Virology

by Ren Warom

  The aggressive growl of caterbikes greets her as she hits the courtyard, and three weave around each other into the narrow space, coming to a halt in front of her. Deuce, Vivid and Raid. Her team. The team she unceremoniously dumped. All unrecognizable under avi-skins Deuce built to protect them from easy ID. Fuck. Shock dropped her in it. Bastard.

  Bastard! She howls into his IM.

  Sorry not sorry, comes the snark-tastic response.

  You fucking will be, Haunt.

  Whatever, Cleaner. Bring it.

  Deuce yanks his helmet off, the skin’s image stuttering and collapsing into pixels. Revealing hair mussed and damp, a face livid and utterly edible, those black eyes of his snapping like piranha as if he can tear the truth out of her, or just tear her apart. He looks like he’s got one hell of a lot to say, until his gaze drops to the man drooping in her arms. Then he sighs, shifting his gaze up to the deepening black of night as if he can find answers there for whatever it is she’s done.

  “Where are the others?”

  “Probably in the bin by now.”

  He groans. “Bin? Really?”

  “They don’t have a furnace,” she says, by way of explanation. “You should smell it in there. My nose is traumatized.”

  “And he’s alive, right?” asks Vivid, out of her helmet and looking, if anything, more furious than Deuce.

  “You can take his pulse if you like.”

  “What I’d like,” Vivid snaps back, “is for you to fucking toe the line once in a while. Seven to one? Really? We’re a team, Amiga. Team members don’t ditch team members and go off hunting their murder jollies all alone. Capiche?”

  Oops. Italian. Vivid’s definitely more than just a little pissed. Raid just sits there emanating disapproval. Terrific. Just what the doctor ordered.

  “I’m sorry, okay?”

  Deuce shoots her this filthy glare and snaps, “Sure. Like that fixes everything.” He dips his chin. “He alive?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then let’s get out of here; whatever you did sparked some serious attention from local Sec. A literal squadron is on the way. I love how you channel your sneaky Cleaner skills to do this shit.”

  His snark is thick enough to spread on toast. She figures to eat it like crow but sees he’s still not in the mood for apologies or explanations. None of them are. When will she learn? The more you push people away, the further they go, until they’re gone for good. She wishes to fuck she could just stop pushing. But somehow it’s all she ever does.

  The View From Heaven

  Braced at the brink of space, Shanghai Hub contains Shanghai as it was, like some divine hand reached beneath and scooped it up whole, resting it into a cradle built to rock gently on the edge of earth and space, domed in crystal-clear glass. Of course, that’s exactly how it happened, minus the divine hand, unless one considers Corps to be divine—it wouldn’t be far from the truth, not if one were thinking divinity in terms of arrogant, possessive gods, like those on Olympus.

  All these hubs, these cities grazing eternity were lifted by Corps, not governments, and are, to this day, run by Corps. Still arrogant. Still possessive. Fiercely independent even before the fall of Fulcrum, the loss of power to the Gung. No one who lives on a hub could easily be persuaded to leave. It’s more than patriotism. It’s fealty. People have always left the Gung for the hubs, searching for a new life. A better one. For a life without Psych tests and suffocating Corp control, but the grass is rarely greener. It is still always only grass. Corps hold power everywhere. Here, it is her Corp that holds power.

  Evelyn Tsai was born and raised here. She’s deeply bonded to this fragile, perfect city; a complicated, symbiotic blending of woman and stone. She runs her hard-won portion with a will that mocks anyone who tried to tell a twenty-one-year-old with no money, no prospects and too many psychological scars that all she would amount to could be found between her legs.

  Evelyn grew up in Shanghai Hub’s Pínkùn Dìqū, one of thousands of poor kids with threadbare clothes, dirty faces and little or no education. Until she was thirteen, she didn’t even know school existed—she worked with her mother in the fish factory, scraping silver scales. She’d hold her hands up to the light to watch them glitter. Smear them up her arms and pretend that, somehow, they would transform her to a fish so she could swim away.

  Slip and RL meshed together in her mind—a fantasy of freedom.

  She’s never forgotten how it felt to be dirty. To smell. To be hungry enough to lick those scales from her fingers— feeling them prick her tongue, her cheeks. Feeling them lodge tight in her throat, making her cough. Those years of want are not behind her; they are carved into her organs and her bones. She will always be sickly. Physically weak. Her doctor is sworn to secrecy upon his life, the life of his family.

  Show weakness and the world eats you alive in gaping, agonizing chunks.

  But she doesn’t blame Shanghai for her beginnings. She loves it for making her fight, for forcing her to learn the strength hidden in her bones: Shanghai’s concrete and steel.

  Night currently veils her city in the hub, drenching it in whorls of neon and blue bio-light, a galaxy of offices, freeways and nightclubs bright enough to shame the stars just beyond the glass. Through her office window, Evelyn takes in the sensual curve of the bund, the ornate crenellations of Jin Mao tower, the dense scatter of high-rises like the skeletons of great beasts, smoothed to silky whites and greys under hot sun and pounding rain— neither of which are real on a hub, only imitations created by atmospheric machines.

  Evelyn shifts her gaze between the light-drenched cityscape and the view beyond the dome, where thousands of hubs glinting like stars graze the boundary of earth and endless nothing. All those cities of the earth, risen up and elevated higher than mountains. Raised to look down upon the jagged shoreline of the Gung as they sail overhead. Gods indeed.

  Gods maybe, but not always all-powerful.

  Only four weeks ago they were beholden to the Gung. To Fulcrum. For access to Slip, for the means to maintain their servers. For any service or tech Fulcrum already owned or bought up in brutal hostile takeovers the Tech industries of the hubs came to despise. But now the landscape of power has changed. Power is up for grabs. So very much power from such a tiny scrap of land.

  Evelyn looks down, though the Gung is far away at this point of orbit. From this height, Earth is a curve of rippled cloud, courting green at the edge, a flash of aurora. Above it, the abyss is black and deep. Absolute. Filled with dead light. It makes her shiver. Shanghai’s cradle is fragile, the grip of tenuous gravity all that holds it from drifting into frozen oblivion. If anything went wrong… it only takes a moment to lose everything.

  Evelyn knows this as deeply as she knows her city.

  A throat clears behind her. “Madame Tsai, they’re conscious.”

  Evelyn thanks her assistant with a nod and strides to the shoot as gracefully as any lady of class, except that she is not one and never was. It can be faked. Everything can be faked, because everyone is pretending. Everyone wears the same masks, paints the same illusions, even the rich—haute couture, exclusive resorts, single-access penthouse suites, private shuttles, cuisine and wine so rare only a fraction of a percent of the entire population of the hubs and the Gung can afford it. Wealth is an excellent disguise indeed, and Evelyn is almost rich enough to ease the clenching of terror in her gut.

  Almost.

  * * *

  Her heels sound out hungry clicks as she steps on to the cool green of the lab floor. This level hums just under the surface; machines everywhere working with quiet efficiency. It’s her favourite part of the building. She had this colour, this ambience, recreated in the penthouse suite she calls home, at the top of one of Shanghai’s most exclusive residences, including the hum, a modulator over the air-con to ensure her sleep is serene.

  Keel joins her as she crosses the corridor to the warren of interconnected, secured labs taking up the entire centre of this
floor. His domain.

  She offers him a soft, “Morning, Keel.”

  “Ms Tsai.”

  Keel, otherwise known as KeelHaul, is the epitome of the young HipXec. Dressed in three-quarter-length pants, a button-down shirt, braces and wingtips, with long auburn hair piled into a bun, his incurious green eyes avoid her gaze from behind handcrafted wooden glasses. Keel’s somewhere on the autistic spectrum, utterly brilliant, an ex-Fail who once worked as a Pharm, a drug developer, for criminals. He’s Evelyn’s ace card.

  Especially today.

  Since the fall of Fulcrum, Evelyn’s been working hard to negotiate partnership with Paraderm, one of the Gung’s remaining big Corps, only to find that Gung Corps are still not keen to work with hubs. The usual nonsense. The Gung is happy to be in control, but the moment they’re expected to share power or cooperate, the usual paranoia surfaces. A viewpoint verging on the fantastical—seeking to reinterpret distance as assumed superiority, when verifiable truth shows that the hubs have been beholden to the Gung’s assumed superiority all these years.

  She’d expected better from Paraderm, run by power couple Marcus and Tahira Shaheen-Lox.

  What a shame to be disappointed.

  But versed in the contrariness of life, Evelyn always has a back-up plan, and this one called for a sealed-off lab generally used as a safe zone for hazardous trials reimagined as a holding cell. Inside, Marcus and Tahira await, strapped into medical chairs. Marcus is enraged, shouting, not seeming to realize the glass is soundproofed. Tahira looks around, her gaze calculating, her demeanour collected and assured. There’s only one way to calculate out of this, and Evelyn rather imagines they won’t. What a shame.

  Keel scans entry with his pass, holding the door open and moving aside to allow her to enter first. Such a gentleman.

  Evelyn nods pleasantly at both of them.

  “I realize this is unconventional. I do apologize,” she says. “I wanted to offer you a last chance to sign up in partnership with Tsai Holdings before I’m forced to take steps.”

  “Unconventional?” Tahira’s voice is a whip slicing the air. “This is illegal. It is criminal. It is not unconventional.”

  “Well quite,” Evelyn says, with a small smile. “But you left me little choice. My current stratagems are heavily invested in securing Paraderm’s resources.”

  “The offer of a business partnership does not come with an imperative to acquiesce.” Marcus. Finally calm. Quietly furious.

  “Of course not, and ordinarily I wouldn’t be anything like so rude as to insist, but there’s a little more at stake, is there not? I’m not the only one to have secured footage from four weeks ago, showing how vulnerable we are, how wrong we have all been, how complacent. I’m certainly not the only one repulsed by Fulcrum’s theft of part of my consciousness. We none of us signed an agreement that our avatars should be so… functional. The abuse of power is beyond disgust and the aberrations it produced beyond offensive.”

  “We might agree that recent weeks have brought a stark new reality to light,” Tahira replies, her voice shaking, “but we do not agree with any of your other sentiments—we were disconcerted at first, but we have come to accept the ways things are. Accept our avatars for who they are. Your attitude is beyond disgusting, your opinions beyond offensive.”

  Evelyn nods. “I see.” She gestures to Keel. “This is my Pharm, Keel. If you’re still reluctant to join with Tsai Holdings, he has a gift for you.”

  Tahira raises a brow. “We were not interested in working with Tsai Holdings,” she says. “And after this violation of our rights, we would never consider working with Tsai Holdings, now or in the future. Not under any circumstances.”

  Marcus directs a look of fierce admiration at Tahira. “It is as my wife says,” he adds. “You have nothing to offer Paraderm, and Paraderm has nothing to offer you.”

  “As you wish. Keel?”

  Waiting by the chilled cabinets at the lab’s edge, Keel opens one to remove a small, clear box. Carefully, he shakes out two small tabs like bumps, the stim drugs keeping a fair portion of the population of the hubs and the Gung happy.

  “One at a time or both at once?” he asks Evelyn.

  “Oh, both at once,” she says. “This is merely a formality.”

  Standing between them, he presses the tabs into their necks and watches impassively as they go rigid. Marcus makes a high keening noise, a double note so disturbing Evelyn has to fight not to wince—after all she is human. As his keening increases, the room fills with golden light. Beside them, gold threads begin to spin and weave, building a dolphin and a lion fish mid-air, panicked and thrashing.

  Tahira starts to scream, a counterpoint to her husband’s loud keen, her body arched and writhing. The fish and the dolphin stutter into frantic, spasmodic rolls, spinning over and over, their paler gold bellies flashing like alarms, fear and panic palpable until they freeze at the exact moment Marcus and Tahira seize up and cease making noise. The precision is extraordinary, leaving brittle silence in which four bodies, two gold, two human, writhe in unison and then stop.

  The moment is eerie, like a freeze frame in VR. Almost unreal. The gleam of light in their eyes, the stillness of their chests, the fixity of their limbs almost unnerving. Five seconds seem to roll on forever, and then the tableau breaks. Marcus and Tahira slump, lax, into the embrace of their chairs and both avatars drift away to rest against the counter, casting warm yellow light like a buttercup beneath a chin. Loose. Limp. Lifeless.

  Evelyn walks over to the CEOs of Paraderm. Leans in to take a close look. They’re just about breathing, a grip on life so tenuous she could hold a hand over their mouth and nose and count away seconds to end them. Their eyes are wide but dull, empty of everything, a huge contrast to rage, to calculation. How fragile humanity is. How reliant upon such brittle connections. Evelyn waves a hand in front of Marcus’s face.

  “Which version was this?”

  “Early. You wanted it to be harsh.”

  “So I did.” Evelyn had all but forgotten her initial intent to be cruel; their maudlin attachment to their avatars lowered her opinion of them. One does not punish lesser adversaries. One removes them. “Interesting reactions. The latest have, I presume, lost all traces of this… extremity?”

  “Of course. And once I have Paraderm’s laboratories it’ll move faster toward sophistication.”

  Evelyn straightens Tahira’s jacket, left askew by her writhing. “Marvellous. And the digitization?”

  “Soon.”

  After the fall of Fulcrum, Keel approached her with a remarkable claim about the small band of J-Hacks and pirates who overthrew the massive Corp. He told her that they’d severed the Queens—the remarkable, massive avatars Fulcrum failed to keep control of—from Josef Lakatos with a drug of some fashion, a disconnection drug, and used it to trap them in Core. He told her he could synthesize this drug. The worth of it was immediately apparent: power. Power over Slip without the need to find the Haunt. An edge, as it were. Evelyn loves having an edge.

  She gave him open access to all Tsai Holdings’ resources. In the four weeks since the fall, he’s managed to synthesize the drug until it worked the way it worked on Josef. And then he began to experiment, to try and make it do what Evelyn wants—separate and contain, so that Tsai Holdings can control access to avatars, and therefore the Slip. And he has. What he needs now if they’re to achieve the next step of digitization, is lab technology developed and fiercely guarded by Paraderm, and more test subjects.

  Once they have the drug digitized, they’ll release it into Slip. Return avatars to where they belong. Put things to rights, and make a little profit—or a great deal of profit—to boot. Evelyn did not ask to be gifted a sentient helpmeet. She wanted only a vehicle. A means of transport within Slip. She does not care for its mind or its selfhood, she did not give her permission to Fulcrum for it to have either. That is the biggest insult, the theft of choice. Of control. Ensuring Tsai Holdings controls the only acces
s to Slip will return choice to her whilst further securing her company’s financial future.

  After all, what will people not pay to have access to Slip? Especially now when, in the wake of Fulcrum’s fall and the Queens’ destruction, it has become more than merely a means to communicate and play. It has become worlds within worlds—a fount of creativity. Too much creativity. Such freedoms lead to unwarranted confidence. To revolution. Best to put a bottle-neck on it all. Remind people of their place. What better way than to make them pay for their freedom again? Money is the great leveller.

  “Be faster than soon, Keel. Now we can obtain Paraderm’s resources I expect swift results.” She doesn’t wait for a response. She leaves the lab, throwing casually over her shoulder as the door closes behind her, “Have someone put those two somewhere safe.”

  The lift back up to her office provides her with a moment to reflect. An important ritual. Evelyn has always taken time to chew over success, to revel in it. She’s never once let a moment such as this pass unnoticed or uncelebrated. Not only the big victories, the tiny ones too; the first item of clothing she bought from a shop rather than received from a charity; the first meal eaten under a roof that did not leak; the first tiny promotion from Reception into the building proper.

  Small steps lead to big ones. Tiny victories precede unimaginable wins. Now she has Paraderm under control—after a little creative paperwork management by her legal team—she’s in a better position to replace chaos with order. To dictate the future rather than be swept up in it. That was the worst of Fulcrum’s advantage, having to give up portions of vital control, to let another lead. Evelyn is not good at concession.

  Back in her office, the paperwork dealt with so her lawyers can go ahead and take control of Paraderm in her name, Evelyn resumes her vigil at the window, sipping a cup of soothing peppermint tea. Other Corps and powers on the hubs are hoping to secure the Haunt and his swarm somehow, hoping to grab power by holding the key. Whilst they scrabble after ghosts, she will step into real power.