Cyborg (The Deep Wide Black Book 1)

by JCH Rigby

  Why the hell didn’t they want to listen to him? If it had all been bollocks, why hold him for ten days? Okay, people were still scared of cyborgs, so a jittery government might want to bury them where they wouldn’t be found, but what about the foreigners—Harvetz and his injured mate, Drovan. the two European soldiers who had accompanied them away from the nightmare of Harmony. Why whisk them away? It wasn’t as if a couple of foreign soldiers were evidence of anything.

  Or was it just completeness? If they all disappeared, so much the better? Then why let him go free? Weren’t they all equally liable to talk, or equally likely to keep silent? Whatever Blank Face said about “something terminal,” Chambers knew he’d been close to death. Chilling. To have your death dispassionately assessed for cost against benefit, and then to be released as a gamble. Nonsense. Spooks don’t gamble.

  The naked threat about killing journalists. Donna and her husband, Richard, were always teased about how in love they still were after years of marriage. A talented team, often working on stories together. No way would Richard have an affair, and even if he had Donna would never have harmed him. Was that the message? Be careful, we kill journalists.

  And what was all stuff about his tragedy? He’d gotten over all that, hadn’t he? It was behind him now, wasn’t it? Using it as a pressure point wasn’t going to work. Maybe the first rule was that other one: stories lie behind stuff which doesn’t add up.

  No one knew Chambers was back on Orchard. Well, the cop at the dock recognized him, but that was no help. Then a thought occurred to him: You never know. Cops talked to journalists; he’d relied on that himself often enough. Perhaps one of the local stringers had been handed something—maybe about a dock being cleared for some black operation, or a lander towed away, or a convoy of nice new armored vacuum wagons which just rolled out of the hangar and into town one day. There had always been one or two sharp boys and girls on the Orchard news circuit, for all its ramshackle infrastructure and navel-gazing, inbred politics. Surely, they couldn’t all have been scared off? This story might just be more interesting to some bright young kid on a news channel than another ho-hum story about local government corruption. You never know.

  Chambers put the cup down on the kitchen table. “Slate. Local news search: Orchard, space, police or politics, last couple of weeks. Give me anything unusual first, then anything obscure.”

  A woman’s voice, in a strong Orchard accent came from the slate: “…and today was the day, finally, after a delay of fifty-seven standard years, our habitat’s long-awaited seabed started to fill with water. The timing has been denounced as politically-motivated…” The screen rolled out, showing a date eight days previous, and an image of huge jets of water roaring out of complicated pipe work.

  What? Shit. He’d been back on the hab, been here when the very event for which his dad worked half his life finally took place, and the whole thing passed him by while he stared at the walls of some deniable cell. The fractional lift in his spirits nosedived. It wasn’t that he’d particularly wanted to see it, but not noticing such an anticipated event felt like a betrayal. A real one, not the clumsy guilt trip Blank Face had tried to send him on. It had mattered so much to the old man.

  Chambers paused in his nosedive to despair as his journalistic antenna twitched. Where had all the investment come from? No one had spent that kind of money on Orchard in decades. The economy had never been strong enough. There had to be another story here, but he didn’t want to hear any more right now. Search again.

  “Slate—”

  “I’ve got you now, Chambers.” The faint voice came from somewhere near the slate.

  Chambers yelped, bashing into the table, the cup of cheff went flying spraying its contents over walls and carpets all this passing Chambers by as he stood open mouthed as the figure of a man rapidly drew itself in the air, downwards from the top, as if a scrolling stylus was extrapolating an approximation from bad data. A translucent head, face, shoulders. As he stared, mouth agape, the chest and arms started to appear. The lounge door clearly visible through it. Chambers backed himself against the wall, as he’d done in the train station. His scalp itched, as if his hair was standing up. His breath coming in those panicky gasps once more.

  “I’ve been waiting forever for you to make yourself known. What the hell kept you?” A flat voice, tinny and distant, like an ancient recording. The torso complete, a sketch of the figure’s hips was forming.

  “What– what–” Chambers struggled to speak. It looked like a poor-quality phone agent, that made no sense, no phone agent he’d ever heard of appeared without your agreement. That was artificial intelligence territory, and nobody used AIs any more, not if they wanted to stay alive.

  Chambers heard the spilled cheff drip off the edge of the table and onto the floor, while a figure gradually solidified in front of Chambers. It started with barely drawn legs and feet, followed by the depth and form of a head, then shoulders and it continued downwards. The face was almost complete when Chambers recognized it.

  “Richter. You’re alive. Thank fuck! Where are you—and what is this?”

  Chambers hadn’t really studied Richter’s face, but, now he saw empty eyes, literally. While the body and head were solid, he could see through the figure’s eye sockets and out through the back of his head. He could also see the slack-jawed expression of hopelessness. Whatever this apparition was, it was not the confident, assertive Richter he knew.

  “Alive? Well, maybe, and maybe not. I was hoping you’d know.”

  Sunday, July 3rd

  The trailing, day-night division was striding toward them now, closing at a brisk jog. When Chambers first spotted it dropping toward the village, the terminator line had shown him only a bright, truncated wedge of distant landscape, sweeping up into the curve. Anything nearer lost in deep night.

  “So, what are you?” Chambers asked knowing it was a weird, unreal thing to say. However, everything about the conversation was unreal, dreamlike. He couldn’t really be standing on the balcony of the family home, staring out across the dark and waiting to see if water finally filled the sea, and talking to—well, what was he talking to?

  The Richter-figure leaned forward, elbows resting on the low wall, head cupped in its hands, staring out into the dark—eyes or no eyes. Chambers recalled the power he’d felt from the eyes of a man lying wounded in a deadly street, bullets fizzing through smoke. He wouldn’t forget those eyes. Eyes belonging to a soldier long dead in one of the numerous conflicts he had covered in his career. This though, this eyeless thing, it wasn’t blind. It saw him. Whenever it moved, the image quality dropped and it became a sketch-man again. When still, its body solidified. The voice faded and grew stronger in response to some unknown logic.

  All Chambers’ life, there had been a smooth, bare plain stretching away from the foot of the little hill on which the village sat. The houses and apartments spread in tangled knots and clusters around a twisty road, every unbuilt space cultivated with vegetable gardens, lawns, flower beds, and the pretty orchards which gave the hab its name. The rocks which underpinned the hill broke through the soil and vegetation at its foot, to reach out in a chaotic tumble toward the machine-smooth skin of the seabed. These hills had been planned, assembled, made as part of the huge construction project which was Orchard Habitat, way back when it was new and exciting. Way back before the wheels came off.

  All through Chambers’ childhood his dad told him stories about the sea, and how one day it would reach a quarter of the way around the hab to their back door, and how it would lap and splash against the rocks, how they’d be able to swim in it and fish in it and go boating on it. Down, way down below the apartment balcony, there’d be a jetty with boats tied up: little ones for fishing; big ones for traveling from place to place, to towns and villages further up around the curve. Out there, on those raised bits, a little lighthouse guiding the boats into port. Dad had seen the plans often. Further out, as well as the fish wo
uld be dolphins, maybe whales, and if you looked way out, up around the curve of the hab, you’d see ships and boats coming down toward them out of the sky. One day.

  That had been almost fifty years ago, and the magical day never came. The funds had never been available to finish the job, somehow. With every budget review the government moved the program back again, in favor of new industrial sites or meteor defenses, or another train line, or tax breaks for investors, or unemployment cover. Having seas would be nice, once the money was found for it.

  Then the crunch came, the foreign money went away, and the local money dried up. The smooth, grey plain of seabed curved up and away for years, huge and barren and empty and useless, an embarrassment to government after government, and a joke on every other hab. If you came from Orchard you were a rustic, a country bumpkin, an unsophisticated peasant from the sticks, and your government was so inept it couldn’t even finish building the place.

  The day-night line moved close enough for Chambers to see there really was water now covering the once barren seabed. Light from the distant curve reflecting off a gently- rippling surface, reminding him of a moonlit night by a genuine sea. He’d seen the real thing a few times, and he had to admit, while this didn’t look the same, it didn’t look bad at all. Far off Upspin, beneath and beyond the trailing terminator which heralded morning, the sea was day-lit, and right there was the difference: you couldn’t look at sunlit water from the night side of a planet. Chambers always found it strange how the horizon on planets fell down everywhere, instead of up in two directions and dead flat in two more, how you couldn’t see the other side of the world if you looked up, and how the daylight grew gradually out of the night, rather than trotted toward you with a sharp-edged line.

  Richter’s musing voice brought Chambers back from his daydreaming “What am I? Good question. I don’t know if there’s a name for it.” The voice stronger, a faint German accent Chambers associated with the—the real? —man. “I feel like I’m me, but I’m actually data, I suppose. I know another me exists, a physical one. Or there was. He’s gone, and I’m still here. He might be dead, but I don’t like to think about that. When I decided to do this, I assumed I was going to be the real one; that I’d go on in my body. I never guessed the data would feel like it was the real me. Or I’d be the data version.” The image suddenly looked stricken which struck Chambers as ridiculous.

  His reporters’ instincts must have been pretty deeply buried. He already had 99 percent of the biggest story ever, but he was battered and scared, and he was forgetting another rule of journalism: Get them relaxed, then get them talking. It didn’t really matter who or what he was talking to—if they had the story, let them tell it to you. Next: Listen. He gave it a go.

  “Tell me what’s happened since I last saw you—the physical you.” Nice distinction, Dave.

  “But that’s the point. You know more than I do—I need you to tell me what’s happened. I downloaded myself on the route back into Orchard, when you were still healing in the tank, so that’s the last thing I know. We reckoned you’d be good to go, warm before we got to Orchard, and here you are, so I presume we did. I know we’re on Orchard, and I know what the date is, and I’ve found you, but I can’t find me. That’s all I know.

  “I need you to tell me, Chambers. Where are the others? What’s happened to them? And where have you been?” The Richter image sounded – exasperated. Chambers decided his best recourse was honesty.

  “I don’t know. The police took us all right off the dock ledge, I haven’t seen anyone since. They kept me away from them, but for some reason they let me go, last night.” He didn’t feel able to go through it all. A nasty thought surfaced: Was this thing actually Richter in some way, or was it something the police had cooked up?

  Chambers looked up. The image stood motionless, more like some emotional fugue state than a failure of whatever technology was involved. “All right, then.” Chambers’ own precarious psychological condition meant he wasn’t sure if he was up to calming this distressed being. “Let’s rewind a bit. What do you mean by being downloaded? You’re not the Richter I know, but you’re no phone agent. What’s the first thing you remember since being downloaded?”

  A pause before the Richter image answered. “Nothing. Nothing until just now, when I found you here in your kitchen.”

  Headlights appeared in the darkness below them. Chambers watched as a vehicle appeared and disappeared again between the houses further down the hill. From time to time the lights bounced off the water, the sight reaching deep down inside him to something young and excited. The vehicle turned toward the new shore, tires crunching on some stony surface he didn’t remember, and stopped. Faint voices, the clatter of equipment, the jiggling beam of a flashlight heading toward the water’s edge, something heavy being dragged. Somewhere in the village a dog barked. He remembered another dog barking back on Harmony before its life was snuffed violently out and it brought back the dread. Chambers shook it off he needed to know what this Richter could remember.

  “But you said you’d been waiting forever. What did you mean?”

  “I did, didn’t I? That’s strange. Wait, do you know what a seal was? The animal?”

  Chambers cocked an eyebrow at the odd question and answered before he realized he had. “Some kind of Earth animal; a mammal, I think. But they lived in water. Why?”

  “That’s it. I saw a vid years ago. They lived in the Arctic—that’s the bit of the Earth which was frozen solid once. They ate fish, I think, but the whole sea was covered in ice, so they dove down through holes to find them. They breathed air, but there wasn’t any under the ice, so they couldn’t go too far from the holes.” What did seals and fish have to do with this, ghost?

  “Where are you going with this?” Demanded Chambers. Over by the stopped car the dragging noise stopped. Splashes, a few clanking noises, a little engine started to purr distracting Chambers from his questioning of Richter. A boat. They’d really done it. Somehow, more than the sight of water the sound of a boat told him they’d actually made a sea.

  “Like I said, I can’t remember anything between then and now. Nothing except a kind of feeling I had to be somewhere, if I didn’t reach there quick I’d have real problems.” Explained Richter.

  “Like the seals and the air holes.”

  The image of Richter nodded. “Like the seals. The thing was, a white bar—bear—which ate the seals. Big creature, almost as big as that thing that nearly killed you and me.” Chambers’ heart stumbled. “It used to wait by the holes to grab the seals when they came out.” The empty eye sockets turned toward Chambers. “I couldn’t stay under any longer, but I was scared to come up. I don’t really know how to be this kind of me, and I can’t be the old kind anymore. But I felt certain it was dangerous to—appear in public, I suppose.”

  Chambers’ mouth went dry. If a hardened combat veteran like Richter was scared, then Chambers knew he should be worried. “Look, let’s take that step back once more. I hardly understand a thing you’re telling me. Is this something to do with AI? You must realize we’ll be watched.” What would that flush out? If this Richter was a police plant of some kind a question about illegal AI’s might garner something.

  The boat noise faded away, and Chambers looked out to see the terminator line was closer now. A tiny light bobbing about on the sea, heading for morning.

  “I’ll come to that.” Said Richter. “It’s deep black from way back. Don’t worry about the spooks listening in: I think I can pretty much control what can be seen of me, and of you whenever we’re talking. Orchard Security isn’t quite the equal of the military tech that lets me do this. It seems there’s a lot more to this me than in any phone agent. Like I said, I’m not sure I really thought it through. I’ll tell you this much: It’s not what I expected.

  “Let me explain something else.” The Richter figure’s voice faded, before strengthening again. “The thing is, I’ve met one of those lizard-thing
s that attacked you before, a long time back.”

  Chambers couldn’t believe it. “What? You knew about that alien thing? Where? When? Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Not your best dispassionately objective style, Dave.

  “What makes you think I didn’t?” Replied Richter. “Understand this: They’re even more dangerous than you think.”

  “More dangerous than I think? It just about ripped my chest out!” Chambers tried not to scream.

  “I know. But there’s something else. There’s a whole lot of data about us we’ve been collecting for years. I’m giving it to you. You’ll need it. When I saw that thing again it took me way back, I realized you were our best hope of getting the story out this time.

  “Look, Chambers, you’re a bit of an idealist. For a journalist, you’ve got some romantic ideas about war and soldiers, I don’t know how you’ve seen what you must have seen and still held on to that. There’s some weird and scary people out there, if you are near enough to big money and power, you start bumping into them. If you think we’re killers, you’ve seen nothing. The rich and powerful tend to leave a hell of a lot of bodies behind them. Usually very well-buried.”

  Like Richard and Donna? Thought Chambers as Richter continued.

  “Well, I’ve met a few of these guys over the years; in our business, you tend to. They sometimes are us, or were. Schutzes, squaddies like me call that ‘going over to the dark side.’ I’ve never cared for that type personally. When I ran into one of those lizard-things before, well, I tried to get the news out. But somebody didn’t want that news out, and people died before I got the message. So, I ran away. I was a lot younger, and maybe it made things worse. I’m not proud of it.