by Al Robertson
[ Their folks must have been hackers as well as terrorists. Interesting. I’ll dig into the code, see what I can find out.]
[ That’s not all the digging we need to do. We need to work out what happened at TrueShield.]
[ I could have killed a god, Jack Conscience Forster decided I shouldn’t, and we had our backsides tanned. End of story.]
[And that should be impossible. None of the other puppets could have done it. They were built on military minds, Totality specialists with no sense of Pantheon structure. They’d have been completely lost in divine security code.]
[Puppet plus accountant equals god fucker,] preened Fist. [ How about that? It was a piece of piss to break, Jackie boy. Pantheon security sucks, it’s overconfidence again.]
[Oh no.] Awe rose in Jack. [Sometimes, when I was working close enough to the Pantheon, I’d hear their protection growling in the distance. I was out on the edge of a five-year business plan once, I saw the Twins’ firewall on the horizon. Unreachable. Unknowable. It burnt so brightly. I couldn’t look at it for more than a few seconds. I don’t know how to describe it.]
[ That’s not how it looked to me,] chirped Fist. [ It was just a little door. I just raised my foot and kicked it down. Bam! I always knew I was special! I only wish all those other puppets were still around, I’d love to have seen those little S.O.B.’s faces when I showed them what I could really do.]
[More than special,] said Jack. [ You’re a Pantheon gun. Could you really have killed him?]
[ I could have done whatever I wanted to. Messed around with his corporate structures. Crashed some of his businesses. Deleted his personality. Copied ours into it. Wait a second …] Fist paused for a second, then exploded with vicious excitement. [ I could have copied us over Kingdom! He’d have become us! We could have been gods! I could have been a god! Let’s go back and do it!]
Fist’s glee scared Jack. Trying to sound as calm and firm as he could, he replied: [ You haven’t thought that through, Fist. Remember, we don’t have any proof of what Kingdom’s been up to. And if you kill a god, lots of people die and the other gods would kill us. We’d last seconds at most.]
[ BUT WHAT SECONDS THEY’D BE!]
[ Remember East’s anger,] Jack told him, keeping his voice gentle. [ Imagine eleven of them turning on you.]
[ I’d fucking have the lot of them.]
[Even if you’re damaged?]
[ Fuck’s sake, Jack. Yamata barely touched me. That’s just a detail.]
[ Really?]
[ I’m fine.] There was a pause. [ Well, maybe there are some little bruises. But they don’t matter.]
[Show me.]
[ I don’t want to think about it. Come on, Jack, let’s go! I’m a Pantheon gun! I may be short of a few bullets, but I’m still ready to fire!]
There was a little less glee in his voice, a little more anxiety. Jack wondered what the true extent of the damage was. [ I need to see,] he said, quietly but firmly. [ I’m not taking you anywhere until I’ve seen.]
[ Jack …] whined Fist.
[ I mean it.]
Fist let a series of images escape into Jack’s mind. The puppet was wrapped in a tightly buttoned and belted trench coat. A little fedora hat was perched on his head.
[ There. Hardly a scratch.]
He turned to left and right, stretching his arms out. He didn’t seem to realise that the trench coat was torn under one arm. The tear revealed a charred wooden body dotted with broken remnants of clothing. Wisps of hair emerged from beneath the hat. There was a new looseness to his movements, as if his joints had been over-strained and left slightly too flexible. His face and hands were darker than they had been, stained by smoke.
[ That looks quite serious.]
[ I’m fine, Jackie boy, fine fine fine! Ha ha ha.] His laughter was forced. [ I’ve just had to reallocate some internal memory. And I’ve still got some repairs to finish. So no full visuals at the moment, I’m afraid.]
[ You’re not at full attack strength.]
[ You’re spoiling everything, Jack.]
[ I’m helping you think clearly. How hard could you hit Kingdom, right now?]
Fist said nothing.
[ Hard enough to be sure of finishing him off ?]
[ Fucking hell, Jack.]
[And what would happen if you didn’t? He’d wipe both our personalities. Then he’d rebuild your attack systems and turn them on the rest of the Pantheon. We’d be dead and he’d be able to take over or kill any of them. Is that what you want?]
For a moment, Fist’s newly battered face was inert. He looked more puppet-like than ever before. Then he leapt into animated life again.
[ I’m bored with this! Let’s talk about Yamata and Harry! We can chat about Kingdom again when I’ve finished my repairs.]
Relief shook through Jack. [Good idea,] he said. [ How could Harry fight her off like that?]
[ I’ve got a pretty good idea. I scanned him when he passed through me. I’ve got his number now. Yamata’s too. And you know what’s really strange? At a systems level, you can’t tell them apart.]
[ But she hit you with a Totality attack package.]
[She’s a post-mortal human consciousness running on a Totality platform – that jellyfish thing was her weave presence. Harry makes more of an effort to look good, but he’s really exactly the same. It’s why he could make such a big dent in her.]
[ You can’t run human minds in a Totality environment. They work in a completely different way.]
[ No one told those two! I didn’t get too deep in, but there was some pretty sophisticated crosspatching going on. Oh, and there’s no fetchware in there at all. They’ve never been near a Coffin Drive. They became what they are as soon as they kicked the bucket.]
[Shit. What about the physical Yamatas?]
[ I’d guess clones, brains scooped out and replaced with nanogel mind nodes. Yamata runs them by remote control. Her signal traces back to Heaven. Harry’s off-Station somewhere. High Earth orbit, by the look of it.]
[ We should tell Ifor.]
[ What? He’s Totality, they’re on Totality platforms. I bet he’s involved. They’re stitching us up. Fucking squishies. We should have killed them all.]
[ This isn’t them. The Yamata clones are several copies of the same body. That’s not Totality, they value variety too much. They never repeat themselves.]
[ But what about Harry? He could be sitting in a Totality server on a snowflake somewhere.]
[ How would they have got hold of him? And why? No, it’s got to be Kingdom. Who else could get two human minds running on Totality hardware?]
[And you don’t want me to touch him. I hope you know you’re his fucking bitch, Jack.]
[ We’re going to get hard, undeniable proof of Kingdom’s involvement in all this. We’ll give it to Grey and East, and the Totality, and between them they’ll bring him down. We’ll be heroes, Fist. And there’ll be no risk of Kingdom getting his hands on your firepower.]
Fist yawned.
[ You’re sleepy?]
[ Repair packages calling. I’ve got to shut down for a bit. This is a boring conversation anyway.]
Fist grumbled back into Jack’s mind. Soon, little snores sighed up. Jack felt hugely relieved that he’d managed to defuse Fist’s excitement at his newly discovered capabilities. He wondered in a tired way how he’d keep protecting him from the damage he could cause. Thoughts of protection turned his mind to Andrea. He worried that Harry might have discovered their relationship, might still take his revenge on her. The past sighed in his mind. They’d worked so hard to hide things. ‘I don’t want to tell him until it’s right,’ she used to say. ‘Until I know for sure it’s serious. He’d be so angry if he found out.’ Jack reassured himself that Harry never had done.
As he drifted into sleep, other memories of their time together brushed at him, like waves caressing a darkening shore. There was Andrea as he’d first seen her, performing in a Kanji Town night club. Harry dragged Jack there after they’d
argued about music. ‘I told you she was better than anything you Homeland fucks have, didn’t I? If she hadn’t fallen out with the Twins, she’d be the biggest star on Station.’ A single spotlight carved the pale mask of her face from the darkness, the rest of her lost in soft shadow.
There was the first time they kissed; a snatched, urgent intimacy that took both of them by surprise, after hours in a near-empty cabaret bar. Two half-empty glasses flared gold between them. Ice had melted into the whisky’s pale fire when at last they remembered to finish them. ‘You can’t pretend you’re not from here,’ she told him then, for the first time.
As she got to know him, she would drag him back to the streets of his childhood and force memories back into him. ‘It’s who you are. Not some Homelander that Grey made.’ He came to believe that she emphasised her Docklands accent when she was with him, used slang that she would normally skip over. He remembered walking past a playground with her. ‘I used to love that place,’ he said. Children still tumbled laughing through it. ‘Look at them,’ she said, ‘finding joy despite the world.’
Towards the end, he found it harder and harder when she went back to Harry. By then, he was living pretty much full time in his Docklands hotel. He was on first name terms with the staff, who turned a blind eye to her frequent late night visits. She was suffering, too. As her affair with Jack had become more serious, so her sense of guilt had grown. ‘He’s not always a good man,’ she said, as they argued one night, ‘but it’s the best part of him that loves me.’ Dawn found her hard-faced. ‘I have to go,’ she said again and again, making no move towards the door. ‘I have to go.’
Three days later, the rock fell.
Mercifully, sleep took Jack before that last meeting came to life in his mind. Memory’s weave drifted off him, tapestried moments falling away. His last conscious thoughts were of sweathead code. He wondered what he’d forgotten as he remembered his relationship with Andrea; what more challenging truths lay beyond his remembrance of their time together. And then at last he slept, too damaged even to dream.
Chapter 38
Fred and Lyssa never left the room. Fred painted the walls, laboriously creating images of a world that was entirely closed to him. Lyssa played with her dolls, imagining moments that would never happen. Ato was both young enough to come and go at will, and old enough to do so usefully.
For a couple of days, Jack let himself calmly drift between sleep and waking, allowing the healing that had taken place in both his body and Fist’s internal structures to fully bed down. Fist was dormant for much of the time. Sometimes they were awake at the same time and talked silently to each other. Fist was sleepy and distracted. Jack only stopped worrying about him when he started grumbling again.
[ I wish you didn’t have so many good reasons for not killing Kingdom. Why do you always have to worry about consequences?]
[ Because they’re always there to be dealt with.] Fist swore grumpily. [ But there’s something only you can do that I need some help with.]
[Oo, what thrills could possibly await?] sulked Fist. [Sending someone a text message? Finding out where the nearest train station is?]
[ No. Hacking fetch code. I want to free Andrea.]
[ Won’t that have AWFUL REPERCUSSIONS THAT KILL US ALL?]
[ No, because you’re good enough to make sure that nobody notices.]
[Motherfucker. It’s not enough that I’ve got to think about sodding consequences before doing something TOTALLY REASONABLE like killing a fucking god. I’ve got to reprogram your girlfriend, too.]
[ Not reprogram her,] Jack replied. [ Not at all. I want to protect her from that. Remember how much you hated it when Grey rewrote just a tiny part of you, just once? She has to deal with far worse than that, all the time. All fetches do.]
[ You sound like the Totality. Get your mate Ifor to sort it out.]
[Please. If not for her, then for me.]
[ It’ll be hard work. It’d mean understanding fetch permission structures, digging into how the weave manifests them and working out exactly how the Coffin Drives store them. Hmm …] Fist was silent for a moment, lost in thought. [ Fuck. That could actually be quite interesting. Useful, even.]
[ It’d be more than useful for Andrea.]
[All right, I’ll see what I can do. But it’s not an easy job. I won’t make any promises.]
[ Thank you, Hugo.]
[Don’t call me that,] snapped Fist. [Gods, you’d think we actually liked each other!]
Jack slept again until the sound of cooking woke him. The meat that Ato had brought back, crowing triumphantly about her waste-raiding skills, turned out to be spoiled, but the vegetables were edible. Fred boiled them in water over a small electric heater, creating something approaching vegetable soup. It smelt thin and unappetising, but Jack hadn’t eaten for three days so hunger jabbed deep into his stomach.
‘Hello,’ he said, yawning and stretching. ‘Do you think I could have some soup?’
‘No,’ snapped Fred. Ato shushed him. ‘Pour him a bowl of soup,’ she told Lyssa.
Lyssa – concentrating hard – tottered over to him with a full bowl. She smiled shyly, blushing as he thanked her, then turned and ran back to the table.
‘Thank you all,’ Jack told them.
They didn’t reply. They were too busy eating. The soup itself was flavourless, the vegetables overcooked to the point of dissolution. Jack didn’t want to speculate on how old they were, where they might have been found.
When dinner was done, the children piled up their plates by the sink in the corner of the room. Fred turned to Ato. ‘I cooked, you wash up,’ he told her.
‘Let me,’ said Jack. He went to stand up, but rose too suddenly and tottered unsteady on his feet.
[Careful,] Fist warned.
The three children watched with wide eyes. Only Lyssa didn’t look nervous.
‘We know what you are, you know,’ said Fred. ‘We know that you’re carrying – one of them.’
‘One of what?’ asked Jack.
‘A puppet.’
‘How do you know?’
‘We’ve got a scanner that picks up anything strange,’ Lyssa chipped in. ‘We used it while you were asleep.’
‘You’re a puppeteer, aren’t you?’ said Fred.
Jack saw no point in lying.
‘Yes. I am.’
‘I saw a puppet once.’ Lyssa’s voice was soft as she remembered. ‘Just like yours. Her puppeteer brought her into school. She was called Lumberjack Lil. She was funny! She juggled her chainsaws.’
‘I saw one of those shows too,’ said Fred.
‘We all did,’ said Ato. ‘They said they were safe, that the puppets would hunt down the evildoers who wanted to harm us. But they didn’t want us to be scared of them, and it was really all for the children who died on the moon, so they made them look like toys.’
[Should I show myself now?] said Fist.
[ No,] said Jack. [ We’ll wait until they ask to see you. I don’t want to surprise them.]
[ Why not? It’d be fun.]
‘They’re not really just puppets,’ Fred was saying. ‘We learned all about them. They’re a whole suite of applications.’
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Jack replied.
‘I wish we’d had your puppet,’ Ato sighed. ‘It might have protected us from sweatheads.’
‘What do they do to you?’
‘Every so often, they catch us.’
‘If Ato hadn’t seen you kill two of them,’ said Fred, ‘she’d have just left you upstairs. But they wanted to kill you. She said that makes you one of us.’
‘Until we start to get grown up,’ said Lyssa, her voice almost a whisper, ‘they’re the only people who can see us.’
‘They attack you?’ asked Jack.
‘Them and InSec,’ said Ato, with a sadness too heavy for a child. ‘There used to be so many more of us.’
The washing-up seemed irrelevant now. There was a spare chair at the
table. ‘Can I sit down?’ asked Jack. Ato nodded. Fred turned round and went back to his painting. The chair was too small for Jack. His knees stuck up and out at an awkward angle, and wouldn’t fit under the table. Lyssa giggled.
‘Have you ever killed any children?’ Ato said suddenly.
‘No,’ replied Jack, shocked. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘You’re like the sweatheads. You can see us.’
‘I’ve only ever attacked the Totality, because we thought they were threatening you. Children like you. And Fist – my puppet – isn’t real like sweatheads are. He’s just a projection.’
[Oi!]
‘We’ve never killed a person,’ Jack continued, ignoring him. ‘Just Totality minds.’
‘The teachers didn’t call that killing,’ said Lyssa. ‘They said that the puppets were going to go and play with the Totality. And once they’d finished, the Totality would think differently about people.’
‘They said they weren’t made to hurt anyone,’ Ato interjected. ‘But my father said that the puppets were going to kill the Totality. That we had to stop the Soft War. And then they came and killed him.’
‘They killed all our parents,’ Lyssa said sadly, ‘all across Station. And their fetches are all caged.’
Fred’s paintbrush made soft scraping noises. He was painting something box-like, but brightly coloured. It could have been a mall.
‘We want to see your puppet,’ Ato told Jack. ‘We need to know that we’re safe. We think we are, but we need to know it.’
[ Your cue, Fist. Get ready. And play nice.]
[Aw.]
‘I’ll ask him to appear,’ Jack told the children. ‘Will he scare you?’
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ announced Grey, stepping into the room from nowhere. ‘These are tough kids, you know.’ The lightest scent of cigar smoke touched the air. He had a gin and tonic in his hand.
‘If you’re using them like you used me,’ said Jack, ‘I’ll kill you myself right now.’
When they heard Jack threaten Grey, Ato and Fred leapt on him. Even Lyssa joined in. They slammed into him, making him stumble backwards and then fall. He found himself lying on the mattress, arms and legs held down.