by Al Robertson
Sadness drifted across her face. Jack was reminded of an advert where a woman had been grieved by her inability to find an effective financial adviser. ‘No, Jack. I can’t break that kind of agreement. But I can burn out the thinking part of him.’
‘He’ll still own – this.’ Jack waved down at his body.
‘It will pass out of your control, yes. But there will be nothing of him to guide it. Just – silence.’
Fist kicked out against her. His eyes blinked, rapidly. He was trying to cry, but was too afraid to.
‘I can’t let you do that,’ Jack told her. ‘I thank you for unlocking him. But I can’t let you touch his mind.’
Fist’s eyes opened wide.
‘He tried to attack me while you were still asleep,’ replied East. ‘Then he told me I should let him take your body now.’
‘His software partitioned part of my mind, and made him there. Everything in him comes from me.’
‘He won’t obey you. He’ll try and stop you.’
‘If you kill him, you kill part of me.’
‘You can’t trust him.’
‘I can’t always trust myself.’
East snorted. ‘Let’s see what he has to say.’ She took her hand away from Fist’s mouth. For once, he was silent. He remained limp in her arms. She set him down at her feet. He tottered slightly, as if standing for the first time, then looked up at her. She stared back, arms crossed. He broke and ran to Jack, leaving a dozen spreading silver circles behind him, and threw himself into his arms, his little voice whispering ‘thank you’ over and over again.
‘You’re going to regret this,’ spat East.
The myriad ripples Fist had left behind bounced forwards and backwards between the two altars.
‘Yamata and her patron may be afraid of him,’ replied Jack. ‘But I’m not.’
‘He’s an unpredictable psychopath. Seems to me that they’re the sensible ones,’ East replied dismissively. ‘Oh, and there’s one more thing I have to do for you.’
Jack was cradling Fist in his arms, soothing him. He looked up at her.
‘What’s that?’
East touched the wound on the forehead of Corazon’s weave presence. The policewoman’s body was already losing definition. A lifetime’s worth of data was falling into the Coffin Drives. ‘I ring-fenced the last hours of her life.’ East’s fingers sunk into Corazon’s head. She grasped something and pulled it out – a bullet. A small pistol appeared in her other hand. ‘I’m going to share them with you.’ She slipped the bullet into the pistol. ‘Find her killers.’
Then she straightened her arm, and shot Jack in the head.
Chapter 23
When Jack came round, floating just off the Spine, his mind felt broken. It took him hours longer than it should have done to walk back to his hotel. Fist had to help him, displaying an embarrassed, awkward solicitude as – at various points – he slid into full control of Jack’s body and helped him totter through the streets. It was late, so very few people were around.
When they reached the hotel, Charles was on duty. His eyes lit up as he saw Jack, sparkling with irrepressible joy. ‘Oh, hello!’ he cooed. His shirt was brightly decorated with endlessly overlapping flowers. To Jack, it felt like a violent assault. He took an awkward step and nearly fell. ‘Dear me, just look at you!’ Charles rushed round from the desk and put an arm round him, steadying him. ‘Poor you. Been overdoing the sauce? I daresay we all deserve a night on the tiles from time to time.’
Jack leant heavily on him as they stumbled down to his room. Charles’ frail body bent and swayed, barely equal to the task of supporting him. Up close, his skin had a light, waxy sheen. There was a scent of gin to him. When they reached Jack’s room, Fist slipped briefly into control again, standing Jack up and walking him to his bed. Charles hovered solicitously at the doorway, his face filled with genuine concern. ‘Thank you, Fist,’ Jack muttered, forgetting that he was speaking aloud. ‘That’s the little man who lives in you, isn’t it?’ asked Charles. Jack collapsed on to the bed as Fist slipped back into the depths of his mind. ‘It must be so nice, to have company like that,’ whispered Charles sadly. And then he made himself beam again. He fussed merrily about the room, arranging blankets round Jack and pouring a glass of water for the bedside table. He sang out, ‘Cheerio!’ as the door slammed behind him.
Fist stayed hidden away. Jack tumbled into sleep. His dreams were suffused with the memories that East had forced so deeply into his head. They were the raw stuff of Corazon’s dataself, the wholly recorded conscious experience that both informed and was created by the weave presence that had surrounded her in life. Jack’s mind snatched at them, pulling them into coherence then integrating them with his own consciousness.
He dreamed that he was leaving InSec, buying food, licensing steak and chicken flavour packs, chatting with a friend. Each moment was part of a broader association set, and so triggered related memories as Jack experienced it. Irin Lestak drank coffee. Corazon trusted her. A hovercar skimmed overhead. This year’s new models would be out soon. Last week’s soup was delicious. The vegetables in her fridge had gone off. The friend was dating a very good-looking man. They should go out for cocktails and a chat. And so it went on.
At last the day ended and Corazon slept. Her dreams pulsed through Jack’s dreaming mind, creating imaginative feedback loops. He felt Fist step into and damp down the memory stream, making sure it didn’t overwhelm him. Again, there was that new sense of care. Even in sleep it surprised him. As the feedback loops faded, Jack realised that he’d stepped beyond dreaming into a new, lucid state of imaginative self-management.
He pulled himself out of the Corazon memory stream and examined it from outside. It was a profoundly complex tangle of interlinked association sets. Jack reached for a simpler, more linear way of viewing them. They resolved into a series of specific incidents, arranged in order of occurrence. Focusing on a particular incident would trigger its playback. Wanting to avoid the trauma of her death until he was acclimatised to her presence, Jack ran through key moments in the twenty-four hours before it. He found himself talking to her. Watching from her point of view, he marvelled at how well she’d overcome her fear and loss as her faith in the Pantheon shattered.
At last, he felt ready to experience the moment of her murder. Fist pricked into alertness, ready to snap into action if the past became too brutal to bear. But there should be no deep pain. Corazon had been shot in the head and died almost instantly. Her body had shown no sign of any other injuries. There was a void where remembrance ended. Jack sited himself a little way before it and let time begin again.
There was the soft wrapping of sheets around her, then slumbering shapes in the gloom and a feeling of dazed half-awakeness as she snatched at the weave and found that it was missing from her senses. The loud knocking that had woken her continued. A voice shouted ‘InSec business, Lieutenant Corazon,’ then a code word. She assumed a weavecrash and an emergency summons to work. Soon she’d be helping clear up the inevitable riot as people lost themselves in a protective combination of rage and fear. It was never easy to face the world as it was, not as they wanted it to be.
Soft T-shirt fabric moved against her as she stood up. She pulled on her even softer dressing gown. Lights glowed into life as she walked to her front door and bent down to peer through its spyhole. There was nothing outside that she understood as a threat, just someone with blue hair, pale skin to match and a soft purple light in her eyes.
Jack was pulled out of the dream for a moment as he recognised the woman who’d shot David Nihal. A man stood behind her. Corazon snatched a glimpse of a sharp suit and a precise moustache before her view of them both was suddenly obscured. Jack winced as he remembered panthers.
Then a huge, all-consuming pain took him as he was shot in the head for the second time. For a moment the world was nothing but the dying roar of a bullet blasting through a spyhole. The door spun away and a wall fell past. Corazon gazed up at
soft ceiling lights. Then the last images her eyes had made faded, and there was very nearly peace. Nothing remained but the static hiss of technology, still yearning for the vivid whisperings of synapses, axons and neurons. But there was no input left for it to gently touch at, and record.
Chapter 24
[ Wake up! Wake up!]
Fist was shaking Jack’s shoulder.
[ What? Hell!]
Jack’s head thumped with the pressure of fresh memories, with deep Pantheonware still unpacking itself into his psyche.
[ InSec outside! They’re raiding us. Shit!]
Jack sat up. The room spun. For a moment, he wasn’t sure if he was waking as himself, or as a woman in soft sheets in the luxury of a Homelands condominium. The puddle of stars in the hotel floor brought him back to reality. Corazon’s ghost left his mind. East was still present to him. The tawdry hotel furniture glittered in a new way.
[ We’ve got to get out, Jack. What if they know I’m uncaged?]
[ They can’t know that. What can you see?]
[Lestak and three snatch teams. Two out front, one at back. Just getting into position. A minute and they’re in the room.]
[Let’s go.]
Jack had passed out fully clothed. He was at the door then sprinting down the corridor, Fist running along behind him.
[ Back way?] Jack panted.
[Dead ahead, up the service stairs.]
They were steep and narrow. The walls were stained dark at shoulder height. They reached an emergency exit door. Jack opened it a crack. He saw a long, covered alleyway. There was bright morning light at the end of it, and the silhouettes of three men.
[One of the squads, Jack.]
[Can you offweave them?]
[ Yes, but you know the protocols. They might miss a check in. That’ll trigger every alarm they’ve got.]
[Shit.]
[ I can climb inside their heads and fuck them right up.]
[ I don’t want to harm them.]
[Sentimental. What about all that Eastware? Must be something useful there.]
Jack pushed his attention into the headache that still gripped his mind. It was like probing a fresh wound with a stick. There was pain, but Fist was right. Jack found a thread he could pull on to reach an entirely new way of being himself. East’s Pantheonware flooded his limbic system, setting up subtle overrides, rewriting his body language, reskinning his oral intonation patterns. There was a gauge that measured ‘presence’, set amongst others that included ‘impact’, ‘charm’ and ‘memorability’. A thought pushed them all to one hundred per cent. Then Jack raised himself to his full height, opened the door wide and set off towards the snatch squad.
[ Fuck’s sake, Jack,] said Fist. [ We’re going to get caught. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?]
They saw him, raised their guns and started towards him. One of them was about to start subvocalizing when Jack said, ‘Stop.’ They saw his face and heard his voice, and a shimmer of subtle behavioural cues settled over their perception of him. Their weave systems were reshaped to make him shine with a strange kind of immanent beauty. All three could do nothing more than stand and gape. One dropped his gun. Another seemed to be wetting himself.
[ Very impressive!] chuckled Fist.
Jack stepped forwards and touched the first of them, wanting to push him to one side. The man collapsed to his knees, eyes still on Jack, his face suffused with inhuman satisfaction. The second moved back, tongue lolling stupidly as he dripped on to the floor. The third was less affected. He was trying to force words out of his mouth, nearly choking himself with effort. At last a question came staggering into the air. ‘Can I have your autograph?’ He reached out for Jack, again imploring, ‘Autograph?’ Jack backed away from him.
[Ditch these wankers,] snapped Fist. [Out of the alley, turn right.]
Jack ran, thrusting the settings on East’s new installations back to zero. It made no difference to the three men behind him. They were still broken. He heard a final, plaintive cry: ‘Autograph!’
[ What just happened, Fist?]
[Gift of the gods. Now don’t think. RUN!]
They lost themselves in Docklands. An hour or so later, Jack was nursing a coffee in a small café in the Neon Quarter. The seat was bolted down too close to the table, forcing him to hunch over. Fist had hacked into a passerby and used him to pay for the drink. He’d ordered a bacon sandwich too. Jack could hear it sizzling on the hob beyond the counter. [ We didn’t need to pay for any of it,] Fist complained. [ With what East’s left running in you, you could have had it all for free.] He leered at the waitress, who was leaning against the bar. [And anything else, too.] Jack was glad that she couldn’t see him.
[ What is in me, Fist?]
Fist wasn’t just useful for hacking outwards. He’d been checking for changes in Jack’s root systems, trying to understand exactly how East had upgraded his personal weaveware. Jack could still feel the new controls in his mind, but – after the alleyway, and the broken guards – felt nervous about even touching them.
[ You’re running Pantheon-level celebrity systems. She’s installed the unlocked version, you can do whatever you want with it. You saw what it did to those goons outside the hotel. Verrrry tasty. I wonder if it would work on a squishy?]
Jack was too tired to argue with Fist. The deaths of the last twenty-four hours had shattered him. He’d seen Nihal’s head blown open and his body broken. He’d felt the last strands of Corazon’s consciousness falling to nothing. A god had put a bullet in his own mind. And he’d broken three men, so overwhelming them with his presence that they became dead to themselves. He hoped that they’d recover.
[ This stuff is hardcore. Combined software and meatware assault. Those InSec goons won’t come down in a hurry.]
[ I didn’t know what it would do.]
[ Try it on the waitress, go on!]
[ No.]
She was coming over to them, an off-white plate balanced in one hand. She’d scrawled weave sigils across her uniform in cheap marker pen. The black ink had faded to a raw, bruise-like purple. Her blonde hair was piled up on her head. A clip, decorated with another sigil, clutched it together in an untidy knot.
[ What do her sigils say, Fist?]
[ They invoke some third-rate designer. There’s a beauty charm too. Give her some of the real thing, Jack!]
Even through all the Eastware was turned down, Jack was still afraid that she would suddenly thrill at his presence. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her directly when she put the plate down. He hunched his shoulders and pulled his coat in, staring at the table and muttering, ‘Thanks.’ She shrugged and turned away.
[Missed your chance.]
[ Be quiet.]
The sandwich went down in a couple of bites. It barely tasted of anything – the bread was just a soft warmth in his mouth, the bacon a sharper, crispier one. Fist had logged him into the café’s tastenet, but it added very little to the experience.
[So what now?] asked Fist.
[Lie low. Avoid InSec. Wait until it’s very late. Pay an old friend a visit.]
[Akhmatov?]
[Oh yes.]
[And you’ve got some questions for him?]
[Especially now I’ve seen how Corazon was killed. He was there.]
[ He killed her?]
[ No. The blue-haired woman from Customs House shot her. Just like she did Nihal.]
[Do you think she’s Yamata?]
[She’s not how I remember her. But she might have done more than just reskin herself. So yes, I think she might be.]
[Oo! Very exciting, we might be starting to track her down. And when you’re asking Akhmatov questions, you might need a little help from me?]
[ Yes Fist, I might well indeed.]
Fist snuggled up against Jack. He tried to wrap his arms around his waist, then gave up and enfolded his arm, hugging it tight. He’d never been so demonstrative before, at best admitting to feeling little more than a friendly but
embarrassed contempt for Jack. He’d been much more helpful too, since his brush with death. Jack wondered how deep the change went, and how permanent it would turn out to be. He wasn’t sure how much he could trust it.
[ I’ll get answers for you,] Fist chirped. [ I’ll be nasty cop. You can use your charms on him. You’ll be nice cop.] He giggled. [ The nicest cop ever! I’m looking forward to it. Today’s going to pass really slowly.]
[ We can’t let InSec catch us. We’ve got to keep moving. Anything more to pay?] Fist shook his head. [ Then let’s go.]
[ What about Harry?]
[ We’ll go back to him once we’ve got some results.]
They spent the rest of the day walking the streets of Docklands. Fist bobbed along beside Jack, sometimes floating, sometimes walking, always reaching out and confusing surveillance systems. He talked in an excited babble, thrilled to at last be fully himself again. Jack said very little. At one point, they found themselves near his old junior school. Nostalgia snapped at him. Wire netting fenced in a playground that was set in the arms of a large, semicircular building.
[Shithole,] said Fist.
[ I had a lot of fun here.]
That would once have been a very difficult thing for Jack to admit. He’d worked so hard to put Docklands behind him. He’d even refused to bring Andrea here. Now, it just seemed to be a simple, uncontentious statement of fact.
[Easily pleased,] said Fist.
It was break time. The children were playing a football variant. Two loosely defined teams screamed and jostled happily against each other. The game had absorbed almost every child there.
[ I was about the same age as you are now.]
[My mind runs much faster than yours,] Fist snorted. [ I’m much older than seven!]
[ Really?]
One team was about to score when a whistle blew, and the game abruptly stopped. The child with the football swore, grumpily kicking the ball away. The two teams broke quickly into smaller groups, some children happily rushing off together, others clearly very annoyed.