Waking Hell

by Al Robertson

The Counsellor shifted awkwardly in his seat. ‘People didn’t like fetches,’ he explained. ‘Still don’t. Blood and Flesh were only the first successful militants. There are always going to be others like them, some maybe even more technically skilled. And thus more successful. Dieter saw how even a failed attack hurt the Fetch Continuum. And hurt you. He wanted to stop that from ever happening again.’ He tapped the glass. ‘So I asked him to make us this. It’s a network sensitive memory virus. I can tag it with any particular network definition, let it loose – it’ll seek out all members of that network, based on shared memory chains, and purge any or all of those chains. Wipe out all memories of the network. Any sense of relationship with each other its members have ever had.’

  ‘And so destroy the network and all it’s working towards,’ said Cassiel neutrally. ‘Very effective.’ Leila felt shock seeping out of the mind. She was surprised that there was none of it in her words.

  ‘It can take any other memory they have, too. All of them, if need be. And we’re running it during the Taste Refresh Festival. The Twins are opening up Station’s memory storage for their annual flavour reset. Everyone’ll be particularly susceptible to it. It’ll propagate very effectively indeed.’

  ‘That’s evil,’ said Leila.

  ‘It’s effective,’ snapped Lei.

  ‘Gods!’ replied Leila. ‘I’m sure it is. But it’s wrong. I’ve been infected with it. I know what it’s like. How awful it is. You have too, Lei. How can something as evil as that protect us?’

  ‘It already has done.’ The Fetch Counsellor looked down, then back up again. When he spoke again, shame and a certain harsh determination mingled in his voice. ‘What do you think stopped the Blood and Flesh militants from ever attacking us again?’

  ‘No…’

  ‘I took their leadership’s memories of the organisation. I took all record of any militant-related meetings or events from their rank and file.’

  ‘That’s a remarkable achievement,’ said Cassiel neutrally. She was hiding deep disgust. ‘But how did you get away with it?’ Her curiosity was genuine. ‘The only thing that scares people more than a minority group is a heavily armed minority group.’

  ‘The gods know the truth of the matter – nobody else,’ explained the Counsellor. ‘Those close to Blood and Flesh believe that their own virus got loose and destroyed them. Poetic justice. I’ve used the virus on occasion, since then – pruning the more dangerous groups, eradicating networks that could otherwise build into new attacks. Always discreet, always careful to harm precisely. Medicinally. The gods know that I only use it responsibly. They permit it.’

  ‘Maybe they’re scared of you,’ said Leila, forgetting for a moment the company she was in.

  ‘No,’ cut in East. ‘We’re realists. We accepted the right of the Fetch Communion to exist. Then we could do nothing as it was nearly destroyed. We had to let it defend itself too. It does so, discreetly and effectively, within very clearly defined limits. We accept those efforts.’ She paused for a moment. ‘And of course destroying radicalism stabilises our society. So the Fetch Communion wins, and the Pantheon wins, and all who live within us win.’ She nodded towards Cassiel. ‘Anti-Fetch radicals tend to be anti-Totality too. So your people benefit as well.’

  ‘The aim might be laudable. That doesn’t justify the methods,’ replied Cassiel. Leila felt rage and disgust sear out of her. The mind was working very hard to keep them out of her voice.

  A thought struck Leila. ‘You said it was important to keep the virus secret.’ The Counsellor nodded. ‘But won’t people find out about it if you unleash it on Deodatus?’

  ‘He’s done a very good job of hiding himself,’ replied the Counsellor. ‘Those who know about him will forget all about him, without remembering why. And those who don’t, won’t ever know he was a threat. Nobody will ever find out how he fell. And if anyone does get close to the truth – we’ve got the rock as cover. We’ll just tell them that the mass memory wipe was a side-effect of the sudden, final collapse of his command and control networks.’

  ‘We don’t have time to discuss this,’ cut in Lei. ‘Deodatus is an existential threat to all of us. We’re going to identify anyone who’s been working for him, whether they’re affiliated with the Pantheon or the Fetch Communion. We know where Deodatus’ two bases are, on Earth and on Station, and we’re going to break them. Then we’re going to erase as many memories of him as we can. That’s going to wipe him out of the Totality too. We’ll turn him back into what he always should have been – a completely forgotten has-been.’

  ‘You can’t,’ Leila told her.

  ‘Do you have any other suggestions?’ Lei shot back.

  Cassiel discreetly touched her elbow. [We’ll talk back on Earth,] the mind whispered inside her. [For now, agree. Let them believe we’re compliant. So they give us the weapon.]

  ‘No,’ Leila told Lei, through gritted teeth.

  ‘We’ve only got one problem left to solve,’ Lei continued, looking satisfied. ‘We want the virus to propagate fully through every single part of Deodatus’ network. So, it’s got to start at its core, back down on Earth. You three need to get it in there.’ She nodded towards Cassiel. ‘It needs to be seeded in the fallen snowflake.’ She turned back to Leila. ‘And you need to get as close to Deodatus as possible, then open it up. We’ll hide it, nobody’ll find it until then. Caretaker, you know how Deodatus works – you can help with that, can’t you?’

  The Caretaker nodded. ‘Yeah, guess so.’

  Leila forced herself to be practical. ‘How do you think I’ll get in front of him?’

  ‘The fallen minds in the pyramid said he wanted to meet you,’ replied Lei. ‘We’ll take advantage of that.’

  ‘You mean I let myself get captured.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it. But you won’t get hurt – you’ll drop the virus on him as soon as you meet him.’

  ‘Sounds easy enough,’ Leila replied. She couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

  [Remember – discretion!] whispered Cassiel in her mind.

  Leila sighed. ‘And how long before the rock hits?’ she asked Lei.

  ‘Seventy-two hours. Give or take.’

  ‘That’s hardly any time!’

  ‘Deodatus is a very dangerous entity. We don’t know what he’s planning or when he’s going to act. And we weren’t even sure if you were still alive. We had to move against him. Hard and fast.’

  ‘What would you have done if we hadn’t survived?’

  ‘Same plan, pretty much. Only we’d have had to introduce the virus into his networks through a remote location – the pyramid, that old satellite you found. It probably wouldn’t have propagated through all of them, so we’d planned for ongoing mop-up operations over a period of months, possibly years.’

  ‘On one level, it’s a shame that we’ve got a much more effective option,’ commented East. ‘The mop-up ops would make marvellous content for my little warriors.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ muttered Leila under her breath.

  ‘What was that?’ said Lei.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Lei raised a disbelieving eyebrow. ‘So,’ she asked, ‘do you think you guys can do it?’

  ‘He’s about a day’s journey by flyer,’ said the Caretaker. ‘I can do a deal with one of the air powers, rent some transport. So that’s no problem.’

  ‘Excellent,’ replied Lei. ‘Not much time left. I’ll leave it to you three to work out the finer details between you. Oh, and – you can stop the flies. Can you teach us how to do that?’

  ‘I can zap them because Deodatus is my brother,’ drawled the Caretaker. ‘Our deep structures are pretty much identical. That confuses the fuck out of them. If I give anyone else the fly spray they get one shot. And then the flies recalibrate against it, and that’s it.’

  ‘Even that would be
useful,’ said Lei.

  ‘I don’t hand out weapons unless I really have to. I gave the fly spray to Leila because she was on the back foot and she needed it, and because I wanted to get part of myself up to Station to help her out. You’re all pretty much on top of things. And I’m doing pretty well on the travelling front these days. So you don’t need to take it and I don’t need to give it to you.’

  Lei glanced towards East, who shrugged. ‘The flies won’t be a threat by the time the gun kiddies get to them,’ she said. ‘Breaking Deodatus and his networks will break them.’

  ‘Totally,’ agreed the Caretaker.

  ‘OK,’ sighed Lei. ‘If that’s the way it’s got to be.’

  ‘One more question,’ said Leila. ‘We can get in.’ She swallowed. ‘I think we can get the virus into Deodatus’ networks.’

  Cassiel nodded. ‘We can.’

  ‘But,’ continued Leila, ‘how do we make sure that we get Dieter and the other two Deodatus victims out?’

  ‘We haven’t made any plans for that,’ replied Lei firmly. ‘Trying to reach them could be very dangerous.’ A pause. ‘We advise against it. There’s too much at stake here.’

  ‘No!’ exploded Leila. ‘He’s our brother, Lei.’

  ‘Leila, I’m sorry.’ There was no sadness in her voice. ‘I know how you must feel.’ She paused. ‘At least, I can imagine it.’

  Leila remembered the pressure man in action, stripping all memory of Dieter from Lei’s mind and replacing it with a void. Leila and Lei were different in one vital respect. Leila had never doubted that her brother loved her profoundly. That knowledge did not exist for Lei.

  ‘You don’t remember him at all,’ Leila realised. ‘That’s why you don’t care about him.’

  ‘It’s not about caring or not caring,’ Lei told her coldly. ‘It’s just easier for me to see the logical course. The one where we win and Deodatus loses. There is no other way, Leila.’

  East nodded approvingly. The Fetch Counsellor’s face was stony. Leila looked pleadingly at the Caretaker, hoping for support. He sighed. ‘I’m not here to tell any of you what to do. You’ve got to work this one out for yourselves.’

  Leila looked back to Lei. ‘He loves you,’ Leila told her. ‘Just like he loves me. And he saved both of us.’

  [Just let it be,] whispered Cassiel in her mind. [If we protest too much they won’t trust us with the virus. We can stop Deodatus without using it. We’ll rescue Dieter and the others. And when it’s all over, you’ll find a way of giving Lei back her past.]

  Chapter 37

  The Caretaker had to use the whole valley to summon their transport to Deodatus. As soon as the meeting ended and they were back on Earth, he asked a senior worker to join them in the room at the top of the tower. She stood by him as he sketched out some kind of sigil. Bees buzzed lazily around them, honey-gold creatures drifting in the air. He gestured out towards the valley. ‘Got to be at least a hundred metres across. Needs to be done by nightfall. Ready to light up.’

  ‘No problem,’ replied the worker, rolling up the sheet of paper. ‘I’ve got twenty spares today, they’ve got the weekend’s drinking to work off. They’ll be up for it.’

  The Caretaker saw the worker off. Then he turned to Leila and Cassiel. ‘And now that’s all sorted, what’s the plan for stopping him? You guys going to blow his mind with the memory virus?’

  ‘I don’t need it,’ said Cassiel. ‘The fallen snowflake is the heart of the contagion. If I can reach it, I can mesh with it, lift all the camouflage off the fallen minds and then destroy it. With the snowflake gone and Deodatus destroyed, they’ll be isolated and extremely visible. Easy enough to capture and heal.’ She looked towards Leila. ‘Which only leaves us with the problem of bringing Dieter back and breaking Deodatus.’

  ‘Can you get me into the Shining City?’ Leila asked Cassiel. The mind nodded. ‘I’ll find Dieter in there. I’ll do what I can to win him back. And then I’ll go after Deodatus. He wants to see me. I just need to get myself caught. But I don’t know how I’ll break him. I can’t rely on Dieter.’ She sighed. ‘Maybe we do need to think about deploying the virus.’ It was a dead weight inside her, squatting at the back of her mind and causing a noticeable lag in her thinking.

  ‘No,’ said Cassiel firmly. ‘It’s the wrong solution. It’s a political tool as much as an offensive one. It protects the Fetch Communion and gives the Fetch Counsellor bargaining power with the gods. Even in that context it’s problematic.’ Leila felt a kind of shiver run through the mind. ‘And it’s never been deployed against Totality minds. Our relationship networks are far more complex than yours. It might go completely out of control, leap across to uncorrupted minds and destroy us just as efficiently as Deodatus would. Anyway, we have far more effective weapons at our disposal. I’m one of them. The skull face is another.’

  The Caretaker nodded. ‘It’s pretty impressive.’

  ‘But won’t he have defences?’ asked Leila. ‘And anyway, it’s built to work on human-scaled entities. How could it hurt a god?’

  ‘You’ve barely used it against him,’ replied Cassiel. ‘You hit a couple of fallen minds before he properly went after any of us. Chances are he hardly even knows it exists.’

  ‘And for entities built like me and him,’ chipped in the Caretaker, ‘it’s a hardcore piece of kit. It forces sensory circuits into overload. Both of us watch over entire cities. Our perception centres are far more widely extended and complex than yours. If the skull face does its job and forces them into a closed feedback loop – well, the damage would be severe. Definitely crippling, possibly fatal. And his defences won’t do much against it. None of us ever planned for that sort of attack. We’ve never had to think about fetches down here.’

  Cassiel nodded. ‘Use that. Delete the virus.’

  ‘I’m with her,’ agreed the Caretaker. ‘That thing freaks me out. Too close to what Deodatus would do. You don’t beat your enemy by becoming him. Rewriting people sucks, no matter who’s doing it to who.’

  ‘But what if he does know about the skull face?’ asked Leila.

  ‘I’ll help you hide it. He’ll never find it.’ He smiled gently. ‘Then you’ve just got to get in front of him. And it looks like he’s very keen to meet you…’

  Half an hour later, the Caretaker beckoned Leila and Cassiel to the window. ‘Check it out.’ As Leila moved across the room, she felt a fresh lightness within her mind. Now that she’d deleted the memory virus, she was once again simply and only herself. ‘This is how we get in touch with the air powers,’ the Caretaker told them.

  The work party had already sketched out a third of the sigil, painting white lines across the valley. As Leila watched, every so often slowing herself to nudge time along, apparently disconnected lines resolved into coherent forms. There was a bird, sharp, straight wings leaping out at either side, a long beak reaching forward from it and two stick figures next to it. ‘A hummingbird,’ explained Mandala. ‘With you two next to it.’ He pointed. ‘That’s a spanner. Then there’s a cloud spider.’ Four legs reached forward, four reached back, all from a narrow body that bulged into a circular abdomen at the rear and spiked fangs at the front. ‘And the last one represents Deodatus.’ It was a skeletal face topped with a stylised crown.

  ‘It’s lovely, but how’s it going to get us to him?’ asked Leila. She’d set a counter to tell her how long until the rock struck. It stood at sixty-eight hours. ‘Isn’t it a bit slow?’

  ‘It’s the speed it needs to be,’ replied the Caretaker. ‘And we’re sending out a very strong, very specific message to just the right people. We’ve got two people needing flight, we offer mechanical support in return, please take the safest route, our destination is Deodatus. We’ll ask them to drop you both on the edge of the city. Then you guys can make your way through those buildings he’s been tying together to his tower and the fallen snowflake.�
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  ‘You’re not coming with us?’ asked Leila.

  ‘You’re disappointed?’ He chuckled. ‘I’m touched. But I’m an old man. I’d only slow you down.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have got this far without you,’ Cassiel replied.

  ‘Yeah, but now you’re a hundred per cent again. You guys make a hell of a team, you know. You really don’t need me anymore.’

  ‘Please,’ said Leila.

  ‘Even if I wanted to – I couldn’t. Now I’ve found myself again, I’ve got responsibilities. A whole city of people to look after. And even if I could leave them – well, this body’s re-meshed with my digital systems. If I tried to separate them, that’d break the flesh. Memory crash, who knows what else.’

  ‘What if we don’t stop Deodatus? Will the city be safe from him?’

  The Caretaker chuckled. ‘He hasn’t got us for centuries. He won’t now. He could try and pay some of the air powers to attack us – but we do maintenance work for them from time to time, shit they can’t handle themselves. They won’t want to blow us up. And anyway, I’ve put out feelers, trying to work out what he’s up to. He’s maxed out his credit buying deuterium from the sea powers for his fusion reactors. Couldn’t afford to put the zap on us even if anyone’d take the job.’

  ‘You talk to them too?’

  ‘We keep in touch,’ the Caretaker replied. ‘They’re really alien motherfuckers. Even worse than the air powers. Hard to understand and they hate coming topside. But they’ve got stuff we need and we’ve got stuff they need. So every so often we send someone down to the beach for a chat.’

  They descended the side of the tower in a glass-walled lift, the desert rising up to meet them. It was almost night. Orange light threw shadows across the valley. Clouds rolled in soft patterns, dusted with brilliance by the sunset. Soon night would come and all would be dark – all but the shimmering lights of the city, a refuge they were about to leave far behind. Leila shivered.

  Two of the Caretaker’s people waited at the bottom of the stairs, holding the pressure suit up between them. It looked a little cleaner. The broken faceplate was covered over with blank, white plastic. Its shoulder cameras hung limply down, peering sadly towards the ground.