Virology

by Ren Warom

  Face blank of all expression, she enunciates slowly in his ear as he snivels and coughs, “You say, ‘Yes, Aunty Dong. How interesting Aunty Dong.’ Understand?”

  A small wail escapes him. “Y-yes, Aunty Dong,” he half-screams, forehead scraping the floor. “H-how interesting… A-Aunty Dong.”

  The suited woman and Aunty Dong exchange glances. Aunty Dong shrugs. “I suppose it’ll do. Where are my secateurs? I’ve lost them again.”

  Another suited woman bustles forward and hands Aunty Dong a neat pair of floral-patterned secateurs with easy-grip handles before both women move back, disappearing into the tangle of plants.

  “What a dear girl.” Aunty Dong beams at the snivelling man curled at her feet. “Hand,” she snaps imperiously. “Hurry now, I haven’t got all day.”

  He remains as he is, head bowed and weeping into the stone floor. There’s a rush of wheels and her chair is by his head. She reaches down and snatches up his right hand, cupped protectively around his head. Her grip is vicious. Like a pincer. He howls and tries to pull back. Aunty Dong yanks him forward, a single sharp tug that sees him splayed at her feet.

  She tuts. Places the blades of the secateurs around his index finger. Snips. Ignoring his screech as the digit pops off into her lap.

  “Index finger,” she says, over his screams. “Authority and independence. Now you have none. You do as Aunty Dong says always. If Aunty Dong wishes for you to cut off all your remaining fingers, what do you say?”

  “Yes, Aunty Dong!”

  She throws his hand off her lap, ignoring the spurt of blood, the stains on the silk. Smiles satisfaction. Inclines her head. At that gesture both suited women appear out from the foliage and drag the man away. Tucking the secateurs into a pocket somewhere in her neat, embroidered skirts, Aunty Dong picks up the bloody digit between a finger and thumb.

  Pursing her lips, she moves the chair in a slow turn around the edge of her planting area and stops at each plant, considering, until she reaches a muscle-red pitcher, almost the size of her tiny head. Lifting the finger, she drops it into the maw of the bowl. It makes a sharp sound like a stone.

  “Rajah,” she murmurs.

  “Tuck in, there’s a dear.”

  Through the greenery above slips a shining form, liquid and furtive, illuminating each lantern bulb it passes, painting soft buttercup gold on every leaf. Bursting out from between falls of spiky leaves it reveals itself as a golden sun, blazing bright and zips a zig-zag dance to Aunty Dong’s chair, neat and dragonfly swift. Hovers in front of her face, gradually dimming until its shape becomes apparent in the glow.

  Aunty Dong’s avatar is Glauert’s Seadragon, a fantasy built of leaves and delicate sea-horse curlicues, a whip of grace, muscle and mischief bought and paid for by her superstitious parents upon the eve of her first birthday. Most auspicious. Aunty Dong has paid a small fortune to ensure Seadragon remains out. When she’s dealt with the tiresome business of revenge, she’ll travel to Shanghai and have a little word with Evelyn Tsai, who has overstepped her boundaries somewhat. She does not enjoy travelling. However, Evelyn Tsai will enjoy her travelling even less, and that will make it a most satisfying visit.

  Does Aunty have a call, dear little thing?

  If it please her.

  It does indeed. Take Aunty in, will you? There’s a dear.

  Leaning back in her chair, she folds her hands in her gore-spattered lap and allows Seadragon to carry her away into Slip. Slip echoes these days, even with the numbers who choose to pay exorbitant tariffs to keep access. Aunty rather enjoyed the chaos before the caging. The hum of activity. The rapid remodelling of Slip to something altogether more intriguing than ocean. She understands what Evelyn Tsai demonstrably does not: change is imperative if the world is not to stagnate.

  * * *

  Hu Hai’s a twitching mess of grit, sore muscles and crying feet. He was forced to spend almost all the flim left in his account to get a flight. Broke, shoeless and disoriented, he’s been wandering Hong Kong since he arrived, trying to find somewhere high enough to spot Dong’s tower because he has no map and no money to access his avi and the Slip to get one.

  Fucking Corps thieving avis. Life gets worse. Always.

  He’s been to Dong’s tower only the once, in the middle of the bloody night almost. He was excited to meet her, to have evidence of his success in impressing her. What a fool he was then. He was shuttled to her roof, feeling like royalty. Met her in her solarium, surrounded by the plants she cultivates and those ugly, bloated dragonflies she likes to feed them with. That’s what he’s been looking for on the skyline. Her lair. He figures if he can get high enough, he’ll spot it, and in this one thing he has luck, though it takes a few tries, Hong Kong being somewhat larger and generally taller than he was expecting. A little more luck sees him getting into the tower without too much difficulty. Turns out Dong has yet to remove him from the employee roster.

  So absolute in her confidence, so certain she’s broken him. Hah. She’ll soon know better.

  The plan now is to get to a damn shoot and get the hell off this floor before anyone sees him and thinks to ask what he’s doing, because at some point someone will see he’s clocked in and will want to log the why of it. Always the way. Offices operate the same everywhere. Turning down another corridor of the first floor of Dong’s tower, he plasters his body into a crevice, hiding from a group of men and women in suits. Counts to himself as they move away, leaving him free to continue his search for a way to the top levels.

  Somewhere in this godforsaken maze of a thousand corridors, like some freakish Chinese hell invented purely for his torment, there’s a shoot to the next levels. Instinct formed through long, painful familiarity with buildings just like this tells him so. Finding shoots in any given Corp stronghold is a skill he cultivated within weeks of first becoming a salaryman at age twenty, alongside a nausea-response to suits, alcoholism, misery and an addiction to junk food.

  He finds the shoots right at the centre, their shining doors surrounded by pale ceramics designed to look like watermarked paper. These shoots go no further than the middle floors. Not unusual. The office fauna on the lowest floors can go no further. Only private shoots go to the upper floors from the lower levels, and they’ll go from the car parks on the ground floor.

  On the mid floors he hunts for the public Exec Corp shoots, something he has a little less experience with, having only had access to the ones back on the Gung for the past few weeks. He finds them set in a sort of potted garden toward the rear of the building, if those monstrosities can be called pots. They’re huge, containing whole trees, complete with ceramic birds. These shoots have a ceramic surround too, designed to mimic some ancient dynasty. He wouldn’t know which—history is not his thing. But it’s pretty. Colourful.

  He takes a spot behind one of the potted trees and waits until a woman approaches the shoots. As she enters, he saunters up as if only just arriving and follows her in, standing at ease and ignoring the sidelong looks he gets for his clothes, his bare feet, his general state of filth. Not her business where he’s going, and she won’t question a thing. Not here. She’s likely seen worse. Every Exec has spare suits for exactly the kind of occasion he looks to have been enjoying. She leaves a few floors later, too swiftly, probably thanks to his stench, and he’s able to enjoy the rest of the ride up in blissful solitude.

  Stepping out on to the highest level, he smells the solarium before he sees the stairs to it, the hot stench of superheated foliage making him simultaneously hungry and revolted. Halfway up he can hear the dragonflies droning. Stupid creatures. He shudders. Is he really going to do this? He’s feeling rather less insane now he’s here. Maybe he should go home. Except. There it is. Under the dragonflies. The buzz of her chair.

  Hu Hai creeps up the spiral staircase until he can see the bright green of plant life between the ornate ironwork of the banister. There she is, in the distance, sat there perfect as a jewel and perfectly smug. Complacent. He
waits a moment or two more, but doesn’t see her guards. Good. She’s alone. Hu Hai steps out amongst the fat bodies of dragonflies, batting them from his face and feeling invincible. Who’ll protect her now?

  “I wondered when you’d turn up.” She doesn’t turn, but it’s obvious she’s talking to him.

  “I… um… I…” He can’t find one thing to say. He bats another dragonfly away, his shoulders slumping a little. Dong was not supposed to guess he’d have the balls to come.

  She looks up, and the annoyance on her face is galling. She’s regarding him as if he’s a dragonfly that won’t digest. “You’re predictable, Hu Hai. You lack imagination.”

  Hu Hai can’t quite believe his ears. He lacks imagination? “I have imagination,” he says. “I had it all figured out. It would’ve worked too, but you had to hit the farm hard. I told you not to but you chose to ignore me. Now you blame me for your failure, take my life from me, and expect me to creep away like a dog? Are you quite right in the head?”

  That look of disgust is still there, if anything more profound. “If you’d been any good at planning,” she scoffs, “the hit on the farm would not have been such a disaster. Have the decency to admit failure.”

  “But… but… I’ve only ever been a salaryman,” he blusters, confounded beyond belief. How can this be a conversation he’s having? It’s not right. “I’m not a soldier!”

  “You should have been whatever I needed,” she replies, calmly deadheading a spiky profusion of colourful leaves. “How deep is your failure. How all encompassing. Your family will be mortified. Your wife will consider herself lucky to have severed from you.”

  Yelling, he lunges for her. Finds himself holding air. A vicious pain hits his side and warm liquid soaks his trousers. He touches the wet spot, wincing as it burns. Why does it burn? His hand comes away drenched. Blood? He looks down. There is blood on him, and it is his. Dong’s over by a repulsive, bulbous plant, as large as her head, crooning to it, dripping blood from her secateurs into its wide mouth. That’s his.

  “That’s mine,” he says. “Give it back.”

  Lurching over to her, he makes a grab for the handles, falling partway into her lap. It should be like collapsing on to a bird, all snappable bones and light feathers, a puff of air somehow given life and personality, instead she’s steel, a formation of cables encased in satin. She wrenches the blades from his hands and chops off the thumb of his left hand as if deadheading a plant. He screeches. She smiles in response and chucks the thumb into the plant.

  Against all reason, Hu Hai leaps after it and the fat plant bursts under his weight, spewing clear fluids streaked with his blood. Dong’s scream of rage and grief echoing in his ears, he scrambles across the floor for his thumb. The hum of dragonflies grows too loud. No, not dragonflies. Wheels. Quick as a flash, Dong’s driven her chair to his thumb, her wheel poised directly in front of it.

  “No. Don’t,” he begs.

  “You killed my plant, you lost my Haunt, you come to my home and attack me and you want me to spare your thumb?”

  “Please.”

  She laughs at him and drives the wheel over the thumb, squashing it. Seeing his thumb all but disintegrate beneath the weight of her wheel makes a light go out inside him. He tries to get up again but the adrenalin is gone. Wasted. He could have done so much with it. Instead he’s lying here on his side, crying about his thumb and probably slowly bleeding to death, barely noting the gold flashing around his face as some tiny, flitty little avatar tries to beat him with its tail. He can’t hear or feel it, but it’s more annoying than a wasp. He wishes he could swat it.

  He should have gone home and eaten the damn dumplings.

  Little Solarium of Horrors

  Entry to Hong Kong is a line system, shuttles moving into bays as they’re processed. Tracker has to do some pretty creative jacking to pass them through the bureaucratic checks, but about two hours after they rocked up to the hub, they’re locked in and ready to go. Amiga would kill to hit a hotel of any stripe and wash the grime away, but time is not an ally. She’s had to settle for a change of clothes from her duffle and a long, cold drink.

  Paris Hub’s already put out an alert. The joy. Tracker will have to keep their ID rolling to prevent them from being arrested here and thrown out without so much as a by your leave. They won’t extradite them back to Paris, but they won’t suffer them within their dome borders. Woes of being a fucking hero. And here comes that itchy sense of unfairness, crawling at her insides again. All they do, all they’ve done, and people still regard them as the problem. Do any of these judgemental bastards deserve their help? Not really. But Dong needs to die with maximum expediency.

  So there’s that. Primo reason to put one boot in front of the other rather than into a few choice faces.

  Roughly a decade ago, Hong Kong Hub pedestrianized most of the roads at its centre and transport has since morphed into a culture of caterbiking or taking a mono similar to the Gung’s to get around. Hong Kong has the best caterbike hire system off-Gung. Climbing on to a caterbike rented for literally change, Amiga steals a glance at Shock as he hops on behind her. He’s the same as ever, slender, too thin, too goddamn pretty, that green and black hair always ratty, those fucking eyes bright enough to blind.

  Eyes shouldn’t be that blue. It’s freakish.

  There’s no way to see the other difference in him, the parts that are all Emblem. Not unless he shows it anyway—gold eyes rising through blue, illusions to cover them as they move through crowded streets, that whole cutting human life off with a thought thing. In those moments it’s possible to completely forget that he’s still Shock, still the skinny little loser who’s not as fucked as he thinks and way more than he wants to be.

  She’s half curious and half not about the whole being his own avi thing. She’s seen the gold, but thought it was less avi and more Emblem. Can’t wrap her cranium around the notion of Slipping without a normal avi. Too strange. Besides which, he hasn’t cracked it out to pinpoint Dong quite yet, and frankly she wants him to hustle. Now they’re here, her only focus is getting some hands on revenge for the Hornets lost in that hit on the farm and, of course, finding Gail.

  She owes Gail a rescue. Big time. Until that’s ticked off her to-do list she’ll be hauling around more metric tonnes of guilt than she can handle.

  You getting your Slip on any time soon?

  On it already, he replies, sounding distant. Preoccupied. Detached. The fact that he’s already in Slip occurs to her. In and out all at once. Nope, that isn’t freaky at all.

  It’s really not.

  I did not say that aloud.

  You’re emanating.

  Shock Pao, that’s enough reading of my emanations. Quit it, or I’ll dump you off the back of this bike on your ass. I mean, fuck sake, it’s skating on the edge of downright wrong that you can do this in the first place without poking your nose into my psyche.

  I really don’t need to poke, it’s right there. Lemme show you.

  Without the touch of his drive to warn her, the whole of Slip appears around her, a vivid dream draped over the world. Strange, bright and overwhelming, it’s still somehow oddly empty and diminished with far fewer avis than usual, all trapped in Slip even outside of their cages—and how the hell does she know that? Because he does. Fuck. He’s right. Everything is right there. All this information, way too much of it, right there for the taking. A fake medium could become a billionaire with this shit.

  This how you see Slip all the time?

  IRL? Hell no. I’d go nuts. Usually I only see the gold, the info, the chat. This shit is what I can see in Slip if I choose to. I let it all hang out now because I need it. Hunting, yeah?

  Even with choice, she can’t imagine how he copes. There’s nowhere to go to escape from it, not even inward. Slip is in every damned cell: an overload, a takeover, a consuming flood. It’s changed, too, to a bewildering degree. Become a surreal landscape, a derangement of ideas. There are things like not
hing she’s ever seen. Mountains of matter, dull gold, sliding through in slow evolutions.

  Before she can ask what they are, or beg him to take this away, he points and she sees Dong’s location, glowing like a fire in the distance. Quite beautiful.

  He cuts her connection then, and the Gung leaps back to clarity, three dimensional and real and so solid she wants to stop the bike, jump off and kiss the fucking ground. She can still see Dong’s tower though, burning in her mind like the after-effect of a flash, and speeds up in the gathering dusk. As they close in on it, she sees how traditional it is, a steel recreation of a Chinese temple stretched to the heavens and topped with a brightly lit dome.

  When they’re close enough to smell the ozone of the thousands of lights illuminating its sweeping cornices, they hide the bikes and share out the few weapons they have. It’s a depressingly low amount, but the plan is to sneak, draw as little attention as possible. The last thing they need is to come out with more of them dead or damaged.

  Part of this don’t be seen or heard plan is rappelling up to the roof. Amiga’s going first, taking Shock on the harness behind her like a dual-jump because apparently, when he’s not drugged out of his mind he’s not fond of the notion of running up a building. Adorable. Feeling magnanimous, she lets him get used to giving in to the pressure of the rope first, before speeding up until they’re both running lightly.

  Shock’s a sweaty state by the time they hit the top.

  Heights suck, he throws out, throwing off the harness at the same time. Since meeting you guys I always seem to end up on heights.

  She grins. Coming up in life.

  He makes this glorious, disgusted face.

  Worst joke ever. Worst whinge ever.

  Fuck you.

  Trying not to laugh and piss him off even more, Amiga tugs the clips to ensure they won’t come loose and sends the harnesses back down for the next two to come up. They’ve come in a team of twenty, so it takes a while until they’re all assembled on the roof and they can move out toward the dome of the solarium, the explosion of greenery within crawling right up to the top. Looks like there’s no room in there for anything but plants.