The Final Evolution

by Jeff Somers

  Anger made me lean forward until the table bit into my belly. “So what, I’m just one of your fucking resources? I’m—”

  “Avery!” he shouted, slamming his hand down on the table. “Yes, you are fucking resources. I do not have any to spare, and I have no fucking time left. No one does. Get that through your fucking thick, selfish skull. Am I using you? Yes! Poor Avery. Poor, poor Avery. I am using you to save the human race from extinction.” He sat back, staring at me. “I make no apology. I also do not play games. I do not lie to you.”

  I realized I was on the edge of my seat, my muscles quivering, ready to launch myself forward. For a second all I could hear was the blood rushing in my ears, and then—someone was clapping.

  Directly behind us. I turned, and the three people at the table behind me were staring at us, just a foot or so away. The woman right behind me was smiling at me, clapping her hands in a deliberate, steady rhythm.

  “Oy, this is a fine scene, innit?” she said, her eyes on me. “The great Avery Cates, bawling and trembling. And you think yer comin’ after me?” She looked past me at Grisha. “Yer gonna need more Gunners.”

  XX

  I KILL EVERYBODY

  I experienced one of those rare moments of total, paralyzing shock—I couldn’t make it fit in and make sense. The woman wasn’t my age but wasn’t young, her reddish hair dry and bristly and mixed with gray, her complexion stained red with gin blossoms—she’d lived hard. She was smiling at me in a relaxed, confident way, but I’d never seen her before in my life. This was a fact. There was no wiggle room in it.

  “What?”

  She cocked her head the other way and smiled. The smile was vacant and terrifying—there was nothing in her eyes. They had rolled up, showing just the whites, and vibrated slightly. Behind her, her friends stared in puzzled agitation.

  “Keep up, boyo. That’s always been yer problem, Avery. Yer good at dealin’ the cards, sure, sure, but you bet like a drunk sailor on shore leave, heavy and blind.”

  A thrill shot through me. This was Orel. I thought of the old Italian man in Fiesole, and a second later I surged up, tearing the Roon from its holster and swinging my arm around, intending to shoot her in the face and find out how much pain you could cause a Psionic when they’d Traveled into another body. As I put the gun on her, though, I hesitated. She wasn’t Orel. She was just a vessel he’d forced himself into, and for a split second I hovered there, thinking I couldn’t just shoot some poor bitch who’d been drinking herself to sleep because of her shitty life a few seconds before, fucking unaware of what a really shitty evening was.

  As I stood there, the woman, eyes still twitching in their sockets, leaned back suddenly and smashed her glass into my head. A bloom of cold and hot spun me around and I shot wild, then let my momentum carry me into a spin out from behind the table. She’d been fast, and as I spun back and brought the gun up, orienting myself, she had somehow leaped up onto her table and launched herself directly at me.

  All I saw as she sailed through the air, my augments working to speed up synapse response, making everything seem slower, were her wonky eyes, all white, little hints of pupil skimming the very tops. She had that same crazy smile on her face as I fired twice, hardwired habit, her stomach exploding into a spray of blood just before she crashed down onto me.

  “What the fuck!” I heard Gall shout.

  I shoved the squirting, twitching body off me and surged up onto my feet, blood dripping from my face where a flap of skin had been carved open.shoved Grisha, and even Mehrak had guns in their hands, tables and chairs rocking gently where they’d been flipped over to clear some space.

  “Well, shit,” I started to say breathlessly, and then the man who’d been sitting with the redhead stood up.

  “Yer gonna have to be faster than that,” he said as his eyes rolled up into his head just like hers had, “if yer goin’ to come after me when I don’t have this kind of fucking lag to deal with.”

  Four guns barked almost simultaneously, and finally everyone else in the place realized they were in trouble, chaos breaking out with shouts and screams, tables and chairs flying as people ran for cover. The man was short and fleshy, a huge belly pushing the structural integrity of his uniform to its limits, but he dived and rolled on the ground like a pro, all four shots trailing him like an invisible tail swishing behind him as he moved.

  “It’s Orel!” I shouted, moving in a wide arc sideways to keep him in my light cone as he disappeared behind a wall of overturned tables.

  “Canny Orel’s five hundred years old and the size of my thumb!” Gall shouted back. He and Grisha were mirroring me in different directions, all of us crouched down and moving slowly, circling around the cluster of tables where the man had hidden himself. The air was cold, and in the distance I could hear the whine of four-wheelers—the SSF responding to shots fired in their precious little city. After all my life spent craning my neck up at Stormers dropping from above, the System Pigs had been swatted from the air at last, having to roll toward trouble on four wheels. The world really was ending.

  “Trust me!” I shouted back. I didn’t know what this meant—how close did he have to be to just take over someone’s mind? How hard did he have to concentrate? Was he ten feet away, comatose with effort? All I knew was that in some sense he was here, and when I’d shot the old man in Fiesole his Psionic “handler” had screamed in pain. I wanted to make Michaleen hurt a little.

  These poor assholes are just bystanders, Dolores Salgado suddenly complained in my head. You’re going to hurt them, and they don’t deserve it.

  I gritted my teeth. The fat man surged up from behind the tables and threw his glass at me with sudden, savage ferocity. My HUD spiked sharp and clear in my vision, all the bars flashing red for a second as I twisted myself aside, the glass sizzling past my ear. I snapped the Roon up and had it on him for a second, but hesitated, Salgado’s voice pinching me in the ass, and he dropped back down to the ground with a cackle.

  “Sweet hell, Avery,” he shouted in another voice but with the same fucking Gaelic accent. “You’re afraid of killin’ innocents now? After the damage you’ve done?” He laughed. “You kill everybody, boyo. It’s your damn calling card. Even the orphans and castaways you try to train, you end up killing.”

  “Fuck you,” I hissed before I’d realized what I was doing. My head throbbed and my ear felt like it had swollen to about three times its size. My HUD had a flashing yellow cross in one corner, indicating that its first-aid routines were not working, and I was onmy own as far as pain and infection and bleeding went. “I took care of the fuck who did Remy.”

  I cursed myself immediately. You don’t fucking talk. You don’t give shit away to people. No matter what it was, it was a way in, and you couldn’t afford that. If Remy had done it I would have slapped him in the head and told him to learn to shut up, and he would have smiled and told me it didn’t matter, because he didn’t have any secrets, or any heart.

  The man suddenly just stood up. He just suddenly appeared, white eyes and slack arms. I put the gun on his chest but didn’t fire, Salgado’s words in my head. “Fuck, that Pusher did a number on you, eh? The fuck who did Remy, huh?” Grisha and Gall had circled around behind him, and we all stood there like assholes, unsure what to do with an unarmed man who was, for the moment, Cainnic Orel. “Well, shit, this’s a test run. Let’s see what I can do, eh?”

  I felt… something. A brush, a feather against my thoughts. I knew the feeling—a Psionic Push, though I was used to a rougher and more invasive sensation. This was like someone was tapping on my thoughts instead of sledgehammering them into mush, and I twitched in response.

  “Are you okay, Avery?” Grisha called, eyes flicking to me.

  I nodded slowly, the butterfly sensation in my head suddenly swelling up like mist and filling my thoughts. And then my legs went out from under me and—

  I saw it all in quick flashes. I was there. I was there and I was there, watching and be
ing watched, like I was hovering around on the edges. Everything happened in jerky cuts, like frames had been removed from my memories. I knew, somehow, that I was being manipulated, that someone was doing something to me, but I also knew, somehow, that this was not a trick. I’d been there. The room felt exactly the same: dry and dirty, the grit under my boots, the smell of Belling rotting away in the bed, the sound of distant business as the hospital tried to function around us, the crowd gathered outside, angry but afraid to follow us in.

  I saw the old gremlin, the Pusher. He just stepped into the room. He didn’t say anything, or hold up his hand in some wonky bit of stagecraft. He just walked in and Remy and I and Belling, we all went still, frozen. The gremlin chewed his gums as he walked, his mouth in constant motion, glistening and pink. He breathed heavily through his nose, unhappy with having to move.

  He looked at me and I raised the Roon; it was practically in Remy’s face. The kid didn’t react, just stood there staring at the door, frozen.

  The gremlin grunted. I pulled the trigger. A small hole appeared in the back of Remy’s head, and with a spray of blood and bone and snot and teeth his face exploded on the other side, and he crumpled to the floor, silent.

  The gremlin grunted. I spun to the bed. Belling just stared, unresponsive, eyes wide and mouth open. I fired twice, moving the gun precisely in between, and Belling shivered and went limp.

  The gremlin huffed and grunted his way into the room and looked around. He smelled. He hummed tunelessly to himself as he wheezed around, and then he took up a spot near where react, jhad been standing, leaned down, and retrieved Remy’s huge, ridiculous gun. Standing up again, his face was bright red. He turned to spit on the ground and nodded to himself.

  “A’right,” he whispered, eyes jittering everywhere. “Le’s get this shit going.”

  * * *

  I opened my eyes.

  The sky over Berlin was gray and cloudy and looked cold. I thought of the yellow, burning snow we had in New York and I wondered if it was the same here. Everything looked empty and clear up to the clouds, the whole world just a crystal, an hourglass, and all of us slowly shaking out of the top to the bottom, getting sucked under.

  I sat up. I felt fine, physically. Kev Gatz used to give me a headache when he Pushed me. Even that old bastard Bendix had left me feeling sick after he’d shoved my brain around, but this felt like nothing.

  I felt like nothing.

  Someone was crying nearby. I sat up, a cold sweat breaking out all over me. I still had my gun in my hand. Squinting, I looked around. Grisha and Gall were kneeling in the spots they’d been in, the worker between them. The fat worker was crumpled on the ground, bawling, shaking with his arms wrapped around himself. Grisha looked up at me.

  “Are you well, Avery?”

  I nodded, pushing myself to my feet. I saw the back of Remy’s head, the spray of blood against the wall.

  Grisha looked back at the worker. “He dropped at the same time you did,” he said. “He began wailing. I think whatever… possessed him has passed.”

  I nodded. I saw my gun almost touching the back of Remy’s head. I stepped around the toppled tables just as a trio of four-wheelers screeched to a stop on the edges of the restaurant’s open area. The worker looked up at me, his face a red, rippling mask of horror. Tears streamed down his face. Michaleen had been in him, had possessed him.

  “Whatever happened to him,” Gall muttered, “it wasn’t enjoyable.”

  I looked at the worker. I saw a tiny wound appear in the back of Remy’s head, like an editing trick. For a few moments, the worker had been Michaleen. Mickey hadn’t made me kill Remy, but he’d made me remember it. And this guy had been Mickey. Had been Cainnic Orel.

  I raised the Roon in one fluid motion and shot him twice in the face. Grisha and Gall scrambled back on their elbows and asses, cursing, and behind me I heard the familiar sound of a multitude of guns being drawn. I stared down at the worker, a dark pool of blood growing around his ruined head.

  I heard an old ghostly voice mocking me: You are not a Bad Man. I am a Bad Man. Through the numb heaviness that infused my torso, my head, I felt a terrifying, black regret. I’d shot an unarmed civilian in the face.

  I was shaking, suddenly. Without being asked, I let the Roon slip from my hand and put my arms up into the air. Something like a ball of mud had formed in my throat, and my eyes stung.

  “Avery!” Grisha shouted, surging to his feet and stepping over to me with purpose. I braced myself for the blow, the crack to the skull that would send me to my knees, and he raised his gun into the air, but paused. “Avery,” he said in a suddenly controlled, tight voice. “You did not have to kill that man.”

  I nodded without looking directly at him. I saw Remy’s body, crumpled on the floor of that hospital. I saw myself stepping over it without a glance. Then I dragged my eyes to Grisha’s, because he deserved to be looked at. I saw a spray of blood and bone and snot and teeth. He flinched.

  “I kill everybody,” I said.

  I felt nothing.

  XXI

  THINK OF ME AS AN EXECUTION

  Mr. Marko gave me a curt nod as I joined him on the steps of the big building being used as SSF headquarters. Everyone called it by a German name that sounded like they were clearing their throat, but I just called it Cop Central out of habit. Behind us as we ascended the steps, Berlin was a cauterized wound, empty and filled with echoes. There were only a few thousand cops and workers in the whole fucking city. Only about twenty thousand cops left, period, according to Grisha, whose ultracompetent estimate I was prepared to accept. I felt all that empty space behind me, cleaned up and whitewashed, all the shitkickers kept outside, pushing against the edges.

  “How are you, Zeke?”

  “That depends,” he said quietly, “on whether you’re going to go crazy and shoot me in the face today.” I clenched my teeth and my hands stiffened in the pockets of my coat, twitching toward the slits in the lining that gave me access to the Roon. But I just swallowed it. Mr. Marko had come down in the world. The old model would never have said something like that to me. He would have been too afraid.

  “Who was he?” I asked, deflating, all my sudden anger pooling at my feet, wasted. I saw his face again, twisted and tortured. Poor sap got sucked into Copland and then got shit on by Cainnic Orel. I tried to tell myself I’d put him out of his misery, but now I saw his face instead of Remy’s when I closed my eyes.

  “Guy named Murray. Didn’t know him well. Worked in the mechanics pool. Not well liked.” He looked at me. Marko without his ballsy halo of hair was just a freakishly round kind of person—his head and torso were like concentric circles of flesh. “You got everyone terrified, and the scuttlebutt is Hense wants to cut you loose.”

  “Let her try,” I said, twisting my head to the right until my neck popped with a satisfying crack. “What about what we discussed?”

  He nodded. “Sure. I’ll take care of it. So, you do something for me, then.”

  I took a step in silence to let him know I was thinking on it. “Go on.”

  “Get me on the team. Going in after Orel. Make me your tech support.”

  I let that hang for a moment. I knew Marko—or I’d known him. But if he still had Marko’s brain, he’d be good to have around, and I realized, suddenly, that I’d gone days now interacting with the Techie without once wanting to slap him, or call him names. We were walking in a comfortable way, old allies. Having him around would be… good.

  “All right,” I said. “Want to see your work firsthand, huh?”

  “I want to get the fuck away from fucking cops.”

  I remembered him, plump in his nice suit, staring down at his holographic ID in the Rock, horrified that it had gone an angry red. I wondered if I’d destroyed Ezekiel Marko too. “Hell, Zeke,” I said quietly. “What happened to you?”

  He shrugged. “I got arrested.”

  “He’s unstable. He’ll be a liability.”

  Hens
e was so angry she almost had an expression on her face. I sat next to Mehrak, who appeared to have been instructed to stare at me with one hand on the grip of his gun tucked into his shoulder. I thought about showing him a little trick that ended with his trigger finger broken, but wondered if you could break an avatar’s finger.

  Grisha scowled. “Yes? You have Gunners on your payroll? People experienced in finding targets and eliminating them, analyzing security fields, allocating resources, being able to pull the trigger when the time comes? You have resources to burn?” He shook his head savagely. “He killed a worker. A worker who, under influence, had just attacked him. So fucking what, Director Hense.” He tapped a finger on the table. “I will repeat it since you have suddenly become a champion for human life: So fucking what. I do not have resources to burn. Avery is our lead on this.”

  We were seated around the most civilized conference table I’d ever seen. It was made of stainless steel, gleaming and scratch-free, apparently made out of a single sheet of metal that had been beaten into shape. The room was too small for it, though, a windowless square of drywall that had us all crowded against the walls. It was the sort of room that kept the peace, because there wasn’t enough elbow room to swing a good punch.

  She pointed one tiny hand at me. “He—”

  “Given the System Security Force’s well-documented stance of valuing all human life,” I said, spreading my hands, “I officially apologize for killing one poor bastard in your fucking kingdom of poor bastards up here.” I put a smile on my face, hard and plastic but the best I could do. “Especially since I know you, Janet, have never lined a bunch of skells up against a wall and shot them all in the head just because you had an appointment to get to, or any shit like that.”