by Sean Platt
“I can’t do it,” she said.
The torment was killing Jason. He pulled his slamgun from its concealment and cocked it. The hammer on the gun did absolutely nothing. CP weapons were at least six or seven generations past the last guns that had required hammers to fire, but the designers continued to add them for effect. Nothing put an exclamation point on a sentence quite like the tiny noise of a cocking hammer, even in an age when it was nothing but bluster.
“I’m telling you, I can’t do it,” she repeated. Now she was crying. Noah Fucking West.
Jason raised his gun. One way or another, this had to end. He wasn’t good with crying women or pleading subjects, and right now he had both. He wasn’t even good with killing people. Always hated it. He didn’t want this to happen either, but he wanted even less to end up in a box himself.
“Do it,” he said.
The woman seemed to focus then put her other hand on the pipe. She raised it over her head.
Below her, Stahl raised his hands. “Jesus. Sweetheart. No. Don’t do it. Don’t. Please.”
She looked at Jason, the pipe now shaking. He twitched his gun, giving her just the one last chance. He knew she was an assassin. Making her kill Stahl was cold-blooded as fuck, but she could handle it. She’d done this kind of thing plenty before today. She had made her bed, and she’d have plenty of other men to lie in it with her.
Kitty inhaled and swung. Her eyes closed on the downward curve as she threw all of her enhanced strength behind it. Her speed made up for her small frame. The first blow glanced off of Doc’s right hand, snapping a finger the wrong way before striking him in the side of the face. He started to scream. Above him, chest heaving, Kitty raised the pipe and swung again, apparently eager to finish. The second blow split his scalp, still not knocking him out. Blood flew up and flecked the woman’s chest and face. This time, she screamed. It was nothing compared to Stahl’s wails. Jason wanted to turn away but couldn’t. He watched as she raised the pipe again. And again. And again. The pipe was heavy, and Kitty was strong, so Jason was shocked at how many strikes it took to close Stahl’s eyes. Seven. It took seven hits before he went down and stayed down. After that, she was just bashing a lifeless form, gasping and heaving and crying all at once, blood and gore on her cheeks, on her shirt, in her long dark-brown hair.
She turned toward Jason, her arms away from her sides and the bloody, hair-specked pipe in her right hand. Her face was a mask of blood. She looked at him with the fury of Hell, and Jason felt himself quail under her gaze, thankful he’d put some distance between them.
“There!” she shouted, spittle flying from her lips. It didn’t clear her face but drooled down her chin instead, mingling with blood. When the liquid reached her chin, it hung like a bright-pink balloon. “I’m fucking done! I hope you’re motherfucking happy!” She reared back and hurled the heavy pipe at him as hard as she could. It came at him spinning end over end, and he dove to miss it.
Jason felt a spike of anger then reminded himself of what he’d just made her do. He stuffed it down, raising his gun again and training it on her chest. She looked ready to murder again, but he didn’t plan to give her a chance. He tossed her a pair of handcuffs and ordered her to cuff herself. He said he wanted to hear them click. When they clicked, he made her hold her hands up and show him that there was no gap between the edges of the cuffs and her small wrists. Then he told her to step back and kneel as Stahl had, with her lower legs crossed behind her.
Only then, with the woman neutralized, did Jason approach what looked like a sack of pulverized meat. He toed the limp pile, keeping Kitty in the corner of his sight. He looked for Stahl’s face but couldn’t find it. He poked the corpse further, looking first out of curiosity and then, eventually, out of confusion. The man had had a face, right? But then he realized that he’d been looking at Stahl’s former face the entire time and almost vomited. He made out a triangle of flesh that was probably once a nose. A deeper, pulpier cut was likely a mouth. He couldn’t see the corpse’s eyes, and didn’t really want to.
The woman, still boring holes in him with her eyes and panting, said, “Did I do it well enough for you?”
“Almost,” said Jason.
He took a step back to mind the splatter then fired a shot through what used to be Doc Stahl’s head. His precautions against splatter were inadequate, and his lower half was specked with blood as if a bomb had exploded. It didn’t matter. He was due to remove the clothes he’d draped over his Stark suit anyway, now that his time of lying low was over.
“Okay,” he said, looking toward Kitty. “Now here’s what I need you to do if you’re coming with me.”
After he finished the sentence, there was a beat of nothingness. It felt like his great grandfather’s record needle skipping in a groove. But the skip was uninteresting, and he paid it no mind. It happened again and again. But it was all so uninteresting.
Somehow, Jason later imagined, he must have finished his directions to Kitty. But in real time, a gray cloud rose from below, and it all just kind of stopped mattering. His mind had seen the cloud twice before — first on the night of the concert riot and then again shortly before Kitty had killed Stahl. The cloud didn’t feel like a hole, or like missing time. It didn’t feel like anything. It was just a slip in which he’d forgotten unimportant details, as happened countless times every day, like when he found himself unable to remember what he’d had for breakfast the day before or where he’d placed his hover keys.
That was the thing about the human brain. When you gave it something it didn’t understand, it drew its own conclusions. It was how people blocked incidents of abuse, how brain trauma patients could function after losing years of their lives and pick up where they’d left off as if no time had passed. It could cause a person to question the nature of reality. Was reality something truly objective, or did everyone have their own?
When Kai sat up in Natasha Ryan’s immersion rig, all she could hear were bloodcurdling screams. Whitlock was still in the rig beside her, plugged in and silent enough to be sleeping. The office door was cracked. The screams were coming from outside.
She made it through the office door just in time to hear the screams cease and to get a face full of Doc Stahl. He was on top of her in the Ryans’ living room before she knew what was happening, his arms pinning hers to the floor and his not-unsubstantial weight on her chest and pelvis. Behind him, Kai could see Doc’s rig and the unoccupied one beside it, Doc’s inputs sticking up at the head of the thing like the legs of a dead spider.
“Fucking bitch!” Doc screamed. Spit flew from his lips and struck her in the face.
Nicolai rushed forward and grabbed Doc by the shoulders. He was trying to pull Doc off Kai, but Doc was too strong. Nicolai, however, turned out to be the better grappler. He easily off-balanced Doc and rolled him to the Ryans’ polished wood floor, Nicolai now becoming the man on top.
“Goddammit, lie still!” Nicolai shouted. “Let it pass!”
Doc drew three slow, shambling breaths then threw Nicolai away from him in a burst of ill temper. Kai watched, thinking that Nicolai had let Doc toss him to vent steam. But he would be okay now; Doc was past the precipice and coming down fast.
Doc glared at Kai as if she’d just beaten the shit out of him with a pipe. Which, of course, she had.
“Do you have any fucking idea how much that hurt?” He met Kai’s eyes then turned to stare into the office at the rig he’d been on a moment earlier. “What kind of sick shit is that?”
“I’m sorry,” said Kai, standing and brushing herself off. “But let’s try to remember that I just saved your life.”
“Fuck you!”
Doc hawked and spat. The blob of spit struck the wood floor and huddled up into a dome on the floor’s thick coat of synthetic wax. It didn’t matter; Kai was planning to have the Ryans’ bots do some housekeeping after they left anyway. Given the way she’d been able to roll back the canvas’s clock back to yesterday — a time when Nic
olai’s ID gave him valid clearance to enter the apartment — she could easily hack the cleaning system and make it forgetful.
“That was harder for me than you think,” she said, getting to her feet. And it had been, too. Dark fantasies aside, twenty-four hours since her spin on the Orion had been enough time to convince herself that high-end immersion couldn’t possibly have been as real as she remembered it. But what she’d just experienced had been real — as real as right now — and killing Doc in a virtual world hadn’t been any easier than killing him in the actual one would have been. She’d felt the weight of the pipe in her hands. She’d felt the way each strike telegraphed through her bones. She’d heard the crunch of his skull, then how his body yielded too much on the following swing. She’d felt the draft in the alley as it ran through her hair. She’d been in the real version of that alley an hour earlier, and where she’d been a moment ago had been exactly the same. Exactly. For a moment, coming out of the rig, she’d had a moment of vertigo, not knowing one world from the other. And on the heels of that thought, a frightening thing occurred to her: If you were immersed and someone programmed the simulation to seem to end when it actually hadn’t ended, you’d never know. A person could live the rest of her life inside without realizing she wasn’t in the real world.
“Oh, I’ll bet it was hard, sunshine. Just as hard as it was for me. You could have at least warned me.”
“You heard me tell Nicolai to put us on the city map in the alley down from the Starbucks. I told you I was going to ask the simulation for a pipe and that you had to let me beat you to death with it. Where was I unclear?”
“You should have asked it for a fake Doc Stahl when you asked for the pipe.”
“I don’t think it has you in the database,” said Kai.
Doc cracked his neck one way then the other. He shook out his arms. “Hell. I didn’t know it was going to be like that. Shouldn’t there be failsafes on shit like this? Pain preventers or something?”
“Maybe Natasha and Isaac are into S&M,” said Nicolai. “Maybe they turned the pain up.”
Doc looked into the office as if it had tried to bite him. Which, really, it kind of had.
“Shit. Well, anyway. How’s your boy?” He jerked his chin toward the other office, where Whitlock was still motionless in the rig. “You think he bought it?”
Kai nodded. “I think so. He was there with us, and his brain will plug the holes on either side of the memory. He saw it happen. He even shot you at the end, just to be sure.”
“Oh, I know,” said Doc. “I felt it. The rig didn’t stop feeding me shit after I died. And let me tell you: Getting your head blown off?” He made a thumb and forefinger circle. “Fan-fucking-tastic.”
After making sure that Doc and Kai weren’t going to tear each other’s heads off, Nicolai walked into Isaac’s office then Natasha’s. He came back out, motioning at the others to make haste.
“I’ve reset everything on all of the rigs. I unplugged Whitlock and erased the cache file on the machine. I think I did, anyway. It’s not like I’ve ever seen anything like those rigs before.”
Doc looked into the offices, apparently recovered. “Yeah, me either.” Then, when he looked back toward Kai, she recognized a look in his eyes. Doc was an opportunist first and a person second. She realized he was seeing dollar signs. The man had just been beaten to death with a pipe, and all he was thinking about right now was that he wished someone would let him sell what he’d just used. The irony was, if Micah had hired Doc instead of trying to have him killed, it would have solved the problem for everyone.
“We need to go,” said Nicolai, looking around the apartment for evidence of their intrusion. “While it’s nice that I didn’t have to lure them away for you, the fact that they’re off on their own makes their return less predictable. She said something about going to Micah’s, but that doesn’t mean she won’t change her mind and come right back. Natasha is kind of…well…” He stopped, apparently unsure how to finish the sentence.
“Go do your shit with funboy then,” Doc said to Kai. “Sex him up.”
Kai did. She got Whitlock ambulatory and led him to the street, where they climbed onto his screetbike. She cuffed his hands around her waist then fought his impossible, sluggish weight as they flew back to the alley they’d come from, where Kai told her nanos to let his fog dissipate. It wouldn’t matter that there was no corpse on the ground when his coherence returned. His brain would fill in the gaps. He would assume he’d called the police and reported a corpse, and that the police hadn’t asked questions once they’d learned who was called it in. Then he’d report the deed as done and, presumably, take Kai home once Micah agreed that she could be trusted. Based on Kai’s experience, it would take less than a day before he committed the patchwork lie to memory as if it were true.
The next morning, Micah Ryan called Kai. His earlier menace was as gone as the threat of Doc Stahl.
He told her about his big plan, and that he had excellent news for her.
They walked for hours.
Leah didn’t have a Beam ID, but the system seemed to know who she was anyway. Every few blocks, she’d press her hand to a wall or a glass window, and it would light up and register her as anonymous. Then she’d tap around on the Beam window for a while (verbal never worked quite right in public and made you look like a tourist), and the system would soon act like it knew who she was anyway. It always took a minute or two, as if there was something in the area — possibly at her last access point — that needed time to sniff her out. But then the window would begin to shift in barely perceptible ways. She’d do a search and find that it autocompleted from a list of recent searches made from her earlier access points. The few times she visited retail pages then revisited later, items she’d recently looked at would appear, as if cookied. She’d find the keypad set to her most natural, preferred position. Search results would end up strangely tailored to someone her age, gender, and level of enhancement.
Block by block, entirely on foot, they spent the day wandering from SoHo’s burned-out studios and shops all the way into one of Manhattan’s most upscale neighborhoods. As the sun set, they found themselves in a trendy section of Harlem. They both felt underdressed. Harlem wasn’t exactly snobby, but it was affluent and not modest in the least. Most of the men wore suits and expensive band ties, and the women wore long, flowing dresses. There weren’t many jeans, headbands, gray braids, pink dreadlocks, or rainbow sarongs at all.
As uncomfortable as Leo had been when he’d met Leah in the cafe, Harlem seemed to press the boot heel harder against his back. Leah found the old man’s discomfort cute, despite feeling slightly out of skin herself. Leo talked all the time about the need to follow your internal compass and not care what others thought, but he clearly had a bit of self-consciousness and peer-think in him after all.
Finally, to Leo’s sighing relief, Leah slapped the wall of a large gray building. It looked as out of place as Leah and Leo, but for different reasons. While the rest of the buildings were glass-and-concrete spires or high-end apartments, the building Leah indicated had a large wooden arch across its front that was surrounded by abstract stained glass accents. The area beneath the wooden arch was chrome broken by two enormous windows. Or at least, they looked like windows, but they weren’t. They showed clouds in a blue sky instead of the building’s interior, which meant they were Beam displays, and as soon as Leo and Leah walked under the arch, they saw that the clouds protruded from the building’s front as 3-D holos. The holos were barely visible from the street, but once under the arch they seemed almost real. Leah felt like she was hiking through the sky, with concrete steps underfoot.
Leo glanced up at the floating clouds. “This looks like a church,” he said. Then he walked over to a small plaque, read it, and returned to Leah.
“Is it a church?” Leah asked.
“It’s a school. A school for gifted children. Why is Crumb at a school?” He paused. “No, wait. Why did a school stea
l Crumb from his hospital room and then erase all trace that he’d ever been there?”
“I don’t know.”
Leo looked at the building, the clouds, and Leah. Finally, he looked out into Harlem, seemingly at the long and winding route they’d taken to get here.
“You’re sure about this?” he asked.
“No,” said Leah.
Leo chuckled. “Good enough.”
The school’s lobby was as odd as its outside. The cloud motif was repeated, and Leah found herself waist-deep in a small cumulus as she approached a reception desk. At least, that’s what she assumed it was. The desk was the most intricately carved thing Leah had ever seen. It was all waves and whorls, its surface rippled like whipped cream. It was roughly desk-shaped — but only roughly, and its surface breathed with a Beam projection of rippling water. The wave projection tumbling across the curved surface made Leah dizzy, and she had to look away as she approached it.
The attendant was as odd as the desk. He was a boy of maybe eight, with thick, messy brown hair. He had large ears and a charming smile and seemed unable to sit still. He stayed behind the desk, but the area behind it was wide and long enough for him to pace. He did so the entire time he was talking, making gestures with his hands.
Leah realized she didn’t know what to say. Why would a school have taken in a strange, sick vagrant? Would the kid know about any of it? And if he did, would he know Crumb as “Crumb,” or “Stephen York?” Or neither? And if the place did have Crumb, would his presence here be a secret? Would Leah and Leo need to connive their way in? The notion, as she considered it, seemed absurd. Something in the school (or perhaps the school itself) had been drawing Leah toward it all the way from lower Manhattan like a dog on a leash. Whatever that something was, it wanted her here. It almost felt like it needed her here. To Leah, the force felt almost magnetic. As odd as it was and as impossible as it would have been to describe, she almost felt like she was on both sides of that magnetism, simultaneously being drawn toward the school and doing the summoning herself. She hadn’t even really felt the mechanics of their journey. Aside from stopping occasionally to access The Beam, the walk here had felt almost like sleepwalking.