by Peter Watts
“I think Hargreave blamed me, in a way, even then. I mean I wasn’t Prophet’s handler, exactly, but I was there. Doesn’t matter how many lab tests you run, your prototype’s always gonna fuck up in the field, right? First rule of product testing. So there I was, in the same room with all those black ops need-to-know heavyweights, just a geek to keep an eye on the suit feeds and work out the bugs. When the suit goes dark, who else you gonna blame? I was the guy supposed to make sure that didn’t happen.
“It was bad enough we all thought he was dead, but then I started getting these messages. A vcard or a voicemail, totally untraceable, just out of the blue every two or three months: Having a blast, wish you were here, that kind of thing. I have no fucking clue why he reached out to me of all people. Nobody else heard squat from the man as far as I know, not even his handler.
“But now Hargreave’s thinking I was in on it somehow. Prophet was a top-of-the-line field man but there’s no way he had the chops to hack that suit on his own, right? I managed to convince him I hadn’t conspired to steal his secret technology—it wasn’t all that hard, actually, Hargreave-Rasch has machines that can sniff out a little white lie from your blink rate, among other things—but that still pretty much wrapped it up as far as the whole Prism gig was concerned.
“Anyway, at least we knew Prophet wasn’t dead at the bottom of a jungle canyon somewhere. But we never saw him, and he never came in, and I don’t know how much of these past three years he spent in that suit and how much he spent out of it. For all I know he never took the damn thing off, and that would be … well.”
Outside, the faint faraway sound of something colossal, falling over.
Gould shakes his head, gets back on message. “The point is, he wanted to come in now. After all this time. And I’m not working at H-R anymore but I guess I’m the only one he trusts. So he reaches out. Going to bring me something, he says, something to save the goddamn world. And here you are. You’re not carrying any gift-wrapped packages. You’re not handing me the key to some safe-deposit box. All you’ve brought me is that fucking suit.”
Find Gould. Nathan Gould. I’m so fucking sorry.
It’s all on you now.
The Geek from Prism hauls himself to his feet. It seems to take all the strength in the world.
“So,” he says. “Shall we get started?”
It’s something in the Nanosuit, of course. Deep-layer package in the memory substrate, is the way Gould puts it. He puts me back in the cradle, pokes and prods every interface the suit has to offer and probably punches in a couple of new ones for good measure.
“Fuck,” he says at last.
I’m impressed by how concise his executive summary is. I wait for a bit more detail.
“I can see it in there,” he says. “It’s a black fucking box is what it is. Classical electronic I can do. Quantum I can do. This molecular format, though—it’s unique to the Nanosuit, it’s proprietary. Maybe Prophet didn’t realize I’d parted ways with Hargreave-Rasch when he made the recording. Or maybe he just grabbed it in its native format. Either way, I can’t decode it here.
“We need to get you to an H-R lab. Prism’s over on Roosevelt Island, but it’s miles away. Plus they revoked my access when I got sack—”
An alarm goes off, right over my head.
When I peel myself off the ceiling I follow Gould’s wilder-than-usual stare to a monitor teetering on a pile of file folders: a compound-eye matrix of in-house securicam feeds. A column of Darth Vader wannabes creeps down a stairwell in one of those facets: they pile up stage left, bleed out of one window, spill across the hallway in the next one.
“Shit,” Gould hisses. “CELL.”
They carefully test each door along the hallway, leaning back against the wall, reaching out with one arm, placing limpets for maximum sensitivity. Occasionally trying a doorknob for tradition’s sake.
Gould spins me around; I’m surprised by the strength in that scrawny body. “They’re coming for me. They’re coming for us. Hargreave wants us dead.” Which isn’t exactly true. I seem to remember some fairly explicit orders that I be brought in alive. But I can’t begrudge Gould his ongoing attempts at motivational speaking.
Besides, it’s pretty obvious by now that being brought in alive is not going to lead to an especially happy ending, either.
Gould pushes me back toward the door, indifferent to the teetering piles of crap we’re knocking over en route. “You gotta keep them out. You gotta take them out.” And I’m back in the hall, staring at a closed door, listening to half a dozen locks and deadbolts clicking into place on the other side.
Brave, brave man, Nathan Gould.
But he hasn’t abandoned me. A moment later he’s back on comm, my own personal Seeing Eye dog: “The stairwell’s blocked at this end of the hall, they’re gonna have to come out on the other side of the atrium. They’re still six floors up, you’ve got a few minutes …”
I call the elevator and jam a potted plant between the doors; if they’re dumb enough to try that approach they’ll have to rappel down the shaft. The hall opens out on the upper rim of a mezzanine, gloomy as a cave and with almost as many places to hide. But if Gould’s right, that door across the atrium is the only access point from the enemy’s approach. Good bottleneck, clear line-of-sight. This could be easy if I can just nail them before they have a chance to fan out.
Gould crackles in my ear: “Hey, I hacked their freq. The idiots are recycling their initialization vectors. They’re CELL, all right.”
I center my sights on the closed door across the space, hold my fire, crank the acoustic gain: sure enough I can hear quiet movement on the other side. I pan back and forth a bit, and double-take: soft sounds whispering at closer range, too, through the nearer walls of the atrium itself. CELL’s trying to flank me. I can hear footsteps, and whispers, and
—slithering—
And Gould in my ear breathing “Ohhh, no … oh, shit …”
And you don’t need volume enhance at all, to hear the screaming.
They hit CELL first. Even on the other side of that closed and distant door I hear them come through the walls. I hear the gunfire, and that otherworldly chittering; I hear shouts and panicked orders and the wet tearing sounds of bones being pulled from their sockets. Then the door bursts open on the far balcony, and all that blood and biosteel tumbles into view like a gory mudslide.
But by that time I’ve got my hands full with the Ceph that have come through the walls on my own side of the playground.
I don’t know how they got in here. I don’t know why they didn’t show up on Gould’s cameras. Maybe they’ve got cloaks. Maybe they just punched through floors and ceilings to get around, bypassed the halls and stairwells entirely. Brave, brave Sir Nathan isn’t any help—“Fuck man I’m outta here!”—and I’m not making it back to his girlfriend’s place anyway, not without a hell of a firefight. Squiddie owns this floor.
The cloak is my only edge. I think the Ceph might be able to see though it, but not very well; their aim is wild, and CELL targets are so very much easier to get a lock on. I’m not a big fan of unnecessary heroics. If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then two families of very dear friends are busy beating the shit out of each other, and I’m not about to get involved in a domestic squabble. So I hide in plain sight. I slip from pillar to post. Sometimes one or two of the grunts turn my way, suspiciously sniff the air with those banana-slug tentacles, then return to the fray.
But just because I’m not an active participant in this melee doesn’t mean I can’t rack up a few experience points. You can learn a lot by watching. So I take a few notes as I sneak out the back way. I watch one merc shoot the leg off an exoskeleton and the squirming slimy thing inside launches itself right out of the harness and comes at her stark naked, flailing its tentacles like clubs. I watch another take out a monster from the stars with a shotgun, seconds before a different monster blows him away in turn. But most of all I see a fight that’s way more
even than it has any right to be: creatures smart enough to hop among solar systems, duking it out with us backboned primitives in a dingy hallway like this was some kind of sock hop between the Bloods and the Crips. I see them fighting like us, and I don’t know why they’d do that. I see combat exoskeletons that leave the meat exposed, tentacles or antennae or fucking penises for all I know, flailing around completely unprotected.
Know what I see, Roger?
There’s got to be something I’m not seeing.
What do you think about that, Roger? You must have an opinion.
I wondered for a while if maybe those tentacle thingies were gills or lungs or something, had to stay exposed to the air to let them breathe. But that still doesn’t explain why you’d expose them to bullets; Jesus Christ, these guys hop among stars and they can’t invent chain mail? Countercurrent air pumps are too complicated for them? Doesn’t make any goddamn sense, running into battle with your junk hanging out.
But then I thought, maybe that’s the whole point.
You know about the Celts, right? The Gaesatae? There were these tribes back in ancient times, took on the Romans, might have even been mercs. And I shit you not, these guys literally ran into battle naked. Painted themselves up, spiked their hair to make them look all badass, but they’d leave their dicks flapping in plain sight. It was an intimidation tactic. Made the enemy feel all insecure or something I guess, you know, Holy shit these guys are so tough they don’t even need armor, we’d better just run away now. And there were even armor-using cultures back then that would deliberately leave their backs exposed, even if they loaded up their fronts with enough shielding to stop a battering ram. To keep you fighting on the battlefield, you know? You’re less likely to turn tail if it leaves you open for an easy kill. And Squiddie, well, most of that exposed meat is definitely dorsal, am I right?
Sorry, what did you call—Handicap Principle. Can’t say I ever heard of it.
Oh, right. You mean, like a peacock tail. Look at me, I’m so fit I can afford to drag all this dead weight around just to look impressive. Same basic thing, I guess. Except your peacocks are trying to impress their mates, and the Celts were trying to impress their enemies. I mean, it’s not very smart, but then again it’s a brain-stem thing, right? And I don’t have to tell you about the stupid shit our brain stems get us up to.
Maybe Squiddie’s not so different after all.
What? Oh, no: They ended up getting their asses handed to them. Scared the shit out of the Romans on first sight, but in the end it doesn’t matter how big your dick is: A javelin’s always gonna be bigger. So the moment someone stopped running and put them to the test it was all Hey, the Gaesatae have no clothes! Game over.
A shame we can’t repeat that bit of history, huh?
You know. Because I am remembering it.
TRINITY
Dear Neville,
I hope our Lord is keeping you safe in these most trying of times. I have tried to contact you through more conventional means but the network has been down for some time in Manhattan and now my batteries have died. I have resorted to the old-fashioned methods our ancient brethren used, in the days before the technophiles and idolaters seduced us with their global networks and their Internet pornography (although I must admit that I find myself missing the satellite feed and Prayer Line that funds our ministry. Praise the Lord, who turns the Devil’s own tools to such righteous ends!).
It is day four and our mission here is beginning to make progress, although perhaps more slowly than I would have hoped. New York was full of wickedness even before the End Days began, which is of course why Satan chose it as his first stronghold (though I admit I would have expected him to start with Los Angeles or Fergus). Communists and sodomites are almost as thick upon the ground here as demons, and while recent events have caused many of the locals to repent, others even now resist our attempts to lead them to salvation (none so blind as those who will not see). Those damnable Anglicans, sensing an opportunity to spread their particular brand of liberalism, have also set up shop on the other side of the borough; many survivors encounter them first, and desperate for even the appearance of redemption, are fooled by their use of Christian props. I hear that even the ragheads have regrouped at a mosque over in Hamilton Heights! Fortunately they are wasting their time by launching jihad against Satan’s armies instead of converting souls (they know the easier enemy to beat when they see it, ha ha!), and we have had no direct encounters with them so far.
Our greatest enemy, of course, is Satan himself. You may have heard mention of “the Rapture” on the mainstream feeds; do not be fooled. It is anything but. I have seen these so-called Raptured with my own eyes. They are infested, brother. They seek the light, but it is not the light of our Lord (you may remember that Lucifer means “bringer of light”). Some kind of demonic tumors grow in their eyes, in their mouths, in their open wounds. It steals away their souls. They are already saved, they say. They have already found redemption. And they are gripped by some evil wanderlust that draws them to wherever Satan’s spawn gather in the greatest numbers.
And there is something else, Neville, something new. You may have heard of the “pingers” and the “stalkers” and the other abominations that walk these streets, preying on sinners and saved alike. I have seen them with my own eyes; they are half flesh and half machine and not remotely human. But just today I saw something that looked and moved like a man, yet was as depraved as any demon. I saw a ghoul, feeding on the flesh of the dead.
It was the color of stone, or clay. For a few moments I thought it might be one of those golems the Jews go on about—they do figure prominently in Revelation, even though they have spurned Christ—but it had metal seams and joints, and a head like a helmet. And its body, Neville, it had such muscles, they shone and rippled and flexed with every movement. I swear, were it not the color of slate it might almost have been you standing there, in the shower at the seminary after practice. But it acted nothing like you, Neville. It was crouched over a pile of corpses and it fed on them through some kind of fang or needle that sprouted from its wrist. I did not get close enough to see the details, but those penetrated bodies—they shriveled up as I watched, Neville. This monster sucked them dry and left nothing but husks of skin draped over bone, like one of the steel vermin that scuttle about these streets draining the dead.
I was transfixed. And before I could recover my wits, this thing turned and looked straight at me. Its face—the air was full of smoke and there was maybe half a city block between us, but I could see that it had red eyes, or maybe just a single great eye. It stood up, still facing me; it must have been nine or ten feet tall. It took a step toward me. I held up my Bible, Neville, I was terrified but I had faith in Our Lord, I held up the Bible to this abomination and it stopped! It just stood there for a moment, watching me, and then—
And then it laughed.
It had the strangest laugh, Neville. It didn’t sound anything like a real voice, it sounded like some kind of primitive machine from the last century.
And it began to move again, toward me.
I confess my faith failed me then. I turned and fled. I must have run for blocks, and when I finally stopped and looked behind me it was nowhere to be seen.
Perhaps it was a golem after all. Perhaps it was the Beast himself that I saw, feasting on fallen souls. I do not know. But it had the shape of a man and the aspect of the Enemy; and while I’ve seen the Devil’s other soldiers wreak much greater destruction, there was something especially intimate about the evil this thing wrought in the streets of this accursed place. Don’t ask me how I know, but I feel in my soul that this ghoul was the most wicked, the most evil of all the satanic forces I have seen here. I pray I never encounter its like again.
But enough darkness! There is so much comfort to be had even in the face of these abominations—for they prove, once and for all, that we were right and the atheist liberals were wrong. The Devil’s minions are everywhere, just as th
e Scriptures foretold. It is truly a joyous time (perhaps not for the abortionists and the unbelievers—who’s laughing now, Dr. Meyers? ha ha!). The coming of our Lord is at hand.
One of CELL’s Christian soldiers has promised to scan this letter to you as soon as he is able. God bless CELL; they are truly doing the Lord’s work. Perhaps once they vanquish the Devil’s Armies they can do something about the homosexuals, ha ha!
Be well, and rejoice. The Lord is with us always.
Yours in Christ,
Franklin
What? You think this thing powers itself?
You think I can leap between rooftops, roll Bulldogs single-handed, throw CELL drones around like kittens without draining the batteries? Have you even read the damn specs?
Everything about this suit is a trade-off. You can crank the armor so tight you’re pretty much invincible, but only for a few seconds and you cut your speed in half. You can disappear entirely, just fade right out of the visible spectrum, but the lensing field sucks so much juice the capacitors run dry before you’re halfway down the block. And don’t even talk to me about trying to do any of those things at the same time.
They don’t mention any of that in the ad copy, of course. To hear the brochure tell it, you just put on the N2 and hit the ground at sixty, invisible and invulnerable, world without end a-fucking-men. But all those bells and whistles take power—and the suit may be a hundred years ahead of its time, but the batteries? Let me tell you, sometimes it feels like this thing’s running on a couple of triple-A’s.