Guardian

by Alex London

  “They’re dancing,” Marie stated the obvious, more to remind herself that this was real, that she hadn’t gone totally insane.

  “They’re going through the motions,” said Syd.

  “Why?” Liam wondered.

  “They’ve built a knock-off world to bring back the one they lost.” Syd looked up. The old neon sign still hung over the space, its buzzing glow long since extinguished.

  ET IN ARCADIA EGO

  He had first seen that sign just moments before he’d met Knox. He didn’t know what it meant then. He didn’t know now. A nonsense language or an extinct one, it didn’t really matter. The past was past. The future was all they had to cling to now, and if they failed to get the networks back on, there wouldn’t be a future at all.

  There was a bitter taste in Syd’s mouth. He felt cold, in spite of the heat of the room. One look at Marie told him she wasn’t faring much better. None of them were.

  He scratched at his neck, tried to strip away the spidery feeling beneath his skin, let his nails dig deeper, just a little deeper. Relief didn’t come, but if he could just scrape a little deeper into the flesh . . . He stopped himself. Remembered the nopes. Scratching wouldn’t help him. Focus. He had to focus.

  Wires ran around the edges of the room, networks of cables and cords webbed across the ceiling. It struck Syd how much the networked wires looked like the web of veins across the skin of the sick. The disease was an echo of the networks’ destruction.

  “Who are you?” A form came toward them from the darkness, flanked by several others. Liam shifted himself in front of Syd, his metal fist clenched.

  “They are our proxies!” Gianna exclaimed, causing a stir of murmurs from the dance floor and the catwalk above.

  “Proxies?” The form stepped into the light. It was another teenaged girl, about Marie’s age. Anglo, with her head shaved. She wore a crisp white outfit, perfectly tailored, perfectly clean, with a red silk scarf around her neck.

  Two boys flanked her. They too had shaved heads and white suits, although their suits didn’t quite fit them and they’d gone shiny and gray at the elbows and knees. Unlike the girl, they were armed.

  Bolt guns.

  Liam nodded politely at them as they approached. He’d already thought of four different ways to kill them.

  A ring of differently attired cultists flanked this trio. Syd understood they were all guards from different “corporations,” each vying to stay close to this girl. She was the one who mattered here, the only one.

  Chey.

  Syd’s heart beat faster. He had come to the right place. The Machine was real. He could save them. He could save everyone.

  The girl strolled forward, confident in her command, and her escorts helped her down from the hood of an old car so that she stood just in front of Liam, Syd, and Marie.

  “There are no proxies anymore,” she said. “Not until the Machine wakes.”

  “We’ve entered into an agreement with Gianna from Xelon,” Marie explained. Chey looked her up and down, taking in the green Purifier uniform, lingering on Marie’s face. She pursed her lips, nodded.

  Gianna rushed up the Chey’s side and began explaining. “They fled the Reconciliation and they entered into an agreement with us and they brought—”

  “Yovel,” said Chey.

  “Yes,” said Gianna. “For the Machine. For a fee, we will broker a deal for Yovel. His death will please the Machine?”

  Liam stiffened; he puffed his chest out slightly. Chey turned to the guards by her side, whispered with them, then she stepped up to Liam.

  “Yovel?” she said. “The one who did all this?” She waved her hand around the club, as if it was somehow the revolution that created a cracked mirror image of what these patron kids used to do for fun.

  “He will give himself freely to the Machine,” Syd said. “If you will take us to it.”

  Chey looked to Syd. She brushed Liam aside with a graceful wave of her hand and stepped directly in front of Syd’s face. Syd saw Liam tense, his muscles ready to uncoil.

  “Why would he do this? The hero of the Reconciliation allow us to sacrifice him?”

  “The Reconciliation is bankrupt,” Syd said. “Something new must take its place.”

  “We do not want something new,” she said. “We want something back.”

  Syd looked closely at the girl. Up close, he could see every vein in her face, the tiny capillaries around the mouth, the pulsing arteries in her neck. She projected confidence, but she was not confident. There were sores on her neck, at least half a dozen of them from excessive scratching, and they were poorly concealed by her white suit and red scarf.

  She, like him, like all of them, was in the process of dying.

  “He wants the network restored,” said Syd. “He too wants things to go back. He believes in the Machine and that the Machine will save us.”

  “Yovel believes?” Chey looked back at Liam.

  Liam nodded.

  Chey looked back into Syd’s eyes. She leaned to his side and lifted her hand up to stroke his cheek. She walked her fingers back to his ear, bent it forward, and looked at the word emblazoned there.

  She turned back to the two boys who had been at her side. “You were right,” she said. “Syd.”

  In a flash, Liam whirled around, knocking Chey’s bodyguards aside and yanking her away from Syd. He held her in a headlock, his metal hand wrapped around her throat. Marie drew the bolt gun and pointed it straight at Gianna’s head.

  “Stay back!” Marie shouted.

  “Liam! No!” Syd yelled at the same instant.

  “Where’s the Machine?” Liam demanded. “Take us to it.”

  A circle formed around them; Marie turned and pointed the gun from person to person to keep them from rushing forward. They’d been in better shape during the standoff back at Knox’s house. At least there they’d only been outnumbered ten to one.

  “Did you kill Knox?” Chey asked Syd, her voice squeaking out through the vise grip Liam had on her.

  Syd stepped close. “What?”

  “That night,” she repeated. Liam loosened his grip slightly so she could talk. “When you left here . . . did you kill Knox?”

  “You . . . you knew Knox?”

  “He was my friend,” Chey said.

  Syd glanced at Marie, then back to Chey.

  He gestured for Marie to lower her weapon.

  “He was my friend too,” he said.

  Chey studied Syd, her neck bulging where Liam gripped it. “Lower your weapons!” she called out. “Let them be.”

  Syd nodded at Liam.

  “You sure?” Liam asked.

  “I’m sure,” said Syd.

  Liam released Chey, who gasped and stepped back, rubbing her throat. There were deep impressions of Liam’s metal fingers in her skin and she would certainly bruise. The crowd encircling them stood still, their leader in the center, with Liam, Syd, and Marie.

  The two boys in white suits stepped forward to stand with her.

  “Nine,” one of the boys introduced himself. “And this is Simi.”

  Syd looked at them closely. They were familiar. They’d met before . . . in this very club. Knox’s friends. These were Knox’s friends. The other one put his hand out for a fist bump. Syd ignored it.

  “I’m Cheyenne,” the girl in the center said. She turned to Marie. “And I recognize you too. I didn’t at first . . . your hair, your eyes . . . they’re different. But you’re Marie? The girl . . . with Knox.”

  Marie nodded.

  “We were in school together.”

  “For a little while,” said Marie.

  “You were supposed to have died,” Nine said.

  “I know,” Marie answered.

  “You need to explain this me,” Cheyenne said. “What did you
do to Knox? Why have you come back here?”

  “I didn’t do anything to Knox,” Syd explained. “He did all of this. He gave his life to shut down the networks and the Reconciliation didn’t want to give a patron credit for it. They told everyone I did it. But it was a lie. It was Knox.”

  “That doesn’t sound like him,” Cheyenne said.

  “He surprised us all,” said Syd. “People do that.”

  “And now you’ve come here for what? To make amends?”

  “To stop that.” Syd pointed at her hands. She hadn’t even noticed that she’d started scratching her stomach furiously. She stopped.

  “This is our punishment!” Gianna stepped into the circle. “Our punishment for serving the Machine without proper zeal!”

  “Be quiet!” Cheyenne snapped at her. “We don’t require your input here.”

  Gianna ground her teeth and sniffed, tried to act as if she hadn’t just been publicly insulted.

  “It can be stopped,” Syd to Cheyenne. “Your Machine . . . if we can get it working . . .” He pulled the journal from the pocket on his leg, flipped through to the illustrations.

  “You can do this?” Cheyenne asked him.

  “I can try.”

  Cheyenne took the journal from his hand and studied it. Her brow was furrowed, her lips pursed. Syd could tell she didn’t know what she was looking at it, but he didn’t dare offend her by speaking up. She handed the journal back.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  “Wait!” Gianna shouted. “We brought these three here on good faith. We were promised compensation!”

  “Compensation?” Cheyenne looked at her two associates and back at Gianna with her ragtag cultists. “What compensation do you want?”

  Gianna pointed at Syd. “The blood of Yovel . . . or whoever this is.”

  “No,” Cheyenne said.

  “But—!”

  “Not yet.” She looked between Syd, Liam, and Marie. “But if they cannot bring back our networks, I promise you, there will be blood.”

  Reluctantly, Gianna gave her consent. Not that she had much choice in the matter.

  “I don’t like this,” Liam told Syd as they followed Cheyenne onto the hoods of the cars and weaved their way across the dance floor to the rear of the club. They were surrounded by over a hundred armed figures now, coughing and spitting and scratching and eyeing Syd. “They all hate you.”

  Syd looked around at the ruined club, the desperate dancers, the army of teenaged cultists, all of them beginning to die, all of them hoping they could be saved.

  “Maybe they do hate me,” Syd told Liam. “But I’m going to save them anyway.”

  [28]

  A DOZEN LOCKS SNAPPED, a dozen guards stepped aside, and a dozen pairs of hands pushed a heavy door open.

  In the small room that had once been—Syd couldn’t believe it—a bathroom, the air smelled like burning hair and old fruit, so powerful that Syd could taste it on his tongue. In the center of the floor, swaying in the hazy smoke, sat a cross-legged figure on the tile. She—or was it “he”? Impossible to tell—was wrapped entirely in wires from the top of her head to the tip of her toes.

  Marie leaned in for a better look and gagged. The wires weren’t wrapped around the figure. They were threaded into the figure’s skin. With flesh and fiber optics woven together, the figure was simultaneously clothed and naked; her eyes were a smokey blue and they stared out unseeing through the haze of smoke in the room. Something about the eyes looked familiar. Syd had seen them before. He had seen them countless times.

  “A Guardian,” said Syd.

  Cheyenne nodded. “She is the gatekeeper, made by the network, a being of pure technological creation.” Cheyenne stepped up to the figure, bowed her head, and took a knife from her belt. She pricked her finger and let the blood drip into the fire.

  “Something organic must be given, so that something inorganic can be made,” she explained. Then she stepped around the terrible Guardian on the floor as if she weren’t even there. Syd, Liam, and Marie followed her, trying not to stare.

  They stood in front of an open bathroom stall and Syd’s heart sank. Inside was a pile of machine parts, discarded projectors, scraps from combat robots and transports, cables and wires running every which way. Not only did it look nothing like the drawing in the dead scientist’s journal, it looked nothing like any sort of machine. It looked like a junk heap.

  “Is there a transmitter?” Syd asked.

  Cheyenne pointed to the fire on the floor behind them.

  “A receiver?”

  She gestured at the crowd gathered in the doorway behind them. “We are the receiver.”

  “She’s just as crazy as the rest of them,” Liam whispered.

  Marie sank back against the outside of the stall. She’d gone sallow and sweat beaded on her face.

  “You okay?” Liam turned to her.

  “It’s hopeless,” she muttered. “Me. My parents. Syd . . . we’re all dead.”

  Cheyenne stepped up into Syd’s face. “You can’t turn it on? The great Yovel can’t do anything? Because if you can’t turn it on, we have to take . . . other steps.”

  Liam shoved himself between Cheyenne and Syd, stared her down, his metal hand balled once more into a fist. This was the part he knew; this was the part he understood.

  “Your machine is nothing but junk,” Syd said.

  There was a gasp from the watching crowd. Their faces crowded the doorway to the bathroom, a many-headed monster, all its heads crying out for blood.

  The mutilated Guardian on the floor swayed in place and Syd’s disgust rose up in him. He swallowed and braced himself to keep from vomiting. He let Liam stand in front of him so he could lean on his bodyguard’s shoulder. It was hard to stay standing. His legs tingled; the itch was growing hot, like his skin was trying to peel itself off of him. He wanted to jump out of his body.

  Syd had been a fool to think this cult of tech-worshipping teenagers would hold the solution to a doomed world.

  “Do any of you even know how this tech works?” he exploded at the crowd. “No transmitter? No receiver? No connections at all? You organized your whole freakish lives around this thing and you don’t even know what a network needs to network? In all this time, did you ever even try to understand it? Did you ever question anything at all? Did you just expect someone like me to come along and save you from your glitch-brained knock-off lives?”

  “You watch how you speak to us, proxy.” The boy called Nine stepped forward, jabbing an angry finger at Syd.

  Without even looking, Liam shot his metal hand out, grabbed Nine’s finger, and twisted it back, using the boy’s own pained contortions to toss him sideways to the floor.

  Crossbows and bolt guns came up. Marie, however, didn’t move, didn’t even reach for her weapon. There hardly seemed a point. The revolution she’d fought for had led only to death, and her betrayal of it had done the same. She’d wanted to bring justice to all. She’d brought only oblivion.

  “Your death will bring the networks back,” Cheyenne said without a hint of emotion in her voice. “One life for all our lives. A good price.”

  “No,” said Syd. He fought the urge to dig his nail into his own face to stop the itching. He couldn’t believe how fast this was happening. “I know how this stuff works. Killing me won’t do a thing and you’ll all still die.”

  Syd looked at Liam, who was ready to fight for him long after fighting could possibly matter, and at Marie, so close to giving up on what she thought she’d known, all her good intentions to make a better world boomeranging back at her.

  Syd had to find a way. For her. For Liam. For the living.

  It’s your future. Choose.

  “We can build something. We can do this,” he said. “There must still be other tech in the city. Who has power? Who has t
ransmitters? One of your gangs?”

  “Corporations,” corrected Cheyenne.

  “Whatever. Do they?”

  “Everything that matters has been given to the Machine.” She pointed at their trash heap again.

  “How about . . . others? There are others here, right? Not everyone is in one of your corporations.”

  Cheyenne didn’t answer.

  “There is Maes,” Gianna called out, squeezing through the bodies in the doorway and popping into the hazy bathroom like a bubble breaking the surface of a sewage pond. “The Maes gang,” she repeated. “They have tech.”

  “Maes,” said Syd.

  He knew the gang. Before the Jubilee, they had been smugglers and killers, running every illicit business in the slum where he grew up. They were the ones who’d killed his best friend, Egan. They’d been hired to kill Syd and he’d barely escaped. He’d murdered one of the assassins. It was the only life he’d ever taken, at least the only one he’d ever taken on purpose. He wondered whether this was how he’d pay for it, returning to Maes on his hands and knees.

  Another echo.

  Repeating the past was his only hope of escaping it.

  Of course, if Maes and his thugs were also sick, maybe he wouldn’t have to beg for their help.

  Maybe he could negotiate.

  Maes was a businessman, after all. He wasn’t a cultist and he wasn’t an idealist. He was practical, and perhaps he could be convinced that it was in his interest to cooperate.

  Syd took deep breaths, tried to push the tingling beneath his skin out of his mind. He couldn’t stop himself from feeling it, but he could stop the feeling from mastering him. Knox’s father had managed to keep himself together until the very end. If he could stay focused through the final stages of the sickness just to torment Syd, Syd could stay focused now to save the lives of . . . well . . . he felt crazy thinking it: everyone.

  “I’ll need your help,” Syd told Cheyenne. “All your help.”

  “Maes doesn’t allow us into his part of the city,” Cheyenne said. “It’s how we keep the peace.”

  “Peace is a luxury we can’t afford right now,” Syd told her. “Instead, we’re going to do some business.”