“You’re the infiltrator,” Gumdrool said. “Where’s your plan?”
“I’ve had enough of following Amichai’s plans,” Dare said. “We should follow yours.”
“If he had any plans, he’d be barking orders already.” I tossed Gumdrool’s earputer back before he could see what I’d done. I wished I could covertly text Dare a message, but Dare’s poker face was awful. “Is there a back entrance?”
“A freight entrance. Huge hydraulic doors. It’d make a lot of noise.”
“Front door it is, then.”
We crept out into the courtyard. The air had the chill of a place in endless shadow; nestled in between the four apartment buildings, the only time this courtyard saw sunlight was a few minutes on either side of noon. Our shoes scuffed on the concrete, echoing off the branch server’s copper walls. The surface bristled with inset cameras.
If I’d been wrong about the screening filter I’d just applied, the cameras would see us. Then the front door would fly open and guards would come running out.
They didn’t. I began bypassing the palmprint locks on the fences.
The prisoners turned to stare at us. They looked gaunt but unbroken, standing stiffly in the courtyard, strangely dignified.
They looked like all the old workers on New York streets, brewing beer or sewing dresses to kill time until they died, hopelessness graven into every wrinkle.
Had the living always looked so much like prisoners?
Except we, at least, got rewarded in the end. The NeoChristians got the void. I mean, they had their primitive belief that some beard in the sky automatically Shrived their souls, but…
Nobody deserved the void.
I wanted to believe the dead drew a distinction between me and these NeoChristians. And if they did: I might, one day, get uploaded.
Until then, both of us were disposable bodies.
I’d closed my fingers into fists so tight, I’d drawn blood. The dead had robbed the NeoChristians, robbed Izzy, robbed the living of ambition and pride… while I’d played pranks. Dare had helped me understand that the world could be different, but that was not enough:
You have to be willing to give up your life to make the future happen.
A voice inside whispered: Burn it all down.
Yes. Before the sun set, this server would burn.
As I walked out into the courtyard, Gumdrool nudged me. “Looks like we have an old friend.”
I followed his gaze towards a familiar shock of red hair. Back at Wickliffe, she’d looked like a fantasy warrior – now she looked like the last woman in some postapocalyptic vidshow, a deep bruise under her left eye, cradling an injured arm. But she stood as though she owned the courtyard, unbowed, unbroken.
Beautiful.
Evangeline’s eyes widened as she recognized me… And then narrowed as she recognized Gumdrool.
I jerked my head towards Gumdrool, then made a disgusted face to indicate I wasn’t with him, I was just with him.
“Ah, the irony.” Gumdrool spoke as though the sight of Evangeline in prison was a fine summer sunset. “Escaping us, only to be captured by her own kind.”
“That’s not her kind,” Dare said. “Why would they imprison each other?”
Gumdrool rolled his eyes. “Read your history, kid. Every religion warred – Protestants hated Catholics hated Jews. If your skybeard hated shrimp and your friend’s skybeard loved it, the daggers came out so much faster.”
Evangeline jerked her thumb towards her chest, then pointed outward. Her meaning was clear: Will you free us?
Gumdrool gave her a thumbs-up. Evangeline seemed startled, but I confirmed our intent with a nod.
Why would Gumdrool want them out?
Evangeline coughed conspicuously. The prisoners, who had turned to watch us, wandered off. Evangeline alone stared after me, as if her faith in me was binding.
We got to the door, keeping a careful distance from the still-unconscious Naked Crazies – but now I wondered what their names had been. The server had an access panel attached to the wall.
In a secure site, wireless was only good for hard-to-reach devices, like wall-mounted cameras. Smart secops procedures had you lock each access point within a titanium case, then have the cases trigger an alarm if anyone attempted to tamper with them.
But here? The access panel was padlocked. One simple tumbler lock was all that stood between me and direct access. And I’d figured out how to break into those in my first week at the orphanage.
“You surprised me back there,” I whispered to Gumdrool as I got my lockpicks out. “I thought you’d let those NeoChristians rot.”
“They would have raised the alarm otherwise,” he shrugged. “No harm in telling them we’ll free them.”
Dare wrinkled his nose in disgust.
“Hurry up,” he whispered. “We need to get Peaches out before they Crazy her up.”
“I’m on it like Izzy was in there.”
“Yeah, well – your sister would have said goodbye.”
His anger made me realize: Peaches had kissed me farewell, but left Dare without a word.
Then I thought of poor Izzy. I’d get voided if they caught us… but would the dead punish her for my crimes? My superiors asked about you when I was in the LifeGuard academy, she’d told me.
That tiny voice: burn it all down.
I popped the padlock open. Some careful wiresplicing gave me limited access to the network, which got me access to the local cameras. I infected them with my image-snipping macro, then verified the hallway was empty before opening the door.
The hallways were white, spotless, well-lit – unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Centuries of treating the physical world as an afterthought made peeling paint, flickering lights, and scuffed floors the best I could expect to see.
We heard Peaches screaming – not in pain, but in protest.
The building was large, making it hard to pinpoint Peaches’ location – but as always, Dare maneuvered his way through the branch like he’d lived there.
We ducked guard patrols – who heard us approaching, looked at the blank videos I fed them, and trusted images over ears. Puzzlingly, the guard’s quarters were stuffed with boxes full of heavy-duty security hardware, all the latest biosensors and heat-scanners – but they lay on the floor, half-assembled. Someone had made casual efforts to put them together before giving up.
My palms prickled with sweat. This place had been designed to be impossible to infiltrate. But the builders had gotten lazy.
We should have been in custody by now.
“We’re approaching the labs,” Dare whispered. “Be careful.”
We crept down a long hallway, with a lab full of barking dogs on one side and a kitchenette on the other.
“No! Fuck it! I’m done!”
We dashed into the kitchen just as a harried-looking man in a lab coat stormed, shouting, out of the laboratory. An older scientist ran up, caught the younger one by the sleeve.
Dare and I stared. These were living scientists.
“Get back in there,” said the older man, scowling. “Their brains are still workable. There’s plenty of intact pathways left.”
I could peer into the lab through the kitchen door, watching the two Rottweilers strapped to a table. Their paws had been clamped into netted restraints, the tops of their skulls sawn off and replaced with a clear plastic covering. Gold filaments were embedded into their brains, trailing up to sockets in the ceiling.
And I thought those were the brains he was referring to – until I looked beyond the dogs…
Behind them, six twitching NeoChristians were strapped to a glowing wall, gold filaments jammed into shaved scalps. They groaned, begging for mercy with the wrong words – “Tractor, slacken window,” they slurred. “Ocean expose.”
The younger scientist punched a wall. “Are you kidding? Their brains are Swiss cheese! They can’t remember their names, let alone their opinions on underwear! We should overwrite al
l their thought patterns with dog brains, set them loose, and bring in a fresh batch we can work with!”
“He’s soft-hearted. He won’t round them all up,” the older scientist said. “So we have to make each test subject last.”
“If He wants results, maybe He should get His ass down here! This work’s impossible! You know how hard it is to change someone’s mind on something! It’s not like their beliefs on God, or good clothing, or the most reliable guns are bound in one place – they’re scattered throughout their cortexes, intertwined with a thousand memories. Yet he wants us to alter their most deeply rooted opinions? Without the subject even noticing? On these stupid, used-up test subjects where we’ve already plumbed their heads so hard they’ve forgotten how to form sentences?”
“Watch what you’re saying, Phil,” the older scientist said urgently, looking from side to side. “The guards might hear you…”
“Those zealous thugs don’t hear anything He doesn’t broadcast directly to them. This is bullshit. I’m gonna talk to Him, tell Him we need more test subjects, or I’ll quit.”
“Quit? You think you can–”
“Besides, the more subjects we doggify, the safer we are! You’d think He’d want more feral guards roaming Little Venice to eat intruders! If He can’t see what a waste this is, recycling these–”
The older scientist slammed Phil against the wall.
“Look, you moron. I had a younger partner before. She tried to quit.”
He let the silence hang ominously.
Phil went pale. “He wouldn’t – would He?”
“You’ve never seen Him drunk and screaming. He loathes us.”
He released Phil. Phil rubbed his throat.
“You’re new here, Phil, so I’ll cut you a break. Our job is to give Him some small sign of progress every week. And we are getting closer, despite this scarcity of test subjects and the ridiculous constraints He’s put us under. But you give Him excuses, you will get voided.”
Phil considered this.
“…all right,” he said sullenly. “Let’s get it done.” He walked back into the lab, where he stopped at a glowing wall with rotating images of six brains. He traced rings around the fuzzy electrical pathways that shimmered through the brain images, then tapped a green button.
“I said,” he asked, in the patient tone you’d use to speak to a slow child, “Do – you – like – silken – robes?”
The NeoChristians’ tongues flopped like dying fish. Their faces contorted with effort as they tried to form words; a few bobbed their heads. The gold filaments shook.
“Galvanic responses show they’re still lying,” sighed the older scientist. “They can’t remember what a robe is at this point. They’d say anything to make it stop.”
“Yeah, looks like those pathways are fried,” Phil admitted. “Heck, this one’s so crosswired every time she tries to remember her daughter, all she can bring to mind is chainlink fences… Doesn’t stop her from trying, though. She remembers loving a fence, and doesn’t know why.”
“Seems cruel.”
“Hey, what’s it matter? These are NeoChristians! You guys are all going to Heaven, right?” The NeoChristians writhed in anguish, straining at their bonds. “Oh, I forgot; Heaven was the first memory we crossconnected. What do they associate Heaven with now?”
“Shoeboxes.” The NeoChristians wailed.
“Well, it’s shoebox heaven for you guys, then.”
They busied themselves resetting their equipment. Dare and I shivered with fury.
“We had a deal,” I muttered. “We spend our lives in slavery, and as a reward we get the Upterlife. But that’s not enough. No, they want to reshape our thoughts while we live…”
“To make us better slaves,” Dare whispered.
“Gear it down, guys,” Gumdrool said. “This isn’t the Upterlife. These are the guys out to destroy the Upterlife, remember?”
He might have been right. Mama Alex herself couldn’t sneak into Upterlife servers – so why was this government facility vulnerable to a smart hack? Who’d handed them all this money and no expertise?
We slipped past that lab, following Peaches’ yells – and saw two guards dragging her into a small antechamber.
They’d shaved her beautiful black locks off to stab a golden crown into her scalp.
“Please, sir!” she shrieked. “I told, you, I got lost…”
Peaches was sticking to character, forcing them to scan her to get the full truth. Buying us time.
They dragged her in and slammed the door.
I pulled up an internal camera feed; Gumdrool looked on, plotting tactics.
Two guards strapped Peaches into a black leather chair under the supervision of a gray-haired Asian woman. Peaches was bathed in the glow of a wall monitor – someone dead, supervising the supervisor.
Peaches pulled at her restraints – then froze, looking up at the screen.
“You,” she whispered. “How can you…”
A guard punched her in the gut. “He’ll tell you when to speak.”
“That’s good, that’s good,” the Asian woman muttered. “Restrict your blows to the stomach. We need her conscious.”
She spoke mildly and looked milder, wearing a plain white lab coat over a thin frame. Her face was expressionless as a doll, an unappealing mole on her upper lip her only memorable feature.
She flicked her fingers across a keyboard; a Shrive Point hummed to life above Peaches. This Shrive Point bristled with circuits and probes, crackling ominously – a Shrive designed to rip secrets from your mind.
Dare lunged for the door. Gumdrool yanked him back.
“Wait till the guards leave,” Gumdrool hissed. “I can’t take on two men by myself without triggering alarms.”
“I don’t like coming here in the first place, Dr Hsiang,” said another voice – a deeper, more resonant one, with a familiar well-worn authority. “And someone slips past our feral Christian packs to show up here? Now? It’s no coincidence.”
“Who is that?” Dare muttered.
“I know that voice,” Gumdrool murmured. “I know it.”
I knew it, too – but it seemed out of place in a torture chamber.
“It’s not as though anyone tracks your movements,” said the doctor, continuing to tap in commands.
“Don’t backtalk me.” The guards glanced at the speakers, fidgeting, eager to leave. “Remember, I’m far from thrilled about the necessity for this research… And you promised you’d be implanting new opinions within three years. Don’t think I’ll hesitate to call in my erasure team if this place is compromised…”
Dr Hsiang gave the slightest of shrugs. “Your threats are noted as always. Yet I work with what you give me, sir. Organic neurology is a complex area. Given time and better resources, I can–”
“I’ve given you plenty of time. I made faster progress than you have – and with the money I’ve committed here, obscurity is getting harder to guarantee…”
“– with all due respect sir, the best you could do was translate a brain, not copy it. You had forty years to study without interference – and you could design custom hardware. In twenty years, shuffled from hidden location to hidden location, I’ve accomplished more than you had.”
“On the back of my studies!”
“You had better help available,” she retorted, that smooth face never changing expression. “If anyone here had the intellect to understand the ramifications of our research…” Hsiang gestured at the guards, who were as frightened as puppies in a thunderstorm.
“You know I don’t dare send actual researchers here.”
“Then you acknowledge I am your best hope. Unless you feel like stepping down to tend to this full time, of course.”
“…stepping down?” Gumdrool muttered, brow furrowing.
“Hit ’em now!” I said. “Give me your taser, I’ll take one out, you hit the other, Dare will handle the doctor…”
Gumdrool shrugged me of
f. “I know that voice…”
The voice chuckled. “Clever, Hsiang. Don’t think I can’t. I could split my consciousness off – if I devoted my full willpower to this, I’d crack it in under a year.”
“You’re one of the greatest consciousness-scanning masters in existence,” Hsiang said, placing a faint but unmistakable emphasis on one of. “But surreptitiously altering opinions is magnitudes more complex than recording them…”
“Ian! Get in now!”
He kicked in the door. Dare and I ran in behind him –
– Gumdrool smashed his truncheon into my throat.
I fell to my knees as Gumdrool rammed his nightstick into Dare’s solar plexus. The guards stood, stunned, as Gumdrool knelt to hold out his truncheon to them, like a knight presenting a sword to his king.
Except he wasn’t presenting it to them. Gumdrool offered the truncheon to the screen.
I looked up to see a familiar face – perhaps the most familiar face. Except the kind gray eyes I’d seen all my life were cold and flinty, and the beatific smile had been replaced by a tight-lipped businessman’s scrutiny:
President Walter Wickliffe. Creator of the Upterlife.
“Greetings, sir,” Gumdrool said, keeping his head bowed. “Please accept this gift of two intruders, as recompense for all the sins I have committed against you.”
“You don’t sin against me, son. You sin against society. What is it you’ve done?”
“I have Shrived Mortal since my eleventh birthday, sir,” Gumdrool replied. “But now I can make it up to you.”
20: TRAPPED IN A GOLDEN TOWER, WITH A MAN I NEVER HOPED TO SEE
* * *
President Wickliffe’s computerized eyes fuzzed with static.
“Ian Montgomery Drumgoole,” Wickliffe recited, a moue of distaste crinkling his pencil mustache. “Applied to, and rejected by, the Junior LifeGuard sixteen times. Wore the uniform anyway. Dr Frank Beldon, the barely competent head of the 82nd Street Orphanage, claimed the unauthorized uniform was therapeutic, despite several complaints of impersonating an officer. Your… disciples… have been written up several times for exceeding their authority.”
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