by Les Petersen
“Negative, Jack.”
“Then we’ll take the alternative. Close and Lock, Sansan. Burn it all.”
“Acknowledged.”
The BB Snip came down the jetty toward me, smiling for some unknown reason. I dropped the holoface, waited with my own eyes open. The Snip saluted Mr Frennet, walked a few more paces toward me, stopped and nodded a greeting. I nodded back, raised one hand slowly and patted Sansan. “Sansan?”
“Yes, Jack?”
“Power down all systems, all surge protection prepped. And thank the gang for me, will you?”
“Acknowledged.”
The Snip raised a pistol, turned side-on like a duellist, closed one eye and took aim at my heart. She wouldn’t miss. Not with Targeting to aim. No chance a holoface would misdirect a bullet. It would be a clean kill.
I kicked in zoom, focused on the finger on the trigger. “Goodbye again, Mr Dayzen,” she said.
In moments of action there are still points: the ballerina poised above the stage; the Gymnast in his tumble; the pilot in his ejector seat; the thump of a firing pin as it slams into the back of the shell, the concussion building to explosive power, the ignition of powder and the moment when the point sheers away from the casing. Moments of fatigue, moments of chance. A butterfly flapping its wings in China causing hurricane winds in Australia.
Just as she pulled the trigger, as the small muscles bunched and the skin flattened against the metal pad on the trigger lever, The Sea Mistress exploded into flame. She flinched in surprise.
The bullet took me above the heart, threw me sideways.
The water slapped me like a ton of memories and I sank, leaving a murderous red line behind me, into a well of profound darkness, a world of murky recall. Underwater, I kicked out for shelter of nearby boats, dropped the peripherals and flex-board; my body screaming with the pain. I surfaced under one boat, could hear the Tinmen rushing down the jetty, some of the squad leaping into the water to find my body. Drawing a deep breath, I ducked under the nearest hull and kicked out for the next. Give them a few moments and they’d begin a heat reading of the area, deep scan and sonar chase. The water was red with flame, with blood.
I surfaced under The Sea Mistress’s mooring post, gasping for air, in agony, flames roaring in my ears. The barnacles on the post were cutting into me, but I struggled to the port side of The Sea Mistress that was clear of fire, found the scuba gear I had left hanging there just before heading for the library. I drew on the full mask and the tanks; tongued the system into action and sank out of sight. I headed for deep water. When I was twenty meters out from the last boat, I tongued up wrist control, pulled on the glove, snapped up enhancement and the rotors on the tanks kicked in. I was propelled upstream at almost thirty knots.
I surged against the flow for a while, not bothering to choose a direction. The water was dark with silt. I could feel the force of the river’s movement against my skin, like hands stroking me. My chest screamed with pain, water ripped at the wound. “Team up?”
“Here, Jack,” Sansan answered.
“Status?”
“System failure,” she said. “We’ve lost GaZe and Charlie. The bullet has caused a hardware malfunction.”
“Medusa?”
“Here, Jack.”
“Backed up?”
“Affirmative, Jack; though RAM damage has caused a memory deficiency. We’re all trying for reconstruction in background, but some share has been lost. I have temporary closure in effect, to prevent unauthorised access or Scan pickup. The water is also making things difficult. Are you all right, Jack?”
“Not yet, Medusa. Sansan, battery life?”
“Fifty-four hours. Jack, your vitals are showing shock intolerance. You require urgent medical assistance.”
“Thank you, Sansan. I know I need a hospital. When we are clear of this. Just get me away from here and we’ll sort it out later.”
“I suggest we go up st—”
“Just go Tactical, Sansan! Don’t ask me to make a decision.”
The riverbed came up on the HUD, directional guidance and target acquisition giving me something to focus on. It was like flying through the night under blue clouds, skimming over bent plantations of silvery weed. A few fish slipped past like lost thoughts.
The pain became thought. The thought became murky depression.
What was the use of it all? Run and chase, run and chase. Without really knowing why. And with nowhere else to go, the chase is over. So bloody simple. So bloody stupidly simple.
At some time in the race from Walker’s Flat I lost consciousness. Then the depression became dreams, nightmares. You don’t want to know. Have no right to know. Everybody hates me; nobody loves me, think I’ll go eat worms. Maybe even worms taste sweeter than memories. More agony. Damn it: let’s share it.
I only found out when Shahn woke me in the middle of the night, groaning and writhing, blood on her hands. The chopper took forever to come and then it wailed into the sky and all the way to hospital. The interns and nurses averted their faces when I asked if she was all right; the doctor spoke quietly. “She’s sleeping now and she’ll be fine. I’m afraid she has miscarried, Mr Dayzen.”
He said other things that I didn’t hear. I walked out of the hospital numb. When I confided in Kren, he stood staring out over the factory, arms folded. Shahn was sedated for a week, but when she finally came clear of it all, her first words were ‘Don’t leave me’. Hell opened up and looked at me.
I won’t deny I thought of revenge. I even achieved a little pleasure from it. Each morning – in the dull minutes between half sleep and the shower – I’d plot the act. An elaborate script for each of the actors. Pointed accusations and the jury waiting in the wings. The judge primed with the conviction ready. I’d lost my sanity then for sure – I just didn’t know it.
Hasty judgements, right? The woman has a miscarriage at thirteen weeks and I condemn her, I think of revenge and scheme to leave her. What do you know, huh? You’ve got almost all the facts yourself and you’re already condemning me. It’s easy for you. It’s fucking easy for you. All the months after the night of that horrible event, when I lay beside her, listening to her breathe in her sleep; all the times I talked quietly with her to ease her pain, fighting off the shock I felt because she needed comforting; the sessions with the counsellors, with the holistic clergy, all wasted actions. I said, “I understand”. I said, “These things happen”. I said, “I won’t leave you”. I told so many goddamn lies because my mind was doing one thing and my heart another. And my cowardice! My inability to shake my fists in fury, to bang the walls and scream at her that she killed my child!
Call me what you will. She miscarried when the child was thirteen weeks old. The sex change is a one-month course of tablets. Five weeks. So she knew. She KNEW.
No known side effects? Figure it out for yourself.
Chapter 9
The mud smelt like sewerage and my face was pressed into it deep enough that I could taste it as well because the diving mask had slipped off one side of my face. Mangrove trees surrounded me as if they had been extruded from the mud and a million crabs were clustered nearby like friends at a barbecue, just waiting for the meat to die. I managed to lever myself a little further up the bank, further into the shade of the trees, disturbing the crabs and a swarm of mosquitoes who were at the trough already, slurping at my hands and face. The mud sucked as I moved and the river muddied around my thighs. I looked down at my chest and was horrified to see blood seeping from a hole the size of a fist. I clamped a hand over it and rolled over on my side. The tanks clanked against a log and the sounded like a bell tolling for thee.
“Sansan? Someone?”
Sansan was there. “Jack? Your vital signs are not good, Jack. I have arranged a pick up. It will be here very shortly. Can you stay conscious?”
A grey cloud floated over the patch of blue sky I could see.
I rolled over onto my back. A thumping headache started at the ba
ck of my head and suddenly the world span through three hundred degrees. A hurricane wind roared out of my head, just ahead of a front of agony. I felt the mud slap against the back of my head; had a brief vision of a young boy’s face peering down through the trees at me and then I lost everything to darkness. The last word I heard was Sansan calling out my name.
Chapter 10
Rough stone for a bed. Trees, so many goddamned trees leaning over me, the thin canopy like drawings of lung tissue. Rings of red flags snapping like flames around me. Above us a small patch of tissue-covered sky. I was naked. I could hear children laughing happily out of sightline and the call of someone watching over them, telling them to mind the brambles. I tried to sit up, realised I was pinned to a stone slab by leather straps and relaxed against the pressure, gulped down sudden pain. My chest felt cold; a pulse thumped in my temple.
A shaven headed teenager leaned over me. Male, tattooed forehead, small bones poked through his earlobes – blue tats of swirls and star maps. The Big Dipper and the Southern Cross. Between his eyes was a crescent moon, under his right eye a comet and under his left a phallus drawn in red. He looked at me, wiped the back of a hand beneath his nose and called out to someone I could not see. “Hey, Barb, he’s awake.” He stood staring down at me.
A woman appeared beside him. I knew her immediately. Barb was the Gofer from the library. Small world, isn’t it? She leaned over me like the Witch of the North, poked me in the ribs, checked the wound and lay the back of her hand against my head. The young kid was watching her and I could see the star-struck admiration in his eyes. His glands were working overtime, but I don’t think she could see it.
“Hey Barb,” he said, “he’s a pretty one, isn’t he?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He’s got soft skin.”
Barb looked at the kid. “Don’t you touch him again, Panchel. Never touch them. Now you go and get the Doc and Shotgun for me. You tell them the guy’s awake.”
He was gone before I realised that others were gathered around watching. Barb looked at me carefully, a little grim snarl beginning in the corner of her mouth. “Don’t you get no ideas, Mister Flintlock man. You just lie there till the Doc gets here and don’t you think about getting up to no mischief. Your boxes are smashed to bits, so it won’t do you no good anyhow.”
A bluff. I knew the feel of missing parts. The PAN’s aural link was still active. I could feel their existence in my circuit plate. I ignored the girl, closed down for a second, let it flow out of the ether at me, settled into the stone like it had always been a part of me. Barb stared at me for a while, then waved away the other lookers.
She leaned over me a bit a bit further. “Gotta tell you that show was something though. All those explosions and stuff. Didn’t expect to see you alive again.”
“You got the wrong guy,” I said. “I fell off a fishing boat.”
“And here I was thinking you were another James Bond,” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. I ignored her. Ferals would never understand the corporeal world as it exists. Trees talk to them, so they say. Too many loose leaves in their tea, if you ask me. Too much compassion for the environment.
I lay there and thought about the past, and concluded that Kren lacked compassion. He also needed to sort out his superiority complex. I remember when he finally tried to exploit his position and his new sexuality. We were going through what was left of Grendel’s R&D files, sorting out the old software modifications and hunting down anything we could use for system invasions. I had found something interesting and he was getting his mind around what I had found.
He tapped away at the console, pulled icons onto the screen and shook his head. He crossed to Moscow, pulled up Bluetags, copied the files and dropped the batch into it. “Interesting, Jack,” he said, while the system fought for dominance. “I knew those monkeys at Grendel were good, but this is the most interesting piece of programming I’ve seen in a long time.”
I sat back against the desk edge, looking at the Tinmen guards who were standing by the door. Their weapons weren’t aimed in my direction. “Thought you’d want to know as soon as poss,” I explained to Kren, “I found it amongst the last batch from the Hisec contract.” The batch flooded the screen, destroyed the Bluetags and began rolling the system again.
Kren rubbed a finger up and down at his Adam’s apple and watched what was happening in the tank. “What response have you planned?”
“I’m running Fault through it now, looking for something we can latch onto. It’s wave-modified. Seems to have accessed and completely duplicated the links in the network and is feeding the info dump back through the links, then echoing the new version of the system.”
Kren nodded. “A real vicious circle. Fill the trash-bucket until it’s full and useless. I’ve seen something like this before. The Steel Hand used it in Denver. They call it a bombing raid.” He tapped the screen and a close-up of a red circular buzz saw filled the room. “But this link replicator has me worried. It has a lot of teeth.” He sat back in the chair, ran a hand through his hair and looked at me. “What do you think? Will the Maze hold it?”
I scratched at my chin. “I’m thinking it’s going to have some way of getting around this kind of defence. Remember the old adage, about the viewer being part of the equation? If I built this, it would have some way of finding out what watchdogs were there. These little circles of green here, my bet. Look at them. Modified readers, pulling apart the coding, looking for ink stains. See, here; more of them. It’s sending out researchers all the time.”
“Containment?”
“I’m not sure., but if it escapes, it will make a mess of the system. Better go for full closure.”
“Four hours of downtime?”
“Better than giving it a life.”
He nodded. “I see what you mean. Wrap it and we’ll replicate.” He tapped up the frame, gave the frame-jockeys the Guillotine and our system went down.
Kren sat and stared at the lifeless screen as if she was trying to see what wasn’t there. She glanced at me, waved away the cyborgs and when they had left the room, swung her legs up onto the desk. She wasn’t wearing any shoes and her … (hell, it’s a him! Use the masculine form!) his toenails were painted red, with small circles drawn on them with mirror dust. He raised his arms and put them behind his head, his nipples pushing at the thin fabric of her blouse. “How’s the new apartment?”
I looked at her face, held my gaze there, kept looking from mouth to nose to eyes. Such a beautiful, feminine face. “Yeah. Fine. You know, a bachelor’s pad is his dungeon.”
“Why don’t you get someone in?” It was an innocent enough question.
“Yeah. I’d thought of that,” I said, “but I thought I’d spend some time on my own for a while. Get used to myself again.”
She raised one leg a little and the hem of her skirt slid down her thigh. I could see a thin line of panties out of the corner of my eye. She dropped one hand slowly, drawing my eyes with the motion. She lay her hand on her knee. “Did you want me to come over tonight?”
I looked away. “What?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve unpacked everything,” he said innocently. “And Wollongong is playing North Sydney. We could have a few beers, unpack a few boxes, sit on the couch...”
What the hell was he playing at? “Leave me alone.”
She … damn … HE frowned at me. “Don’t need a bit … of company?” I clenched my teeth. He flicked the skirt back across her knees. “What is it, Jack? You are very uptight these days. I know you don’t really like what Shahn and I have done, but there’s no need to take a hostile stand against me. I was your best friend.”
I got up and walked over to the window. The sky outside had broken apart into heavy thunderheads and the south was as black as Satan’s bedroom. “She can do what she wants, Kren.”
“I’m not talking about her, Jack.”
I tapped a finger against the window and looked at the mark it left on the pa
ne. Strange how at times the simplest of actions clears your anger away. “I’m busy tonight Kren. I think I’ll wash my hair or something.”
He knew I had aimed a shot at him with that comment and he swung his feet off the desk and stood up. “You know how tenuous your contract is here, Jack?” he said, brushing hair out of his eyes. “If I didn’t keep the watchdogs off your ass, you’d be in front a review committee and they’d ask a few questions about the amount of time you’ve had off recently. You pull your head in and get your shit sorted out. Start being a man.”
I didn’t even bother to reply to that comment. He came around the desk, lay a hand on my shoulder and leaned over very close. “Maybe you need a little distraction from your problem. Maybe a night of fun.”
My head was filled with her perfume. I reached up and took his hand in mine, firmly, but gently. “If you don’t keep your hands to yourself,” I said as evenly as I could, “you might regret ever giving me the chance. I’d wear you out.” I gave him a wink, then nodded at the doorway. “You go home and start without me. Okay?”
He smiled at me in uncertainty. “Now that is the Jack I know.” He patted me on the arse and turned away. As he swung his hips on his way out of the office, he gave me the full benefit of his new shape. And I stood there holding back the rage. That night I gave SmartGuy the new coordinates and he began the transfer. At the stroke of midnight, I disappeared into another me.
And five years later I was lying on a stone slab in the middle of the Australian bush with my chest busted open. Barb was leaning over me again and with her a tall angular man wearing a trench coat over a pair of grey overalls. He had a stethoscope around his neck and a mediac tucked into his top pocket. Not that he was using either of them. Maybe he had already, the mediac still had LEDs flashing and the console was still illuminated. Maybe it was for show, I’m not sure. He was peering under the bandage on my chest. When I looked down to see what he was doing, I saw they had stuffed some sort of moss there as well. He saw me move, stood back and gave me a smile that proved that dentistry was a lost art.