by Russ Linton
“Say that to my face, troll. For the love of the Harrington Martyrs, say that to my fucking face.”
The juggernaut stooped, placing meaty hands on his knees so he could be eye to eye. “Sure you don’t want to go get your little robot first?”
Frozen, M@ti checked the gathering of hackers for anyone with a clearer head. Youthful genetics or not, she wasn’t sure how Deva would survive. Nobody else made a move.
“Say it,” Deva growled. “To. My. Face.”
The troll opened his mouth.
M@ti had to piece together what happened later. The first bright flicker of white, that had been Deva’s shop rag. Her small hand stuffed it past her tiny wrist into the giant’s parting lips. The next brilliant flash, that had come from Deva’s other hand. With the flash came the acrid stench of burning flesh. She’d jammed a small box into the man’s neck and he’d crumpled, twitching. M@ti only barely saw her stuffing the box back into her pocket.
“Anybody else want to have a crisis of fucking faith today?” People backed away. “Good. Somebody roll this manatee on his side so he doesn’t die on the doorstep of a goddamn shrine.”
Several more hackers with tattoos on their forehead emerged and wrestled the collapsed slab of muscle out of the way.
“Coming?” Deva asked, sweetly.
M@ti very cautiously nodded.
Deva pushed through the doors into a dimly lit room. The soaring cathedral where Knuckles had played his drums could fit a dozen of these tiny sanctuaries. Rows of rotted pews and mismatched chairs faced the pulpit. The fraying carpet had worn to bare concrete down the center aisle. Crimson drapes hung on the walls, hues splotched, the fabric moth-eaten.
She’d often tried to imagine what these mysterious hackers who’d created all those amazing tools were like. Finding out they were nothing more than scavengers should’ve been a relief. In a way, these were her kind of people. Secretly, she’d hoped for more.
Being underwhelmed would’ve been an easy decision to make. But this church had one thing the cathedrals on Manhattan didn’t. The faithful.
Pews were packed shoulder to shoulder. A video played on a display mounted on the front wall. Events and images appeared which she’d never seen in the archives of the Nexus. Seditious, pre-partition stuff. Without a word, M@ti edged toward a pew at the back. Deva stopped her and pointed down the aisle.
M@ti crept forward, feeling eyes drift from the movie to her. Deva stayed close, but she was much too small to hide behind. M@ti did her best to keep her attention on the screen.
In the videos, men and women wore outlandish outfits like her figurine and they battled like forces of nature. This was no magic, or sorcery, or Nexus illusion. These were human beings wielding unspeakable power. Lightning, ice, the strength to topple buildings, toss trucks. Ember, the augment with her blazing orange uniform and mohawk flashed on screen and erupted into a column of flame.
M@ti dropped heavily into the empty seat between Deva and Kraken.
“That’s the one I have,” she told Kraken, reaching for her pocket.
He pressed a finger to his lips.
So far, the video played without sound. The scenes were disjointed, spliced together from incomplete sources. One minute, a battle raged in a desert where a man melded into the sand and another fired bolts of energy from his fists, the next, a familiar insect-like robot battling an ancient looking cowboy with jet black hair atop a wind turbine.
Deva squeezed her hand. “The second coming of the Black Beetle,” she whispered with glee. “My favorite part.”
“Second? How many were there?”
“Three, officially. We don’t talk about the third one.” She smiled big, a finger tapping her own chest. “I’m the fourth.”
The fiery woman appeared again on screen and M@ti pulled the figurine from her pocket.
“Where’d you get that?” Deva’s already big eyes threatened to pop out of her skull.
“Times Square. The gift shop,” M@ti said absently.
Excited, Deva reached across and jabbed Kraken to get his attention. The old hacker gave her a disapproving scowl. A quick gesture was enough for her to leave him be, but she kept stealing glances at M@ti’s figurine.
Voices joined the images. M@ti hadn’t noticed but two people stood on either side of the screen, their red robes blended perfectly into the shadows. They took a step toward the audience. One grainy video started to loop. In it, a building burned. Stone archways ran the entire length capped by elegant designs. It reminded M@ti a little of the theaters she’d seen on 42nd Street.
Smoke billowed from boarded doors and windows. Muted and smeared, the video lost all detail as a gout of flame shot through the roof of the theater. A small group of people staggered outside, two of them carrying a man just as big as the troll who’d confronted Deva, only leaner, more sculpted. M@ti instantly recognized the black and crimson costume. This was the first figurine she’d found, the one lost at her former home.
“Sisters. Brothers. Others,” said one of the robed priests, a woman. Dark skin and full lips, her cowl fought with cloudy, black hair. “We’ve come to holy ground to acknowledge the schism in our past as we do every year.”
“A gap,” the man said, as if following a script. “Not bridged by bone or blood nor even the mighty spiral of life shared by us all...” His unnervingly pale eyes settled on M@ti and his scripted tone faltered. “To which most of us in this hallowed room are eternally bound.”
M@ti shifted uncomfortably. Things didn’t get better when the man’s disapproving gaze wandered to the figurine in her lap. While Deva had been shocked, this guy’s face stretched in utter horror.
The robed woman checked her counterpart and filled his awkward silence. “To our east, in the eye of the rising sun, lies the location where all of human history unraveled. Where we pitted ourselves, flesh against flesh, in a war with no victors.”
East. That would be the empty lot. M@ti checked the corner of the frozen image on the screen and thought she could make out the brick profile of the church beside the burning theater. The woman had paused, waiting to hear the man return to his bit of the strange duet, but he kept staring.
M@ti covered up the figurine. The movement only brought him closer. She could feel the entire congregation’s eyes shift to her again and she squirmed in her seat.
“Daemon,” the woman said, her tone soft and pleasant. “Daemon.” This time louder, a patient reprimand. The man continued to creep toward M@ti, one hand extended.
The bent of his gnarled hand and the feverish gleam on his sickly face gave Daemon the gaunt appearance of somebody the world was finished with. M@ti wondered if, like Deva, he simply didn’t show his true age. If so, he might’ve been around before the city fell.
Stooped, leering, the man peered directly into her pupils. “A thrall? In this house?” He bolted upright and turned his sudden intensity on M@ti’s neighbor. “With stolen relics!? Kraken, you’ve gone too far!”
Kraken wasted no time. “Too far?” he bellowed, shooting to his feet. “Daemon, I’ve only just begun.” His thick hand dropped heavily on M@ti’s shoulder and she went rigid. “M@ti’s going to help us prune the tree until Chroma herself begs for mercy!”
Her idea of bringing down the system had been strictly single player. This wasn’t about them. She’d make that clear sooner or later. For now, she needed to control the voice inside her head telling her curl up and hide from all these people.
Deva snatched the figurine from her lap.
Before she realized it, M@ti was on her feet too, trying to get it back. Deva climbed atop the pew and waved the little orange effigy in triumph.
“Format the whole damn thing!” she cried, her angelic features wracked with disturbing zeal.
M@ti’s hand hung in the air just shy of the figurine. All those eyes she’d imagined staring were definitely on her now. A burst of pent up energy coursed through the crowd and the congregation erupted into chaos.
28
What M@ti could only assume were the hacker leadership huddled at the front of the church communicating in guttural growls and clicks.
“Is this some kind of religious ceremony?” M@ti asked. “Are they speaking in tongues?”
“Tongues?” Deva laughed and continued cleaning off the little black box which she’d warmed up on the troll and just used to clear out the sanctuary. She’d called it her ‘stinger’ and given the same manic little laugh when she said it. “You haven’t heard any speech but the interlingua, have you?”
“Inter what?”
“The interlingua,” Deva said, stuffing the box into a pocket. M@ti was glad to see it stowed. “Kya aap samajh rahe hai mai kaya kah raha hoo?”
Deva stared, waiting for comprehension. The words at least sounded like somebody trying to speak, even if it was gibberish. They weren’t, however, anything like the animal sounds coming from the freak coven up front. Perplexed, M@ti shook her head.
“I asked do you understand what I am saying. You would, if you were logged on.”
“How’s that?” M@ti asked.
“I said it in Hindi. For anybody connected, the Collective translates and renders all speech. They feed it back in the listener’s own language, emulate the speaker’s voice profile, and even render the right facial movements.”
M@ti knew people spoke other languages in different Preserves across the world. She’d never heard one with her own ears.
“Sure, the communication barrier. More ways humanity was divided before...” She realized she was launching into a lesson from her AI-taught schooling. Deva watched her with an impish grin. “The Collective used to tell some old story about a tower which ancient gods feared. People had built it high enough to reach heaven and they could only do it because shared communication allowed them to work together. Gods or angels or something then made it so people couldn’t understand each other so nobody could ever do that again. The Collective fixed that.”
“You are fresh from the bubble, aren’t you?” Deva said. The comment seemed hurtful, but M@ti had zero plans to take on the little scrapper. “Weaker AI aced language translation centuries ago, but what you think you say and what people hear from the translation algorithms isn’t exactly the same. That’s really the interlingua, the language the AI created to translate all others is their creation, completely under their control. Do you scrape?”
“Scrape?”
“Scrape. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying’ said another way.” Deva crossed her arms and slunk low enough in her seat to plant the soles of her boots on the pew in front of her. “How do you think your helpful little Collective would’ve translated that?”
“I’m no fan of the Collective. It’s just how the story was told to me,” said M@ti. “Besides, slang isn’t exactly translation.”
“No, you’re right. But if there’s any small margin of error for interpretation, the Collective controls the final outcome, eh? That’s why you’ve only heard their interlingua your entire life.”
They’re shaping reality, M@ti remembered Kraken saying. What people heard, saw. Not only how they perceived the world and how they navigated it, but in frighteningly more subtle ways.
“Is that why everybody calls me a thrall?”
Deva glanced sideways. “Yeah, sorry about that earlier. Thralls are people in the Preserves. They exist only as part of the Collective’s grand experiment.”
M@ti could vouch for that theory. A series of barks and feral grunts rose from the front. The weird cultist, Daemon, the one who’d screamed at M@ti earlier, was on his feet.
M@ti watched apprehensively. “So we don’t know what the Collective are up to, but what the hell are they doing?”
“Babbling.” Deva laughed at her own joke. M@ti could only stare, confused. “Our fearless leaders are wrecking their own parlay, I’d wager. No divine curses required.”
“But they’re speaking the same language, right?”
“Crypto speak. Think of it as encryption. The Collective can translate any language, even those it hasn’t heard, as long as they follow similarish rules.”
“That’s brilliant. It must be fluid then. I mean they couldn’t base it on a logical structure—”
“Or else the Collective could understand.”
“But why speak it here? Who’s here to rat on them?” M@ti stopped as Deva threw her an apologetic glance. “Right. The thrall.”
“Don’t worry, Kraken will bring them around. If he doesn’t, we’ll wreck Collective Central without them. That is what you want to do, right? Kraken says you tried once already.”
Deva looked at her expectantly. Everybody seemed to know her business without so much as asking her. Was she that transparent?
“I guess that’s why I’m here and not on a beach in San Diego.”
“San Diego? That your Nexus jam?”
M@ti shook her head. “Nexus? Naw. Not enough sand in my crotch there for my liking.”
Deva chuckled and elbowed her in the ribs. “You should be just fine here.”
M@ti’s gaze went to the meeting of the minds. “Who is that Daemon guy, the one who freaked out when he saw my figurine?”
“Daemon’s a splicer.”
“Humor my bubble brain with some more data.”
“Splicers think we can reclaim the glory days with more experiments. Trouble is, they’ve been saying it for centuries.”
“If he’s wrong, why was he up front speaking?”
“He’s pretty much the fanatic who oversees the church. Quite a few of us have faith, but we keep it a little more rational, you know? The church has members in all the hacker circles, so Daemon’s something of a wild card. He keeps the histories and that relic of yours is a rare piece of it. Luckily, you didn’t have the box. He might have shit himself on the pulpit.”
M@ti snorted and made sure not to mention that she had, indeed, once had the box. “And that guy there with the semicolon on his head like the meathead you bounced earlier?”
“Prime. He’s a member of the New Statement.” Deva’s lip curled in disgust. “As crazy as Daemon is about the histories, those guys refute it. Your personal helix is the sole answer. As if.” She shifted forward, kicking the pew with an echoing thump. Several of the leaders, including Kraken, turned. M@ti shrank in her seat. Deva didn't show the least bit of concern, but she lowered her voice. “We’ve all got the CM Protocol running through our marrow. It’s how we survived all these years on the outside. Those New Statement skinbags think they don’t need it.”
“Your youth, Kraken’s strength, that’s all from the same source.”
“Nice, bubble girl! CM, the Crimson Mask, he was our fucking Lord and Savior. His genetic line made sure we survived the scary times when people went to war and tore the planet apart.”
“So the Collective wasn’t lying about everything.”
M@ti’s observation didn’t seem to sit well with Deva who pushed closer, her hushed whisper becoming fevered. “They’ve been lying since the day they buried Crimson Mask. The bastards burned him alive, don’t you know?”
“Okay, okay. What about that guy?” M@ti pointed toward the friendliest looking one of the bunch, hoping it would rub off on Deva before the stinger came out.
“That guy?” Deva rolled her eyes. “That’s Lembas, the spineless jerk.”
“But he seems nice.”
“Like how the Collective seems nice, eh? He’s the leader of the freaking Disciples of Enigma. You want to blame anyone for the world as it is, blame him and his AI loving assholes.”
Her plan had obviously backfired so M@ti kept moving through the faces.
“Her. Who’s she?” M@ti pointed at the dark-skinned lady who stood closest to Kraken, the same who’d been at the front of the room giving the speech. “Tell me she’s done something you like.”
“Oh...that’s Clarity. She’s nice.”
M@ti waited. “Is that all?”
“If there’s a reason the sausag
e fest hasn’t whipped out their rulers, she’s it. You won’t find a better meta-analyst. She’s also the only reason Kraken has his plan, though she’s got a different interpretation of the data.”
“What’s that?”
“You’d have to ask her. Way above my pay grade.”
“M@ti?” Kraken left the huddle and beckoned her forward.
She got slowly to her feet and whispered to Deva, “Anything else I should know?”
Deva bit her lip and pointed to the last one in the circle of hackers. “Hawt Pocket. He’s with the LulzPhreakz. He’s a psycho. I mean they’re all fucking nuts, self included. Probably more unchecked humanity in one place than you’re used to. Just be you.”
M@ti walked down the aisle. Psychos. Religious fanatics. Hackers who claimed to see the future. None of this so far had helped her. Coming here, she wanted to see what she could learn or maybe download some new tools, not be thrust into a civil war.
“Do have a seat.” Daemon oozed forward, motioning to the plain steps of the pulpit.
Sitting that low, they’d all tower over her. Probably part of his plan. She looked first at Kraken who remained unreadable, so she sat.
Daemon gave her a twisted smile and bent. “Good. Good. Now, we’ll need the relic.”
“You mean this toy?” She asked, pulling the Ember figurine from her pocket. “Number six plastic manufactured using carcinogenic processes? Hard to recycle, no longer produced, yet in mint condition?”
The sneer Daemon had worn earlier returned and M@ti wondered if he was headed for a full blown system crash.
“What I think M@ti is trying to say is that this is not a relic,” said Kraken. “It’s a recent production.”
“No disrespect to your religion and all,” M@ti added, with far too much sarcasm.
The tattooed forehead guy, Prime, chortled. Yellowed teeth gleamed in a ragged beard. Not quite the person she’d hoped to impress.
“Well, well,” Clarity said. “Could be the singularity is tired of being the only one of her kind.”
“Could also be that she wants to let the world return to chaos,” Kraken added gruffly. “The figurine, as intriguing as it is, isn’t why we’re here. It’s M@ti.”