by Peter Watts
I run like hell up Broadway.
Of course it was a bad choice. There weren’t any good ones. What would you have done, hide in a dumpster? Run up fifty floors of some office tower that’s already been so torqued it might go over if you kick it in the shins? Fuck that noise. The farther you get from the waterfront, the higher the ground; the more buildings you’ve got between you and that big fucking flyswatter heading for the coast. Office tower doesn’t do you much good if it comes down around you, but even in a million pieces all that mass is gonna act like some kind of breakwater.
So I’m burning up the boulevard as fast as the N2’s mighty little nanofibrils can move me, and neither CELL nor Ceph nor civilian get in my way. Maybe they didn’t happen to be hanging around on that street, maybe they were and I didn’t notice, maybe the word’s gone out and everyone’s just running for cover; but all I see is cars and corpses, and all I hear is a low steady rumble rising behind me. I know I can’t outrun it—not even NANOSUIT 2.0 can win a race against a tsunami—but maybe it’ll be worn out by the time it catches me, maybe it won’t be a flyswatter so much as a plain old flood. Maybe it’ll just lift me up and carry me along and it’ll be just like river rafting, just a day at the water park.
Right.
That rumbling’s pretty loud by now, and deep, almost subsonic; you hear it with your bones more than your ears. The ground won’t stop shaking. I can feel it under my boots, I can see windowpanes bursting over the street, I can hear car alarms going off. And there are these other sounds too, little metallic popping noises, and I don’t turn around to see what they are because I don’t dare, I can hear the whole Atlantic roaring at my back and no way am I going to break my stride for even a second. But I don’t have to look behind because a manhole cover blasts out of the street right in front of me, and farther ahead, and all the way down the street like a row of space shuttles blasting off on columns of white water. I run through an intersection and something’s blocked off the street to my left and it’s moving and holy Mother of Muhammad the goddamn ocean flanked me, it’s coming at me from all sides now, these huge motherfucking gray-green mountains of water and I barely have time to look up and take one last look at the sky—just this tiny strip of brightness way off overhead, disappearing between two dark heaving walls. It’s like being swallowed whole, it’s like taking one last look at the world through closing jaws.
And I’m squashed like a bug at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
To: Site Commander D. Lockhart, Manhattan Crisis Zone
From: CryNet Executive Board
Date: 23/08/2023, 16:05
CC: CELL Oversight Secretariat; Jacob Hargreave
Commander Lockhart,
We reluctantly conclude that your assessment of Jacob Hargreave’s mental competence is correct at this time, and we herewith relieve him of all board-related duties and shareholder privileges. He is to be contained within the environs of the Prism building until a medical team can assess his mental health. Operating mandate is also revoked in the case of Special Adviser Tara Strickland, pending further investigation. She is to be detained for questioning.
Your request for overall authority in the Manhattan Crisis Zone is herewith granted.
I wake up to a soft distant roar, like the sound of a seashell held to your ear. I hear a river chuckling away somewhere nearby, a seagull squawking Don’t fuck with me, and False Prophet mumbling something about resequencing vectors. I hear other voices, too: Must be around here somewhere, and Yeah, if Gould’s tracking gizmo actually works worth shit, and If the wave didn’t get him. Fucking Pentagon …
That last sentiment of which, I gotta say, I’m finding myself more and more in sympathy with. But these guys sound friendly for a change—even familiar—so it is with something close to a sense of hope that I open my eyes.
And what should greet me but a blue sunlit sky full of puffy white clouds. And a giant green fist the size of a bus, ready to punch my lights back out.
I think Jolly Green Giant. I think Incredible Hulk. Statue of Liberty comes a distant third, but that’s what it turns out to be when my eyes finally focus. Big green disembodied fist in a river that used to be a street, still bravely holding aloft the Torch of Freedom or whatever the fuck it’s supposed to symbolize. Too bad statues don’t come with a sense of irony.
Oh, and here comes the gunfire. Naturally.
Regular army, this time. Camo fatigues, no insectile body armor, just a bunch of jarheads and Squids shooting at each other. The Ceph seem awfully undrowned, but maybe they have been rocked back on their heels a bit because our boys don’t seem to be having too much trouble mopping them up.
It’s a nice sight to wake up to, even though I can’t join in the festivities because my suit is still rebooting along with my brain (I swear, Roger, the way this thing crashes I’d swear the OS was written by Microsoft). By the time I can do anything more productive than twitching and rolling around there’s nothing left but backbones. And the best sight I’ve seen all fucking day is the guy who reaches down to help me to my feet.
“Alcatraz. Nice suit, man. Fifth Avenue? You been shopping without me?”
Chino, back from the dead. I thought he went down with the Swordfish, I thought he was rotting on the bottom of the Hudson. I’d hug the dude if I could do it without crushing him to jelly.
“You do remember me, right? Gould said they’d knocked your voice box out, but he didn’t say anything about brain damage.” He leans in, squints through the faceplate, doesn’t see anything but his own reflection. “What the hell happened to you?”
He’s fallen in with some kinda ad-hoc mash-up of marines and airborne and regular army, the closest thing left to a chain of command in this shitstorm. The man who’s holding it all together is one Colonel Barclay—“I served under him once, good man,” Chino says. “Anyone can pull a winning hand out of this pile of shit, he can.” The colonel’s set up a field command at Central Station, way above the high-water line, and he’s keeping the Ceph hordes at bay while the evacuation kicks into gear.
Barclay. I know that name. I heard it a hundred meters under the surface of the Atlantic, back in those innocent days of childhood when we thought gengineered Ebola or a dirty nuke was the worst that could happen, when we thought we were Lords of fucking Creation, when we thought we were such incomparable badasses that we had to make enemies of one another because no one else was up to the job. I heard it a hundred years ago, back when I still thought there was some kind of line between life and death.
I heard it this morning.
There is a chain of command. There are still backbones out here who know which side they’re on. There is a CO to report to, there is a higher purpose. His name is Barclay, and these are his men, and they have come to take me home.
And since Jacob Hargreave’s grand viral counterattack seems to be on hold, I have nowhere else to be. I saddle up and join the posse. I lost pretty much everything I was packing when the wave hit, but Chino’s new friends came prepared. I rearm and reload and help hold back the tide as we head for higher ground.
But oh, Roger, what thy masters have wrought.
There are no streets left, only rivers. Half the storefronts are still underwater. Streets have split down the middle; foundations, turned to quicksand, have given way and dropped whole neighborhoods into the earth. Ceph conduits lie exposed in the fissures, emerging from these masses of bedrock, disappearing into those: They’re everywhere under the city, like sewers beneath the sewers. We walk along the edges of newborn cliffs and see streetlights and shredded leafless treetops, more like roots than branches, barely breaking the surface. The buildings across the park are walls of pigeonholes, all torn open on this side. Anything more than five or six stories up seems dry. Everything else is draining; trickles from the upper reaches, cascades from lower floors that only just got back above the waterline. It’s actually kind of scenic: a great majestic matrix of waterfalls, tinkling and roaring and filling the air with g
littering mist. The wave did absolutely nothing to stop the Ceph but it seems to have scoured the battlefield, left all the wreckage squeaky-clean. I see rainbows everywhere I look. Rainbows, Roger. Even nature’s part of the spin machine.
“Maybe it took care of the bedbugs, at least,” Chino says.
We fight north while the city drains around us. We evict Squiddie from a flooded Coffee Stop and make it safe for Free Enterprise again. We help out some marines getting their asses kicked by a Ceph gunship in Madison Square. Sometimes we go together, sometimes separately, but we always leave Ceph blood in our wake, pooling like mercury in the wetlands.
Good times, Roger, good times. Once or twice I even remember that I’m dead and it almost doesn’t matter; I’m doing more good now than I ever did when I had a heart. Not even Hargreave can spoil the party. He comes back online once or twice to complain about the dents and scratches I’m putting on his suit, but it turns out even a rich tourist like him has his own problems. He tells me events are escalating beyond his control. Welcome to the human race, Jack. But apparently he and the suit are already busy cooking up Hargreave’s new-and-improved Countermeasures Interface Soufflé, and that’s not gonna change whether I’m fighting Squids or surfing porn. Hargreave spells it out himself: What we need now is time, and if Barclay’s Badasses can buy us a bit of it, maybe I can help them get a better rate of return.
For once, everyone seems to be on the same page. Not sure how I feel about that. I guess you could call me ambivalent.
Now, there’s one of those words I never used when I was alive.
There’s a whole lot to feel ambivalent about these days. I’m sure you appreciate that. But you know what really strikes home when I think of that word? You know what picture illustrates ambivalent in this souped-up superconductor that used to be my brain?
My own guys. The backbones I fought side by side with. Grunts, regular army types. Even Chino, although he’d never admit it.
Some of the shit they say, when they think I can’t hear them:
I dunno, man, looks to me like something they’d build.
You think there’s anything inside at all? Anything human, I mean?
That suit guy. I mean yeah, he saved our asses but Christ he creeps me out.
Chino had to keep telling them not to shoot at me. Had to keep reminding everyone whose side I was on. Even my kill card didn’t help. The more Ceph scalps I collected the scarier I became, somehow. Golem Boy, The Unkillable Monster That Even The Ceph Can’t Vanquish. If I’d been a little less good at my job—got an arm blown off or something—maybe they would’ve trusted me more.
Of course, if I’d really wanted to prove that I wasn’t unkillable, I suppose I could’ve let them know that I was already dead. Probably just as well I didn’t, though.
Oh, you think my feelings are hurt. That’s not it at all. I suppose there’s some little module down in my midbrain that’s feeling wounded and alone, but it doesn’t call the shots anymore. No, what I am is concerned. Because I really don’t look like one of them. The tech may be Ceph down in the molecules, but the morphology is all human. I don’t look like one of them at all; I look like one of us in weird-ass body armor.
But these guys, they see through that somehow. Maybe it’s pheromonal, maybe I smell wrong or something, but they sense a truth their eyes can’t possibly detect. They know who I am, they know we all wear the same dog tags. But something about me still freaks them out, right down in the brain stem. Even though they can’t put their fingers on it. And that, to me, is cause for concern.
Why, Roger, because we have things to do. And it’s going to be a lot tougher to do them if we can’t get people like you to trust us.
Not to worry, though. We’re working on it.
The good times don’t last forever. The party screeches to a halt when Hargreave comes out of the closet.
“Hopefully I’m reaching your comrades, too, with this,” he says when he comes back online. “I’ve bounced this signal off your suit to their comms.”
He’s reaching them all right. Chino’s tapping his earpiece like he’s trying to dislodge a bug. “Who the fuck is that?”
“My name is Jacob Hargreave. You may or may not be aware that Alcatraz’s suit is evolving into a powerful bioweapon against the aliens you face. But in order to complete that process, a stabilizing agent is required. Ideally I would ask you to come to Roosevelt Island, but clearly that is impossible now.”
Chino looks at me. “Is this a joke?”
I’m feeling like my mom just showed up on the LAN in front of all the cool kids and asked me if I remembered to clean my room. But Mom is completely fucking oblivious; he announces that there’s an early prototype of said agent over at the Hargreave-Rasch building, right here in Midtown. He squirts coordinates: the familiar red line zigzags down wireframe canyons and comes to rest somewhere on East 36th.
“Take your colleagues with you; you will need their support. Please make haste, all of you. The Ceph will not wait on us.”
Nobody moves for a moment. Then someone says, “Did that civilian fuck just give us an order?”
Chino looks around at the congregation. “Actually, I’m gonna read that as more of a request. And we are talking about something that’ll kill the Ceph.” Now he’s looking at no one but me.
“Aren’t we?”
Ah, shit.
I nod. I don’t know how well it comes across from the outside, but Chino takes it as a yes.
We head out. Hargreave helps me pass the time, fills my eyes and ears with tactical intel on our destination. The main entrance to Hargreave-Rasch is blocked solid with rubble; the building itself is in lockdown. We might be able to get in through the parking garage, but the research wing is up on the eleventh floor and the stairwells and elevators are all locked out.
No problem, Hargreave says cheerily. The security console in the lobby’s still hot. Should be able to manage a systems reboot from there.
All things considered, we make good time. The wave may have smashed half of Manhattan down to the bricks, but it also pushed a lot of that wreckage into nice convenient moraines: a real cocksucker if they happen to be in your way, but if they’re not the streets are cleaner than they ever were when we backbones were running things. At least most of the bodies have been flushed out of sight. And those few corpses still tangled in trees, or skewered so far down signposts that not even a twenty-meter tidal wave could wash out the stain—even those are being taken care of. Ticks never sleep.
We come up from the south. I don’t know if our route has been uplifted or the Hargreave-Rasch block has dropped, but we’ve definitely got the high ground on approach: There’s a tumbledown escarpment of broken streets and buildings leading down to the south face. Hargreave wasn’t kidding when he said the entrance was blocked: collapsed and pulverized office towers jam the streets to either side and spill around into the space in front. You can barely see the tops of the southern doors under all that shit. The tactical wireframe shows another way in on the north side—at the bottom of a big cylindrical silo, like a castle turret, half embedded in the middle of the façade—and I think that’s actually the main entrance, but there’s no way we’re gonna get there from here.
There’s the parking ramp, though, off to the right, sloping down and out of sight right where it’s supposed to be. The only thing between it and us is about fifty Ceph on the ground and a dropship hanging overhead like a giant black scorpion.
“Oh, fuck,” Chino grumbles.
Even as we watch that scorpion drops another egg onto the playing field, shoots it into the ground like a meteorite. Any one of us earthlings would have turned to jelly on impact. The Heavy that emerges from that shell doesn’t look anything but eager.
I remember enemy combatants, hesitating at my scent. I remember a stalker trying to shake my hand at the crash site, I remember a horde of Ceph waiting in ambush at Gould’s apartment. And now here they are again, waiting.
Are th
ey really just swarming through the city like rats, or is it me?
“Fine.” Chino heaves a theatrical sigh. “We’ll cover your approach. Go in and get your fix, man. But make it fast.
“And if you do get out of there alive, drinks are on you for the rest of your fucking life.”
Broadcast Intercept (decrypted): 23/08/2023, 16:32
37.7 MHz (gov/nongov shared, land mobile).
Source unknown (.mp6 transmitted anonymously to Cpl. Edward “Truth” Newton, USMC [ret.]). Identities of JACOB HARGREAVE and DOMINIC LOCKHART confirmed via voiceprint comparison with public archives.
Hargreave: Hazel section—what the hell do you think you’re doing? This is Jacob Hargreave! I order you to cease fire!
Voice (presumed Hazel Sec.): Blow it out your ass, old man! Tin man dies here!
Hargreave: You idiot! The suit, you idiot! You’ll destroy our only hope! Cease fire!
Lockhart: Take him down, gentlemen. Maximum force. I want this abomination ended now.
Hargreave: What are you doing, Lockhart?
Lockhart: I’m doing what the CryNet board should have done three years ago, old man. I’m pulling the plug on your obscene cyborg dreams.
Hargreave: You fool—you think you can hide from the future? We have no choice in this!
Lockhart: That dog won’t hunt now, Hargreave. The board sides with me this time—they’re not buying your bullshit anymore. I am in command here. Now you will stand down.
Chino and chums are as good as their word. They take the heat and I slip from cinder block to sewer pipe: cloaking as I cross the open spaces, uncloaking behind the shelter of a bakery truck or a pile of concrete, fading to black and sneaking to the next blind spot. Occasionally I pass too close to a grunt and it hesitates, sniffs, stutters trains of soft clicks into the air. I never let them see me, though, and they never press the issue. They’re too busy trying to kill my friends.