Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  “Are you happy to stay so badly scripted?” I ask.

  She chuckles, signals for cigarettes. Toss the clutch. She catches one-handed. Lights a smoke. Stares uncomfortably.

  “Are you?” I push.

  Her eyes become red from staring. Picks at them with an uncomfortable delicacy. Watch her drain the bottle.

  “You don’t have to be cruel,” she says quietly.

  Freeze her there, satisfied. Then go over and open up her face. Locking in a lead, begin dumping memory. Recall interface is full sensory. Lucid screaming. The whole kaleidoscope. Output is usually packaged for auto-assimilation. Standardised setting. But I was hooked. Ran a feedback system. Siphoned memory before conversion. Only a cloud could unlock assimilated data. Safety feature. That would never happen. Nothing left my head. Now I was drowning in memory. Dreamy days in the tank. Weeks. Walking painless labyrinths in drone-skin. Riding vessels designed to be worshipped, defiled. Addictive. Drone programs animate, run counter-grooves. You sense them strong when you’re in there—the others. Like what Phoneutria is becoming. Something other. Worse when you doll-ride. Taps subconscious. Deep currents. But there have always been dead gods among us. Some grow hungry. Centuries of neglect. Temples shrink to the dimensions of a bodily cavity. Dead gods speak to us, from time to time. Some of us answer.

  * * *

  Overhaul Phaedra. Complete by afternoon. Then down to the underground garage. In the car, haven’t driven for three weeks. But the engine caught like a blade. Deep purr. Magnetic glide. Pilot us out into the atomic glare. Direct exit to freeway strata only. Nobody street-levels. Not officially. Outside, the paranoia starts. Drones get all the neuronarc. Run pirate copies. Operators do it all the time. Doll-riders do it live. I try everything. Phaedra is a good source. New phase-variable had me mesolimbic. Numbly navigate a high-speed freeway. Astral projection of myself. Not that I’m really piloting. Standard self-drive. Mapped optic-interface feedback. So much like manual control. Wheels see your eyes. All in real-time. With crash parameters active, you could do anything and not die. Clouds are low toxic. Catch the glare pink. Similar to Phaedra’s auto-bruise. She’s in the passenger couch. Strappy swimsuit and heels. Lips and fingernails flush. Black to cobalt. Micro bob extends, rearranges, burns blond. Double melanin saturation. Ultraviolet exposure auto-react. I signal reset. Scheme 456 is familiar. No strangers now. Not in this state. Hair retracts. Floods back jet. Phaedra is breeding alters. Signature personality programming. Could only do my own shadows these days. Too much isolation. Neuronarc snowstorm. Phaedra lounges, seemingly absorbed by the wraparound view. Monolith hive glass. Lavender-lit industrial. Vertical loop access. The corroded world below. Phaedra cannot register the bruised beauty of my cloud. She is focused. A highly specialised predator. Cobra to Phoneutria’s night tiger.

  * * *

  Pull off onto the verge. Sheer concrete faces. Low underpass on a low level. Barrier drops to the ruined city. Distant, broken roofing, visible through ventilation slits. Borderline catchment level below, rusty with detritus. A storm of cars above. Both directions, on a magnetically enhanced midway. Wheels-free. High speed zone. Verge is responsively sunken—wide safety apron. Deacceleration buffer ramp lines the length. Air-conditioning at full scrub. Upper-level fumes sink. Collect in places like this. Leave a sun-slit haze. Canopy filters refract. Emerald glow. Stain paints the capsule-cockpit. Vivid. Unbuckle, sliding my seat back. Light the last cigarette. Prep for doll-riding. Phaedra raises a bare leg, into the unfiltered glare. Lacquer sole against impact-glass. She’s gearing down to a holding pattern. Disengaging the harness. Does something unexpected. Jerking the strap out. Arm’s length before releasing. Buckle slingshots, catching her on her jaw. Head snaps round, cracking against the window. I stop moving. Phaedra stutters. Bumping couch control. Its movement confuses her. As the seat reclines, she arches her spine backward. Close to breaking point. Then freezes, twisted. She’s processing. Spine disengages, reverts. Snapping to a seated reset. Jaw out of alignment. Flexes back with a click. Lip movement normalises. Head swivels. Harness now fully retracted. Phaedra sways to unheard music. Stares vacantly out the window, raising the seat again. Watch her for a minute. Strict protocols for behavioural development and drone grading. I know them. Break them all. Have this notion of technology developing in the wild.

  * * *

  Phaedra is out on the concrete. Watch through the canopy. Car floods with rapid expansion gel. Helmet seals. Heavy piping lock. As glassy gel encapsulates me, crash-couch folds to the floor. I’m buoyed horizontal, in suspension. Sun glare refracts aquatically throughout. Catching me gold on submersion. A glimpse before visor blots. Phaedra’s sensory comes up in the helmet. Everything except olfactory. Always extreme limitations there. Usually, I doll-ride vertical. In the lab. With a polymorphic floor-pad. Horizontal makes it dreamy. Pick-up is sharper on location, though. Enough to ignore mobile floor-pad limitations. Different flavours. Gel is responsive auto-coagulant. Translated to mimic host’s microenvironment feeds. Now I’m standing outside. Floating on needle heels. Begin the action of walking. Similar to the car interface, Phaedra picks it up. Real-time. Takes me where I want to go. Ventilation openings at twenty-metre intervals. Move down the shaft, pausing at each slit. Auto-compensation for glare. Go macro. Scan desolate streets. Zoom into cracks in the structures. Move on. By the tenth slit, I’m over contaminated drainage canals. Stagnant. Murky with refuse. Decaying waterfronts. Paranoia makes me glance back. Am I really in that car? Happens sometimes. Maybe it’s the neuronarc. Catchment border net is directly beneath. Spring out to the rim. Auto-compensate catches the barrier neatly, between spike heel and sole. Then overbalance. Plummet to the city. Slow later for macro. 360-capture. Detection field pings. Exit/entry is logged—somewhere. Not uncommon. Trash is forever raining down. I’ve seen things. Skyscraper tops, piled with rotten cars. Metal rain. Hit the water—bullet through debris layer. Oxidised wrecks on the bottom. Ruptured containment. Rusted spur tears left arm open. Regeneration should knit before I exit water. Grading specs push for weak drones. Malfunction liability. I disagree. Cast titanium alloy armatures. Impact-porcelain moveables. Tweak field-print generation. Wandering the deserted city. Lost in macro/micro. Till Phaedra is out of signal range.

  * * *

  Malware Park is this place I go. Tower access. Via a structural support. Highways dip in the quadrant. Mostly industrial. Service access hack. Invisible data entry. Ramp-road spirals tower core. Terminates underground. No view on the way down. Lower-level perimeter encompasses several city blocks. Containment area, below street-level only. Utility reasons. Emerge into these dim, yawning lots. Ancient neighbourhoods. Flattened by forgotten industries. Stranded when thoroughfares rose. Malware Park. Navigate carefully beneath highways. Car not optimized for terrain. Circumvent rubble. A trash-blown house at the edge of a concrete stretch. Nearby, another tower base. Unseen signal boards strobe relentlessly. Glare down highway chinks. Light reflections code, shutter into dimness. Repeat. Catch on building fronts. Overhead—relentless, aerodynamic roar of high-speed traffic. Desolate. Still, just a shoreline of the underworld. Beyond distant security barriers—lightless wilderness. Ruin. No man’s land. Enter house through kitchen. Highway glare paints dim interiors. Arching skylight, meshed with vine. Diffuse. Petrol stove shines in the squalor. Moll is brewing tea in shabby overalls. Cracked, collectable mug from a junk grave. He archives antique highway schematics. Always working on his book. Something about how the road system developed. Used to be an engineer. Now it’s just the book. Writes longhand. Diagrams. Boxes of paper.

  “Seen Phaedra?” I ask.

  Reflexive obfuscation, Phoneutria exists only for me. Moll stares.

  “Something for you,” he mumbles, passing an object.

  Vintage hard drive. Could still lift data.

  “House hunting?”

  “Untapped street,” he nods. “Close to the edge.”

  “Thought police would have cleaned them.”


  Moll is amused. Funnels sucrose mechanically.

  “Ever seen a policeman?”

  Takes me a moment.

  “No,” I reply, truthfully.

  “Look in the mirror?” he spits.

  Headfucker. Go upstairs. Moll’s voice follows.

  “Look at what you do. Your ideas? Sub-cranials are hackable. Cloud eyes. You have cloudy eyes…”

  Room at the top. Battered futon. Catches heavy glare. Scattered detritus. Phoneutria meets me here, from time to time. We pan for gold in hell. People pass through Malware Park like highway mirages. Regulars. Ghosts, sometimes. Room is deserted. Takes a second to confirm. Processor got me down. Maybe it’s the neuronarc. Lie on the futon. Glass tinkles. Phoneutria. Genus: wandering spider. Special project. Mining grade armature. Could survive a vacuum. Worse still—protocols deactivated. Since inception. Spins her own behavioural matrix. Just like web. A killer. Seen it. Down there in the dark. Too dangerous for Neurocropolis. Even the surface. Phoneutria’s territory starts beyond the barricades. The underworld is her natural habitat. Malware Park is the closest she comes. Ariadne in reverse. Threads in the labyrinth. Smells my signal. Rises from the deep. Ripe with memory, neuronarc, chemical synthesis. Flowers of oblivion. Things no one’s seen. Dreamed even. Shadow work. Crack the box on Phaedra’s haul. Neurotransmitter signal-jammers. Puts me in a hole while waiting. Hallucinations. Optic glitch triggers. Dream short, sharp video bytes. Flat plastic meat in radiation water. Dust husk worlds. Wake in half-darkness. Distant neon signal tide. Head feels packed. Hard pack foam. Phoneutria is beside me. Watching from the shadow of my head. Colourless mirror eyes. Hands snake me in. Slow flash paints her uncoil. Underwater textures. Doll mouth opens a soft, hot scar. Tongue-mounted double hypodermics rip my gums and tongue. Sugar-shock obliterates the sting. Phoneutria blossoms up my spine. Mouth dissolves against hers. Melting plastic. Slowly swallows my face. Inside out. Drone limbs butterfly. Double speed movement—against my atrophy. Wholly unnatural. No recourse to naturalism, though. Not here. Volcanic aperture sucks me into her like a leech. She writhes and flutters. Macro moth in a blown light. Fast-edit memory injections, direct to my core. I mortify in stop motions. Subterranean visions. Plummet through the safety net of paralysis. Through the futon, rotting floor and basements. Into a rapid-eye ocean of memory. Swimming the sunken cities. Phoneutria wraps my form as we fall. Soft-bodied virus. A vacuum of slowly fading afterimages.

  * * *

  Day is like night in Malware Park. Minimal glare diffusion. Catches high corners. Weakens along immense structures. Arrested dusk haunts the neighbourhood below. Lying on the floor near the window. Glass on my skin. Dentist ache. Hypodermic damage. Roll over, onto my knees. Optics glitch micro. Staring down into a gloomy plastic jungle. Lost in the carpet. Auto-reset. Snaps me out. Phoneutria, frozen on the futon. Entwined with an emaciated playbot. Not like any bot I’ve seen. Face hidden, upturned fabric. Wounded. Cuts. Slices. Naturalistic musculature. Ouroboros tattoo along her flank. Also on freeze-frame. Shed husks of spiders. That’s what they remind me of. Seen many—blown macro. Microscopic nights. Some blurry recall hits. Phoneutria—controlled, violent spasming. The way some insects throb. Vomit in the corner. Drone must be learning insects too. Phaedra imprints from humans. Phoneutria from whatever she can find. Even micro. Seen it. Nano-filament colonization. Bacteriological biomes. World mapping. I picture her. Frozen, like she is now. In some corner of the abyss. Lost for days in a single drop of water. Phaedra is the earlier model. Urban range. After Phreudia, Phaery, Phrygia, Pheromona—all retired. Regular lab-overhaul required in each case. Not Phoneutria. Self-generates. Coded for salvage and survival. Field-printed construction. Even I don’t know knows what she’s building down there. Barely scratched the surface of her memory dump. An iceberg. Too much data. She hides things anyway. But I want her wild. She hasn’t moved yet. Neither has the playbot. Am I holographic in still-frame? Breathe out hard for confirmation. Negative. This is baseline. Phoneutria has a hand around a dirty bottle. Glass cracked on entry to bot’s belly. Coagulated blood substitute. Everywhere. Dislocated sense of lost time. Something moving in the bottle. Worm-like. With a human face. Trying to get inside her machine-womb. Phasing after-effect. Hallucination. Must be. Numb pain in right-hand palm. Clutched tight. Open slowly. Scabs break. Surgical blades. Holding them all night.

  * * *

  Leave feeling sick. Sensory dislocation. Not sure what she did to me. Prioritise recall when back on the slab. Get up topside. Strata pit-stop. Sanitized nexus. Migraine coloured ampoules. Electrolyte feed. Regeneration working my hand. Did I cut that playbot? Memory wipe. Maybe just neuronarc. Cyberette down quarter charge. Drain it. Droplet of blood splashes. Optics glitch micro. Red waves fill my vision. Looking down on an ocean. Something alien. Searching for the bloody shoreline in my palm. A moment to reset. Back in the lab. Scrub down. Deep reaching anti-particulate blaster. Incinerate clothing. Can’t read the microbes transmitted. Unknown strains. No available data. Charge cyberette. Straight to work on the vessel. Heavy grade industrial. Micro-welding. Upgrading Phoneutria’s specs. A day passes. Three more. Washing hands too much. Scrub thoroughly. Ten minutes later—I’m doing it again. In case I missed something. I cut that bot? Recall failure. Scrambled data. Maybe just neuronarc. Scan myself in zoom function. Constantly checking. There are microscopic kingdoms. Been there. Hand healing nicely. Rigging the Vessel. Carbon fibre mesh core structure. Nearing overall completion. Chemical coating leaves me lightheaded. Polymorphic pigmentation receptors. Depressurize on videotape. Looping film fragments. Glitch-fog. Girl in a tenement. Dead for twelve years. That’s the script. Dead but alive. Futuristic Cleopatra haircut. Deep blue light. Chrome highlights. Can’t lift holo. Try anyway. Analogue fog in the room. Trouble processing. Walkthrough freeze-frame. Highways. Light a cyberette. Static-free body sheath while working. Recharge cyberette. Never seen a playbot like that. Glitch-fog. Scar tissue in my palm. Moving around. Video girl smokes, overlooking a system of highways. Constant washing leaves hands antiseptic. Drain to the red. Charge, repeat. All day liquid conductor relays. High-resolution dirt under my fingernail. Weeks ago. The same minutes. Repeated from different angles. Light a…

  * * *

  Wake to morning haze. Glass on auto-tint. Phaedra’s legs slip away from me. Turn sharply. Drone’s in sleep mode. Warm beneath a slab membrane. No memory of her circuiting. Don’t remember running a script. Memory glitch. Heavy whiteout. Aftershock maybe. From Malware Park. Phoneutria’s bite. Peel back the membrane slowly, exposing her. Half expecting a broken glass tube. Some unborn thing struggling. Then see my arm. Surface-stripped. Carbon fibre musculature. Titanium alloy armature. Reflexively recoil. Dent the metal wall with my elbow. Doll-riding. I’m riding the new vessel. Stumble from bed. Whiteout.

  * * *

  Smell of cooking. Real meat. Wake to morning haze. Upper tower smog fractals. Shadow work. Strong, rich aroma. Must be baseline. Got me watering. Impossible to code that response. Turn sharp on reflex. Alone on the slab. Sense of lost time. Check my arm. Still real. Then see the blood. Dried droplets on the slab. Triggers optics. Glitch micro. No waves this time. Rusty desertscape. Long dune shadows. Directional sun. Reset. Run diagnostics. Panicky. Hear meat frying. Starving. Scan shows sub-cranial additions. New Hardware. Surgical procedures logged. Skull opened up in sleep. Surgery? Stagger to kitchenette. Touching head and face tenderly. Some parts feel different. No pain. But weak. Phaedra in a white kimono. Dishing slabs of pale, succulent meat. Gives a pretty smile. Bob mussed from sleep. Wrote that hairstyle.

  “Eat,” she prompts, kissing my cheek.

  Collapse on seat. Stare at meal. Been so long on synthetic protein and hydroponics. Still, hesitant. Coded drones bring goods. Never foodstuffs, though. Study Phaedra, scanning for bugs. Regards me. Face cupped in palms. Get up, open freezer. Plastic satchels of meat. Massive quantities. Start rifling packages. See something. Bluish line on a cold cut. Crack seal. Mea
t unravels heavy drapery to the floor. Ouroboros tattoo. Drop it. This is not Phaedra. Drone’s face splits vertically. Down the middle. Mandible jaws disengage. Vomits acid over the meat. As it dissolves, a butterfly tongue unfurls. Sucks the mess up, along with a partially melted plate. Phoneutria is demonstrating. This is how she has observed things eat. Must be staring. Her limbs fold backwards. Triple joints splitting the garment. Mobility upgrades. Her own design. Kimono billows down in strips. She springs backward, scuttling up a high wall. Across the ceiling, to the windows. Glass breaches. Glides open on remote command. High-altitude wind, knocking things down. Just in time to see her plummeting to the highways. Catching the light. Gather armfuls of meat. Throw them after. Takes three trips. Packages flutter. Distribute like petals. There she goes. Only real girl I’ve ever seen. Collapse down wall. Wind drives through rooms. Things crashing, breaking. Neuronarc snowstorm. Diagnostic processes new hardware. Drivers for the handicapped. Similar to self-drive. Nervous system signal-buffers. Rerouting damaged limb commands. Translation/mobilisation. Phoneutria’s hacked my sub-cranial implant. Optical logs. Everything. Can’t tell how long she’s been in my head. Riding me through whiteout. Can’t do it when I’m conscious. Too much interference. Ariadne in reverse. Like that scalpel show. Motor control practice run. Must have been. Difficult to drive human nervous systems. Impossible without sub-cranial relay. Easy now. She’s installed makeshift operating systems for my body. Revolutionary. Despite shock, feel proud. My own design. Invocation. Meat makes sense now. Phoneutria wants me healing. Matriarchal mode. Insect observations. Arachnid logic. Learned, then incorporated. Phaedra’s duplication was too clean, though. Must have had contact. Seal glass. Activate Phaedra’s tracker. Should have guessed.