by Jeff Somers
And he was old. His body was barrel shaped and stretched the cheap fabric of his suit uncomfortably, and his round head had wispy, thin white hair on top of a pink, burned scalp and thick, dirty white whiskers all over the bottom two-thirds of his face. His eyes, round and empty like every other Psionic I’d ever seen, were bright green in a cloudy yellow milk. They were old eyes, and I didn’t like looking into them.
“Should’ve stayed down, Mr. Cates,” he chided me, chewing his mustache. “That was stupid.”
I could hear the gasping breath and moans of the cops around us, floated up by the fierce, damp wind that swirled everywhere. “I’ve never been very bright,” I gasped, the invisible fist tight around me. “Maybe that’s why I keep killing all the fucking Spooks I meet. I keep thinking if I eat their brains, I’ll get smart.”
Someone laughed, one of the cops, a dry, pinched sound.
The Pusher moved his mouth, his bushy mustache like steel wool rippling on his face, a faded caterpillar. “It’s men like you, Mr. Cates, with their technology that they use without knowing anything, monkeys with buttons, that have led the world to its present state. Not only are you not going to be allowed to free Londholm’s invention and distribute it to the rest of the monkeys out there, Mr. Cates, but it’s high time you were put on trial for what you’ve personally done. Done with guns, with hovers, with circuits and chips and logic gates. With technology.”
Forcing myself to breathe shallowly, I kept still, my face blank. Something moved in the shadows of the overpass behind him, and instinctively I kept my eyes off it.
“The whole world ruined by technology,” he said suddenly, as if in response to something. “Parasites like you—you, who would be sweeping up refuse in the streets, who would have died young if not for the prop of machinery. Misguided servants like the SPS think preserving technology is our future—technology is destroying us. They will be dealt with.” He shifted his weight a little on the poor cop, whose arms and legs were trembling, his whole suit of clothes stained with sweat. “God has appointed us, Mr. Cates, to cleanse this world. We are representatives of his organic power. We do not need machines or electricity or silicone minds. We do not need batteries or wireless uplinks. We were created by God, and we will tear down all of this.” He raised one hand and waved it about randomly. Then he cocked his head a little, regarding me. “And we will punish men like you who have done so much damage.”
Behind him, the Monk stepped out of the shadows. It was still grinning. I kept my eyes moving past it and then shut them, giving in to the excruciating pain that crept up my back and down my legs, beating in time with my fluttering heart. I didn’t know if Mara and the Poet could maneuver out of the tunnel without being seen, and I didn’t know if either one would chance a rescue attempt. Mara, I was pretty sure, wouldn’t shed any tears if I got snapped in half by this freak.
Black spots appeared in my vision, and I felt like my eyes were popping out of my head.
“Perhaps you will tell your people to reveal themselves before I begin to make you really suffer.”
I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh, or tried to, my body shaking painfully. “My people will probably be halfway back to the mainland by now,” I managed to squeak out. “You want to talk about tech—I got a head crammed full of the shit, and none of it is doing me any good.”
He squinted at me, and suddenly I spun slowly in the air. “I see,” he said as I revolved back around. The Monk had crept a few feet closer, its smiling face a frozen, terrible mask that appeared to be staring directly at me, like the grinning face of fucking death floating toward me. “This is just your damnation writ large. You’re no better than a cyborg. You’re no longer even human.”
My HUD had faded red; breathing was becoming more and more difficult. “At least . . . I still . . . have my looks . . .”
Next to us, the cop being used as a chair by the old man laughed. “Cates, I’ll take up a fucking collection to pay you to kill that hairy motherfucker,” he panted. “He’s been crushing us for fucking hours.”
I concentrated, trying to find my calm, quiet sphere, keeping my eyes open through stubborn will. It felt like I’d been fed into a vacuum, like my inner pressure was bulging out, threatening to splatter me everywhere. I put my eyes on the Monk as it stepped gingerly behind the crazy old bastard. I knew that I shouldn’t look at it, that I should pretend it wasn’t there until it did something useful, but looking away seemed like so much work, so much trouble. I just stared.
“We will not allow you to claim the augment for Mr. Orel’s use. I find you guilty, Mr. Cates,” the old man said as I shut my eyes to rest them as they bulged out of my head. “I sentence you and your kind to death.”
Said the mouse to the cur, Dick Marin’s voice suddenly whispered lightly in my thoughts. Such a trial, dear sir, with no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath. I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury, said cunning old Fury. I’ll try the whole case, and condemn you to death.
Good to hear you, Dick, I thought dreamily, my own thoughts echoing in the sudden dry emptiness of my head. I thought I’d lost you.
I opened my eyes again and slowly focused them as the last bit of leeway disappeared around me, locking my diaphragm under tons of invisible pressure. The Monk took one final step, pausing just a few inches behind the old man. For a second, I looked right at it, and it was as if the fucking thing grinned right at me. Then it lunged forward and wrapped its fake arms around the old man’s chest. He startled, and I was suddenly tossed into the air, the invisible fist dissolving around me.
And then, the Monk exploded.
XXII
WELCOME TO THE LAND OF THE LIVING
I was hurled backward, suddenly free, and for a second there was a bizarre bloom of joy and relief as I could breathe again. This was immediately replaced with a sudden damp surge of terror, and then the usual vague hope that I wouldn’t bite my own tongue off when I hit the ground.
I smacked through a flimsy clapboard wall of one of the shanties built up along the old roads, skidding to a halt on the pitted old asphalt that made up the floors of the place. My HUD blinked off for a second and then flashed back into place, and a dull ache settled into my chest. I’d landed in an awkward sitting position, slumped over myself, and I just sat there for a moment, gasping, feeling like I couldn’t take a deep enough breath.
After a moment, I realized that my coat was smoking.
There was a commotion outside, voices shouting, and I forced myself to get onto my knees and straighten up. I felt like wires had been shorted inside me, synapses flickering, sparking, filling me with the smell of ozone. If I’d gone all the way android, if I’d just let the cosmos make me into a fucking robot, I’d be fine right now. Living a dozen lives, all the data spooling onto a server that was the real me while my body could be dispensed with. I wouldn’t be sitting here cut up into a dozen pieces with a remote control a few dozen yards away ready to make me dance, make me sing, make me dead.
My HUD suddenly cleared and flashed a quick message to the effect that all military systems were in an acceptable state. My status bars remained a sickly yellow. Thankful that the invasive tech that had been shoved down my throat had survived the explosion, I took a shuddering breath, coughed for thirty seconds or so as the veins in my head turned ropy and purple, and then spat a glob of green phlegm onto the ancient pavement. I let myself fall forward onto my hands and knees and pushed myself up, grabbing onto the splintered wood of my own impact hole to pull myself upright. I leaned out into the damp air and scanned the tunnel plaza, reaching into my coat for my cigarettes, crushed but serviceable.
“Avery Cates!” someone shouted. I peered down through my own exhale and found a short, broad-chested man in a grubby, once-splendid silvery suit. Like him, the suit had been through the ringer. His arms had been torn off a gorilla and sewn onto him, and his head was a puckered mass of reddened, burned flesh, healed now into a plastic layer of scales. I studied him as he walked c
loser to my perch, just six or seven feet off the ground, and wondered how he’d survived his burns.
“How in fuck are you still alive?” he said. As he got closer, I realized he was stiff, moving with an odd ambling motion, left arm hanging forgotten at his side, the hand encased in a leather glove.
I sucked in smoke. It was making me nauseous, and I considered what would happen to my reputation if I puked all over him. “You a cop?” I said, spitting tobacco from my lips. “You know me?”
The horrible demon’s face grinned, revealing a shock of perfect white teeth. “No and fucking no, I guess not,” he said. “Welcome to the land of the living. You wanna call out your friends? ”
He reached up and extended a hand to me, offering to help me down. A dozen thoughts flashed through my mind, starting with the vague sense that I might need a hand down and ending with the suspicion that my friends were likely several blocks away. I didn’t mind; I knew more than they did about the current situation; I’d catch up with them if Mara didn’t move out of range and kill me. I nodded at him. “You in charge of this graveyard? ”
He smiled again, nodding. “Welcome to Hong Fucking Kong, population about three thousand these days. What you’ve got here are probably the last fully human cops left in the SSF.” He spread his arms. “We’re starting our own country. Or we’ll die trying.” He looked around. “Gotta thank you for taking out that old bastard. Spooks showed up a couple of days ago and been a wart on my ass ever since. Never seen ’em with that kind of range and strength.” He laughed, turning back and eyeing my cigarette. “If there’s more on his level, the rest of us are fucked, huh? Did you bring that piece of silicone just to do him?”
I thought of Hense telling me the Monk was resources, that she had plans for the old man. I wondered if the smiling Monk had even had a real brain in it, or if it had been fitted with a digital one, programmed to suicide under the right conditions. Fucking cops. If the Spook had been holding me a few feet closer, I’d be the burned cop’s twin.
“No,” I said, coughing. “No, that was just my luck kicking in.”
I took stock of my HUD and decided I wouldn’t collapse if I jumped a few feet to the ground. Settling my cigarette in the corner of my mouth, I swung my legs out and dropped. My knees buckled and I had to stumble forward awkwardly, skinning one hand on the rough pavement, but righted myself and struck a relaxed pose while my heart pounded in my chest, my vision swimming. I looked around, noting the defensive positions—the big mounted guns, the hastily poured concrete blinds, the groups of men and women stretching and inspecting themselves. Then I looked back at the burn victim.
“You guys are gonna get fucking creamed,” I said, pulling out my most recent pack of cigarettes and shaking one out for him. “You know that, right? The army’s got tanks.”
He plucked the cigarette from my hand and looked at it with wide-eyed, crazy joy. Tucking it behind one sorry, melted ear, he grinned again. “Fuck it. We got some tricks. I should have died already—got blown to fucking hell, burned up and crushed. And what did my brother cops do, the grand old SSF?” He winked. “They jammed needles into my brain and downloaded me into a brick and left me for dead.” He shook his head and indicated with an outstretched hand that I should walk with him. “You know there’s a standing order for cops like me—in my situation, surviving our own murders—to report in? Fuck, that’s balls. That’s Tricky Dicky for you—balls. That motherfucker has balls the size of planets.” He sighed, like we were neighborhood pals chatting. “They got a new process, you know? They can make people into avatars without killing them. Good news, right? You know what Dick Marin ordered? He ordered that every fucking person bricked into an avatar be killed anyway. He doesn’t fucking want human beings.” He looked at me as we started walking around the plaza. “You’re here for the Techie. Londholm. You’re here for him and his gadget.”
I had already shaken out a second cigarette and held it out for him. “Do we have a problem?”
He plucked the smoke from the pack and jammed it between his blistered lips. “Naw, you kidding? Kill the motherfucker. Kill him now—please kill that bastard. We got fucking dozens of freelance talent infesting this island. Got whole neighborhoods, nothin’ but Takers and Gunners looking to make their bones on this guy. It’s a fucking distraction.”
I considered this, looking around as we paused for me to hold my cigarette up for him. “How many are you? ”
He shrugged as he leaned into me, puffing at the cigarette until he was rewarded with a thick cloud of smoke. “We’re about a thousand.” He straightened up, taking a deep drag. “Think about it, man: You got the fucking robots, the cops with digital brains. You got the cyborgs, all the soldiers with tech rammed down them like silicone sausages. And then there’s us. Just plain old human beings, and damned few of us left.” He looked up. “We got the skies covered—the SSF set this rock up with Droid rocket launchers, so when the grunts try to put asses in the air, we knock ’em down—unless they somehow build about a thousand more hovers in the next few days, we can handle their air force. So it’s the tunnel. Numbers don’t matter. Y’were in there, man. They’re gonna be choked up and we won’t need more than fifty meat heads on the mounties to hold ’em back.”
I nodded. “The water? ”
He shook his head, grinning again. “Mined, and if they find a lane, there ain’t more then a hundred boats in the whole fucking System—who goes by boat anywhere? They could build, but that’ll take time. Their manufacturing system is all fucked up, too. Nope—it’s the tunnel. We can hold this piece of shit forever, we need to.”
I studied him for a moment. He was like a piece of red rubber shaped into a man. The last fully human cops in the System, maybe, I thought. Eventually, maybe the last fully human folks in the whole goddamn universe, myself and my wired-up brain included. I’d spent a big part of my life hating the cops. All I could remember was cops pushing me this way, threatening me, shaking me down. Arrogant fucks in expensive suits, picking and choosing which laws to enforce. Here I was, now, wishing the last of them luck. At least it had been fellow human beings fucking me over, instead of data bricks with legs.
I fished in my pocket and pulled out my little map of Hong Kong. Placing it in my palm, I held my arm out and twitched my thumb, making the city pop up in a beautiful skein of pink wireframe.
“Any help you wanna give me?” I asked, rolling the cigarette around my lips as I spoke. “You want this shithead dead, I’ve been hired to do it.”
“Dead? ” Pucker said with a cock of his head. “You sure? Half the assholes here been hired to snatch him, or his little toy.”
I shrugged. “I’m here to kill him and make sure that shit gets lost.” I knew I might be lying to him, depending on what Mara was going to do once we got there, but I didn’t have time for niceties. I looked through the pink city at him. “You see it? In action?”
“The God Augment?” he said, shaking his head. “It’s fuckin’ vaporware, for all I know.”
I considered that, the possibility we were all chasing bullshit. It cheered me up. It felt like the System was back to normal.
“He’s here,” he said, suddenly jabbing a gnarled finger into my map, making it shimmer briefly. The map automatically telescoped in scale, bringing up a clear wireframe of the tall, skinny building I’d seen in Brussels. “He’s got a mercenary team protecting him, and they’re professionals. Ex-cops like us, some army deserters, some just hardcases like you picking up a steady credit line. Jap runs the show and he runs a tight ship.”
I nodded. “You take a look at their setup?”
“Yeah,” he said, all business now, absorbed. “It’s tighter than your shit pipe, Cates. No entry at street level anyway, and the building’s had all of its legacy infrastructure sealed off, so no way in through old sewer lines or mechanical access lanes from below. They took the top two floors and locked them down, mounted guns, about three, four dozen strong. Good discipline; they’ve got some p
ortable batteries but you don’t see any lights at night, and they must be provisioned pretty well ’cause I guarantee you nothing in or out.” He shrugged. “Now”—he gestured expertly and the map zoomed out again, showing the hotel as a tiny rectangle lit up orange—“the area right around it is kind of no-man’s land—no one’s claimed it. This because the fuckers in the hotel have a tendency to tear shit up with their big guns anytime they see someone creeping around out there. From here”—he gestured again and the map shifted slightly to show our location; I recognized the curling lines of the old streets threading out of the tunnel—“you’re gonna have to go through some foreign territory. We got enough manpower to hold the key areas—the hover lot, the tunnel, our own buildings—but the city’s divided up right now and to get to Londholm you’re going through some sovereign countries. You’re gonna have to negotiate your way through.”
I nodded. “What about underground? The old transit.”
He looked up at me. “I wouldn’t. Old tunnels are owned by Triad Federations. When this shit went down, they went underground immediately, setting up a whole shadow city under there. They’re protected from air attack and can get anywhere in the city undetected. They’re not friendly and they’re not trustable, you ask me. They’re thin”—he shrugged—“so you might slip past ’em in the dark, but that’s a chance.” He looked back at the map. “On the surface you’ll do better, just because no one’s got enough materiel to cover their claimed territory, so you can slip through a lot of gaps if you’re careful. Your best bet is to go south from here”—he traced a road from our position, lighting it up orange as his finger moved—“through here, which is contested by fucking everyone. There’s a chance you can even slip through there without seeing anyone, because every time someone tries to set up a stronghold there to claim it, someone else comes by to complain with their guns.”
I studied the route. It was a disturbingly straight line from here to there. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” It was too simple.