by Nate Kenyon
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Apex Publications, LLC
www.apexdigest.com
Copyright ©2009 by Nate Kenyon
First published in 2009, 2009
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NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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CONTENTS
To Emily, Harrison, and Abbey:
Acknowledgments
BEFORE
AFTER
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-2-
-3-
-4-
-5-
-6-
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PRIME
By Nate Kenyon
This collection is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
PRIME
Copyright © 2009 by Nate Kenyon
Cover art “Cloning” © by Katja Faith
Interior art © by Mike Dominic
Cover design by Justin Stewart
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce the book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Apex Publications, LLC
PO Box 24323
Lexington, KY 40524
www.apexbookcompany.com www.natekenyon.com katjafaith.deviantart.com
First Edition, July 2009
ISBN TPB: 978-0-9821596-2-0
Printed in the United States of America
www.apexbookcompany.com
To Emily, Harrison, and Abbey:
May your sandcastles never fall down.
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Acknowledgments
I'd like to thank Jason Sizemore at Apex for his enthusiasm for my work and Deb Taber for her excellent editing skills.
I'd also like to thank my agent, Brendan Deneen at FinePrint Literary Management, for helping find this novella a home and for his constant support. He's one of the good guys, and I'm glad to have him in my corner.
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"At this inflection point the world as we know it will change; real will mesh with virtual and life will bleed seamlessly into art until there are no longer any visible seams. Humankind will, at its Second Stage apex, become one with the machine, and will never look back."
—Michael Gutenberg, Transformations: Book One
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BEFORE
Outside the shell, the machines were alive, swarming his flesh. They entered through his mouth and tumbled down his throat like a thousand tiny sand fleas, leaping and turning and wriggling, pumping oxygen into his lungs and cells, keeping his blood fresh and red. The nanomachines took to their duty like good little soldiers while the waveform manipulators washed his cortex, reading whatever blips remained and recording past histories.
His chest rose and fell, muscles twitched, an eyelid fluttered, and imagination took flight with the dreams of men.
Inside, all was still and dark and empty.
—
"He's gone, then?"
"Not quite. We can detect a bit of activity, but it's not clear what's left."
"Could see it coming. He lost focus."
"Love will do that to you."
The figure standing before the glass sighed. “What was recovered, then?"
"Memories. Fragments. I'll show you."
The glass flickered as a holodeck unit hissed to life. The projected image showed a darkened room and a man strapped to a chair, arms cuffed behind his back. His head was down, and although his chest moved, he gave no indication of consciousness.
A second man entered the projected room, and then a third. They approached the man in the chair, spoke in a Cantonese dialect, and then one of them kicked the legs of the chair away so that the prisoner fell backward to the floor.
"Siu sam!” the other said. Be careful.
The other one laughed. “Nei bin do tung?” he said to the man in the chair. “Nei sui yiu hui chi soh ma?"
The man on the floor moaned. “Don't,” he said. His voice was barely audible. “Please."
"English?” The one who had kicked him stepped closer. “You no tell us who hire you, you hurt more. I take finger.” He took out a laser blade. “I cut one, two. Maybe more. Maybe here next.” He gestured to his own crotch. “You like?"
"I...” the prisoner tried to move away, pushing his legs weakly against the floor, but the chair kept him still. “I'll tell you. Just please..."
"Yes?” The man with the blade leaned in. “You talk now. Name?"
Abruptly, the man on the floor thrust up from his hips and lashed out with a vicious kick, his foot snapping the other man's head back and driving the cartilage of his nose deep into his brain. He flexed his arms and the chair frame cracked, and as his adversary fell dead he was already free of the chair and looping his cuffed arms underneath and around his legs to his front.
The second man who had entered the room turned to run. The cuffed man was on him in seconds, flicking his hands over the fleeing man's neck and pulling the chain taut.
Silence fell, broken only by the choking sounds that slowly died away—and then a second body falling lifeless to the floor.
The cuffed man listened for a moment, then returned to the first body and picked up the laser blade. A quick twist of the blade in his hands and the cuffs fell free.
He stood among the dead and smiled.
—
"Stop it there, please,” said the man standing at the glass. The holodeck image froze. “Impressive."
"He was hired to take down a virus that had disabled half the East Coast network. These men were members of the group who unleashed it. He went in afterward and killed the bug in record time, then found the rest of the group and terminated them. He was gone before they'd even started to clean up the mess."
"Hmmm. How do we know he's not playing possum now?"
"His waveforms are practically flatlined."
"We didn't see this sort of effort here."
"He's been compromised. Lost focus, as you said. I have other examples of his skill—"
"No, that's enough. You think we still need him. Can he be revived?"
"I don't know."
The man at the glass studied the supine figure on the table. “All right. We have what we want. If this is an insurance policy, have at it, whatever you need to do. Just don't let the whole thing come back to bite us."
The man stepped away and left the room. After a few moments the second man who had spoken approached the barrier. He stared at the prisoner on the table. “Thank you,” he whispered.
As he watched the nanomachines do their work, his finger absently traced the circle and arrow pattern etched into the glass.
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AFTER
Six years later
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-1-
The two women were historians, and as they entered the nesting cubicle, they were deep in a heated discussion about meat as art. “Fischer's oils create a visceral response,” one said. “Raw flesh becomes an object of worship, whereas with Sterbak it's often more about human flesh and our response as it is presented under circumstances that are jarring to the viewer. It's the difference between consumption for sustenance versus sexual pleasure. You see?"
"I w
ouldn't call her House of Pain sexual."
"Ah, but that's exactly it.” The two women settled back in soft, contoured zero-gravity chairs, their weight perfectly balanced within the contact suits they wore like second skins. The cubicle was bare, the smooth cream walls meant to swallow noise and reflect sensation. It was rented by the hour. “Sex and death. Ever read The Tears of Eros? They're inextricably linked."
"Bataille was a surrealist."
"Only when it was convenient.” The second woman, taller and nicely plump, rubbed her ample breasts. “These suits always make me feel like I'm wearing nothing at all. Are you ready, Dobs?"
Deborah nodded and handed her the headgear. “I want a tall one this time, a royal perhaps, with chest hair."
The plump woman, whose name was Stephie, slipped the gear over her head and settled it into place. No corneal implants for either of them, at least not yet, although Deborah finally could have afforded something like that after all these years.
She looked at Stephie. So enthusiastic, like a child with a new toy. A net virgin until university, born to card-carrying members of the virtual resistance who were obsessed with organic cloned fruits, historical recreations of eighteenth century France, and leg hair, the experience was still relatively new to her. Deborah assumed that the history degree in twenty-first century art had been her rebellion. She seemed to be making up for lost time.
Stephie's voice came muffled from within; they hadn't established a com-link yet. “Sustenance versus sexual pleasure, indeed. I'm thinking Nordic, with a fighter's build—"
"That's what you always choose!"
"And a brooding, artistic type. Eric Bloodaxe and Poe. Wouldn't it be fun to have an intellectual discussion with one while the other bends you over a chair?"
Deborah giggled. “You're so dirty, Stephie."
"We're on vacation. I feel it's appropriate."
"I suppose I need to invest in my own equipment."
"Then you'd use it all the time,” Stephie said. “I'm not ready to give up on the physical, regardless of what our lovely government is preaching, but the temptation would be too much if it were right in front of me. As Gutenberg has made abundantly clear, once the illusion of reality is seamless, humanity will have difficulty finding reason to return. You've experienced his Transformations, haven't you?"
Deborah nodded. Of course she had; everyone had at least once, even the non-believers. She had experienced it originally as a historian concerned with understanding the modern belief structures of humanity. She was not one to attach herself to religious movements; she considered herself a practical person. But she had to admit that the idea of Transforming was, regardless of her natural aversion to technology, quite appealing.
"Are there really natural sensitives?"
"Of course there are. I saw a documentary on one just the other day. I asked the AI what it was like, and he said it was just like experiencing a serotonin dip."
"He was pulling your leg."
"I asked for an immersive, and he showed it to me. Seamless: blinking in, blinking out, as natural as breathing."
The lights in the room began to dim. Deborah sighed and adjusted her gear as the link popped. Stephie's voice was inside her head. “See you on the other side, Dobs."
The room went black. Deborah felt the familiar sensation of panic as her senses reacted to the lack of stimuli. The feeling of floating through endless space made her want to jerk out her arms and legs for balance like a sleeping child falling from bed. Sterback would have enjoyed an experience like this, Deborah thought, sexual expression that was real and yet not real. Would she have studied the reactions of users and considered them authentic? The ability to control an encounter compromised the experiment, perhaps. No matter how far you took it, there was always the safety net.
Sex and death. Two of humankind's most powerful experiences. It was no wonder so many got the two confused.
—
Sometime later, Deborah said goodbye to her version of King Henry the Eighth, who had become tiresome. She had thought it would be good fun and a bit of a dangerous thrill to be intimate with such a legendary rogue, one whom she had spent so many years studying. But after their initial conversations about the Boleyn sisters and the torture and execution of John Fisher, she found him terminally boring. The program could draw from recorded history, but it was unable to make him react with truly unexpected responses the way a real human would. He could not tell her with any conviction how the colors on his feasting room walls made him feel, nor describe the smell of torchlight at an execution. Besides, she was feeling sore.
Stephie, on the other hand, seemed to have an endless appetite for these sorts of encounters, as if her parents’ resistance fighting had given her an addict's temperament. Deborah switched off the gear and let the blackness envelop her for a moment, enjoying the floating, disconnected feeling as much as anything that had come before it. She talked a good game for Stephie's sake, but, truth be told, she would rather spend her days buried among the actual pages of old books than inside the net. She'd grown up among the orphanages of Bangalore, where instead of ubiquitous net access they had a room full of books nobody had any use for anymore, old-fashioned novels and illustrated art history encyclopedias with vivid full color prints. Her early schooling had been taken with Indian slave traders, between hours of begging for assistance for her father, crippled from the war; a father who did not actually exist.
Perhaps that was why she and Stephie got along so well, she thought. They had hit it off instantly when they'd met in a class on the impact of Tata's Nano on the population explosion and industrialization of the Third World. Perhaps by then they had been the last two net virgins on earth.
Even through the lack of any external stimuli, floating weightless in the void, Deborah imagined she could feel the city of New London rising up around her, steaming streets full of the heat and humidity of nearly constant rain since the collapse of Old Greenland, the smell of twenty million humans, stray dogs, and garbage filling her nostrils. This was her third trip to New London, and she found it terrifying. Giant OLED video screens and holographic projectors streamed customized infomercials and dark marketing broadcasts twenty-four hours a day. The latest wave technology beamed some of them straight into the brain like tiny focused lasers of capitalism. They seemed to know Deborah's every whim and wish before she knew herself, and the alternate reality games made her thirst to buy things. Stephie said they were altering her alphas without her consent, although that was supposedly illegal. She didn't like the feeling. It was more than a little unsettling for a woman who had lived unplugged for a good portion of her early life.
But Stephie embraced all new experiences with her typical gusto, her appetites huge, her enthusiasm limitless. Deborah was more than a little in love with her. Not in a sexual way, of course. And anyway, she would never say such a thing out loud.
When King Henry had sufficiently faded from memory and she had removed her gear, the first thing she noticed was the heat in the room. It seemed to have risen twenty degrees.
She turned to Stephie, but it was too dark to see much other than the vague outline of her body. She seemed to be jerking back and forth.
"Steph?” Deborah whispered, wondering if she were out of the sim. But no, she could just see the suggestion of headgear over her companion's face. Stephie was still inside.
There was a smell in the air. Burnt hair? Not quite. Deborah pinched her nostrils shut. It was growing stronger by the minute. Something was wrong.
"Lights,” she said, but nothing happened. She tried to get up, but the zero-gravity chair made it nearly impossible. The controls weren't working at all, and knowing she was inside a seven foot square cubicle didn't help.
A sudden tingle in the fingers of her right hand made her realize she was still holding onto the headgear. The tingle came again, much stronger this time, and she threw the gear against the wall like she'd been scalded. Her friend thrashed more violently. “Stephie
!” she shouted, rolling against the contoured surfaces of the chair—damn these armrests—until she rolled over the edge and onto the floor with a thump.
Sex and death, Deborah thought, for reasons she only vaguely understood. She got to her feet with the smell of burning flesh in her nostrils and realized that she could see now because Stephie's hair was on fire.
Deborah screamed, but the room's acoustics deadened the sound. Drawn forward by a mixture of fascination and dread—driven by an animalistic urge to know, to see—she leaned over her friend's body. It had arched upward so far it was as if Stephie's spine had cracked. Her lips had peeled back from her teeth in a rictus of pleasure or pain, and her skin was blistering and turning black amid the flickering flames.
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-2-
The building's sheath was as slick-shiny as a salamander's skin. It thrust up from the sea in a wash of organic colors, flashing with the occasional blue and blood lights of passing Privates and the brilliant floodbeams of larger Carriers, and looked like the tail of a monstrous scorpion sticking up out of the ground, quivering and many-jointed and poised to sting.
New London Tower: the centerpiece, the power source, and the heart of the vast city.
William Bellow stood one hundred feet away and breathed the salt air. He'd come many miles today, and he was tired and hungry and covered with a thin sheen of sweat. He held an old leather valise in his right hand, the kind with straps and metal buckles. It matched his well-worn façade just fine. He had bought it at an antiques shop in Singapore; the old lady who sold it to him had spoken some sort of dialect that he had barely understood.
"Sic-sicca lau lee.” Your face is dangerous. He'd understood that much. Perhaps she'd seen him on the news. He had paid her in New London credits and tried not to notice as she shied away from his touch.
"It ain't going to bite, old man,” said a passing teen in a textured work suit. The kid grinned. “Not from here, anyway.” Pressure points stood out like rubber nipples all over his scrawny body. His scalp was palmed by the tattooed holographic image of a hand, the pads of black fingertips resting upon his brows as if holding them up in an expression of permanent surprise.