by Ren Warom
The impossible, he replies.
Zero Sum Game
Serene under a canopy of stars, the tensions bubbling under the surface only a few days before smoothed to tranquillity by night and maybe Deuce’s work in Slip, the Gung is strange tonight. Or maybe she’s strange. Changed. She doesn’t feel the same, like some part of her has skipped a beat and gone out of sync with what it was before.
Amiga’s a different tune. One she doesn’t know the words to yet.
Everything surprises her. Most of all Deuce. His courage. The sheer amount he took on in the name of protecting his family, protecting more than that. The Hornets have kept the knowledge of those changes as a pact of sorts. They’ll be the ones to remember, because it’s their doing, their wrong to make a right. So here she is, seeing the new laid over the old like illusion and knowing it’s real.
Today the world knows that Tsai Holdings and Fulcrum were criminal Corps brought to justice after brief, fierce wars by the Sec forces of the Gung and Shanghai Hub. They know that their avatars have been out forever and will be restored to them soon, that Slip is coming to life in more ways than one and, like avatars being alive, this is just the way things are. Normality. Not everyone will like this, but they will have no power to change it. Most of all, most profoundly of all, when the Gung wakes in a few short hours, it will be to a life without Psych Evals. No more Pass or Fail. No more choice as strait jacket. Only the future, reeling out, open to any possibility.
The thought of it is giddy. Electric. From the lowest of office fauna to the highest Exec, it’s all up for grabs.
Sat in the back of a rickety truck, holding Shock steady again and feeling déjà vu like fuck knows what, Amiga drinks in the sight of ’scrapers, of narrow roads, the grime and rubble of the Gung and allows herself to hope for its future as they travel back to the warehouse holding the Zeros. It’s some stupid hour of the morning, but this is all they have left to do and they need to get it done, to fix the hell Zenada created, mainly because Deuce wrote it right and they need to bring reality in line with that. Exhausted beyond anything she’s ever felt before, Amiga promises herself a respite for at least three weeks once they’re done with this. She can’t promise longer than that. Too much inaction is her kryptonite.
When they arrive, dawn still a few hours distant, she leaves Shock under the watchful eye of Ravi and goes into the warehouse with Deuce—Puss wrapped around his torso. Weird to see her there. Almost disconcerting in fact.
Inside, one of the few people left not yet sick leads them to see Maggie and Mollie. Amiga drops boneless into a chair at the sight of their pale, thin bodies. Maggie’s on her side, facing Mollie, who’s been draped into bed beside her, her wires dangling around them, limp and somehow too dull. Her light isn’t meant to be dimmed. She’s the neon angel, she should be blinding. Greasy with sweat, their skin is riddled with veins torqued to letters. No longer zees, which is a small mercy. These new symbols make Amiga’s eyes swim with strain, like they’re working too hard to make sense of a riddle. She smooths a hand over Maggie’s brow, trying to ignore how unsteady she is.
“Can we fix this?”
Deuce lets out a breath he seems to have been holding forever. “I hope so. You felt what Zenada did to them?”
“Yeah.” She shudders. Full on goose over the grave shit. Zenada was something else. Secretly Amiga’s banking on this narrow connection to Shock disappearing real soon, much as she loves the skinny bastard. The echoes of Zen in his memories are giving her major nausea issues. “Rather forget it if you don’t mind.”
“I’m going somewhere with this, Amiga. That was all her work. So was her name on Zero bodies. But this?” He looks down at the obscure patterns on Maggie’s body. “I think this is all them, attempting to communicate.”
“It’s a virus. That’s all.”
“No. She messed with them; they changed. They woke up, like Slip has. Then she took them over. Puppet viruses. The kind of thing she was doing with the Queen if you’ve been paying attention to those memories of hers still whacking around in Shock’s head.”
She goes to laugh but the funny in the situation eludes her. Hijacking bodies. Hijacking newly sentient viruses to hijack bodies. That’s a horror right there. The violation of her friends, of anyone infected by Zen’s last stand, has her jonesing to turn back the clock to the moment she jumped Zen and take a few seconds to stamp all over her fucking face. Stamp it to unrecognizable mush.
Might have prevented Shock from needing to throw his life into the abyss.
“So can you fix them without making it worse?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe? It’s a fucking virus and it’s killing them. If you can’t put a full stop on that shit, then the choice is not difficult. If I had to choose between them and some stupid self-aware advertising code, I’d pick my friends. Every. Damn. Time.”
Deuce closes those poker chips of his for a second, and damn it if it doesn’t feel like he’s shutting her out. She is not disappointing the fucker. No way. Not in hell. This is nothing to disappoint about. It’s not kittens, or children, it’s nothing but the kind of shit she used to have to flush out of her drive if it happened to hit her unawares during Slipping.
“Well my vote is a no,” she says, as if her opinion weren’t obvious.
“Noted,” he growls and promptly pisses off with a guy called Eddie, to go hunt out the first Zero infected, apparently kept somewhere in the main floor of tanks. Maggie would know exactly where, but Maggie’s here. Mollie’s here. Both silent. Still. Too sick for her to bear.
She holds Maggie’s hand, and then reaches across to grasp Mollie’s as she waits for him to come back, wanting to hang on to them. To let them be aware she’s here. That they’re not alone. It takes a long arse time, or else she’s so fucking tired that minutes have stretched to hours in her perception. Whatever it is, Deuce looks wiped when he walks back in. Wiped and weary in ways he’s never looked before. He doesn’t look sad, though. That’s a positive, right?
“Spit it out. Did you do it?”
“We gave them a voice,” he says, and his voice is blurry with exhaustion. Almost non-existent.
“I don’t understand.”
Puss speaks then, watching her from his torso. She looks tired too. Fuzzy. We gave them one voice to speak for them all. A tutor. A source.
Will it cure everyone?
Look.
Amiga looks down at Maggie, at Mollie. Their skin is marginally less pale. And perhaps, unless she’s mistaking hopeful imagination for the real world, they’re breathing easier too. This relief is different, almost dizzying. She feels as fuzzy as Puss looks, as Deuce sounds.
How long before she’s well, before the rest are? Will they all be? Even the ones like Tracker?
The Hornets will be fine, Amiga, so will the people Zenada hurt. But it will take a while. Virads are hard to herd—it took most of our time and energy to make them understand, but they’re making their way to the host now, to learn language. Once they’ve all gone, the sickness will run its course. I suspect only the sickest and weakest of the Zeros will struggle to become fully well.
You think some will die?
Yes.
Which means you didn’t make the host the original infected Zero.
No. We didn’t.
Amiga goes to ask who they picked, but then she catches a glint in Deuce’s eyes. Guilt. Hold the hell on. “You did not. Not EVaC. No way.”
Deuce bites his lip. It’d be adorable if she didn’t want to punch it. “What do you want me to say, Amiga? It’s done.”
“And what about EVaC?” This isn’t really a betrayal, not of her, but it feels like one. She feels utterly betrayed.
“He gave permission.”
“Are you sure? What if it was the virads talking? What if he stays sick?”
Not that she wants to be questioning him, but how can she not? Her vote was a no, and it’s EVaC he’s risking here, because it is a risk. Virads are tw
o things: viral adverts, and unusual life. Dangerous life. What if they decide they’d like a body to use like Zenada did? She thinks she might be furious with him. Feels like she needs to have been there, seen for herself. Because what if he’s wrong? What then?
Understanding her as he always does, Deuce crouches down by the bed and takes her hands. “He won’t stay sick. They want to help him. To have him help them. And I promise you I would not have done this if I doubted, even for a second, that EVaC was making his own choice, that he could handle this, that we could trust the virads to simply learn and not use him. Do you trust that, at least, Amiga Tanaka? Do you trust me?”
Oh. Wow. Talk about a slap around the proverbial. Talk about a question designed to kick her out of her stupid self. Theoretically, she could lie to herself right now, and to him. She’s done it before. But she lost him then, long enough to wound them both, and getting him back was—to her mind— pure serendipity, AKA nothing she’s willing to chance again. Besides, she’s not really afraid of this truth any more. Not all truth hurts. Not all truths are difficult to face.
Squeezing his hands between her own. Hanging on. Letting him feel the strength of her conviction, Amiga flips a hard middle finger at her need to control shit and allows him to catch her for once. Completely.
“With my life,” she says. “I trust you with my fucking life. So I guess I can trust you with his.”
* * *
Leaving Mollie and Maggie and the rest of the Zeros behind in Eddie’s care, they take EVaC and head out to the shuttle. Next stop, a rendezvous with the rest of the Hornets. Time to sleep, eat, share stories. Time to begin again, without the targets on their backs. With one hand on EVaC, just to know he’s there, Amiga holds Shock in her lap, Puss wrapped around the both of them like seaweed; watches out of the window as Deuce flies them away from the Gung.
The sight of her home city from a height is one she’ll never get over. Huddled alone in a patch of ocean, mountains to its rear, and all but dwarfed by the vast ranges of ’scrapers upon its back, the Gung is disordered, ragged, brooding. Crowded and too loud, too jumbled, all cheek to jowl and teeming with people, an ant farm on overload, groaning at the seams. It lacks elegance. Charm. Dignity. And somehow all of that combined makes her hungry for the sight of it, happy to drink it in through her pores. Even though she may never go back.
As they move away, climbing to higher altitudes, clouds reel out beneath in a layer so thick they look more physical than water vapour has any right to be. Ruffled landscapes of creamy white and jewel-like greys, eerily still—the soft haze of thin cloud moving above them the only clue that they’re not what they seem. The first time Amiga saw clouds like that, she wanted to run on them. She’s never been as foolish since.
The world has stolen her whimsy.
The shuttle moves lower, into the cloud bank, transforming it to a mist of white. Breaking through to bright sunlight bouncing off ocean so still it appears frozen in place. Not a land ship in sight. Not a peak of broken continent. From the left, moving parallel to them, the flukes and flumes of a pod of whales appears, giant shapes gliding serene and steady beneath calm waters so clear she can see the scars on their bodies, the gentle sway of their tail fins propelling them through the water. She catches her breath. Takes a snapshot of the moment to store in her drive.
Swooping in from the West, they hit the outskirts of the Russian Straits, a series of ribbon-like estuaries between the jutting hulks of what was Russia, the Siberian ranges. Amiga leans forward, her nose pressed against the glass, watching as a small group of land ships navigates one of the larger estuaries of the straits, the metal in their structures glinting, mirroring the sunlight bouncing off their wake. Not such a rare sight this, they’re probably hunting for communities to pillage, other ships to steal. But from here they look innocent. Beautiful.
They’re so bright they make her blink, colourful cities on mobile scraps of land ploughing bright-blue sea between the livid green of the cliffs surrounding them, that verdant growth all but swallowing the broken remains of buildings. The cliffs are steep in this section of the Straits and only birds live here, thousands of white specks, roosting and diving, billowing in raucous clouds.
On other journeys, flying through different Straits, Amiga’s seen communities clinging to the mountainsides. Marvelled at their tenacity. It’s a narrow life, and dangerous, with land ship pirates on the ocean and wild animals grown resilient and fearless. She shudders at the thought of being prey. At her core, Amiga is a predator. She couldn’t accept any other reality, and she made her peace with that now. Fully. No pain, no shame. No confusion.
Which makes the reality she’s heading toward one she can fully align with.
Out on the ocean, on the land ship Resurrection City with her team and the Pharm Exec who created the cages version of Disconnect, Vivid’s waiting for them to join her. She sent word via IM not long after Deuce fixed the world, when hiding wasn’t really necessary any more. Amazing how things work. They’d have had a place to go even if they’d voted not to do it. But none of them regret it. How can they? It’s not just their lives they were protecting. Not just their lives they were saving.
Amazing too how much Amiga, a creature of cities right down to her core, is looking forward to being on a land ship in the middle of the fucking ocean. But this land ship, she’s not just any old land ship. She’s a warship that fights on the right side. A salvage ship. A community. A motherfucking pirate ship. After all they’ve done together, after everything they’ve been through, despite all her rebellion, her deep-seated need to act on her own, Amiga’s proud to call herself a J-Hack. The collective noun for a bunch of J-Hacks just happens to be “pirates”.
Where better then for them to end up, than on a pirate ship?
The View From Here
The ocean is a multi-layered illusion, deep and delirious, mimicking the sky from blue surface to space-dark deeps, revealing all its secrets in shimmering lines. The peaks and troughs. The valleys and flats. All filled with the flit of fish, their specs flashing beside them, and the leviathan weight of giants, some gentle, some terrible.
Above it, over it, draped like a veil, glistening and silent, lies the greater ocean. The Slip. Today it is all but entirely changed except for the still-startling lack of the vast majority of golden avatars who used to swim and hover from bottomless deeps to sun-speared heights. Volk and Deuce are working on breaking them out, with Keel’s very reluctant help, but it’s taking time.
Everything is changed. Undone and remade.
Watching it all, Shock experiences himself profoundly: a multi-layered illusion.
He blinks the Slip away, choosing to see only ocean and sky—blue into blue into grey horizon and bulbous cloud. The world is real. He has to remember. The world is all too real. But it can’t be trusted. It can be rewritten so easily. Recently, the Hornets voted to rewrite it. Deuce went into Slip with Puss and set the world to rights in so many ways. They did it for him. For the avatars Volk’s working hard to save. For the parts of Slip that somehow woke up. For the virads Zen forced to evolve.
He’ll never forget waking to that. They wrote him in on the changes so he wouldn’t be confused, never dreaming that he might be bemused. Blindsided. Surprised by what they would do for him. Unexpectedly touched. He doesn’t feel worthy of their regard. Of their sacrifice. Of Amiga’s. Not just because it was his fault Zenada managed to do so very much damage, but also because his life is entirely contingent upon the presence of Puss.
Without the constant press of her presence, whether in Slip or IRL, he wouldn’t be awake. Wouldn’t be aware. Wouldn’t be functional. Emblem did all it could to save him, but the damage caused by Zenada’s attack, by his destruction of her, has taken a terrible toll. He’s a mishmash of Emblem, Shock and, worst of all, Zen memories. Waking nightmares. Hallucinations. Things he’d give anything to scrub from his mind.
As for his body… Parts of him are paralysed. They only work because of
Emblem. He can’t actually feel them. His mind is oh-so-slightly tattered. He forgets things. Loses focus and drifts away, unravelling. But here he is nonetheless. Awake. Alive. Present. And as long as Puss is here, he will be too. He’s not afraid of that changing. If they can’t jack the cages, Volk and Deuce will re-jig the system to take ghost flim. One way or another, they’re getting the avis out.
One way or another, he’ll always have Puss.
Beneath him, the Resurrection ploughs into a wave, sending up a seventy-metre spew of foamy seawater. Shock struggles up out of the way, yelling, as it splashes down soaking him from head to toe, a dousing of water so cold, the parts of his skin that have feeling shrink and ache. Gasping water from his mouth, he plucks his wet shirt from his chest. Begins the long climb back up to the surface of Resurrection on unsteady legs, trusting Emblem to keep his footing on slippery wooden walkways and ladders. He has to trust Emblem. He can’t do it himself.
Back up near the surface, the noise of Resurrection begins to drown out the crash of waves against her massive sides. Shock immediately feels himself cringing, wanting to retreat back down to the quiet of the sides, broken only by the shouts of the wheelmen and the raucous screech of sea birds, the slap and roar of waves.
They’ve been part of Resurrection’s crew for nineteen days. This is a generous ship, and a friendly one, and he is grateful, but he wishes he had something to do apart from attempt to hide in his room—impossible with the Hornets, Volk, and Petrie, the ship’s bosun, determined to keep an eye on him—or skulk about on the sides and risk a drenching. Truth is though, he’s not well enough. He will be. One day. Maybe. Until then, he’ll endure their concern, the boredom, because he’s here and he genuinely did not expect to be.
Cassius, the Captain of the Res, gave them a large complex amidships to share. Plenty of room. Plenty of rooms. Many of them, unfortunately, communal, which is totally a Res thing and so anathema to Shock’s being he wouldn’t endure it if it weren’t the Hornets and the folk of the Res, all of whom are family. Family he wants, even if he has to hide from them most of a day just to stay sane.