Cypulchre

by Joseph Travers MacKinnon

  Oni lifts a grate, and guides Paul into the earth. Without question, he shimmies down a ladder slick with mud. Oni seals the mouth of the tunnel behind her.

  Together, they slog along a wet, rifled barrel, towards a soft-white light. Paul, mole-blind, follows Oni to the end of the tunnel.

  “Wait!” whispers Oni. She places her hand against Paul’s chest, preventing his progress. “Careful,” she warns, indicating the fall ahead.

  She uses her obstructing hand to feel around the mouth of the tunnel. She finds what she’s looking for: a wire. With a tug, a second ladder falls, nearly guillotining her.

  Up the ladder, there’s a slim path that navigates the cliff-side, which juts out like an inhaler-addict’s teeth. Below them: wires, a couple-hundred hazardous catwalks and cantilever bridges, all reaching to the other side of the gulley, unguarded. The other side appears to be a twin, an industrial neighbourhood similarly shorn and interrupted by the chasm.

  With a grunt, Oni leaps across a divot in the path. An old refrigerator, toppled-over with its door open, marks a waypoint that—judging from Oni’s look of recognition—means they’re close. She mounts it, sits, and swivels to the side.

  Paul similarly leaps across the divot, and joins Oni on the fridge. Across the gulley, encrusted in piecemeal barbwire fences, ruined cars, concrete, and rebar, a metallic carpet of urban decay lines Mount Baldy. Swarms of drones course through the air. Tracer fire illuminates the smoke stacks, pillared along the horizon, penned behind the wall.

  “This is the backdoor to the PIT.” Oni turns her wrist and activates a holographic map of Paul’s destination. “Gotta wait a few minutes until the border patrol’s passed. It’ll be quiet at first, but once you’re street-side…it’s FUBAR. Don’t trust anyone and keep moving.”

  Paul nods, transfixed on the unhappy sight. Rolling blackouts make the vertical slums twinkle like tangled Christmas lights. He squints to focus on the shelves of humanity—encapsulated rot at war with ruin.

  “I’m sorry about Emily and Constance. Any chance that they’re still—”

  “No. They’re dead. Two more links in a very long chain,” Oni says casually. She shakes her head, and tosses a glance Paul’s way. “Sorry, that must have sounded callous.”

  “You’re just being honest.”

  “Suppose I’m just tired of lying all the time…Massaging atrophied legs, telling over-stimmed dead men it’s going to be okay…I’m so sick and tired of it, Paul.”

  “I get that.”

  “Then you also get that we have to destroy it,” she declares sternly in Japanese.

  Paul gulps.

  “The CLOUD, I mean.”

  Biting his lip, Paul turns to Oni. “Yeah.” He exhales heavily through his nose, announcing his aggravation. “I know. But I’ve got to get the evaps out first. All of them. Only then do we go after the Anomaly, and with the Anomaly, down goes the CLOUD. My goal compliments yours...”

  “What do you think it wants?”

  “The Anomaly?” Paul watches Mount Baldy flicker. “It’s infinitely more knowledgeable than you and me. Who knows what something with all that data at its command might want or need? What we do know is that it is growing, most likely in order to survive. Given its current rate of expansion and assimilation, I’m doubtful it still has a targetable centre, if it had one to begin with.”

  “If you can’t kill the dreamer, kill the dream.”

  “Precisely. Katajima showed me some holos of Outland’s data flows. It’s imperative that I…that we destroy it as soon as possible before it makes the leap from CLOUD tech to the Net and into our lives.” Paul remembers Pythia’s comm. “Damn.”

  “What?”

  “Before the raid…The Anomaly’s gone after my family. She called it a ‘he’. He’s taking them on a tour of the CLOUD.”

  “Who called it a ‘he’?”

  “Pythia, my youngest daughter.”

  “The Anomaly is assimilating minds left, right, and centre, but stops to play virtual flaneur with your kids?”

  “I don’t know…”

  Oni’s eyes stray across the sand-swept ruin. “Paul,” she says excitedly. “There is a way to eject all of the evaps en masse.”

  “You were saying before…”

  “Yup. Winchester.”

  “Shouta had also mentioned it.”

  “It’s in the Citadel.” Oni flicks her wrist, and intuits a bookmarked query. Hemigraphic blueprints depicting a stilted device projects above Oni’s bracelet. “Right in his office.”

  “The Baal Deck.”

  “That’s the one,” she rejoins, excitedly.

  “Assuming I get Katajima’s executive deck and the fragmentor back, we’ll have ammunition without a gun.”

  “Sucks that your version is encrypted too.”

  Paul shrugs his shoulders. “When I duplicated the program, I also duplicated the encrypted activator. Everything else is good to go.”

  “Then what’s the fragmentor for?”

  “It fragments it so I can deliver it, but I need a way to remotely decrypt it on the other end to deploy it. Before he died, Katajima told me he had a team working on breaking the encryption. Didn’t make any inroads. Was going to have me take a crack.”

  Oni smiles thoughtfully. “Please tell me you didn’t overlook our greatest asset—Outland’s best cipher of all?”

  Palms up as if to give a prayerful offering, Paul replies: “I don’t follow.”

  “The CLOUD. It can take a madman’s jumble of loose connections and make sense of it. If you were to take the fragmented code into the CLOUD with you—whether stored on your exo-cortex or chipped-into your PILOT—you could Trojan horse it. The CLOUD will decrypt anything and everything it considers relevant to your synch.”

  Katajima wouldn’t have considered letting the CLOUD open the self-addressed weapon of mass destruction. Not as a first course of action, anyway.

  “How do I get the Empty Thought onto my memex, assuming both that it’s me who goes in and that I can get a memex?”

  “Someone will have to transfer it to you on-site. All of the memices are locked up in cypulchres around the state.”

  An ulcer sends acid crawling up Paul’s throat. “I suppose it’s less coincidence and more providence that Winchester’s storm machine and a host of available memices should be stowed-away in the same place.”

  “The Citadel is the best-protected building in the state. I know it’s been a while since you were last there; it’s no longer a glorified corporate skyscraper. Ever since the RIM ticks attacked it on the first anniversary of the Purge, and…” she smiles, “my fire incident, it’s become a fortress. No one’s getting out of there alive.”

  “Not without this, anyway,” Paul says, holding up Katajima’s PILOT insert. “An all-access pass to Outland’s Holy of Holies.”

  Oni furrows her brow. “That’s barely enough to get in. And even if you managed to get in—and that’s a big if—they’d figure out pretty quickly that dead men don’t meddle with top-secret devices. There’d be no way of uploading the program to your memex and getting to the storm machine in time.”

  “Which is why I won’t go in alone.”

  Oni rolls her shoulders, disapprovingly, “It’s suicide.”

  Paul shoots Oni a look of worry.

  “Don’t worry, Paul. I’m onboard, one-hundred percent. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  “Well, like it or not, it’s what needs to be done.”

  “And you don’t have what you need to get it done, unless you’re willing to open your mind for some CLOUD gear.” With an exaggerated sweep of the arm, Oni taps the back of her head.

  “I don’t imagine you have yours in-tact?”

  “My implant?”

  Paul nods despondently.

  “Outland mercs crop-dusted a rally I was at with mycotoxins. Synchronization would kill me.”

  Paul’s eyes widen. “Nuts to that,” he vents. “I can’t.”
>
  “You can’t or you don’t want to?”

  Silence.

  “Then you absolutely need to get that deck back. Katajima’s executive, remote-access is your only alternative for successfully delivering the package. With the deck, you can go it alone—steal into Winchester’s, rain everyone out, and then upload the fragmented Empty Thought. Hell, with Katajima’s deck I can upload the Empty Thought from here while you’re off and about.”

  Paul turns to face the gulley and the human wreckage built into the mountain. “And then there’s the matter of getting in…”

  “We’ll figure that out when we come to it.”

  A heavily armoured Border Patrol gunship blurs by. All of the bridges and wires wag and whine in its wake.

  “That’s it, then.”

  Oni turns off the hemigram blueprint with a bandaged finger and re-projects the PIT-map holographic. Two pale dots strobe amidst the yellow and green lattices.

  “So where do I begin to look?”

  “I told you the girls were dead.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s only half of it.” Oni turns the holographic of the PIT and thumbs their current location. “We can track any PILOT device we’ve logged-in at the camp.” The hologram presents a vivisection of the PIT. Oni zooms into a three dimensional map of a densely-populated junction at the base of the mountain. At the center of the depiction, two dots pulsate.”

  “Is that Emily and Constance?”

  “Past-tense. They’re not moving. I didn’t want to tell Gibson. It’d send him over the edge. I knew it would be less a rescue, and more a salvage run...Take this to track them down.”

  Oni unclasps her wristband, and the hologram disappears. She hands it to Paul, who adjusts it to fit around his scarred forearm.

  “Hopefully…” Oni’s mirthless stare cuts through Paul, “If you find their remains, you’ll find Dr. Katajima’s deck. If they’ve survived the crash, they’ll hawk it as their first order of business. Fingers-crossed they didn’t survive. In the meantime, Gibson and I will figure out a way into the Citadel and tweak Dr. Katajima’s insert to at least get you through the gate. Can’t race if you don’t pass go.”

  The Partition appears particularly ominous. Paul spots devils dancing on the distant shore. He fiddles around in his pocket, and procures a few SIK tabs to quell his satanic fantasy. “Come back the way I came?”

  “If you can. Otherwise, head for the rooftops. I’ll track your signal.” Oni angrily points at the mountain lying beyond the Partition. “Kill anyone or everything that gets in your way. Those monsters are beyond mercy.”

  Paul flicks his wrist, bringing up the map. He swipes it closed, and jostles his revolver out of its groove. “We all are.”

  “Let’s say you make it out…”

  “Yes, let’s,” Paul says, cracking a grin.

  “Then we’ll figure out the rest.”

  Paul’s laughter breaks the tension. “A kinder, gentler destruction.”

  Oni fails to fight a smirk, which transforms her scowl. “Right…”

  Chapter 23: THE WALLED CITY

  PAUL’S NEVER BEEN to the PIT. The metaphors he heard thrown around and used to describe it weren’t lost on him, though. In his twenties he’d been stationed in Detroit. There he got his first taste of despair and chaos. That was bad. Really bad. But it wasn’t really big and bad.

  The PIT had grown outside its original constraints, largely as a result of the ’27 Migration. No one wanted to be near the Mexican border until the War of the Americas died down or until all of the factions had massacred each other or run out of drug money, so most people got out of southern California. Only the immobile and the mad stuck around.

  By spring, refugees doubled the population of both Los Angeles and Anaheim. By fall—around the time that the military evacuated San Diego in order to turn it into a pivot-point for NORTHCOM—the region’s population quadrupled.

  The eastern-LA refugee camps couldn’t hold all of the migrants, but economics, politics, and paranoia prevented them from expanding, forcing them to adapt. Since reactive, proto-partitions were already in place, the refugees and their hosts were forced to build their walled-city both skyward and away from anchored, moneyed folk, into the mountains.

  There’s no shortage of nick-names for the resultant territory, but only one really stuck: the PIT. Supposedly ‘Hell’ was taken.

  Of course Paul has seen pictures and holograms, and heard tall-tales spun by colleagues who’d gone in for a scare—a popular remedy for those privileged Blue Zone blues. Whether they’d ever own up to it or not, anyone who came back had taken every imaginable precaution and would only have travelled with the most reputable thano-tourist outfit.

  One of Rachel’s old friends from the Academy, Braedan Becket, had gone in on “safari.” This hunter retained a small army for a hefty sum to make sure he wouldn’t be chased while slum-running. His guards, in turn, greased palms PIT-side using a fraction of their charge. This kept PIT rats off their backs and guaranteed Becket’s safe passage. Whereas Becket had a small army, Paul’s got a revolver and a schizophrenic’s temper.

  “Oh, I could never!” Rachel protested, laughing flirtatiously.

  “It’s darker than even the best de-sensitization tank,” Becket had bragged, “So much so that those who can scrape the change together buy themselves night-vision goggles or implants. They wear them 24-7 over there. I can’t even imagine: no natural light at the lower levels! Really caught me off guard the first time.”

  “It really is another world.”

  “The goggles, I mean. There I am, crossing one of the make-shift wood bridges connecting the slum-scrapers, and all of a sudden there’s ten, maybe fifty homunculi with huge bulging eyes closing-in on me.”

  “Oh my god! What did you do?” Rachel’d cried out with real concern in her voice.

  “Well, I didn’t have a weapon, as per my security detail’s terms, so I activated my energy bubble and waited for backup. My guards dispatched with them, naturally.”

  Becket had gone again for his fiftieth birthday and never returned. Paul smiles to himself, thinking maybe he’ll find Becket, the dapper world traveller, vacuum-sealed into a hazmat suit with green, bulging eyes. “I’d have to dispatch with him, naturally,” Paul says to himself, grinning like an idiot.

  Paul leaps from the last of the precariously-strung catwalks swaying above the chasm onto the flatbed of a burnt-out two-tonne truck balanced on the far-cliff’s edge. He winds himself on landing. The truck squeals, Paul having dislodged one of the tires. It bucks back. Panting, Paul scrambles to his feet, and monkeys over the truck’s cab, which no sooner is under him, then over the side. With dirt climbing under his fingernails, he holds on for dear life, waiting for the crash below. If Oni’s watching, she’s going to lose hope for the mission before it even begins.

  Emily and Constance’s champion grapples with an exposed root belonging to a tree long-gone, and pulls himself to safer footing. He turns to wave triumphantly at Oni, but she is already gone, off to figure how to break into the country’s most inaccessible fortress. He can’t see Camp Mud from the wind-swept ledge he’s toeing, just the Blue Zone’s bright and marvelous skyline and the Hyperloop sky-transit system running red, parallel to the chasm.

  Paul gives up on waiting for Oni’s validation and presses into one of the cliff-side factories, torn asunder—spilling its contents into the rift—and through to the other side. Old strung-up traffic lights creak, while the rest of the façade picks a dissonant metallic chord.

  Behind the cliff-side ruins, there’s an impassable wall, preventing Paul from walking straight down Main Street, USA. ‘Wall’ might be a misnomer. It is part of the north-south barricade that eventually becomes the Partition proper, built with a dual purpose: to hide the interconnected, eighty-storey sin-shacks on the other side from civilized eyes, and to make mobility between the two worlds next to impossible.

  Paul was just a kid when it first
went up. Back then it was a reflective, chrome-colour. Keeping LA, the States’ southern-most gem in the imperial diadem, pure and safe.

  Paul mulls about, looking for another illusory strong point that he could disappear. He nearly stomps a rat as he carelessly ambles along the wall’s skirting irons. The pathetic, hairless pest—grotesquely disfigured by bald tumours—turns and hisses at Paul’s tanker boot, and then scurries away. Back at the retreat, Paul would have simply shot such a pitiful rodent, but he’s instantly glad he didn’t.

  The rat takes a sharp turn along a drainage pipe. It scampers up the pipe into what Paul initially mistakes for another concrete aberration jutting out of the wall. Paul pursues the quantum-leaping rat to the juncture between the wall and the pipe. It hadn’t vibrated at the atomic level, but had rather made use of a man-grate mounted just above the pipe. Thankfully, the bars sealing the sewer channel have already been laser-cut. There’s fabric and spittle in the metal fingers, curled away from the laser incisions. The fastest way is through.

  The smell of excrement overpowers Paul. He takes a deep breath, and then clamors in. If shit’s what comes out, what do you call what goes in?

  Nearing the end of the sewer tunnel, he looks back to savour the last glimmers of natural light. It only gets worse from here. He pops his head out of the tunnel mouth, and, although more or less blind, senses for threats. Satisfied no one is laying in ambush, he gasps for air, the quality of which has certainly not improved. He hops out, and slips. Slime makes its way into his boots. It soaks his socks. It finds his wounds.

  “Damn!” His swear echoes, stirring bats and rats and other grotty creatures.

  Paul intuits-on his Monocle and prompts it to provide visual assistance. Prefaced by a faint hum, the Monocle pings the room, determining depth and dimension, and then factors artificial colour into the heads-up display for Paul’s benefit. The night vision doesn’t reveal much, but then again, there’s not much to see.

  He’s ass-backwards at the end of a canal in a slurry of body parts, nameless fragments, inhaler canisters, android features, and human waste. The canal, stretching-on for miles, is lined with gargantuan pillars that reach up to support the PIT’s lower levels. Looks like an evil, industrial version of an old-Provençal country road, but instead of trees for shade, the canal boasts an entire city.