by Ren Warom
This close to her, with Emblem alive within him, he can finally see what she is. Avi after all. Josef’s avi. But not always his. Running through her in streams, the taste of Kamilla, never entirely forgotten. Stronger than Josef, more able, until she got sick. Until they made her sick, and now Josef too. And before them? Not avi at all. Intelligence. Pure calculation built from code and so strong, so full of intent they were afraid of it, tried to lasso it with human thought, human intent. And all it did was give her different ways to think. Different ways to outthink them. Are the other Queens like her? Like this?
He turns his attention back to them and finds them the same, but lesser. Later models, designed to corral her, and incapable of doing so. She made them part of her gestalt. Fine filaments link them all together, linking them to Josef’s Queen and, through her, to Josef. Parasites piggybacking his drive. He’s been trying to hold them back. Relying on Emblem to keep them in check, hoping it would hold until they could find a way to make it stronger, whilst suffering the pressure of them inside him.
And how long did Kamilla hold them back before him? Unthinkable that this struggle has gone on in such secrecy, that they’ve managed to keep it between them. Then again, it’s easy to make people believe what you want them to when you have access to their minds through something like Slip. How many times will they have subtly rewritten the truth that way?
The Queen bends down, watching him travel in the shoot, suffocating him with her presence. He wants nothing more than to be wherever she can’t touch him. The hunger in her gaze horrifies him.
Shock!
Petrie. Shock nearly drops to the floor, relief stealing what little strength he has. Tries to keep himself from showing elation, so the Queen can’t pick up on it. Is Volk there?
Yeah, we lost maybe half of our people though.
Damn, I’m sorry.
Part and parcel. We’re on the top floor with Josef. He’s on the way out. Says the Queens are beyond his control anyway. What do we do? How can we help you?
How can they help him? He wracks his brain, trying and failing to come up with any solutions.
I don’t know.
Volk interrupts with her usual impatience, and something else. Something he’s never heard from her. Excitement.
Shock, the Queens are avis. Well, the Alpha is, sort of, and the others resonate that way through her.
Yeah, I know. How’d you guess?
Josef told me. I have an idea.
The shoot reaches ground level. Shock looks out onto a chaotic mass of people trying to run from things so giant there’s literally no way outrun them. Trying to escape drones intent upon killing everything in their path. There’s blood everywhere, on everyone, people falling down in the street, their avis falling in Slip all around him, some writhing as if fighting death with everything they have, others unfurling to bytes as they go. A confetti of gold.
He sends Shark after the drones, to turn them off, smiles viciously as they too begin to drop from the sky, silver amongst the gold. There are too many for Shark to deal with alone, but it won’t tire. It’ll keep on until they’re all gone. The Queens will remain though, and he already knows they have no good intentions for the Gung.
Tell me.
I brought a weapon with me. A drug called Disconnect. You can guess what it does, the effect it would have. I was going to use it on you. Make sure the Queens could never reach Emblem.
This is news. Not so long ago it would have been enough to end his part in this endeavour, no matter how important. But he understands now. He’d do the same.
What can you do?
Isolate the Queens inside their server, like a giant flash drive.
They’re connected to Josef. Will you use it on him?
On his drive. If I embed it in the section dedicated to Core, with all its separate VA protocols, I can make a prison for them, disconnect them from everything. Then we shut down Core, and they’re gone.
Core is the centre of Slip, Volk. Know what they put there? Our avis. All their information. Shut Core down, and you shut down all the avis.
Silence.
Shit. What can we do? It needs to be Core. It can’t be Hive. Shutting Hive would be catastrophic. Everything would go dark: Gung, hubs, land ships. The world as we know it: gone.
Shock looks around again, at all the people running. At Slip, avis falling gracefully to the seabed. Avis and drives are intertwined. Core might hold all the data for avis, but avis originate from the drive, inextricably linked to each one. Shock contains Emblem, and Emblem freed his avis from Slip. They’re linked only to him now, reintegrated. Three into one. What if he could do that for everyone?
I could bring the avis out of Slip, all of them.
Silence.
You can do that? Something like awe in her voice.
Emblem can, I think.
You think?
If it can’t, we’re screwed huh? Go. Do what you need to.
Okay. She pauses. Shock, when I start to do this, I think they’ll come for you. Try to force their way in. Don’t let them. If they manage to take over from your avis, then I’ll have to use your drive for this, and I will not hesitate, because they cannot stay out, they cannot control us. Understand?
Shock closes his eyes. Yeah. I understand.
IRL he limps to the courtyard, between glistening sculptures, and with Puss in Slip he travels to Core, amazed at how easy it is now, the VA parting before him as if he’s a god. He tries to figure out how to recreate what happened to him without quite knowing how Emblem did it. Working blind. Struggling against Emblem until he realizes Emblem is the part of him that knows how to do this. So he leaves it to that part of himself, concentrating on keeping the physical self out of drone fire, hidden from anyone in the crowd who might have followed him to Heights.
Turns out he’s not so great at hiding now he’s no longer a Haunt. Yang yells his name. Concealed behind sculptures, behind cars, behind anything solid enough to protect them, are his troops, firing at drones alongside the Dengway Mafia and the Grey Cartel, brought together by fear and circumstance. Yang yells again, and they cease firing. Turn their guns on Shock.
“Where can you go?” Yang calls out as Shock continues walking. “You’re ours.”
Shock doesn’t slow. Doesn’t even acknowledge them. They won’t shoot him, he’s too valuable, and Emblem’s almost done.
Any. Second. Now.
“Come along, Shock, have some dignity,” Yang calls out, almost friendly. He thinks he’s won. They all do. In a way they have. They just don’t know it yet.
Emblem sighs in his body, in his cells. Not a sound of satisfaction. This sigh is like something once sealed tight finally opening, that breath of release when the locks are breached and the doors swing wide. A lock becomes a key. So much more than Breaker and Josef meant for Emblem to become. Shock stops to watch, seeing in the activity of Slip how breath has paused. None of the avis around him seem to know what to do. The door is open, and they don’t understand that they’re free.
The exodus begins unexpectedly, with a woman hiding in the shadow of liquid-metal sculptures trapped in plas-glass, her arms clasped to her chest like armour. Her eyes tune out. Go blank. She grabs her head, fingers tensed into her skull. Broken-throated screams erupt from her like vomit and in the depths of her eyes, gold lights begin to swirl, particles to form, bursting like rays of sunlight to illuminate the sculptures, turn liquid metal into liquid light.
From her, it’s a knock-on effect. Human dominoes. Hands rise to skulls, eyes burst golden beams like search lights across the sky and, from here to the city limits and beyond, in the hubs and on the land ships, avis weave themselves into being. Millions upon millions of avis threading from Slip to RL. Disappearing from one place to the other like sand through the neck of an hourglass, glistening as they go. Fucking hell but it’s beautiful. Shock’s arrested by the sight. Stolen. Unable to move as street becomes Slip. Becomes oceanarium. Alive with golden sea life.
Eels dart between legs; ponderous dugongs graze the traffic; schools of tuna dance between streetlights; dolphins dive across the roofs of cars; seals frolic, chasing each other through the air. Everywhere Shock looks are hammerheads, squid, narwhals, lionfish, sunfish, anglerfish, every manner of marine life, real or imagined, from the tiniest shrimp to the impossibly huge pod of great golden humpbacks gliding down the centre of the Strand, silent and majestic as ocean liners. They open their mouths and mournful song echoes from glass and steel. Life is everywhere, glistening even without sunlight. Transforming the street, the city, the world, into a goldmine no one can touch.
Momentarily confused by the chaos, the escape of the avis, the drones ceased fire. Now they begin again, pushed by the Queens to destroy this rich centre of the Gung. But other avis, looking from Slip through human eyes, have already seen what Shark’s been doing, and they join him in their hundreds, their thousands, taking down every drone they touch. Emptying the sky, transforming silver flashes to soaring flocks of gold.
Breathing in deep, Shock begins to limp forward again, aware there’s nowhere he can go to hide, but determined not to be caught waiting. Yang runs toward him, lifting his gun, his face full of the same delirium, the same confusion Shock remembers from when his avis first came out of Slip. Only this morning. Still only this morning. How far he’s come.
Yang’s avi is a moray eel, poking out from under his arm; its face belligerent even in repose. Resting bitch face. Figures.
“Stop,” Yang demands, his gun trembling. “What’ve you done?”
“Saved you,” Shock says, still walking. “We have to stop the Queens. We’re going to lock them in Core, shut it down. Your avi was in there. You want it in there when that happens? Tell me you could survive it. Go on. Lie to me.”
Yang can’t seem to find words. His first instinct will be to lie, and there’s no way to do it. No words to find that will fit a lie that works. Shock watches as realization follows intent across Yang’s face. As his arm, catching up with thought as the body often does—in slow motion, a beat behind—lowers toward the ground.
“Go,” he says. “Get the hell out of here.”
It happens then, right in front of Yang. The Queens fall on Shock’s mind. Dig in, huge and irresistible; their hunger so potent he vomits blood. He falls to the ground on hands and knees, his brain under siege. For the second time he hears Puss scream, feels Shark thrashing in pain as the Queens try to tear them loose, to destroy them, and Shock’s screaming too. Pure agony. Screaming, retching, and fighting with everything he’s got to hold his drive shut, keep them out. Screaming internally at Emblem to hold him together, to lock him tight.
If the Queens get in, if even one of them gains a foothold, he’ll lose his avis, himself, and in this moment, understanding that, he finally begins to comprehend how little of himself he knew. How much of him was hidden in them. How much he let them hide from him, because he couldn’t bear to see it. Whole reams of self locked safely within them and about to be ripped away. He wants to see it, to learn himself, to learn to live with himself. It’s not too late. It can’t be.
Volk yells into his mind. Hold on, Shock! Just hold on in there. I’m going as fast as I can.
He could tell her he’s trying. He is. But the Queens are too strong. He can’t fight them like this. Has to find another way, a way to be equal to them somehow. An advantage. He can only think of one, and it fills him with as much dismay as hope. Shock looks into Slip for that thing Li left behind when she died. The Kraken. He finds it where it was, coiled up tight, and all as huge, all as revolting.
He picks up the strand of connection he broke, and links it to his drive. It’s vile to touch even when no longer active, sending ice through every vein, every neurone. Li was all kinds of wrong, and her thoughts, her impulses infect this mass of suckered flesh all through, their corruption a stench he can’t ignore. Bracing himself, he reawakens it, puking again as the filth of it flows through him.
Awake, aware, alive once more, and barely under his control, the Kraken explodes from Shock’s eyes in soaring leaps of gold, sending Yang and the men around him running. Hungry, eager to destroy, it tries to break loose, go where it wants, to anything smaller, anything weaker, Puss and Shark included. Shock hauls it back, his mind creaking under the strain as he corrals to his control, driving it upward toward the Queens. As it rises, its tentacles fill the sky: huge fleshy gold appendages covered in suckers the size of craters. It’s a city hub of coiled and urgent flesh on the hunt.
Eager to hurt whatever it can, denied easy pickings, the Kraken launches at Josef’s Queen, the first, the strongest, flowing through the air to latch onto her body, tangle around her huge limbs. Her silence is terrifying, denotes a fierce will, a determination outstripping even the very size of her. She tries to hold on to the Heights, but the Kraken is too strong, and she topples. Anticipating impact, Shock can only stare, stunned, as she and the Kraken hit the ground together, two gargantua locked into warfare that affects only themselves, each other. It doesn’t seem possible.
The Kraken tears at her with relish, pulling one of her legs clean off. Then another. As they break loose, their golden threads untangle, dispersing into the air like mist. Snapping its beak forward, it gouges out one of her eyes, tears off a feeler. She’s keening now. Her voice shaking the air as her body could not shake the ground. Shock’s unable to think, to see. Everything is her pain, her agony, her outrage. It reaches out, distracts the other Queens from trying to crack his drive.
They rush to her side, grabbing the Kraken’s tentacles with their incisors. Obscuring even that great tentacled bulk with their vast bodies, they rip chunks from its thrashing limbs, its golden head. Shock’s never felt pain like it. Attaching it to him, he’s linked it to his neural system, and the agony prostrates him. He thinks he might have pissed himself.
And the Queens are winning, the Kraken dying, dissipating into mist. In a few seconds it’ll be gone for good, and if Shock doesn’t break the connection, let it go, it’ll take him with it. By the time he remembers, he’s too weak, can already feel himself fading away. Puss tries to help but she’s too weak herself, too hurt by the Queens.
Shock. I have them.
Volk’s voice barely registers. Shock’s staring at the remnants of the Kraken, watching as his last moments fade into fragments of mist and dissipate. Too broken to fight. Too lost to care. It’s Shark that saves him, saves Puss, powering in from nowhere to savage the fine thread between Shock and the Kraken, rending it apart as the final pieces of that creature dissolve. With nothing to distract them, and aware of Volk’s meddling now, the Queens turn on Shock as one, ploughing their minds into his.
Helpless in the wake of their attack on the Kraken, the harm it caused him, Shock has no means to resist. No will to hold against theirs. They hit like a hurricane, tearing his mind apart, tearing Shark’s connection from him as if it were nothing. As if it were meaningless. Shark’s swimming toward him, desperately trying to reach him when the connection goes. It stutters mid-air, flailing, and mandibles close around it, shattering it to motes of gold. Crying out, Shock reaches for Shark, for everything that’s gone with it, atomized into thin air. The grief is immeasurable. All-consuming.
He holds on to Puss for dear life, knowing she’s next and then he’ll be nothing, an empty slave, the Queens’ plaything, but it never happens. They’re gone. Their weight out of his mind, leaving it too light, light enough to float away, their bodies no longer devouring the skyline, leaving nothing but vast ’scrapers to dominate in their stead, crowding out his vision.
Shock hears the Queens screaming fury. Is it them? He can’t tell if the sound is real or imagined as, through Emblem, he watches Core sputter and go dark. Cease to exist. There’s still Slip, everywhere, as far as his eye can see, further, and the life outside of Slip, but at the centre… only darkness. It has swallowed them whole. Swallowed him.
Laying his head on the ground, Shock’s too
grief-stricken to cry. The darkness within is all but absolute; the part that was once Shark now lies dead. Empty. He’s a fractal, core reflecting core reflecting emptiness into infinity. How will he bear it? He can’t. If Puss weren’t here, her tentacles laid across his back, her head rested on his, he’d die right now. Just let go. It would be so simple.
Shock!
Volk. He can hardly speak, even via IM.
Are you okay?
Stupid question.
Shark, he says, then his throat strangles. Paralyzes. He can’t say it. Can’t speak any more. What use are words? What use is he?
I’m so sorry, she says. She means it. It doesn’t help. Hold on, we’ll be there in a minute. We’re coming. Just hold on.
Nothing she says registers. Shock wants to lie on the ground forever. Be absorbed into it. Disappear. Atomize like Shark and join it wherever it’s gone. But the gold gleam of Puss’s head, so close to his, illuminates his lids; turns them into cathedral windows, flooding light and colour into echoing emptiness.
He stares at the red tracing of capillaries, all of them connected, and realizes he’s not the only one who’s lost someone. He’s not the only one hurting. Puss is broken too. Hurt by Li, by the Queens, by Shark’s loss. Hurt by his removal in grief. More vulnerable than ever, even though she’s partially back in Slip. Pushing himself up, Shock gets to his feet. His body is battered, his mind worse, but he can move. He can find them a place to go. He’s good at hiding. Or at least, he used to be.
Come on, he says, and waits for her to slide up his leg to her favourite spot on his torso. It doesn’t feel like she’s clinging to him any more. It feels like they’re clinging to one another.
Curling an arm beneath her, around the sharp flinch of broken ribs, he limps off down a street that looks more like an ocean. Floating at last, but all wrong, like seaweed on the tide, directionless and heartbroken. He thinks of Sendai. Hallucinogenic oblivion. Birds singing in the trees. What was that dream he had of them falling silent one by one and dropping to the earth? That Shock, that dream of Sendai, has fallen silent at last. Dropped to the earth.