by Greg Chivers
‘OK, OK, I’ll do it. You’re pathetic, you know that? It’s just a freaking bomb shelter. It’s been empty a hundred years.’
‘Love you, man.’
‘Yeah, whatever. Bye.’
It should be a ten-minute walk to the Mission from my apartment, but Yusuf’s detour takes up the hour after breakfast, and the streets are filling up by the time I get going. The route takes you to the north edge of the Old City, where the walls crumpled like paper and the only time people talk about reconstruction it’s the punchline in a bad joke. Harsh morning light shows up the worst of it. Broken glass shines like teeth in the windows of skeleton buildings. Sagging wires just above head height carry stolen electricity to a few of the squats, but at night it’s mostly dark around here.
The Mission’s the least shitty thing in the neighbourhood, which isn’t saying much. All the cripples and the kanj-heads are outside, cluttering up the doorway or sliding off like woodlice to wherever it is they hide in daytime. They watch quietly, trying to figure out if I’m a mark, losing interest as soon as they realize I’m not here to empty my wallet. Eventually one of them points me in the right direction.
At first the robe throws me off, but the brown ghost pushing a mop around the crummy dining hall is her. All that cloth hides her legs so it looks like she’s floating across the yellow patches of floor between the tables where the bums eat their dinner.
‘Hey, Cinderella …’ She looks up. ‘Spare me a few minutes of your valuable time?’
She fixes her eyes on the mop; they follow the shiny streak it leaves on the floor. It smells like a hospital in here. ‘Last time we spoke, you said you didn’t need a girlfriend. I think we’re on the same page.’
The mop goes into the stained metal bucket like a drowning man and unleashes another burst of detergent stink. I grab the handle. She looks at me like she’s a second away from reaching for a blade. There’s something funny about her eyes, like they’re set too deep. She pulls the stick away from me and the head makes a big wet slap as it hits the floor. She’s strong.
The thing about being in my business is that you learn pretty quick not to take the brush-off: from girls, from gangsters, doesn’t matter. If you need something, you go after it. Also, like Yusuf said, options are something I don’t have right now.
‘Fat Saul wants his orange back.’ The hood of the robe falls back, away from her face, as she looks up at me, eyes wide with suspicion, maybe fear. She wants to ask how I know, but she’s not saying, which is good; keeping your mouth shut is an under-appreciated prerequisite for this business. Some people never learn it. The mop stops and settles into a thin pool of grimy water as she leans on it, listening. ‘Are you even earning any money here?’ We both know the answer to that question but still, the point needed to be made. ‘One week, two thousand shekels, and don’t worry, it’s nothing nasty.’
The money gets her attention, like I knew it would. I can see she’s still thinking about it when the mop starts moving again. How clean does a floor need to be? It’s only bums that eat here. ‘Don’t they ever give you time off in this place? Listen, I can see you’re busy with some important work right now, but when you’re done, come see me down at Yusuf’s tonight. We can have a proper conversation. I’ll be there ’til seven o’clock.’
The place is empty apart from the regulars when I get in. Yusuf’s watching war porn on the news feeds. One look is enough to tell you tourist season won’t be happening any time soon – Machine crackdowns on insurgents in France and Norway, Sino-Sovs still getting pushed back on the Kazakh front. He finally drags his eyes off the screen when the picture cuts from footage to a talking head.
‘Hey, Levi! Did you—’
‘Don’t say it! I know what you’re gonna say and I don’t need to hear it. It’s under control. That’s all you need to know!’
‘I was just going to ask if you got the whisky.’
‘Yes! Yes, I got your whisky, OK? And yes, I went to the Mission. I did exactly as you said. There, OK, I said it. Happy now?’ I know he’s just pushing my buttons and I shouldn’t give him the satisfaction but sometimes I can’t help it. I mean, it’s one thing to give the guy a little excitement in his life when he’s stuck behind the bar all day, but you’d have to be a saint to put up with his I-told-you-so shit.
‘So …’
‘She’s coming.’
‘When?’
‘Tonight.’
‘I guess we’ll see.’
‘Yeah, I guess we will.’
By the time she walks in, its twenty to eight and Yusuf’s already collected on the little bet we made about whether she’d show. The robe’s gone, and she looks different, dark blond hair combed back like a man’s, I guess so she gets less attention, but she’s wearing those weird tight clothes again. Maybe they’re not so strange if you’re from Europe. I don’t know – we used to get tourists, now we get refugees, but she doesn’t look like either.
‘Good to see you, babe, but you know, punctuality is important in this line of work.’
‘Yeah, sorry about that. I brought you an orange.’
There’s an orange on the table and I don’t know where it came from. I didn’t even see her fingers move. In those clothes there’s nowhere she could hide one of Fat Saul’s big Jaffas. This could still be a good day for Levi Peres.
6.
Silas
A shining stalactite of drool extends from the lip of the broken being in front of him. In a minute it’ll break and land on the office rug, which supposedly belonged to a Persian King: Cambyses or something. At moments like this, his father’s words come back to haunt him. The old man used to say: ‘The problem with money is that you have to earn it.’ After a lifetime spent trying to prove him wrong, this moment serves as a dismal affirmation. Meeting the customer is perhaps the harshest of the many unforgiving practicalities of business, and today it manifests in the form of three figures of indeterminate gender filling Silas’s office. Metal obliterates almost all trace of the people they used to be, sculpted into shining limbs and crania, leaving only the merest patches of exposed flesh necessary for cutaneous respiration. The nearest one, the dribbler, has taken a step further to abandon his humanity; sludgy nutrient sacs on his back are proof he has overcome the tyranny of desire for food, but the feeding tube running into his mouth prevents his lips meeting completely. Hence the carpet issue.
Of all the many stripes of loon who form the patchwork fabric of the city, none irritate Silas as effectively as the Cult of the Machine, but personal preferences cannot be permitted to intrude on business, not when these sums of money are at stake. If his visitors notice his carefully veiled animosity, they give no sign. An inability to perceive the emotions of others is a weakness that almost always afflicts those who consider themselves superior, and the Mechanicals are no exception. They glory in their semi-synthetic endocrine and lymphatic systems, crudely re-engineered to interface with their creaking prosthetics. Anyone with an ounce of self-worth would permit only as much intrusion into their body as is necessary for the essentials of communication and medical care, but the Mechanicals would have you believe that slaving your nervous system to a Korean-built micro-processor in a box at the base of your skull somehow makes you more than human, rather than less. Their very presence here, in his office, gives the lie to their bluster. If they’d attained any Machine-like detachment, they’d sit back and wait for delivery, but no, they’re worried. A skilled observer can discern the signs; it’s just a different kind of body language. Real people fidget or mess their hair. These damaged appliances emit heat. The dribbler speaks first.
‘We want you to bring forward delivery of the device.’
The feeding tube gives the poor thing a lisp. Manners dictate Silas endeavour to look it in the eye. The oval face is pale and veined from tissue rejection and the steady diet of immunosuppressants taken to counter the body’s response to contamination by metal limbs and digits. The reality of cheap, backstreet augmentat
ion is something the Cult doesn’t show to potential recruits, but progression depends on physical demonstrations of commitment, and the faith doesn’t pay for new arms for the rank and file. If they survive to reach middle management, they all look like this one, give or take a tube. It won’t have long left in its current form; it’ll either ‘ascend’ and be admitted to the factory-labs of Europe by its masters, where they’ll remove the last vestiges of human flesh and graft its electronically preserved consciousness into a bio-engineered form within an exoskeleton of shining metal, or it will die of something resembling AIDS. The Machines who inspire this worship are an abomination, a wrong turn humanity might have avoided in a better world, but their power is more real than any god’s, and their ersatz faith certainly incentivizes the workers.
Silas shrugs. ‘You know the schedule we’re on. The job entails expenses. If you want me to stick to the dates, I need you to cover my operating costs.’
‘It is yours. You should take it and give it to us.’
‘We’ve discussed this. The Antikythera Mechanism is not mine, it belongs to the city.’
‘But you could take it. Give it to us now. We will pay you more.’
This is where difficulties arise. The Machine Cult are decidedly less than human when it comes to acknowledging such minutiae of existence as holding down a job. You could view that as evidence of the changes their body-modification has wrought upon their minds, although Silas rather suspects they haven’t changed at all – the people who inflict this upon themselves are the ones who couldn’t cope with all the messy uncertainties real life entails. The extinction of flesh reduces the uncomfortable variables of self, but the external world is harder to control. Reality is stubborn and unforgiving, and today Silas is its avatar.
‘Please, there is a schedule. Deviating from it will bring trouble none of us want.’
The taller, healthier one in the middle of the trio pipes up. ‘Another two million. Bring it to us tomorrow.’ The end of the last word disappears in a wet gurgle. They are not flexible thinkers – they struggle to let go of an idea once they’ve latched onto it. The mistake would be to think they are stupid. The one at the back, not talking, is doing a reasonably surreptitious survey of the security arrangements. The slow, lateral turns of his head suggest he has some sort of scanning augmentation built in around his eyes, perhaps even total replacements. If they’ve received surveillance technology from their patrons in the West, any locally available counter-measure will be useless.
‘I have removed the Antikythera device from public display as a precursor to our enterprise, but it is not on these premises. If you wish to withdraw from the arrangement previously agreed …’ Silas stresses the word any sane human being would recognize as significant. ‘… you should feel free to make your own arrangements. After all, no money has changed hands. I feel I should add, though, just so you fully understand the parameters within which you must make your decision, that in addition to their standard weaponry, I have equipped the museum’s guards with dart guns capable of delivering a discreet dose of phenobarbital.’
They stare blankly.
‘Really? No? Well, allow me to enlighten you. It’s a remarkably cheap and effective way to negate immunosuppressants.’
The heat from their bodies becomes palpable as nervous energy is reprocessed into something their systems can handle. They remain perfectly still. Without the drugs, their bodies will reject the metal they’ve forced in, attacking it like cancers. It is a grim, painful death, but, more than that, it is an undoing of everything they’ve become – a forced recognition of its artificiality and wrongness. Those darts are existential terror for a shekel a shot.
One of them takes a step forward, his shadow darkening the desk. It is another weakness of the Machine Cult that they overestimate their ability to intimidate. In their infuriating way, the Cultists are a fascinating case study in the gap between the imagined perceptions of others and reality. They imagine they wield the power of their inhuman masters in the West – the unspoken threat of it hangs in the air – but it is bluff. The writ of the great powers does not extend to the Holy City. If it did, Jerusalem would be just another factory, but instead their proxies are ruining the carpet.
‘So, gentlemen, to my expenses: I require five hundred thousand to cover my initial outlays on personnel and equipment, and another five to fund the next stage of the operation. That will suffice until delivery, at which point I’ll have to insist on payment in full prior to handover.’
Their stare is unwavering, but eventually the one at the back speaks. ‘You must be there.’
‘No. My terms of delivery are non-negotiable. The associates I have engaged are quite capable of getting the item to the coast, or any other chosen extraction point. My government commitments do not permit me to leave the city.’
The frustration of it is that he has had this conversation with them before, in various forms. They must have hoped their physical presence would alter its outcome this time, but the truth is that they came here with no leverage. If you were inclined towards sympathy, you might even pity their predicament. They are laying out a huge quantity of money given to them by creatures of utter ruthlessness and unimaginable power. For them, failure in this enterprise carries not just a certainty of death, but a denial of the afterlife they have dedicated their existences to achieving. Like any purchaser, they want to feel they are in control. In a commercial transaction a good salesman will foster the illusion, but this is the point at which criminal enterprise differs – even the appearance of ceding control can be fatal. Silas makes a show of looking at his watch, a usefully pointed anachronism for the present audience.
‘You’ll have to forgive me, I’m afraid I’m going to have to bring this meeting to a close. If you can be sure to have the money wired to my account by close of business today, I will be sure to keep our little operation on schedule.’
7.
Clementine
Levi’s thin fingers close around the bright fruit as if to test its reality. He pinches the green leaf from its stem and sniffs it before leaning back, apparently satisfied. At the edge of her vision, the other one watches from behind the bar, his face halved in blue chiaroscuro by light from a screen showing some foreign sport. A bank of three refrigerators against the wall hums as freon courses through the tubes of their heat exchangers. One is a semitone deeper than its fellows and rattles faintly at thirty-second intervals. A dripping tap plays counterpoint to the chorus, but otherwise the room is silent.
At a nod from Levi the barman bustles out from behind the counter like a heavily muscled housewife. Clementine hovers, uncertain where to sit, resisting the urge to blink and peer into the room’s darker recesses. A squeal of tortured wood from behind makes her jump as Yusuf slides a splintered wooden bar down between two staples on the door, sealing them all in.
‘Closing early tonight. This is a private conversation.’ His smile summons the memory of yesterday. His kindness had been a chink of light in her despair, but that meant nothing now. These people were criminals; that much was clear.
‘Over here.’
A sudden circle of light illuminates a small round table in the corner of the room. Levi hunches over something, just as he did before. That time it was trinkets, now it’s two data slates hard-linked by a physical wire: old-school, but secure. Whatever is in them is supposed to be secret. The yellow glare from the ceiling lamp prevents her seeing what’s on the slates. Levi extinguishes the images with a tap of the finger and looks up as she approaches.
‘So, how are you doing? You like it there, at the Mission?’
‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ Guilt darkens Clementine’s words. Nobody at the Mission made her sign contracts or swear oaths, but this still feels like a betrayal.
‘Yeah, I guess you are.’
‘So are you going to tell me about this job?’
‘In a minute. The thing you need to understand is that once I tell you the details, there’s no back
ing out.’ He looks over her shoulder to where Yusuf still stands next to the barred door, and then looks to her, waiting.
‘You want me to say “yes” without knowing what I’m agreeing to?’
‘Basically, yeah. Don’t worry, it’s only a little bit illegal.’ Levi chuckles at his own joke, but Clementine turns away, stares at the floor. The attempt at humour throws the reality of her choices into stark relief. It’s this or the mop and the kitchen forever, serving the ghosts as they pass through.
‘Levi, we don’t know each other. We can’t really talk about trust, or agreements, or anything like that. There’s no reason for me to trust you, or vice versa, so let me tell you where I’m at, and then you can decide for yourself how much of a risk it is to tell me about this job. How’s that?’
His mouth narrows into a line and his gaze flicks to Yusuf and then back to her.
‘OK, tell me “where you’re at”.’ His words mimic Clementine’s still shaky Arabic accent.
She forces a smile. ‘I’m broke, I spent last night in a homeless shelter, and the locals seem to regard the only clothes I own as some kind of sexual invitation. I need the money.’ Her smile sags beneath the weight of reality in those words, but she holds it in place and fixes Levi’s gaze, waiting for him to speak.
‘I think we can do business.’ His grin is a salesman’s, closing an easy deal. He taps the corner of one of the screens, and both of them shine into life; then he flips them around to face Clementine. They are photographs of the interior of a building taken from its own security cameras. ‘I need you to get into this building – it’s a museum storage facility – and retrieve an artefact. Think you can do that?’
‘Yes.’
He laughs again. ‘Confident, that’s good.’
Her fingers slide across the table to touch the tablet, but Levi jerks it back, caging it with his own hand just beyond her reach.
‘Keep your hands to yourself. You see what I need you to see, no more.’