by Peter Watts
They say it keeps you going under normal conditions for almost a week without a recharge. I don’t have to tell you conditions are anything but normal out there. I tapped into the grid on those rare occasions when I could find a grid to tap into. Even then, it was even money whether I’d be able to suck up a decent charge before the extra load blew the breakers over ten city blocks.
The suit’s got a NOM option to metabolize carrion on the battlefield. Cellular ATP gives you almost sixty kilojoules per mole, and that’s not even counting bomb-cal content of the raw meat. So, yeah. I used it once or twice, to keep myself going. I fed off the dead like a fucking tick, and I’m not proud of it.
Still, you can’t deny it makes sense. The grid may go down, clouds may cut you off from your solar sats—but the one thing you’ll never run out of down here is bodies.
Gould isn’t gone. I’m starting to get the sense that Gould is never gone, not really. He’s like one of those mutant unkillable STDs you pick up out in the Gene Zone: Just when you think you’re finally free of it, your dick starts oozing again.
He pops back onto my comm channel as if the dustup at his apartment had never happened, bursting with good news he’s skimmed from forbidden frequencies: some kind of field hospital set up at Trinity. He figures that was where CELL planned to “debrief” Prophet. The good news is that hardware designed to interface with all the suit’s black boxes is pretty much a given.
“The bad news,” he says, “is that we’re going to have to storm the post.”
He actually says we.
“I’m already halfway there,” he tells me. “The Harley doesn’t give a flying fuck about rocks in the road, I can thread this thing through a gutter pipe if I have to. I’ll wait for you there, but you gotta haul ass.”
I went to church religiously until I was fourteen. Never liked it much. Don’t expect to like it much now but I make the trip, find a decent vantage point to scope out the territory: a midrise apartment complex that looks like it’s been derelict since the Double Dip. The top floor gives me a perfect vantage point: Trinity’s steeple reaches up from across Broadway, a great stone dildo with a thousand ribs and projections urging the Incredible Fifty-Foot Woman to let go. The main entrance is a two-story arch, deep in shadow; but I have no trouble making out the two CELL grunts slouching in the shade.
I zoom the view and pan the terrain. Gould guesses the entrance is going to be rotten with motion sensors and smart guns and he’s right about that: I make three autosnipes in addition to the two hamburgers at the front before someone emerges from inside. The hamburgers jump instantly to attention. I prick up my ears, too: It’s—
“Sweet smoking Jesus, that’s Tara Strickland,” Gould says. “Used to be a Navy SEAL, went over to CELL after her father died. Try not to get killed by her. Try not to kill her, either; she’s big fish, she’s the goddamn Rosetta Stone if we can get her to talk.”
She’s talking now, tearing a strip off the grunts for slouching in a war zone. Then she disappears back inside, leaving her minions standing a lot straighter.
“Now, those assholes?” Gould says. “You can kill ’em all you want.”
So I do. Three shots total. Then I take out the smart guns. Two other hamburgers come charging out of the shadows and decide, too late, that discretion is sometimes the better part of valor. I take one of them out with a single shot; the other gets to cover behind a Ford pickup whose front bumper is festooned with the smiling face of Osama bin Laden and the words I’M STILL FREE: HOW ABOUT YOU? He knows he can’t get back to sanctuary without taking a bullet; he knows, as my grenade arcs down on top of him, that he can’t stay where he is. He bolts at the last second for an ad-infested bus stop shelter, manages one panicked yelp before the grenade goes off. He dies by the light of a flaming advertisement for Carmat Artificial Kidneys (ISN’T YOUR LIFE WORTH THE PRICE?).
I hit the stairwell and take the stairs ten at a time, make ground level in thirty seconds flat without hearing any rotors overhead, any boots below. I’m not quite sure I believe it; shouldn’t there be an assault helicopter coming over the rooftops by now? Shouldn’t someone be wondering why Asswipe Seven hasn’t called in? I can’t hear anything except this little voice in my head chuckling over the fact that we can’t even stop killing each other when we’re being invaded by space aliens.
It’s funny, you know, because it’s true.
I peek out, pan on zoom, again on thermal. I pull up my cloak and cross the street; I’m still half expecting a hail of heavenly lead but I don’t run into so much as a stop sign. I reach the bodies I’ve laid out across the asphalt, rob them of firepower and ammo that did them no fucking good whatsoever. I take some comfort in the knowledge that I will put it all to better use. I decloak in the shadows, let the charge build back up, fade again. Push one of those massive doors open just a little—solid bronze, I think, they looked like they were a couple of hundred years old—and sneak into God’s House like a shadow on its stomach.
And still nobody’s drawn any kind of bead on me. There’s nobody even here as far as I can tell. So I stand up and I look around, and—
And holy shit, Roger. It’s beautiful. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I don’t know if I can even describe it. One second you’re in the middle of a post-apocalyptic wasteland and the next you’re on the floor of this great golden cavern, it’s dimly lit but somehow you can see everything even without the augments. You’d swear the ceiling reaches halfway to the stars; it rests on massive arches topped by these glorious stained-glass windows and they aren’t even broken, Roger, I swear not a single one of them is even scratched. The seats, the benches, what do they call those—yeah, the pews. Those have been ripped out. And sure enough a field hospital’s been set up in their place but even that’s gone now, nothing left but a few rows of stripped cots and a pile of empty crates with red crosses on them. The arches tower over everything like redwood trunks from the eighteen hundreds, you know, you see pictures online sometimes. And way off at the front behind the pulpit, about halfway up the wall are rows of life-sized statues in little alcoves, saints or martyrs or something. And towering over that there’s this enormous mother of all stained-glass windows: wide as any church I’ve ever seen, and twice as high, a great arch that’s all one window full of a hundred colors and a thousand facets. Must be five, six stories high and the colors are so rich they almost hurt my eyes, I almost forgot we had colors like that in the world. The light’s almost—I don’t know. Divine.
I feel like an ant in a kaleidoscope. I swear to God, Roger, that church was so much bigger on the inside, we could pack the whole city in there if we tried. And there’s more than enough room, because I’m the only one there. No CELL grunts, no whitecoats running around with beeping boxes, no hard-ass ex-navy bitches waiting to feed me my balls on a platter. I pump up the acoustics, I zoom every shadow, and there’s nothing but this insane, beautiful pocket universe I’ve stumbled into. I just want to stay there and let Armageddon go on without me.
No chance of that, of course. Because here comes Nathan Gould roaring up outside on his motorbike and he comes stomping into the place like a fucking barbarian. I don’t think he even notices the windows. He looks around and sees nothing, kicks one of the cots. “Shit. We’re too late.”
But he gives it the once-over anyway, starts poking around the desks and the tables up front, and the spell’s broken so I figure I might as well join him. After a few minutes he lets loose a whoop and holds up a sheaf of papers like it was the head of a vanquished enemy.
“They’ve relocated!” he says. “Moved across the way to Wall Street, looks like. Closer to the trunk line.” He jerks his chin at that magnificent windowed wall. “Down in the basement, under the stairwell. There’s an access tunnel, goes under the street. I can hack the security codes, but there’s bound to be muscle. What we need—”
He looks around, and nods to himself.
“—is a diversion.”
CELL Internal Security Incident Report
Time/Date of Incident: 23/08/2023
Nature of Incident: Security Breach
Location: Field Interrogation Facility, Wall Street, Manhattan
CELL Personnel Present: C. Abao, S.-H. Chen, H. Kumala, D. Lockhart, M. Parpek, B. Rawles, T. Strickland, L. deWinter
Others Present: N. Gould, Unknown
Reporting Participant: deWinter
Account of Incident:
I was carrying out duties assigned by CO Lockhart (installing/prepping NODAR interface for debriefing incoming rogue agent) along with Chen, Lieutenant Kumala, Parpek, and Dr. Rawles, when the incident occurred. We were operating in an active combat zone but we were guarded by at least 14 active CELL paramilitary both during initial deployment at Trinity and subsequent relocation. At approximately 1300 I overheard Kumala speaking to Special Adviser Strickland on encrypted channel. SA Strickland reported that the rogue operative had been sighted in the area and would be in custody soon. We therefore booted up NODAR and began ground-truthing sims. (We had to do this three times because of intermittent power failures during the first sequences, before Chen got a generator from the trailers.)
Shortly after this SA Strickland entered the facility via the underground entrance and had words with Lt. Kumala. She seemed to be angrier than usual (I think she was unhappy with the soldiers guarding the facility but I did not hear any details). SA Strickland stayed on-site for perhaps five minutes, during which time she approached me and asked if the equipment was ready. I told her that we would be ready shortly (we were still running the third ground-truthing sequence). This did not seem to be the answer SA Strickland was hoping for. At this point Lt. Kumala approached SA Strickland and reported that there appeared to be “a problem” with the guards stationed at Trinity. SA Strickland then assembled a small force (maybe 3 or 4 soldiers) and left through the Trinity tunnel. Before she left she told Lt. Kumala to reassign snipers to the roof because “Prophet won’t be thinking as two-dimensionally as you lot.”
Parpek and I completed the ground-truthing sequences during this time but then Dr. Rawles tripped over the power cord so we had to start again. While we were reinitializing the NODAR the ground began to shake and I heard what sounded like a muffled explosion in the distance. (I believe this was the ammo dump going up in the churchyard.) I noticed Lt. Kumala becoming agitated over at his command post. He then approached the technical team and said something like “He’s here. He’s right outside. Get that f______g machine working already or I’ll feed your nads to Hargreave myself.” Lt. Kumala then took the rest of his forces and left via the main entrance.
At this point only Abao, Chen, Parpek, Dr. Rawles, and myself were in the room and none of us were armed. We could hear gunfire and shouting from outside. Dr. Rawles suggested that we might be safer if we moved up the tunnel into Trinity but Abao pointed out that the trouble seemed to have started at Trinity so we decided we would be better off where we were. Chen locked the tunnel door.
The gunfire and the shouting trailed off while we were talking. I heard someone crying, and a single shot, and then two sets of footsteps coming up the tunnel. I heard a voice on the other side of the door but I couldn’t hear the words. Then the door unlocked from the other side and a male civilian weelding [sic] a gun entered from the tunnel (I learned later that this was Nathan Gould, an ex-employee of CryNet). Abao asked the civilian not to shoot and the civilian said he wanted to do a suit scan. Parpek was at the telemetry panel and I saw him mouth the word cloak but then there was a gunshot and Parpek was hit in the chest. At this point a second intruder became visible and I could see he was wearing a CryNet Systems Nanosuit either 2.0 or 2.2, it’s hard to tell without checking the neuropticals. (I learned later that this was “Prophet,” the rogue we were supposed to be debriefing.) He was also holding some kind of pistol, I think maybe an M12, and he had a machine gun strapped to his belt, too, although it was not deployed. Chen promised we would not make any trouble, but Dr. Rawles had been standing behind the door and he came at “Prophet” from behind. (He had a dynaport multitool in his hand, so he may have been trying to short out the Nanosuit through the cervical interface.) “Prophet” pointed the gun in Dr. Rawles’s face and Dr. Rawles backed away. Dr. Gould said something like “I asked you not to shoot the geeks” but “Prophet” had stopped shooting by this point anyway. I thought I saw a tic in the forearm musculature so it could have just been temporary spindle lock.
Gould then directed us at gunpoint to hook the rogue up to the NODAR, which we did. Chen handled biotelemetry and I ran the suit diagnostics. I was parsing the twitch protocols when Chen said “F_____k, he’s dead.”
Gould threatened Chen and told her not to make threats she couldn’t back up, but Chen explained that the rogue was actually, literally dead. I accessed his vitals myself at that point and confirmed this. The right ventricle and left lung were gone and his right lung was relatively intact but nonfunctional due to pneumothorax. I could see that the right lung might be salvageable (the diaphragm had been perforated but the N2 had infiltrated the injuries with a synthomyosin mesh that was restoring some integrity), but the rest of the thoracic cluster was just gone. The N2 had bypassed the pulmonary system entirely and was infusing O2 directly into the aortic arch. I also noticed that it had extruded synthomyosin around the shrapnel and it had coated all the torn internal surfaces with anafibrin, but none of these were stand-alone modifications. The N2 extended into its wearer at the molecular level and had taken over most of the vital processes, so Chen was medically right. The undamaged tissues left inside the suit did not meet the definition of a complete viable organism as defined by National Health Industry Standards. “Prophet” was legally dead.
I watched for some kind of reaction to that news, but he kept his visor locked the whole time and I could not see his face. I did not notice any obvious change in body language. I think maybe he knew already.
How did I feel? How did I feel? How do you think I fucking felt?
Betrayed. That’s how.
I knew it was bad, of course. I knew I was dead the moment that gunship hit me on Battery Park. But then, Prophet, yo? My hope and my salvation. This Lazarus suit, this second chance. I didn’t know if it was actually fixing me or just keeping me going until the guys at Syracuse could put me back together but I always thought that if I made it out of the battle zone alive I’d at least get a chance to step out in my own skin, you know? I thought, somewhere down the road, I’d be human again.
But all the suicidal thoughts and the despair over my lost humanity, none of that really gets a chance to sink in at first—because I’m still trying to parse the fact that the N2 just mutinied on me, that it actually froze my goddamn finger on the trigger and scolded me for killing “mission-critical collaborators.” I’ve already taken out the lab rat who tried to hack me on remote but there are still four other potential enemy combatants in the room, as they say. And the suit—the fucking suit—is telling me I can’t eliminate those threats.
But then I hear what one of those techs has just told Gould—
I’m dead.
I’m dead.
—and suddenly, crazily, I actually feel dead. I could swear that up until this very moment I’ve felt the air flowing in and out of my chest; when those Ceph came through the wall, when I tangled with the mercs outside, I felt my pulse pound. It’s not something you think about consciously but it’s damn well the kind of thing you notice when it’s gone, right? And I haven’t noticed anything missing until right now, until the moment that tech with the V-gloves says, “No, he’s literally dead,” and just like that all those comforting biorhythms I thought had been keeping me company all this time, they just drain away. I reach for a pulse and find nothing. I try to catch my breath and I can’t. And all I feel in that instant is this crazy gobsmacked astonishment that all those things have gone and left nothing behind and I never even noticed.
And the next thing I feel
is a rising, murderous fury at Nathan fucking Gould.
Because Gould scanned me, just a couple of hours ago. Sure his rig didn’t come with all the latest bells and whistles but it sure as shit should’ve been able to tell when someone’s dead, you know? It sure as shit should be able to tell you when your goddamn heart is missing.
Gould, you fucker. You slimy, sorry sack of shit. You knew. You knew all along, and you let me do your dirty work, and you never even told me, Gould, you never even—
I swear I’m going to break his scrawny pencil neck but I’m locked down in the cradle. I can’t do anything but listen to the lab rats talking over me like I’m fungus in a petri dish. Gould couldn’t give two shits about my injuries, he just wants to know what the N2’s holding in its deep-layer substrate. The technician tells him they’re uploading it as fast as they can, and they’re all pointedly ignoring the body twitching at the corner of my eye. And that twitching, it doesn’t stop. It actually gets worse over time and its not just the body anymore it’s the things around it, it’s the very air and I’m trying to turn my head for a better look and no dice—I’m still wired into the harness—but that’s okay because that weird shimmery twitchiness is spreading across my visual field like water spilled across the floor, like the ground racing up at you when your stabilizers are down and you’re coming in too fast—
I think it short-circuits me, somehow. The cradle. Knocks me right out of the here-and-now and right into some, some—I don’t know. Some schizophrenic’s nightmare. I can hardly see anything, just shapes and silhouettes stuck in shades of blue and black like I’m in some kind of subterranean grotto. Giant machines everywhere. At least I think they’re machines, judging by their outlines. And there are things all over them, crawling down the walls, slithering along the floor. Coming for me. The monsters are coming and I’m stuck in molasses, I’ve got a gun but I barely even have the strength to bring it up much less defend myself.