Waking Hell

by Al Robertson

  ‘Oh, you know Dieter,’ she replied. ‘He loved the idea of being a fetch. He won’t opt out. He always used to go on about how Cormac Redonda had wasted his afterlife. And then there was Mum.’ She couldn’t keep the sadness out of her voice.

  ‘Indeed,’ replied Ambrose. ‘Distressing cases, both. Cormac in particular.’ His voice was strained. ‘I wish we could have done more for him.’ He paused for a moment, then said: ‘You’ll understand – I don’t want to talk about the box. About how it happened. It’s too late to do anything about that now.’ Grief shadowed his face. He looked away for a moment. Then he looked back, forcing a determined cheerfulness into his voice. ‘But I can help you with what comes next.’

  Leila nodded. ‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘I understand.’

  Ambrose looked profoundly relieved. ‘So,’ he said, ‘You’re in the money?’

  Leila too was happy to move away from a subject that caused him so much pain. ‘I saw Dieter’s lawyer this morning. There’s a payment coming to me from a corporate entity called Deodatus. Apparently Dieter had critical illness cover and held Totality investment bonds. Of course as a fetch there are limits on the amount of money I can hold, so the lawyer’s set up some sort of Totality trust fund to manage it on my behalf. I can draw cash out of it whenever I feel like. Dieter’s money will go into it too.’

  ‘Dieter had a lawyer?’ Ambrose smiled at the thought. ‘That is a surprise. He was never very good at organizing that sort of thing.’

  Leila’s defence surprised her with its strength. ‘He could be pretty together, when he needed to be.’

  Memory flared in her. For a moment, she was thirteen again, and their mother had been dead for a week and a half. Dieter was pulling on the suit he’d bought for the funeral. ‘I’m going to get a job,’ he told Leila. And he did. He stuck with it until she left college and no longer needed his financial support, walking out on the day of her graduation ceremony. He even hacked his medical records so he wouldn’t get drafted to fight in the Soft War. ‘I’ll not have you ending up in some shitty Twins orphanage,’ he told her. Of course, the hacking created its own problems.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ asked Ambrose, pulling Leila back into the present.

  ‘This Deodatus insurance policy. I know how much money he had. I know what he spent it on. Nothing like this, there’s no way he could have afforded it. And – critical illness cover! Totality investment bonds! He just wasn’t – isn’t – that kind of person.’

  ‘Maybe he was pretty together about that, too.’

  ‘No. In the hospital he told me that he’d made some sort of deal with someone. It didn’t sound like an insurance company. He called their representatives the pressure men. I think I met one of them. He was a little strange. Dieter said they’re going to take him away for a bit. And I’ve had a message from a Totality fraud investigator.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I need to know what he’s got himself into and how to get him out of it.’

  ‘You don’t want to go to InSec?’

  ‘Gods no. Not them. Not till I’ve got a better idea of what’s going on.’

  Ambrose thought for a moment. ‘I can’t promise all the answers. But I’ll do what I can. Look, I’m free for the rest of the afternoon – why don’t you go and sit in a café somewhere? I’ll go through any paperwork you’ve had, dig around a bit. Give me a couple of hours and I’ll be much more clued up.’

  ‘Thanks, Ambrose. I appreciate that.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ He stood to see her to the door. ‘Before you go – there’s something I have to say. You’re a very wealthy woman now. Despite all this’ – he waved to indicate the office – ‘I’m just a little backstreet Docklands lawyer, an exile from a much bigger firm. If you’d rather work with a slightly more upscale practice, I’d completely understand.’

  Leila laughed. ‘Ambrose, I know you and I trust you. That’s what’s most important. Especially now I’m actually worth ripping off.’

  Ambrose looked touched. ‘Thank you,’ he replied. He coughed in an embarrassed way. ‘I’ll let you know once I’m up to speed. Oh, and one more thing…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve got to call your boss about another matter. Should I let him know you’re resigning?’

  She smiled. ‘I’d like to. But I’m not sure if I should until I know where this money’s come from.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can persuade him to extend your compassionate leave.’ He tapped his nose. ‘Grey’s emotional trauma legislation. Very useful in moments like this.’

  As Leila walked to the café, she remembered Dieter’s lawyer, a mind called Xavier. He’d been scrupulously professional as he’d explained how easily Leila could get round the laws limiting fetch financial activities. ‘Your trust will be administered on your behalf by a small group of Totality financial intelligences. They’re barely conscious. In effect, they’re a thin veneer of quasi-intelligence overlaid on an entirely standard investment account.’

  ‘And all this is legal?’

  ‘Entirely so. Standard practice for the wealthy dead.’

  ‘I thought you couldn’t be wealthy and dead. That it all had to be passed on to your heirs.’

  Xavier chuckled. ‘Your life has – or rather, is about to – change very considerably,’ he told her. ‘Your good fortune will open up a world that works very differently from the one you’re used to.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit dodgy for the Totality?’ Leila asked.

  ‘My dear,’ Xavier replied, leaning forwards. ‘The market demands, and we deliver. How could anyone possibly object to that? And we’re far more stringent than the gods of the Pantheon. I understand that you can buy almost anything from them. East offers celebrity, Sandal offers citizenship and the Rose will even let you buy her out of criminal investigations.’

  He knew very little about Deodatus: ‘I received a message asking me to manage a substantial personal insurance payout on your behalf. I hope I’ve done so to your satisfaction. And no, I’ve had no other contact with Deodatus. Hadn’t even heard of it until now. And I certainly don’t know what a pressure man is.’

  Leila reached the café and pulled herself back to the moment. It was a basic Twins joint. As a waiter dressed in jeans and a T-shirt cleared the last customer’s detritus from the table, Leila thought about trying Junky Fi again. But now the crisis had passed the box was an irrelevance. All Leila really wanted to do was yell at her for being so bloody careless, and that wouldn’t get either of them anywhere. She decided to let things be.

  Looking around for something to distract her from her anger, she found herself wondering how her new-found wealth would change the details of her world. The weave overlaid her surroundings with content appropriate to her status. As a low-earning fetch, she could afford few frills. So she usually experienced a smattering of outdated freebies and ad-funded aesthetic tweaking. Now she was wealthy, that would no doubt change. She opened herself to any local weave systems, and let their outputs rise up around her.

  There was a light tickle in the back of her mind as the café’s branding engines queried the basic details of her social and financial status. Then there was the digital equivalent of an exclamation mark and everything started to shift. Mirrors shimmered into being on the walls, reflecting a suddenly more elegant clientele. The little zinc bar top at the back of the room became marble. The susurrus of late afternoon conversation was overlaid with the gentle tones of a moodcore turntablist quartet. When the waiter passed by her again, the jeans and T-shirt had gone. He was wearing black trousers, a white shirt and dark bow tie, and a crisply-pressed apron. The bushy moustache was new, too. He caught her eye. ‘Your order, ma’am?’ She asked for a coffee, being sure to specify that her order was virtual only. He scurried off to prepare it, ignoring his other customers. She was probably paying much more than them for her drink.

&n
bsp; She glanced out into the street, but for the moment it seemed that not too much had changed out there. Docklands was as scruffy as ever. As she watched, a little unit of gun kiddies took up a defensive position over the road from the café, exotic weapons scanning backwards and forwards. The kiddies were overlaid with grey-green battle armour, their faces hidden behind gold visors. Underneath, Leila imagined intent, scrappily dressed teenagers. East had taken to writing their live-action combats across the streets of Station. She remembered Dieter grumbling about them. ‘They should be coding their own games, not buying up content from East. No creativity in it.’ Grief rose up within her. For a moment, she considered muting it. But that seemed to be a step away from humanity. She let it surge through her. ‘Six months,’ she said to herself. ‘He’ll be back in six months.’ Loss settled back and became bearable again.

  She decided to distract herself with a little media, and sent a call to one of East’s main current affairs channels. As it spun up, Leila felt East’s subscription systems probe her. She wondered how the content served to her would change. But when it started to play there didn’t seem to be anything new. Perhaps trashy, excitable current affairs programming was something that even the rich couldn’t escape.

  An anchorman drifted over the table, introducing a series of thirty-second news reports. The Twins were preparing themselves for their annual Taste Refresh Festival, flooding Station with seafood imagery. East had brought out a small Totality media hub for vast sums of cash. ‘It’s a whole new way of thinking about content,’ a very young man enthused. ‘It’s so exciting that the gods understand that.’ Another gravity quake had hit Docklands, this time shaking Prayer Heights. There had been some panic, but little damage. Most of the buildings affected were under the protection of Sandal, housing his dock workers. He’d complained to the Totality, who had inherited responsibility for Station’s gravity engines from Kingdom. A Totality mind appeared, its featureless face glowing softly purple as promises came that soon all gravity upgrade works would be complete.

  The coffee arrived. Leila sipped it once without really thinking, then again, surprised. It tasted better than any cup she’d ever had before. If she was paying over the odds for it, she was at least getting value for money. She savoured a little more, inexplicably feeling a little guilty, then turned back to the news. The next report had begun. There was footage of a Blood and Flesh march down ‘ti Bon Ange Street. The camera closed in on the angry faces, shouting their hateful slogans. Leila thought about flicking channels, but that would have felt like cowardice. At least their militant wing was no longer active. Apparently one of their own memory weapons, a planned sequel to the Blood and Flesh plague, had activated prematurely and neutralised the more hardcore elements of their organisation.

  Leila had been hugely relieved when she found out, and had even briefly considered visiting the Coffin Drives. But fear had still filled her at the thought of returning to them. That fear was with her now, but she realised that she had to face up to it. For the moment she was wealthy enough to live where she wanted, but if her newfound riches were illegally acquired they could well just vanish. She might yet end up having to go back and to live in the Drives. And even if that didn’t happen, Dieter could well move to them after his rebirth. She’d have to go and visit him if she wanted to see him on anything like a regular basis. She could no longer avoid the past. She sat back and remembered.

  Chapter 4

  Two and a half years before, fetches were still coming to terms with their newly sentient status. Jack Forster, Hugo Fist and Andrea Hui had worked with the Totality to release the dead from semi-sentient slavery. But the Rebirth was just the start of a longer coming of age. It was one thing for ten thousand weaveselves to be reborn as fully self-aware continuations of ended lives – quite another for them to come to terms with that new start, both as individuals and as a group, and understand what to do with it. When Leila stepped out of the sea and into her new, post-mortal life, she became part of that conversation. It was a profoundly confusing time, because every single fetch had a different sense of what the afterlife should be. And the Coffin Drives was an entirely virtual and thus immensely malleable environment. Each of its inhabitants could project their opinions on to it, in ways that ranged from the subtle and elegant to the madly grandiose.

  The root geography of the Coffin Drives was – mercifully – unrewriteable. The fetches lived on a circular island, tens of miles across. The ocean that encircled it was a visual manifestation of humanity’s shared data, a digital subconscious for an entire culture. Newly created fetches were born out of it, the deep tides taking six months to knit the strands of a weaveself together into personhood. Each newborn fetch walked out of the waves and on to a long, wide beach, o-shaped and therefore infinite. Leila remembered her own walk up the beach. The cold breeze had tugged at her wet clothes while the endless sea roared behind her. As she remembered, fear sparked in her and she shifted uncomfortably. There had never been anything troubling there on the seashore, she told herself, only the Fetch Counsellor waiting to introduce her to her new life. She was relieved to feel the fear settling.

  Then she moved on to the city at the heart of the Coffin Drives. Before the rebirth there had been a prison at its heart, embedded in a lake made of lost, fragmented memories. Afterwards, the lake and the prison had been remade as a memorial. The Coffin Drives’ occupants surprised themselves with their near-unanimous agreement that it should remain a stable, unchanging space. But every other part of the city was chaos. And the emotional geography of the city had been as variable as its street plan. Individual fetches experienced their rebirth in many different ways. The luckiest were heartily welcomed by their families and friends, immediately and unquestioningly understood to be a direct continuation of the lives that had so recently ended. The unluckiest were rejected completely. Most experienced something between the two.

  East and the Totality came together to launch a vast transmedia campaign, designed to convince the humans of the Solar System to treat the returned dead with kindness. But they were pushing against deep emotions. East in particular was shocked to find that her audience was not its reliably malleable self. The dead found that they often had to fight very hard to win back the lives their living selves had once occupied. Many failed. Some chose true death, letting themselves dissolve back into the memory seas. Some retreated into perpetual hedonism. Others sought to escape their loss through mysticisms of one kind or another. Some just moved bitterly on. And the worst of the living started to push back, creating the Blood and Flesh group. And the Blood and Flesh group created the plague that had nearly destroyed the Fetch Communion. At the thought of that, Leila decided to drop out of memory and back into the present.

  Her media stream had moved on from the news. An episode of Hugo Fist’s chat show was just beginning, its unmistakable theme tune ringing out as the camera closed in on the little ventriloquist’s dummy and his guests. Leila smiled as she turned him off. She’d happily watch him for the rest of the afternoon, but then she’d get nothing done. The agonies of the past – agonies that, with Dieter’s help, she’d overcome – made the present that little bit easier to deal with. She pulled up her mailbox and started going through her messages. Most were condolences. Those from her own friends expressed careful sympathy. A couple hoped that she wouldn’t have too much trouble finding somewhere new to live. Dieter’s friends were much less guarded. After a clichéd platitude or two they usually expressed deep excitement about his future. ‘He’s such a tech head,’ one enthused, ‘he lives and breathes that shit, he’s going to love being a fetch.’

  She dealt with some of the more important messages then dropped her attention back into the café, wondering about another coffee. But, glancing round for the waiter, an alien presence caught her eye and she froze. There, at the other end of the room, sitting discreetly at a corner table, was a man she didn’t know but did recognise. She blinked, realising that it
wasn’t his face that looked familiar – it was his sense of style. He was dressed just like the strange man with the soft, buzzing voice she’d met in the hospital. A pressure man, she thought. The tasteful colours of his suit blended perfectly with his surroundings, but its antique cut stood out a mile. He saw that he’d been spotted and stood up, then started rapidly towards the door.

  ‘Stop!’ Leila shouted, standing herself. ‘We need to talk.’

  The buzz of conversation died and all eyes were on her. The waiter materialised at her elbow. ‘Mademoiselle…’ The pressure man was almost at the door. She went to follow him. A firm grip held her back. ‘The bill…’ A white slip appeared on the table. She glanced at it then waved distractedly, feeling an amount of money she could live off for a week vanish from her account. When she looked back the door was closing.

  ‘Shit.’ She pushed through the café as quickly as she could.

  Reaching the street outside, she sprinted to catch up with him. They were on a small quiet road, leading up to a busier main thoroughfare. ‘Stop,’ she called, but he ignored her. ‘Please.’

  The gun kiddies watched her go by, pretend weapons swivelling to track her. She wondered if she was somehow integrated into their game world. For a moment, she worried that all she was really doing was embarrassing herself by chasing down a complete stranger with a taste for retro fashion. But then she caught up with him and saw his face, his cold good looks a perfect rhyme with those of the man in the hospital, and smelt the same powerful perfume again.

  ‘Please stop,’ she said, stepping in front of him. He looked down at her, his expression so frozen that he could be a mannequin, saying nothing. ‘You work for Deodatus,’ said Leila. ‘You’ve done business with my brother.’ There was no response. ‘I need to know what’s going on.’