reMix

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “Really? How interesting,” said LizAlec. “How really fascinating.”

  They waited in cold silence and LizAlec had a good idea what they were waiting for, which didn’t improve her temper one little bit. Though what Brother Michael didn’t appear to have realized was that the slack-tongued little sandrat was going to like his plan even less than she did.

  LizAlec gave the cuffs the lightest tug but, light or not, they tightened all the same, closing around her wrists until flesh bulged either side of their undulating red surface. Another pull like that and she’d have them burrowed down to the bone. There was a simple code key to remove them, there was bound to be. LizAlec’s problem was that she didn’t yet know how she was going to get it out of Brother Michael.

  But she had to get it, just as she had to ditch that bioSemtex worm at the same time. Only LizAlec liked that idea even less.

  Sex was out as a lever. The preacher wasn’t big on commitment. He’d no sooner fuck her than toss her aside, as he’d done with every other disciple. No, what she needed was to get under his skin, get unrestricted access to his mind. Up close and personal was what she had in mind. The only trouble was, getting there meant someone getting hurt and LizAlec just knew it was going to be her. Still, it was time to lose the worm.

  “Hey, shit for brains,” LizAlec spat in Brother Michael’s direction. At first the preacher looked like he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard and then he looked like he believed it only too well.

  “Yeah,” said LizAlec. “I was talking to you.” She waited, watching. Her arms pulled up above her head, her body open, defenceless. Brother Michael wasn’t going to pass up his chance to hurt her, he wasn’t the type.

  “Hey,” LizAlec demanded. “You going to answer me, you dumb fuck?”

  He did. The first slap caught her across the face, twisting her off to the side.

  Sweet Jesus, LizAlec thought hazily, when she was back in a fit state to think anything. But it was too late to stop now.

  “You’re pathetic,” LizAlec told him, through a mouthful of blood. “A pathetic, talentless...”

  That was as far as she got before Brother Michael broke her nose with the palm of his hand and LizAlec almost blew everything by passing out with pain. Except she was Lady Elizabeth-fucking-Fabio, or maybe she wasn’t, LizAlec wasn’t sure, but whoever the fuck she was, she had built-in hyperfocus and it was on.

  Fully functioning. Like her death wish.

  LizAlec inhaled her own blood, as greedily as Fixx had ever sucked up the ice he kept offering her. She inhaled the warm liquid until it flooded her nasal cavity, almost choking as she tried to stop it backing up in her throat. Then she shook her head frantically from side to side and sucked in stale air through her mouth, pulling in dust, low-density sweat molecules, anything that would fill her lungs to bursting. And then, lungs full, she blew out hard, pushing blood and air through her swelling nose in a single snort, red liquid splattering across Brother Michael’s white shirt like buckshot.

  The bioSemtex wriggled like a crippled slow-worm as it tumbled slowly across the interior of the cathedral and ricocheted gently off the floor before bouncing off a far wall. Brother Michael had done that for her, shaken the monstrosity loose and filled its hiding place with blood until the worm could no longer keep its grip.

  The girl wondered if Brother Michael knew that — as of now — she owed him her life... Not that LizAlec was going to point that out. Especially since she was going to kill the man. And she was, much sooner than he realized.

  “Brother Michael,” said a shocked voice. It was Lars, standing in the doorway of the lift, a large nanny goat clutched firmly in his arms. The sandrat was doing his best to look anywhere except at LizAlec. When he finally did, LizAlec grinned at him and Lars went rapidly back to petting his goat, which had been hobbled with polymer wire to stop it struggling.

  “You wanted to see Betty?” Lars held out the goat, then thought better of it and started slowly unwinding the wire. When that was finished, he held the goat out again but Brother Michael made no attempt to take the animal. In fact, he made no effort to go near the goat at all.

  “Open hatch,” Brother Michael said crossly and the glass door to the airlock swung slowly back, opening until it could go no further. “Grid,” Brother Michael demanded and the metal grille folded in on itself like the tendrils of a plant. Not sideways as LizAlec had expected, but from the bottom, folding up to almost nothing. So much for disapproving of nanetics.

  “You,” Brother Michael said to Lars, “Put the goat in the airlock...”

  Lars just looked at him.

  “The airlock,” said Brother Michael tiredly.

  Lars did nothing.

  “Is there a problem?” The tall preacher gave up trying to clean blood off his shirt and stared hard at the boy.

  “That’s an airlock,” Lars said.

  “I know what it is,” said Brother Michael crossly.

  “You want me to put Betty in there?” Lars sounded puzzled, as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard the order correctly.

  “Yes,” said Brother Michael. “I want you to put the goat in the airlock.” He could have been giving instructions to an idiot. From the pained expression on Brother Michael’s face it was obvious that was indeed how he saw it.

  “Betty will die,” said Lars. “Vacuums kill...” He said it as if, maybe, Brother Michael hadn’t realized that. And in her head, LizAlec felt a blaze of eidetic memory. Lars and Ben. Vacuum. Death. The sandrat’s own memories, stolen from him on Darkside that time he had tried to rape her.

  Most people LizAlec could read but Lars was something else. Trying to second guess the sandrat was like looking into a paint-spattered screen: something was undoubtedly going on behind it but no one knew what.

  “He wants to kill Betty,” LizAlec told Lars.

  “Shut up,” Brother Michael ordered, but LizAlec didn’t.

  “He wants to put her in a vacuum... watch her eyes pop out. You wouldn’t want him to do that, would you?”

  “Shut it,” said Brother Michael, wrapping one huge hand over her mouth. But the damage was already done.

  “You can’t kill Betty,” Lars said suddenly. He stepped forward, looking intently at LizAlec’s face for a second as she struggled against Brother Michael’s grip, and then headed back towards the Otis, the goat wrapped protectively in his arms. “I’m putting Betty back...”

  “You’re what?” Brother Michael was stunned. Not pretending, but the real thing. It was as though a lift door had turned round and answered him back.

  “That’s right,” said LizAlec quickly, getting her comment in before Brother Michael remembered he was supposed to be smothering her. She bit down hard on his thumb, earning herself another slap. Next time round, Brother Michael kept his fingers away from her teeth, manoeuvring his palm firmly over her swollen mouth, using its edge to block off her nostrils as well.

  Behind Brother Michael, Lars was looking badly worried, but he wouldn’t put down his bloody goat, he couldn’t... There was nowhere to put it and Lars couldn’t bring himself to let the animal float off in zero G, he knew goats hated that.

  So instead he just looked on as Brother Michael slowly and certainly began to choke the life out of LizAlec. The man was smiling now, cold brown eyes hungrily staring into hers as he watched LizAlec go down into the rapidly approaching darkness.

  “Shit,” LizAlec thought, as the glass cathedral around her began to fade. She was being murdered and there was nothing she could do to stop it happening. Nothing conscious.

  Nothing human.

  “He means it.”

  LizAlec never knew exactly what woke her, but whatever it was she jerked awake to gulp down a breath that sank like melt water into her burning lungs. She could feel her heart kick-start into a steady reassuring beat as its right ventricle pumped sluggish blood to her lungs, where the blood took up oxygen and returned heartwards, haemoglobin-red, to be pumped through her arteries, releasing th
e gathered oxygen.

  It was a beautiful, simple, inherently efficient system — and she was impressed. LizAlec didn’t as yet understand the mechanics, any more than she really understood how an explosion of synaptic fire could translate into shock at still being alive.

  She wasn’t dead, that much was obvious, but LizAlec couldn’t work out whether or not she had been. And if this was a standard near-death experience, where were the sympathetic angels and strange aliens? All that shit that qualified her to go on Soulderado? No. She was alive, watching Brother Michael walk towards Lars who was busily backing away, still holding his bloody goat. She was unquestionably alive. It was just that she wasn’t expecting to be.

  Her throat hurt.

  That was so great an understatement that even Lady Clare would have been proud of her. Every breath burnt on the way down and then caught fire again on the way back up. Pain she could live with, it was how much pain she could live with that was beginning to surprise LizAlec. But what ripped her attention away from the hurt in her throat was not Brother Michael’s approach towards Lars but the steady chanting that started up in the back of her head.

  Low, rhythmic. A chant so faint she couldn’t hear the words. If LizAlec hadn’t known better, she’d have thought it was someone muttering, but softly, under their breath.

  Maybe she was having that fully fledged near-death experience after all. Either that, or she was mad. Whichever it was, there’d be a CySat show more than happy to talk to her. If she over got back to safety, wherever the fuck that was.

  “Who are you?” LizAlec demanded hoarsely, her own lips moving at the question, though she’d meant to ask it in her head.

  Brother Michael spun round in disbelief. “What the...?”

  And suddenly LizAlec saw herself as Brother Michael saw her. Chained to the base of the glass pulpit, hands pulled high above her head. She looked a wreck, No, more than that, she looked like death incarnate. Weird eyes burned out of a wide scowling face. She had good cheekbones and a strong jaw. What she could see of her skin was light brown, but her lip was split and her chin was black with dried blood.

  “Razz?”

  It was the voice in her head.

  “No,” said LizAlec, “Not Razz. Razz was my mother...”

  “Your mother?” The voice smiled.

  Impossible, LizAlec knew, but it happened just the same. An overwhelming sense of amusement, almost happiness swept through her mind. Brother Michael was watching her, slack-faced and frozen.

  “You’re doing that,” said the voice in her head. Inside its echo LizAlec got a sense of ghosts and howling wastelands that curled in on themselves, like folds in time or wormholes in space, except that no one had yet proved either of those existed.

  “You’re Elizabeth Alexandra?”

  LizAlec nodded.

  “Yeah, I heard you’d been born. At least I think I did. Maybe. It gets hard to remember...” The voice was soft as wind through an empty attic, as brittle as dried grass. LizAlec didn’t yet know if the words were real or if she had imagined them. That both could be true hadn’t yet occurred to her.

  “Who are you?” LizAlec asked. And when the answer came the girl wondered if she’d always known, because she felt no sense of surprise.

  “I’m Alex,” said the voice. “Or maybe not. The real me is locked in a cell at San Lorenzo. The Church Geneticist will never let him go, you know... Not while he can spin DNA like that.”

  “What are you really?” LizAlec asked.

  The voice smiled again. “You mean, am I a real ghost? Yes, I suppose so, in a ghost-like sort of way. Alex put me in here before you were born. Well, the neural framework, anyway. It’s amazing what can be knitted out of little stretches of junk DNA.”

  “The framework?” LizAlec said. “What else is there?”

  “Oh, a bit of naturally grown bioClay, a neat bridge between hemispheres, a little optic enhancement... Nothing clumsy enough to set off an m/wave sensor.”

  LizAlec took a look inside her skull, seeing blood swirling through the Willis circle. There were more arteries and veins than she could ever imagine. Beneath and between were folds of tissue, rich with thread-like nerves. More stars fluoresced inside her head than LizAlec could see through the glass walls of the cathedral. The problem was, LizAlec didn’t know what was meant to be there and what wasn’t.

  “Am I really looking inside myself?” LizAlec demanded.

  For a second the voice seemed to hesitate. “No, not really. But it’s a perfect construct of exactly what you would see if you did.” There didn’t seem to be much answer to that.

  “No wonder I felt so odd,” LizAlec said bitterly, her voice loud enough to make Lars stop fussing over his goat and look up.

  “The fury, the paranoia, that sense of standing outside looking in?”

  LizAlec nodded.

  “No,” said the voice. “That’s not odd, that’s just the way it goes.”

  “Yeah,” said LizAlec. “Well, it’s still shit.” She looked across to where Brother Michael stood frozen, then abruptly jerked herself out of his head. The preacher took two clanking steps towards her before she went back inside his mind and he froze as muscles knotted up and he almost stumbled sideways.

  LizAlec pulled herself out of his head again and then went back in, repelled and fascinated. There were dark memories of other girls. On their knees or on their backs. A few were cuffed below the pulpit as she was, but unlike LizAlec they were naked. Some she knew, many she didn’t. Unless she did and the change from fresh-faced disciple to silent shuffling slave was too great for even LizAlec to make the connection.

  She was inside Brother Michael’s head. Not physically among the blood and veins she’d found in her own skull, but feeding off dark memories remembered only as fixed neural patterns. He could feel her in there, pillaging his mind, and LizAlec was glad of it.

  She thought pain and felt him stumble.

  She told him to move and watched his disjointed steps.

  “Key,” LizAlec demanded and Brother Michael winced, throwing up his hands to protect himself from something he couldn’t see but could only feel.

  She had her answer before Brother Michael could even get his fear-frozen lips to frame the code. LizAlec spoke the word aloud and felt the cuffs slither from her wrists and hang lifeless like laces over the rings fixed to the glass pulpit.

  Two strides took LizAlec close enough to Brother Michael for her to be able to pull back her boot and kick him hard in the crotch. Which she did, enthusiastically. His scream echoed around the vast cathedral. LizAlec hadn’t needed to kick him, she understood that. Any pain she wanted to inflict she could post straight through to his thalamus, jack up his limbic system. Pain only existed as electrical impulses anyway.

  But LizAlec didn’t want agony’s simulacrum, at least not where Brother Michael was concerned. When you came down to it, she was an old-fashioned girl at heart. LizAlec took one last look at herself through his eyes. She looked insane. Maybe she was. Wild-eyed and staring, wired up on emotions even Fixx couldn’t begin to imagine. Well, maybe he could, LizAlec admitted, but only with a little chemical help. And even then he couldn’t do the things she could. Fixx needed music to make people do what he wanted: she just had to think about it.

  LizAlec looked at the open airlock and then at Brother Michael.

  “No...” The preacher was staring at her, aghast, his face weak with fear. He had his hands twisted together in front of him in a mockery of prayer. LizAlec didn’t know if it was conscious or not, and she didn’t care. She wasn’t a believer anyway. It had taken three weeks of bullying from Lady Clare to get her to agree to get confirmed with all those other little corps noblique girls at Notre-Dame.

  LizAlec fed Brother Michael back his own memories, Sarah again and then Rachel, sobbing for forgiveness, begging him to stop. LizAlec looped that memory and left it playing, an unending circle of blows and bitten-back moans.

  “Get inside,” she told him and
watched Brother Michael fight himself, then lose. Every sinew in his legs strained against her order, so tight that his knees were close to rupture, but still he put one foot in front of the other, like a dead man walking. Only stopping when he was inside the airlock.

  “Please...” There were tears beading from his eyes like pearls that floated away into the stark empty beauty of the cathedral. He was shivering, begging, crying. LizAlec didn’t bother to answer. There was nothing she wanted to say.

  “You ever killed anyone before?” It was the neural construct of the father she’d never met and probably never would, the ghost in her head. She hadn’t, and he knew she hadn’t. There was nothing about her he didn’t know.

  But she answered all the same.

  “You sure you want to do this?”

  She was sure, but then LizAlec remembered why she couldn’t. She didn’t know how to operate an airlock. Fuck it. LizAlec cut off the endless loop inside Brother Michael’s head and as he stopped, suddenly, blindly hopeful, LizAlec pulled out of his mind instructions on using the airlock, and then let him know exactly what she’d just taken.

  It was enough to sink him back to his knees. Though it wasn’t prayer that kept the preacher there but one gravity boot and abject fear. He was shivering like an injured animal, slipping between panic and his own approaching insanity, reaching for that refuge but never quite making it. LizAlec made damn sure of that. She didn’t take kindly to having been killed and she wanted Brother Michael to know exactly what was happening to him, as it happened.

  Every bursting vein, every ruptured internal organ.

  LizAlec walked over to the gold eagle-winged lectern and waved her hand across its surface to awaken the keypad. Keys materialized on the surface, or rather the black glass reading surface swirled clear to show keys resting beneath. Brother Michael might claim not to approve of unfettered technology but he’d still bought the best deck Microsoft could supply.

  Fingers flicking over the keys, never quite touching, LizAlec recreated the inner grille to the airlock, then closed the recessed door, checking its seal. Not that she needed to, the glass was machined to a four-micron tolerance. Even unbolted, it was designed to seal itself under pressure. And the opening servo couldn’t kick in unless atmospheric pressure inside the lock stood at .52 and rising.