‘It’s not how we do things,’ he said. ‘We don’t really have possessions, money, any of that. Everyone gets assigned what they need, when they need it.’
‘That sounds grim,’ Kit said. Walking drunk and barefoot through dirty streets.
‘It’s a better way,’ Bear said. ‘You’ll see.’
‘But what do you want?’ she asked.
‘Me?’ He sounded startled.
‘All of you. Jana, whoever. I mean, what do you get out of coming here, doing this? What do you want for yourselves?’ She sighed, seeing his helpless shrug. ‘Never mind.’
He walked with her until she reached her door, watched her put her key in and push it open a crack. She leaned on the doorframe, shoes in hand.
‘You want to come in?’ she asked, looking up at him in the orange streetlamp glow. ‘For coffee?’ She twined her fingers in his and leaned her head back, half-closing her eyes, tilting her face up for him to kiss her. He didn’t move. Kit’s eyes flicked open in annoyed surprise.
‘I won’t take advantage of you,’ he said, so seriously that she laughed.
‘Just come in.’ She pulled him in through the doorway.
Inside she curled up on the sofa, made him sit down next to her.
‘I guess you didn’t do it yet,’ he asked.
‘I was busy.’ ‘I can see that.’ He smiled.
‘We work hard,’ Kit said, suddenly defensive. ‘All of us, we work hard and play hard, that’s what we do.’
She always had. All-nighters in the library at exam time, eyes burning. The brittle, precarious desperation: have I done enough, do I know enough, what if it isn’t enough. Caffeine, pro-plus, Adderall, there’d always been one drug or another dancing through her veins, and hunger the best of them all.
Well, you had to have something, didn’t you, or you’d cry with the emptiness, the futility of it all. Kit lay back on the sofa, feeling the room spin.
He didn’t mention the job again. Instead he told her about the people on his homeworld who’d evolved the ability to photosynthesise, receptors in their skin, living on air and water and sunlight and never needing or wanting to eat.
‘What, so they’re green?’ Kit asked, giggling.
He smiled at that. ‘No. They’re more efficient than your plants. They use all the wavelengths, they’re kind of pale, translucent, so fragile. They’re beautiful.’
Gently his fingers traced the thin delicate bones of her wrist, the silver scars on the back of her arm. Then he turned her hand over and kissed the soft inside of her wrist where her lifeblood pulsed.
She slid her arms around his neck, drawing him down close. His eyes were deep blue, like a late August sky. Cornflower blue maybe, though Kit couldn’t remember ever seeing an actual cornflower, not even long ago before all this, before the city and the hunger, when there might have been some afternoon on the edge of a field with the sun hot and the golden smell of the wheat.
‘You remind me of summer,’ she murmured, drowsy, and let her eyes close for just a moment.
She woke up alone with a blanket tucked around her, a pale morning light coming in through the blinds, and her knickers still on. All her clothes still on, in fact. So much for summer-blue eyes.
Kit got up, wincing at the pain in her head, threw up in the bathroom then drank a half-litre of water with a double-dose of painkillers. Under the shower, hot water running rivulets down her body, she ran a finger over the delicate ridges of her ribs. I am barely here. How would it feel, she wondered, to be strong and capable like Jana, to move with that purpose and assurance? To believe you could change the world for the better.
If her stomach hadn’t been so queasy from last-night’s wine, she might even have eaten breakfast.
Seven pm, hunched over her desk, Kit sipped her diet Coke, the fizz of it sharp like apprehension. The markets had long closed and the office grew quieter as people started to drift away.
‘You go home,’ Kit said to Patrick next to her. ‘I’ll finish up here, get the last few changes in.’
‘You sure?’ he asked her. ‘You’ll be OK getting home?’
‘Sure. I work past nine, they’ve got to pay for my taxi, right?’
He left her, surrounded by empty desks and darkened screens, and it was time.
Kit always had access she wasn’t strictly supposed to. There were regulations, procedures, but small modifications got slipped through all the time, and the harassed, overworked change managers didn’t want to know about them. It was breath-taking to think of it, the chaos, the mayhem a rogue coder or engineer could wreak. It was just that no one ever did think of it.
Remotely hopping onto one server and then another from that one, flipping IP addresses to cover her tracks. Kit wrote a random number generator into the code to pick the stocks and price them: nothing more chaotic than randomness, or more difficult to track down. And then a self-destructing script that would flip everything back to the way it was afterwards, and then, in an act of final sacrifice, delete itself.
Of course there were automated checks on these trades, that alerted when something unusual happened. Kit knew precisely how they worked: she’d written them. Her first big project as a bright new graduate, fresh from those prize-winning, top of her class days; how long had it been since she’d felt like that? Three years, an eternity. Until now. She disabled the checks easily.
How big is this, she wondered. That bug last year, where someone accidentally flipped a Boolean flag in the code, and all the call options came out as puts and vice versa. It lost the traders millions and made idiots of them; they’d been terrible in their fury, and for Kit and the others it had been all nervous appalled laughs and thank god it wasn’t me who did it. He’d been fired, of course, the poor guy who actually did do it. Some said they’d seen him working the trading floors as a shoe-shine boy afterwards, all spit and polish and resentful humiliation, but that was probably lies.
Maybe it was all lies.
‘You did well,’ Bear said to her the next day. He’d been waiting for her outside to walk her to the station when she’d finally managed to get away from the office. The chaos had been astonishing; the share price had crashed, the markets in turmoil, the accusations, the scramble to find out what went wrong and who was to blame. Kit had worked tirelessly on the investigation, scrubbing clean any remaining traces of her involvement as she went. She knew she’d done well. She always did. So why doesn’t it feel as good as it should?
Outside the night’s rioting had already started, and protesters lined the street; hooded, Hallowe’en masked in the dark. Kit thought of Jana’s infiltrators among them, insidious, wondered what they whispered in credulous ears, turning greed and envy to their advantage, playing with human emotions, pushing their buttons. She knew how to push mine well enough. And I don’t like it.
‘Jana’s pleased with you,’ Bear was telling her as they walked.
‘Is she, now?’ Kit was startled by the bitter edge to her own words as they came out, but she was past caring. ‘Does she think I lap up her approval like some stray fucking dog?’
‘Kit?’ He looked at her in shock. Clearly you didn’t talk about Jana that way.
‘Whatever, like I have a choice now. Like any of them do.’ She walked on ahead of him, trying to shake him off, but he followed. On the river bridge they stood and watched, listened, the distant smash of broken glass and the police sirens’ futile wails. That sense of purpose she’d thought she had, unravelling.
‘We’re not forcing anyone to do anything,’ Bear said eventually. ‘That’s not what we do, not what Jana does. We’re just helping you. You were all free to choose.’
‘Why did she put that tracker in me, if I’m so free? What happens if I run?’ She saw the answer in his look before he spoke. ‘Never mind, I understand.’
‘Would you want to run away? Really?’
Kit shrugged. ‘Where would I go?’ She stared down into the chill black water below; there was always one escape rou
te, of course, though that thought was best kept silent; if they knew she was considering that, they’d find a way to stop her.
‘You’re cold,’ Bear said, standing so close he could feel her shivering. He put his arm around her shoulders. He felt warm as always, solid and strong, and despite herself she leaned tiredly on him. He held her close.
‘Kit, it won’t be as bad as you think. I’d do anything for you, to keep you safe, make you happy. That’s what I want.’
I know, Kit thought. I know. But that isn’t enough. That doesn’t make this right.
If you sat still long enough, you found yourself in darkness, the motion-sensor controlled lighting fooled by stillness; it was as though you weren’t there at all.
Kit sat alone at her desk, staring at her screens in the dark, spider in the web. She’d been avoiding Bear, as far as she could, which wasn’t very far with that tracker in her arm. She’d stalled and made excuses for the things she hadn’t done: I’ve been busy, I didn’t get the chance. I’m sick, tired, she told him, all the time sensing Jana’s impatience behind his kind careful demeanour.
And for the big job, the last one, the one that was supposed to happen tonight, she’d needed no excuses, even with her contraband passwords she couldn’t access all the hundreds of servers. But there would be someone who could. There was always someone.
And there it was, right there. The sudden spike in network traffic, someone else logging on to the server, the script running, installing itself. It wasn’t even subtle, but then it seemed that the time for concealment was over.
Kit got up, strode across the open plan floor, the ceiling strip-lights flickering into belated life in her wake. She ran down the stairs, down into the basement, and almost slammed straight into Tony, hardware engineer, coming out the door of the data centre. He froze when he saw her.
‘Working late tonight, are you?’ Kit asked. She looked him in the eye and made her expression hard like Jana’s, no more eyes-down flirty appeasement.
‘Aren’t we all, these days?’ He gave her a half-smile, uncertain. ‘What’s the matter, love? You’re looking at me like…’
Her hand shot out, reaching for his arm above the elbow. He stepped back quickly before she could touch him, too quickly. It was enough.
‘Have you done it?’ she asked.
He nodded.
‘It’s on all the servers, ready to go, it’ll be replicated over all the sites by the time the markets open.’
‘Not if I have anything to do with it,’ Kit said.
‘I wouldn’t cross that Jana, if I were you,’ he warned with a grimace. ‘Mind, she’ll make things right, it’ll be for the best. She’s a good woman.’
‘She’s not,’ Kit said. ‘It’s a totalitarian regime you’re talking about. What about individual choice, freedom? It sounds no better than slavery to me.’
‘That’s easy for you to say, love. You haven’t got kids yet, have you?’
She glanced down briefly at herself: do I look like I’ve got kids?
‘Well, I’ve got a family to think of, we’re struggling bad these days, and I don’t get paid half what you lot upstairs do. They said we’d be taken care of, we’d all be taken care of.’
‘Whether we want to be or not,’ Kit insisted. He looked at her miserably, but unashamed, undeterred.
‘I’m sorry, Kit. I’m just doing what I have to do.’ He went to leave, then hesitated a moment in the doorway. ‘Kit?’
She glanced back, had he changed his mind? ‘Be careful, love.’
She laughed, then, despite everything.
The replication ran at midnight every night, copying the contents of every server onto its equivalents around the world, a safeguard against disaster wiping out the originals, but tonight a vector of destruction. She could pull the plug, of course, switch off the power, though she’d have to somehow take out the emergency generators as well. But even if she could do it, that would only delay the inevitable. It’s got to be a real disaster, she thought, a catastrophe, the ancient primal kind.
Fire or flood.
Water, everywhere, water running down the walls and spreading relentless across the floor. It had been easy to cut the power cables to the huge air conditioning units, and the temperature was already rising rapidly, the power-hungry servers overheating in their cases, humidity condensing on their surfaces. More difficult to rip free the coils and drain hoses, sending a deluge of water flooding out from each one, but she’d done it.
Kit sat down on one of the server racks, feet dangling above the wet floor, and rolled up her sleeve. The tracking device was a hard lump under the skin, moving like a cyst as she pressed on it. She got out her knife, poked at one end of it with the point until she drew blood, then tried to squeeze it out with her fingers. It wasn’t coming. She cut again, harder, then made another deep slash, parallel, to widen the cut, like a teenage girl wanting it to scar. Blood rolled warm down the inside of her arm as she dug the blade in deep, gritting her teeth, and levered out the little rod-shaped device. She held it up between finger and thumb to inspect it, then dropped it into the water pooling on the floor around her.
So that was the end of all that, then.
Though your sins be as scarlet, I shall wash them all away. Was that how it went, some half-forgotten devotion from childhood?
Her arm was bleeding badly, she realised, startled. She pinched the edges of the wound together as best she could, blood welling alarmingly between her fingers. Maybe I nicked a vein, or something. She’d never cut that deep before, it had never been her thing, not really.
Something slammed hard against the locked door, making her jump, then again. It’s locked, she thought, it’s reinforced steel, and then the door burst open, crashing back against the wall.
‘Kit.’
Bear was coming towards her, alarm and almost anger on his face. She’d never seen him angry before, and she tensed in apprehension. How did he get past security, she wondered, not sure she wanted to know.
‘What have you done?’ he was asking urgently. But he wasn’t looking at the rising waters, she realised, the drowning servers. He was looking at her white silk blouse half drenched red, the knife in her hand. ‘Kit, what have you done to yourself?’
‘I took it out,’ she said, her lips numb. ‘My body, my choice.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ He reached for her arm. ‘They put an anti-coagulant in them, it gets activated when it’s exposed to the air.’
‘Oh.’ Kit looked down distantly at her blood-soaked clothes, realised she was shivering despite the heat. ‘So I bleed to death.’
‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘No, no. It’s not that bad. I’ll get help for you, we can fix it.’ He was gripping her arm hard, like the way he’d done that first day, putting a crushing pressure on the veins. She flinched and saw her look of pain reflected in his face.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you, got to stop this bleeding.’
He ripped the sleeve from her blouse, thin silk tearing easily at the seam, and wrapped it tight around her arm until her fingers went numb and icy.
‘Come on, we’ve got to get out of here. I’ll get you back to the ship.’
‘No. What’s Jana going to do to me when she finds out about this?’
He looked around at the wreckage of the servers, just shrugged.
‘It’s not the end of everything. The support on the ground’s been better than we expected, we’ll bring the system down one way or another. Anyway she’ll be angry with me, not you, for letting it happen, and there’s nothing she can do to me.’
‘Why not?’ Kit asked. ‘Seemed to me like she’s the boss of you.’
‘You’ll see.’ He lifted her down from her seat. ‘Come on.’
She stumbled against him, and he picked her up in his arms like a child, feather-light, insubstantial. Was it all for nothing then? Kit clung to his shoulder, looking back at the destruction she’d wrought, as he carried her easily from the room
and up the stairs, up and all the way up to the rooftop.
It was there, hovering in the night sky above the building, shimmering white-hot and beautiful like a sun, while below the riot-torn city seethed with smoke and its people rose to greet their vanquishers.
‘The ship is mine,’ Bear told her. ‘No one else can pilot it.’
‘I thought you didn’t do ownership,’ Kit said tiredly, wondering why she cared.
‘I don’t mean I own it. We’re linked, it’s part of me, or I’m part of it, whatever you want to call it. That’s just how they work.’
‘What if something happens to you?’ She kept her voice carefully expressionless.
He smiled. ‘Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to happen to me.’ He set her down gently in the corner, where a low wall bordered the rooftop. She was shivering, and he took off his jacket, reached around her to put it over her shoulders, the fleecy lining still warm from the heat of his body. ‘Just wait here. You’re going to be all right.’
Kit flipped the knife open, twisted to her feet and lunged at him, surprise on her side. Or so she thought. It was a look of bemused concern he had as he caught her wrist and held her, oblivious to her struggles and attempts to kick him. The ship had veered off course for a moment, edging dangerously close to the adjacent tower, but then Bear was in control again and Kit was on the ground with her arm pinned firmly behind her back.
He did it carefully, gently. I don’t want to hurt you. But he did it with practiced competence and ease. His knee on her back, she felt him prise her fingers off the knife, take it from her.
‘We can help you, Katarina,’ she heard him say. ‘I only want to take care of you, protect you.’
‘Shouldn’t that be my choice?’ she whispered, so soft she wasn’t sure he heard. He let her go, warily, turned back to the ship. Kit pictured Jana up there, watching, jubilant.
She was bleeding again now, from the struggle. Leaning weakly against the wall, she put her hand up to grip her arm the way he had. And watched him, the concentration on his face as he guided the ship slowly down.
It looked so soft, the shape-shifting gelatinous skin of it. No wonder he had to pilot it in so carefully, slowly, it would never survive a collision with steel and concrete, reinforced plate-glass, no more than any of its inhabitants would. That was why they’d landed it in the water, after all.
Kzine Issue 7 Page 10