Ashes of the Fall

by Nicholas Erik

  I don’t have an answer prepared for that.

  We duck into an old open-air shopping promenade, the kind that developers used to sell to neighborhoods when they were trying to gentrify the area. The granite stones are now warped and cracked and a large video screen hangs off-center from the corpse of a decapitated high rise.

  In the hazy moonlight, it’s difficult to tell if it was an act of rebellion, an errant wrecking ball, or just decay that did the building in. But what once stood thirty stories now stands about twenty, its bare neck exposed to the elements.

  I hear a little trickle. Something splashes my boots.

  Whiskey.

  “One for the fallen,” he says. “Gotta have respect for the dead.”

  Marshwood looks at me with those sunken eyes. I’m gonna punch him if he grins at me. But instead he nods, not opening his mouth, and laughs to himself.

  “What’s funny?”

  “This is the first thing me and Matt made the little nano-builders do,” Marshwood said. “This was the test.”

  I look at the ruined architecture. Now I know why Atlanta resembles a miniature New Manhattan—albeit unfinished. This was the program’s testing grounds, safe from prying eyes, questions or any outside interference. We turn off the promenade without further commentary and continue walking. I realize it’s been more than a couple blocks since the Pink Rose. Either Slick gave me bad directions, or something’s up.

  “I thought you lived closer,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, precautions,” Marshwood says. “Or you think everything around here just fell down on its own?”

  “That why no one comes here?”

  “You want to get caught in a feud between old friends?” He scales the burnt out shell of a truck and lands upright on the other side. I take my time and then have to run to catch up with him. “Me and Blackstone have been fighting it out for years, man.”

  “What’d you do to him, anyway?”

  “Stick around long enough and maybe I’ll tell you.” Marshwood takes a sip from the flask and caps the whiskey. It’s like he’s got an endless supply beneath that blouse of a dress shirt. At this point I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that he secretes the stuff and it drips out of his pores into the container like tree sap. “But you don’t really want to know.”

  “I don’t, huh. Why’s that?”

  “It’s boring,” Marshwood says. We round another corner. “You like my house?”

  At the end of the block is an old, magnificent building. Its architecture marks it as a product of the 20th century, maybe even sometime in the 19th. Either way, from its prominent position at the end of a wide street, and its regal, if crumbling tower rising from the center, its easy to tell that we’ve finally arrived at city hall.

  “I’m the mayor, now,” Marshwood says. He thinks this is funny, and laughs and hums to himself as he skips down the street, between the abandoned cars. As I watch him, I spot a series of drones flit out from beneath the wreckage, following him as he sings.

  Whatever this strange, broken man did to Blackstone, one thing’s clear.

  There’s a damn good reason no one comes into the Black Hole.

  Marshwood’s brushed metal lighter clicks as a thin blue flame springs into the grungy darkness. The light’s reach doesn’t go far. My main takeaway of city hall thus far has been that it smells like a rat den. Or a marsh. Probably a product of it being abandoned for twenty-two years.

  A whoosh rushes through the air, and the tiny flame suddenly becomes a gigantic one. Marshwood brandishes a wooden handled tar torch.

  “Take this.” The dancing flames cast medieval shadows on the floors. There’s a plaque on the wall that says the interior was renovated in 2021, after “nine decades of loyal service.” Didn’t get to enjoy that for very long. I can see the faded outline of a starred logo, referencing some department or another that has been long forgotten. As he transfers the torch to my hand, I catch a better glimpse.

  “State of Georgia,” I say. “Wisdom, justice and moderation.”

  “Clearly worked out for everyone,” Marshwood says. “It’s mine, now, anyway.”

  “You got the deed?”

  “I cleared out mountains of rat shit,” Marshwood says. “That’s a deed in this world.”

  Sounds fair to me. More square than the old system of mortgages and borders and contracts, anyway. You shovel the shit, you reap the rewards. Simple and elegant.

  Marshwood lights another torch, and the flames are now bright enough that I can almost see to the ceiling. We pass through a dormant metal detector, long-retired, and then head up the stairs. There used to be red carpeting on the steps, but it’s almost all worn away, leaving only a little fuzz behind, like when an old guy is in denial about his hairline.

  “So tell me about you and Blackstone,” I say.

  “Gifted Minds, man,” he says. “You know how many programs we ran, man? We ruined the world.” He lights a cigarette in the torch. “Your brother and me, we couldn’t take it, you know?”

  We stop going up the stairs and turn off down a hall. My heart twitches at the mention of Matt, but I don’t say anything. I follow Marshwood down a hallway lined with brass knobbed doors. The carpet here is a little thicker.

  “Blackstone’s baby,” Marshwood says. “At least I ruined it for him.” He stops at a door towards the latter quarter of the hall and turns the knob. It groans in response. The whiskey is beginning to catch up with him. The torch knocks against the frame, singing the mahogany trim before bouncing on to the floor.

  He stands there like a moron while I jump on the smoldering rug. I snatch the torch off the carpet before it burns the entire building down, along with whatever Marshwood has stored in the dusty archives.

  Probably nothing. I’m surprised he even remembers which room is his. I hand him back the still-lit torch. His eyes droop a little bit, and he gives me a tired nod of appreciation. The orange light casts eerie shadows over the stacks of files—boxes and boxes of manila folders, neatly labeled in the same hand.

  “You ruined what?”

  “The program, man,” Marshwood says. “Shut the whole thing down, basically. Over.”

  I can’t tell if the words are bitter. He tends to a fish tank in the corner. I see my own reflection for a brief moment, my wild eyed stare, already so different than the man who began this journey. Or maybe the look of surprise is just from the small shark gliding through the water, next to a glowing computer array that takes up half the tank.

  “Oh, you met Hector,” Marshwood says. “Say hola, Hector.” He taps the glass, and the creature’s beady eyes flash with anger. It can’t do anything. But I have a feeling it would eat its only friend if it had the chance. “My parents would be so happy.”

  “Happy about the shark?”

  “They were always trying to get me to speak Spanish. No, I would say. No, mother.” He mimes a slap with his right hand. In his left he has some sort of mash of food that smells almost worse than him. “But I still refused. I wanted to be someone, not just a refugee. And look at me now!”

  His voice booms off the tight wood paneled walls. I wince and curl my lips. Even Hector is annoyed, dashing away from the bloody grub falling into his tank, rather than towards it. Me and Hector, we could be good friends, I think. Unfortunately, fate and time don’t have an extended relationship in the cards. I came here for the HIVE drive, not a pet.

  “I even changed my name,” he says. “From Martinez.”

  “I don’t really need a family history.”

  He doesn’t seem to hear. “But one member of the family lives on. Isn’t that right, papa?” He taps the glass again, and I swear I can see the shark contemplating suicide. I don’t know what it means that he named his shark after his much-hated father, but that’s a Freudian quagmire that I can’t untangle.

  I decide to c
hange the subject. “About Blackstone.”

  “I told you it was a boring story,” Marshwood says, slumping into a sagging office chair. “I did everything I could for the Circle to take notice of me. And they did—one day, Blackstone’s men came and took me from our home, gave me a new life in the Gifted Minds Program. I was thrilled. I had made it.”

  “Then?”

  “We lived here in Atlanta, for a while, all of us. Before it was the Otherlands. It gave us plenty of…space for our experiments. Mostly kids. Your brother was always the smartest, but we got along. Over time, my ambition was curbed by…the moral problems of what we were doing.”

  “Such as?”

  “After seven years of work, the program was moved to New Manhattan. A supposed upgrade in facilities. Each of the remaining members of the Gifted Minds Program was, in turn, granted a position on the Inner Circle. There were six of us. We all received official jobs and titles—given my skill in mathematics, I was tasked with running the country’s economy. Tanner’s reasoning was that the program had indoctrinated us to be loyal to the Circle, grateful for bringing us the opportunity to do something great. As such, we would repay him in kind with excellent service to the NAC.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  “That year—2040—Blackstone started us on a new project. The massive expansion of buildings in Manhattan wasn’t good enough. We needed to create a method of controlling people. Propaganda was outdated. Matt came up with the HoloBand—a Trojan Horse, of sorts. Give people what they craved in communication and information in exchange for their privacy and some freedoms. It was brilliant.”

  “But.”

  “He immediately regretted the idea. So he asked me to sabotage the project while he came up with a more permanent solution.” Marshwood laughs, this time with genuine happiness. “I destroyed the main lab in New Manhattan, erased the files. Set the project back months, if not years. Tanner was furious, but couldn’t figure out who had performed the sabotage. Since Blackstone was head of the project, Tanner used him as a scapegoat—banishing him back to the south almost as quickly as soon as he had come to New Manhattan. Destined to be a no one.”

  “But then how’d you get caught?”

  “Blackstone eventually figured out that I did it. Traced some of the accelerant back to me. He proved it to Tanner, but was still commanded to stay down here and oversee the Otherlands project. A crippling blow for an Inner Circle member’s ego.”

  “And Matt got away?”

  “I took full responsibility,” Marshwood says. “He was going to work on a more permanent solution. It never came. And now we have HoloBand 6 and HIVE.”

  “Why didn’t they just kill you?”

  “I think Tanner believed that I could be rehabilitated—that I was just a young man lashing out at new surroundings,” Marshwood says. “You have to understand, we were the smartest individuals in the entire NAC. Simply killing us when we acted up would have been foolish. Although, I must say, my transgressions outstripped any other minor acts of rebellion by a large margin.”

  “What’s with the Black Hole?”

  “I took over part of the city when I was sent into exile. The Otherlands was still in its earliest stages of development, and most of it was uncharted. When Blackstone learned I was here, he was furious, and sent guards to kill me for what I’d done. Luckily, I had a defense system. The past eight years have been…eventful between us.”

  Yes, from the warzone I walked through to get to Marshwood’s quarters, one could say that. The mystery of Blackstone and Marshwood solved, I decide that it’s in my best interest to get out of here as soon as possible. I’m about to ask a question, when Marshwood stands up abruptly.

  “I know you’re here for Blackstone,” he says. “Indirectly, or directly.”

  I eye him carefully, but he doesn’t look poised to attack. “I need the HIVE source code.”

  “Matt didn’t give it to me when he visited,” Marshwood says.

  “But you said you’d take me to the source code.”

  “No, that’s what Matt asked me to do.”

  “So why’d you take me here?”

  “To show you this,” Marshwood says, gesturing towards the tank. I stare at the sleek metal chassis that sits underwater, stretching from end-to-end of the fifteen foot long tank. Blinking lights adorn the slick case, green flashes indicating that all is well. “After which you can make an informed decision.”

  “Don’t tell me Hector is hooked up to that.”

  Marshwood looks at me strangely and then laughs. The aroma of whiskey and vomit and chum hits my nose, but there’s nowhere to escape. I blink and hope the onslaught ceases, not for my ego’s sake, but for my other senses.

  “And I thought I was the drunk,” he says. He sighs, wiping the corner of his eye. “Ah, it’s been a long while since I laughed like that, man. Thank you.”

  “Any time.”

  “I remember too much.” He totters over to the desk and rattles around in the bottom drawer. A large handle of whiskey clangs against the thick wood as he hazardously lifts it onto the table. Somehow it reaches its destination without shattering. Marshwood, apparently too blown away to bother with such formalities as flasks, leans over and meets the bottle halfway, tipping it over until it funnels into his mouth. A few shots end up on the floor as a result, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

  I look at Hector. His eyes scan the scene shiftily as he chews on his rancid meat. If we could both leave, we would. But this man has something we both can’t live without.

  “You want to hear Matthew’s story, now?” Marshwood says, wiping his chin. His fingers make a scratching sound as he runs them across his stubble. “One story.”

  He holds up one finger, like that’s all he’s got time for. I shrug, as if to answer, whatever.

  “That’s not very much enthusiasm.”

  “I’m not getting my hopes up.” It’s a good philosophy, given the state of the world.

  “Look around. All we have left is hope.”

  I don’t bother to heed his instructions. I’ve taken in the surroundings already. Me and Hector, we both know these are the ramblings of a broken drunk. Hope is dangerous in a world owned by power hungry men, buffeted constantly by nature. For some time, man enjoyed the illusive promises of hope. That good would triumph over evil.

  That illusion has long since been shattered.

  “I didn’t come for a philosophical treatise,” I say.

  “No?” He wipes the front of his ragged pants. There’s a growing wet spot. Hard to tell if it’s whiskey or not. I don’t care to inspect to confirm, either. “So you do have hope. You are hoping that I would tell you something else.”

  I catch a flash of something outside the shaded windows. “I gotta get out of here.”

  “You’ll miss the story.”

  “Man, fuck your stories,” I say, headed towards the door. “All you told me was that you and my brother were responsible for just about everything that’s gone wrong in the world.”

  “He was sorry,” Marshwood says. “That’s what we talked about when he visited, mostly. How much we regretted the choices we made.”

  “I’ve already heard this shit.”

  “But what I didn’t tell you,” Marshwood says, pushing the whiskey bottle away to the back of the table. “Was that he was glad he was asking you for help on the project.”

  “I don’t care.” Another burst of light outside the window convinces me that this place is under attack. I don’t need to get caught in the crossfire of an eight-year-feud. I reach for the doorknob.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you leave.”

  “Like hell you can’t.” I grip the knob and turn. When I do, all the air rushes from my chest, just as a giant explosion blows outs the window and rattles the room to its core.

  “To understand,�
�� Marshwood yells over the noise, “you must experience what he has built.”

  At first I think I’m pinned to the ground because something fell on me. But then I realize that Marshwood’s knees are grinding into my back, right where Adriana shivved me.

  “Get off,” I say, trying to throw a punch backwards.

  I glance at Hector, who is hiding in his little underwater shanty, his beady eyes staring back at me. He looks panicked. He isn’t ready to die. If he hated Marshwood before, he hates him even more now.

  Another blast buffets the side of the building. Dust trickles down from the rafters.

  I feel something at the back of my neck. “What are you doing?”

  “Giving you a map to the answers,” he says. “It might sting.”

  Then a man covered in his own vomit and piss and sweat and whiskey slides two wires into the base of my skull and I feel a slight surge of electricity as something is uploaded into my mind.

  “You’re not jacking into my skull.” I flop around, but years of surviving on his own have made Marshwood sinewy strong. He holds steady as gunfire rakes the sides of the building.

  “It’s a piece of HIVE,” he says. “Not the whole thing. That requires HoloBand 6. Just enough of a demo so that you know.”

  “Get the fuck away from me.”

  When he finally lets go, I immediately tear at the wires. Despite their thinness, they refuse to break. They lead back to Hector’s tank, the computer within.

  “What did you do?” I say, watching the computer inside flash blue, then red. “What are you doing to me?” It’s half-growl, half-fear. Now, no matter what Marshwood does, it doesn’t matter. The demonstration will commence, regardless of my feelings. “You’re insane.”

  I stumble through the doorway, the wires trailing behind. A blast of light sears through my head, sending me to the ground. Marshwood doesn’t follow. Outside, I hear guns and missiles unloading against his adopted residence.

  I feel the wires loosen from my neck, and for a moment I think everything’s normal. I pull them out and shake my head, trying to regain my sense of equilibrium. Then blocky computer text begins to filter across my vision—literal source code, running before my eyes. I blink and the numbers remain.