Up The Tower

by J. P. Lantern

  * * * * *

  Ana’s relationship with her family was complex, at best.

  When she was young, her mother had entered her into beauty contest after beauty contest. Ana's talent had been singing, but really her talent was being pretty (inasmuch as the judges deemed children as pretty). She could not sing worth a damn.

  She won contests in her neighborhood and then her area. Then, she was a finalist three times in the city. This was a big deal, if only because there were so many contestants and so many gauntlets to run through. Ana didn’t think that little girls really cared that much about being pretty—she didn’t think that they cared about anything except what their parents told them to care about, and even that much was iffy. But everyone cared about being famous, and plenty of folks floating into their homes on the screens started with beauty contests. Girls and boys, both. Kadaya Sarin started with beauty contests. What a star. Like an immortal angel.

  So she would spend weekends with her mother, who gussied her up and did her hair and her make-up all day Saturday. Then on Sunday, her mother would ask Ana to do all of it again by herself. Sometimes Ana could and sometimes she could not. If she could not, she would be reprimanded—she was special, appearance was important, and her appearance had to be exceptional.

  At school, her grades were important. If something didn’t come easily to her, then she was doing it wrong. Shame was expected and encouraged. Once, in the fourth grade, she came home with a report card full of excellent marks. Smiling pretty (everything had to be pretty in her home), she handed it to her father, who was sitting at the kitchen table with a few drinks in him already.

  He looked at it, smiled, handed it back, and asked, “Now, how are you going to do this again next year?”

  Of course, she hadn’t thought about it yet, and she told him so.

  “I expect a plan before the night’s over, then. You can’t let up, Ana. You can’t let anyone get the edge but you.”

  Besides beauty contests, there were sports. They cycled her through several for a period of years—softball, basketball, drillball, heatsink, soccer, and cardio-ride, before finally settling on tennis.

  Tennis was chosen mostly, she suspected, because of its ability to show her off. They could put her in skirts and rather-too-tight tops, and men would take note. Playing tennis in college, on a scholarship that paid for a quarter of her tuition, was how she had met Raj.

  When she was fourteen, her father died. He was never a kind man. Calling his wife a useless old hag was a favorite pastime of his.

  She would make him a roast, Ana's mother, and it would be a few degrees off perfect—too little salt, too much.

  "You're just a useless old hag, aren't you?" he would say, smacking his wife on the side of her head.

  It was, you could even say, almost a sort of playful slap. The kind you might see boys delivering to each other on the arms after a good joke—only it was always directed to the same spot, right above her ear. Her mother would slide backward, not responding. Even though her shoulders were withdrawn and her chin summarily attached to her chest, it seemed almost like she held her head up high. She took her shaming with pride. No one else could take it like she did.

  After her father died, there was a vacuum. A hole, and someone could fill it. Ana could fill it. It would be nothing to dismiss the role she had already—pretty little trophy daughter. She was only what her parents had created her to be in the first place. Her existence was already a vacuum. To instead use herself to fill another vacuum was nothing at all.

  After the funeral ended, Ana found her mother in the bedroom. She was sitting over a picture of her husband, of Ana's father, crying. Crying over that man. It filled Ana with disgust.

  "Stop crying," she told her mother, smacking her on the back of her head. "You're just a useless old hag, aren't you?"

  Her mother was shocked for a moment, and then straightened up. Given her sick pride again. Knowing how to act. Roles completed.

  It was nothing to fill in for a man. Nothing at all.

  * * * * *

  Upstairs from where Samson had murdered Storey—and he knew he had murdered her, there was not any other way to think of it—the nanotech slime was still trying to fix the breaking Tower in the wake of the aftershock. Huge parts of the Tower’s structure now were gone, absorbed by the nanotech. The slime burned down the carbon for fuel to make more of itself in its attempts to heal the Tower’s structure. This absorption had left enormous gaps in the walls and floor. The slime, no doubt, would eat up its own repairs soon to fix the holes that it had made. Wind throttled at Samson as he carried Partner up.

  It would have been an impossible task even an hour before, carrying up Partner. But now the robot was so damaged, so many pieces missing, that Samson did it with ease. The stairwell leaned terribly, the building leaned even more, but he stepped up bit by bit.

  The nanotech slime filled out the room in front of the stairwell again, attempting to repair the damage to its repairs. There was only so much it could do. Samson laid Partner down on top of the long white slime.

  Samson wasn’t really sure what the nanotech of the Tower could fix or not, but the theory felt sound in his mind:

  - The nanotech was made to fix mechanical and electrical bits.

  - Partner was made of mechanical and electric bits.

  - Partner could be fixed by the nanotech.

  “You’ll have to tell it what to do, Partner.”

  “Yes.” Its voice was weak now, echoing through the torn remains of its chest cavity. “Repairs. Very smart. Good Dude.”

  The slow, white wave of the nano slime swept over Partner. For a moment, stupidly, Samson was afraid the copbot would drown. And then the slime ebbed away, as if it had been sucked up and eaten. Partner’s shell was reformed, all new parts with a slight blue sheen to them.

  “Ah, Partner-Samson.” It stood up slowly, knees creaking. “That was a good idea.”

  Something dead, or dying, now come back to life. Samson backed away from Partner. Horror overtook him; horror only at himself.

  I knew you, boy.

  He knew that Storey had. He knew even that she had every right to want him dead. His morality wasn’t anything to do with good or evil, just keeping himself alive. Who was left for there to die besides Samson?

  There was Ore.

  Samson had known Storey better than he knew his own sister. How about that.

  You want his sister? Go get her.

  She would have been dead, slaughtered with his parents, if she hadn’t smartened up to what a jinx Samson was. Garrett and the Crowboys died because they worked with Samson. Storey knew Samson; Storey died. There was a whole Tower full of dead folks using tech Samson had grafted onto them.

  And this copbot...it hadn’t been safe since Samson had known it. Not so long ago, Samson had been about to kill it.

  “Where do we go now, Partner-Samson?”

  “Don’t call me that,” he said. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter where I go, all right? None of it matters.”

  He turned to the open space of the outside. There was a support he could use to steady himself. So much there in the city; so much falling apart.

  “Partner Samson—”

  “You’re not my partner. Stop calling me that.”

  “Partner-Good-Dude Samson, we must—”

  “I am not your partner. I am not a Good Dude. I am not your friend. No one is my friend. No one can be my friend, do you understand? Everyone close to me disappears. They die. I've never had any friends. I won’t have any friends. I won’t have any.”

  He sat down and hugged the support. His body slid, the angle of the tower steadily more severe, and he stared down out at the flood below.

  “I won’t have any.”

  Like a message from above. Like the brush of an archeologist, pushing away dust to something old and true.

  “I tried to kill you,” he said, looking back to the copbot. “I was going to do it, and then the earth
quake hit.”

  Something far away exploded. All that Samson could see was the ball of fire erupting. It was still the day, outside, but the sky was dark, all choked on smoke.

  You want his sister?

  Partner stepped forward to the edge, its hand on Samson’s shoulder.

  “Attempts of crime are difficult to record in the database in such cases. Almost and maybes are no way to judge anything.”

  “That sounds very nice.”

  He laughed and spat into the abyss, watched the wind carry his spit down and back around the building's edge. Sirens blared in the distance. Rescue lights flaring. Every few seconds a flare would go up, or gunshots would fire. Millions of people out there, dying and hoping.

  “Samson.” The copbot took him by the waist and lifted him away from the dangerous edge. “I do not know about any of that. I know that where you go, I will go. That is what I know. So. Where do we go now?”

  Go get her.

  Okay.

  “Don’t you copbots all have a way for hacks to wear you?”

  From the big gape-mouth grin Partner gave him, this was a question, it seemed, that the copbot had been waiting for Samson to ask.

  * * * * *

  Ore woke to a hard thunking sound.

  She had thought the quakes were all over—and they were on the top floor. Would there be more quakes? Would she end up as nothing else than the highest person to die in a terrible disaster?

  That would be fine. So long as Wallop died too.

  She stood up, looking around, dusting herself off. The Tower was in disarray around her, sparks flying down from lights, walls tumbled down, floors crashed through, and ceilings broken open. Everything that had been chrome and lined with tech spilled over with concrete and angry lines of piping and tubes. There was smoke and dust—more dust than smoke, all that rubble—and it was hard to see where everything was. She followed the sound of the thunking. It was joined, as she listened, by Ana grunting primal sounds.

  They were in some kind of game room. Broken screens sat at angles to the walls. Bowling pins and balls all piled in one corner.

  What she found surprised her. Next to a demolished bar, alcohol dripping down, Ana stood over the rapidly decomposing body of Victor. Her hair a mess. She slammed his head against a jagged, broken piece of wall. He was clearly dead. Had been for a while. His skin was eating itself up, sort of like a rockslide in reverse. There was a lot of blood but it was turning into dust as Ana worked, filling the air around her with a red tinge. The skull wasn't breaking—metal. Lots of metal—his ribs, his breastbone.

  Ana was worn out. Ore almost put a hand on her, but stopped. Her pretty face all deranged, twisted up like a sheet left too long in the wash.

  “I think you can stop,” Ore said loudly.

  A few more thunks and then some heavy breathing. “What?”

  Ana's voice floated with rage. The question, coated through Ana's veil, seemed like an attack now.

  “I think he's dead, is all. His body is all gone.”

  Parts of the metal leg bones lay on the floor. The skull, or what bit of it was left, connected only to three-fourths of the torso and a few loose circuited ligaments attached to steel vertebrae. Looking down at it, Ana dropped the remains of the skull.

  “I guess you're right.”

  Ana stood up. There was blood on her legs, up and around her thighs and crotch. It was unfortunate placement.

  There was a bar towel on the floor. Ore tossed it to Ana. She looked down at all the blood and then let the towel drop.

  “Victor? Victor, are you there?”

  They both jumped. The voice came from Victor’s skull.

  “Victor, we tried rebooting you again and there's no response. Are you all right? Is the data all right?”

  The data was all right. Ore had it still, completely intact in the bag on her back.

  Some things started to fall into place for Ore. She didn’t know what Victor was. A cyborg seemed wrong. Cyborgs didn’t dissolve. So maybe something else, maybe something expensive. Not so long ago she had heard that Jackson Crash had wanted a clone. But he hadn’t been able to work it—or rather, the scientists he hired weren’t able to make it work. Horror stories floated out from the Tower about a floor filled with half-formed bodies. Bodies that only had so many of the right organs, or had too many, or just couldn’t stay together. Bodies that dissolved.

  “A clone,” said Ore.

  “What?”

  “The way he fell apart. I think he was a clone. I don't think he was ever human.”

  Ana picked up Victor’s skull. The ribcage dangled down and bounced off her arm.

  She spoke into the skull. “Was he a clone?”

  “Who is that?” asked Mike. “Is that the gangster? Or is that the pretty girl?”

  “Never mind who it is. Was he a clone? He’s nothing now. Just bits of a messed-up metal skeleton.”

  The voice sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, he was a clone.”

  “You’re Mike, is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, Mike. Screw Citizenship, okay?”

  “What are you doing?” asked Ore.

  Ana grabbed her. “This whole damn world is trying to kill us, and if it's not trying to kill us, then it wants to rape us into being mothers. I'm supposed to struggle for a vote? For a voice? Screw you. I want my piece of the pie.”

  Ore pushed her away, wiping the spittle of her face. “Go on, then.”

  Let the woman do what she wanted. Ore just wanted her brother.

  “What are you saying?” asked Mike. “Did you lose the data? Did it get lost in the aftershock?”

  “No, the data’s fine. It’s all fine. But we have been through the grinder and back, and I deserve better. If you want to have what I have, then you will give us a share, dammit.”

  There was silence. Ana started stomping at the skeleton. The delicate circuit-rubber meshes of the ligaments broke apart, and she ripped off a metal vertebrae. She walked over to the window, sliding and slanting through glass and rubble.

  “I bet this whole skeleton is valuable, huh? You want it back? Give us a share.”

  She tossed the vertebrae out the window.

  “You see that? Did you see that piece of spine? You have eyes everywhere, I bet.”

  “I saw it.”

  “You want the rest of it gone? You want me to toss the data? Give us a share.”

  “If you don’t give us that data, you don’t have anything to bargain with. You’ll die on that tower.”

  “Hey. Hey!” Ana was screaming now, throttling the skeletal remains. “I have been dying my whole life. Do you know what's been in my way? Do you know who's been standing on me? There's isn't time left in a good day to tell you all the ways that I've been screwed. So this is the bargain. I will string it out from you in every way I can, and I will make you sorry you didn't offer it to me earlier. So you tell me what I want to hear or I will toss out everything you care about.”

  “...All right.”

  Laughing, Ore clapped Ana on the back. It was good news for both of them.

  “All right,” said Mike again. “But you’re only getting a small one. A nanoshare. A percent of a percent of a percent of a percent, all right? One each for both of you.”

  That was more than enough to set them up for the rest of their lives.

  “Good enough,” said Ana. “For now.”

  “What, no 'thank you'?”

  “Thank you, all right. Send that chopper up. We're at the top.”

  “I'm already on it.”

  “You sure got a way,” said Ore.

  Ana wasn't listening. She had started prying at the skeleton’s ribs.

  “You said those gangsters, the Faces, they would be here on the top, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Banging and pulling, Ana tugged one rib off. It was like a long, curved knife in her hands.

  “Well. That chopper isn't here yet. So, I want a weapon.” />
  Ore nodded.

  There wasn't all that much to the floor. It was small. Opposite the elevator were a series of closed-off rooms. One set of bathrooms. Then a few offices. Up ahead was the staircase to the roof. The door was open. Sunlight spilled in.

  Check the offices, she decided. Look for Samson. And then run down the stairs, looking and looking.

  “You're gonna have my share,” she told Ana. “I'm gonna...I have to find my brother.”

  Ana raised an eyebrow. “You'll die down there.”

  “Yeah. So you're gonna have my share. Okay? You hear that, Mike? Give her mine.”

  Mike didn't answer, though.

  Time started to slow down. Sensations struck out at Ore, as if captured from a dream. First, a long breeze looped through the floor, filling her nostrils with the scent—weirdly—of hamburgers and ketchup. Like the many quakes had catapulted a barbecue into the air. Like there was someone cooking out in the clouds.

  Then, one of the office doors door dinged open. Out stepped Max Bones, drugged out of his mind. Eyes wild and dim. He saw Ore; he saw Ana. For a few moments, he put his face in one hand, rubbing intently with his palm. There was a gun in his hand, held lazily—like a sandwich carried around a festival.

  “Go away,” he moaned, banging the top of his gun on the nearby wall. “Go away, come on.”

  He looked up again, still seeing them there. He sighed, raised his gun, put it down again.

  Roaring, Ana rushed him. Victor's rib glinted and shined. She jammed the sharp metal into Max's throat. His gun popped off, harmlessly, the shot bouncing through the walls. Max fell, clutching his throat, blood spurting out silently. He didn't look angry or sad; he didn't even look surprised. He was just existing, and then he fell over and he wasn't anymore.

  Ana pulled the rib from the dead man’s throat and shoved it into his back and then his sides. Ore approached, backed up. She wanted to grab the gun, get into the other offices, but Ana had clearly gone mad. Stabbing, stabbing again. The gun too close to her. If Bones was there, that could mean that the other Faces were close. It could mean...

  Another office door opened.

  “The hell is going on out there, baby? Storey, you find him?”

  Three men walked into the hall, cutting off Ore from Ana, from the gun. One in the middle, so much tech it appeared like a suit, shifting and closing and flapping around his body. Then another man, shorter, skinnier, his face covered over with a mask, holding a stack of data slabs. And then the last one—enormous, huge arms wrapped in tech, all of him built for breaking.