flashed a lecherous grin and she turned back to Medlin.
“You got to sell what you got, darling.” She smiled. “Look at me, an old bag, got nothing nobody wants or needs, except in here.” She smacked her temple with her spoon leaving a brown smudge. “I got knowledge, and knowledge is money.”
“What kind of knowledge?”
“Knowledge of the future.” Medlin’s eyes wobbled and her voice choked with reverence.
“Nobody knows the future,” Mira said.
“People pay me to tell ’em what they already know. I can earn enough for a good bottle at the end of the day.” She winked and creaked to her feet. “Sell what you know, honey. World’s full of suckers. Don’t be one of them.” She glanced up at the ceiling again and grinned. “I hear the sky’s falling. That should be real good for business today.”
Mira watched as she gathered up her empty bowl, dumped it in a wash bin and headed out the food hall. “What do I know?” she muttered, looking down into her soup, rapping the spoon on the table in frustration.
A thought entered her head, maybe the first rational one she’d had in ages. She dropped the spoon in her bowl and stood up. I do know something. She left the bowl where it was and headed for the door as fights broke out over the remains of her soup.
Jett missed space.
The simplicity of the void, just darkness and gravity and the cold, dead light of distant stars awaiting their voidian explorers.
He’d lost track of how many he’d killed. Hundreds, thousands? Rampaging across the slopes of Transit Mountain, gutting and devastating warehouses and buildings. But his quarry escaped: The man with the Star-River in his head. He was there, hanging in chains, and I let him go!
Rex, that was his name. Revealed by screaming, groveling Reeva as Jett flayed the nerves from his body, hanging them out like a spiderweb in front of his eyes. The mechanical construct calling itself Sister-Eleven had told him nothing, erasing its own memory and self-destructing in his grip.
He returned to Trendle Tower in the early hours, hoping to meet Yellow’s tank army for a real fight. A few guards eyed him as he passed, no one dared stand in his way. The tower was empty as he rode the elevator and sat, smoldering, in Thorne’s chair.
At first, he’d enjoyed the effect his violence had on “her” in his memory. The revulsion at the things he did. Her sickness as he pulled people apart like bugs. It satiated his anger in some small way, fueling the mindless machine, stripping away the annoying humanity that tempered responses and questioned his actions.
But the real “him”, the one who Jett’s memory was taken from, had never done such things. She’d never really seen such monstrous acts. It was all just Jett’s imagining, the construction of false reality. How she might react if she were even real.
Out of all the murder and destruction, he gained one truth: if his mission was going to succeed, he needed to see the world through their eyes and learn to predict their actions and their lies. He needed more memories, and not just gist memory, but real, human experience. Maybe then, he’d know when a Yellow cyborg was going to open fire or when a twitching wreck hanging in chains was the most valuable being on Earth.
Why do I have so few human memories? he asked AI-Gale.
Gale’s skull sprang into his vision and rolled out his pre-programmed answer. “I had only five days to prepare. After receiving Xell’s transmission, I made the decision to divert you from my attack on Cloud9. I needed to transform you from a militarized combat unit to a being that could interact and problem solve on Earth. I took the episodic and semantic parts of my own mind, the mind given to me by my creator, and filtered them to create you.”
Jett felt a warmth, like touching the Star-River or holding Her in his arms. He was a small part of Ursurper Gale. “The memories are just so few.”
“What you think of as memories, like our images of Her–” Jett felt shocked, but of course Gale knew about Her, “– are bleed-overs, left-behind fragments of the original experiences that were edited away when creating the gist-memory. You know much more than you think, Jett. Knowledge resides within you and should surface when needed. You have an excellent mind. Use it!”
Use it?
His anger boiled again. TwoLunar had exploded. War was raging in space. The voidian might already be free, and he was down here, trawling through human brains and detritus looking for some relic from the GFC’s past.
Daylight brought on the city noise, human business awakening like a giant solar-powered forest. A strange bubbling noise distracted him, and AI-Gale vanished. Sounds drifted down the corridor, a form of human speech but with no discernable words:
Laughter.
He flowed silently from the office and found Yellow and several of Thorne’s men gathered in a room. One wore Yellow’s cloak and was doing a gangly, awkward dance around a tabletop while the others sat around laughing.
They froze as Jett filled the doorway. “Mission successful?” Yellow said, oddly devoid of the fear etched on the other men’s faces.
Jett returned to Thorne’s office. Yellow clattering along behind. Use my mind. Be a human. He ground the corner of Thorne’s desk to dust with his fingertips. “Isn’t this human enough,” he asked Yellow who hovered in the doorway. “Destroying, killing, that’s human right?”
“Mission didn’t go well then?” Yellow slid inside, sending a longing glance back down the corridor.
“I located my target, but he escaped.”
Yellow eased his corpulent form into a chair opposite Jett. “Well, we have to find him.”
“How?”
“What do we know about this man? You interrogated Reeva, right?”
“The man is called Rex. Reeva said something about him having lots of glowworms and that he used to be someone important but lost his mind and lived on the streets for years.”
“Excellent…” Yellow struck a thoughtful pose. “He’s a worthless bum, a Glow addict, on the run from the Grim-Freakedy-Reaper. He has two choices. Find more Glow or seek help. He might come looking for a fix through one of our reputable sales contacts. In which case we’ll have him. I can spread the word amongst other dealers, offer rewards et cetera.
“But for my money, we already know there’s a connection with the Sisters of Salvitor. If I was this guy, I’d head back to that cozy hostel in the cathedral. Safe from angry robots with skeleton faces.”
Jett felt the thrill of the hunt rise again, a chance to redeem himself.
“You’ll be storming the cathedral then?” Yellow said.
“I need a few hours to return to optimum combat performance.”
Yellow cocked his head as if listening to an inner voice. “There’s someone here to see you. Chap by the name of Niros. He’s our lich.”
“We don’t have a lich.”
“Technically true, but after Auld defected, we employed one on a freelance basis. We send Niros the perp’s info, he harvests them, and pays us a percentage and recommendation fee.”
“What does he want?”
A man stepped through the office door and stood before Jett. “Business,” Niros’s voice boomed. “You haven’t sent me any and I need to get paid.” Niros was a skeleton, thinner even than a revenant with flesh pulled tightly over reedy cords of tendons that articulated his bones. His teeth and eyes bulged from his skull as if under great internal pressure. He wore the support struts of a powered exoskeleton which had assumedly been removed by the guards on the way in. His hand twisted at an odd angle, seemingly unzipping and turning his fingers into a tiny sonic pistol.
Jett stared at the man, watching his muscles and tendons ripple, not like the Amp addicts, but something different, as if beings of purpose lived inside him and they wanted out.
“Where’s Thorne?” Niros demanded, his eyes widening slightly as he noticed Jett for real. “Who the fuck is this clown?” He poked a thumb at Jett.
Yellow cleared his throat, stood and made a careful retreat to the doorway. “This er, clown, is Jett. He runs things around here now. I’ll leave you two to have a cozy little chat.” Yellow closed the door and moved away down the corridor. The hissing sounds of his hydraulics betrayed the swiftness of his retreat.
“I’ll cut the bullshit,” Niros said, his voice loud and accompanied by flecks of spittle. “You need me, I need you. You got to feed me the perps, so we can both make a living. Is that too hard for a rookie to understand?”
“I don’t need you,” Jett said, his tagger flashed gun angles, rotation speeds, sonic impact cones, and that crucial distance from Jett’s hand to Niros’s throat. Normally this would be an easy kill, a mere reaction, but after being shot by Yellow–
“You won’t find no better lich than me for the price.”
“I don’t need a lich.” Jett leaned across the table, eyeing Niros’s anatomy that appeared unique among all the humans he’d recently dismantled.
“Fine, then you owe me money for sitting on my ass. Read the contract. I get no business; you pay my retainer. I got a rig to run, gotta feed myself, and get some Glow for my own personal use or I start to rot. Just look at me.” He waved the gun up and down his chest, its muzzle pointing momentarily away from Jett.
Jett struck like a mechanical viper, one hand ripped away the gun, the other clamped Niros by the throat hoisting him into the air. He hung there squawking, hands groping at Jett’s face. “What the fuck–?” Then to Jett’s disappointment, something inside Niros snapped and he passed out, body flopping limp in his grasp.
Jett twitched, resisting the instinct to pop the annoying man’s head. This human, a lich, loaded with Glow, the very stuff he needed to understand, tiny machines, biomech machines, but just machines–
Jett’s fingers unwound, bunches of monofilaments traced the paths up Niros’s nerves, burrowing into his body through neck and head. More fingers sprouted from his torso routing in through Niros’s feet and groin, filling his body with invisibly fine threads that sought the information channels, the lines of communication between the biomech nodes.
The network was there, chattering away to itself in its own language. Wide open, just as Ursurper Gale claimed, somebody had hacked the GFC’s unbreakable code.
Jett spawned pattern recognition algorithms, thousands of them grinding along in parallel. He moved Niros’s head next to his own and more filaments sprouted from nexus points on his face to pierce Niros’s eyes, clamping cable bunches onto his retinas while others wormed into his nostrils, ears, and taste buds.
Jett sent pictures into the retinal fibers, projecting familiar images of Yellow and Thorne into the man’s brain, watching the network’s reaction as it gobbled up the sensory input.
He saw how Glow-nodes clustered around the primitive parts of the brain, tapping the sensory data before it made it to the higher functionalities. He saw its motion detectors, fibers grown into Niros’s muscles and joints, mapping his body movements and poses. He saw the whole somanetic web, trillions of tiny filaments jabbing cells, sampling glands, filtering and feeding bacterial growths. Glow formed a parallel body inside an oblivious host with enough innate computational power to model that body, to enhance it or if it needed: to destroy it. It was Simmorta but free of its constraints. The missing piece Gale needed. A flawless mind on a Glow substrate, inside of a voidian body: perfection!
