Cullsman #9

by Michael John Grist

  The green blip bursts across the visors, then is gone.

  Ren- What happened?

  Tekalus- The guy just exploded!

  Lorie- It's blood. The tracer's in blood, in a box.

  Tekalus- What the..?

  Lorie recoils, wipes the slick red mixture from his hands against the suit, but it doesn't come off, just slides around his shaking red palms. The blood is pulsing, and he glimpses strange metal inside, whirring. A pump. He feels like throwing up, reaches down for the tube, doesn't comprehend what's happening.

  Ren- This is very important, Loz, what's going on?

  Lorie- Blood, and guts, in a tin. I think this thing's a pump.

  Tekalus- A pump, what does that mean?

  Lorie- I can't find my gloves, I-

  Tekalus- Speak to us, Loz? What?

  There's a crackling of static, a loud crash, then Lorie's life signs drop from their visors.

  Tekalus- He's dead.

  Ren- He's not. Maybe he took his visor off. I'm going after him.

  Tekalus- It's not safe.

  Ren- I don't care, it's my fault, I have to get him out. Go and wait with the motexes, I'll be there with Lorie and trophies in no time.

  Tekalus- Ren, think, maybe it was a bomb, I've heard of that. He said there was a pump, in a box, like bait. Someone could have rigged this up! He's gone, Ren, let's just get out of here.

  Ren- Have those motexes ready.

  REN

  Tekalus keeps on protesting, but he ignores it. He never should have let Lorie go off alone. He knows it, and now he has to fix it.

  At the entrance to the building, he's already feeling the generators effects. Just watch your stats, Ren old boy, he says to himself. Just keep an eye on the old counters, and we're going to be fine.

  Straps his gloved hands round the tube tightly, steadies his nerves, and climbs the ramshackle stone steps up to the building's entrance. He's on blacks, but there's nothing. He feels prickling heat creeping along his spine, into his shoulder blades.

  Ren- Give me some readouts, Tek.

  Tekalus- There's nothing, the blips gone. You can't see anything, neither can I. Don't do this.

  Ren- Watch my vitals.

  Tekalus- Dammit, Ren, what do you think you're going to find down there?

  Ren- Lorie, collapsed.

  Tekalus- What if it's a trap?

  Ren- Calm down. This is me, Tek. Calm down. I'll get him, well be fine, just watch my vitals.

  Stalking through the building's crumpled facade, his booted feet crunch in mounds of ground glass. Everywhere are stunted metal frames, not matching the grey map-lines in his visor. Presses on.

  He's the leader, always has been. His father tells him, he'll take over the candidacy some day. He'll be a leader of many men, important men, so he has to practice now. He's responsible for these two. He's responsible for everyone, it's what he does.

  His father says so. Spreads his broad shoulders, shrugs sometimes, and says, it's going to be your job, and that's that.

  Feels the heat, sweat trickling into his eyes before being sucked into the suit's vents. Lift shaft, he climbs down. Finds himself wondering if this was how Lorie was feeling. It feels bad.

  Ren- Talk to me, Tek. Feeling light-headed. You getting anything?

  Tekalus- No signals. The motexes are here. What can you see?

  Ren- Nothing. There's nothing moving, it's too hot. I'm on the level.

  Tekalus- I got you. His last position's just down that corridor. You'll be there in seconds.

  Hears the voice of his hunter contact drifting through the haze. Some good hunting, he'd said, plenty of blips, in good condition. Not entirely legal, not wholly licensed. It just made it more exciting.

  Snap out of it. He shakes his head, tries to stay alert. He's here for Lorie. Can see the wide open space spread ahead, then around him, and he's walking towards the corner where the blip was last sighted, where-

  Tekalus- He's back! You see that? Lorie's back!

  On the visor Lorie's life signs flash back up to normal levels. Little elevated, but better than dead.

  Tekalus- He's behind you, at the lift shaft. You see his marker? He must have just come round, or something. You must have passed him.

  Ren- I didn't see him.

  Tekalus- He's reading out normal. Lorie, can you hear me?

  Ren- Tek, I didn't see him.

  Tekalus- So turn around.

  He takes the final few steps, to the corner, where the blip faded out.

  Tekalus- You're going the wrong way, Ren. He's behind you. You see his marker, right, he's right there.

  Ren switches on his whites, sees the burst open silver container, a froth of dark blood with a churning pump, and something else. A black exo-glove, amongst the mess.

  Tekalus- He's coming towards you now, must have seen your whites. Damn, he had me worried. Maybe his comms got damaged when he blacked out.

  Trails of the crusted black blood, leading round the wall. Round the corner.

  Tekalus- Ren, where are you going? He's behind you, you need to be getting out.

  Round the corner, he sees the pale white body of Lorie, luminescent in the clinical bright lights, stripped of his suit. The ground is bloody and steaming around him, wreathing him hazy through the vapor. Strands of blonde hair jut from his caved-in face. No suit.

  Understands, and spins around.

  Ren- He's dead. It's a trap, Tek, run!

  Brings the tube up to angle, white lights pick out the lumbering black shape before him but then a flood of blue light and-

  The transmission cuts out.

  TEKALUS

  No answer again on the comms, as Ren's readings drop from the visor. His marker winks out. Lorie's marker turns about, heads back through the open space, and Tekalus watches. Flicks through to the comp transmit, reads that Lorie's tube just launched. Watches his marker along the narrow corridor, into the lift shaft.

  Ren is dead. Lorie is dead.

  Tekalus jumps on his motex and fires it up. The wheels slide up, fins expand, and he slots his legs into their sockets. The engine roars and he slams the accelerator. The machine gusts, detritus blows from underneath, and he's taking off.

  The Lorie marker has sped up, started to run, half a block distant.

  Tekalus- Stay the hell away from me!

  Screaming through the bleary under-lit grounds, scant inches above the road as his motex gathers speed. To the Out, he has to get to the Out, the only way.

  Tekalus- Who are you? Who the hell are you?

  No answer. Lorie's marker's at the motex dump, and his visor registers one of them start up. He imagines he can hear it behind him, the roar of fans and jets winding up. Chasing him, and he realizes he should have blitzed the ignition on them while he had time.

  Tekalus- What do you want?

  Behind him. Picking up speed.

  He's getting some lift. He'll need it, for the Out. Races past shadowy remnants of old architecture, the rusted remnants of sky-trains. Skims under some raggedly strung power lines, over the twisted growth of traffic light boxes, clawing for height.

  He thinks of his father, and all his hopes. He'd never liked Ren, never liked the hunt, but he couldn't stop him. He's weak, and his eyes are watery whenever they speak.

  The flight passes in seconds, the Lorie marker steady behind him. Slows down for the Out, pulls his legs from the slots and the engine begins an automatic descent. He jumps, rolls into the Out, and glimpsed the other motex, lights blazing closer over the up-rooted land below.

  Up and climbing the ladder, breathing heavy, a tight pain in his chest, he holds his hand over the scan pad.

  Red blink. Access denied.

  He stares in horror, holds up the other hand, before the pad.

  Red blink. Access denied.

  Tries to calm down, shakes his hand, holds it up again carefully.

  Green blink. Access granted.

  The hatch hisses, starts to slide open, and he real
izes it's not going to be fast enough.

  Turns to watch the motex dock, watches Lorie's black suit standing up, tube outstretched. He grapples for his own, sways from the ladder, has to reach back so he won't fall. Eyes are dry.

  Tekalus- Who the hell are you?

  His visor crackles to life.

  - Just another hunter.

  The tube flares up, blue lights blossoming in its depths. Tekalus watches, caught doe-like in the glare, until his helmet smashes back into his brain.

  His life signs drop out of the last visor remaining.

  8. THE BLUE CHIPSET AND THE THING

  I'm standing atop the way-station's broken dome, holding up the blue chipset and willing it to work. The sky is swirling with a purple vortex, everybody is dead, and I'm waiting for the Thing to come.

  Around me the desert winds blow hard, and there are scraggle-lined black creatures dancing closer through the sand, flitting from shimmer to shade, soon to descend.

  The Thing stomped here, and passed on. The desert was leveled, and only I survived, because I have the chipset.

  I turn it over in my hands, a blue chunk of flat plastic. Even now it's sending out a signal to summon the Thing back, purpling the skies and driving me back into myself.

  I'm thinking about a girl I once loved. Where does love go? She may still exist out there, somewhere, it's hard to say. How far has the Thing reached? Has it stomped itself everywhere? Did it wipe out Tokyo? Did it take out the seed banks on Svalbard?

  I hold the blue plastic chipset up before me, wink the tears from my sand-whipped eyes, and start shouting command lines into the roaring purple wind.

  * * *

  Dasny said the black things were invisible but coming. I hadn't believed him.

  He was lying in a bed in the way-station. We were only supposed to watch, but he'd gone down, gone out, and gotten himself infected. I don't know what it was, but the computer called it a 'memetic virus'. The Thing.

  "I met a girl," he said, his face choke-white, the tendons in his hands straining like piano-wire. "Her name was Carobel."

  I mop his steaming forehead down with a cool white sponge.

  "What happened to her?"

  "I threw her away," he said. "Like I throw everything away."

  "You can't throw a person away."

  "She killed herself a few weeks after we broke up. In her note she said it was not my fault. She said she loved me, but she understood that I wasn't responsible for her."

  "You weren't. She did what she did, not you."

  He shook his head frantically. "I did it. I knew what I was doing. I used her up like old computer then threw her away when I was done. When I took her on I knew her program was damaged."

  "Things happen," I said. "You can't blame yourself."

  He grabbed my wrist and pulled me in close. Waves of heat rushed up from his shaking white body. "I knew. I'm a bad person. I deserve worse than this."

  Then he lapsed into fits. After that a coma, and then he died, and for a time life resumed on the way-station as it always had.

  * * *

  We watched what we watched. We saw people coming and going, life was life.

  I played chess. I slept. I talked to the computer. Joel and Abu Hara sometimes took me on in gravity ball. We slapped that old pig-skin up and down the tube like maniacs

  "What do you make of Dasny?" Joel asked me after one game. We were in the rec. room watching old renders of Casablanca, eating hot fries and chili dogs.

  I shrugged. "Bad memes ate his brain. There was nothing to be done."

  "No, I mean about what he was saying. About his girl."

  "That was all mad talk."

  Joel nodded. "I know that," he said.

  We ate chips.

  Later that day, I type in my report blog:

  Imagine a purgatory full of lonely people. They all sit in their spaces, trapped in their own fear of being alone forever. They neither cry nor rock nor whine. They merely sit, and stare into the purple void. Some of them shake without end.

  These people are hungry. They are empty limpets, leeches, slung on the underbelly of the fabric of reality.

  Of course none of this is real. There is no soul. We are just little memetic programs running on mechanical human tubes, with such a hunger. Imagine that great hunger, the yearning of so many lost bits of mind, longing for something. There's a hole left by God in what we are. There's a yawning purple hole that could rip the Clan from the face of the Universe.

  When I think of Dasny, this is what I think of.

  * * *

  Abu Hara was the next to show signs of the Thing.

  She grew sloven, and careless. She left the hatch open so the desert sands blew in. The way-station echoed with her silences. She grew to be like a black hole.

  I sat and spoke with her. She drank a can of pop and smiled at me as I spoke.

  "What's the matter, Abu Hara?"

  She smiled like she meant it, but I felt the malaise creeping within her.

  "Nothing's wrong, Georgie," she said. She patted at my hand. "I'm fine."

  She entered a coma that night.

  I write in my personal journal, on paper, with a pen:

  Abu Hara joins their ranks.

  * * *

  I don't know why this thing started. I refuse to believe that this is evolution, that this is what we are all fated for, lost souls in this immense way-station watching over a world.

  Joel and I play chess. He loses.

  "Looks like I lose," he says.

  We don't mention Abu Hara.

  Joel and Abu Hara were lovers. We don't mention her now, an unspoken rule, but Joel does anyway.

  "You think she'd have still done it if we'd upped the narcs on her?" His king lies dead on the board before us.

  "The deadeners?"

  "Muters."

  I mull it over. "Why are you talking to me about this?"

  He shakes his head. "Emotions. This damn hard-wiring."

  "Shake it off."

  "Mute them."

  I pause a moment, look at him. "Are you telling me you're infected?"

  He stares off into space. Above us there are stars, bright and white and filling the sky through the glass roof overhead, all the many galaxies of the Clan.

  He grins. "No."

  I nod. He nods.

  I wonder how long it will be before the Thing shuts him down too.

  I write in my private journal:

  We are not meant for this. We have reached out and touched the face of God, and found nothing there but the codes of our own DNA, and what is our DNA but a cleverly built house, a spiral tube that is empty on the inside, just the crackling of outmoded programs that have come to know themselves.

  * * *

  I put muters in their food supply, so they're all deadened. None of them smile much for a time. Nor will they feel sad. They will feel nothing. Their dopamines have been blocked, along with all of their little chemical bits and pieces.

  They can think clearly, and move around, and play chess, but they do not feel. Still they are entering comas and dying.

  I read their reports, I know they aren't feeling loss, they don't feel bad, its not emotional. They are simply empty. It's in their hollow words as much as the vacant looks in their faces.

  I find dead bodies everywhere I go.

  I write in my report blog:

  The Thing is stomping here.

  * * *

  We built the way-stations on one in one hundred worlds, apart from the masses, to reach out and touch divinity. But we didn't touch it, we tore it open, and now the new light of its knowledge is tearing us all apart.

  I've been watching the news, people are entering comas all around the Clan. The Thing is stomping them all, killing them off. It's like watching dinosaurs in the Pliocene, as they just give up.

  I begin the chipset as an effort of will. I broke the seal on the reality code, after all, so I am responsible. It is a blank blue stretch of plastic,
but crammed with millions of synaptic lines, more than a brain, denser than thought, the key into divinity. It can summon the crackle of consciousness, and harness the power of soul.

  * * *

  When they are all dead, I switch it on, and begin to recall the Thing. I stand on the way-station dome, above all the dead bodies of my colleagues, and summon the Thing that stomped this world flat around me.

  It comes. I feel the purple rush of its emptiness tugging at my core, and wonder what the next step should be. I wonder how to insert myself into the plastic sheet.

  I think of love.

  "What is love?" I ask the chipset.

  I want to hear that love is more than just electric pulses, more than bits and bytes of chemicals that muters can dull. I want it to tell me love is as real as the Thing itself, that love is an antidote, that it might save the Clan.

  I loved a girl once. She left me, long before the Thing began. Dasny knew a girl and she died. Abu Hara died, and I may have loved her. They were more sensitive than me, I suppose, not inoculated by that first venture through the reality rip. Still I feel what they feel, I see the fields of the lonely and lost in my dreams.

  What use is love if it can't reach beyond the grave and appease these people, if it can't harness the weight of all our dead pressing down from above, like mounding sediment that breaks carbon to diamond.

  The Thing hovers above me, purple in the skies, the Thing is on my shoulders, peering into my mind. I hold the chipset out and will it to work. Is this love, I ask the chipset, is this the grand plan, is this the best we could do?

  The purple skies crescendo above me and I will to mind the memory of the girl. She was young, I was young, it is one simple memory.

  We saw shooting stars lying on her garage roof. That moment was magical to me then. She reached over, she touched my chest, and that was magical.

  I try to will my knowledge of chemicals and DNA and bits and bytes out of my mind, I push away the reality code and focus on what I feel, what I sense, and I pour it into the chipset via command-lines in my skin, saying- 'If ignorance is what it takes to make love real, and love is what it takes to live, then I accept ignorance and forget everything else.'