by Greg Chivers
I turn my head away but I can still hear the tremble of his limbs against the floor. I don’t want him to die; I’ve only just learned to know him. Without Levi, these strange disciples of a nonsensical faith are my only link to humanity. I will be lost.
The crash kit emits its high whine as the charge builds again and Hilda shouts …
‘CLEAR!’
I step aside and she bustles past, paddles rubbing with that sound of sliding metal. The thump of current discharging into Levi’s chest fills my ears.
35.
Levi
Somebody burned holes in my favourite T-shirt and threw it on the floor. Whoever it was also left me naked in a room that smells like singed hair. My fingers are covered in dried blood and it hurts to touch anything. I haven’t tried to move yet but the warning signs are all there; it’s not going to be fun, so I skip it. My head falls back on a single thin pillow and the ceiling speaks to me, faces in the whorled wood of the beams mouthing insults. They’re right; Levi Peres is a fucking idiot.
At least I know where I am. The cheap pale pine and the absence of anything fun tells me I’ve got to be in one of the Mission’s empty accommodation huts. I would like to know how I got here. I would also like to know what day it is – the way my body has buried itself into this bed tells me I’ve been here a long time.
Or maybe not.
Maybe it’s just because I’m fucked up, but I swear there is something going on in my head, like I’m watching myself thinking. A part of me thinks I only just got here, and all these thoughts are stupid and meaningless, the buzzing of a fly crashing into a windowpane. It’s like sometimes when I have a hangover, I hate myself for at least six hours, but this is worse, like someone else is doing the hating.
The realization that the burnt smell is coming from me flashes a memory of pain and light through my skull. What’s left of my chest hair snaps between fingertips and the touch screams on my skin.
Shit.
I was on my way to the Gethsemane bunkers. I can remember a glimpse of the Old City silhouetted in the twilight before I entered the tunnels. I remember the dark but I don’t remember going in – no journey, no transition. There’s other stuff, memories too jagged to touch: the image of a tattooed man with a gun holding his finger to his lips; a girl with metal hair – I see her moving but at the same time I see her lying in the water on the tunnel floor. The pictures are true but jumbled. I don’t know what they mean. Did I ever? There’s a shadow in my head and it boils when I try to think.
Just lie here.
My body sighs as it hits the mattress. The bed feels good but a part of me, the part of me that’s still me, knows it’s not right. I can’t just lie here; that’s giving up. My brain throbs with the urge to flee; my limbs twitch, uncertain. How can I run from thoughts?
The muscles of my spine howl in protest as I lever myself up to sitting. My left arm spasms under the strain of lifting, and my hand slips on the cheap sheet covering the mattress, pitching me onto my side. My elbow catches on the bedframe. The jolt of pain is lightning in my skull. In its flash I see the shadow recoil like it’s alive. What am I even looking at? I’ve never seen pictures of the inside of my head – no, my mind (what’s the difference?) – before. This isn’t imagination. This is something I don’t understand.
The weight of my legs swinging to the floor drags my torso to an approximation of upright. The door frame slants diagonally across my eyeline. There’s something wrong with my vision? Balance? I’m still going through the possible permutations of neck muscle and spinal adjustments when the skewed door opens and a rectangle of faint daylight frames a diagonal Clementine.
The sight of her makes me cry. I look at her face and for a moment I see my mother, a snapshot from my earliest memories, before I knew about the bruises she hid with her hair. But Clementine isn’t my mother. She’s a strange, beautiful child that I dragged into all of this. She glides over like a ghost and kneels in front of me, looking up. Those weird, deep eyes: I know what they are now – they’re where she’s been marked, remade into something different, but they don’t stop her being beautiful.
‘Levi, you’re weak, you shouldn’t move. We’re safe here. Rest.’
She’s wrong. I’m not safe. Nobody’s safe. My jaw shivers. A weak sound leaks from my lungs. Why can’t I say that? Clem puts her fingertips on my chest and pushes like a breeze. I fall back into the bed flailing like a drowning man, shaking my head frantically, except I can see in her face that I’m not. The command to perform the action of head-shaking echoes pointlessly around my head, blocked by the shadow.
‘Help.’ The word rises to my lips with no conscious effort, a cry of animal instinct to survive – that’s how it escaped. Clem’s eyes defocus and her body stiffens. In an instant she transforms subtly from nurse to predator. Her fingers dig painfully into my shoulders but the sensation nails me into presence – I am here, now, in this body. It is mine. She stares through me at the presence within. Her lips draw back in a snarl, and then the sun explodes in my head.
‘Clem …’ I can talk.
‘Levi, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it would still be there. I thought, I hoped, we’d killed it.’
‘Killed it? What are you talking about, Clem? What the hell’s happened to me?’
Her fingers unclench from my shoulders but stay touching, the pressure a gentle reassurance – for me, or for her?
‘Something inside the Antikythera Mechanism attacked you, infected you. It attacked me first when I touched it but my vital signs started dropping through the floor. My heart stopped, so Hilda zapped me with the defibrillator. It seems this thing plugs into the human nervous system and overrides commands from the brain, so that makes it at least temporarily vulnerable to sensory overloads. The shock from the defibrillator gave me a chance to take back control of my body. I wanted to warn you, but you’d already gone by the time I could talk.’
‘So that’s what happened to the other people in the tunnels with me?’
‘We think so.’
‘I don’t understand any of this.’
She shakes her head, apologetic. ‘None of us do. Hilda calls it a demon. Whatever you want to call it, the thing from inside the Mechanism is old. It spreads like a computer virus. It takes control of anything it touches.’
‘But you can beat it? With your stuff … you just blasted it out of my head. I can’t feel it any more.’
‘The things that seized control of you and me were bursts of tailored code, fragments of its essence designed to make us receptive to the commands of the creator. I have remade myself more than once – as soon as Hilda gave me a chance, it wasn’t hard for me to exorcize a bad program. I can’t do that inside your head. The biological functions of your brain are messy and imprecise – I can interact with the code, but not you, not internally.’
My hands move uselessly to the sides of my head. ‘It’s still in here?’
Clementine nods slowly, eyes not meeting mine. ‘You have a headache. It’s a neurological after-effect of the arithmetical wrestling match we fought for dominance of your head-space. It lasted micro-seconds – you probably experienced the struggle as an instant of blinding pain, but the code is still reliving it. I trapped it in a data loop, except I tweaked the ending so it won. If we’re lucky it could stay transfixed forever, or at least until some contradictory data intrudes. I’ve bought you time, Levi. I hope it’s enough.’
Time. I want to ask how much, but I know she doesn’t know. I want to scream. I want to dash my head against the wall until the thing inside comes out. I do none of these things.
‘So what do we do? Destroy the Antikythera thing? At least that way it doesn’t get anyone else. Maybe that’s enough to fuck up this piece of shit code in my head too.’
Clem’s hand squeezes gently, but she still won’t look at me. ‘I’m not sure we can.’
‘What are you talking about? Antique bronze meets sledgehammer, or laser cutter, or acid bath – whateve
r, it’s all good.’
‘The thing inside …’
‘The demon.’
‘… the thing inside the Antikythera device isn’t the same thing as the device itself. I think the device is a containment mechanism.’
‘Like a prison.’
She tilts her head, weighing the word for its suitability. ‘I suppose so.’
‘So you’re saying we shouldn’t break it?’
‘I don’t know, Levi. I’m guessing about all of this stuff.’ She points to herself with a thumb and looks goofy. ‘You really want to get your advice on fighting monsters from a six-year-old?’
‘Are you kidding? If you want to know about fighting monsters, a six-year-old is exactly who you ask. Seriously, nobody else understands this like you do. I don’t think anyone in Jerusalem could see it even if it was staring them in the face.’
Fear shadows Clem’s face as the truth sinks in. It’s us who have to deal with this thing, which means her. ‘Maybe Hilda …’
We both know the thought is wrong, but she doesn’t get to finish it before the door creaks open. It’s Ludmila, looking different again, any trace of the showgirl vanished with the coat. She pauses a moment to take in the sight of us, then utters a single word.
‘Hide.’
I feel Clem flinch. ‘Levi’s still too weak, he can’t move yet.’
‘What’s happening?’ My voice comes out as a croak. I shift my bodyweight in the bed to see if anything’s changed since I woke up. Clem’s hand pins me in place so easily, I’m not sure she’s even trying. Ludmila’s face darkens.
‘The police are coming. We just saw vans on the camera next to the main road. The track gets too narrow for them pretty fast, so they’ll have to get out and walk. You’ve got maybe ten minutes before they’re on you.’
Ludmila’s impatience breaks her stillness. She bends at the waist and starts gathering my stuff from the floor into a bundle. Clem shakes her head, gives me a look like she’s apologizing, and then hoists me out of the bed in one movement. Before I know it, I’m staring at the floor, draped across her shoulders in a fireman’s carry. The burns on my chest howl harder, and every muscle in my body joins in, but Clem moves smoothly, pivoting so I fit lengthwise through the door. As soon as we’re outside, she turns to Ludmila for direction. ‘Where?’
The tall nun points to one of the greenhouses with her free hand, clutching my clothes to her chest with the other, and Clem sets off at a steady run, eating up the metres as if she didn’t have a full-grown man on her back. Ludmila matches her stride for stride, even though she’s got to be maybe twenty years older. In two minutes, Clem’s bending to ease me through the heavy plastic curtain that serves as the greenhouse door. She’s not even out of breath.
For a second I feel like I’m drowning as the humidity swallows us. The air’s so thick I can’t see the sides of the polytunnel through the greenery, even though it’s only a few metres away. My ears fill with the hisses of water under pressure and the snicker of sprinklers. Everything in here drips.
‘What’s going on, Clem?’
Ludmila’s voice answers from behind us. ‘Someone must have traced us from the precinct house when we got you.’
Clem opens her mouth like she’s about to say something, but looks away, guilty. The conversation stops as we pass through another heavy plastic curtain.
We stop next to a massive pile of compost. I swear I can see it steaming, even in here. I can sure as hell smell it. She lays me out on it and lies next to me, curled into a ball; then Ludmila drops the clothes on us and covers us with what looks like a tinfoil blanket. ‘We can’t rule out the possibility they can detect Clementine’s EM signature. This should block the obvious wavelengths.’ I’m still trying to work out what the hell that means when the first forkful of manure lands on my face.
‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ I spit out some stinking rotten straw that strayed into my mouth.
‘It gives you a chance if they bring sniffer dogs.’
‘That’s not what I mean. Most people in the city already think you guys are pretty weird, maybe even dangerous. If you start aiding and abetting felons – it could all blow up in your face.’
She pauses a moment with the fork in her hand. A look passes between her and Clem. ‘It’s too late for us to back out of this now.’ She resumes forking the dirt.
‘Seriously, you need to think about this …’
‘Close your mouth or I’ll fill it with dung. I’ve got maybe two minutes before the cops show up. The Mission exists to help the helpless. We don’t stop whenever it gets inconvenient.’
Another clod of manure on my face cuts off what I was about to say. I breathe through my nose. The dirt around me muffles the sound of heavy feet running outside.
36.
Clementine
I see it when I sleep; the darkness bleeds through the bars of its cage and expands through my mind like ink in water. When I wake, the memory lingers, the mark of a dead god on my consciousness. The code lies dormant during the day. It is harder for Levi. Last time I saw him, his eyes were a battleground of two wills locked in mortal struggle. That was a few hours ago. I cannot know how much he has left to give.
They keep us all in separate cells. I think Hilda is somewhere close, but Levi is in the main block with the other male prisoners. The police ransacking of the farmstead was brutal, an act of war by a city seeking revenge. They found everything. Levi was turfed, stinking, from the dung pit. The bomb squad used metal detectors to find where we’d buried the Antikythera in the corner of a field of freshly fertilized zucchini, and they took it away in a different metal box. We were all put in a high-sided armoured van with tiny windows at the top and handcuffed to a metal rail on the wall.
I cried when Hilda told me the van was taking us to prison. All I knew was stories from films I’d seen in the tanks growing up – morality tales where harsh incarceration exacts retribution on deviants who flout the law. It’s really not that bad. As ‘a special-risk prisoner’ I am alone in my cell, which is a blessing not conferred upon those deemed less threatening. In some ways this place is not so different from the Mission, although mould darkens cracks in the whitewashed concrete here. Around me I dimly sense the swirls and eddies of all the jail’s data, but caution prevents me exploring. I have to assume I am being observed across the spectra. Deploying my antennae would tip my hand. I will only get one chance to play it.
A lawyer has visited me twice. He is young, older than me in strict chronology, but occasional moments of wide-eyed incredulity betray his nervousness. Before we were separated, Hilda warned me to say nothing about the device. She placed no other strictures on what I reveal, leaving it to my judgement which of our many secrets might offer some hope of reprieve or mitigation, but his reactions to the few morsels I offered convinced me Hilda’s course is best, though it fills me with fear.
A brief hum followed by a clatter announces the extinction of the lights on our level. My bunk folds down from the wall and locks into position, held up by a chain at one corner. My body moulds itself to the hard wipe-clean surface, but sleep doesn’t come. For two hundred heartbeats I stare into the shadows of the ceiling. Is this cell, or another like it, where my journey ends? In most ways it’s no worse than the vats where my nameless, genderless siblings and I lived our ersatz childhoods, growing on a diet of synthesized nutrients and hormones, our minds shaped by propaganda. In here, the absence of stimulation is more than offset by the knowledge that every experience, every trivial itch or breath, is real. It’s not so bad, but I’d hoped for more.
Soft footsteps from the walkway outside rouse me from my thoughts.
‘Hilda?’
No response. I prop myself up with both elbows. The faint light from a guard post at the end of the corridor outlines the figure of a man standing still and silent outside the door to my cell. My eyes itch with the urge to engage my low-light image-enhancement module, but for now I must remain base-human.
‘Not sleeping, Clementine?’ The voice that issues from the figure is an old man’s, but smooth and confident, like a singer’s.
‘Who are you?’
‘You haven’t guessed? Or used any of your marvellous tricks to find out?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Something like a flush of embarrassment courses through the scars along my spine.
‘Oh, it took us a while to find out what happened in the museum storage facility, I’ll admit that. We are a technological backwater compared to the white heat of your European war factories, but I like to think what we lack in sophistication, we make up for in persistence. Beautiful work, by the way. I was fully expecting Peres, or one of his fleabag associates, to shinny up the drainpipe, or something equally crude. I’d temporarily disabled the security systems to permit something of the kind to happen, but instead your tele-presence ghosts in, switches labels on two packages, and we deliver the Antikythera Mechanism to you. The theft would have gone unnoticed for months if it weren’t for all this political nonsense, but here we are.’
The dark figure falls silent, leaving a gap I don’t want to fill, but the thought of what’s in Levi, of what’s inside me, forces me to speak. ‘Give me the device and let me out of here, or you will die.’
‘Is that a threat?’ Light glints off metal on his wrist: an antique timepiece. I remember it from Levi’s descriptions of Silas. This must be the man he was so frightened of.
‘I’m in no position to threaten. It is merely a probable outcome of the situation as it stands.’
He laughs. ‘Why? Is it supposed to be sacred in a way a heathen like me couldn’t possibly understand? You’re a Machine; why do you care about an archaeological curiosity?’
The question takes me off guard. I expected to be dismissed out of hand. This man, for all his calculated evil, is open to learning in a way I have learned most humans are not. Perhaps there is hope. ‘The Mechanism is dangerous. It is killing Levi. It will kill anyone it touches.’