Virology

by Ren Warom

To her surprise, instead of getting defensive, Ebon busts out a throaty laugh. “Considering Rue de Soupir is currently in flames,” she says, “I rather think you would.” And there’s delight in it, fierce and admiring. “Perhaps we should ask you for lessons?”

  Amiga stops dead for a moment. Because that’s not how it works. It’s not how it worked for them and it’s not how it’ll work for Ebon, and she needs to know that. She needs to know it’s not easy. It’s not some fantasy of will or strength or know-how. It’s far simpler and uglier than that.

  “You don’t need lessons,” she says quietly. “You just need your tipping point. Once you hit that, there’s no going back. Not ever.”

  * * *

  Lost inside himself, Shock tries to figure out whether he’s asleep or dead or some untold combination of the two because he’s still not sure he can die, not in the conventional fashion. He’s too much more than skin and bone now—can’t quantify the amount of him Emblem’s leaked into and through. The awareness of it within him is fundamental. In the same way as he experienced the weight and fact of his body he’s experienced it gradually being overwritten. Parts of him feeling strange, then different, then not feeling at all. Not numb, precisely, but other. He’s distanced from his experience of humanity. One day, possibly now, he’ll stop feeling human at all.

  He has no idea what he’ll be then.

  Whatever he is right now, dead or asleep, or possibly, less hysterically, in a coma, this is a punishment. Emblem is sentient code. Bio-ware. And also more. Having grown into him, used his biology to evolve, it’s like him in reverse—he’s becoming less human and Emblem more. And it’s furious at being misused.

  He once abused Emblem by utilizing it to reach out and cut Li Harmony’s connection with her avi, driving her to madness; now he’s used it to reach out and cut the life from over a hundred soldiers all at once. Genocide. Or mass murder. What’s the difference? The fact that he thought he didn’t mean to kill them until it was done is damn near irrelevant.

  His connection with Emblem is more profound in some ways than his connection with Puss, because she has her own body, however metaphorical it might be. Puss. See, there’s the problem. He can’t begin to measure the pain of losing her. It sits beside the pain of losing Shark, too big to contemplate, and he can’t bear the weight of it within his body, his mind. It’s frightening how swiftly that translated into rage, and how quickly rage became murder.

  You don’t know yourself until someone you love is threatened. You don’t know what you’re capable of. Shock will kill. That surprises him as much as it upsets Emblem.

  Emblem understands the drive behind the act; it just doesn’t approve. It thinks he’s irrational. Excellent character reading there. He bloody well is, and he’s willing to embrace his irrationality right now to put a stop to all of this shit. Shock wants to lean into the pain, to use it. He can’t cope with it lying on him, a useless, unwieldy burden.

  Let me wake, he says. This is pointless. I get it. I won’t use it to kill again. You have to help me though. You can’t shut me down every time I do something you don’t like.

  He has no idea if Emblem will respond. It has his words, has access to everything in his brain, but has yet to vocalize. What he gets instead of words is a pressure. A pulling/pushing sensation. Then he’s golden and in a room.

  It’s gently warm. A touch humid. So quiet the air almost sings with silence. The room is painted pure white, forming a perfect illusion of seamless emptiness, endlessness. A casual or even searching glance would not see at first the sphere hovering at the absolute centre point of the four corners of the room.

  In the sphere a woman sits cross-legged. Sleeping. She’s beautiful, fragile, too much bone under oh-so-delicate olive skin sprinkled with dusky freckles. She’s a golden sun encased in a wild halo of coarse brown hair, all corkscrews and question marks. And all that untouchable beauty is blurred inside the golden belly of a sleeping polar bear, paws curled like it’s holding her inside, a human cub in a bear womb.

  The bear twitches. Stirs. Opens sleepy eyes to blink at him.

  “Run,” it says, actually speaks, not mind to mind but voice into air, a rumbling filled with panic. “Get out of here right now. She’s waking up.”

  Blindsided by an avatar speaking aloud, Shock takes precious seconds to sort through what it’s actually saying and finds himself staring at the woman within the bear. The bear’s eyes are closed again, were maybe never open, but hers, oh, they’re open all right. Hazel edged with gold, and staring at him like he’s a miracle.

  How are you here? she says. Are you here?

  Shock chokes. Clutches his head. That voice. It echoes like a thunderstorm overhead, like the rumble of ground shaking, growing and booming and building. It screams: Queen. He knows who this is. Zen. Zenada Lakatos. He looks around the room, frantic for clues, but there’s nothing. Only white. How the fuck do they find her? And how does she still have an avatar?

  Please find me. I’m lost. Did she hear him? Impossible. She’s shaking a little, hands clutched in her lap. Talk to me. Let me know you’re real. Please. I see things that aren’t real.

  He has no idea what to say. This is the woman they need to kill? Why? She’s suddenly childlike. Fragile and lost. I’m real. I think. How is it you have an avatar?

  She leans in to rake him with her eyes. The suddenness of it, the crow-like intensity, makes him uneasy somehow. Yours is gone.

  Stolen. For profit. They all were.

  By whom?

  We don’t know. We’ll find out. Do you know where you are?

  She shakes her head, curls flying. Breaker hid me. I haven’t seen a person in a long time. I haven’t been awake in a long time.

  Her eyes are desperate as much as wondering now. And she’s pale, her freckles stark against her skin. So reasonable. He could easily believe her, but his body emanates warning. Vibrates with it. The only word in his mind, repeating over and over, is Queen—as if he needed reminding. Why would Emblem bring him here? From the depths of his mind, Emblem shares a memory he’d rather forget: the Queens, delving into his mind, trying to carve him out so they had space for themselves.

  The face it gives the Queens is Zenada’s. The implication is clear. She was there.

  Zen’s face goes blank. Stop lying to him, she snarls, and something in his head snaps. Blacks out. For a moment he’s entirely in his own body and it feels like yet another bereavement. And then it doesn’t.

  I can do that, she says with a smile. I can make it go away. Make you human again. Would you like that?

  I…

  It’s not human, she says. You can’t trust it.

  I… don’t think I can trust you either.

  She laughs. And can I trust you? We’re all in the same boat. All enemies until proven otherwise. I need your help. Trust me at least that much.

  Shock wants to promise her, to help her, a compulsion that feels part and not part of him, and terrifying for both reasons, but the emptiness inside, the dregs of memory, hold him steady. Remind him to keep a distance. She shut Emblem down. He can feel it waking again, its frantic scramble to reassert itself, to protect him, but it was gone. Cut off from him as profoundly as Puss is, as completely as Shark was.

  He licks his lips. They aren’t even here. He’s dreaming this. A waking dream. Emblem wants him to think of it as a nightmare. He takes a step back, almost unaware of it until she’s further away.

  I’ll do what I can. He could be lying; he thinks he is, or she could be talking through his mouth.

  Her eyes narrow, the light in them changing, and he catches a glimpse of what she is behind the innocence and desperation. It makes his blood freeze. So much power, so much intent. Everything that the Queen was, Zenada is, and worse. The only thing stopping her is her prison, and Shock has no idea how Breaker managed to contain her, unless she was less than this when they first put her here. No, she was never less. She was always danger.

  How the hell will they k
ill her? It would be suicide to even get close.

  Don’t forget me, she pleads, as if her mask is her reality. I’ll be waiting.

  Trying not to show her his reluctance but terrified she can see it anyway, he nods and allows Emblem, fully awake now, to pull him away. He feels her eyes on him all the way, like she’s watching where they go. He struggles against Emblem to make it hide their route, but it’s panicking in ways he’s never felt it panic and refuses to listen, dragging him back to his unconscious body.

  Dammit, let me wake up, he snaps at it, beyond furious.

  Instead of responding, it pushes at him again, but not to anywhere. It pushes at the parts of him not yet Emblem. There’s an urgency to that pressure, a meaning. He knows what it is. Time to admit that every time he’s acquiesced to giving up more of himself, he’s gained from it. He’s been resisting the more complete changes Emblem wanted to wreak upon him, scared his humanity might be in jeopardy, but if Zenada can switch Emblem off as they are now. If she knows where they are…

  The Zen behind the mask flashes into his head again. She hides it so well, but there’s nothing left in her remotely human. She’s a gaping void, not psychopathic or evil; just empty. A force of power with no interest in anything but itself.

  Will it be like that? Will I?

  Emblem takes him back to the memory of the moment it was cut off and holds him there until he understands. Even if he doesn’t go to her, she’s awake now, and she’s trying to get out. Eventually she will, and he’ll have to kill her somehow if he wants anything he values to remain safe. If he’s not like her, if he doesn’t let go of what’s left and embrace the bio-ware as integral, he won’t have a hope in hell.

  Fine, he says. Do it.

  Zen Tangle

  One second the Haunt is there, golden and so close, the resonance of Emblem wound through his in a counterpoint almost tuned to perfection. He’s resisting it though, refusing to become what it could make him. Choosing weakness. Giving her chinks in his armour, handholds. Probably they’ll be gone by the time she sees him again—Emblem’s too smart, too adaptive, to allow for cracks to remain. No matter.

  He was so close. The key was so close. She needs to bring him back. Properly this time. She needs to be free.

  Zen beats against Bear’s belly, willing it to burst. How is an avatar, an insubstantial dream, so solid? No matter. She’s seen the Haunt now. Felt his mind with hers. And she sees where he is; unconscious in fact.

  Raising her head, Zen focuses on the one link she still has with the outside world; they’re too muddled, too infected already to be anything but incoherent, but they are hers. The Zeros. One by one they’ve succumbed, and through them, she’s reached out and taken other minds, ones familiar to her, for fun. It’s been so satisfying making them pay for Breaker’s cruelty. A distraction whilst her greater game played out.

  Finding many of the Zeros flooded with code all through now and open to suggestion, she nudges, plucks at the nerve connections between brain and limb. Laughs in pure delight as their limbs move to her commands.

  On Paris Hub where the Haunt lies sleeping, she threads herself into the minds of every malleable Zero she can find, tangling into their neural networks, gaining a foothold. Amplified by all those drives, however confused the minds behind them might be, she reaches out to Slip, to J-Net. The Hornets are with the Haunt, on Paris Hub. The Cleaner is. Their signals as loud and clear to her as everything used to be. It’s been torture to be denied this clarity.

  Maybe she can play another game?

  The Cleaner and the Hornets are in the catacombs. Trapped, like she is. She’ll send them a message. Send them her Zeros, armed with weaponized virads— virads remade to hunt thoughts and eat them, replacing them with her words like virads replace language with marketing speak. The Haunt relies on the Cleaner, his connection with her as profound in many ways as his connection with his missing avatar. Hurting the Cleaner will hurt him; increase his vulnerability.

  Gleeful, Zen drives the Zeros up and into the world. Walks it through their eyes. It’s nothing like her Queens, too big and loud, too garbled through the messy senses of Zeros, but it’s close enough to life to fill her with wild joy. She kills a Zero’s neighbour almost by accident, lunging to place hands around her throat, to feel something, and so charmed by the sensation that she can’t stop until the life is gone, the last breath trapped behind tight fingers. With the Zero’s hands she pats the woman’s head in thanks, pushes her to one side.

  The Zeros are miles apart, but she can drive them as fast as she wants, take them wherever she wants.

  This is too much fun. Zenada adores having fun.

  So Below

  Given their somewhat precarious situation with the gendarme aware of not only their presence on Paris Hub but their actual fucking faces, Ebon thinks they’ll only be safe exiting the catacombs in one of their hidden locations. No arguments there, not even from Deuce, except the secret exit is seven goddamn miles away. Joy. Nothing more delightful than the thought of trekking another seven miles of cramped, poorly lit tunnels shellacked in mud so thick Amiga will be washing it off her boots for the next fifty years.

  She rallies though, because fifty years of scrubbing mud beats fifty years toe-tagged and jailed in the bowels of a hub, drive-jacked to work hella long shifts on the engines every day. Problems of having a drive in your skull: you can be written over or into and be none the fucking wiser—these are things she’s learnt only recently and they appal her. If she had nightmares, these would be the terrors waking her screaming in the small hours.

  Focused on ploughing through mud in almost complete darkness, the mind-numbing, exhausting slog of it, Amiga misses the tweaking of her danger-dar until danger’s right in their faces. They’re in empty tunnel, then they’re surrounded by what? Gotta be people. People with the freakish adrenaline strength people get on drugs. Are these junkies? Whatever they are, they’re everywhere and even though the dark steals half her senses they seem unaffected, finding her unerringly and attacking over and over no matter how hard she pushes back.

  “Are there junkies in these tunnels?” she shouts to Ebon.

  “No.” Ebon sounds terrified. “These are not junkies. I do not know what they are.”

  As she fights on Amiga realizes she doesn’t either, that she can’t actually process what she’s fighting, or why, even as she’s fighting it. The clammy skin, the implacable strength and determination, the ugly, heavy pulse of blood under her hands when she grabs arms to twist them away from her. Forced to hazard a guess she’d have to shoot for, say, zombies—but the rational mind shies from such nonsense.

  “Does anyone see what the fuck these are?” she howls, plucking fingers away from her face. “We need some light, goddamnit.”

  Yanking yet more fingers away from her cheek, her mouth, she twists hard, teeth baring at the satisfying snap, but they come again, the jarring grate of broken bones scraping at her ear. She has to bite back an uncharacteristic screech. They keep trying to get to her face. Her head. The weirdness of it, the fixation of it, intensifies that reality shift, that conviction that she’s fighting dead people. Living dead. Stupid. No way the dead walk, or fight, or anything.

  “My fucking head!” Aggie shrieks. “They’re ripping at my head.”

  Amiga tries to fight her way toward Aggie’s voice, more hysterical by the second, to the sound of something tearing. Skin. It’s skin. Then Aggie’s gurgling, this gross sound like dirty water bubbling in a drain. She hears Sim yelling her name, trying to fight her way in from elsewhere. And all she can hear is the gurgling, the smack of fists on skin, and then Aggie says, clear as day.

  “Zen.”

  Amiga’s so bewildered she stops fighting for a second and damn near loses a chunk of hair. “Get the fuck off,” she snarls, grabbing the thing scrabbling at her behind the head and spinning to slam it face-first into the tunnel wall.

  “Zen.”

  “What’s she saying that for?” Si
m asks, and there’s a plea in it. Amiga can’t blame her. It’s not the word, it’s the way she’s saying it, the way her voice sounds flat. Dead. Like something inside her is using her mouth to speak, making her a puppet.

  And that’s when Amiga twigs.

  “Zeros,” she yells. “They’re Zeros! Don’t let them get to your drive. They’re trying to infect you!”

  With Aggie droning the word Zen over and over they fight frantically, trapped by the constriction of the tunnel walls, the sheer number of Zeros seemingly growing every few minutes. Impossible to hold back. Instead of making inroads they’re restricted to keeping groping hands away from their drives, their backs plastered to the tunnel wall.

  Rock digs pits into Amiga’s back, scrapes at her spine, but rather that than fingers near her drive, virads in her mind. The single word droning from Aggie’s mouth sparks her to fight harder, be more vicious. She has no idea how many Zeros she’s injured. Tries not to imagine a scenario where one of the Zeros tearing at her face is EVaC. Hurting him would break her, she’s sure of it. But she’d have to.

  In the corner of her eye a flare of gold, lightning-bug brief, becomes a trickle of neon yellow before sparking like the lights crackling out the end of a firework. They illuminate the faces of the Zeros and she wishes right the fuck away that the dark was back. Zombies is closer to what these Zeros are than she realized—the blank in their faces is horrifying. Even in death faces have more expression than this.

  The electric flares of gold spark to a chain reaction, to golden chains, to limbs, the flick of long hair hiding eyes that when he’s not gold are a blue as bright and electric as the sparks creating his form beside her. The sight of him, awake and rocking his usual dishevelled chill gives her hope for the fucking universe.

  He takes in the situation. Shakes his head.

  No wonder Emblem sent me here before letting me give Deuce a heads up.

  On what? she asks, curling up her hand to introduce the heel of her palm to a nose.

  He scours her with a glance. Being awake. Idiot. Now brace yourself, this might hurt.