The Loss (Zombie Ocean Book 4)

by Michael John Grist

  "Her cells are starting to cook!" Carrolla calls to me from above. "Get out of there, Rit."

  I can't though, not with the inject still inside her like bloody chum to the Lag. If I don't do something fast it'll bite half her mind away just to get the foreign matter out. Now the only way out is through.

  "Stress levels are up," Carrolla calls, barely audible over the thump of the EMR. "If you're not coming out then get it calmed!"

  I gaze through the layers of thought into Mei-An's eyes, big dark staring spheres, and will her to calm down. I've dived deeper than this a hundred times before, and it never gets any easier, or safer, but I've always survived.

  The Lag snaps up at me from within her head.

  "Look at me Mei-An," I say as I tune my thoughts toward a stronger connection. "Look at my eyes, that's it."

  She tries to nod but now she's losing motor control, making the movement uneven and jerky. She's terrified. I kick a leg at Carrolla to increase the cooling CerebroSpinal Fluid flow bathing her brain, because if it gets any hotter inside her skull her brain really will begin to cook.

  "It's going to be OK," I say, then crank the wavelength of my thoughts all the way down to fully match with hers.

  A rush of thought-data pummels me, hard bubbles rising through the water; the inputs and outputs of billions of her individual brain cells. I swim roughly through the barrage, able only to see the pattern of her mounting panic. Her whole system is in emergency mode. If I had a better EMR I could fix her through that, but this is proto-Calico, a floating slum built of old wreckage and flotation barrels, and I don't.

  So I dive.

  A second flood of thoughts buffet me like the Arctic ocean in tsunami: chemical stress levels spiking, the cell firing rate shooting up, even the inject area flipping belly up as unconsciousness dawns.

  "Damn it, Rit, she's slipping," I hear Carrolla calling from above.

  I dive deeper still, down into the root and branch systems of her brain's architecture, blasting by brain structures like thick tufts of kelp, so deep I lose my grip on the world above and the sense of my own body flits away. I pass beyond the confines of brain cells and structure, through the ocean's crust and into the realm where my mind truly meets hers.

  The Molten Core.

  Lava blooms around me, the burning red and orange fire of the living mind. This is her consciousness, where she thinks, and here I am an invader. It is bright and chaotic with the violent churning of her thoughts.

  I peer through the boiling heat. Nearby I can see the silvery inject being attacked by the Lag in a powerful immune reaction. Here the Lag is a kind of worm, massive and fleshy, able to burrow through blazing lava with ease. I am powerless before it, battered and buffeted by fiery tidal flows, but I'm also the only thing that can save a good chunk of brave Mei-An's mind.

  Everything is to play for now.

  My sublavic ship forms around me, a submarine built for diving magma in the Molten Core, as it has a thousand times before, hulled with three layers of heat-proof brick cladding. Within its belly my six crew members fire into existence like clay pots forged in a kiln, and I send them to their posts throughout the ship: at the engines, manning the periscope, setting a course for Mei-An's Solid Core.

  The Solid Core is the utmost center of the mind. I've never dived that deep, in my mind or any other; it would be madness. No one ever has. The risks that deep inside are massive, where the Lag is god and all the pathways are an endlessly shifting maze. I'm not even sure I could get in if I tried.

  But I don't need to. I only need to get close.

  The engine-screw churns the ship inward, and bubbles of memory burst out of the lava ahead, popping over the periscope and leaving behind hints of who this girl is and was. In one I glimpse her slinging back Arctic gin in an off-wall dive with a guy with a sternum piercing. In others she makes her first tentative forays across the tsunami wall and into the neon skulks of proto-Calico, falling into company with smugglers, shits, and the children of the Don.

  The Lag snaps up at me with ravenous meat-jaws from the magma, and I launch a few sacrificial memories as torpedoes to slake its hunger: my walk through the park that morning, the taste of the juice-box Carrolla brought in for me, Arclo-berry, one of the newest strains out of the pack-ice. I won't miss them too much, and for the moment the Lag is distracted. It's just a worm, after all, ever hungry.

  My sublavic ship powers on through molten rock, and in moments I hear the dark boundary line of the Solid Core through sonar, a pulse spreading through the magma with a steady

  thump thump, thump thump

  that is utterly unique, and key to deciphering this girl's burning architecture: her mother's pulse.

  The mother's pulse is the first memory formed in the infant brain, a fingerprint of the mother's heart that molds the baby brain like soft clay, instilling a powerful mental immunity. It is the foundation all minds are built upon, with uniquely healing properties, and I don't need to break into Mei-An's Solid Core to get it; I'm close enough to tap the sound like a keg.

  Tuning forks punch out through the ship's brick cladding and capture the pattern. The forks melt in seconds but I get what I've come for. I turn the ship around and amplify the pulse outward by vibrating the hull, soothing the Lag with this gentle lullaby from the womb. I head away from the Solid Core with the pulse rippling out around me, bathing Mei-An's mind with a pattern too complex to fake.

  It works, and I feel her chemical stress levels calming through the flow of lava. Her brain-rate is settling down, so I pull my consciousness out a few layers, back into the realm of my ship's conning tower. More thoughts bubble up across the periscope; glimpses of her latter days in the company of the Don's son, an abusive shit who beat the will out of her, but calmer now, as the panic of her immune rejection stills.

  thump thump, thump thump

  The Lag has been quieted, but it's still out there tracking me sleepily through the lava. The job is not over. If I don't do something it will still eventually scrub the skills inject, so I head to the zone where I first injected the silvery fluid, at the tail end of the optic nerve. There I massage the pulse around the inject's edges, guiding it by the nose like I would a kelp-tilling shark. It cools the enflamed cells and pets the Lag on the head like a trusty old dog.

  I sigh with metaphoric relief.

  "Can I have my Arcloberry juice box back?" I ask the Lag, a wordless information request through the CerebroSpinal Fluid. I remember the memory because I only gave the content not the frame, but the Lag is mute on its refund policy.

  "My walk through the park then?" I press. "Come on, don't short me."

  It bares its lipless, fleshy teeth. Fair enough, I've lost far more in the past, and at least I still have the frame. Nothing earthshattering happened on my way through the park anyway. Did it?

  Dammit. I pull outward, and my body and the sublavic ship merge back into one as my thoughts suck free of Mei-An's mind. I rush back through the bubbling outer ocean of data as my consciousness disengages, then I'm back in my own head and panting hard in the decelerating thump thump of the EMR machine, back in the graysmithy room.

  Mei-An is lying in front of me, her eyes now closed and breathing deeply. I feel shattered too. The job is done.

  The tray engages, and we slide out of the hollow EMR machine together, into the plain gray of the dive-room. It's painted gray all over for just this moment, to not provide any confusing stimulus to a disoriented brain.

  "Strong work, Ritry," Carrolla says, slapping me on the back.

  It takes a moment to associate his words and his movement with the impact on my back. He knows this and keeps patting until some rudimentary synchronization takes places.

  I roll away from Mei-An and look up at Carrolla. He reminds me so much of someone I used to know.

  "Fine work, really excellent," he's saying, words more to key me back to my body and sense than for anything else, "and you bedded it in too. How was the Lag?"

 
I slide my legs woozily off the EMR-tray and sit up with my back to the girl. She'll need a few hours of medicated sleep for her mind to fully settle.

  "Not bad," I say. My tongue feels thick as a wodge of dry seaweed in my mouth. Carrolla hands me a glass of water and helps me hold it up while I take a sip. Better. "Have you got any more of those Arcloberry juice boxes though?"

  He frowns. "You gave up the juice? Dammit, Rit, that didn't come cheap. What's wrong with water, do you not have enough memories of drinking that?"

  I shrug. "It came to mind."

  He laughs. "Well shit. But, I heard they've got vodka mixes out at the skulk-end, some new seed-blend. Sound good? Yes sir. Let's get you to recovery."

  "I'm fine."

  "Of course, I'm fine also, now move it."

  Carrolla is always effervescent, even when he's blackout drunk. Most people want to punch him after a few minutes, but I like it. Either punch him or sleep with him, actually, he gets his share of both.

  Together we hoist my body up off the bench, and I can mostly walk on my own, so he mostly lets me, assisting only when I sway. We hobble together out of the gray dive-bay, and he's saying something about the girl, Mei-An, and Don Zachary. A warning maybe. I barely listen. Down the polished steel-floored corridor we go, to the end of the smithy building and the glass-walled outlook space. Here there's a massage chair with a Cerebro-sonic bath, overlooking the green-gray Arctic waves off the edge of our floating barge, skulk 47.

  I let him settle me down in the chair, looking out at the gray sky and level sweep of empty ocean. Beyond the glass the Arctic spreads north into endless nothingness, into spaces where there used to be ice. There's nothing there now, not since we blew it all up in our hunt for hydrate resources deep underwater, in the Arctic skirmishes. This is the world we've made for ourselves.

  "Switch on your favorite music," Carrolla says, as he guides my head into the sonic bath-well in the chair's head. He makes a good nurse, better than he'd ever have been as a marine. That's a small mercy. "Settle in and you'll be up in time to party, unless Don Zachary comes for you first."

  "Arcloberry," I mumble, in place of what I meant to say which was perhaps some kind of joke.

  He nods and repeats the word but I don't hear it, and the world fades away as the sonic bath takes hold with a medley of music I've reacted well to in the past. Underneath the beat it attempts to mimic the sound of the mother's pulse, automatically reverting the body back to the same womb-like state of recovery and growth I put Mei-An into.

  It's a poor imitation for most, and works even less for me, since I never had a mother, and the pulse I grew up to was the seven-tone chime of an external machine womb, but still, I like the music. In a few hours I'll wake up feeling better, and so will Mei-An. We'll probably have sex, part of the contract for those who need a little extra context to frame the mental re-structuring a graysmith provides, and that is not an entirely unpleasant notion. She was pretty, and real.

  I drift off thinking of her and the blunt-nosed face of Don Zachary's son I saw in her mind, completely unaware of how goddamn awful he's going to make my life, any moment now.

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  Copyright © 2016 by Michael John Grist

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  Cover art by Francisco Ruiz Nunez.

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