The Final Evolution

by Jeff Somers

  “That was—” he started to say, but I shoved him aside and stepped over to where Orel’s avatar slumped, eyes open like Hense’s. Without Orel’s personality it was just the image of a tall, plain woman, reddish hair in curls around her face. I knelt down and yanked on her feet to straighten her out, then took hold of Marko’s shoulder and yanked him down with me. He fell into a kneeling position, squawking in protest.

  I pulled out his hand and pressed the knife into his glove.

  “What are you doing?” Grisha shouted at me.

  I ignored him. Time was closing in on us—another avatar of Hense was on her way, System Pigs in tow, and even if she believed me that Orel had played us, she’d already decided I was expendable.

  The noise level kept climbing and the slow, drugged shuffle of the dying bastards around us was herking and jerking into an alarming flurry of jagged movement. The Pushed weren’t in any physical condition to be a threat, but a couple dozen warm bodies could slow anybody down, and some of them did still clutch their rifles, assuming Orel had even bothered to give them ammunition.

  I tugged the shirt under Mara’s jacket down, exposing her white neck. I looked up at Marko. “I want the head,” I rasped. “You’re the trained technical associate.”

  “Aw, fuck,” Marko muttered, leaning down and tracing his chubby fingers along Mara’s neck. He was murmuring something softly as he worked, reciting specs from the avatar designs.

  Suddenly Grisha was looming over me. “Cates, there is no time for souvenirs—”

  “I’m done following that bastard around, playing by his rules,” I said, lungs burning. I watched Marko take the knife with a precise, strong grip that hinted at competence and certainty, press it against the avatar’s fake white flesh, and begin sawing. Coolant oozed everywhere like sap, slow and cold. “I’ll bet you he didn’t manage to erase everything from this avatar. I’ll bet you he doesn’t want lowly old Avery to have it. I’ll bet you he comes after it.” I grinned. “This time, Orel’s gonna come find me.”

  PART V

  XXXIII

  SHEER DETERMINATION AND WILLINGNESS TO HURT

  “Three hundred and sixty-two cigarettes left,” Grisha said.

  “In the world, probably,” I said, shivering uncontrollably. The fire we’d built three weeks before and had kept going continuously was huge, but it seemed to offer no heat whatsoever. “Time to quit.”

  “Quitting is easy,” he said, smiling as he knelt down, putting his hands out to warm them and leaning forward with a cigarette in his mouth to light up. After a second he leaned back, exhaling smoke into the air like he was making clouds. “I have quit many times.”

  I didn’t remember it so cold. Or so flat, and so empty. You could still see the basic outline of the buildings, and about half the wall was still standing, sand creeping up on both sides, catching the moon now and then and glinting like a beacon in the distance. The silence was complete. When the fire died down and Marko and Grisha and the ht="1em" aa>others had gone below, all you would hear was the wind, the sky above crystal clear and filled with stars.

  I held out my hand. “Give,” I said. Grisha snorted, amused, and handed over two cigarettes. I settled back into the weird little seat I’d made in the sand and stuck one behind my ear, the other in my mouth. I didn’t bother lighting it yet. Grisha was getting cagey with his cigarettes, and I could see the near future when he would simply refuse to give me any more.

  A few hundred feet straight ahead of us the tail end of an old SSF hover jutted straight up into the air. In the daylight it was charred and dented, more than half-buried, a permanent sculpture in the middle of fucking nowhere. At night it looked sleek and shiny, the firelight playing off of it giving an impression of infinite possibilities, thousands of shadows. I’d been staring at the hover for days now. I was pretty sure I’d seen it crash, in some alternate universe thousands of years before, when I hadn’t had any metal in my brain, when Remy was alive and far away from me.

  If Remy had lived, I’d have told him that patience was the most important thing a Gunner could learn. Canny Orel was legendary for his patience, for waiting in rooms for days just to get the drop on a mark, for pretending to be an entirely different person for weeks, for months. Any asshole could score a cheap gun or a good knife and walk around like a hard case, calling himself a Gunner, and maybe even get someone equally stupid to pay them to kill someone. If they didn’t learn patience, if they didn’t learn to wait for the right moment instead of charging in, stoned out of their minds and convinced sheer determination and willingness to hurt would carry them through, they usually died fast.

  And Remy would have said, “Shit, Avery, I put up with you, don’t I? I know all about fucking patience.”

  The world felt empty. Grisha had called home to his SPS troops and gotten a hover to us in fifteen minutes, skimming easily through the chaos in Split. The System Pigs were embroiled in an assault on Diocletian’s palace that proved to be tougher than they’d anticipated, because the Pushed topside had been given clear instructions to resist and didn’t let minor things like gunshot wounds slow them down. They fought until they bled out, and then someone stepped up from behind them and took their place. The cops actually took losses. The SPS hover had gotten us to Spain in decent style, back to Grisha’s people. Even there things had felt wide open and loose, like my every step had an echo that had been muffled before.

  Sitting down next to me with a grunt, Grisha glanced past me at the old crate I’d set up as a makeshift table, shook his head, and settled in, smoking contentedly.

  “How many N-Tabs?” I asked.

  “About a thousand,” he said immediately. Grisha’s competence was startling sometimes. “Mr. Marko has determined baseline survival can be maintained with a half a tab each per day, assuming adequate water. Which we cannot assume, as we have found no source of fresh water yet. Please do not ask me how much water we have left on hand.”

  I nodded. Half an N-tab wasn’t much, but I’d done worse. I’d done worse in this very spot.

  We’d made no effort to be stealthy, making a lot of noise on our way from Spain. We’d stolen what we needed, often at gunpoint, and I’d used my own name everywhere, obnoxiously. Not that it mattered, I didn’t think—Orel could certainly track us electronically if he had some power to draw on and a functional satellite in the air. But everywhere you went these days there was old tech, abandoned, rusting, useless, so you couldn’t make any assumptions. I wasn’t taking chances.

  “Why here, Avery?” Grisha said suddenly.

  I didn’t answer right away. I felt small in the hugeness of the world around us, suddenly, comfortingly certain that I was too tiny to really matter, that nothing I did was going to nudge the cosmos this way or that. I was off the Rail, I thought. I’d jumped the tracks and I was skittering down a steep incline, scraping myself off on it, eroding myself on the way down, but at least I was choosing the path.

  “I wanted someplace familiar,” I said, leaning forward with some difficulty to light my cigarette in the flames. I wanted New York, but New York was gone. There was nothing familiar there anymore. “I wanted someplace where I would know where I could put my back, where I could grab some cover. I wanted someplace empty so I wouldn’t have to worry about collaterals.” I waved my hand around. “There’s no fucking place on earth more empty and familiar than Chengara Fucking Penitentiary.”

  The underground complex was still usable, depending on your definition of the term. The topmost level was a wreck, bombed to hell and invaded by sand. The old elevator shafts were sturdy enough and the lower levels were clear enough and stable enough to use as shelter. I didn’t like being down there, both because it reminded me of them shoving needles into my brain, that moment when hundreds of voices had poured into me, screaming and chattering, and because I didn’t want to get trapped down there. Shelter could become a tomb if someone got the drop on you.

  “Familiar, yes,” he said sourly. “I remember it wel
l, also. I did not realize it could be so cold here.” He sent another plume of smoke into the air. I heard a commotion from my right, but didn’t bother lifting my automatic from where it sat on the ground next to me. Grisha had brought two dozen grimly silent men and women, all our age—fucking old—and all wearing the plain gray jumpsuit that was kind of an SPS uniform, but I’d come to recognize Marko’s thunderous entrances into any situation; if he didn’t have a knack for tech and a kind of unquestioning obedience I admired, he would have been nothing but a lethal weak link in any operation.

  “But it is good choice,” Grisha went on, studying the coal of his cigarette, which inspired me to finally light mine. “Defensible. Wall still in place, mostly, which is both good and bad—masks approach but gives us protection from long-range attacks. Wide open so we can keep watch and no one can sneak up on us. Underground bunker that has proven to withstand aerial assault, plus it gives us movement under the ground.” He nodded. “With the tech we have wired, and the sun that never fails us out here, we are in best possible position.” He snorted. “Except for not being here, best possible position.”

  Marko lumbered up to us, bundled up in several layers of clothes. His beard and hair were growing back nicely, and at a startling rate. The man was like the God of Hair. He tossed a pack of cards into my lap, their >

  He’d asked us the same question every night for a week. “I’ve still got about five million yen in dormant accounts,” I offered.

  Grisha snorted. “Five million digital yen is worth as much as this sand here. We might as well play for sand.”

  “You’re just pissed you don’t have any yen in dormant accounts,” I said mildly, sucking in smoke. I couldn’t remember how the old cigarettes, the pre-Unification ones, had tasted. These seemed fine, but I thought the old ones had to have been better, even as stale and dry as they’d been. “This is just grousing.”

  Grisha nodded. “We play to see who digs the new shithole,” he said amiably.

  “Fuck,” Marko muttered, sitting down. He glanced at the crate next to me and made a face. “Why not just hand me the shovel, then? I never fucking win.”

  Grisha leaned over and placed a hand on Marko’s shoulder, his face serious. “You do not wish to be pitied, Mr. Marko. If we let you win, we would not respect you.”

  “Digging shitholes, on the other hand,” I said immediately, “is a sign that we cannot possibly respect you more.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then Grisha solemnly picked up the cards and began shuffling them. I tried to pinpoint the odd feeling I had—peaceful, but amped up, like I was jonesed about something and perfectly happy to do it. Like I knew, for the first time in forever, exactly what I was doing and how it would all end up. Me dead, certainly—but that was, for once, part of the plan. Nothing bothered me, and I didn’t even want to twist Marko’s nose. I liked Grisha; I even liked Marko. I was fucking happy.

  “How do you know, Avery?” Grisha said, frowning down at the cards in his hands. “How do you know he will come? And how do you know he will not just wait until we are dead?”

  I shrugged, flicking the stub of cigarette out into the desert. “He can’t stand to think I’ve got him, a version of him. His mind. It’s driving him crazy, because I’m not supposed to win on any level. You can’t beat Canny Orel. It’s not allowed. And I’ve got him—his thoughts, his memories. He can’t risk us digging in there, finding out his secrets. And he won’t wait because he’s been a fucking god for only a few months. He’s not used to being forever, and waiting for us to die is just too fucking long to wait.”

  Grisha nodded, then glanced over at the crate. “What do you say, little head?”

  We all glanced over at Mara’s head, wires snaking from her neck into a humming black box Grisha had produced, its power meter glowing a pale green in the darkness. It appeared to be asleep, eyes shut, mouth slightly open, but as we looked it popped one eye open and flashed it around at us.

  “Och, you bet your ass I’m comin’,” Orel said. “And sooner rather than later.”

  XXXIV

  UNCOMFORTABLY CLOSE, AND THEN GONE. USUALLY DEAD.

  The sun hadn’t changed. The wind was freezing, but the sun was hot, though the overall temperature wasn’t nearly what I remembered. I’d been in Chengara only a short time; I must have missed the winter out here, which was almost fucking pleasant.

  Grisha didn’t agree. For about the thousandth time he straightened up from where he’d been sweating and wheezing over a tiny black box he’d half buried in the sand, and squinted up at the sun, cigarette dangling from his lower lip. “Fucking sun,” he groused.

  I rubbed my damp head, the rough fuzz of hair warm to the touch. “We could be underground in the shadows, but you insisted we had to walk the perimeter and check the security systems.” I scanned the flat, almost featureless horizon. Spread out around the old prison were small groups of Grisha’s people, all of them huddled over similar spots, fussing with wires and boxes. “What is this shit, anyway?”

  “Motion sensors,” he grunted, leaning down again. “Self-charging, though the cells are getting saturated and only hold a three-fourth charge at best. There are not many of these types of cells left.”

  I nodded absently. “You think motion sensors will keep Orel out?”

  “No, Avery, I think they will warn us when he arrives. That is all.” He flicked open a tiny little handheld that began buzzing and chirping as he passed it over the box. “Unless you are a fan of having your throat slit in the night.”

  I shrugged, letting my eyes roam the bright, cold landscape. “Not usually, but there have been times when it probably wasn’t the most horrifying option.”

  He snorted. “Of course, we are still going to be dealing with a… creature that can affect objects with its mind, dominate your will, Travel into your body, and shoot at you. I have brought as many Psionic-related security devices as I could, but we have no way of effectively fighting Orel, if he does come.”

  I nodded. “He’s coming.”

  He snorted again, and then paused. “Avery,” he said, and I looked down at him. “Do not tell Mr. Marko this. He is terrified as it is.” He looked away suddenly. “I would… protect him. If it were possible.”

  I studied Grisha. I’d never considered anything personal about him; partly because the time I’d spent with him had generally been bullet riddled and terrifying, and partly because it had never occurred to me that there was anything personal about Grisha. He was a machine.

  After a moment, I nodded, grinning and looking away again. I wondered if I shouldn’t cut Marko loose, give him a dozen N-tabs and a canteen and send him on his way. He’d been useful during the trip and getting us set up at the prison, but keeping him around now seemed fucking cruel. Marko had never actively tried to fuck with me, and I couldn’t hold his general air of physical incompetence against him Besides, Marko and Grisha were the closest things to friends I had left.

  I wondered about Adora, what she was up to. We’d been cooped up in a ship’s belly for weeks, in the dark, our noses up each other’s ass, and then she was gone. It seemed as if everyone I’d known was like that—there for a while, uncomfortably close, and then gone. Usually dead.

  Something on the edge of the world caught my eye. My augments, wheezing and chugging, zoomed my vision as much as they could manage, and I stood there staring out into the desert for a while.

  “I don’t think we’re gonna need this shit, Grish.”

  Grisha cursed unintelligibly, all consonants and spit. “And why is that, Avery? Has Orel the power to dissolve into mist now?” He sighed. “I would not be surprised, honestly.”

  “Nope,” I said, pointing at the tiny dots approaching from the distance. “Someone’s coming.”

  “You’ve got a fucking organization,” Marko said. “You’ve got people. Why do we have, like, a dozen fucking people in the middle of fucking nowhere? We should have a battalion here.”

  “All that woul
d be is ammunition for Orel,” Grisha said testily. “He had dozens, hundreds Pushed simultaneously in Split. If we had a battalion here, it would quickly turn into the Fighting Orels.” He shook his head. “We tried it the way the cops wanted, and it did not work. This is our way.”

  I snorted. “My way is usually me tricked into committing suicide. I didn’t know there was another way.”

  We were watching the group approaching, about a dozen people in long black coats and sober suits that must have been hot in the sun despite the cool air. They were walking, and since there was no indication otherwise I was assuming that they’d walked across the fucking desert. If that was true, chances were they were going to drop dead the second they stopped walking, so I chose not to worry too much about them.

  “What about us?” Marko demanded. “Won’t Orel just control us?”

  “You, yes,” Grisha said, smiling faintly. “Avery’s brain is damaged beyond use. My own brain is made of steel.”

  I turned and scanned our little camp one last time. Grisha’s mopes stood directly behind us in a ragged line, looking tired and slightly pissed off, their single-action rifles slung over their shoulders. We’d disconnected the avatar head and hidden it away; we didn’t need Orel shouting things at inappropriate moments, and I didn’t need people knowing more about me and my situation than necessary. Though I suspected that people locating you in the middle of a fucking desert, on foot, indicated that your personal security measures were, perhaps, not quite up to snuff.

  I watched them walking from under my own eyebrows, the sun making everything white and filled with glare. We hadn’t been idle. These were definitely Spooks coming toward us—no one else had such consistent and terrible fashion sense, and no one else walked around lookin like a dozen brothers and sisters of exactly the same fucking age. Lucky for us we’d been working hard to defend the camp from a Psionic. I tapped the switch plate under my foot lightly, making sure I was positioned correctly, and lifted one hand to shade my eyes as I checked their distance, scanning the ground for my reference point, an old ammo locker the SSF had left behind, a well-preserved green tub once filled with shredder rounds.