by Jeff Somers
“The world is dying, Mr. Cates!” a woman’s deep voice shouted from outside, the same round Creole accent the old man had sported—our Traveler, I decided, giving the term a capital letter. “You know this. In fifty years, there will be no one left, only the sullen monuments of arrogance we leave behind. We are here to bring meaning to these final years of humanity, to judge those who have ensured its destruction. You cannot prevent this extinction, no matter what your friends in SPS have told you. If you try to derail god’s plan, he will simply find a new route.”
Hell, I thought. Why is it that the crazies always find god, and always talk so fucking fancy? Any theories, Squalor?
The ghost of Dennis Squalor, who’d founded the Electric Church and been the world’s first digital intelligence, remained silent.
“They want you to protect Orel, Mr. Cates,” she went on. “They wish you to find him and collect him, and then he will make a deal, and he will live. They will grant him protection in return for the information he possesses. These are your friends.”
Another rain of bullets from above, and I duckwalked over to the doorway and leaned out carefully, trying to spot our Spooks. I wanted to kill them with my bare hands, feel the bones in their necks snapping, see the terror in their eyes. I wanted them to feel what Remy had felt, shot while I lay there unconscious. I wanted them to feel what Gleason had felt, being eaten alive by tiny robots, bloating and swelling as her body was devoured. I wanted them all to feel it. I wanted Michaleen to feel it. It seemed like Michaleen had been in my life forever, since before I was born. I’d been hearing the name my whole life, and I wondered, suddenly, if it had truly been a coincidence that Wa Belling had showed up in London all those years ago, claiming to be Orel and inserting himself into my Squalor operation.
The cosmos didn’t do coincidence. There was a Rail.
The square outside looked exactly as it had, empty and dusty. I could see only a chunk of it in front of me and off to my left, a disorienting slice of the world, but if I leaned out farther to get a better view I’d more than likely be in the air. I stayed still and forced myself to breathe, trying to will my HUD to stop flickering and either disappear or at least stabilize. Patience, I would have told Remy: Patience kept you alive. When you had the urge to run, to blast away, to throw away ammo, take a breath and wait.
And Remy would have said, Fuck it, I can’t die this way.
As I crouched there, a medium-sized woman with red, almost unnatural-looking hair streaming behind her ran across my field of vision and ducked into the large building across the way. I could just see her white shirt in the dark doorway almost directly across from me, but I had no shot while I hid behind the wall. I saw myself squaring around to take a bead on her and being sucked into the air, sailing gracefully until I smashed into something ungracefully.
I turned and looked at the Spook facedown on the floor, a big guy, broad in the shoulders and sporting the same shade of unbelievable red hair, his black pants damp with piss. I grunted my way back from the doorway and hooked the cuff of his pants with one hand, pulling him slowly toward me. When I had him out of sight, I slid my arms under his shoulders and pushed to my feet, pulling him up with me, my knees popping and back screaming. When I had him up in front of me, I settled the weight in my legs and staggered toward the door, staying out of the line of sight until the last moment. With a grunt, I surged forward and swung myself around into the doorway, letting go of the corpse just as it was pulled away from me.
The dead Spook jerked up into the air and I put myself into motion, my augments smoothly dumping adrenaline and endorphins, allowing me to hit top speed in three strides, holding the Roon out in front of me. As I ran I aimed at the white patch of her shirt, the gun made steady by the curious focusing of my augments, and squeezed the trigger three times. With the third shot the patch of white shirt disappeared, and the corpse hit the ground in front of me.
dropped and rolled, smacking into the stucco wall hard enough to make my HUD blink off for a moment. In that flash, I thought I heard Remy, somewhere inside me like the other ghosts.
Stop, Avery. Don’t.
Then it was gone, and I shook my head, trying to clear it and get my focus back. I jumped to my feet and took a breath, leaping forward to land in the doorway, my augmented vision adjusting to the darkness immediately. The Spook was on the ground, her chest a red bloom, her eyes staring.
I had myself in my nostrils. I smelled like someone else’s piss.
“Next time you decide to make a charge, Avery,” Grisha shouted from behind me, the crunch of his boots approaching, “perhaps warn the people shooting indiscriminately at the ground, yes?” I felt him get close, and then he was standing next to me in the doorway. He stood there for a moment and then he clapped me on the shoulder.
“The third one, the leader, has run,” he said.
I turned and holstered my gun. Stop, Avery. Don’t. I replayed Remy’s voice in my head. Something fist-sized had appeared in my throat, and I wanted to punch Grisha in the face.
Gall was coming up behind him, scowling. “You shot at Carlo, goddammit,” he groused. “Why the fuck’d you do that?”
“I’ve shot a lot of defenseless old men,” I said gruffly. “You’re gonna have to be more specific.”
Grisha held up a hand to stop Gall’s approach. “Avery, you have made the right decision. These people, these Angels, have only their own twisted agenda. We are trying to salvage what is left of this world.”
“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for,” Gall said. “A wise man once said.”
“We have an agreement, then,” Grisha said so seriously I wanted to laugh, at him and the rest of SPS, their pretensions to saving the human race. We were unsavable, I knew. “You will get us into SSF-controlled Europe and make introductions.”
“Sure, I’ll get you in touch with an old pal o’ mine,” Gall said. “Mr. Cates, I believe you know her, too.”
I stared at them both, and nodded, then turned back to look at the dead Spook in the shadows. “Tell her to bring Mr. Marko. For laughs.”
I didn’t say anything they might take for agreement. I had my own plans.
XVII
I HEAR I MIGHT ACTUALLY OUTLIVE YOU
“The border’s tighter than my ass,” Gall said in his easy, booming way. “Which is pretty fucking tight. The cops who are left thought they were hunkering down to preserve the System for the Second Coming of Marin or something. Now they’re starting to fure out Marin ain’t coming, that the Shutdown is coming, but they’re still grinding the gears and walking the wall.” He shrugged. “They don’t know what else to do.”
Everyone had cleaned up nice. Gall was still a crispy fritter of a man, everything about him hot and red and scaly, but he’d gotten himself a clean suit of light pink that matched his general skin tone pretty well, making him look like a big clown. Grisha had changed out of his grubby overalls and into a snazzy suit that looked about twenty years old, based on the style and the sheen of the worn fabric, and he’d pulled in a dozen more people from SPS, quiet men and women who did anything Grisha told them to with a speed and dedication that meant they either were terrified of him or thought he was a genius. Maybe a little of both.
It was fucking madness outside Berlin. Grisha had come up with more four-wheelers and we’d made decent time north, the roads getting better and better as we drove until, finally, about thirty miles south of Berlin we’d clambered over a pile of rubble and bounced onto the widest highway I’d ever seen, in good shape, too. The roads hadn’t been maintained for decades, sitting out in the weather, ignored while people sped over them in hovers, but they’d been sitting there, waiting, like the world knew we’d all come back to the roads eventually. Most of them had been torn up at some point, by bombs or weeds poking up through cracks an inch at a time, but long stretches were still usable, as long as you didn’t mind the taste of your kidneys in your throat. We’d hit speeds that reminded me of hover rides,
complete with constant low-level terror and the urge to always know exactly where your safety netting was. That had been great for six hours or so, and then we’d hit the camp.
It was a tent city, if you wanted to be generous with the word tent. I saw the blue tarp familiar to me from Potosí everywhere, stretched and folded in ingenious ways that gave me hope for the future of humanity no matter what Grisha said. It was a huge settlement, thousands of people crammed onto a rubble-strewn area pressed up against the fortified border the System Pigs had set up, straight across the road like it wasn’t even there. We pulled up, secured the four-wheelers with thick, rusty chains through the axles, and started walking.
The border was just an overpass the cops had barricaded with two burnt-out hover hulls overturned to block the road, guns mounted on the bridge stretching perpendicular to the road above, a mass of pissy-looking officers gathered at the choke point where they scowled and, I assumed, interviewed people who wanted in.
“Why is everyone camped out here?” I asked the ex-cop. The world was filled with abandoned real estate; you could have a mansion somewhere if you wanted it.
“They want in,” Gall said. “They don’t know any better; they think the System is their best choice. Sure, there’s power up there, some order maybe, but it’s all fucking cops. The cops don’t need a bunch of mewling assholes to watch over, now that they don’t have Marin’s programmed requirements to protect and serve and all that pushing them along. They need slave labor to keep the gears turning and they need every Techie they can get their hands on to work their little autoshutdown problem.” He laughed, a bitter cough. “These assholes are trying to get in because they think there’s yen up north, work, jobs, safety. There’s work, all right, but that’s about it.”
I shook my head, staring around. I knew these people. I’d never met them, but I’d walked around the streets of New York with them. I’d been knocked around by System Cops with them. I’d plotted to kill, beg, and steal with them. And here they were, begging to get back into the System, or whatever scraps of it were left. I fucking hated them for it. They didn’t know the world was dying—or maybe they did, who knew? But they could have been trying to make something better. To do something.
I was doing something. I was going to do plenty.
Rough avenues had been carved in the camp, forming muddy pathways, and we picked our way through the throngs. People sat outside their crappy tents and stared at us, people jumped up to run in front of us, begging, people looked at our clothes and our boots and scowled, hating us on sight. I knew exactly how they felt, but it was strange to be on the receiving end. The world had turned and suddenly I was rich, I was powerful—and they hated me. And with good reason.
My HUD sharpened in my vision as my heart rate kicked up. I felt that acidic boiling in my belly, the sense that violence was on the horizon. Gall walked with the rolling, stick-up-the-ass gait of the seasoned cop, certain he would not be touched simply because he didn’t wish to be touched. Grisha strolled with his hands in his pockets, chin on his chest, oblivious, his team mimicking him like they thought his posture was going to save them. I fought the urge to turn and look behind us, certain that a huge crowd of angry people was gathering at our backs.
And I thought, Shit, this is just like the System!
Nothing happened, though. We slogged our way through the camp and came to a wide, central path, just as muddy, but someone had taken the time to line each side with stones. It led directly to the barricades, and the System Pigs doing border duty watched us with their fake, plastic eyes as we approached. They were all officers, dressed in nice suits that looked a little worn, a little tattered on the edges. They were all men—if you could consider avatar bodies made of silicon and circuits to have a sex—and each wore a broad-rimmed hat, a hip holster under their jacket, and a battered-looking Roon 1009, a shredding rifle slung over their shoulders. As we approached I looked up at the big swivel guns mounted on the overpass, and then back down at the cops staring at us. The entry was only wide enough for one person, and no one was going to move those hovers easily, even for a Tele-K. Forcing your way into Copland wasn’t easy.
Feeling their eyes on me, probably uploading my face and running an optical facial recog scan through their servers, I wondered why anyone would want to force their way in. Then I thought about the mud I’d just skated through, all that piss and sweat and shit and blood pumped into the earth by people living under blue tarps, and it almost made sense.
The cops didn’t speak, or pull weapons, or anything. They just watched us until Gall turned and gestured for the rest of us to stop a few feet away. He spun around and continued forward, holding up his hands and saying something that made the cops laugh. Then he leaned in and had a whispered conversation with one of them, who I assumed was the station chief. Watching them, I was amazed all over again at the avatar tech. These were robots, with quantum-state hard-drive brains on whith stonucking program that had been them was operating at clock speeds. They looked human. Their skin moved right, their eyes shone right, and they had all the nervous tics and weird tells of a person. But they were fucking androids, connected to a network in the air, constrained by programming and destined, according to Grisha, to shut down in a few weeks, just go dormant and sit there for eternity, rusting.
Gall nodded and turned back to us. The cop he’d been speaking to straightened up and resumed practicing to be a statue of a System Pig.
“He’s sending in my message. Shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.”
“Sure,” I said. “She’s probably got about twenty-five of herself running around in there, doing her chores.”
It took twenty minutes, and when Janet Hense emerged from the shadows behind the barricades, she looked exactly like I’d last seen her, fighting the civil war in Brussels, snapping out orders and handing me a bomb disguised as an old Monk. And back then she’d looked exactly like she had the day she’d left me for dead in Bellevue back in Old New York. And I suspected she’d look exactly the same fifty years on, and maybe forever.
The cops manning the barricades straightened up when she emerged. I noted the five pips on her collar, and had no fucking clue what that meant. Last I’d seen her she’d been a major, four pips and everyone had run away from her like she could order executions without filling out the paperwork. Now she’d been promoted past that, and I didn’t know what rank that was. She was a short, tiny woman with skin the color of light coffee, her dark, straight hair pulled back with a minimum of style. She paused and ran her eyes over us, not pausing or reacting in any way when she saw me. Then she stepped forward, and I noted with professional detachment the way the cops on the line stiffened up, put hands on their rifles, and looked in different directions. I guessed it wasn’t often a ranking officer stepped outside their green zone, this close to the shitkickers.
“Horatio,” she said, almost smiling. “It’s good to see you. You look fucking terrible.”
“Janet,” Gall said with a nod. “I wasn’t sure you’d be so happy to see me.”
She nodded. “We need everyone we can get, Rache. There was an amnesty issued a few months ago, asking every officer to come on back, no questions asked.”
Gall cocked his head and grinned. “Funny how that happened after you couldn’t build any more units, huh?”
For a second, they stood there in perfect silence, perfect stillness. Then Hense turned to look at me. “Fucking hell, Cates, you’re a fucking weed: You can’t be killed.”
I winked. “Someday, Janet. You just got to keep faith. Although I hear I might actually outlive you, in a sense.”
She didn’t like that. She stared at me for another few seconds, chewing something sour, and then spun away, walking toward the barricades.
“These people are with me,” she announced to the cops guarding the entrance to what was left of the Stem of Federated Nations. “They are at liberty and anyone who fucks with them will be erased from not just his unit but the fucking ser
ver itself. Pass the word.”
The cops said nothing and stared anywhere but at her as we approached. I kicked up a little and caught up with her.
“Every time I see you,” I said, grinning, “you’ve moved up in the world, Janet. What are you now? God?”
She stared straight ahead. “What do think?” she said, and then turned to look at me. “I’m Director of Internal Affairs.”
XVIII
WE JUST FIND PEOPLE TO PAY US FOR WHAT WE WERE GONNA DO ANYWAY
Berlin was the cleanest city I’d ever seen.
It was so clean my skin itched as we rode along its wide, empty streets in a huge version of the four-wheel vehicles Grisha seemed to have an endless supply of. These were cleaner, slightly larger, and clearly marked with the stars and globe of the SSF, and appeared to be Droids, driving along without anyone at the controls. We all sat in rigid silence, packed into the back, driving along at a stately pace so slow I would have considered it impossible according to my understanding of the physical laws of the fucking universe—we might, I thought, be going backward.
Jammed between Grisha and Gall, I was suddenly conscious of how bad I smelled.
“What are you waiting for?” Hense suddenly snapped at Gall. “This is the fucking meeting. I don’t have time for anything formal.”
Gall grinned, his rubbery face demonic. “Don’t look at me, Janet. I got paid to set up a meet. This is their gig.”