Virology

by Ren Warom

  Everything ends. But not like this. Please not like this. It’s all Maggie can think of. Consumes her every thought as much as the burr of factories at work. There has to be a way. If only they could find it. If only Volk, the Pharm who created Disconnect, who used it to lock the Queens in Core, could find it. But even she is helpless, and the more they try, the less they achieve. The virad sickness continues to mutate. Continues to spread. Volk has started to say there may be nothing they can do at all except watch the Zeros die.

  Maggie’s never given up. Not once. She’s a pugilist, she can take a punch, but this… this one comes with a pre-installed glass jaw. She won’t survive it.

  Eddie pops his head around her office door. He’s their doctor and one of her oldest friends, all the way from Tech. She looks up to receive a small smile, but he’s not happy, he’s trying to be comforting.

  “It’s Mollie, yeah?” She abandons her work, opting to talk, wanting the physicality of speech, the weight of words in the air to hang on to.

  “She’s unsettled again,” he replies. “Distressed. I can’t soothe her.”

  Dragging herself up from her chair, Maggie stretches out, bones cracking and creaking. “I’ll go to her.” She makes to leave the room past him, but he stops her with a hand to her shoulder.

  “Are you okay? You seem tired lately. Pale.”

  Eddie’s all concern and means well, but this is not a conversation she’s ready for. One of many conversations she has no idea how to face. “I’m fine, Eddie. It’s a lot of work.”

  “For all of us. But…” he pauses, the turmoil plain on his face. “Are you okay?”

  She pulls away from him. “Of course I’m not okay, Ed. The love of my life is fucking sick and I’m losing her. We know they don’t get better. We know she won’t. So of course I am not okay.” She strides away, not giving him time to respond, but still hears him say, as if wondering how the hell it got to her yelling at him.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Maggie knows what he means. She can’t think about it. The only response is denial. She tugs at her sleeves, making sure they cover her right to the end of her wrists, refusing to acknowledge the livid shape of her veins, risen up too close to the surface. Risen remarkably like the Zeros’ have. But she is not a Zero. She’s not sick. It’s impossible.

  Mollie’s room in this ancient, crumbling warehouse is an old tower unit. Fuck knows what it was used for back when—these factories and their warehouses are as old as the Gung, maybe older. Maybe a remnant from before the breaking. Whatever it was, the height of the tower, the lack of sunlight, is everything Mollie needs for comfort in her augmented state.

  Augmented. Ridiculous to use the term for Mollie— she’s so completely herself. Maggie can’t imagine her any other way. Before she was Agen-Z, before she was Mother Zero, Mollie was a performer in a circus burlesque. They called her The Neon Angel. She’s an angel still. She’ll be up there in the rafters, twisting improbable gymnastics in her own wires, her tattoos glowing in the dark. A legend. Always.

  Maggie struggles to find air. To find balance. Her whole world is slipping through her hands. And in her gut, small and hard and ugly, the knot of fear tightens and grows. Absently, she scratches at the crease of her elbow, the thin skin drawing ever thinner. Changing. Chasing translucence. She’d hardly known what to think when she first saw it. Maggie isn’t a Zero, so how could it be? Undeniably though, it is.

  Everything she loves is dying, and now, so is she.

  Coming out of the Cad, that last year of too much throttle and noise, wrapped as it was in GarGoil gigs, finals and the inexorable slide toward the flash of red letters, this was not the life Maggie imagined for herself. Nothing her mind was capable of conjuring at that point, no matter how extraordinary, could even have come close. The one thing she knew for certain, was that she would Fail. She wanted to.

  The GarGoils were born out of frustration with the system, a horror with how some set against it might work so hard to fit in just to have a Pass, to give up free thinking for the WAMOS life. And with an irony Maggie could not have predicted, that’s how the GarGoils themselves came to an end. Before the year of their reign of the B-Movie nightclubs was up, two of their girls fought to fit in, to hide their light, to quash their minds and squeeze thought into a box, suffocate it of air, and succeeded, taking down the GarGoils with them.

  Maggie didn’t expect to become a legend herself from that short time, but somehow she did, they all did—they became the voice of a generation who sold it for scrap. That old bastard Saint Jimmy taking their fame, like a corvid stealing jewels, and warping it. Ten months of political power-housing on stage transformed into a circus side show, a roundabout of tribute as tacky money-spinner, slick and unreal as a K-drama.

  In that first year of the GarGoils reborn, Maggie watched with horror and outrage the death of everything she believed in and understood then that this is how it’s done. This is how they take your fight, your beliefs, your rage, your power, and crush it. Use it against you. They commodify it, commodify you; strip you of meaning. And sometimes it’s not even intentional. Sometimes it’s just some devious old fucker looking to make a mint on the back of your success as he perceives it through a warped comprehension of reality.

  She joined the Movement that year, a desperate attempt to reclaim herself from the mockery made of her anger, sick to her stomach and disillusioned. Barely surviving. To her mind, joining the Movement was an end. She expected to fight to the death. Relished the notion. She was done with sitting back and allowing life to fuck her. She wanted to pick her own way out. Go down fighting. She didn’t understand then that when you seek to end things in that fashion, what you might find instead is a beginning. A fresh start. The rehabilitation of a belief system and an introduction to the people who’ll make up a true family. Not the GarGoils after all, but a bunch of J-Hacks fighting tooth and nail for freedom, whatever it might mean.

  Meeting Mollie came years later. Almost five. At a point when Maggie was deep enough in the Movement to be trusted in the presence of the people at its heart. That day is crystalline in her memory. Colourful as a butterfly, drifting on an ocean of virad junk, strong and fragile and exquisite, Mollie hit her like the all-consuming glare of stage lights, like the roar of a crowd, the addictive crawl of music in a ribcage. She was hooked in an instant. Free falling. And falling in love with her felt inevitable. But Maggie never expected for a second to be loved in return, never once imagined she’d be gifted the heart of a creature so peculiar and wonderful. That was miraculous. It still is.

  Even now, when everything she loves is falling to ruins around her, that miracle stands strong. She should be overjoyed that it happened at all, instead she finds herself eaten alive by rage.

  Maggie yearns to take this virus in her hands and choke the life from it. Crush it to component codes and drop its components so far apart in Slip they drift eternally too distant from each other to ever be whole again. Instead, she finds her Mollie as she always does. Clings to what’s left, knowing it will slip through her fingers, no matter how tight her grip.

  Slung in graceful disarray halfway down the tower tonight, Mollie glows as always, illuminating the walls and ceiling in odd shapes and patterns. She’s a constellation in human form, but the gleam of her flesh is transparent around the neon tattoos; veins worryingly prominent and mirrored now with the selfsame hieroglyphs as the veins on the other Zeros. Meaningless nonsense. Or it used to be.

  Where curlicues of ropey vein once spelt nothing but gibberish, row upon row of letters have taken precedence. Zees. Staring at them, Maggie’s consumed once more by inelegant rage. Wants to reach up and wipe them clear. Not Zee for Zero. Zee for Zen. Zenada. She dreams that name night after night. Whispers building in the corner. Rushing toward her. It fills her with as much dread as her Mollie being sick, as the new transparency of her own skin.

  She’s convinced Zenada is the author of Mollie’s distress, haranguing her in
dreams. Mollie’s dreaming again now, her fingers reaching for something, spread and straining. Trembling. She cries out. Soft, inarticulate sounds of distress that tear at Maggie’s heart. She runs lightly up the rungs of the ladder placed beneath Mollie’s dangling body to capture Mollie’s hand within her own, rubbing it between them to take the chill away, to loosen the horrendous tension.

  Looks up to find Mollie’s buttercup eyes watching her, drenched with despair and pleading.

  “Hey,” she says, reaching up to cup Mollie’s face. “Hey. It’s okay. It’s okay, love.”

  Mollie blinks in such slow motion, Maggie could count each separate lash as they sweep up. She opens her mouth, puffs air sounds, like a child learning to speak. She hasn’t spoken out loud in years. Only IM, and even then with trouble. When they come, the words are like the whispers in Maggie’s dreams, a syrup of syllables colliding.

  “FiiiinnndZeeeeeeeen.”

  Maggie sobs. Leaning in, she presses her forehead to Mollie’s. “No.” If a word could form to action, she would send it to cleanse Mollie of harm. Wipe Zen from her body, her mind, her dreams. “No. No finding Zen. Not her. Shhh. Shhh. It’s okay. We’re okay.”

  “FiiindZeeeeen,” Mollie moans again, and Maggie begins to properly cry. Helpless. Hopeless. Because no sickness in the universe is terrible enough for her to give in to this request. To follow the directive of her dreams, no matter how insistent.

  Not even if they follow her into waking and speak through the mouth of the one she loves.

  Hu Hai Abandoned

  Having managed the feat for just over a week now, Hu Hai has settled upon the perfect description for carrying Aunty Dong around in his head: torture. Sheer. Mental. Torture. He’s positive the old hag is peering out through his eyes. Is, in fact, nervous of looking in the mirror these days, which accounts for the scraggly beard taking up residence upon his face. He’s not sure whether he likes it or not.

  On the one hand, his weak chin is well and truly hidden from sight, which makes him feel oddly powerful. On the other hand, he’s certain he looks more like a tramp every day. And his wife hates it. To the extent that she’s been threatening to leave if it’s not either a) trimmed or b) clean shaven ASAP. He’s explained about Dong and mirrors but his wife is like her mother, a woman of little sympathy.

  The only way he’s found to effectively handle the proverbial Dong weight in his neural drive is to attack the surrounding mass of grey with baijiu. Oddly, his wife is not particularly pleased about that either. He recalls something quite sharp and bitter being said about money for baijiu being useful for a barber before he passed out last night, or was it the night before? Staggering out of bed, he all but tumbles into the shower, his mouth tasting like the scum residue on a pot of bone stock.

  Five minutes later, clean but no less filthy somehow, he makes his way to the kitchen and falls into a bowl of congee. Congealed. The dense silence of the house makes itself known gradually through the subtle jackhammer of his hangover headache. Becomes deafening. A pressure in his ears similar to that of diving too deep into a pool too fast. Eyes still heavy and stinging he scans the kitchen for clues.

  First clue: his wife is not here. Highly unusual; the kitchen is her domain. Second: the note on the fridge, held with that magnet she bought on Lijiang Hub when they visited his family, the one of a happy mountain with “Welcome to Lijiang” written across the bottom in red kanji. He hates that magnet. Threw it into the bin seventeen times only to find it front and centre on the fridge. Subtle his wife is not.

  Tugging the note from beneath, he tries to read her kanji. She has chicken scratch hand made worse by impatience or rage and it would appear this note was written with a healthy dose of both. The general gist turns out to be the culmination of several weeks’ worth of threats: I’m off to my mother’s. There’s a week’s worth of food in the freezer, mostly dumplings because it’s not like I’m your damn chef. Think about shaving and drying out, I love you.

  Even in desertion she’s trying to make him fat.

  He grabs at his belly. Sighs. Scratches his balls. Thinks about getting dressed, or maybe drinking some more. He’s about to grab out a couple of frozen dumplings and use them as some form of half-assed decision-making tool when the burden of Dong lands in his drive, emanating way too much cheerful energy for him to cope with. Gāi sĭ. How is the old bitch even awake? It’s nigh on three A.M on Hong Kong Hub right now. This confirms his secret conviction that she’s not a woman at all but a yaoguai in disguise.

  Hu Hai! she all but trills, a drill bit of words churning gaping holes, his headache set to hit terminal in two point three seconds.

  Immediately he wishes that ten hours ago he’d had the foresight to quit at two cups. Sadly for him, those three bottles he eventually chugged away without a hint of pity or thought for his future self are now fighting to make a titanic reappearance all over the kitchen table. Hu Hai holds on to his gag reflex for grim death; he’ll be damned if he’ll allow all that flim to go to waste.

  Aunty Dong. Good morning. Instead of this rigid politeness, he wants to scream. Yell. Stamp his feet. But he likes having feet, and lungs, and lips. Being rude to Aunty Dong is a sure fire way to lose all of them. Slowly.

  Good morning, dear. Now, what are our plans for today? I presume after all this time we’re making some progress? Under the cheer hides an edge of steel. His head on the block. And for the thousandth time he curses his luck for pulling this assignment in particular. All things she could have asked of him and she asks for this. He bites back a groan.

  He’s been dreading report time as much as he dreads waking to the inevitability of her arrival in his drive, as much as he’s been wishing he’d never sought to impress Dong with his stupid bloody over-capable planning skills in the first place. Wishing he’d stayed anonymous amongst the suits of the Gung-based businesses she inherited when Li and Ho died. But oh no, he had to go and think of promotions and pay rises and gone out of his way to be noticed, to be special. He’s an idiot. He was never made to be anything more than a salaryman, but she’s made him her puppet. Put him in charge of thugs, thieves and liars.

  He hates her. He hates this. He’s terrified of failing.

  He’d give anything to burn the path from her drive to his, to stop her almost obsessive need to micro-manage. What’s worse? Her expectations or her inability to let him get on with it? Both. Everything. Fuck. To think that four weeks ago his worst day was one in which his wife, resentful of his long work hours and his commitment to leisure time with his friends, playing cards and watching soccer, would treat him to thin-lipped silence and bitter-brewed tea.

  Almost four weeks of scouring the Gung has produced not one single match to the Hornets or the Haunt, not even with a physical stats program written by Aunty’s best Tech. Seven hundred square miles makes for a big haystack. Which is why he’s taken not only to drinking but to gambling on the pricking of his gut. If this hunch he’s had is wrong, he won’t need to shave ever again.

  I moved all the teams to Hunin district.

  You have reason to believe they might be in Hunin? There’s a heaving dose of scepticism in there. Hunin’s a terrible place to hide and she’d be aware of that. It’s only a tiny leap from that to guessing he’s going on his gut. He’s so screwed.

  Swallowing again and feeling quite heroic to have so much control over his heaving stomach, Hu Hai gives the response he’s been practising since yesterday. Not Hunin. Not a great place to hide. Only the clubs and the cage apartments shoved cheek to jowl with families of ten and up. Never a greater advertisement for the use of a condom. Probably a single one considering the median earning rate of a Hunin desperado. I think Shandong.

  If Hu Hai were on the run and looking to find the one place in all of the Gung where trouble won’t immediately follow or enemies seek to look, he’d choose the far off farms of Shandong. Simple logic. Mountains not only make steep and winding roads, easy to keep an eye on, they also block invading signa
ls from the outside, and Dong’s not the only one after them. They’re hot property amongst several hub notorieties and they’ll be aware of it, or they aren’t the scary competent bunch of kids who somehow took down the Queens, Fulcrum, and the Gung with them.

  Aunty Dong hums, ignoring his attempt at humour. Interesting. Mountains would make sense, but not habitable, unless they’ve bribed a holding to conceal them. I have eyes there as you well know, and no reports.

  They’re resourceful.

  Granted. However, if Shandong it is, why are you in Hunin?

  The same reason they’re in Shandong, Aunty. Searching Shandong is next to impossible without them seeing us coming. So we wait in Hunin for them to come to blow off steam. They’re young. They’ll come to party, and then I’ll follow them home.

  Excellent. Don’t disappoint me, Hu Hai.

  Never, Aunty Dong. What are we doing with the Haunt? Killing?

  She pokes his IM hard, causing a ripple effect that makes him heave violently, barely holding on to breakfast and booze both. No, fool. I might want the Haunt dead, but I have uses for him beforehand. Nothing like holding the most valuable chess piece on the board, is there?

  No, Aunty Dong.

  Now do clean up and quit moping, or I’ll be forced to have you cold cured. You’re an absolute disgrace. I’ve sent flowers to your wife. I’ve advised her to divorce you and given her the IM of my lawyer.

  Aunty Dong!

  Her silence is momentary but ominous. Yes, Hu Hai?

  He gulps hard. My apologies. You’re right. I will do better.

  Do your best.

  Yes, Aunty Dong.

  There’s a good boy. Chop, chop now, no time to waste.

  Home Again, Home Again…

  The Western edge of Shandong: bridges clasp ranges together across white-flecked waters. All the paddy-rises are here, the centre of the food industry, their staggered paddy-field balconies growing rice and vegetables and fruit; grazing meat stock or flocking with multi-coloured arrays of poultry. Anything grown or reared comes from these huge, unnatural galleries and sells for extortionate prices. Only the wealthy can afford produce from Shandong; everyone else eats food grown or synthesized on the Chinese hubs.