Virology

by Ren Warom

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Zen Awakening

  I Am a Mountain

  Hunting Solo

  The View From Heaven

  The Aftermath Always Sucks

  Zero Dark Thirty

  Hu Hai Abandoned

  Home Again, Home Again…

  Hostile Takeover

  Zero Tolerance

  A Killer Can Look Upon a Queen

  Hu Hai in Hunin

  What KJ Did…

  Shandong in Flames

  The Place of Dead Roads

  Disconnect

  Zero Hour

  How Not to Steal a Shuttle

  Part Two

  The Stars My Destination

  The Unholy Trinity

  Last Tango in Paris

  Aunty Dong Disappointed

  Tokyo Drift

  As Above

  Zen Tangle

  So Below

  A Resignation by Proxy

  Don’t Upset Your Aunty

  Little Solarium of Horrors

  Less Than Zero

  Shanghai Blues

  Audience

  Life’s a Circus’ Pal

  In a New York Minute…

  The Shape of Things to Come

  Deuces are Wild

  Zero Sum Game

  The View From Here

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY REN WAROM

  AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  Escapology

  TITAN BOOKS

  virology

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785650949

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785650956

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: June 2017

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Ren Warom asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Copyright © 2017 Ren Warom

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  For my three stooges AKA the spawn.

  If I could have kids all over again, I’d choose you every

  damn time, no matter what I might say about swapping

  you for hamsters…

  PART ONE

  Zen Awakening

  Zen strides the city of Foon Gung with her Queens, laughing. Her Queens are finally free, permanently unleashed from their virtual prison, the Slip. They will have their fun and then come for her, bring her down to them. Until then, she rides within them, dreaming all they see. Being all they are. Immense. Goddess-like. The ground so far below it’s nothing more than a game of the world in miniature.

  Clouds brush past. Drones buzz in her ears. Screams drift up as laser fire lays waste to the inner city; all those ’scrapers in too-close proximity, helpless to defend themselves or the thousands caged within them. All those fragile lives. For a moment, she’s the very sky falling upon them. And then it all goes wrong.

  The Haunt and his Hornet swarm. His pirates.

  They ruin everything.

  Somehow the Haunt pulls a Kraken from the depths of Slip. Some lost or abandoned avatar, a thing of hungry coils. This thing, this hideous id best left in Slip to rot, is set loose on the nodal-Queen. High-pitched, her cries echo across the Gung, calling the others, who come running, and Zen comes with them.

  She revels in the destruction of the Kraken, urges them after the Haunt, to tear him to shreds in the same fashion. To stop him.

  They get to his second avatar first. His Shark. Desperately trying to get back to him. She screams at them to destroy it. Destroy him. Claps her hands as they snap that connection, injuring him as she was injured. And she’s laughing again as she urges them to rend into his mind, dig a hole deep enough for all six Queens to cocoon within. Use him as he used the Kraken.

  As his mind begins to cave, she longs to be there, to take part. To feel him break apart in her hands. Unexpected then, the sudden snap. Pain unimaginable. Enough to wake her. Wide-eyed and gasping.

  Awake for the first time in… how long?

  She didn’t know she could wake.

  But the Queens are gone. Her connection to them, though minimal since Josef’s accomplice, the J-Hack, Breaker, replaced her proper link to her Queen with the link to Polar Bear—the intruder-avi, her jailer—is gone. Nothing but silence where once the talk of the Queens lulled her in her dreams.

  Cut off and denied, awake, she stares out into endless white, desperate to close her eyes.

  She wants to sleep again.

  Anything but being back in this two-fold prison—her sphere and within in the warm sleeping womb of Polar Bear, who was never hers, never meant to be hers, whose presence is punishment. Cruelty. Bear is still sleeping, of course she is. Bear will always sleep. Once that meant that Zen would always sleep too. Now she has no idea what it means.

  Zen will never escape her though. Not without help.

  And Bear is not all there is. There is the orb, the glass that contains them both, floating in this sea of white. Glass should be breakable but she imagines this glass is far from it, and she has no idea where this white space is, only that is it formless and so warm it crackles with static. How long has she been here? It might be over a decade. Longer. She should be in pain, should be starving. Broken inside. But Josef couldn’t see her hurt no matter how much she hurt him. And she did, didn’t she? She enjoyed it too.

  She’s a little disappointed in him. Punishments should hurt. His did.

  Zen and the Queens made sure of that.

  Josef. Thinking of him, she remembers what happened in the tower before her Queens walked the Gung. Did he die when her Queens stepped through his eyes? Oh she hopes he died, long and slow. He betrayed her. Betrayed her Queens. Helped Breaker diminish her… Zenada screams as if some dam has broken, surprised to hear her voice. She remembers. Her Queens. The Haunt. He stole her Queens. He stole her key.

  She stares with burning eyes through the golden shape of Polar Bear and the glass of the sphere. Smooth. Impenetrable. Inescapable.

  She’s helpless and not helpless. The Haunt isn’t the only one with bio-ware in his head. Though hers, admittedly, is far from the sophistication of Emblem, which once kept the Queens locked in Slip, she’s had longer to learn it, to make it work with her. For a long time, it was all she had left of real awareness, her only connection to life.

  She’s been experimenting with it in her dreams. Using it to travel Slip, attaching new protocols to scraps of code, forcing them to erupt to change. To evolve. Reaching out to put her mark
on the real world through the medium of the virtual, the Slip, her Slip, and the results are already out there, written on the flesh of Zeros. Trapping them within their bodies as she’s been trapped. Soon they’ll be more code than person. Drivable.

  There’s a game here. A way to have them bring something to her. Someone. Someone who can unlock her prison. A key in human form. A Haunt remade to a key.

  Long used to patience, to dreaming, Zenada dreams of all that might be possible when she has what he has. Of ways to make the world pay for all she’s had taken from her.

  Of punishment. Richly deserved, and dealt with absolute pleasure.

  I Am A Mountain

  At the rear of Foon Gung’s seven-hundred-mile sprawl, Shandong’s mountain ranges rise from the mist, crooked and vast. Around them, abrupt and impatient, juts an array of interlocked high-rises, reflecting mountains, mist and sparse greenery back at itself from every window, turning mountains into a maze, a confusion. These ranges span miles, interweaving concrete and stone right out to the sea where occupied bridges—intricate as cobwebs—connect the mountain habitations to broken spars and ranges too treacherous to live on, all surrounded by furious ocean.

  On clear days the sight of spars retreating into the sea, a terracotta army shrunken with age, is both beautiful and sad. A reminder of what the world lost.

  On an outcrop above a rolling expanse of restless mist sits a lone figure built from golden code bright as fireflies and scintillating in the rise of sunlight: Shock Pao.

  Once a Haunt, a hacker able to pass unseen, signal-less in Slip and IRL, he’s now fugitive and stranger than human. Around him a temple forms, built in gradual increments from a delicate swirl of gold, chain-like filaments. A perfect facsimile from its tiered and sway-backed roof to the rows of prayer lanterns jostling in the breeze. Inside, thick banks of incense give off sickled drifts of golden smoke, floating away to particulate embers of code. Before them the restless ghosts of monks stand bowed and chanting, their voices a murmur on the breeze, low enough to enter the skin like warmth, in tingling vibrations.

  Across the floors, around the pillars, avatars bloom into being, roving in curious bursts about the walls. After he freed them from Slip so his friends could trap the Queens in Core, the dark centre of their Hive, the avatars have grown bold, exerting their independence. Why would they not? The lock is gone; the gates open. They have a choice now, and they choose, in general, to leave. To play. To make up for a lifetime of being locked in. There are people who can’t understand that. After all, the Slip is an ocean so vast it defies measurement. But is anywhere really big enough when you know you can’t leave?

  A shoal of fish darts between lanterns, briefly flaring bright and shade under golden flames. Shock touches them and feels somewhere far away the shape of the mind attached. Masculine. Reclined in a leather chair. Faint scents of whiskey and musky aftershave. Eyelids twitching. By the lazy swirl of his thoughts he imagines himself dreaming. Dreaming in Slip. Cute. Also impossible, considering Slip is pretty much already a dream. Real but not at all real. Shock smiles to himself, wondering what this man would do if he knew this temple was just an illusion of an illusion. A dream about dreaming.

  This is where Shock hides. In this place. In moments like this. To escape from everything, even when he shouldn’t be, because there are days that imprint into your psyche, that make or break you, but always change you and, until four weeks ago, Shock thought that was the worst a day could do. He’d give a lot to still be that fucking ignorant. Four weeks ago he went through twenty-four hours that dismantled him. Tore him apart cell by cell and remade him. Literally. What he is now is not quite human, not quite together, a mishmash of aching scars, bio-ware and brokenness walking around in a human skin trying to look normal and feeling whole fucking universes away from it.

  Long-ass story of that twenty-four hours in short form? He kind of broke the world.

  Short story long? Where to begin? Foon Gung, the last land left on earth not leering out of the sea at an awkward angle, the only bit that survived when they physically broke the world a few hundred years back—on purpose as it happens—used to be run by the Corporation known as Fulcrum, created and run by the Lakatos family. Why did Fulcrum run the Gung? Simple influential and financial weight. They owned the Slip, the virtual world that everyone everywhere uses—jacking in to ride inside golden avatars in the shape of ocean creatures that until four weeks ago he thought were more thing than person. Turns out he was wrong there too. Avatars are made from you. They’re alive. Real. Beings.

  Which is kinda why he had that twenty-four hours to begin with.

  Slip was run by the Hive Queens, giant AI avatars created by Fulcrum to manage the vast amounts of data created by billions of service users. The Queens were ants. Giant. Fucking. Ants. Why ants in a Hive? Why a Hive at all when Slip is a virtual ocean? Who the hell knows? Fact is, not only were these Queens ants, they were fucking lunatic. Wanted to bust out IRL and take shit over, Old Testament style—that whole giants walking the earth shit. Only thing keeping them in? Emblem, a tiny shred of bio-ware, the lock and key between Slip and RL, hidden away in Core at the centre of the Queens’ Hive, the only place they couldn’t go.

  Now Emblem’s in his head, so meshed with his brain he can’t tell where it ends and he begins. Yeah, long-ass story.

  Suffice it to say that in twenty-four short hours, he pulled off the most extraordinary heist in hacking history—because, yeah, no fucker’s ever got far enough to jack Hive, let alone Core—got hijacked by said bio-ware, chased by gangsters, caught and tortured, rescued, chased again, electrocuted by a psychopath, killed her and her crazy brother, jacked every avatar out of Slip, got head-jacked by the Queens and had his second avatar, Shark, torn away from him. That’s like losing a piece of yourself and FYI Shock knows that shit inside out too, having lost several fingertips when he was tortured.

  His fingers tingle at the memory and he lifts his hand, staring at biotech tips, functional instead of familiar. Gold at the moment, they’re silver against the soft tan shade of the flesh they cap IRL. As it happens, you can replace fingertips and teeth, but you can’t kill the memory of loss. You can’t mend invisible damage.

  The only reason he’s still here wasting air is because, in all the chaos and cruelty of that day, life chose to send him a break or two. His friends. Amiga, a Cleaner sent to kill him who instead decided to save his stupid wreck of a life; the Hornets, a J-Hack crew of super-smart and sassy drop-outs; and the people of the Resurrection, a floating city of pirates, scientists, lunatics and damn good folk, who put their lives on the line to help save his so he could save the Gung. He’s not sure he did that. In fact he’s certain he didn’t.

  By the end of that twenty-four hours everything he knew about the world and his place in it was re-written. But it didn’t end there. If fucking only.

  Without Fulcrum, the Gung, too big, too messy, too full of people and now too scarred, littered with the fallout of one day of unmitigated disaster, is vulnerable to Corp takeover. Right this moment the big names are slugging it out for control, like Kaiju smashing each other senseless with whole buildings ripped from their foundations. And the people of the Gung, forced to see the lie their lives have been, are slowly boiling to agitation. They won’t stand by and watch the power struggle for long. They’re itching to join in, and fuck knows what happens then.

  The only thing he knows for sure is what happened to everyone who fought with him that day.

  Captained by Cassius Angel, a scar-patterned sprawl of a man with few foibles and a hot temperament, and carrying Volk, the Pharm whose drug locked the Queens in Core, and Petrie, the man-mountain bosun who led a rabble of well-armed pirates to save Shock’s ass, the land ship Resurrection City took her people back out to sea, to the ruins and remains of North America—tilted land masses forming vast valleys around white water estuaries. They’ve dropped anchor by the remains of Louisiana, a vertical swampland of vast twisted oak, cyprus,
banyan and water tupelo crawling with fifty-foot long alligators, to fix their ship, half destroyed by battle on the way to aid his sorry ass. He pops in to check on them every now and then, trying and failing not to freak them out with this new avi-form of his, but mostly he just misses them.

  As for himself and the Hornets, he kind of (totally did) fuck things badly. Call it grief, call it stupidity, whatever you fucking want, but he forgot to shield them from the outcome of what they’d all done that day. Apparently shit like removing crime lord threats and freeing the Gung’s citizens from Fulcrum’s control is illegal even when it saves people’s fucking lives. And apparently, even with Emblem being unpredictable as hell, he’s still considered a primary asset by… oh… just about everyone anywhere who equates controlling Slip with power, which is kinda everyone.

  Not long after the dust settled, all eyes turned on them. No matter that Shock scrambled at that point to scrub them from the Slip, from any memory anywhere, he was still too slow.

  Which is why they’re hiding. And hunting.

  He should be in Slip helping them right now, trawling the messy, cluttered streets of the Gung for the biggest threat currently on their tails: the Grey Cartel. Before Fulcrum fell, the Cartel was barely repped on the Gung, a few dozen lower-tier dealers here and there, no biggie. In the wake of Fulcrum’s fall, the Cartel have come from out of nowhere in droves. Sneaky bastards that they are, they’ve been ignoring Slip to comb the Gung district by district. So diligently in fact, that it’s a mere matter of time before they realize he and the Hornets are in Shandong and attack full force.

  So why is he procrastinating? Why is he here, building a dream, an illusion of escape from everything he has no right to hide from? Simplest answer? He’s scared.

  When he lost Shark, the rage he shaped his second avi from didn’t go with it, and now it’s no longer Shark-shaped it’s no longer under his control. Boiling inside of him, black hurricanes fraught with lightning, leaving him afraid of what he might do. Of what he can do. Before Emblem, when he was a Haunt, signal-less, capable of hiding from anyone, he was still always on the run. He was very good at running away.