Virology

by Ren Warom

It’s okay, she tells him. Always comforting.

  He wants to comfort her. He’s fed up of needing comfort. It’s not meant to be one-sided—comfort isn’t her job, it’s something they should give one another. He should be capable of that. Should be able to fix this. Instead he’s… what? He reaches out to his body, unconscious somewhere he doesn’t want to think about. His head is screaming waves of agony. Probably concussion, maybe worse.

  Fracture? Is that near his drive? Fuck but if that’s damaged then it’s all over before it’s begun, because he knows where he is. Knew the moment he saw Zeros waiting by the caterbikes.

  He didn’t see the ones behind him until it was too late.

  Resting his forehead on the bars, he closes his eyes again, unable to bear the sight of her trapped like this. I’m so sorry. I fucked up again. I should have told them about Zen. Warned them.

  Yes, you should. That’s Puss, never sugarcoating, always being real with him. Until he had that, he never knew how necessary it was for growth.

  Now they’ll come after me. She’ll do terrible things to them if they try to kill her. They don’t know what she is.

  She leans in close, tentacles braced against the bars. They’re smarter than that. Don’t give up. Fight.

  She’s right. Of course she is. But Zen… she’s more than the Queen was. Worse. The Queen learnt to be what it was from her. Zen’s filled with a blank need that won’t settle until it has everything. Self-serving and terrifying in its capacity to dismiss the lives of others. He didn’t want to have to deal with anything like the Queen again. Ever. To have to deal with worse, no more than a month later, is oddly cruel.

  But then life is.

  He’s about to ask Puss what he can do when unwanted consciousness jerks him away from her, lurching his body as he crashes back into it. Jolting the damage to his head hard enough to make him dry heave, cheek pressed against soft carpet to brace himself against the pain vibrating from the crown of his head right down to his ankles. If he could grab this pain and pull it out of him, it’d have longer tentacles than Puss, covered in tiny, deadly suckers.

  Inside his head, Emblem’s surrounded the fracture with a coded mandala of peculiar complexities. Seems to be trying to fix physical damage with virtual means. He wishes to fuck it would stop; it’s using too much that isn’t him to hold the edges of him together. And there are edges, he feels them grinding. The sound it makes inside his skull is trees creaking, ’scrapers swaying in the wind, a vivid memory of his bones cracking as Pill worked him over.

  “You should have stayed asleep.”

  Shock recognizes that voice. Bear. He can’t stand to move his head by lifting it. He rolls it instead, using his whole body as a lever. The movement causes brilliant sparks of light to shoot across his vision. Pain or damage? No way to tell. Bear is gazing at him. Soft eyes. It has such soft eyes. The gold of it shines too bright in the bland whiteness of the room; it hurts to look at. Or is that the damage too? He thinks he’s really very much in trouble. Beyond Zen even.

  “You’re part of the prison. Do you make her sleep?” His voice is raspy. Dry. He needs water. Sleep. He needs to sleep so bad. Needs a Polar Bear of his own.

  “Don’t sleep again. You may die. They hit you too hard. Or rather she did, through them. Over-excitement. She’s damaged you badly. It made her angry enough that I managed to wrestle back control. It won’t be for long though. Can you get up?”

  “I wouldn’t want to try.”

  Bear makes a face. An actual face. A cross between a frown and a grimace. What is it? It’s an avi but it’s not. Shock can only vocalize as an avi because he has the right vocal chords for speech and because avis are essentially life, though a very specific kind. If Bear could learn to talk somehow it would maybe growl, or vocalize the way bears do. Not form words. And there’s no distortion from teeth or jaw shape. It’s perfect. Then again, it’s likely Breaker’s work. If anyone could imagine a bear avi with speech into being, it’d be him.

  “Breaker, he made you?”

  The bear tilts its head. “He did not make me, he adapted me. I was a sacrifice.”

  “A sacrifice?”

  “To the world.” Polar Bear’s head falls forward, listening to its belly. “She’s waking. Hoard your resources, Haunt. Don’t let her out.”

  Easier said than done. He wants to say it but Polar Bear already has its eyes closed, and Zen’s are opening, bright and hard. She peers down at him and makes a chuffing noise, much like a bear would. If he could laugh without puking, he’d laugh out a lung.

  “I made a mess,” she says, but she’s not talking to him. She’s barely even seeing him. “Never to mind. Everything I need is intact.”

  Blinding pressure hits his drive and the unfamiliar swell of a mind, steeped in bitter lemon taste he recalls with a pang of terror. Such strength she has, to leave this taste in Slip. He has no enthusiasm for seeing her up close and personal but cannot help peek as she squeezes way in. Traumatic memory recalls Queens doing this, so many vast minds inside his, looking for footholds to try and drag him out of himself, to scour him out so they could fill him with themselves. Zen’s not doing that. She’s after switching Emblem off again. Fuck knows what she plans to do to Shock then.

  Probably erase him.

  Dimly, he registers blood beginning to pour from his nose, but he’s not afraid any more; he wants to laugh again. Lying here, broken and bleeding, her presence rolling in his drive like sickness, he wishes he had the energy to mock her for this misjudgement. For her pure arrogance. Emblem’s everywhere. Can’t switch Emblem off now; there’s nothing left in it vulnerable to switching off. Same for him pretty much. Why the hell does she imagine he’s still alive with this fucking catastrophic head wound?

  If she wants to control Emblem, she’ll have to become them both. Fight for control. And she’ll be fighting forever. Control is not something he’s willing to hand over under any circumstances. Five weeks ago, he made a decision that changed his whole existence, and now his actual humanity. He doesn’t regret that decision. All he regrets is that he didn’t fully embrace it sooner.

  What is human after all but the capacity to make choices?

  * * *

  Too far behind. They’re too fucking far behind. Shock’s in serious trouble, his signal intermittent enough to tell them he’s badly hurt, and they’re too far behind. That’s all Amiga can focus on as they speed away from Hong Kong Hub on a stolen shuttle; not the hell she raised getting them out of there, the sheer amount of dead bodies she left in her wake, or the fleet of shuttles that pours out after them, sirens blaring.

  “Fuck!” Deuce whips them into heavy cloud, but they’ve been seen.

  Hong Kong is inside Earth’s atmosphere at this hour, charting a course over the ocean set to take it close to the Gung. Not near enough to see, but near enough for the convenience of easier imports and exports. Shock’s far off planet by now, and headed for another hub. They need to get moving, to follow his path. Fast enough to send them all tumbling, Deuce aims the shuttle up and they burst out into space. The sound of the sirens cuts off as they pop through. Only the lights can be seen, pulsing away like dying stars. Floating to the window, Amiga watches them burst through one by one.

  “Buckle in,” Deuce tells her. “We have to break the speed limit to get outside their jurisdiction.”

  Hubs have jurisdiction zones. Outside those, they can contact other hubs to intercept, but most don’t. InterHub and Planetary systems of law are generally incompatible, each hub having its own legal system and bureaucracy. Extraditions are costly, often fraught. Most hubs prefer to hope anyone fleeing their jurisdiction will end up offending on the Gung. Offenders with outstanding InterHub warrants end up on the severe, almost uninhabitable Yellowstone Burr—a mountainous drift of continent deep in the Pacific used as a sort of penal colony.

  Beyond the reach of Hong Kong, Deuce strikes out in Shock’s current direction. At this point he’s still moving. It’s when he stop
s she’ll worry. That promise she made to Mollie keeps coming back like bad rice. Killing Zen. How can she do that? Can she do that? Mollie’s sick. She’s a Zero. Zen is controlling the Zeros. She’s something else. Worse. Something it might not be possible to kill. What if there’s no way to stop this?

  Even so, she has to try. The possibility of Shock being under Zen’s influence makes her want to smash things. That bitch has no right to him. But his shuttle is so far ahead, and things have already happened to him that Amiga has no control over. It’s like Pill, knowing she was twenty minutes away and how much damage torture can do in twenty minutes. Hell, some damage you need less than a minute for. Whatever they find, she’ll have to judge it on sight and hope that killing Zen won’t mean killing Shock.

  The trail of broken signal leads them a couple of hours east, where several Trans-American Hubs make their orbits. Giving herself the biggest forehead slap in the history of slapped foreheads, Amiga calls it there and then. Gotta be New York. Plain sight. The Lakatos family made their home there. Sure enough, that’s where his signal leads: the Peace Tower. Despite being built for the Lakatos family, it’s essentially a public building and full to the brim with New Yorkers and tourists. Amiga swears a streak of Javanese her mother and aunties would have screamed about, their hands fluttering.

  New York’s docking system, as befits a Trans-American hub, is payment based for non-residents— Deuce does some wizardry that will keep feeding the glitchy, crappy payment system ghost-flim until they need to fly out. Leaving a couple of volunteers behind to rescue the injured Hornets on the shuttle Zen’s Zeros stole, the rest of them waste no more time, grabbing any weapons they have left and racing out of the bays, intent on getting Shock back.

  NYC Hub has no caterbike hire system; it has a cranky mono and an even crankier subway, neither of which is particularly safe. They head straight for the underground link from the docking station. The lights down here are dirty yellow and gangs of muggers work the lines in shifts. Most people are used to either packing heat or carrying nothing of value, though some carry a dummy wallet with minimal flim and low-cred chips in for fear of being killed. Better, they think, to lose some money than lose their life.

  The Hornets take seats and pay no attention to the muggers on shift, who give them a wide berth. Perks of being pretty much head to toe in dried blood. No one wants to tango.

  Running up filthy stairs to daylight, Amiga looks left, in the direction of Shock’s signal. The Lakatos family’s contribution to the Hub’s skyline, the Peace Tower, is pure-white glass in silver-grey steel. Ugly and somehow tacky despite the flowing lines and whimsical design, but the locals love it for the art galleries and museums, the indoor botanical gardens and, most impressive of all, the oceanarium on the ground floors. You can’t enter the building without passing through the oceanarium, surrounded on all sides by creatures from the oceans of the Gung—it’s like Slip IRL, a multifarious collection of remarkable sea life, both tiny and vast. They even have a blue whale. Passing through today, Amiga doesn’t see it, but there is a flash of sea turtles, some so tiny they can only be infants, and a shoal of tuna, bright silver as they flow past.

  Amiga thinks of them in gold and misses the avis so acutely her chest burns. Somehow she imagined they’d appear at some point, because she knows Vivid won’t let them down. But maybe it’s not that simple. And that burns too. Brighter. Fiercer. That’s a burn right down to the bone, blackening to char.

  The oceanarium covers four floors; it’s full of tunnels and walkways, restaurants, and even a hotel where you can sleep surrounded by sea creatures. On the third floor Shock’s signal changes, stuttering dangerously and they race for the fourth-floor shoots. Amiga can’t calm her heart. She’s never felt stressed going in to conflict; there’s no point, but this is different. This is Shock. The thought of losing it, of losing him, makes her want to tear down this whole fucking tower.

  Deuce slips his hand into hers, his palm warm. “It’ll be okay.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  “We’ll make it okay. He won’t just let her kill him, you know that, right?”

  She knows. Doesn’t help worth a damn. Funny that. Funny too that Deuce has no problems with how she is with Shock. Trust him of all people to grok what it is they mean to each other and be cool with the fact it’s not anything he could be, not anything she needs him to be.

  Shock’s signal drags them past the public floors to the Lakatos family home on the upper levels, a ridiculous twelve floors for what she thought was two people, and now likely only the one, unless there are other Lakatoses she hasn’t heard of. The doors, naturally, are locked. Auto-locks. Bio-print. Zen must have forced her prints through Zero flesh to get them in.

  “Fucking hell!” Deuce does something she’s never seen him do. He loses his cool. Slams a boot just beneath the lock, sending the doors crashing open. He blinks surprise. “Manual jacking,” he says, slightly breathless. “Who knew?”

  The ground floor is grand. Deserted. Designed to look like the entry hall of a Georgian mansion, with a great double sweeping staircase. Amiga looks at the landing. He’s up there. Somewhere.

  “Oh fuck me.” Ravi. Too quiet. She looks where he is and sees the blood. Lots of blood.

  She hits the stairs at a dead sprint, the Hornets at her back. Blood like breadcrumbs brings them to the mid-level. Six. A level all in white, visually bewildering. Chasing blood, Amiga runs down long corridors contorted to a maze, her hand trailing the walls—white-silk cool under her fingertips. Room by room, corridor by corridor, she pares it down. Measures time in breath and the flex of muscles, the susurration of her heels on thick carpet, until she finds herself at a threshold to an empty room so drenched in white her eyes struggle to see anything at all, the walls and floor melting together.

  Blinking, she struggles to focus. Sees everything all at once. The Zeros at the walls. The ruin of them. The way some are slumped bundles of limbs with hands like bent branches. Shock on the floor in a heap. Too limp. Too small. His head rests in a circle of red-drenched carpet. Then finally, the sphere, painted in dull red hieroglyphs. The golden Polar Bear with the woman in its belly.

  Rage hits so hard, she loses the ability to breathe.

  Look at Shock. Look at what that bitch has done to him.

  Without thinking, barely even feeling, she lifts her gun and empties the clip into the glass, hearing it shatter from what seems like an implausible distance. Why wasn’t it bulletproof? Some part of her expected it would be, expected that it should be, or what the hell were Josef and Breaker doing? Part of her didn’t care either way. Most of her maybe. That part was hoping the bullets would smash through and devastate the flesh inside. She wanted to see that bitch bleeding.

  There is blood, for sure, but Amiga gets only a second to admire her handiwork before the bear bounds out, a surge of gold and fury, and slams into her, throwing her across the room and against the wall.

  “What did you do!” it roars in her face, huge paws pinning her down. What? Its claws are drawing blood. And it’s speaking. Speaking. “You don’t let her out!”

  Amiga scrabbles at the paws on her body. “She’s wounded. I hit her. Maybe she’s dead.”

  The bear snaps at her face, huge jaws inches from her flesh. “If I’m not dead, she’s not. Fool. You should have saved a bullet.”

  Through the gold body of the bear, Amiga watches as Zenada, her face a study in disbelief, steps out to the carpet, one leg after the other, jerking like some awful stop-motion puppet. She touches the wounds on her torso. Licks the blood off her fingers and laughs. Oh fuck. Oh holy fuck. That’s a monster. It’s not the blood licking or even the laughter. It’s the emptiness in the eyes. The chasms.

  “I’m sorry,” Amiga mutters, to herself, to the bear, to Shock most of all. “I’m sorry.”

  Zen staggers over to Shock, marionette-staccato. Bends down to stare at him. Her fingers pincer his chin, yanking his face up. Zenada leans in close, teeter
ing. Places her other hand behind his head, getting herself covered in his blood.

  “Open wide,” she says to him, her voice dry as dust, and rams her fingers through the fracture in his skull into the back of his head.

  Life’s A Circus’ Pal

  Space being at a premium on Shanghai Hub as much as it is on any hub, the Jīn yún mǎxì is housed in a garden tower, one of several built to emulate a feeling of spaciousness. Old Shanghai, and those who deify it, refuses to acknowledge these additions, but the citizens of Shanghai spend much of their free time wandering the gardens and balconies, enjoying the entertainments and restaurants— watching the stars from the crown viewing platforms.

  Contained on the mid levels, their circus is set into one of the parks, a permanent red-and-white striped triple-point big top surrounded by stalls and amusements with the circus folks’ homes scattered at the rear; a profusion of tents, caravans and tiny huts with wide wooden porches. Getting back there is easy. Getting any one of the performers to stop and talk with strangers? Boss-level hard. They’re eyed up as if they’re trouble walking, which isn’t far from the truth.

  It’s noisy too. Not any old noise. Fundamentally the kind of noise that cracks your brain open like a coconut and pours inside until it fills you up, breathing it in and breathing it out, holding it in your cells, knowing that if you live tomorrow and the day after, and the day after that, this noise will haunt your ears, hang in your mind, thundering there amongst the internal motions of heart and lungs and refuse to be ignored any more than it is now.

  Making their way back out to the stalls and amusements, they try sweet-talking them as they play. The response is glacial and KJ, quick to boredom, wanders off. An hour later, when the rest of them have given up trying to make circus folk talk about anything except how many darts they want to buy or what sauce they want on their pancake, he returns with a group of three performers in skin-tight leotards, all talking at once. Trust KJ to find the people here most like him—he thinks she doesn’t know that he used to dance. Probably forgets that every time he gets drunk he tells her all about it, sobbing into her shoulder, breaking her heart over and over with how broken his is. How much he misses what could have been.