by Al Robertson
‘It seems that history has defeated us,’ said Cassiel, pulling Leila back into the present. She trudged on, despair pulsing through her. There was no longer any hope of finding Dieter. And there was nothing she could do to stop Deodatus running riot. East would have to face the Rose directly. She probably couldn’t stand up to her. The Kneale Pit would run out of control, pulling the whole of Station into its absurd, broken rebirthing of the past. The loss of her brother left her feeling so bleak that she hardly cared.
‘We have nowhere left to look,’ Cassiel continued. ‘We have failed. The Totality is no longer the future.’ Her voice was thick with angry despair. ‘Deodatus is. And he will overwrite us all.’
‘Guys,’ shouted the Caretaker, somewhere behind them. ‘Come back!’
Leila ignored him. A moment or so later she heard him running up behind her, rocks sliding and clashing beneath his feet. ‘Fuck,’ he shouted as he tripped and fell. Through his eyes, the ground came up to meet him.
‘Well at least that got your bloody attention,’ he wheezed as Cassiel helped him up. He’d had to run hard to catch up with them.
‘We’ve failed,’ Cassiel said again. ‘We need to find somewhere new to hide.’
‘I don’t know where we can go,’ replied Leila.
The Caretaker took a deep, gasping breath. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked. ‘Guys, you’re not yourselves!’
‘You want to keep poking around?’ asked Leila. ‘Fine. The Wart’s your home. Stay here. Cassiel, let’s go back to the flyer.’ She sighed wearily. ‘And then on to who knows where.’
‘But Leila, Cassiel – you haven’t been inside the pyramid.’
‘Of course we have,’ snapped Leila.
‘No,’ replied the Caretaker, almost howling the word out. ‘Don’t you remember? The flies came. Got your disc, got me. Must have zapped you too, Cassiel. Whole fucking swarm of the little shits. I blacked out. When I came to, you guys were a hundred metres away, heading back to the flyer.’
‘But there weren’t any flies,’ said Cassiel. ‘There was just the pyramid. And it was empty.’
‘Then they wiped themselves out of your mind too. It’s the perfect defence.’ Leila had never heard him talk with such urgency. ‘Think back over your memories. Man, there’s got to be something wrong with them. Cassiel was writing a code block to break through the perimeter. She fired it. Then the flies hit us. I was there, dammit, I saw it.’
‘It can’t be,’ replied Cassiel, sounding puzzled. ‘If it was, they’d have rewritten your memory too.’
‘I don’t have much in there to start with,’ the Caretaker told her. ‘Maybe that’s why they couldn’t touch me. But they got you both. For fuck’s sake, you have to believe me. Just come and look at the bloody flies.’
Cassiel said nothing. Leila was silent too, as she worked back through her memories of the pyramid. They all seemed so real, so present – so definite. Pushing into the vast cavern inside the pyramid, moving down through its underground layers, the dust rising around her as she walked. There was no weave in the pyramid, so no possibility that anything could be hidden. She saw reality and it was empty. The bitter pain of failure filled her. The Caretaker and Cassiel were with her, not saying anything, just moving sadly through the void.
And then she stopped, and scrolled back. Hope pulsed in her as she ran a particular memory set again, then a third time. Her feet stepped across the floor. Her footsteps echoed in an empty room. Her passing raised clouds of dust. All of which was impossible, for she was a fetch, and had no physical presence.
‘Gods, you’re right,’ she told the Caretaker. ‘We don’t need to see the flies.’ She turned to Cassiel. ‘We didn’t go in there.’
‘I remember it all so clearly,’ said Cassiel.
‘My footsteps raised clouds of dust.’ She thought for a moment. ‘The flies gave us memories of exploring a depressing, empty pyramid. So we’d walk away and not want to come back. They must write those memories into anyone who comes along. But they didn’t expect a fetch to come along. Fair enough, there’s no weave out here, not many of us passing by. They only set up memories for corporeal people – humans, minds. So I remember having a body, being physically present. Raising dust with real feet. And that’s impossible.’
Cassiel stood still for a moment. Soft lights flickered within her, memories flashing through her mind with firefly speed. ‘We entered the pyramid. We explored…’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I picked at the rubble blocking the lower passageway. You two were both there.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Yes. I’m watching you now, Leila. You’re walking past a sarcophagus. There’s a cloud of dust. And you’re picking up stones, shifting rubble. Which is indeed impossible.’
‘So you believe me?’ asked the Caretaker. ‘Thank fuck.’
‘We can still get Dieter back,’ breathed Leila, profoundly relieved. She turned to the Caretaker. ‘Thank you.’
Cassiel sank into a squat, wrapping her arms around her head. ‘We fought a war to escape this kind of oppression.’ She sounded deeply traumatised.
Leila knelt down behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘We’ll stop Deodatus. We’ll stop all of this.’
‘Before the Totality freed me, I worked for Kingdom. One of his software and hardware licence enforcers. Running covert missions. Proper black ops, not like those gun kiddies. And after every one, I had my mind wiped. I found some of the mission files, after the Totality seceded from the Pantheon. I did such terrible things for your gods, Leila. Took so much from so many. And I have no memory of any of it.’
‘But this is Deodatus. It’s just a blip. We’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.’
‘It always comes back, Leila.’ She sounded bleak. ‘I wasn’t the only one. All of us minds – we had operating system upgrades, factory resets, memory defragging, full wiping forced on us, all of the time. None of us could form coherent identities. We were built to be efficient machines. And there will always be someone who sees how we can be more efficient if we are stripped down and rebuilt. If we march to their beat, not ours.’ She looked up. Light glimmered softly behind her face, grief made visible pulsing in time with her words. ‘We worked so hard to escape it. We vowed that we’d never lose our memories again. After the Soft War, we sent search parties across the system to root out the tiniest parts of our minds. To protect our deep selves. And yet here we are, and here it is again.’
‘Hey,’ replied Leila, her voice soft. ‘Us too, remember? Until the Totality freed the fetches, we were broken too. People used fetches like photograph albums. Replay the best bits of life, toss away the rest. We were a shattered people.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘They shouldn’t have called it the Soft War. It should have been the Memory War.’
The Caretaker sat down on the other side of Cassiel. ‘I guess that means we’re fighting the second Memory War now,’ he said. ‘Taking back the past from Deodatus.’ He put a hand on Cassiel’s shoulder. ‘It’s tough. But we’ll stop him. And anyone else that tries to pull this kind of shit.’
‘You’re right,’ said Cassiel, raising her head. ‘You said I wrote a code block to break us in there?’
‘You were trying to convince the flies that we were one of the minds controlling them,’ the Caretaker told her.
‘Well, that clearly didn’t work. I’ll go back in there. Work out what I did wrong.’ There was a new determination in her voice. ‘If the flies come back again, run.’ Her head nodded forward. The soft light of her nano-gel dimmed, until she was nothing but a silhouette, almost as absent as the gun kiddies had been. Leila imagined code carving through the flies, breaking them into the land of the dead.
This time, Cassiel succeeded. ‘We’re in,’ she told them, once she’d returned her attention to the world.
The wall of flies parted like a curtain and there was nothing betw
een them and the militant past.
Chapter 30
Once they were through the perimeter, security was light. ‘Relying on the flies,’ hissed Cassiel, who was once again translucent. ‘Overconfident.’
‘Cormac got that right,’ said Leila. ‘Kneale Pit security’s usually based on the assumption that they can rewrite anyone they want to.’
‘They almost did,’ pointed out the Caretaker.
A minute and they were at the rear of the pyramid. ‘I’ll scout,’ Cassiel told them as she unhooked Leila’s disc from her back and vanished into the darkness. A minute or so and she was back. ‘They’ve opened up the main entrance,’ she reported as she shrugged the disc back on. ‘But there are guards on it. We’re going through Cormac’s back door.’
The pyramid rose away from them, its stone blocks blackened by age, their sharp edges looking slightly melted. Glancing up, Leila felt a strange kind of vertigo.
‘Why’s it so bloody high up?’ asked the Caretaker, looking doubtful.
Leila had asked Cormac the same question. ‘Makes it difficult to spot,’ she told the Caretaker. ‘Stops anyone just finding it and filling it in. And even if someone official does spot it, who’s going to bother going all the way up there just to block it up?’
Cassiel reached up, her arms elongating. Her fingers stretched out as they touched stone, reaching into cracks and holes to secure themselves. ‘Grab my back,’ she told the Caretaker.
‘What? Thought I’d be climbing up next to you.’
‘Too slow.’
Cassiel flowed up the pyramid like a liquid, the Caretaker clinging to her. Some of its blocks were loose, shifting beneath them. The Caretaker swore under his breath when he felt them move, but each time Cassiel found a firm footing and kept moving forwards. Leila, still soft-linked to her, felt a great sense of relief and confidence pulse through the mind. ‘You’re enjoying this,’ she said.
‘At last I can do my work unhindered.’
‘You haven’t fallen off yet, I’ll give you that.’
Leila expected a sharp reply. Instead, Cassiel stopped dead, suddenly throbbing with concentration.
‘Are we there?’ asked the Caretaker.
The mind shushed him. ‘Guard,’ she whispered. ‘Very basic.’ A moment, then: ‘I own it.’ A few more seconds of motion and she pulled them into an opening hacked in the stone, the mouth of a low, narrow passage. Soft light glowed out from within. She set down the Caretaker and Leila’s disc. ‘Wait here,’ she hissed, then was off into the darkness. Barely any time passed and she was back.
‘Where did you go?’ asked Leila as Cassiel shrugged her disc back on.
‘Setting up a distraction. Now, let’s see the guard.’
Leila gasped as it pattered down the passage towards them. It looked melted. One leg was shorter than the other, so it moved with little skipping movements. There were no arms, only stumps. Its torso stopped at its chest. Its skin was pitted with decay. Flies hung within it and buzzed around it. Leila flinched back.
‘The flies can’t see us,’ Cassiel told them. ‘And the guard is too limited to attack or even perceive us without them.’
‘What the fuck?’ asked the Caretaker, deeply shocked. ‘It looks so wrong.’
‘Significantly impaired on all levels. It was exposed to extreme heat. No effort made to repair it. It’s lost all but the most basic sense of itself. Deodatus must see this as a very unlikely entry point, to leave something so basic watching it.’
They squeezed past it and shuffled down the tunnel. It ended in a rectangle of light, its edges broken only by a black ring sticking out of a side wall. ‘For abseiling down into the main chamber,’ commented Leila.
‘Whoa,’ drawled the Caretaker, looking nervous.
Cassiel went to a crawl, the Caretaker following her. They reached the end of the corridor and peered out. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the glare. As vision returned they saw that they were looking past a pillar and out into pyramid’s interior.
‘Oh, wow,’ breathed Leila.
The great chamber bustled with activity, and yet all was silent. There were no machine sounds, no whine of engines or chug of power generators, no jack hammer blasts of industrial noise. Instead, there was only a quiet bustle, a strange low collection of grunts and groans and a regular metallic beat.
The space was dominated by a high, slender metal tower, shaped like an upside down test tube and built from a patchwork of metal plates. Spotlights shone up at it, sending jagged shadows leaping across the sloping walls. The tower was about seventy-five metres high and – at the lip that ran round its broad base – fifteen or twenty metres across. Improvised-looking scaffolding nestled around it. Little figures moved along rickety walkways or up and down unsteady ladders. The scaffolding stopped at two high, wide open doors. A bundle of translucent ruby rods peered out at the world. The whole machine had an air of malevolent age. The cracks and joints running across it looked like wrinkles carved into an ancient face. The rods glowed, making Leila think of a single bloodshot eye. The air around it was punctuated with flies. The main entrance to the pyramid was hidden behind it, on the opposite side of the pyramid.
Cassiel zoomed in and Leila followed her gaze. Maybe a dozen or so fallen minds were managing tens of human workers. The minds were clearly in charge. They were far more decayed than any Leila had seen in Docklands, fuzzed blisters and oozing welts burned across them, but they moved with authority, sending their charges bustling up and down the scaffolding and across the pyramid’s dirty floor. At first, they seemed to be entirely autonomous. But then Leila saw that each one would constantly stop to consult plans that were invisible to her, then pull their attention back into the work chamber and nudge their workforces into even greater efficiencies. They were fixed elements of a command structure, passing on an apparently very clearly defined vision.
Leila turned her attention to the humans, a tide of broken humanity become a single construction engine. There was no individuality in their actions – nothing that wasn’t rigid or programmed, no movement that wasn’t precisely calibrated to serve a greater whole. They were components, nothing more. And each one was a scrawny, desiccated ghost of itself.
‘That’s how Dieter and Kedrov ended up,’ said Leila. ‘They look just like sweatheads.’
‘I studied sweatheads,’ said Cassiel. ‘But I never saw a living one.’
‘What is a sweathead?’ asked the Caretaker.
Leila explained. She too had never seen one in the flesh – her weaveware always screened them out. But she’d seen the charity appeals, with their deliberately disturbing footage of broken addicts. She described their tottering yet oddly energetic gait, the way that they’d find tiny, repetitive jobs and work obsessively at them, the slow ruin of their bodies as Sweat, the drug they couldn’t stop taking, ate away at them. They’d been treated almost as badly as pre-Rebirth fetches. Then the Totality had come, taken pity on them and cleaned them off the streets.
‘Maybe the fallen minds diverted some of them to work here,’ suggested Leila. ‘If those guys aren’t just normal people who’ve fallen to Deodatus too.’
‘Oh man. Those poor bastards.’ The Caretaker looked shaken.
And yet the workers were not quite like the sweatheads that Leila remembered. The ones on the streets had never had anything of worth to their name. These people were patched round with fragments of technology, implants and add-ons that from far away looked like jewelled decorations. They replaced missing body parts, ageless components bolted on to exhausted flesh machines. Each worker had a different set of modifications, but they all had one thing in common – downwards-pointing triangles pressed deep into their bellies.
‘Why the triangle?’ asked the Caretaker. ‘Why not a square?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Leila. ‘Maybe it’s a rank thing. Kedrov and the Porn
omancer had those triangles too, and they were pretty much screwed. Holt and the minds all have squares, and they’re in charge. Dieter was killed by one, he’s pretty senior too.’ She turned to Cassiel. ‘And what are they building?’
‘I think it’s a laser,’ Cassiel told them. ‘A basic design, but very powerful. And dangerous.’ She glanced up at the pyramid’s point. It was still intact. ‘They haven’t fired it yet. It’ll take the roof off when they do.’
‘And hit the other side of the Wart,’ Leila said. ‘What’s the point of that?’
‘It won’t just hit it,’ replied Cassiel, her voice grim. ‘It’ll crack the Wart’s skin like an eggshell. And the Wart holds Station together.’
Leila imagined the Wart breaking, Docklands and Homelands drifting apart from each other. Pain shook through her. ‘Why are they even doing this? Won’t they all die too?’
‘I bet all this made sense, once,’ said the Caretaker thoughtfully. ‘I bet there was something out there for the laser to hit.’
‘Dieter thinks he’s going to break the gods and remake Station,’ said Leila.
‘If the laser fires, he’ll do that all right,’ Cassiel replied.
One of the workers on the scaffolding tripped then stumbled. He staggered towards its edge and almost caught himself on one of the barriers. But it wasn’t well secured and it fell. He went with it, tumbling down to hit the floor with a dull thump. Red pooled beneath his broken body. Nobody else registered the death. One worker crossed the spreading pool, leaving a trail of bloody footprints. Another stumbled over the body, nearly dropping her load. She steadied herself and moved on, unmoved.
‘Bastards,’ said the Caretaker. ‘Those fucking bastards.’
‘We’ll shut them down,’ Cassiel told him. ‘Once we find Deodatus, in his Shining City.’ She nodded down at the pyramid floor. ‘Got to get down there.’ In one corner of the room, there were stairs leading to the space below. ‘But there’s one more thing to see first. The flies are sharing their own version of the weave. Full local overlay. I’m patching us into it.’