The second message Luka received from Tycho was, as promised, a time and a place.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DISEMBODIMENT
CADIE FELT A HAND ON HER arm and opened her eyes. The doctor was standing over her, the soft lights behind her head coming up gradually and gently. When Cadie realized that Abbasi’s head was uncovered, she knew something was wrong.
The doctor’s hair was shorter than Cadie expected. Instead of being long and pulled back into a conservative bunch, it was fairly short and charged with waves and curls that made it almost playful. The expression on her face was an obvious attempt at reassurance, but Cadie could see that there was something more that she could not suppress in her big bronze eyes. Something like panic. Or maybe just urgency. Cadie could tell that whatever was about to happen, it was going to happen fast.
“It’s time to get you out of here,” Abbasi told her. Another attempt at reassurance with a quick, tense smile.
As the doctor rolled her up onto her side, Cadie realized the significance of being awakened by Abbasi’s hand. A soft and gentle touch. Something she actually felt. And now she could feel her body suit opening down the back and the epidural patch being peeled off. She was rejoining the world—no longer simply an observer, and no longer disembodied.
She was able to move now. As she sat up, she was surprised to find that she was neither stiff nor sore. She could feel the surface beneath her undulating—cycling through patterns and configurations probably intended to help avoid compressed nerves, blood clots, and pressure ulcers.
The doctor handed Cadie a bulb of cold water and Cadie drank. She looked around her, took deep breaths, and felt alive and strong. There was no pain in her abdomen and she did not think about the baby. There would be time later to grieve, but right now, she needed to be present. She trusted the doctor, and she knew she had to focus.
“How do you feel?” Abbasi asked her.
“I feel good,” Cadie said. “I feel strong.”
“Very good,” the doctor said. She pulled a black elastic band off her wrist and offered it to Cadie. “Pull your hair back,” she said. “You’re going to want it out of your way.”
Cadie accepted the band, and as she ran her fingers through her hair to gather it, she found that the doctor’s brushing had kept it free of knots and tangles. When the band was twisted tight, she swung her legs around and let them dangle from the side of the platform.
The doctor knelt and slid what felt like slippers over Cadie’s feet. They fit her well, though Cadie could feel them further molding themselves around her toes, heels, and arches until they matched the shape of her feet exactly, more like prosthetics than shoes. She dropped down on the floor and felt light and even buoyant on her legs. Her ponytail leapt as she bounced on the balls of her feet and found that her quadriceps and hamstrings and calf muscles were limber and well developed.
“You should probably use the washroom,” the doctor advised.
The semiopaque privacy panel slid to the side as Cadie approached, and then slid closed again behind her as the lights came up. The entire room—including the shower, the counter, and the basin—seemed to be fabricated out of a single, uninterrupted flow of smooth white silica. It took Cadie a moment to realize that the handle between the chrome bars was used to lower the toilet, though she correctly guessed that pivoting it back up into the wall activated the flushing mechanism.
When she came back out, she found that the doctor was not alone. There was a man beside her. He was much taller than the doctor, and he was cradling a stubby, scoped rifle. The man had fiercely red hair and he wore cargo pants, boots, and a tight sweater—either dark blue or black—with tiny insignias pinned through the shoulders. There was another weapon strapped to the man’s right thigh. When he spoke, Cadie immediately recognized his voice.
“You good to go?” the man asked her.
Cadie looked at the doctor, and the doctor nodded.
“Yes,” Cadie said.
“We’re going to need to move fast,” the man explained. “And we’re only going to get one shot at this. Are you going to be able to keep up?”
The surge of adrenaline Cadie had felt back in V1 when stepping through the outer door of the airlock for the first time was nothing compared to this. As she shook out her arms and legs, she wondered if the man would be able to keep up with her.
“Absolutely,” Cadie said.
“OK, then,” he said. “Let’s do this. Follow me.”
He started to turn but the doctor took his arm. The man stopped and looked down at her.
“Thank you for doing this,” Abbasi said.
The man watched the doctor for a moment. Cadie wondered if it was as strange for him to see Abbasi with her head uncovered as it had been for her.
“Don’t thank me yet,” the man said.
Ayla was back on the Hawk. She pretended to be asleep as her cabin door opened, then closed again a moment later. Her shift had ended two hours before his and she was supposed to be asleep, but she never slept when she knew Costa was coming to bed. At least not very soundly. She liked to listen to him undress and brush his teeth. He frequently did several sets of push-ups and sit-ups to help him wind down, the floor creaking as he pushed his lean but muscular body against it. Ayla liked to listen to his breathing get heavier and more strained until it was almost a grunt.
one of Costa’s quirks was that he frequently washed his feet throughout the day, and always before bed. He told Ayla that he once had a fungal infection that required him to keep his feet clean and dry, and go without boots and socks for a month. Washing his feet before bed became a habit—a kind of ritual that, for reasons he didn’t really understand, helped relax him. Perhaps it was a form of symbolic purification, he once speculated as Ayla leaned against the open bathroom door and watched him perform the curious ceremony, always starting with the toes of the right foot. Far too many of his days were spent doing things he was not proud of, so perhaps washing his feet was his own personal form of repentance.
Sometimes he spent a few minutes at the terminal embedded in the wall beside the bed, or simply stood there meditatively, perhaps trying to detect signs of aging in the mirror on the back of the door, or maybe watching Ayla pretend to sleep. Whatever he did, he did as quietly as he could so as not to wake her up, never realizing that his wife was always awake, and never knowing how much she loved just listening to him—just being in the same room as him. But most of all, she loved that moment when he switched out the last light, and the bed compressed beneath his weight. As he pulled the sheet up over him, she could feel his heat, and then his arm around her waist, and then his body against hers. And when she finally did fall asleep, it was always thoroughly intoxicated by whatever it was about Costa that made him smell like Costa.
She frequently thought about telling him that she was awake, or maybe just rolling over and opening her eyes so that he knew. But there was something about the routine that made her want to keep it a secret. Although the ritual was almost entirely about him, she also felt that it was something completely her own, and that if anyone ever found out about it, they might somehow try to take it away from her.
But tonight, the routine was different. Something was wrong. Instead of turning off the lights and getting into bed with her, he turned the lights on and shook her awake. Ayla felt her body from the Accipiter Hawk rejoin her body here, and when she opened her eyes, she remembered where she was. The man in her cell was armed, but he did not seem to be threatening her. When Ayla sat up, the man backed away.
“We need to go,” he told her in a tone that combined solemnity with urgency. He was an older man with short and thinning gray hair, the beginnings of a wattle beneath his chin, and a gentle paunch beneath his tight commando sweater.
Ayla squinted in the light and rubbed at her eyes. “Who are you?”
“We’re here to get you out,” the man said. “But we have to move fast.”
The man’s use of the word “we
” made Ayla look toward the door. The slats were open and she could see two other soldiers keeping watch outside her cell. It was dark, but in the ruby-red light outside, she could tell that one of them was a woman.
“Where are we going?”
“We’re taking you back to your ship,” the man said. “You, and the people you brought with you.”
Ayla began working her feet into her boots. “What about Omicron?” she asked. “I’m not leaving without him.”
“Him, too,” the man said. “But we can’t open his cell until I’m certain you can control him.”
“I thought you could restrain us at any time,” Ayla said. She was referring to the incarceration suits they were issued when they were brought in. It was explained to her that the polymer fibers in the material could be instantaneously realigned to become a thousand times more rigid in response to a focused beam of something or other. A certain wavelength of light, she thought. She didn’t remember the details. The upshot was that any attempt to escape would result in them being swiftly subdued. Ayla had never heard of such of a thing and half wondered if the whole thing was a bluff.
“We don’t have time for that,” the man said. “We need everyone’s full cooperation if we’re going to get you out of here in time.”
The man’s assumption that Ayla controlled Omicron was misguided. She’d never felt in control of him (though she never felt she needed to be), and although she made a few halfhearted attempts to assert herself early on, dominance was simply not something she had in her. Shortly after Omicron joined her crew, Ayla realized that it was never actually a bodyguard or a servant she wanted, but simply a constant and meaningful connection to another human being. While she and Omicron were being escorted from the Hawk to Hexagon Row, Ayla permanently disabled the vital sign monitor she wore on her wrist and willingly allowed it to be confiscated. Nobody controlled Omicron anymore except Omicron.
“In that case,” Ayla said, “he just has to know that I trust you.” She ratcheted one boot closed and started on the second. “Otherwise, there’s no telling what he’ll do.”
“How do we convince him that you trust me?”
“That’s the problem,” Ayla said. “I don’t.”
She slapped the last buckle down on the second boot and stood. The man looked down at her for a moment, then swung his rifle back on his shoulder.
“Fine,” he conceded. He drew his sidearm from the holster on his thigh, passed it to his other hand, then offered it to Ayla, grip-first. “Here.”
Ayla watched the man’s dull gray eyes carefully as she reached for the weapon, since she knew that any betrayal would begin there rather than in his gloved hands or composite-toed feet. When the pistol was firmly in her grasp, the man released it, then clasped his hands behind his back. Ayla’s index finger went up to the loaded chamber indicator and found that it was indeed protruding from the presence of a round. Just to be certain, she looked down at the weapon, then pulled the slide back just far enough that she could see the cartridge through the ejection port.
“Good,” Ayla told the man. “Now I trust you.”
The two oldest and largest above-deck structures on the San Francisco were the Market Street Refinery and the Mission Street Foundry. On the outside, the two buildings were identical, built from the same set of bland but functional schematics; on the inside, they were customized for their own specific, though highly complementary, purposes.
Once the minerals that were sucked up from polymetallic nodules on the ocean floor were sufficiently isolated from the surrounding silt, pneumatic conduits carried them up to storage tanks in the refinery’s basement where they were joined by complements of additional substances acquired in bulk from various ports, pod systems, and broker posts. What happened to the material as it was distributed among reservoirs, vats, and both well-staffed and entirely automated laboratories—subjected to various chemical, thermodynamic, and even small-scale nuclear processes along the way—was primarily dictated by the Mission Street Foundry’s unending queue of orders, and by projections of future requirements based on algorithmic analyses of historical demand. The end result was hundreds of individual chemical elements, alloys, and various complex molecular substances fed to the refinery’s sibling—the foundry—through an intricate network of pipes that had once been an above-deck eyesore, but as a result of one of the City Council’s many industrial gentrification initiatives, were relocated down below the basement level to deck two.
Once in the foundry, the various forms of matter—usually referred to collectively as medium—were stored under various conditions where it was modestly but steadily sipped by the hundreds of specialized assemblers that paused only long enough to be repaired, calibrated, upgraded, or to have their latest compositions removed by technicians before being reset and put back to work on the next order in the queue.
Without looking out of a window to check the circadian phase of the artificial light reflecting down off the dome, one could not tell day from night inside the foundry. Although technicians with seniority had first pick, all three shifts were staffed equally, and at no time, nor under any circumstances, was the foundry’s output permitted to subside. Producing almost every single physical item required to keep an entire city not just afloat, but also growing, evolving, and feeling as though it was prospering was an incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive endeavor that only grew increasingly demanding the higher the standard of living rose.
But the same could not be said for the refinery. Although it was technically in operation twenty-four hours a day, it was usually able to dial down production significantly at night. For the first two shifts of the day, converting natural resources into clean medium for the assemblers required about the same level of manpower as running the foundry. But at night—assuming production had been high enough that day, and that all the right tanks and cartridges were at high enough capacity, and that all daily quotas had been met—most of the third shift was routinely called off. Automated diagnostic and safety systems were considered sufficient for keeping an eye on the largely idle operations, and those who were required to stay back usually took full advantage of the cots in the control rooms. The fact that the refinery was almost entirely abandoned during the night shift—combined with its size and the constant noise even at minimal production levels—made it the perfect place for Luka and Charlie to meet, finalize their strategy, and get below deck without being detected.
In the basement of the Market Street Refinery, not far from the cargo lift, there was an odd bend in an assembly of hexagonal pipes—probably there to avoid some type of support structure or another cluster of pipes that had long since been relocated. Luka had climbed and hoisted his way up to the small platform and nestled himself down into the cavity to wait for Charlie. It was hot down in the basement level, and he could feel the high-frequency buzz of gritty material moving through the pipes beneath him. There was a smell down there unlike anywhere else on the rig, and it reminded Luka of some of Valencia’s kitchen experiments. She and her friends used to try to recreate recipes from the archives using anything that wouldn’t be missed from the gardens. Of course they were forced to make wild substitutions, and the results were seldom even edible, much less appetizing. Luka used to wonder what was in store for him when he was met with unfamiliar odors between the lift and the door to his transpartment. What he smelled now reminded him of Val’s first (but unfortunately, not her last) attempt at something called Irish soda bread. It somehow combined the pleasant aroma of something freshly baked with the noxious tinge of something being nearly incinerated.
Luka knew he should be trying to get a few hours of sleep, but he also knew that there was no way that was going to happen. He’d left the weapon he’d assembled lying flat on the floor below, having initially leaned it up against some sort of filtration system, then thinking better of it. It would have been nice to bring it up with him as a sort of distraction while he waited, but he was afraid of dropping it during th
e climb and either damaging it, or worse, accidentally discharging it. What he brought up to his perch with him instead was an envelope of curious yellow along with a flared glass tube.
In retrospect, Luka wasn’t entirely sure how he ended up with either item. It felt to him like the work of someone else—someone whose eyes he looked through, but whom he couldn’t control. A type of disembodiment. He had watched himself go to work early that morning and claim one of the older workstations vulnerable to binary code injection. He’d watched himself apply the exploit, run the job, and then look around to make sure nobody was paying attention as he tapped the thin layer of yellow dust off the surrogate gigacore graphics processing card into an improvised paper receptacle, which he then folded up and slipped into his jacket. And finally, he’d watched himself hang his coat up beside his transpartment door that evening, but rather than removing the envelope from the left-hand pocket, he’d deposited the glass tube into the pocket on the right.
Luka did not want to get high, but once again, he was outside of his own body, watching himself do something he felt powerless to prevent. He watched himself unfold the paper and tap at its edges until the powder was evenly dispersed, and then he watched himself retrieve the glass tube from his lap, lift it to his nostril, and bend down. That was when it occurred to him that maybe his body knew what it was doing. Maybe it was better to be just a little bit high tonight than to be distracted by withdrawal. Maybe tonight, of all nights, he needed his edge. It was suddenly obvious to him that it would be better to quit tomorrow, after whatever was about to happen was fully behind him. This, Luka promised himself, would be the very last time.
Luka felt his opioid receptors buzzing in anticipation as he allowed himself to merge with this other being and once again become whole.
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