Waking Hell

by Al Robertson

  ‘Will I notice at all?’

  ‘No. It’ll be seamless.’ Dit winked. ‘I’m that fucking good.’ A moment’s pause, then: ‘Dieter’ll be so pleased with me.’

  Grief tore at Leila’s heart.

  Chapter 23

  Dit told Leila to stay out on the streets until he’d finished transferring her to the safe house weaveserver. Leila decided to watch the InSec agents. They moved in twos, pacing purposefully through the streets. She skipped from one pair to another, an invisible eye tracking power as it wrote itself across the city. As she mapped their movements she saw that they were moving to a single plan, together drawing a great search pattern across Docklands. She thanked the gods for the safe house, while at the same time worrying about exactly how long it could remain secure. And then a message came in from Dit. ‘The transfer is complete. Oh, and I’ve added some new code to your core.’ Unfamiliar commands appeared in her mind. ‘You can use these to move yourself anywhere else, whenever you need to. You’re as safe as I can make you.’

  Leila jumped straight back to the safe house. Cassiel and the Caretaker were sat on the sofa. Two screens hung in the air in front of them. One showed an empty street and a warehouse frontage, lit by late afternoon spinelight. The other showed a writhing tangle of flesh. Sighs, gasps and groans poured out of it. Sparks pulsed through Cassiel’s body, flickering in time with the action. The Caretaker too was rapt. Leila waited for a few moments, but they didn’t notice her. She coughed. The orgiastic noise drowned her out.

  She tried again. ‘Er, guys – what is this?’

  Cassiel turned to her. ‘You’ve led quite the sheltered life. It’s pornography.’

  ‘Very inventive stuff,’ said the Caretaker, his eyes glued to the screen.

  ‘Gods’ sake, I know that,’ replied Leila.

  ‘I always thought Station was deeply uncreative,’ reflected Cassiel. ‘I was quite wrong. This man’s work is remarkable. Perhaps pornography is the true art form of your culture.’

  ‘What that guy gets up to…’ said the Caretaker, sounding astonished.

  ‘I’m glad you’re expanding your horizons. But why are you watching it?’

  ‘The third dude on the right – he’s one of the new Deodatus victims,’ the Caretaker told her. ‘This is research.’

  ‘Well, that’s good to know. But we don’t have time for this.’ The hypnotic action continued. Leila found herself getting sucked in. ‘Is that even legal?’ she asked. ‘Who watches this stuff?’

  ‘They’re all of age,’ replied Cassiel. ‘So yes, quite legal. And the victim has a substantial following. He calls himself the Pornomancer. His subscribers ride his consciousness and experience his – exploits – at first hand.’

  ‘He promises never to engage with the same partner for more than five minutes,’ chipped in the Caretaker. ‘He’s had himself rebuilt, he can keep this up for hours.’

  ‘You’ve got far too into this,’ Leila told them.

  The camera angle shifted as the Pornomancer moved to a new position. ‘No, that’s too much,’ the Caretaker said, wincing. ‘How do you even get turned on by that?’

  ‘You tell me,’ said Cassiel. ‘Physical intimacy between minds is very different.’

  ‘You guys have sex?’ blurted out Leila. Then, embarrassed: ‘I’m sorry. That just came out.’

  ‘Of course we do.’ Cassiel peered curiously at Leila. ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘Shit. Yes,’ stammered Leila. ‘I just didn’t think…’

  ‘Humans tend not to,’ Cassiel told her, a little dismissively.

  The Caretaker wasn’t really listening. ‘He is what he is, he meets a need,’ he pondered. ‘A job’s a job, I guess.’

  Glad of the change of subject, Leila agreed. The screen panted on in front of them. Once again, Leila felt herself getting sucked in. ‘Look, this is – remarkable stuff,’ she said, ‘You’ve clearly checked out the Pornomancer in some detail, which is – er – great, but what about the other one?’

  ‘Jayne Kedrov,’ said Cassiel. ‘A wealthy, reclusive art collector. Not too much known about her. She spends a lot at auctions. Buys up anything that’s becoming popular, hides it away so hardly anyone can see it.’

  Someone gasped. ‘Look, can we turn it off?’ asked Leila. ‘It’s a bit of a distraction.’

  The Caretaker sighed. ‘Yeah, fair enough.’ He waved a hand and the Pornomancer’s small, energetic world vanished, leaving only the screen showing the empty street and warehouse. ‘That’s where she stores her collection. We’ve been keeping an eye on it.’

  ‘Not as closely as the Pornomancer,’ said Leila.

  ‘There’s not quite as much going on,’ shrugged the Caretaker.

  ‘Which is not to say that she’s not interesting,’ continued Cassiel. ‘She activated heavy security a couple of days ago. There’s been nothing from her since then.’

  ‘You think Deodatus has got to her?’

  ‘Quite possibly. You need to get over there and have a look round. As soon as possible.’

  Leila disagreed. ‘I’ve done enough leaping before I’ve looked,’ she said. ‘I want to know as much as possible before I go in somewhere new. We still don’t even know why Deodatus is interested in our four people. Have you found any links between them?’

  ‘The new ones are just like the first two,’ replied Cassiel. ‘No evidence they’ve ever met. Never shown any interest in historical artefacts. No close links with East. But now we have two more people to think about it, I think we’re beginning to see certain thematic links between the way the four of them live their lives. We have a sexual obsessive, a professional eater, a military psychiatrist who specialises in interrogation techniques—’

  ‘So really, torture,’ chipped in the Caretaker.

  ‘And a profoundly self-absorbed art collector,’ concluded Cassiel. ‘There’s self-absorbed greed, commodified intimacy, over-consumption and an entirely instrumental view of other people.’

  ‘Oof. That’s pretty negative.’

  ‘It’s basically how we in the Totality view Station society,’ said Cassiel in a matter-of-fact way. ‘Your motivations in miniature.’

  ‘Not all of us,’ Leila shot back. She thought of Dieter. He’d always been so positive, so generous. It seemed so wrong that he should be involved in something like this.

  The Caretaker interrupted them. ‘Guys, there’s something you should see.’ He pointed at the screen. A familiar figure stood at the entrance to the warehouse, talking into an intercom. It was Holt.

  ‘As I said, you should get over there as soon as possible,’ Cassiel told Leila.

  ‘OK,’ agreed Leila reluctantly. ‘That little shit turning up does change things.’

  ‘And we should observe,’ Cassiel told her. ‘Can we watch through you?’

  Leila wasn’t quite sure how she felt about opening up her sense feeds to two relative strangers. But there was no time to waste. ‘OK,’ she said again as she readied herself to jump.

  The flat vanished, leaving Leila hanging in the darkness that existed between specific locations. The ghost cloak queried her, asking permission to burrow into Kedrov’s warehouse. It worked quickly. There was a flash of light as her sensorium meshed with the warehouse’s internal weave systems. Then reality leapt into being again.

  Leila found herself standing in the middle of a long, low-ceilinged room. A series of vast canvases hung down from the roof. Bright colours swirled across them, thick oil impastos bulging luridly out in dense, hypnotic patterns. There was something familiar about their style. She noticed a signature at the bottom left of one of them – ‘Femi’, dripped on with oozing black paint. Memories flashed into her mind. She’d been valuing the single most expensive home she’d ever been in and seen a similar painting hanging on the wall there. ‘Lovely work,’ the vendor commented. ‘One of
our true masters.’ He stopped in front of the painting, sighing. ‘Very few of them around. Femi died young. One show, that was it – and most of it was snapped up by a private collector. A very private collector. I lease virtual replicas of this painting to several other collectors, but she won’t even do that.’ He went to move away from the picture, then stopped and said, ‘selfish – but at least it keeps the value of mine up.’

  [Hi Leila,] said the Caretaker. [Just letting you know we’re on board.]

  [Let’s get going,] ordered Cassiel.

  Leila drifted through paintings and sculptures. She heard soft voices and approached them cautiously. She knew she was safe but it was impossible not to worry that the ghost cloak had been compromised. She imagined flies settling on her, tearing at her past, rewriting it to suit Deodatus.

  [Quicker,] grumbled Cassiel.

  [I don’t want to take any risks.]

  It took her a minute or so to reach the point where she could see who was talking. She recognised one voice as Holt’s. She nerved herself, then peered out from behind a painting.

  There was a long, low leather sofa running down the edge of a small office space, made up of a desk, a chair and a small pile of tall, wide parcels. Holt sat on the sofa, next to a fashionably dressed young man.

  ‘That’s right,’ he told Holt. ‘We thought it was just a sculpture. Appeared in the post, no idea who sent it. A little broken triangle. So evocative! Jayne – Miss Kedrov – took it into her private rooms. And then I was away for a couple of days. She didn’t come out this morning but that’s not unusual, but then it was the afternoon and she wasn’t answering when I knocked on the door and well…’ He put his head in his hands.

  Holt watched him, a cold, disinterested look on his face. ‘We’ll find whoever did this,’ he replied. ‘We’ve seen several cases like this recently. We’re close to a breakthrough.’ His voice was emotionless. He stood up. ‘I’d like to take another look at the body.’ The personal assistant waved his hand. ‘Please don’t disturb me. You might find some of my investigations distasteful.’

  Leila followed him into Kedrov’s quarters. She lay in her bedroom, a still shape beneath a stained sheet.

  [Dead,] remarked Cassiel.

  Each wall was a canvas. Sombre, soothing colours drifting across them in soft, meaningless patterns. Kedrov’s bed was raised up on a plinth, its linens tinted to match the walls’ palette. Two broken weavesprites followed each other around the room, bouncing off walls, a bedside lamp, zinging past Holt and making him duck.

  ‘Wake up!’ they chanted, ‘Wake up! Rise and shine!’

  Each was little middle-aged man, dressed in a little grey suit. Their little wings whirred with a high, desperate whine. Both had their arms stretched out in front of them and their eyes tight shut. Their small minds were broken. Holt put out a fist and opened it, palm up. Now that he was on his own, his movements were quicker, more nervous. A fly leapt into the air. It brushed first against one of the sprites, then the other. There was a moment’s pause, then they screamed as one and vanished.

  Holt went over to the bed and pulled the sheets off the body. ‘Gods,’ he said. Leila gasped, memories of Dieter’s death flashing into her mind. Kedrov’s corpse had the same desiccated look to it, dried skin stretched like varnished tissue paper over bones that had a balsa-wood flimsiness to them. An ear had slipped down the side of her head. Her nose had partially collapsed. There was something dark half-sunk into her chest, between the dried, collapsed mounds that had been her breasts.

  [Is that how your brother died?] asked the Caretaker.

  [Pretty much,] gulped Leila. [Except the thing that killed him was square.]

  [Fascinating,] breathed Cassiel.

  The artefact that had broken Kedrov was an equilateral triangle, its point facing down towards her groin. A sticky, brown residue spilled out of it across the corpse’s belly. Holt pulled the sheet off the bed. Leila inspected the rest of Kedrov’s body. One hand had dissolved, soaking the sheets with black liquid. A dark vacancy had eaten away most of a knee. Bone gleamed whitely out.

  [Selective dissolution,] commented Cassiel. [Curious.]

  Holt leant over and placed a hand on the artefact. First one fly, then another, then a third and fourth and fifth, climbed out from beneath his cuff, moving down his hand with stop-motion jerkiness. They scuttled over to the triangle and vanished into it. Then Holt took his hand off the corpse’s chest and turned his attention to its face. He pulled the mouth open as far as it could go. The skin where Kedrov’s lips met split. He ran his hand through his hair and sighed deeply. Then he bent over, put his mouth to hers and exhaled. Kedrov’s chest shifted a little. Then he breathed into her, breathing for her, for a minute or so. At last there was a choking cough from the triangle, as if a small, organic machine had woken. Holt stood back up, a satisfied look on his face. A moment, then the corpse gasped and shook. Air shuddered in and out of its lungs as it began to breathe again. A fly appeared at its mouth, dark limbs scratching against paper-white flesh like inkless nibs, then vanished back into her. Kedrov’s laboured, reborn wheeze filled the room.

  [Fuck,] breathed Leila.

  [Heavy,] replied the Caretaker.

  Kedrov sat up, her body moving in a rigid, unnatural way, as if its muscles were relearning their functions from scratch, and turned her head towards her reviver. He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. Her voice was a small, soft buzz. Leila knew that her throat was furred with wires, but found herself imagining flies climbing into a broken voice box, their transparent wings beating words from the air. ‘Ready…’ The word was a ghost of itself.

  ‘Good.’

  Holt turned away from her, opening his shirt as he did so, a pained look on his face. Leila caught a glimpse of a black maw just beneath his rib cage, full of a crawling darkness. Flies leapt out of him, full stops scrawled on the air. They buzzed up and out, moving in lazy circles and loops, up and down, forward and back. One of her internal warnings pinged. The room’s weave systems were opening a doorway to a virtual location. Suddenly the flies were drawing black lines on the air. They flew forwards and back, up and down, pulling a dark, rectangular portal into being.

  [I can query the fly swarm,] Cassiel said. [See if they can tell me where it leads back to. But I need to use you as a bridge to reach them. Run part of my mind in yours.]

  It was an uncomfortably intimate suggestion. [Is there any other way?] asked Leila.

  [Running a compatibility check now,] said Cassiel, ignoring her.

  [So that’s a no,] Leila grumbled. [You’re worse than my brother.] She returned her attention to the room.

  Something had appeared next to Kedrov. It hung in the air next to her, a dense, grey teardrop carved from a cloud, its tip touching the ceiling and its base touching the floor. It represented a lifetime’s worth of data. Leila thought of Dieter’s similarly-shaped weaveself and touched the pendant at her neck. Kedrov’s head turned to gaze up at the cloud, flesh regarding the soul that had left it.

  [This must be what they did to Dieter,] said Cassiel.

  The Caretaker shushed her. [She doesn’t want to hear that.]

  Leila imagined Holt coming to her brother in the cold depths of a mortuary and pulling his weaveself from him. She pushed the thought from her mind.

  Holt smiled weakly. ‘Very good,’ he said.

  He turned back to the rectangle and waved at it. It pulsed out a burst of white light and Leila had to look away. When she looked back, it had become a white arch framing a doorway. And through the doorway was a space she recognised. Two couches lay head to head in the centre of a round room. There was a desk pushed up against the wall, papers scattered across it. Windows showed a marble landscape, shining under a pale moon. Next to the complexity of Station, of her own life, its simplicity was oddly appealing. I
t was Dieter’s workshop in the Shining City. And then her brother appeared in the doorway and stepped through it.

  Chapter 24

  Leila gaped. For a moment, she wanted to let the cloak drop away and reveal herself to Dieter. But Holt would see her too. She’d lose all anonymity.

  [Be cool, Leila! Let’s see what he’s up to.]

  [We’re fully compatible,] hissed Cassiel. [Just need you to give me the right permissions.]

  Leila barely heard them. She stared at Dieter. He was a soft blur, shifting forwards and backwards between different versions of himself. But he was less defined than he had been, less rooted in any single identity. With fewer and fewer coherent memory chains to support it, his core self was dissolving. The thought of that terrified her. She wondered how much time she had left before the damage became permanent, before it would be impossible to assemble even an incomplete fetch from his weaveself.

  [Please, Leila,] said Cassiel. Without really thinking, Leila granted permission. She felt an alien presence in her mind as Cassiel unpacked part of herself into it. [Thank you,] sighed the mind. [This’ll just take a few seconds…]

  Leila bought her attention back to the room. Holt and Dieter were inspecting the weaveself. Myriad clusters of tiny lights flickered within it.

  ‘All’s good,’ Dieter said. ‘Kedrov’s weaveself is intact. I can use it.’

  [He’s working for them all right,] said the Caretaker.

  [We told him not to trust Deodatus,] replied Leila. [I think we were getting through to him. All that must have been deleted.] She hoped desperately that he hadn’t lost too much else.

  ‘We never had a problem gathering weaveselves,’ replied Holt. ‘Just putting them to work. Please don’t screw it up.’