Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1)

by Grist, Michael John

  Everything is to play for now.

  My sublavic ship coalesces around me, crewed by the facets of my mind and built out of pure attention. I man the periscope at the con and order propulsion to bank for the central memory near her Solid Core, by which to orient myself and bring the chaos into order.

  The screw churns us forward, and bubbles of memory burst out of the lava, frazzled hints of who this girl is and was. I glimpse her slinging back gin in an off-wall dive with a guy with a sternum-piercing, see her making 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 thoughts as torpedoes to slake its hunger: my walk through the blue-tarp 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, and for the moment the Lag is distracted.

  The sublavic ship powers on through molten rock, and in moments I sight the radiant outreach of what I'm looking for, embodied as liquid sound. It is waves pulsing through the magma with the steady thump thump, thump thump, that is utterly unique, the key to deciphering this girl's burning architecture.

  This is her mother's pulse. It is the primordial memory, locked away in the Solid Core at the heart of her mind.

  I don't need to surface through the lava and into the moat of air encircling her Soid Core, I'm close enough to tap the sound like a keg. The sublavic stores its pattern, turns, and I unleash the sound outward through the ocean of lava, amplifying it to settle the Lag's immune reaction. It is soothed by the gentle lullaby memory of the womb. I leash the sound and drag it back and away from the Solid Core with me, bathing Mei-An's mind with the right kind of CSF, tinged with harmonics too complex for any machine to reproduce.

  I feel her dopamine levels calming through the flow of lava, the brain-rate flow settling down, and pull my consciousness out a few layers, back into the realm of my sublavic's bridge. Numbers flash up in green across the periscope, as the panic spike of rejection stills beneath the smoothing pulse.

  Thump thump, thump thump.

  Sound is the first memory formed in the neonate's brain. Though all other sound is also heard dimly across the mother's belly wall, muted and simplified like the sublavic's Engine Order Telegraph bell, it's the pulse that sounds the loudest for that forming seed in its amniotic sac.

  Thump thump.

  The pulse is goddess, a fingerprint of the mother's heart that molds the baby brain like it was soft clay, shaping it in its own image, instilling it with a unique engrammic immunity.

  That same immunity will still scrub the language engram-inject if I'm not careful, so I race to Brodmann's zone where Carrolla first injected the Afri-Jarvanese pack, in the crevice between the tail-end of the optic nerve and the auditory cortex. There I massage the pulse around the engram's edges, guiding it by the nose like I would a kelp-tilling shark. It cools the enflamed cells lining the language dump and pets the Lag on its head like a trusty old dog.

  I sigh with metaphorical relief, and turn to the Lag.

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

  "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 have the frame. Nothing earth-shattering happened on my way through the park anyway. Did it?

  Dammit. I pull outward, feel my body and the sublavic ship merging back into one as my thoughts suck free of hers, rushing up a tunnel of data and figures as my mind disengages, then I'm out again, and panting hard in the decelerating whump whump of the EMR machine, back in the graysmithy office.

  I'm leaning over her still, looking down on her dark eyes staring back at me. I notice I've drooled on her face. Oh man, that looks bad. I hastily rub it off, my arm a bit jerky as the gears of my brain slot back into sync. She doesn't notice, she's totally out.

  Then the tray engages, and we're sliding out of the quieting machine together, into the filtered gray light of the dive-room.

  "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 off Mei-An and look up at my employee Carrolla. He's tall and shaven-headed, with features just shy of model-worthy. I've never asked him, but I think he must have been a marine too, at least had the training. He reminds me so much of someone I used to know, but he never served his time. He's too young for it, has way too much energy.

  I've always imagined this skulk is his skirmish. proto-Calico. It makes him a tourist, but I can't complain about that. Having him around makes me feel good.

  "Fine work, really excellent," he's still 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, sit up with my back away from 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. "What, you gave up the juice? Hell no, Rit, that cost me 20. What's wrong with water, do you not have enough memories of that?"

  I shrug. "It came to mind."

  He laughs. "Shee-it. Well, I heard they've got vodka mixes out at the skulk-end, some new seed-blend. Sound good? Yes sir. Now 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. Perhaps this is why I find him cheering, though most people want to punch him after a few minutes. He can get very loud. Either punch him or sleep with him, actually, he gets his share of both.

  Together we lift me up off the bench, and I can mostly walk on my own, so he mostly lets me, assisting only when I sway. We trudge like that together out of the gray dive-bay, and he's saying something about the girl, Mei-An. I barely listen.

  Down the polished iron-floored corridor we go, to the end of the smithy building, and the outlook space. Here there's a massage chair with a cerebro-sonic bath, overlooking the green-gray effluent on the Allatanc waves, off the edge of skulk 47.

  I let him settle me down in the chair, looking out at the gray sky and level sweep of empty ocean. This is the world.

  "Switch on your favorite music," he says, as he plumps my head into the bath-spot. 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."

  "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, as the world fades back and 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 doesn't really work 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 want it, and that is not an entirely unpleasant notion. She was pretty, and real.

  I drift off thinking of her and the depths of her life, while the sonic-bath does its best to smooth the stress of the dive away.

  I rouse hours later with Carrol
la's steady hand on my shoulder again, odd memories flitting up from the remnants of the bath. Who I am, and what I've done.

  "You're up for it?" Carrolla asks, as he lowers the thrum of the sonic bath. "We can always dose her, if you're not."

  I blink, looking out of the glass. The sky is dark outside, I must've been comatose for hours. It was a deep dive, as deep as any I've done since working bounty in the Arctic skirmishes. Now I'm woozy and disoriented.

  "I'll do it," I say, patting at Carrolla's hand. "Give me a minute."

  "No problem. She's in recovery."

  "She awake?" He nods. "Five minutes," I say. "And see you for that Arclo gin later."

  He smiles. "Glad you remembered."

  His footsteps clank away, and I'm looking out of the glass again, waiting as my mind gets itself together. It's all darkness beyond, waves lapping against the skulk's quays, but for a few buoy lights on the kelp-farms and the faint lights of ships out in the distance. All so fragile, tenuous, like limpets clinging to a rock.

  Memories of my last skirmish-day dives rise like bubbles from the down deep cortex, those boys and girls who'd needed memories excised and implanted at once, expertise instilled while the trauma was lifted. I hardly breathed back then, between dives and the balm of sex that followed.

  I only had sex with the women. The men I spent longer with, sitting by their bedside while they wept about their fathers or mothers, something lost, something found. It's all complex dopaminic compounds, the body's unique cocktail, and through it we're forging a bond in memory that serves as solid ground for the injected engram to bed into. Sex is easier really, and faster, but I never savored being with another man.

  I get up and start through the graysmithy. Down the corridor there are no decorations, only sheer white walls, plastered and painted since I took this place over, but otherwise unchanged.

  She is waiting in the recovery room, the best room in the graysmithy overlooking another open swathe of gray ocean. She smiles when I come in, a shy thing, and gets to her feet.

  "Alsh bevral I ferraqu," she says. "Kalin Very."

  I nod, because she's speaking Afri-Jarvanese, the language I injected. "Very good. Do you know what it means?"

  "Not really. Just a feeling."

  "You said good morning, and wished me well. I suppose it'll be morning soon."

  She brushes a strand of dark hair from her face, an errant bang. For a long moment she looks at me, sizing me up and down. It's not an unfamiliar sensation, and not entirely uncomfortable. "They said it'll make me feel better," she says at last.

  "How do you feel now?"

  "Bad. Nauseous. Like I'm not myself."

  "Then it will," I say. "If you're willing to trust me."

  "You don't mind?"

  "It's my job." A smile, which always helps. "And you're beautiful, so no I won't mind."

  She raises an eyebrow, clipped like a silkworm, and walks over to me. Each step is measured, a carefully managed gait she surely learned at one of Calico's schools of manners. She's dressed again in the clothes she came in wearing, a bright red gho over her shoulders and hanging down like the curtain at an old movie theater, pink stockings underneath.

  From the Calico Reach.

  "I remember what you did," she says, taking my hand. "In the skirmishes."

  I take her hand. Soft, small like all the Reach girls, modified to be that way. I wonder what she's doing here, why she came to one of the lowest skulks to get her brain mauled. Of course she knows something about me now too, some glimmer of my skirmisher life, since I've been within her. This is why the post-dive contact is so important, to add context to knowledge that would otherwise be corrosively unsupported. To alleviate the mystery and help the inject sprout roots.

  "Don't think about that," I say. "Come on, let's go."

  Hand in hand we walk down the beaten steel floor of the graysmithy, past the reception desk where Carrolla is talking seriously with my receptionist Habeas. He gives me a nod. The elevator chimes in seconds, and we ride the three floors in silence.

  Outside the air is thick with salt and rot from the off-skulk kelp farms. Stars glimmer faintly overhead through the noxious off-wash of Calico's glow. A desultory alley winds down to a nondescript dock on the left, flocked with nesting crulls, half gull half crow, and a shark-tiller's coracle. On the right the alley leads up to the wall through a gauntlet of cheap pink and purple neon, signs glowing off the skulks' three B's; brothels, bars, and barrios. Each is lit in their own lurid glow like a row of hungry divas lusting for applause.

  She looks at me. "How can you live here?"

  "I don't live here," I say. "I just work here."

  In places the neon is interrupted by dark gulches of shadow, lean-to escarpments and scaffolded construction projects, squat boat-holds and opium dens built out of rotten-hulled boats, much of it flotsam salvaged from after the last tsunami.

  With her small hot hand in mine, we start along the alley. Underfoot the skulk fabric shifts, as the flotation barrels it rests upon flex with our weight. Ahead of us, rising above the crock-pot chimneys and uneven lines of the skulk, stands the implacable off-white shank of Calico's tsunami wall.

  It's vast, of course, as big as any dam in the pre-skirmish days, enough to stop the twenty-meter tsunamis that churn up from quakes in the Allatanc fault-lines. It's been over twenty years since the last big one, way back when I was a hungry young recruit headed north to the pack-ice, when there was still some ice left. We've been due another for as long as I've been in the skulks, the past ten years.

  We're all living on borrowed time.

  "You don't belong here," says Mei-An, catching me looking up at it. "You belong on the other side. You paid your dues in the skirmishes."

  "I paid enough to stay wherever I want."

  She doesn't say any more, and I'm glad of it. I wouldn't want to fall out over this, not when the job is still unfinished, nor do I want to hear any more of her life in Calico. I have enough life histories weighing me down already.

  The massage boys, whores, and touts leave me alone as we pass by their neon dens, each a cave to forbidden pleasure. Some give me a wink. These are the people I drink with most nights, after Mei-An is long gone, back to whatever life this new language patch will build for her. All of us make our choices one night at a time.

  "You must like it here," she says, as we turn off the alley and into one of the blue-tarp parks. The old homeless marine shouts out something as we pass over the salvage astroturf. A few stunted trees root toward neon from soil-pods dropped amongst the barrels, fractalling out like dendritic tufts. I imagine chromosomal messages passing through them, genetic information like an electronic charge popping on off, on off, as the tree builds the seeds that will outlive it by far.

  We skirt the sunken pond, rainwater trapped in the plastic sags where a few barrels have lost their buoyancy, and I wonder how I can best stem her curiosity, in the fewest words.

  "You know about the Lag," I say, hardly a question.

  She nods by my side, clutching to my arm more tightly now. I don't blame her, it's dark here, out of the park and walking the skulk-slums where the sex-workers and ex-bountymen go to burrow in, ride out the daylight like vampiric worms.

  On either side the maze of slums unfolds, shacks built in whatever order their owners settled the barrel raft. I came in on the skulk's first non-wave, when half of these were empty. I found an empty condo on a second floor, with glass windows, and like a hermit crab switching shells took it for myself.

  "It's like that," I say. "This whole place is a Lag, a doldrums in space that doesn't mean anything to anyone. You can do anything you want out here, and none of it matters."

  We enter through the backdoor, the canvas walls flexing as I lead her up the stairs.

  "I don't understand," she says, an excited flutter in her voice. Of course she doesn't understand.

  I ease off my jacket as we enter my bedroom, an oblong space in the air held together with
rope and sailcloth. There's my bed, freshly made, a television which I never use, even a glass wall looking out over the lower slums, all dark outside, and my books. The red glow of an alarm clock casts a brothel-like glow over the neat, hollow rest of it.

  "It's so empty," she says. I feel through her touch that she is crying. The inject has played havoc with her emotions.

  "It's not empty now," I say. "You're here."

  Her gho comes off easily and now she's weeping against my chest. This is nothing new. She pulls at the buckle of my belt and starts to kiss my face frantically.

  "Thank you," she murmurs, as her lips crush against mine, her hands racing hungrily into my pants. They come off, as do hers.

  She pulls us to the bed, tugging at me so hard it hurts, squirming off her stockings, pressing her hot flesh against mine, folding me into her. She gasps and we begin, this most ancient of complex dopaminic bond exchanges.

  ME A

  I wake with a mouthful of liquid smoke and fire in my eyes, hardly able to move, breathe, or see. I gag, and retch oil down my black uniform, smirching a pattern of pretty yellow stripes embroidered there like lines in a maze.

  Captain. Thoughts bubble up from nothing, giving meaning to shape. This is the Bathyscaphe and I'm the captain, and something has gone very wrong.

  I tug at my arms and legs but they are trapped, coiled within thick orange licks of fire, holding me in place and burning me into existence.

  "Shit!" someone shouts nearby, and I recognize the voice, Ray, though I don't know how.

  I shake my head, spit out the sour taste of smoke, and blink the grit out of eyes I've never used. A corroded steel wall lies before me, corridor, and I'm in some kind of bay dressed in a sheer black uniform like a shop-window mannequin, wreathed around with fire that doesn't hurt.

  "Ray!" I shout.

  "Me, I'm burning here man!" he shouts back. He knows my name, Me. I hadn't known it until then, but of course that's who I am. Who else would I be but Me, captain of the Bathyscaphe, even now diving for the Solid Core?