“Hello, Sylvie.”
Without apparent transition, I was at the bar in Tokyo Crow. She leaned next to me, nursing a glass of whisky I didn’t remember her having when we were there for real. There was a similar drink in front of me. The clientele boiled around us at superamped speed, colours washed out to grey, no more substantial than the smoke from pipes at the tables or the distorted reflections in the mirrorwood under our drinks. There was noise, but it blurred and murmured at the lower edge of hearing, like the hum of high capacity machine systems on standby behind the walls.
“Ever since you came into my life, Micky Serendipity,” Sylvie Oshima said evenly, “it seems to have fallen apart.”
“It didn’t start here, Sylvie.”
She looked sideways at me. “Oh, I know. I said seems. But a pattern is a pattern, perceived or actual. My friends are all dead, Really Dead, and now I find it was you that killed them.”
“Not this me.”
“No, so I understand.” She lifted the whisky to her lips. “Somehow that doesn’t make me feel better.”
She knocked back the drink. Shivered as it went down.
Change the subject.
“So what she hears up there filters down here?”
“To an extent.” The glass went down on the bar again. Systems magic refilled it, slowly, like something soaking through the fabric of the construct.
First the reflected image, from top to bottom and then the actual glass from base to brim. Sylvie watched it sombrely. “But I’m still finding out how much we’re tangled through the sensory systems.”
“How long have you been carrying her, Sylvie?”
“I don’t know. The last year? Iyamon Canyon, maybe? That’s the first time I whited out. First time I woke up not knowing where I was, got this feeling like my whole existence was a room and someone’d been in, moving the furniture around without asking.”
“Is she real?”
A harsh laugh. “You’re asking me that? In here?”
“Alright, do you know where she came from? How you picked her up?”
“She escaped.” Oshima turned to look at me again. Shrugged. “That’s what she kept saying, escaped. Of course, I knew that anyway. She got out of one of the holding cells just like you did.”
Involuntarily, I glanced over my shoulder, looking for the corridor from the bedroom. No sign of it across the smoky crowding of the bar, no sign it had ever existed.
“That was a holding cell?”
“Yes. Woven complexity response, the command software builds them automatically around anything that gets into the capacity vault using language.”
“It wasn’t very hard to get out of.”
“Well, what language were you using?”
“Uh—Amanglic.”
“Yeah—in machine terms that’s not very complex. In fact, it’s infantile in its simplicity. You got the jail your levels of complexity merited.”
“But did you really expect me to stay put?”
“Not me, Micky. The software. This stuff is autonomic‘
“Alright, did the autonomic software expect me to stay put?”
“If you were a nine-year-old girl with a teenage brother,” she said, rather bitterly, “You would have stayed put, believe me. The systems aren’t designed to understand human behaviour, they just recognise and evaluate language. Everything else is machine logic. They draw on my subconscious for some of the fabric, the tone of things, they alert me directly if there’s an excessively violent breakout, but none of it has any real human context. DeCom doesn’t handle humans.”
“So if this Nadia, or whoever she is. If she came in speaking, say, old time Japanese, the system would have put her in a box like mine?”
“Yes. Japanese is quite a bit more complex than Amanglic, but in machine terms the difference is close to irrelevant.”
“And she’d have got out easily, like me. Without alerting you, if she was subtle about it.”
“More subtle than you, yes. Out of the containment system anyway. Finding her way through the sensory interfaces and the baffles into my head would have been a lot harder. But given time, and if she was determined enough…”
“Oh, she’s determined enough. You know who she says she is, don’t you?”
A brief nod. “She told me. When we were both hiding down here from the Harlan interrogators. But I think I knew already. I was starting to dream about her.”
“Do you think she is Nadia Makita? Really?”
Sylvie picked up her drink and sipped it. “It’s hard to see how she could be.”
“But you’re still going to let her run things on deck for the foreseeable future? Without knowing who or what she is?”
Another shrug. “I tend to judge on performance. She seems to be managing.”
“For fuck’s sake, Sylvie, she could be a virus for all you know.”
“Yeah, well from what I read in school, so was the original Quellcrist Falconer. Isn’t that what they called Quellism back in the Unsettlement? A viral poison in the body of society?”
“I’m not talking political metaphors here, Sylvie.”
“Nor am I.” She tipped back her glass, emptied it again and set it down.
“Look, Micky, I’m not an activist and I’m not a soldier. I’m strictly a datarat. Mimints and code, that’s me. Put me in New Hok with a crew and there’s no one to touch me. But that’s not where we are right now, and you and I both know I’m not going back to Drava any time soon. So given the current climate, I think I’m going to bow out to this Nadia. Because whoever or whatever she really is, she stands a far better chance of navigating the waters than I do.”
She sat staring into her glass as it filled. I shook my head.
“This isn’t you, Sylvie.”
“Yes it is.” Suddenly her tone was savage. “My friends are fucking dead or worse, Micky. I’ve got a whole planet of cops plus the Millsport yakuza looking to make me the same way. So don’t tell me this isn’t me. You don’t know what happens to me under those circumstances because you haven’t fucking seen it before, alright. Even I don’t fucking know what happens to me under those circumstances.”
“Yeah, and instead of finding out, you’re going to stay in here like some fucking Renouncer dream of a good little girl your parents once had. Going to sit in here playing with your plug-in world, and hope someone on the outside takes care of business for you.”
She said nothing, just raised the newly-filled glass in my direction. I felt a sudden, constricting wave of shame pulse through me.
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be. Would you like to live through what they did to Orr and the others? Because I’ve got it all on tap down here.”
“Sylvie, you can’t—”
“They died hard, Micky. Peeled back, all of them. At the end, Kiyoka was screaming like a baby for me to come and get her. You want to plug into that, carry that around with you for a while like I have to?”
I shivered, and it seemed to transmit itself to the whole construct. A small, cold thrum hung in the air around us.
“No.”
We sat for a long time in silence after that. Tokyo Crow’s clientele came and went around us, wraithlike.
After a while, she gestured vaguely upwards.
“You know, the aspirants believe this is the only true existence. That everything outside is an illusion, a shadow play created by the ancestor gods to cradle us until we can build our own tailored reality and Upload into it. That’s comforting, isn’t it.”
“If you let it be.”
“You called her a virus,” she said pensively. “As a virus, she was very successful in here. She infiltrated my systems as if she was designed for it. Maybe she’ll be as successful out there in the shadow play.”
I closed my eyes. Pressed a hand to my face.
“Something wrong, Micky?”
“Please tell me you’re being metaphorical now. I don’t think I can cope with another hardwire
d believer at the moment.”
“Hey, you don’t like the conversation, you can fuck off out of here, can’t you.”
The sudden edge on her voice kicked me back to New Hok and the seemingly endless deCom bickering. An unlooked-for smile tugged at my mouth with the memory. I opened my eyes and looked at her again. Placed both hands flat on the bar, sighed and let the smile come up.
“I came to get you out, Sylvie.”
“I know.” She put her hand over one of mine. “But I’m fine here.”
“I told Las I’d look after you.”
“So look after her. That keeps me safe too.”
I hesitated, trying to frame it right. “I think she might be some kind of weapon, Sylvie.”
“So? Aren’t we all?”
I looked around at the bar and its grey speed ghosts. The low murmur of amalgamated sound. “Is this really all you want?”
“Right now, Micky, it’s all I can cope with.”
My drink stood untouched on the bar in front of me. I stood up. Picked it up.
“Then I’d better be getting back.”
“Sure. I’ll see you out.”
The whisky went down burning, cheap and rough, not what I’d been expecting.
She walked with me out onto the wharf. Here the dawn was already up, cold and pale grey, and there were no people, speeded pastiche or otherwise, anywhere in the unforgiving light. The sweeper station stood closed and deserted, the mooring points and the ocean beyond were both empty of traffic. There was a naked, stripped look to everything and the Andrassy Sea came in and slapped at the pilings with sullen force. Looking north, you could sense Drava crouched below the horizon in similar, abandoned quiet.
We stood under the crane where we’d first met, and it hit me then with palpable force that this was the last time I’d see her.
“One question?”
She was staring out to sea. “Sure.”
“Your preferred active agent up there says she recognised someone in the holding constructs. Grigori Ishii. That chime with you at all?”
A slight frown. “It sounds familiar, yes. I couldn’t tell you from where though. But I can’t see how a personality would have got down here.”
“Well, quite.”
“Did she say it was this Grigori?”
“No. She said there was something down here that sounded like him. But when you flaked taking down the scorpion gun, afterwards when you were coming out of it in Drava you said it knew you, something knew you. Like an old friend.”
Sylvie shrugged. Most of her was still watching the northern horizon.
“Then it could be something the mimints have evolved. A virus to trigger recognition routines in a human brain, makes you think you’re seeing or hearing something you already know. Each individual it hits would assign an appropriate fragment to fit.”
“That doesn’t sound very likely. It’s not like the mimints have had much human interaction to work off recently. Mecsek’s only been in place what, three years?”
“Four.” A faint smile. “Micky, the mimints were designed to kill humans. That’s what they were for originally, three hundred years ago. There’s no telling if some piece of viral weaponry built along those lines has survived this long, maybe even sharpened itself a bit.”
“Have you ever come across anything like that?”
“No. But that doesn’t mean it’s not out there.”
“Or in here.”
“Or in here,” she agreed shortly. She wanted me gone.
“Or it could just be another personality-casing bomb.”
“It could be.”
“Yeah.” I looked around one more time. “Well. How do I get out of here?”
“The crane.” For a moment she came back to me. Her eyes switched in from the north and met mine. She nodded upward to where a steel ladder disappeared into the laced girderwork of the machine. “You just keep climbing up.”
Great.
“You take care of yourself, Sylvie.”
“I will.”
She kissed me briefly on the mouth. I nodded, clapped her on the shoulder and backed away a couple of steps. Then I turned for the ladder, laid hands on the cold metal of the rungs and started climbing.
It seemed solid enough. It beat ripwing infested seacliff and the underside of Martian architecture, anyway.
I was a couple of dozen metres into the girders when her voice floated up to join me.
“Hey, Micky.”
I peered downward. She was standing inside the crane’s base, staring up at me. Her hands were cupped around her mouth. I unfastened one hand carefully and waved.
“Yeah?”
“Just remembered. Grigori Ishii. We learned about him in school.”
“Learned what about him in school?”
She spread her arms.
“No idea, sorry. Who remembers shit like that?”
“Right.”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
Good question. Envoy caution seemed like the obvious answer. But stubborn mistrust came in a close second. A refusal. I wasn’t buying the glorious return of Quell at the cut rates Koi and the Bugs seemed prepared to accept.
“Maybe I will.”
“Well.” An arm lifted in farewell. “Scan up, Micky. Keep climbing, don’t look down.”
“Yeah,” I yelled it down. “You too, Sylvie.”
I climbed. The sweeper station shrank to the proportions of a child’s toy. The sea took on the texture of hammered grey metal welded to a tilting horizon. Sylvie was a dot facing north, then too small to make out at all. Maybe she wasn’t there any more. The girders around me lost any resemblance to the crane they had once been. The cold dawn light darkened to a flickery silver that danced in patterns on the metal that seemed maddeningly familiar. I didn’t seem to be tiring at all.
I stopped looking down.
FORTY
“So?” she asked finally.
I stared out of the window at Vchira Beach and the glitter of sunlight on the waves beyond. Both beach and water were beginning to fill up with tiny human figures intent on enjoying the weather. The offices of Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep were eminently environment-proofed, but you could almost feel the building heat, almost hear the rising chatter and squall of tourism that accompanied it. I hadn’t spoken to anyone since I came out of the construct.
“So you were right.” I spared a sideways glance for the woman wearing Sylvie Oshima’s body, then went back to looking at the sea. The hangover was back in place, worse it seemed. “She’s not coming out. She’s fallen back on childhood Renouncer crabshit to cope with the grief, and she’s staying in there.”
“Thank you.”
“Yeah.” I left the window alone, turned back to Tres and Vidaura. “We’re finished here.”
Nobody talked on the way back to the skimmer. We shouldered our way through brightly-garbed crowds, working against the flow in silence. A lot of the time, our faces opened passage for us—you could see it in the expressions of people stepping hurriedly aside. But in the sunny warmth and enthusiasm to get to the water, not everyone was running even a surface level of attention. Sierra Tres scowled as her leg took clouts from garishly-coloured plastic beach implements, badly carried, but either drugs or focus kept her mouth clamped shut over any pain she suffered. No one wanted to create a memorable scene. Only once she turned to look at a particularly clumsy offender, and he practically ran away.
Hey guys. The thought ran sourly through me. Don’t you recognise your political heroes when you see them? We’re coming to liberate you all.
At Sunshine Fun Jetties, the pilot was lying on the sloping flank of the skimmer, soaking up the sun like everybody else. He sat up blinking as we came aboard.
“That was quick. You want to get back already?”
Sierra Tres glanced ostentatiously around at the bright plastic everywhere in view.
“You see any reason to hang about?”
“Hey, it’s not so bad. I get
down here with the kids sometimes, they have a great time, ‘s a good mix of people, not so fucking snooty like they are at the south end. Oh yeah, you, man. Rad’s pal.”
I looked up, surprised. “Yeah.”
“Someone asking after you.”
I paused on my way across the skimmer’s flank. Cool drenching of Envoy preparedness, inked with a tiny, joyous splinter of anticipation.
The hangover receded to the back of my awareness.
“What did they want?”
“Didn’t say. Didn’t even have your name. Described you pretty solidly, though. It was a priest, one of those northern weirdos. You know, beard and shit.”
I nodded, anticipation fanning into warm, shivery little flames.
“So what’d you tell him?”
“Told him to fuck off. My woman’s from Saffron, she’s told me some of the shit they’re getting into up there. I’d string those fuckers to a weed rack with livewire, soon as look at them.”
“This guy young or old?”
“Oh, young. Carried himself too, know what I mean?”
Virginia Vidaura’s words drifted back through my mind. Sanctified solo assassins against targeted infidels.
Well, not like you weren’t looking for this.
Vidaura came up to me and put a hand on my arm.
“Tak—”
“You go back with the others now,” I said quietly. “I’ll take care of this.”
“Tak, we need you to—”
I smiled at her. “Nice try. But you guys don’t need me for anything any more. And I just discharged my last remaining obligation back there in virtual. I’ve got nothing better to do any more.”
She looked steadily back at me.
“It’ll be okay,” I told her. “Rip out his throat and be right back.”
She shook her head.
“Is this really all you want?”
The words chimed, real-time echo of my own question to Sylvie in the depths of the virtuality. I made an impatient gesture.
“What else is there? Fight for the glorious Quellist cause? Yeah right. Fight for the stability and prosperity of the Protectorate? I’ve done both, Virginia, you’ve done both, and you know the truth as well as I do. It’s all so much shit on a prick. Innocent bystanders blown apart, blood and screaming and all for some final greasy political compromise. Other people’s causes, Virginia, I’m fucking sick of it.”
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