Virology

by Ren Warom

  He’s running now, but the difference between then and now is that he’s stood and fought too. Fought and won. And once you know how to fight, once you know that you can, the urge can be hard to resist, and sometimes he just wants to let go. Be a shark. Be Shark. Sometimes he wants to tear the walls down just to hear them scream like he’s screaming. Feel like he’s feeling. At those moments, he has to stop. Breathe. Resist. Even when he doesn’t want to. Especially then. Especially now.

  Closing his eyes, Shock allows the temple to dissipate like smoke and fills with shame, hot as liquid lead.

  Sensible.

  Wincing, he opens his eyes. Swirling before him in the air is Puss, his primary avatar, her direct gaze made alien by square pupils and too familiar by his connection with her.

  Bathed in her censure, he falls back on old defences, saying sardonically, Aren’t you proud? I could have followed the impulse instead.

  Proud? Of your meagre display of self-control? Maybe a little, something quantum, she says, equally sardonic. Back to work maybe? I think you’ve wasted enough time.

  Fading away, Puss leaves one tentacle until last, gesturing imperiously. Yes ma’am.

  Shock sighs. Steps through from mountainside to Slip, shaking off the wisps of temple still clinging to his shoulders. Slip’s a virtual ocean, but it no longer looks like one. Freed from Fulcrum’s control, higher level Techs and Corps with hacking skills have begun to tear down some of the corals once used to connect the world and are building in their place something strange. Wonderful. A little terrifying.

  A little of everything—ragged portions of bizarre cities, rebellious of convention and physics, portions of landscape so surreal they could be other planets, zones akin to bubble universes with their own rules of physics. Castles in the air. Towers made of trees. Whatever can be imagined can be made here. Is being made. The sheer breathtaking invention of it astounds him. But it means the Slip is no longer so open. Things can hide here, and they do. They hide too well. Maybe even from eyes as sharp as his.

  Puss is nowhere to be seen, already off again trying to keep a working map of Slip as it changes and evolves so Shock, reading her, can avoid getting lost.

  Reaching out into the infrastructures connected to the Gung, Shock winces as the whole shape of it builds in his mind, a panorama of aching white noise, all those bodies and cars, too much information, the flash of monos, trailing conversation streams. Snippets of music, vid-stream, of arguments and laughter. The whole world in his head.

  There’s no way to ignore it, instead he makes use of it, focusing on specific patterns. Tells. The rhythms he’s come to associate with the Cartel. In this fashion he manages to pick up traces of the unit he’d clocked near Risi before tapping out and needing a break. Faint. Very faint. But it seems they’ve headed in to Risi proper.

  Shit. That’s where Amiga’s crew is hunting.

  Used to be he came here and rode behind Puss’s eyes and had to swim everywhere he needed to go, utilizing data gulleys if he needed to move fast from one area of Slip to another. Now? He closes his eyes, thinks where he needs to go, opens them: and he’s there. Emblem makes Slip accessible in this way and he has no idea how it works yet, only that it does and that, yeah, it freaks him out. He shouldn’t be able to do this. No one should. Picking up the exact whereabouts of the Cartel unit in the data streams of Risi, all that RL interference resonating through Slip code madness—that’s not so easy. Reassuringly tough, in fact.

  When he finds them, they’re on scooters, mere streets away from where Amiga, Deuce, Vivid and Raid are sat drinking coffee and arguing search routes. With little time for formalities, he does the single thing Amiga hates the most—considering how it reminds her of the erstwhile boss she killed by shooting rounds through her own lung—and IMs without chiming.

  Heads up. Cartel about two minutes away, closing in fast.

  You have got to be shitting me! She’s snarling. So not good. I’m guessing this means Puss gave you that verbal slapping you sorely deserved?

  You sicced Puss on me? Oh wow, Amiga. Best friend ever. Bitch.

  Oh fuck off. My goddamn Cleaner senses have been twitching all morning and now we’re what… seconds from imminent discovery, no thanks to you?

  Ugh.

  Yeah. Right. Sorry.

  Just get back on them and give them a nudge away. Last thing we need is a fight here. Too many people around, as per fucking usual. Track me in on their direction so we can follow.

  On it.

  He leaves her be, assuming she’s going to tell the others, instead she throws in a toilet break excuse and goes off alone.

  Amiga!

  What?

  You’re supposed to take your fucking team.

  I did. Me, myself and I. Poke the unit toward one of those ’scrapers for me. She throws him a vivid mental picture. She’s ridiculous gifted at vis. He thinks maybe it was her specialism before she Failed, but wouldn’t ask. The “danger, here be dragons” sign over that portion of her life is writ large enough to be seen from Mars.

  NO. Not until you call for back-up. He doesn’t tell her that he’d do pretty much anything to avoid nudging. Has no intention of letting her know how awful it feels to interfere with anyone’s right to think for themselves.

  Shock. Do it.

  Amiga has this thing she does, this quiet, cold thing that frankly makes his jaw ache. She does it on purpose. He hates it. Hates her when she does it. But he understands her need to be alone. It’s not like he’s a fucking social butterfly, even though he technically lives with over a hundred and twenty Hornets, he sees only five of them semi-regularly and only Amiga every day, if she’s around.

  Shock. Drive them, or I will.

  No point arguing. So Shock does what he hates to do and reaches in to the minds of the Cartel unit to plant presumed knowledge of the Hornets hiding in one of the nearby ’scrapers. They’re a strange design, these ones, and he can guess why she wants them there—all the better to corner them. It’s a good strategy. It’d be better if she had back-up.

  Done.

  Don’t call the others.

  He sighs. Like I would. Be real, Amiga. Be fucking careful too.

  I don’t need to be careful, she snaps, and then she’s gone, leaving aching silence.

  Yeah, you do, he whispers to her absence. You just don’t want to.

  All okay? Puss rolls out of Slip tentacles first, radiating calm in that way she has.

  Nope. Why have we always got to seek the worst-case scenario?

  Because you two are your own worst enemies.

  Hah. Maybe.

  Definitely. But chill. We won once, we’ll do it again, even if you two are still running solo like absolute idiots.

  Feeling his honesty like a burden, he admits, It didn’t feel like winning.

  Puss sends him the warm glow she uses as a smile. It rarely ever does, she says, soft and sad.

  Shock reaches for his body, sat cross-legged on the edge of a balcony at their hideout in Shandong, far away from the chaos of Gung, still overcrowded but somehow remote. Peaceful. Pops out facing himself, staring at his own face, the ever-present warmth of Puss wrapping around his back. He looks in through his own eyes to see himself, golden, looking back at him. Smiles, and watches his selves, gold and technicolor, smiling at each other into infinity. This is what he is now on the inside. A paradox. An illusion. Nothing he understands.

  Trying not to allow it to frighten him any more than it already has today, he reaches through those multi-selves to the connection he has with Deuce, and wholesale dumps the information Amiga demanded he keep to himself. Okay, so he promised he wouldn’t. He lied. If she can be stupid, he can lie, right?

  The solemn promise of retribution doesn’t matter.

  Some things are just worth the aggro.

  Hunting Solo

  Rotten fish stench grabs Amiga’s nostrils, shoving its way in beside the almighty reek of sweaty bodies and filthy walls. Talk about uninvit
ed visitors. Ramming the back of her hand to her nose she hunkers down, hoping stench may resemble smoke and remain high, but if anything it’s stronger, pulling hot bubbles of acid gorge to rise and pop in her throat. And now the thigh she took a bullet through saving Shock is having a bitch fit, despite all the work Ravi, the Hornets’ sawbones, has put in trying to fix it like new.

  Her fault for pushing too hard, but rest is boring. Inactivity is the only thing more certain to kill her than a bullet.

  “Holy honking hell, Batman, someone needs to throw their goddamn trash in a furnace,” she mutters, oblivious to memories of her own overflowing bin habits. Hers never stank this bad. “They need to throw this whole goddamn place in a fucking furnace.”

  Having lived in the sweaty confines of the Gung her entire life, Amiga’s seen some shit holes for sure, but all fifty floors of this ’scraper’s narrow, poorly lit, grime-streaked concrete corridors resemble nothing less than a circle of hell. Turning the corner at the end of the corridor, she finds another stairwell leading up into darkness and runs lightly up, scaring off a couple of roosting pigeons. Amiga shushes them impatiently. If she had a gun she’d shoot them. But she chucked it when she ran out of bullets.

  Plastic 3D-printed gun. Useless after the magazine is empty.

  Also less easy to come by every day, like everything is with the Corps up in arms and the Gung spiralling to pieces, less sure of itself and more aggressive by the day. If things don’t change soon, or break, this place will go up in flames. Or explosions. Amiga kinda wants to be out of Dodge before then, wants her Hornets, her family of choice, out of Dodge. They’ve had enough of being caught in crossfire. But first there are rats to hunt. Cartel rats.

  The stairs end at yet another long, dirty corridor. Of the caged bulbs above her head, about one in every five casts light in a sputtering cone, illuminating ranks of poor-quality steel doors, dented and fissured from who the hell knows what. It could be a prison, or an institution, but people live here. Until she left to start Tech, Amiga used to live in a similar place. Maybe a bit cleaner. Heck, a lot cleaner, but no less fucking miserable. Misery is a commodity for the Corps and criminals who build these pits.

  Today their penny-pinching will work in her favour. This place has pretty much nowhere to hide. The inside comprises a spiral. Corridor leading to corridor leading to corridor until you hit the stairwell to the next floor. In other words: if there’s a fire, everyone dies.

  Her targets, therefore, have to be somewhere ahead.

  How many floors did this thing have again? Amiga checks back at her brief scan and offers up a silent curse at any listening entities when she realizes she’s barely more than a quarter of the way up. Her thighs are on fire. Stairs: literally the worst invention ever. Yet somehow the most irritatingly persistent.

  The only good thing about these shitty ’rises, apart from the currently useful design, is that the people in them know violence well enough to avoid it. They’ll have heard the epic gun battle in the middle of their courtyard and gone on lockdown. Meaning she won’t accidentally kill someone.

  A scrape in the hallway ahead snaps her eyes forward. She feels the grin before she realizes it’s grabbed her mouth. Oh crap. Shouldn’t be smiling. Shouldn’t be having fun, especially not in this epic vom-sauna of BO, fish and grime. This is scratching an itch, nothing more. A little hit to keep the urge in check, to hold back the flood.

  Another, more discreet scrape, almost too faint to hear.

  Amiga’s head flashes clear, cleansed by the lightning of adrenal rush. Palming her knife from her back pocket, she creeps forward to the corner and rises to stand— head pressed back into the wall regardless of dirt. In this heightened state of clarity she can hear the Cartel soldiers waiting close by. There’s anticipation in the hitch and rasp of their breath. They know she’s followed them. They were counting on it.

  Fuck’s sake, Amiga mouths to the ceiling.

  Why do people do it? Why? Knowing what she is? Amiga’s breath stops altogether for a moment. Was.

  Knowing what she was, they shouldn’t think they can entrap her into chasing them and then dispatch her without effort because narrow corridors and outnumbered and stupid goddamn bringing a knife to a gun party. This shit is worse than the whole hail of bullets assumption. It’s downright insulting. Hurts her fucking professional pride to the core.

  These absolute morons are going to learn first hand the very significant difference between a killer and a Cleaner up close and excruciatingly personal.

  Flexing her hands, Amiga visualizes, tenses, and flits around the corner. Sure enough, all seven Grey Cartel members are ranged up the next corridor, guns high and ready to shoot. Not ready enough. They’ve barely clocked her presence when she’s right in the face of the first one, grabbing his arm to ram it behind his back, up and under, forcing him in front of her as the others turn to fire the dregs of their bullets.

  “Good evening,” she says brightly into his sweat-soaked hair as he jerks against her, blooms of blood and flesh slamming out of his torso. “Today you’ll be playing the part of my human shield.”

  It makes her laugh how they portray combat on film and in the stream-shows from the hubs, the sensual flow of choreographed moves, so slick and smooth you’d think the blood might clean itself off the floor in reverence. Reality works a little different. Violence is ugly. Breathless. Personal. Fists miss targets. Feet slip. The impact of walls and floor, of fists and feet on flesh is a shock to the system, each one sparkling like a constellation of stars. The body aches. Burns.

  A knife cut is numb and sear. A bullet startling impact and then heaviness. There’s nothing reverential about any of it, apart from the stunning responsibility of taking a life. Cleaners understand this from the inside out. Use it to their advantage. Waste nothing. Execute eliminations with swift, brutal efficiency, the kind that leaves a great deal of mess. Incongruous then, the use of the term clean to describe what the Cleaner does. Never fails to amuse her. Nor does the assumption that facing a Cleaner will be like in the movies.

  Facing a Cleaner is facing death, and people never fail to realize it until it’s too late.

  Out of bullets and one man down, his torso a mess of minced meat and bone fragments, the Cartel remain in close ranks as if they think she can be intimidated. Cute. Stuffing the laughter down, because it’s not safe to laugh—laughter in this situation steals humanity, makes her a monster—Amiga palms her knife and allows them to make the first move, en masse, as if that will go in any way toward changing the outcome.

  Five kills, one immobilize and capture. No darts, no bullets, no crossbow bolts. No fucking problem.

  Spinning her knife sideways in her hand, she waits, relaxed over the balls of her feet, until they’re close enough that she can see the colour of their eyes in the dim light. The fear that sparks when she glides forward, smiling, knife flashing left and right to leave the first two in her wake, their guts steaming on filthy concrete, a third reeling back choking, his hand clamped to his throat as if that can stop the deluge.

  “I need one of you alive,” she tells the remaining three, shadowing them as they step back, uncertain. “Draw straws, maybe?”

  They break at that, the lights going out, swallowed whole by dull clouds of panic. Good. Panic steals adrenalin. Steals movement. Fight or flight would kick in any second now if she gave it a chance. So she doesn’t. Running forward on the balls of her feet she grabs the closest and spins him, pulling his back hard against her chest, cupping his chin with her free hand and yanking, feeling that snap, that vibration as shockwaves travel the spine, the sudden heaviness of an emptied body.

  Chucking him to the side, she’s on the next before he can scream, her knife sliding between his ribs, holding him steady as she drives the blade in over and over until all resistance falls out of his stance. Amiga drops him at her feet. Steps over him. Job done. It shouldn’t feel this fucking good. She shouldn’t feel this alive. Killing like this when she was doing
Twist Calhoun’s bidding was killing her, she knew it. So why is it the opposite is now true? What does that mean?

  The last soldier stands staring at her. He looks like he wants to run and can’t. Flushed and sweating through his jacket, he makes a move like he’s going to back away into the corridor, his whole body wracked with tremors. She walks up to him slowly, daring him to try. Daring him to run. He freezes.

  “You said you needed one alive,” he says, gulping hard. His hand jerks, pointing at the bodies of his friends. “They’re all dead. You can’t kill me. You need me.”

  “That’s right,” she says, and smiles.

  Flipping her knife so the heavy metal handle is outward, she cracks it across his head. Watches him collapse to the floor, in slow motion at first as the body fights the inevitable and then in a great rush and thump as it gives in. Amiga sheathes her blade, grabs out a few ties from her jacket and makes quick work of fixing his wrists tightly together behind his back. When she’s finished, one of the doors opens. A middle-aged man in nothing but canvas shorts stands there, his body shining with sweat. They’ve been watching. Of course they have.

  “You leaving now?” he asks, no heat in it. He’s scared but he wants her to go and he’s letting her see that. Admirable. Must be one of the floor Uncles. In a place like this, each floor will have several designated Aunts and Uncles, making sure everyone’s looked out for as much as they can be in this level of appalling poverty.

  Amiga nods, reassuring with a smile. “Yes. You can clean these up.”

  “We have no furnace.”

  She makes a face. “Don’t I know it,” she says tartly. “My nose filed for divorce fucking ages ago. I suggest you chuck them in the bins. Hell alone knows they couldn’t smell any bloody worse.”

  Clamping her teeth against the pain in her torso, another scar she won’t let Ravi get rid of, she grasps her unconscious rat under his shoulders and wrestles him up. Swears at him for being so fucking heavy, and annoying, and worst of all utterly stupid as she makes her way out of the building, one awkward thumping drag down a staircase at a time, her brain already motoring at top speed, considering and rejecting some manner of explanation that might evade her friends’ fury.