Glow, p.34
Glow, page 34
A man leapt the road barrier, running straight at the Sister.
Rex! The tag tried to hide itself, but he saw it. Rex.
The figure bounded up the steps, eyes all around, low and stealthy, up to where the Sister stood.
Definitely Rex.
No! No! No! Mira screamed, plastering tags across his vision. He smashed his head into a wall, punching through concrete and rebar. “Get out of my head!”
This ends now!
He kicked out a window, tripped over the sill and tumbled out. Plummeting like a meteor, his fingers spread wide, webs of fiber bridging the gaps like bat wings curling him up and out into a steep glide.
He sailed over two dozen streets before dropping below roof level, then flipped in midair, folding wings back into arms and heavy, spring-loaded legs. He hit the street, compressed, and sprang forward over another building down into the next street.
Mimicking Rex, Jett ran and then bounded, four legs, six, eight, tearing up the paving with fullerene claws ripping traction from the ground, propelling him forward through his own bow wave of sound, past cars and buses and out onto the main road to the cathedral.
Arrow-straight, he blazed a path through Welkin, through commuter buses and cars, leaving bodies and debris spinning in tornadic clouds. His mind was a roar of protest, a sea of tags and confusion. Rex. Rex. Rex–
He didn’t notice the important tags through the haze:
Incoming.
Evade!
Evad–
The round smashed into his forehead, just left of center, and for the first time Jett became the darkness that he had always believed himself to be.
CHAPTER 39
And the Network Sees Me
Rex stared at the inside of the cathedral door. Latches and crossbeams clanked and growled, sealing the doors shut. Lights flickered as power switched from the militia-run generation grid to the Sisters’ own, internal, sources.
Fucking Christ, Rex, you back in this cage?
“Mira?” He whirled on the spot expecting to see her standing behind him, but it was just more Sisters, their faces blank, devoid of any human features. Only Sister-Zero maintained a distinctive personality.
“Mira is not here, Rex.”
“Mira’s dead,” he said, looking hard at the door, wondering if there was still some way to squeeze out.
A cheer rang out from the food hall where hundreds of residents milled around news screens, watching developments outside of the building. Sister-Zero turned back to Rex, her face now a more positive arrangement of features. “An auto-gun shot the assassin on the way to the hostel, Rex. The danger has passed.”
“No, no. No, you don’t understand, Sister, it doesn’t just die. Shooting it just makes it angry.”
The tone in the food hall changed as a deep guttural rumble spread through the building. “The Alliance ship is landing,” Sister-Zero announced. “The militia resistance is futile, and they will take control of the Island. We have to get you to safety, Rex, before they arrive.” Her grip was firm, the direction she swept him in non-negotiable.
They passed through a security cordon manned by fearsome, faceless Sisters with guns instead of hands. Through a door Rex had never noticed before and into an area of military cleanliness, shining metal, heavy locks and doors. Only Sisters occupied this area.
Doors slammed shut as they passed through, partitioning areas into defensible spaces. Sisters strung wires and welded metal bars across corridors. On through an ancient nave where a blank, stone wall resolved into a cunningly offset series of barricades that led to yet another hidden section of the building.
“Where are we going?” Rex asked.
“We have new allies, Rex. They will be in charge of your safety from now on.”
“Who?” he said, feeling a sudden chill. The Sister didn’t answer and that could mean only one thing: they were hiding something from him… again.
Like a beached squid, Jett’s body took off across the pavement dragging its fractured head like a rock in a seaweed bag. It spun at a wall, thrashing through cement and rebar into an inside cavity, through the gap between floors, and on up the towering office building. Its nascent, survival-oriented mind sought darkness, confined spaces and altitude, avoiding warm bodies and noise.
Outside, militia flooded the streets, lively and confident at having seen their foe fall so easily. Puzzled by its apparent disappearance as if hauled offstage like a limp curtain.
Like Jett’s body, his mind wove back together from strands. Not fullerene fibers but strands of awareness. Motes of who and where he might be that coiled together becoming more conscious. The feeling of gentle motion, of being carried, cared for… loved.
The glowworm voices were gone but some memories remained. Those ground and punished into him through training and repetition: his experiences. In that moment, he realized the lie of his existence. That he had never really existed before the mission. All those training exercises, voidian combat drills, battles across the Moon and Mars, through the vacuum of space… None of those happened, they were just simulations. Virtual beings jousting with machines and duplicates of themselves, copied and pasted into some base memory layer like the operating system of an old-fashioned computer. Jett saw all those layers: the innate survival memory buried under training simulations, all buried under those voices, the mass of additional memories he acquired through learning on mission. That part was still offline, and it needed to stay offline if he were to function as a warrior.
He was a fleeing rat: find a hole and hide, keep moving, avoid detection, find other rats. But all his kind of rats were up in space, fighting their way out of Cloud9 as his creator and mentor, Ursurper Gale, stormed the orbital.
And here I am–
His inner voice sounded calm and alone, not the AI-tagger, not his memory, not the annoying woman who’d contaminated his thoughts to distract him from his mission.
The mission.
His standard bipedal form gelled out of the ooze of fibers. His head twitched and rotated, arranging itself back on a coil of thick neck and shoulder cables. He extruded an extra-long arm and reached up to the high ceiling of the empty ballroom he found himself in. Grasping overhead beams, he hauled his body up and through another layer of structure. Up, rising through the floor into a living room, to pause like a smoldering stack of coal radiating the heat of combat exertion.
An old man sat in a chair watching a TV screen. He glanced at Jett, took a desperate swig of his drink and returned to the screen. Jett touched his head where the bullet had struck, a fist-sized section of skull had broken away. His finger probed the space inside: circuit modules, rolls of flexible silicon memory substrate, a separate module was probably his Inner-I. Another was the AI-tagger or some other add-on Gale had stuffed inside his crystal skull to enhance his functionality.
He withdrew the finger and a wad of fullerene crawled up his cheek and formed a plug for the hole. He was lucky to be alive. The bullet had ricocheted away, taking the skull fragment with it but not entering and shattering the precious circuits inside.
I’m just circuits. A machine, and yet I feel alive. I remember. I see. I feel.
The man in his chair completed a slow blink. His eyes opened onto an empty room with a smoldering hole in the floor and a man-sized break in his wall leading to the next apartment.
Think, Jett. Think and plan while you still can.
AI-Gale? He mentally activated the function, but no skull-face flashed into his vision.
He kept moving, cautiously taking back control of his body from his autonomous response systems. Damage warnings: major head trauma, impossible to heal. Some auxiliary memory modules missing, destroyed, but a reconstruction process had begun from backup arrays. A blinking bar across the bottom of his vision informed him of the time left until the reformat completed and the voices and memories he’d gathered from the Glow victims rushed back into his head.
He snatched clothes from wardrobes, draped himself in disguises, exited and entered new buildings working his way closer to the cathedral. His green arrow was back, blinking the direction he needed to go. He loved this silence, this clarity of thought, dreaded the voices. Was this how a Glow addict felt after a fix?
The cathedral loomed in the next street and the Alliance embassy craft angled in over the rooftops toward Welkin park. Landing was imminent, and Jett knew that whatever issued forth was of a severely higher military grade than anything he’d yet fought.
He found his mark, a long corridor in what was once a hotel. A window at the end looked out across one last street to the sheer side of the cathedral. The gray tiles of its roof started about ten meters above.
Jett stoked his micro-cellular-fusion reactors, bringing everything online, sucking air through microscopic pores, cracking hydrogen, fusing it and venting the exhaust helium through tiny ducts.
His consciousness tuned to maximum throughput and his world slowed, cars eased to a halt, people froze mid-step. Fluttering flags gelled rigid; their colors dimmed to grayscale. Sounds grew louder, faraway events moved closer, detail sprang from blandness. The inside of his mind grew larger, like the void of space.
Plan, reconfigure, fight, and win.
He eyed the length of the corridor, people poised mid-flight. Their heels and elbows motionless as they dived for escape doors and side rooms. Eyes wild with fear at the monster at the end, steam and heat rising from its furnace-red body.
Jett’s core shrank, no point wasting material on a body. He became a mass of legs, arms, and appendages connected by webs. Two, slim, snakelike necks articulated his head.
I am Jett. Voidian. The ultimate warrior.
He touched his headwound like a salute. The external rumble of ship engines ceased. The real enemy was here. He imagined the voices of his voidian kindred cheering. “Burn brightly, Jett. For the voidian!”
I am a machine with one, singular purpose.
His sonic boom shattered all glass in the building as he roared down the corridor, fragmenting the immobile humans in his way. Jett exited the window, up and outward, massive back legs thrusting him into the air, shattering the concrete windowsill from which he leapt.
He sailed out into the air on toward the battle he remembered training for, the battle he imagined he’d wanted the whole of his short life. In his mind’s eye, she watched as he blasted away into space, a pioneer. He who would change the world and create a galactic civilization. Nothing would ever be the same. He saw it in her eyes and felt it in his chest: Pride.
CHAPTER 40
Incoming
Ellayna clawed her way through the now very familiar corridors between the medical wing and Jesh’s lab. Her coordination was way-off. Flashes of Inner-I noise threw her vision into pixelated color-scapes. Sounds came and went like alarm gongs sounding right in her ears. Tiny, yellow worms crawled the periphery of her vision as if chewing reality away from the edges. Inner-I glitches or is something really eating me alive?
She dipped a mental toe back into Utopia, hoping Hmech was waiting, then sidled out and back to Ben Nevis in case Del was there. Screw you all. She collided with a wall and crunched to a painful halt.
“You okay, Director Kalishar?” She spun around to confront the voice behind. Just one of her guards. She’d forgotten they were following.
Tomas’s message icon blinked on. “Are you there, Ellayna?”
“Tomas, tell me you haven’t done anything stupid yet?”
A low-bandwidth monochrome of his face prickled into vision. He looked better, more upright, as if he’d made decisions that he felt good about. “I’m waiting for you.”
She threw all caution to the wind. What did it matter if Taunau, Martin, or anyone else decoded her intentions. “I tried reaching Hmech, but he refused contact.”
“They’re already here, Ellayna. Ghosts.”
“If that were true, we’d all be–”
“Dead? I saw a ghost and hit myself with a low-power stun bolt from my finger gun. Knocked the Inner-I offline and there he was, plain as day. Would probably have gutted me too with his knife, but I was lucky, and some guards were just around the corner.”
“Did the guards see this… ghost?”
“Of course not, our Inner-Is are hiding them. It’s the opposite to augmented reality, artificial blindsight, and we, Ellayna, are so very, very blind.”
She turned a corner and glanced back. The corridor behind was empty. “Tomas, my guards have gone.”
“Come straight to my escape pod. Strapped inside, we can’t hurt ourselves anymore. Once outside GFC control any contact and hacks through the GFC servers should be impossible.”
“I’m meeting Jesh to remove my Simmorta. It’s compromised, spying on us, Tomas.”
“Figures.” Tomas’s shoulders slumped. “I turned mine back on. Increases my odds of making it through open space, surviving reentry, and remaining functional long enough to appreciate my escape.”
She reached a junction. Her mental arrow showed Jesh’s lab to the left, escape pod storage to the right. “Don’t go anywhere yet, Tomas.” She hung up his connection and pinged Martin. “Martin, my guards have vanished.”
She heard Martin’s breathing, a stressful sucking sound. “Martin?”
“Ellayna…” She almost gasped in relief. “Your guards are right behind you.”
She stared into the light, willing a shadow, anything to betray a hidden presence. Martin’s voice made her jump. “They’re not responding to my pings. Must be coms failure or–” He vanished into a haze of static.
She ran toward Jesh, only thirty seconds away, gripping her finger gun, rotating the bezel to full power. “There are no guards, Martin.”
There was something in front. A perverse inversion of reality like someone invisible crawling along the floor while their shadow walked through the air above. She startled to a halt and the shadow vanished. She turned sideways… There! In peripheral vision.
“For god’s sake Martin, I need guards, support.” Static gurgled back from Martin’s feed.
She turned and jumped, kicking her feet off the walls and rolling into a side-on barrel roll, deliberately confusing her visual systems. If Tomas was correct and her Inner-I hid reality, then overloading it might throw off the hack. She grabbed at sims and news feeds, peering through the fakery. There! Closer now, moving steady and confident toward her, a hint of human shape in stop-motion.
She slapped her thigh, triggering the kill-switch. Her ARG went offline taking with it all her coms and information displays, clearing her vision. Nothing, no ghosts, no shadows.
Made sense. They’d infiltrated her Inner-I, not the ARG. She grabbed her finger gun and twisted the bezel back to its lowest setting and touched the ring to her temple.
“No!” yelled a voice out of nowhere as she pressed the fire button.
The electric jolt knocked her senseless. She convulsed, hanging in midair, legs curled under, dropping slowly to the floor.
Her eyes perceived the orbital without the benefit of augmented reality. We really do live in a shit hole! Filth clung to the walls and ceiling. She focused down the corridor and saw the ghost, now just a man dressed head-to-toe in light, pastel green, running toward her, knife in hand.
Jett shot from the hotel window across the road, spreading wide like a net to clamp onto the cathedral wall. A moment of sublime peace and purity of purpose. The red bar showed three minutes until his auxiliary memory reconfigured and swamped his thoughts. Enough time to find Rex, rip the Star-River from his skull and exit to safety.
With a single jolting bound, he was up and rolling across the roof tiles, microseconds ahead of bullet trails that dissolved the granite slabs into heat and shrapnel.
Sparks flew from Jett’s fingers as he tore up the slates to the roof’s peak. A laser grazed his shoulder, its energy dispersed along translucent fibers. He vectored sideways faster than the targeting system, and hurdled the roof peak to land on the other face looking out in the opposite direction. A second to pause, take images, plan, all his foes on this side of the building were off-guard, guns pointing the wrong way.
The Alliance embassy ship was down in Welkin Park, enveloped in a mist of incoming fire. Mobile gun platforms scurried across its surface seeking optimal firing positions. They clamped down like limpets and strafed the surrounding buildings, returning any incoming fire with deadly machine precision.
That battle was over. The militiamen were throwing their guns and fleeing. Their loyalty to their drug bosses and commanders suddenly and dramatically diminished.
Focusing downward, Jett swam through tiles and roofing material, down through layers of insulation, wooden joists and steel mesh. He dropped into the attic, landing at full run, his green arrow picking a logical direction and sending him barreling through work benches, washing machines, and ranks of drying sheets and towels.
Randomized search pattern.
Facial recognition prioritized: Find Rex.
The cathedral roof vault was six-stories of utility rooms, storage, and staff quarters. A wonderful three-dimensional combat zone where Jett had full range of motion leaving his cumbersome enemies shooting at shadows.
He cleaned out swathes of rooms like a hurricane through a paper city, avoiding doors and straight lines, spiraling along corridors, dropping through floors, popping up through roofs. People stood frozen in panic as he passed, those with weapons toppled into bloody heaps as Jett became a scything mesh cutting through flesh and stone, then rolled into a quadruped with huge thighs and battering-ram arms that bludgeoned its way through walls and barricades, leaving limbs and disembodied heads whirling through the mist behind.
His AI-tagger tracked targets: hundreds of heat signatures, some fading as bodies cooled into death. Snapping faces and running comparisons… not Rex… not Rex…
Reinforced doors loomed ahead. Goshguns forward. Panic preceded him like a shockwave. Heat signatures behind the doors milled and churned in terror. Even the Sisters had a little heat glow.
He struck the wall next to the door. High-speed debris killed most of the defenders. He flattened a survivor before his finger squeezed his gun trigger. Appendages like whips cleaved a half-dozen militarized Sisters into segments. White plastic heads spun and dropped as he left.
