Long Dark Dusk

by J. P. Smythe

  “Yes,” I say.

  “You think she might have followed you?”

  “Yes.” I’m close to tears now.

  “Blinds,” he says, and the windows darken—adaptive glass that makes the room almost pitch black. There are lights in his augments, I can see: pale trims of faded blue and green.

  “Have you called for backup?” I ask. I don’t want to be caught. I don’t want to be.

  “No,” he says. “Not yet. Maybe we can sort this out. Chan, yeah?” He knows that’s my name. He’ll know everything about me. “Let’s see if I can get this right. You ended up in the docks doing whatever you can to get by. Odd jobs, probably some people telling you to join the work lines, go and do some maintenance on the Wall, right? The promise of those lines: get a job and an apartment. A proper life.” His face scowls, his mouth curling around the bit of his jaw that doesn’t move. “But she was a better option. Easier. She was for me, at one point in my life. What’d she offer you?”

  “I’ve lost somebody,” I say, “and I want to get them back.”

  “So she said she’d help you find them. Guessing it was her sent you to the Archives the other day? That’s her handiwork all over it. And after that, she told you that you weren’t quite done. One last favor, and then she’d give you answers, set you free.” He stands up. His legs move strangely, like the mechanics are a few steps ahead. He picks up the EMP, tosses it from hand to hand. The hands react seemingly of their own accord, like he doesn’t have to think about it; there’s no chance of them dropping it—not even a slight chance. Silver flashes around his torso where the skin is peeling. More and more of him is not quite right, not quite human. “She builds these herself, she tell you that? Used to be in technology, then everything fell apart for her. So she rebuilt her life differently.” He puts it down, squats next to me so that we’re level. “How did I do?”

  It’s more complicated than that, I want to say; because he doesn’t know the full situation. There’s a past to every tale, a complicated backstory that serves to be everything when you’re making your choices. It’s always there and it has to be important. It can’t just be about now.

  But I don’t say that.

  “You know why they call me The Runner?” He grabs something else from the desk to fiddle with. For the first time I look around and take in the room properly. It’s temporary, sure, not somewhere that people actually live for any real amount of time. Everything is clean and must have come with the place—blended into the walls, fastened to the floor. There’s no personality here, not really—not like Ziegler’s place, or even Alala’s. There’s no stamp that says, this belongs to somebody. No clothes on the backs of chairs. The bed in the next room is bare, the sheets stripped, the curtains pulled tight.

  He hands me the tablet he’s holding. It’s old—even I can tell that—solid, no holo tech. Instead it’s running some software that I don’t even recognize and work has been done to it on a hardware level. The back of it is exposed so that wires jut and circuit boards are exposed.

  “That’s me,” he says. A video plays on the screen of a man running, sprinting, an athlete in a competition. It’s him. His legs are pumping, no visible augments. Two arms, no scars that I can see. He’s so fast that it’s barely conceivable. He presses the screen and it slows down, showing me everything about him—how his body is behaving for him, the muscles all working with each other. “She’s rich,” he says. “You know that? She doesn’t need to live there. She’s got resources, contacts, people all over. She could move anywhere she wanted, but she stays there, in that shack on the edge of the outskirts, I’ll bet.” I nod. “Because it’s not about money for her. It’s about power. She got me the augments I needed to compete, to win. Simple as that—pulled strings. Don’t ask me how. Told me I’d repay her afterward.”

  “You were fast,” I say. “That’s how you got the name.”

  “Not quite. And I wasn’t fast enough, not even close. Couldn’t afford the augments for it by myself. She knew people from her life before: new models, prototypes. Anything’s allowed on the circuit provided you can mentally control it, so you do what you have to do. But you know, it doesn’t always work like that. If I’d won, maybe I could have done something—paid her back, paid her off, whatever. But . . .” Then he plays another video. This one shows him fall—his limbs like spider’s legs trapped underfoot, snapping and bending at strange angles, the ground beneath him churning as the mechanics in his broken legs keep going. His face is still. “I’ve seen this hundreds of times,” he says, “never get used to it. I was healing when she called in the favor. She said she’d make everything okay—outfit me with better augments if I did everything she wanted. And I needed that, because I lost. I couldn’t refuse, but I didn’t even want to. She’s like a genie or something—there when you want her, when you need her.”

  “What’s a genie?” I ask.

  “From stories? They grant wishes. That’s what she does. What makes her invaluable.”

  “What did she ask you to do?”

  “After I ran, I joined the police. With the augments I was an asset. They wanted me, and I needed to work. Made sense.” He leans forward and looks away from me, props himself up on the table. “Then one day, she came to me. Turned up at my door. Told me she’d been watching. I’d almost forgotten her—or, I’d hoped she would have gone away. That’s when she laid me out. I woke up with something in my spine—I’m guessing the same as you’ve got. She told me she wanted me to do something for her now. Get her information.”

  “Did you go where she sent you?” I ask. I’m captured by the story. He seems like a good guy. He’s just like me: scared, lost.

  He nods. “I went. She wanted something from the Archives, and of course I had the access to get in there. I stood there by the computers, ready to get the information she needed, and I realized she couldn’t see me. Couldn’t reach me there to do her . . .” He makes the same finger twitch Alala made. “I called it in. Told my bosses what happened. I didn’t tell them about Alala, though. Told them I didn’t know who’d done it. I had been buying black market augments; likely I’d have been kicked off the force. Lost everything. They got surgeons to defuse the device and told me to get back to work. That was about a year ago. Since then I’ve been waiting. Doing my job, bringing down criminals, waiting for her to screw up—to make a move that I can use. I went to see her a couple of months ago, told her the device was gone. She told me that I would regret it one day, not helping her. And I thought, right there and then, that I could take her out. Solve my problem. Nobody would know why.” There’s a glimmer in his eyes, and he’s somewhere else for a moment. Then he’s back with me. “But I couldn’t do it. I have to do it right. She sent you here to kill me?”

  “She said I had to,” I say, “but I’m not going to. I can’t. I’m not that person.” I say that, and I get a flash—a rush, almost like falling, like the ground is screaming toward me. But it’s faces of people who have died, who I didn’t save—of Agatha and Jonah and Mae, even Rex and then Dave. And I feel sick, dizzy for a moment; my stomach knotting, churning.

  “Did she give you a weapon?” He’s quiet. He’s ahead of me.

  “Only the EMP,” I say.

  “So what are you meant to do when you’ve used it? Slit my throat?” He draws his finger—one metal finger—across his neck, in the action. “That’s not the weapon, Chan. You are. She’ll be waiting to explode you, take us both out. You’re no use to her now.”

  “I’m alone,” I say, and this suddenly feels like bargaining—for my life, for my freedom. I’m alone and nobody will miss me. Nobody will know I’m gone. Ziegler will publish his story as it is, and nobody will believe him without the evidence. Mae will be taken by Alala, or left where she is, and I’ll never know how she is. Nobody will know. I want somebody to know, to miss me. “Please.”

  He moves away, sits on the bed behind me. I can’t see what he’s doing, but there’s a hiss, the sound of something cr
unching. I bend my neck to try and get him back in my sight. Then he walks back around, his other prosthetic arm fitted to his body. He tenses it, twitches the fingers.

  “What are you going to do?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” he says, “and neither are you. And I’m not going to give Alala the chance, either.” He drags me, grabs my shoulders, props me up against the wall underneath the window. There’s a mirror opposite, on the wardrobe, and I see what I look like right now: a disaster, hurt and tired and wrecked.

  He shuts the door, locks it, barricades it by dragging over the chest of drawers as if it’s nothing; it’s so light for him to move it barely registers.

  “Now we wait for my guys to arrive. Sorry, Chan. I wish we could help you more. But this is always how it was going to end for you, you have to know that.” His eyes flicker; he’s sending a message though his augs, finally getting the backup he’ll need to lock me away, to defuse the bomb in me, likely, before we get out of here. “We can get you a deal, maybe. You help us to take down Alala, maybe we can help you find whoever it is you’re looking for.”

  It’s a good deal. Safer. But there are no guarantees, and Alala’s got the information now. That’s faster. I don’t want to kill him, but I don’t know that I can trust him either.

  I lunge for the EMP. I make it, both hands on it.

  “No,” he says, but I squeeze it.

  The lights pop off; the noise that I hadn’t even noticed—all the noise from outside, from the street, from the building itself—comes to an end. Hoyle clatters to the ground, hissing coming from his limbs, which, when I look over, are limp—a stillness to them that they didn’t have before this moment. His face has gone dead as well, though his eyes are moving; his jaw is tight, like he’s gritting his teeth. The Unabler drops off my wrist and falls to the ground, suddenly useless. And inside me, something changes. I worry that what I squeezed wasn’t an EMP but a device—that I am on the cusp of exploding, of taking Hoyle out with me. But I don’t. Instead, there’s a gnawing pain from deep inside me that’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before—like cramps, but a hundred times worse, creeping through my insides from my spine. From down below, noise rises again and then there’s panic. Cars have crashed into each other. It sounds like chaos. People scream. Everybody’s devices will have stopped working—augs as well. Some people will be crippled, blinded.

  Then I hear the sound. It’s a buzzing, a furious whirr. It’s not right outside, but it will be soon enough.

  The birds are coming.

  I look over at Hoyle and he stares back, totally still. He can’t move. Another surge of pain hits my insides—huge and horrible, scraping at me like fingers clasping my organs. I struggle to my feet and Hoyle makes a noise, his half-useless mouth telling me to stop. But I can’t. I push up using the wall, the sill. There must be a weapon here, a knife or something. Something that I can use to defend myself.

  “Don’t,” he says. His voice is strained, the words forced out of a mouth that can’t do what he wants it to, not just yet.

  “I have to!” I scream, and I realize that I can’t not scream—that the noise is pain and anger and terror, all coming out, one crash of everything I’m feeling. The birds are getting closer. The door is locked and I can’t see the key or how to open it, even. It’s electrically coded, likely. All that’s left is the window. I can maybe go back the way I came in. I open it, try to make out the birds as they soar down the streets toward us. They’re harder to see in the daylight—grit against the backdrop of the buildings in every direction, floating motes of dust, the sun only glinting on their shells when they’re at the right angle.

  I’ve got thirty seconds, I figure. No more.

  Foot up on the sill. The pain inside me hurts more. I’m nearly out; I don’t care if Alala sees me because—

  Hoyle’s hand on my ankle. He’s turning back on.

  He grabs me, throws me against the chest of drawers and I thud painfully against it. I try to move right away, but I can’t. My arm kills, so do my legs and neck. I’m out. I can feel it. I’m in too much pain to dig any deeper, to find a last reserve to send me running. Something’s broken. I look down and there’s bone jutting through my shoulder where it hit the drawer unit. I can’t really feel my spine anymore.

  I’m done.

  Hoyle stands in front of me, gasping as his body becomes operational again. Everything is slower than it was, twitchier. I’m guessing it doesn’t happen often that his whole system shuts down. I think about how vulnerable he must feel when it does. I know what that’s like.

  The birds are so close.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. Then he’s quiet, waiting, and I wait with him. The buzzing is right outside the window. There’s a mechanical voice—Gaia issuing some sort of alert, telling the crowds below not to panic. Hoyle crouches in front of me. “Who were you trying to rescue?” he asks.

  “Mae. Little girl,” I manage. It hurts too much to speak. My jaw is broken, I think.

  “I’ll find her. Do what I can.”

  I don’t have time to say anything. I want to thank him. The birds are outside the window, a swarm of them, a shape made in the air as they orbit each other.

  They drive through the window, smashing the glass, flapping and beating against one another with their tiny silver wings.

  PART

  TWO

  EIGHT

  Today is a day like every other. I wonder during my waking moments if my life is merely a dream, because it feels so much like a dream. The vagueness of it and the way that it seems so fleeting, as if everything—who I am, where I live, the people that I know—might just evaporate from me. Everything that came before is suddenly not quite so real as maybe it once was. Perhaps it’s not this day that I am dreaming but the past that I now barely remember. I try and call back to mind who I was once but it’s gone.

  It’s a shape I can’t quite form, no matter how hard I try.

  I can’t make out the angles, the lines.

  Instead, I understand the nature of truth. That is what’s presented now. The truth is not vague and it is not slight. The truth is what’s directly in front of me when I wake up, and absolutely nothing more.

  “Good morning,” everybody says (without fail, every single person here). That is good manners.

  “Good morning,” I reply. We are all so polite. Sometimes people say my name. My name—sewn into the back of my clothes, written in the front of my books. printed on my door, my private space, my room. Everything with my name on it is mine.

  Chan. This belongs to Chan.

  What do you feel? asks Gaia when I wake up. Every day, I hear the alarm first and then her voice, which for some reason is inside my head. I thought it was a mistake, that I was broken, the first time; and then it was explained. It’s just for me. Talk to her, because she won’t be there forever. Gaia’s voice is cold. She sounds female, and she must live here as well, but I have never met her. But she is always here—every morning and every evening—and she is kind, and I’m told not to be scared of her. I’m told to open up to her, that talking with her is a private opportunity just for me, for the moment.

  So I do. I tell her if I have had a dream, and I tell her if I am unsettled. I can imagine her nodding while I talk, listening carefully and really attempting to understand every little thing that I am saying.

  We are assigned different tables for mealtimes because we’re told we have to socialize. We talk about our days and we discuss issues that have arisen. Sometimes we tell each other secrets and sometimes we talk about our morning conversations with Gaia.

  Everything is as open as it can be.

  One night I am at a table with people that I don’t know, the next with more people that I do not know, the next with somebody from the first night again and two people from the second, the next with new people. Over and over. In the morning, the voice in the rooms asks us who we like, who we enjoy spending time with. “Do you think you form attachments easily?” Gaia asks. “Do y
ou enjoy the time you spend with this person?”

  They ask us to remember the names of our friends. Names are important, they say. They have power and they have meaning. A name is an identity. It’s so much more than just a word.

  Every few days we have a meeting with Doctor Gibson. He’s a doctor, “But of the mind,” he says.

  “Any doctor can mend a broken bone. We’ve gotten to be so good with them, you understand. We can heal those in minutes—moments even, as fast as it takes to take a breath if the bone isn’t too badly broken. But this is about something else entirely, Chan. This is about what’s wrong with society. Sometimes we have something we can fix, and so we should. We would think nothing of operating on that broken arm. There’s always something that we can smooth over, you know? So think about your art sessions.” In art, we paint and we draw and we sculpt. “The clay you use? It’s rough, isn’t it?”

  I agree with him. A lot of being here and succeeding is about agreeing.

  “So when it’s done and you want it to be pleasing to look at, to touch, to be something that is useable? That’s when you smooth it down. That’s when you have to make it what it can be. You see that? Not what it is, but what it can be.”

  I agree again.

  “We are all like that clay, Chan. Or we’re like a canvas, if you prefer. Do you like to paint? What happens if we make a spill, if we paint something that we don’t want to have painted, something that we need to get rid of?”

  I tell him that we paint over it, that we start again.

  “Exactly. Exactly!” He points into the air, like a punctuation mark. He chuckles. It’s a fun little chuckle, quite sweet, nice to listen to. “We start again. I was trapped once, so I started again. Now I’ve got a family. Do you want a family?”

  I want to say that I’ve got one, but . . . no. That’s not true.

  I want one.

  “I’ve got children,” Gibson tells me. “Two of them, because they’re twins, which makes us rare, you know? That’s like nature’s way of giving you special dispensation to get around the rules. But if you want a child, if you want a family, you’ve got to succeed and get out of here. Become a part of the infrastructure. That’s all any of us wants.” He sits in a leather chair and I sit on one that’s exactly the same, directly opposite him. There’s a table between us with a bottle of fresh water and two metal mugs. He pours the water out, like a ritual, even if I’ve only drunk a few sips from my cup. “So, you should tell me what you remember. Tell me about your childhood, if that helps.”