“No need for pretenses,” Severyn said. “I merely hoped to establish a more personable base for negotiation.”
“Fuck you.” A warble of static. Maybe a laugh. “Fuck you. There’s not going to be any negotiation. This isn’t a funding op. We just caught one of the biggest parasites on the planet. The Priesthood’s going to make you an example. Hook you to an autosurgeon and let it vivisect you on live feed. Burn what’s left of you to ash. No negotiations.”
Severyn felt the icy churn in his stomach again. Fear. He realized he’d almost missed it.
GIRASOL WAS DREAMING many things at once. Even as she spoke to her captive in realtime, she perched in the limousine’s electronic shielding, shooting down message after desperate message he addressed to his security detail, his bank, his associates.
It took her nearly a minute to realize the messages were irrelevant. Grimes was trying to trigger an overuse failsafe in his implants, generate an error message that could sneak through to Nokia.
Such a clever bastard. Girasol dipped into his implants and shut them down, leaving him half-blind and stranded in realtime. She felt a sympathetic lurch as he froze, gray eyes clearing, clipped neatly away from his data flow. If only it was that easy to reach in and drag him out of that pristine white storage cone.
“There aren’t many female Priests,” Grimes said, as if he hadn’t noticed the severance. “I seem to recall their creed hates the birth control biochip almost as much as they hate neural puppeteering.” He flashed a beatific smile that made Girasol ache. “So much love for one sort of parasite, so much ichor for the other.”
“I saw the light,” Girasol said curtly, even though she knew she should have stopped talking the instant he started analyzing, prying, trying to break her down.
“My body is, of course, a volunteer.” Grimes draped his lean arms along the backseat. “But the Priesthood does have so many interesting ideas about what individuals should and should not do with their own flesh and bone.”
“Volunteers are as bad as the parasites themselves,” Girasol recited from one of Pierce’s Adderall-fueled rants. “Selling their souls to a digital demon. The tainted can’t enter the kingdom of heaven.”
“Don’t tell me a hacker riding sound waves still believes in souls.”
“You lost yours the second you uploaded to a storage cone.”
Grimes replied with another carefully constructed probe, but Girasol’s interest diverted from their conversation as Pierce’s voice swelled from far away. He was shouting. Someone else was in the room. She crosschecked the limo’s route against a staticky avalanche of police scanners, then dragged herself back to the orthochair, forcing her eyes open.
Through the blur of code, she saw Pierce’s injured crony, the one who’d been sliced belly to sternum, being helped through the doorway. His midsection was swathed in bacterial film, but the blood that hadn’t been coagulated and eaten away left a dripping carmine trail on the linoleum.
“You don’t bring him here,” Pierce grated. “You lobo, if someone saw you—”
“I’m not going to take him to a damn hospital.” The man pulled off his Fawkes, revealing a pale and sweat-slick face. “I think it’s, like, shallow. Didn’t get any organs. But he’s bleeding bad, need more cling film—”
“Where’s the caveman?” Pierce snapped. “The bodyguard, where is he?”
The man waved a blood-soaked arm towards the doorway. “In the parkade. Don’t worry, we put a clamp on him and locked the van.” His companion moaned and he swore. “Now where’s the aid kit? Come on, Pierce, he’s going to, shit, he’s going to bleed out. Those stairs nearly did him in.”
Pierce stalked to the wall and snatched the dented white case from its hook. He caught sight of Girasol’s gummy eyes half-open.
“How close are you to the warehouse?” he demanded.
“You know how the Loop gets on weekends,” Girasol said, feeling her tongue move inside her mouth like a phantom limb. “Fifteen. Twenty.”
Pierce nodded. Chewed his lips. Agitated. “Need another shot?”
“Yeah.”
Girasol monitored the limo at the hazy edge of her mind as Pierce handed off the aid kit and prepped another dose of hypnotic. She thought of how soon it would be her blood on the floor, once he realized what she was doing. She thought of slate gray eyes as she watched the oily black Dozr mix with her blood, and when Pierce hit the plunger, she closed her own and plunged with it.
SEVERYN WAS METHODICALLY peeling back flooring, ruining his manicured nails, humming protest rap, when the voice came back.
“Don’t bother. You won’t get to the brake line that way.”
He paused, staring at the miniscule tear he’d made. He climbed slowly back onto the seat and palmed open the chiller. “I was beginning to think you’d left me,” he said, retrieving a glass flute.
“Still here, parasite. Keeping you company in your final moments.”
“Parasite,” Severyn echoed as he poured. “You know, if it weren’t for people like you, puppeteering might have never developed. Religious zealots are the ones who axed cloning, after all. Just think. If not for that, we might have been uploading to fresh blank bodies instead of those desperate enough to sell themselves whole.”
He looked at his amber reflection in the flute, studying the beautiful young face he’d worn for nearly two years. He knew the disembodied hacker was seeing it too, and it was an advantage, no matter how she might try to suppress it. Humans loved beauty and underestimated youth. It was one reason Severyn used young bodies instead of the thickset middle-aged Clooneys favored by most CEOs.
“And now it’s too late to go back,” Severyn said, swirling his drink. “Growing a clone is expensive. Finding a volunteer is cheap.” He sipped and held the stinging Perdue in his mouth.
Silence for a beat.
“You have no idea what kind of person I am.”
Severyn felt his hook sink in. He swallowed his drink. “I do,” he replied. “I’ve been thinking about it quite fucking hard, what with my impending evisceration. You’re no Priest. Your familiarity with my security systems and reticence to kill my bodyguard makes me think you’re an employee, former or current.”
“People like you assume everyone’s working for them.”
“Whether you are or not, you’ve done enough research to know I can easily triple whatever the Priesthood is paying for your services.”
“There’s not going to be any negotiation. You’re a dead man.”
Severyn nodded, studying his drink, then slopped it out across the upholstery and smashed the flute against the window. The crystal crunched. Severyn shook the now-jagged stem, sending small crumbs to the floor. It gleamed scalpel-sharp. Running his thumb along it raised hairs on the nape of his neck.
“What are you doing?” the voice blared.
“My hand slipped,” Severyn said. “Old age.” A fat droplet of blood swelled on his thumb, and he wiped it away. He wasn’t one to mishandle his bodies or rent zombies for recreational suicide in drowning tanks, freefalls. No, Severyn’s drive to survive had always been too strong for him to experiment with death. As he brought the edge to his throat he realized that killing himself would not be easy.
“That won’t save you.” Another static laugh, but this one forced. “We’ll upload your storage cone to an artificial body within the day. Throw you into a pleasure doll with the sensitivity cranked to maximum. Imagine how much fun they’d have with that.”
The near-panic was clarion clear, even through a synthesizer. Intuition pounded at Severyn’s temples. The song was still in there, too.
“You played yourself in on a music file,” Severyn said. “I searched it before you shut off my implants. Decapitate the state / wipe the slate / create. Banal, but so very catchy, wasn’t it? Swan song of the Anticorp Movement.”
“I liked the beat.”
“Several of my employees became embroiled in those protests. They were caught trying to coordina
te a viral strike on my bank.” Severyn pushed the point into the smooth flesh of his throat. “Nearly five years ago, now. I believe the chief conspirator was sentenced to twenty years in cryogenic storage.”
“Stop it. Put that down.”
“You must have wanted me to guess,” Severyn continued, worming the glass gently, like a corkscrew. He felt a warm trickle down his neck. “Why keep talking, otherwise? You wanted me to know who got me in the end. This is your revenge.”
“Do you even remember my name?” The voice was warped, but not by static. “And put that down.”
The command came so fierce and raw that Severyn’s hand hesitated without his meaning to. He slowly set the stem in his lap. “Or you kept talking,” he said, “because you missed hearing his voice.”
“Fucking parasite.” The hacker’s voice was tired and suddenly brittle. “First you steal twenty years of my life and then you steal my son.”
“Girasol Fletcher.” There it was. Severyn leaned back, releasing a long breath. “He came to me, you know.” He racked his digital memory for another name, the name of his body before it was his body. “Blake came to me.”
“Bullshit. You always wanted him. Had a feed of his swim meets like a pedophile.”
“I helped him. Possibly even saved him.”
“You made him a puppet.”
Severyn balled a wipe and dabbed at the blood on Blake’s slender neck. “You left him with nothing,” he said. “The money drained off to pay for your cryo. And Blake fell off, too. He was a full addict when he came to me. Hypnotics. Spending all his time in virtual dreamland. You’d know about that.” He paused, but the barb drew no response. “It couldn’t have been for sex fantasies. I imagine he got anything he wanted in realtime. I think maybe he was dreaming his family whole again.”
Silence. Severyn felt a dim guilt, but he pushed through. Survival.
“He was desperate when he found me,” Severyn continued. “I told him I wanted his body. Fifteen-year contract, insured for all organic damage. It’s been keeping your cryo paid off, and when the contract’s up he’ll be comfortable for the rest of his life.”
“Don’t. Act.” A stream of static. “Like you did him a favor.”
Severyn didn’t reply for a moment. He looked at the window, but the glass was still black, opaqued. “I’m not being driven to an execution, am I?”
Girasol wound the limousine through the grimy labyrinth of the industrial district, guiding it past the agreed-upon warehouse where a half-dozen Priests were awaiting the delivery of Severyn Grimes, Chicago’s most notorious parasite. Using the car’s external camera, she saw the lookout’s confused face emerging from behind his mask.
On the internal camera, she couldn’t stop looking into Blake’s eyes, hoping they would be his own again soon.
“There’s a hydrofoil waiting on the docks,” she said through the limousine speakers. “I hired a technician to extract you. Paid him extra to drop your storage cone in the harbor.”
“The Priesthood wasn’t open to negotiations concerning the body.”
Far away, Girasol felt the men clustered around her, watching her prone body like predatory birds. She could almost smell the fast-food grease and sharp chemical sweat.
“No,” she said dully. “Volunteers are as bad as the parasites themselves. Blake sold his soul to a digital demon. To you.”
“When they find out you betrayed their interests?”
Girasol considered. “Pierce will rape me,” she said. “Maybe some of the others, too. Then they’ll pull some amateur knife-and-pliers interrogation shit, thinking it’s some kind of conspiracy. And then they may. Or may not. Kill me.” Her voice was steady until the penultimate word. She calculated distance to the pier. It was worth it. It was worth it. Blake would be free, and Grimes would be gone.
“You could skype in CPD.”
Girasol had already considered. “No. With what I pulled to get out of the freeze, if they find me I’m back in permanently.”
“Skype them in to wherever my bodyguard is being held.”
He was insistent about the caveman. Almost as if he gave a shit. Girasol felt a small slink of self-doubt before she remembered Grimes had amassed his wealth by manipulating emotions. He’d been a puppeteer long before he uploaded. Still trying to pull her strings.
“I would,” Girasol said. “But he’s here with me.”
Grimes paused, frowning. Girasol zoomed. She’d missed Blake’s face so much, the immaculate bones of it, the wide brow and curved lips. She could still remember him chubby and always laughing.
“Can you contact him without the Priests finding out?” Grimes asked.
Girasol fluttered back to the apartment. She was guillotining texts and voice-calls as they poured in from the warehouse, keeping Pierce in the dark for as long as possible, but one of them would slip through before long. She triangulated on the locked van using the parkade security cams.
“Maybe,” she said.
“If you can get him free, he might be able to help you. I have a non-duress passcode. I could give it to you.” Grimes tongued the edges of his bright white teeth. “In exchange, you call off the extraction.”
“Thought you might try to make a deal.”
“It is what I do.” Grimes’s lips thinned. “You lack long-term perspective, Ms. Fletcher. Common enough among first-lifers. The notion of sacrificing yourself to free your progeny must seem exceptionally noble and very fucking romantic to you. But if the Priesthood does murder you, Blake wakes up with nobody. Nothing. Again.”
“Not nothing,” Girasol said reflexively.
“The money you were paid for this job?” Grimes suggested. “He’ll have to go into hiding for as long as my disappearance is under investigation. The sort of people who can help him lay low are the sort of people who’ll have him back on Sandman or Dozr before the month is out. He might even decide to go puppet again.”
Girasol’s fury boiled over, and she nearly lost her hold on the steering column. “He made a mistake. Once. He would never agree to that again.”
“Even if you get off with broken bones, you’ll be a wanted fugitive as soon as Correctional try to thaw you for a physical and find whatever suckerfish the Priests convinced to take your pod.” Grimes flattened his hands on his knees. “What I’m proposing is that you cancel the extraction. My bodyguard helps you escape. We meet up to renegotiate terms. I could have your charges dropped, you know. I could even rewrite Blake’s contract.”
“You really don’t want to die, do you?” Girasol’s suspicion battled her fear, her fear of Pierce and his pliers and his grinning mask. “You’re digital. You saying you don’t have a backup of your personality waiting in the wings?”
She checked the limo’s external cams and swore. A carload of Priests from the warehouse was barreling up the road behind them, guns already poking through the windows. She reached for the in-built speed limits and deleted them.
“I do,” Grimes conceded, bracing himself as the limo accelerated. “But he’s not me, is he?”
Girasol resolved. She bounced back to the apartment, where the Priests were growing agitated. Pierce was shaking her arm, even though he should have known better than to shake someone on a deep slice, asking her how close she was to the warehouse. She flashed TWO MINUTES across the smartpaint.
Then she found the electronic signature of the clamp that was keeping Grimes’s bodyguard paralyzed inside the van. She hoped he hadn’t suffered any long-term nerve damage. Hoped he would still move like quicksilver with that bioblade of his.
“Fair enough,” Girasol said, stretching herself thin, reaching into the empty parkade. “All right. Tell me the passcode and I’ll break him out.”
FINCH WAS FOCUSED on breathing slowly and ignoring the blooming damp spot where piss had soaked through his trousers. The police-issue clamp they’d stuck to his shoulder made most other activities impossible. Finch had experience with the spidery devices. They were designed to rea
ct to any arousal in the central nervous system by sending a paralyzing jolt through the would-be agitator’s muscles. More struggle, more jolt. More panic, more jolt.
The only thing to do with a clamp was relax and not get upset about anything.
Finch used the downtime to reflect on his situation. Mr. Grimes had fallen victim to a planned ambush, that much was obvious. Electronic intrusion, supposedly impossible, must have been behind the limo’s exhaust port diagnostic.
And now Mr. Grimes was being driven to an unknown location, while Finch was lying on the floor of a van with donair wrappers and rumpled anti-puppetry tracts for company. A decade ago, he might have been paranoid enough to think he was a target himself. Religious extremists had not taken kindly to Neanderthal gene mixing at first, but they also had a significant demographic overlap with people overjoyed to see pale-faced and blue-eyed athletes dominating the NFL and NBA again.
Even the flailing Bulls front office had managed to sign that half-thally power forward from Duke. Finch couldn’t remember his name. Cletus something. Finch had played football, himself. Sometimes he wished he’d kept going with it, but his fiancé had cared more about intact gray matter than money. Of course, he hadn’t been thrilled when Finch chose security as an alternative source of income, but…
In a distant corner of his mind, Finch felt the clamp loosening. He kept breathing steadily, kept his heartbeat slow, kept thinking about anything but the clamp loosening. Cletus Rivas. That was the kid’s name. He’d pulled down twenty-six rebounds in the match-up against Arizona. Finch brought his hand slowly, slowly up toward his shoulder. Just to scratch. Just because he was itchy. Closer. Closer.
His fingers were millimeters from the clamp’s burnished surface when the van’s radio blared to life. His hand jerked; the clamp jolted. Finch tried to curse through his lockjaw and came up with mostly spit. So close.
“Listen up,” came a voice from the speaker.
Finch had no alternative.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12 Page 50