Headspace

by Damien Boyes

  My breaths are coming loud and shallow, echoing in the small pod.

  “Service Override: Gage, Finsbury,” I yell at the dash. “STOP. NOW.”

  The Sküte doesn’t stop. The bus is metres away.

  Not again.

  I flip my seatbelt off and throw myself against the right side of pod, force it off balance.

  The pod cranks sideways to maintain its center of gravity and pulls far enough I only clip the bus’s front bumper and careen back into the westbound lane. The Sküte ricochets off a hirecar and tosses me hard against the seat, spins back into control and races forward once more, straddling the line between lanes of traffic, building up speed, racing toward the red light ahead.

  And the six lanes of traffic streaming through the intersection.

  I reach inside my jacket to draw my weapon and the Sküte veers sharply to the right, tosses me against the side of the pod and my head slams against the window. My vision fuzzes and I hear the gun clatter to the floor.

  My chest pushes into my back as we accelerate and the gun slides under the seat to the pod’s small cargo area.

  “Now I will be whole,” the Sküte taunts.

  I’ve got about three seconds before the Sküte launches into an intersection full of traffic, and I’m bounced around like a pinball.

  A fragile, blood-filled pinball.

  I need my gun.

  I get up into a crouch on the seat and hurl my entire weight against the windshield. It catches me and I watch the road surface get closer as the pod swings forward. The gyroscopes engage a fraction of a second later and the wheel speeds up to pull the pod back upright and I’m catapulted backwards, slam sideways against the back window and roll down to land on the hard seats.

  I drop my arm to the floor as the momentum rockets my weapon forward, brushes my fingers.

  I fumble for it and manage to hook the trigger guard and swing it into my palm, point the gun at the dash—the intersection’s red lights now reflecting off the windshield—and empty the clip into the Sküte’s controls.

  I must hit something important because we jerk hard to the right and slow. Enough that when the pod impacts the side of a northbound transport it bounces off instead of crumpling.

  Still, I tumble around like shoes in the dryer.

  Tires screech. I slam into something else and roll to a stop with the Sküte lying on its side.

  “I found you,” crackles out of the pod’s speakers.

  My head is woozy and I hurt all over and I just want to lay here and enjoy not being dead, but I can’t stay in this pod a second longer.

  I kick the door open and clamber down and crawl out onto the asphalt.

  Cars are stopped around us. Even the Sküte lanes are still.

  A crowd is gathering, tabs out.

  I need to get out of here.

  I work myself to standing and push through the people watching. Someone tries to stop, to offer help, and I mumble something and duck into the first alley I see.

  I’m being hunted. This is about the accident, I’m sure of it now. Evidence erased from the link, a threat that made the AMP look silly and now an autonomous vehicle hacked to kill me.

  Whoever it is that’s coming for me is getting stronger.

  I don’t know how, but I need to find him, and fast.

  StatUS-ID

  [fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]

  SysDate

  [22:30:29. Friday, January 17, 2059]

  By the time I get back to the apartment from the Gladiator fan club meeting, Standards has granted my request to visit Miranda and Tala.

  They’re locked in stocks, rithm jail. The self-contained low-poly virts where Reszo criminals do their time. I’ll be in one just like it if Agent Wiser has his way.

  It took less than a year after COPA for the perma-strapped prison system to realise that incarcerating a fleshed rithm was a waste of resources. Instead, Reszos found guilty of breaking the law were stripped of their skyns and transferred to a cheap binary stock.

  What’s the point in housing and feeding a body when you can imprison the rithm for the cost of the electricity required to keep the stock running?

  Shelt submitted requests this morning and Tala’s came back first, Miranda’s just after. I book sequential visitations. The Corrections AMP runs me, as Gibson, through a rep-check, then warns anything said during the visit could be used against either of us and when I agree the doorway in my head opens on an achromatic void.

  I step through into a haze of non-colour. The ground and sky are the same, endless in every direction. Directly in front of me, arranged in a lopsided triangle, floats a long flat rectangular, a hard-backed ‘L’, and two thin boxes stacked face-up on a square—a bed, a chair and books on a table.

  There’s nothing else, barely a third dimension. Tala is nowhere to be seen.

  She can’t have gone far. There’s nowhere to go. Rithms don’t need exercise, so there’s no yard, no walls to go over. Rithms don’t need food, so there’s no mealtime, no guards to overpower. There’s no chance of suicide. No one to bribe or cajole or beg. Just the prisoner trapped in a low-fi aspect and nothing to keep her company but her thoughts and the endless, unchanging passage of time.

  Human Rights advocates argue stocks are a thousand times worse than solitary confinement, but on the general public’s outrage meter the suffering of a few thousand sub-human rithms who got what they deserved is sandwiched between politicians exceeding their stationery budget and selecting most effective brand of bot polish.

  I step through the doorway and my limbs grow leaden, my joints thicken. I look down and I’ve lost my clothes and any distinguishing characteristics. I’m barely here, a shapeless grey humanoid. A digital mannequin. A feeble facsimile in a no-rez world.

  Sensation evaporates from my skin as I approach the empty bed and is gone by the time I get there. My footsteps make no sound. My avatar doesn’t breathe. The virt is unearthly silent, my thoughts the loudest sounds I can hear.

  I move past the bed, stiff-legged into nothingness, immediately lose track of how far I’ve gone and how long I’ve been walking. A glance over my shoulder shows I’ve only moved a few meters away from where I entered, the shimmering doorway back into my head is the only colour in this otherwise bleak landscape. I resume walking but can’t resist checking back to make sure my escape stays open.

  I walk for a while then stop when the bed, table and chair reappear ahead of me, tiny on what would be the horizon, if there was one. I step back and they’re gone. Step forward and they return. I turn three-quarters of the way around and take a step and there the furniture is, ahead of me.

  Guess I’ve found the edge of the world.

  I turn to my left and resume walking, keeping the bed and table at a consistent distance off my shoulder, until a tiny lump, slightly lighter than the grey haze that surrounds it, materializes ahead of me.

  A few more steps and I hear a faint murmur, another few steps and I can make out a tune. I can’t hear the words but I recognize the song as one of Klaxon Overdrive’s early hits.

  Tala. I’ve found her.

  She’s wearing an aspect identical to mine, hugging her shins and rocking back and forth with her head tucked between her knees.

  I hesitate, trying to decide how best to make my presence known, but before I can, she stops rocking and jerks her head up.

  She watches me, her face a mask, then takes a long look around and back down at herself.

  “Go away,” she says without moving her lips. The sound barely reaches my ears, like she’s on the other side of a large empty room.

  “Are you okay?” I ask and the words are snatched away the instant I speak them, like the opposite of an echo.

  “You’re not real,” she says and squeezes her head between her hands. “You’re not here.”

  “I’m as real as you are. Do you remember me? I’m Finsbury. Gage,” I say.

  She shakes her head. Leans forward and back, forward an
d back.

  “We were in counselling. Do you remember? I need your help.”

  “No. No, no no nono,” she moans, rocking fast now.

  “TALA,” I yell, but the stock rounds the volume down.

  She stops, quivers. Looks up at me. “That’s me?”

  I can’t tell if it’s a confirmation or a question. “Tala. Vivas,” I say. “That’s you.”

  “Tala,” she repeats, a hesitation in her voice. She stares off into the distance for a long moment, and I imagine she’d be blinking if her pupil-less grey eyeballs had lids. Then her memory kicks in. “That’s my name,” she sobs, heaves a noise that doesn’t move her chest. “I tried so hard to forget. Do you know how long it takes to forget who you are?” She starts, sits up, focuses on me. “What’s the date?”

  “It’s January,” I say.

  “What year?”

  “2059.”

  “No,” she says, her little voice growing fainter. “That can’t be right. It’s been years. Decades, surely…” her words trail off but then she’s on me, her frozen fingers hard around my shoulders. “Are you here to get me out?”

  “No, I’m sorry. I just came to talk. I need your help.”

  “Talk?” she pushes me away, scrambles to her feet and barks a noise that’s halfway between incredulous and insane. I rise and stay still. “About what? I don’t sleep. I don’t eat. I can’t even touch myself, how could I help you? I can’t take this anymore. I’ve tried to kill myself a hundred ways, but I just won’t die.” She punches herself in the chest with a painless thud. “There’s nothing here to kill.”

  Tala was a soldier, granted a lucky chance at a new life after a fatal wound in combat. Then something flipped a switch in her and she did a suicide raid on a scaflab churning out skyns in the shape of pre-pubescent kids. That ended her up in here. Made her like this.

  I can't blame her for how she’s acting, this isn’t her fault. I’ve only been in this place for ten minutes and I’m already on the verge of losing it myself.

  “I don’t blame you for a second,” I tell her. “But you need to stay alive,” I point to my head. “In here. Keep hope.”

  She laughs, like I’m a fool. “I tried to stay alive,” she says, “Used my training. It was useless here. There’s no escape. Nothing to resist. The hope dried up real quick. I found one way to survive, and that’s to make in there,” she points back at my forehead, then swirls her finger around the room, “as blank as it is out here.”

  “Tala, something’s going on out here. Something Shelt thinks you were a victim of.”

  She doesn’t move. The room is motionless. A molecular stillness. Heat-death of the universe quiet.

  Then she says, “Maybe I’m innocent.”

  “I don’t know, Tala. I really don’t. But somebody brought me back, I have no idea who, and a few hours after that Dub attacked me. You remember Dub?” She nods. “He was dead less than a day later. I just talked to him, claims he says he has no memory of it. Sound familiar?”

  “He says he didn’t do it?” she asks.

  “Did you do what they say you did?”

  “They say I massacred a bunch of twisted Fleshmiths fabbing skyns of pre-pubescents, little boys and girls—” She looks at me, waiting for an argument, continues when I don’t offer one. “I don’t know what happened, or what I did. I wasn’t syncing much. I was shyfting. Letting things slip. I’d had it tough, I didn’t complain. Maybe I should have. I’d seen some bad stuff on my last tour and then when I got hurt…” She snaps back to now. “My last memory is from twelve days before I did what I did and as far as memories go, it’s nothing special. I was miserable, but I didn’t plan on a shooting spree.” She stops, turns her head at me. “I wanted to though. I fantasised about it. I found out what those Fleshmith bastards were up do but didn’t have the guts to do anything. Guess I changed my mind. In the end, they got what they deserved—and so did I. It doesn’t matter if I did it or not, if I actually pulled the trigger. I sinned in my heart, isn’t that what’s important?”

  “Not if you didn’t actually kill anyone.”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know. If I did or I didn’t, I don’t know. It doesn’t make any difference now anyway. I’ll never get out of here. I’ll fade away long before.”

  Her mind isn’t right. This place. How can we do this to people?

  “Tala,” I say. I need to get her back. At least a little. “Look at me. You need to stay you, you need to fight.”

  “I tried. It doesn’t work.”

  “You know they say you turned the gun on yourself. Would you have done that?”

  We look at each other for a second, two lifeless statues in an empty gallery.

  “Probably,” she finally says. “Maybe that’s why I’m here. Maybe that’s why you’re here with me. If this isn’t purgatory, what is?”

  She crouches back down, resumes the position she was in when I found her.

  “Did you mention the Fleshmiths to anyone?”

  “I brought it up in counselling once, Elder wanted me to,” she does finger quotes with her fused action-figure hands, “‘open up.’”

  “Do you know what happened to him?”

  “About as much as I know about what happened to you,” she says. “Now I’d like you to leave. You’re making me think. It hurts.”

  “What did happen to me?” I ask.

  She levels her gaze at me. “You went from a cop to a guy who ends up kicked off the Service and dead in a gang-war or something. Elder was the most grounded guy I ever met, then he just up and vanished. Miranda killed her husband. I did what I did. Things went to shit. Now Dub, you said.”

  “When did it start?”

  She lowers her head, talks to the floor between her knees. “When you died. The cops started coming around and then when Elder ghosted it, that’s when it all fell apart,” she says, her words barely audible. “It started with you.”

  ***

  SysDate

  [22:30:29. Friday, January 17, 2059]

  I leave Tala and find my way back into my head and accept the invitation to Miranda’s stock, go through the same series of questions with the Corrections AMP, take a deep breath, remind myself I'll only be in there a few minutes, and step through the doorway into an identical grey wasteland.

  I don’t know what Shelt expected me to get out of coming here. Tala was so far gone, I don’t know if I can trust anything she said. Except she’s saying the same things everyone else has. Somehow I’m to blame for all this.

  I expect Miranda will tell me the same thing.

  I find her sitting cross-legged on her slab of a bed, a book open in her lap. She jumps up the second she notices me. Her book falls through the floor and rematerialises on the table.

  “Where’s Sara? Is she okay?”

  “Who’s Sara?” I ask.

  “Sara, my daughter—who are you?”

  “Finsbury Gage.”

  She narrows her eyes, takes a step away from me. “You came back,” she says. “What do you want?”

  She’s doing far better than Tala is. “I’m helping Dub. He’s been accused of something he has no memory of.”

  She paces for a moment then rests on the edge of her cot. I pull out the lone chair and mechanically ease myself down.

  “They got him too?”

  “Who?”

  She just shrugs. “Them.”

  “Do you remember killing your husband?”

  “He wasn’t my husband,” she snarls.

  “Then who—”

  “I was his toy. His slave. He wanted someone to wear his dead wife’s face, and I was dying. Sara would have been left alone, so I did what I had to. Even after he got tired of fucking a replica of his wife and brought one of his daughter home for me to wear—I did that too.” She straightens her back, squares her shoulders. “The police and the lawyers and the judge all said I killed him, stabbed him over and over then slit his throat when he tried to crawl away. They say I
jumped out of the window and swan dived thirty stories face first into the pavement.” She’s angry. That’s what’s keeping her sane.

  “But you didn’t?”

  “Oh, I wanted to. I imagined it a hundred different ways when he was inside me, calling me his ‘little darling’ but I never…I never would have abandoned Sara. God, she must be so scared.”

  Tala and Miranda are trapped in here, being consumed by their minds. And it could be my fault. “I can check on her for you,” I offer. Small consolation.

  “You will?” she says, grabbing my arm. “Will you come back and tell me how she is, I have no contact with anyone. You’re the first visitor I’ve ever had.”

  “I will,” I say. “Can you tell me what’s the last thing you remember?”

  “Laying down for a back-up the night before.”

  Same as Dub.

  “Did your linktivity show contact with anyone in the time before you killed your—”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “—before he was murdered.”

  “Just one. A five and a half minute conversation. But it was anonymous, the IMPs couldn’t track the source.”

  “Did you go anywhere, meet anyone?”

  “Rep-checks show I passed through the Market that day. Left my seven-year-old daughter home by herself while I strolled around, bought some fruit. It was still on the counter when the cops came.”

  “Your defence, they didn’t have a theory as to what might have happened?”

  “Of course they did. They thought I was guilty. I wanted to fight but the evidence was overwhelming, so I pleaded out. That’s why I only got twenty-five years instead of life.”

  Twenty-five years in here. I’d prefer the death penalty.

  “Did you ever mention wanting to hurt your husband to anyone?”

  “No, I—actually, yes. I did maybe say something to Elder about it. I was upset one day at counselling and he tried to console me.”

  “There’s nothing else you can remember, days or weeks before this happened, nothing odd? Even the slightest thing could help.”

  “Of course there was. You got killed. Then Elder disappeared. The police came by and asked everyone questions. That sure as shit was odd. But it became less so, after everything else.”