Crashing Heaven

by Al Robertson

  ‘He’s locked up all her non-essential systems,’ gasped Ifor. ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘No,’ said Jack wearily. ‘Not for Fist. And Harry’s controlling him.’

  Harry staggered and put a hand to his head, then recovered himself. Now all the Pantheon were shuffling back, trying to put as much distance between themselves and him as possible. Only the snowflakes didn’t move, pulsing with unreadable colours.

  ‘I just force-triggered a full internal self-audit,’ explained Harry. ‘It’s a vast resource drain, she’ll be out of action for the next hour or so.’ He was a little paler than he had been. He controlled his shaking voice. ‘Just like that.’ He chuckled, once again in control of himself. But his hair was a soft grey, where before it had been black. ‘So it’s true. Accountant plus puppet equals Pantheon gun.’ He turned to Jack. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I saw Fist’s weapon systems. Crying shame, giving all that power to you. What the fuck would you ever use it for?’ He turned back to the Pantheon. ‘All this Homelands wanker’s good for is fucking other men’s wives. But I’ll deal with him in a moment. I’ve got you lot to sort out first. You screw us all, every single day. And I’m going to start with the biggest cunt of them all.’

  He pointed at Kingdom.

  ‘You.’

  ‘No. Please. You don’t know what you’re doing,’ begged Kingdom, his voice thin with fear.

  ‘Oh, I know all right. I know exactly what I’m doing.’ Black dogs appeared, lined up on either side of Harry. They tensed, ready to pounce, snarling out anger and threat. ‘You promised me so much, Kingdom. But you didn’t deliver any of it. So I’m not going to fuck around with an audit. It’s hostile takeover time. And I’m going to take everything you’ve got.’

  Kingdom cowered backwards as the seven dogs leapt. They lost form as they flew towards him, stretching out to become long, hard shadows, staining the air with darkness. When they hit him their black liquid mass slicked across his body. He screamed until the darkness covered his face. He stopped struggling very quickly, becoming a dark, inchoate statue.

  Harry strolled towards him. ‘All ready for me now, aren’t you?’ he said triumphantly, and then turning to the Pantheon, ‘None of you got the balls to try and stop me? No?’

  ‘I’ll never let you get away with this, you bastard,’ spat East. ‘I’ll have every journalist of mine exposing you!’

  ‘I’ll be a hero,’ replied Harry confidently. ‘I killed the entity that dropped a rock on the moon and started the Soft War. That’s what your journalists will write, or I’ll have them looking for sources outside an airlock, and I’ll put you in a closed audit loop for the rest of time.’

  And with that, he reached out and touched the dark figure that had been Kingdom. His body disappeared into it. His clothes, suddenly empty, dropped to the floor. There was a moment of silence.

  ‘Shit,’ said Jack, stunned. ‘I think we just lost.’

  ‘We have to get out of here,’ gasped the Twins.

  ‘We can’t,’ stuttered Sandal. ‘The lift’s still locked.’

  Powerlessness was a new experience for the gods.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ whimpered one of the Twins. ‘I don’t want to be lost in my own accounts forever!’ The other Twin sat down with a thump. ‘Our lovely hotels!’ she wailed. ‘Our medical centres! Our agri-sites! Who will care for them if we can’t?’

  Only Jack noticed a little hummock suddenly appear in Harry’s clothes. It was somewhere under his waistcoat. As the gods sobbed, or just stood in shocked silence, it moved towards the neck of his shirt, where a familiar face popped out.

  [ Well,] beamed Fist [ That went about as well as it could have done. How fortunate for Harry that I carelessly left such a clearly signposted route into Kingdom’s core systems when we broke into his headquarters.]

  Jack couldn’t find any words to say.

  Fist clambered to his feet and addressed the assembled divinities. ‘Thank fuck Harry was SO excited about becoming a god that he left my cage door open,’ he chirped, before forcing a little pain into his voice. ‘It was agony watching him attack Kingdom. Agony!’

  ‘You saw it all, then?’ asked Sandal nervously.

  ‘Oh yes,’ replied Fist. He stifled a pretend sob. ‘All of it. The horror! Oh, the horror.’ He was clearly enjoying himself hugely, despite the fact that his hair too had turned grey.

  [ You’re play-acting,] said Jack. [ Harry’s damaged you. And what about all the people who rely on Kingdom? You’re playing with their lives.]

  [ There’s enough of me left to finish the job,] replied Fist. [And they’re all taken care of. Like I told you, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about consequences. Sit back and watch a master at work.]

  There was a mature confidence in his voice that Jack had never heard before. Fist switched back to speaking out loud. ‘But, looking on the bright side, most of my weapon systems are still largely intact. Even after such terrible misuse of them. Misuse over which I had no control whatsoever. Misuse that even damaged me!’ He pointed at his newly aged hair.

  As he spoke, the darkness that had covered Kingdom fell away. The takeover was complete. Now Harry stood there, his eyes closed. His skin glowed gold. He was wearing Kingdom’s dark shirt and loose trousers. His battered face was wreathed with the numinous. Despite himself, Jack felt awe touch him. Harry opened his eyes, and looked down.

  ‘You?’ he boomed. ‘LITTLE YOU?’ His voice echoed around the conference chamber. He threw back his head and laughed. Virtual stars rang with mockery.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Fist, his voice low and menacing. ‘Me. Little me. And I’ve got a bone the size of a planet to pick with you.’ He rose into the air, and floated towards Harry. ‘Do you remember what I said, that dark night in the garden?’

  ‘I’ll shatter you, puppet, if you come any closer,’ warned Harry.

  Fist closed on him regardless. Jack felt his weapon set grind once again in his mind. The sound of its awakening went so deep, far beyond anything Harry had been able to summon. Jack slumped. Fist was boosting his offensive power by drawing on Jack’s resources. Harry hadn’t been able to do that either.

  ‘Are you OK?’ worried Ifor. Jack felt soft hands at his shoulders, holding him up. He found that he couldn’t move his mouth. Those parts of his mind were running other, more brutal systems.

  [ I’m sorry,] Fist told Jack. He was controlling his voice so carefully, but still a wild, abandoned rage broke through. [ This is going to hurt. Him more than you, though.]

  [ What are you doing?] The deep structures of Jack’s own mind groaned in protest as Fist snatched even more resources. [ I can’t let you,] he continued. He tried to call Fist back.

  The puppet laughed. [ You can’t do that any more. Not since we were rebuilt. All you can do is watch. And trust me. You’ll never see me like this again. You might never see me again. But it’ll be worth it. Oh fuck yes. WATCH!]

  Jack wasn’t sure if it was his own will or Fist’s that made him turn his head and reopen his eyes.

  ‘Jack,’ said Ifor. ‘You’re conscious.’ He followed Jack’s gaze, and then he too was silenced. Fist was drifting towards Harry, his body changing as his attack systems fired up.

  ‘I said I’d broken minds like yours before, and I’d break you too.’

  His arms stretched out of his sleeves and his legs stretched out of his trousers. His torso grew. Piece by piece, his clothes ripped off him. A snapped bow-tie, fragments of dress shirt, a tattered tail coat, a pair of shredded black trousers – all fell away as he slowly advanced on Kingdom.

  Each wooden body section exuded strands of attack code, coiling together to define Fist’s new, expanding self. It manifested as silver-grey barbed wire, growing into the shape of densely muscled arms and legs, vast shoulders and a squat, powerful neck. Fist’s hands and feet had grown too, fingers and toes stretching out into jagged claws and talons. Jagged wire sprang up and danced around them, then around Fist’s whole b
ody. It leapt up to cover his now entirely white hair and he laughed.

  Now his face stretched out and began to change too. His cheerful painted eyes fell back into his head, and there were two shadow pits where they had been. His little pointed nose fell in on itself, becoming a jagged slit in the centre of his face. He smiled, and his smile was an axe cut, ripping back into his cheeks. There was a loud crack, and his teeth broke through his jaw – uncounted sharp grey barbs, waiting to rend and tear.

  Nothing remained of the well-dressed puppet that had been built to charm children. This was the elemental Fist, a deep and focused savagery unleashing itself on the world.

  Harry stumbled backwards. ‘What are you?’ he breathed.

  ‘Death,’ hissed Fist, smiling his barbed-wire smile. His wooden face was a flat, dead mask on a thorned metal head. The wire filled his empty eyes and the slit that had been his nose. He brought his arms up from the side of his body, extending each metal-wrapped wooden finger. Blue sparks flickered round them. Harry gestured with his hands. Nothing happened. Fist kept coming.

  ‘CHILD!’ he shouted, the word rasping out from a hard metal tongue. ‘You’re five minutes old. I’ve been killing angels for seven years.’

  Harry took a step back. He had his arms up in front of him. His own fire leapt to his hands. Fist continued speaking. There was no longer any trace of the toy he’d once appeared to be. Jack wondered if this was what the Totality had seen when Fist attacked them.

  ‘You dared – YOU DARED – to break into me, and force your way through me, and use me as a router. A FUCKING ROUTER! To get to that bitch Yamata.’

  A few words were shouted. Most were spat out in a vicious, barbed whisper.

  Fire leapt from Harry’s hands. It didn’t reach Fist. The puppet’s feet had touched ground. He was walking. He was a foot or so taller than Harry. Wire dragged behind him, leaving a path of sparks. ‘You thought there’d be no comeback.’ He brought his hands up to his face, and looked at them appraisingly. He teased out a strand of wire from his left hand with the finger and thumb of his right. ‘Look at my strings now. You thought you were pulling them, didn’t you? But they bit into you, little god. So deep.’

  There was a roaring in Jack’s head. He could watch, and he could think, and that was it. All through his mind, core structures were shaking themselves to pieces as Fist seized the capacity he needed to break a god. Jack could feel his own systems rushing to compensate for the chaos. Had he not become a digital version of himself, he would by now have been irrevocably shattered. He wondered if either of them would survive Harry’s death.

  Harry laughed nervously. ‘You can’t hurt me, puppet.’

  Fist snapped his fingers, and a barbed explosion of code leapt out of him. For a moment it hung in the air, and then it pulled itself round Harry, snapping his arms to his sides and his legs to each other, charring clothes black and scoring blue lines where it touched bare flesh.

  Harry howled. Subroutines knifed into his mouth, his throat. His scream had a gurgling, half-broken quality to it. Fist snapped his fingers again. More wire leapt at Harry and bit at him, tracing hard symbols of pain across his skin and then dancing deep into his body.

  ‘ARE YOU IN POSITION, TOTALITY?’ he yelled.

  ‘Yes,’ said one of the snowflakes. ‘One of our craft is at the co-ordinates you gave us. A squad of minds have penetrated Devlin’s physical security systems and are ready to reoccupy the stolen servers he’s running on. They’ll use the link he’s established with Kingdom’s core systems to follow him there too.’

  ‘NO!’ screamed Harry. Wire poured into his throat, silencing him. He writhed, collapsing to the floor.

  Fist sunk down so that he was right next to him. One hand touched Harry’s forehead. There was a tiny puff of smoke, a smell of burning flesh and then the black print of a wooden hand was branded in Harry’s flesh.

  ‘You’re the careless one, Harry. You never bothered looking deeper than the puppet. There’s so much more to me than that.’

  Harry groaned. Jack was barely conscious. Fist took Harry’s head in his two barbed hands and pulled it from his shoulders. He roared with triumph. It was his last great effort, and it broke him. He shimmered and vanished. Harry’s broken corpse vanished with him. Code howled in Jack’s mind. Through it all came Fist’s voice, surprisingly quiet and controlled.

  [Let yourself go, Jack. I’ve broken my weapon systems killing Harry. Now’s time to reboot and rebuild.]

  Unconsciousness took Jack. It was kinder than death had been, but only a little.

  Chapter 48

  The spinelights were dimming over Homelands. Towers faded into the gloom as lit windows shimmered into being, a thousand tiny protests against the dark. Snowflakes hung above them all, now fully integrated into the weave and so into Station’s day-to-day life. Jack turned away from the window. Fist was sitting on a chair, knocking his hand against a conference table, making a loud, sharp, repeated tapping. He was four foot tall again, with a little painted face and a little painted body. He was wearing black tie, topped off with a rather natty monocle. His body was entirely physical.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I can’t get over how this feels. This is a real table; here’s a real me; and here I am, hitting it. Who would have thought a meat body could fit little Hugo Fist so well?’

  ‘You’re a real boy at last.’

  ‘I’m not a boy, Jack, or a man. I’ve seen enough of people not to think I’m human any more. I’m an incarnate artificial intelligence. But then so are you, now – a digital pattern, running on a nanogel soup. Most of you isn’t even in that head of yours. It’s distributed across Station’s weaveservers. I don’t think there’s really any difference between us. You’re alive, but artificial – I’m artificial, but I’m alive.’

  ‘Things have got a lot more blurred lately,’ agreed Jack. ‘All these new ways of being alive. I suppose that’s one good thing to come out of it all.’

  ‘It’s just a shame it had to happen the way it did.’

  ‘Well. That’s a fight that’s not over yet.’

  ‘That sounds worryingly like sedition,’ said Lestak, appearing at the door.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Fist smoothly. ‘It’s just his grumpy way. And besides, it’s much harder to be seditious these days. Now that the Totality sits on the Pantheon as an equal member, and fetches have pretty much the same rights as the living, there’s no them and us any more. There’s just us, and plotting against us, rather than them, is pretty pointless.’

  ‘You make it sound so simple,’ replied Lestak. ‘Not everyone sees it like that. It’s created a lot of work for us.’

  ‘And what about the divinities who supported Kingdom?’ asked Jack. ‘Any work gone into finding them?’

  ‘They’ll have covered their tracks by now. We wouldn’t be able to prove anything.’

  ‘So the gods are too big for justice?’

  Lestak sighed. ‘There’s been enough change, Jack. People have lost so much faith in the Pantheon. Keeping a lid on it all is a big challenge. If another god fell – well, who knows where it would end.’

  ‘Very sensible,’ interrupted Grey, shimmering into being. ‘Humans, gods – we’re all so fragile. Too much change, too suddenly, could overwhelm us all.’

  ‘We’d survive. Even if the whole Pantheon fell.’

  ‘But not all of us would go down. And those of us who remained would be even more powerful. Even fewer checks on our behaviour. Remember what Harry was like when he thought he ruled Station. Power corrupts, and you’d be feeding us more of it. Think about that, Jack, before you start toppling gods.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Of course, factually you’re quite right. At least one of my colleagues did support Kingdom. Perhaps more. Covertly, of course.’ His voice took on a forced cheerfulness as he swept his arm out towards the peaceful city. ‘And now, I think, looking at all this, they’re very much regretting doing so.’


  ‘You won’t tell us who they are, though, will you?’ asked Jack. His voice was weary.

  ‘We’ll be late for the ceremony if we stand here talking,’ replied Grey jauntily. ‘Won’t we, Lestak? Hadn’t we better head for the main hall? Don’t want to keep people waiting.’

  ‘There’s not going to be any ceremony, Grey. Jack’s refused it,’ Lestak told him.

  ‘Rejecting the thanks of the gods?’ said Grey. ‘Some would call that ungracious.’

  ‘Fist’s been granted full citizenship. The Totality helped build him a body. My record’s been cleared. There’s nothing else either of us wants from you.’

  ‘You’ve really got to stop focusing on the downside,’ chided Grey. ‘You’d be so much better off if you let yourself enjoy what you’ve achieved. You and Fist are heroes. You purged Kingdom and you protected all of us from Harry. And as we’ve just agreed, anyone who can bring down a Pantheon member is a threat to us all.’ He shot Fist a pointed look.

  ‘Oh, I know that very well,’ said Fist. ‘I’m only sorry that I couldn’t stop Harry before he destroyed Kingdom.’ He almost sounded as if he meant it. ‘It’s Jack who’s the pessimist, not me.’

  Jack glared back at Grey. ‘Harry kills Kingdom, Fist kills Harry, problem solved, all done and dusted,’ he spat. ‘Nice and easy and resolved. That’s how East’s spinning it too, isn’t she? Let the blame fall on the dead, don’t dig into the crimes of the living.’ He sighed. ‘All we’ve really done is enable a whitewash.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ exclaimed Grey. ‘Think about the bigger picture. You’ve enabled peace. Your actions brought the Pantheon and the Totality together. When Fist killed Harry, it left a space they had to fill. Their immediate takeover of his corporate structure saved tens of thousands of lives. The revelation of Kingdom’s crimes offset their opening of the Coffin Drives and paved the way for their acceptance into Station. Without you two, the peace negotiations would never have led to such a positive outcome. And now we’ve got that peace, we really can’t do anything to risk it. Which is why we’re all going to look forwards, not backwards, from now on.’