Glow, p.8
Glow, page 8
They slung the corpses onto the bed of a pickup truck and drove out of town toward a reprocessing plant that rendered bodies, extracting useful chemicals and nanotech drugs.
No one noticed a corpse slip off the back of the truck and into the darkness. It grew taller, thicker, clothing appeared out of a mist of fibers as it broke into a swift walk and headed back toward the city.
CHAPTER 9
Ursurper Gale
“Where the heck is it?” Ellayna thrashed through her single room apartment creating a cloud of whirling pens, papers, books and trinkets. There! She reached out and plucked the tiny gun from the corner near her bathroom. Microgravity was a bitch. Not strong enough to stave off atrophy or the problems associated with bathing, drinking, personal hygiene and practically everything humans needed to do to survive. It was, however, enough to drift any unsecured items into myriad unforeseen hiding places.
The tiny finger gun was a gift from Martin after her last fear-filled rout through the orbital, fleeing imaginary stalkers. She’d removed the weapon when showering, something Martin was very specific about doing. It held just three charges, but each could jolt enough electrical energy into an attacker to paralyze them rigid.
She left her room, taking a reluctant look back into her safe, cozy environment before closing the door, abandoning her stray possessions to clump and stick to walls and furnishings as their innate magnetism pulled them back into stable states.
Loneliness was so much more bearable with a gun on one’s finger. She switched off her shoe magnets and bounced her way to the medical wing of Cloud9 enjoying her twirls and acrobatics like a young woman in her… late… fifties should do.
Upright and reattached to the floor, an AI did a quick identification ping of her Inner-I and let her inside. A nurse greeted her as she entered. The sound of clattering implements and voices felt like a storm on her ears that were conditioned to utter silence.
“Why so busy?” Ellayna asked, scanning the rows of waiting gurneys.
The nurse sighed. Her brow wrinkling into an expression that said much about the fickle stupidity of the average GFC director. “Idiots switching off their Simmorta. They forget how fast bodies degrade out here without a good, functioning somanet. Before they know it, they’ve stroked out, blown an aneurism or are battling acute organ failure. We go find them, bring them in and reboot their somanets.” She turned and stormed away, yelling back over her shoulder. “Haven’t been this busy since the Great Defection.”
She passed through to the quieter wing of the medical complex, past two sleepy guards draped outside the VR monitoring unit where fully half of Cloud9’s residents plugged-in and lived their lives in virtual worlds, fed by tubes, monitored by AIs. Probably safe in there. Safe from the bugs… unless… somebody hacked the AI?
The prison wing was right at the end. A converted research lab with only a single guard, and, as far as Ellayna was aware, only a single prisoner inside.
Del Krondeck’s cell was an echoingly large space, stripped of decor and humanity down to its alloy wall panels and support joists. Ellayna stood in the doorway gazing across at her ex-lover, ex-best friend, the ex-cofounder and ex-chief science officer of the once mighty Genes and Fullerenes Corporation.
“Hello, Del,” she said softly, while pinging his Inner-I with the same message. She didn’t expect a reply from either as she walked over to the prone figure lying amongst the heaving knots of cables and tubes.
Emaciated and pallid, Del resembled a mummified corpse. His gray hair flowed in long wisps around his head, stirred by the light breeze from banks of computer server fans hissing and whirring as they crunched the vast number-scape that formed Del’s own, personal virtual world. The place he’d retreated to years earlier and had never emerged from.
She pulled up the visitor’s chair and sat, wrapping support webbing around her waist so she didn’t float away. Her finger traced the line of his hooked nose and the heavy brow that gave Del that thoughtful, caring appearance even when comatose. The suck and blow of the respirator accompanied the musical chirps of medical monitors. Display screens jumped and writhed with brain activity and body functions.
Long ago this body had been so familiar. More than just familiar – intimate. Where are you now, Del? Colonizing a simulated galaxy? Creating the next Simmorta?
She missed his love, his energy, his passion for anything novel. Those nights poring over diagrams and papers, mapping ideas and thoughts onto virtual whiteboards. She and Del would dance with ideas like lovers, alive and fully immersed in the experience. Oh Del, we could still have that – at least some of that – if you hadn’t betrayed us all.
She hadn’t known about his plans: the uprising, the defections. Maybe he’d just assumed she’d come along. That she’d agree with his cause. Which I so nearly did. But if she had, then they’d both be dead now. I stayed behind to keep us alive. She knew that was a lie, but had told it to herself so many times she almost believed it.
She’d pleaded ignorance, dodged culpability and used her power as the only remaining GFC founder to veto Del’s death sentence. She’d even struck a deal to keep him confined in a prison-research lab. Del could continue being a useful contributor to GFC society, or he could languish in whatever VR fantasy he wanted. “We need that genius alive,” she’d petitioned. “If the world knows that Del deceived us, that he’s lost, then we are so much weaker.”
“I am still here, Del. Have you forgotten that I exist?” Her finger passed over his lips. She imagined kissing them, his eyes opening and her falling into his arms like some fairytale princess. All forgiven. All forgotten.
She checked her message inbox. Nothing. The GFC was failing. Enemies closing down their advantages, cutting off escapes and options, stealing their technology. They could do a lot worse than seek guidance from their original visionary. “We need you Del. More than ever.”
“Ellayna, we’ve located Ursurper Gale.” The message snapped into her mind, and she opened a visual portal onto Martin Haller’s calm, pointed face.
“Excellent.” She felt revulsion again at the name. Ursurper Gale forged memories of rebellion, usurping power, conflict. But mainly it was because he was somehow Del’s pet, and in the end Del had trusted his pet more than he’d trusted Ellayna.
“Situation, Martin?” She flipped to tactical view. Data holograms filled her vision.
“We’ve got a team of troopers following leads from scout drones. We’ve tried this before and never found him, but this time… I think he wanted us to succeed.”
“Why do we think that?”
“He’s messaging us and demands to speak with, well, with you Ellayna.”
The tremble down her back was like a convulsion, a tightening of muscles that she almost couldn’t control. “Is that safe?”
“We’ll route all comms through the GFC cybersecurity portal. I’m sending Gale a VR access code with security restrictions built-in. You’ll be fine, Ellayna.”
She prioritized the tactical screens, one showing TwoLunar from a hundred kilometers out, the others showing closeups. Tiny markers indicated the trooper teams, a dozen in all, spread across structurally stable parts of TwoLunar. A side screen looked down on Martin in the operations room surrounded by his security personnel, their eyes all staring far away at virtual renderings of the impending conflict.
With the merest flick of thought she could shuffle any vision to the foreground while gazing through them all like layered glass, taking in all the imagery in parallel, while still seeing the room she was in, still seeing Del in his prison, and her hand resting on his chest.
“We used sensors to pick up micro-vibrations in TwoLunar’s structural pumice. We’ve extrapolated them back to a single point around here…” Martin’s face disappeared and a complex wire-frame representation of TwoLunar appeared with a flashing X marking their target. “I pinged him and he knew we’d nailed his location, so he decided to come out.”
“Why?”
“He knows he’s almost surrounded.”
“Almost?”
“It’s a three-dimensional warren of collapsed tunnels and rooms. Our maps are inaccurate at best. I’m closing the other trooper teams in on this area, but it’ll take a while to get them all in place.”
The view of TwoLunar was staggering. The great pumice cylinder tumbled slowly in the void, surrounded by a lethal halo of debris and near-invisible strands of elevator cable. From certain angles, it was still a cylinder. The nova blast had ripped out a complete side, but somehow its endcaps remained attached to the curving remnants of the outer shell. Gutted frames of buildings clung to the insides of the ruins. At the Earth-side endcap, the rod-like structure of the light bar, the artificial internal sun, poked out about a quarter of the distance to the space-side cap. As the open wound rotated away from her view, she saw the outside surface mottled with thousands of crystal blisters, the gardens and bio-domes all dead and empty. As sunlight caught them, they sparkled like Earth’s lakes of plasma glass, making TwoLunar appear as a tiny model of Earth’s larger destruction. A game-sized version, and she was here to play.
A message feed flashed red. Her heart leapt as a black shadowy avatar sprang into her vision. She took a deep breath. Ok, Ursurper, let’s do this. She reached out with her mind and opened the channel.
“Ellayna, so good to see you again.” Gale’s voice oozed into her mind like molten basalt.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” she snapped. She hated the way he seemed to know her. It was some game of Del’s: give his pet memories of her, so he thought he knew her. She didn’t dare ponder what memories Del had contributed.
“I assume you are here to impede my personal freedom again?” Gale’s carbon-black features filled her view. That translucent, black skull thinly veiled beneath a course weave of fibers, knotted and twisted into a grotesque parody of a human head with shiny black beads as eyes. A toy, a disgusting doll from some wiccan tradition. Del’s pet monster.
She struggled for self-control, throat dry, skin slick with sweat. “We have evidence that you were illegally sending a package from orbit to an ally on Earth. TwoLunar is still the property of the GFC. It, and everything inside its orbital pathway, remains our property.”
Gale’s eyes fixed her in their dead gaze. She reminded herself that they controlled the data feed and he couldn’t actually see her, just a stationary image. His face was wildly asymmetric as if he’d pried apart panels of fibrous flesh and stitched them back together. Such crude self-surgeries were attempts at finishing Del’s great experiment: perfecting the voidian race. Did he really understand how far from perfection he was? Incomplete, flawed, a failed project that could never work. Never be allowed to work.
An image feed showed a security bot creeping up on Gale from behind. Other troops closed from the front and sides. Their ETAs ticked down in her vision. She zoomed in on Gale, just hanging in space, proportioned like a gibbon, with spidery long arms and legs. His feet looked like another set of hands, his core body just a dense twist of cables. Long hair-like strands emerged from his back, writhing slowly in the void like asphyxiating snakes.
As she watched, Gale extended his arms as if to encompass the whole universe. “How could I forget? The GFC owns everything beyond low-Earth orbit.”
She sent Gale the video feeds of the meteor events. He chuckled, a hollow sound like someone scraping flesh remnants from the inside of a skull. “I am flattered you bestow me with such godlike powers. ” He twisted in an exaggerated bow as a pulse of gas from a small ring-motor in his hand sent him spinning slowly out into the open center of TwoLunar.
“Can we take him, Martin?”
She watched as Martin assessed the troop positions. “Not capture, he’s too mobile. Lasers don’t work well. The fiberoptic properties of his body disperse the energy. Maybe kill him with kinetics, but I need to be close… within a ten-millisecond shot range.”
“What’s powering him?”
“Bunch of small reaction motors attached to various appendages. Don’t think he’s armed.”
“Why is he out here, Martin?”
“He’s fucking with us, testing to see if we’ve got anything new.”
She watched Gale move and felt a twinge of envy. In space, he was alarmingly perfect, balletic and free. Nearly immune to heat, cold and radiation, things that no human, no matter how augmented, how well-equipped, could ever truly be.
Distract him. “Ursurper, I’m here with your creator, Del Krondeck.” She zoomed in on Gale’s face to see if there was any change in expression, but his features remained inanimate.
“Del is awake?”
“Del still wallows in whatever mental exercises he has chosen to pursue. Why help defectors and smugglers, our enemies, Ursurper? Helping them endangers your creator.”
“Free my people, Ellayna, and maybe we’ll help you.”
Ellayna laughed, throwing as much scorn and spite as possible. “You still cling to that delusion? Where in the name of all space-time did you come up with this… this theory?” She knew where, of course. Del had sown the seeds when he’d created Gale’s mind. Just as he’d filled it with memories of her, he’d created false memories of legions of imprisoned voidian inside of Cloud9.
“Don’t lie to me, Ellayna. I was once on Cloud9. I saw them myself.”
“There is no voidian race,” she yelled. “Just you! Weird, dangerous and utterly alone.”
“We’ve found something, Ellayna,” Martin said, routing a different bot-feed to her Inner-I.
The view showed a small chamber, an opening that was once a crystal window giving extensive views of Earth. Equipment lined one of the walls, most of it old and cobbled together with bare wires and optical cables. Some looked handmade, circuits and boards soldered and kluged like a schoolboy’s homework project. A telescopic camera pointed at the Earth. Its thin end connected to an image intensifier and recorder. To the side sat a communications laser, tilted away to point at the blank wall.
“That’s all the evidence we need, Martin. Blow this shit away.”
“Not close enough, Ellayna, need a few more seconds.”
But Gale sensed the change in attitude. Maybe an alert tripped from his hidden lab. Gas puffed from his reaction motors and he began to spin, slowly folding inward as if wrapping his fibrous body into a protective knot around his own skull.
“Do it, Martin!”
Targeting feeds from troopers sprang into her mind. A weapons array on a distant gunnery platform came online. Gale’s eyes popped open, staring across the void right into Ellayna’s mind. Something akin to a smile creased the knots and cables of his face. A message hit her Inner-I and at the same instant Gale ignited a hidden hyper-compressed gas cylinder. An acceleration that would turn human flesh and bone into boiling pulp, flattened him into a disk of disparate tendrils that rocketed off on a diagonal course toward one of TwoLunar’s ragged openings.
“He’s escaping!” Ellayna yelled, but before the words emerged from her mouth, she knew Gale was gone. A slow-motion after-image showed him rolling into a pointed, bullet-shape and crashing through one of TwoLunar’s inner walls.
“We’re in pursuit,” Martin said, but the tone of his voice didn’t hold much hope.
Ellayna sat back, dropping the comms feed and sliding into the reality of Del’s prison, hand gripping the soft fabric over his chest as if it could shield her from Gale’s assault.
“Why did you do this to me, Del!” She snatched her hand away and raged to her feet. “Why let that monster free?”
To fuck with us, of course, to aid the defectors and harass the GFC into surrender.
She remembered Gale’s message and opened the data packet letting its words spill across her vision. “When you decide to run, Elly. I’ll help you.”
Elly? Only Del called her that. She almost spat at Del as he lay still and vulnerable. The spit would probably still be there when she came back to visit weeks later.
In the end, it was just a tear that left her body.
“Gale sent you a message, Ellayna?” Martin asked.
“Nothing, Martin, just puerile chiding. I deleted it.”
CHAPTER 10
Mira
Free!
Rex ran like a dog leading a chase, while the real dogs rallied around in a loose pack. Terriers, Bela and Mahler, crisscrossed over and under in a wild, four-dimensional fugue. Goliath, the wolfhound, surged to the front, carving through the long grass as Rust the pit-bull and Copland the boxer nipped at his heels.
Three days after his encounter with the militiaman, Regoth, the ache of confinement overwhelmed Rex. With a hand-selected dog pack, he headed for the park, exited through a damaged fence panel, and fled for the far edge of the Tellus District where the buildings thinned into open grasslands and rolling hills.
Past the Tellus Hills loomed Transit Mountain; only the first two plateaus were visible, the rest of the tower remained shrouded in mist. The smell of grass and earth stirred memories: starved and lost, creeping down from the hills into town to rob garbage cans and pick scraps from the streets. But these were cloudy memories now, actions performed by one of his past personas before the Future-Lord took control of his destiny and allowed the real Rex to shine through. He felt Him like a searchlight, an illuminating beam cutting through the fog of thin, unsubstantiated minds that lived inside of his head. Glowworms, dangerous personalities that hitched a ride on the drug as it was liched from the dead and sold back to the living, ghosts of dead addicts and past users. He had a lot of glowworms, but the Future-Lord’s light cleansed them away and crystallized his past.
It was all there, he just didn’t want to see it… not yet. His head striking that concrete, the terrible, vile child he must have been to deserve such punishment. Other things he’d done, murderous things and how he’d tried to bury them. He hadn’t used a concrete pavement or a brick wall or wooden door, he’d used chemicals, burning out neurons and axons, drugs, nanotech, sims… over time he’d tried them all. He wondered how and why he still lived. How was such an unbalanced and pathetic man allowed to exist?
