Book Read Free

Men and Machines II

Page 4

by Charlie Nash


  He can’t hear anything below, can’t hear anything except his ragged breath, and the thoughts panic helpfully brings. Things like, you’re fucked buddy. Then, the mental equivalent of a slow-hand clap. Well, fuck that.

  He reaches six levels, the access panel a square of light in the dark wall. He doesn’t want to do this twice, so he hangs on his hands, abs screaming, and kicks with both feet. The crummy bathroom plasterboard ruptures like a clown’s cream pie, and next moment he’s through into the tiled space, shedding white dust like an old-time steam-train.

  Around the corner is the pedbridge, and freedom. He can replace the GFs, replace the Webz hugger. Easy.

  But around the corner is a bunch of cops, and a barricade. And Thumper suddenly realizes: this is how it is all over the building. Every pedbridge. She told them well.

  It’s at that moment he knows what he should have done. He should have gone to ground, down to the street level where the city is meaner than the cops, where Thumper’d be as likely to get killed as get away, at least a fifty-fifty chance.

  And he’s thinking that still when they cuff him and cart him away.

  They take him to the cophouse, another multistory with bright, white cells and bright, white teeth in the interviewer’s mouth.

  “Name?” says the cop, pen paused above his tab-form. He’s got a young head of hair and an old-worn look of a man who only works for the money.

  Thumper just grins at him.

  “Like that, is it?” says the guy. “Fine.”

  So, the cop scans his biometrics and punches the scanner card into the terminal. Five seconds later, he frowns, just as Thumper’s expecting. “Identity cloaking is a very serious offense,” says the cop.

  Thumper knows where it goes from here, and his mind is blazing. If he was in the Webz, he’d be better equipped. Escape is pure software. But the hard reality of bricks and mortar is different. He’s got to draw deeper in his history. He turns to the watching camera in the corner. “I would like to speak to my lawyer,” he says carefully.

  The cop rises wearily, and pushes across the desk-mounted tab-phone. Thumper tries not to get too excited. He has to be clear to code this one. But he knows; he can see it all. The tab-phone runs on the central system, so he has a way in. The cameras run on it too. He can jam them all. And the sprinklers—now there’s an idea—their deluge valves are system-controlled too. He learnt about that when planning the FarmCorp job. So to buy time, to cover the fact he’s opened a command line on the tab-phone, he calls the only person he knows with an untraceable, iron-clad security wall: José.

  “Hey,” he says, as the call goes through. Hey, the greeting that means I’m in trouble.

  “Hey,” returns José. “That agri fault-finder get you after all?”

  “I’m in a coptower,” he says.

  “You’re not seriously asking—”

  “No, nothing like that. Just needing a little time,” he says. Keep talking, don’t you get it?

  A pause. A sigh. “Was she worth it?”

  The question punches through Thumper’s concentration like a ballistic round. If Tak’s found the job he set at FarmCorp, she’s in some serious trouble. “Need your help with that, too,” Thumper says. Then he makes it happen. Execute. Lights go out. Execute. A rush of water. His fingers slip.

  “What the fuck’s that noise?” says José.

  “Gotta go,” says Thumper, grabbing the bioscan card.

  Tak hears about it in the Scram terminal, just before she escapes to the Arizona corn belt. She watches the wet cops fending off desperate, hungry journos and freelance clip-posters. She sees the embarrassment in their tight-drawn mouths. Suspect escaped. A smile lifts her lips, even as she’s shitted they lost him. She’s won in the end; found the sabotage before it took them down, stayed employed. But her smile is mixed. It’s part admiration. Part intrigue. Part wanting to know if she could do it again.

  So, she wonders what’s waiting in Arizona. Knowing he’s still in the world.

  The Message

  He had once been more than just brother.

  Siah had been son, cousin. Even father. Then had ruined each and all, kinships become ghosts, other selves. But brother … he’d counted on that to his end. Now he wondered if it counted at all.

  His remaining sister held the precious paper for him to take, its edges already wrinkled, its tip shaking in her grasp. Even on his knees to remind him of her station, his lip wanted to curl; he hesitated just to slight her. Seer or no, this message was a mistake, one she made for them all. But she stared him down, that knowing look, the one that said she knew his will to disobey her.

  “Go, brother.”

  Her command was law. Even when it sent him into the wastes at night, where he could become Drel-hunted, or fall in a sewer crevasse, or be killed by the enemy watch. So he left her in a puddle of murmuring voices and made a show of leaving, dutiful brother, messenger into the dangerous night.

  As he went down the feet-tracked hall, his vision fuzzied as it did whenever he left her. The carpet, worn to its under-threads, smudged whole again. Walls, peeling and bloomed with mildew, blurred uniform gray. Multiverse-many, he saw them all, and all but one was probabilistic uncertainty. Quantum vision, a cursed thing. And he knew he could betray himself at any moment; when his gaze flickered just so, his propensity for fuck-ups. He coughed; let his eyelids droop.

  The other hunters huddled in the battery room, by the stacked acid barrels with their tangled wire coat. The grubby maps in their fists were a gray mass, and a scavenged bulb shed a turbulent glow. Siah kept his gaze down, squint in place as they gathered round. No point getting killed now. But their relief was his irritation. None would go with him, none would offer, such were these men. Hunters, not brothers.

  “Thank gods it’s over.”

  “Will you take the ninety-six?”

  “Watch saw deer in the hollow, might be Drels there too.”

  “None of the motors are running.” This one was an apology.

  Siah let them talk while they proffered arms. He strapped a knife at his thigh, and another blade in the hollow of his back; stuffed a revolver in his belt. Two rounds; better than nothing.

  Then he stretched down—somewhat to test his strapping, but mostly to hide his eyes. They hurt as he controlled the flicker; it was strong, an unleashed animal after being tempered by his sister so long.

  More reason to get gone.

  He feigned a pensive look, out the window. Formed a plan, but kept it loose and changeable. Down the ninety-six to the message circle, or maybe through the side tracks. If no one’s there, through to the mall ground. Or not. Across the wastes to their Hold. Or maybe that will never be. And all he said to them was, Don’t expect me till morning.

  The Hold inhabitants watched, anxious in the upper windows, as he strode out the heavy doors, double thick and barred, and through the palisade of stakes and sharpened steel. But they closed the doors behind him, and then he was alone.

  Down the hill and over the wall, he crept inside the ruin-infested forest. The moon waned, half-destroyed, like the city that had stood here before the Event: a violation that had smudged out nearly all existence. The lunar glow made skeletons of the new trunks and rimmed craters in the failing rooftops. But all of this was blurred for him, savage beauty softened. Siah hated that he saw this uncertainty, the true nature of the universe; that the world doubted its own future. Siah certainly doubted his. No one else within the Hold saw these things. With his sister’s cancelling presence, he could pretend normalcy. Without her … he was vulnerable. And now he was alone.

  So why had she sent him?

  He fingered the message, a lump in his belt leather, wondering if the whole point was to put him in harm’s way. He was a liability, she risked herself protecting him; but had it come to that? Siah growled, frustrated. His brand of quantum alteration was not hers: he was blind. She was a Seer; ergo, she saw. She was useful. He was a filthy Q-liner, a thing both label and
consequence, spoken of only when the fires burned low and the Hold’s men were drunk and brave. Impulsive quantum universe fuckers. Bad luck bringers. Kill on sight. And no one knew but her.

  Her voice returned to him in a whisper. Go, brother …

  Siah slunk from the forest to the old ninety-six, a grassy corridor littered with rusted car husks. He wove between cover, trying not to think of his destination: the message circle, a bare asphalt ring under a dead thrusting trunk that had enveloped a buckled highway sign in its growth. Rumor said that the circle was where a Q-liner had lost it; that they’d unwritten the fabric of the universe here and reassembled it. Cursed ground. That was why nothing would grow. Siah didn’t believe it; if a Q-liner had really done it, the patch would have been the size of the city.

  He stopped short of the circle, his fist working the message until the flimsy folds softened. He hadn’t expected anyone to be here, and they weren’t. Not after the last time.

  Then, the enemy had organized an exchange. They’d send a junior hunter, one who didn’t get it. That you didn’t plan in this world. Concrete intent got you killed or taken. Drels lurked in the forest wastes, they saw probable opportunity. Siah played with the paper, unfolding and refolding it, one-handed. He re-lived that day. Ten crisp seconds of certainty chute, when his vision had cleared because the outcome was sure.

  That simple news relay became ambush. Drels had killed four and taken three in breathless speed. At the time, Siah had been sure he had not done anything to promote it. He hadn’t lost time; hadn’t made a quantum switch. No reversis, no ripples. Nothing to indicate he’d slipped. But afterwards, doubt had come. He’d stuck closer to his sister, where the multiverse couldn’t tempt him, where the hunters couldn’t reach him—

  He amputated the thought. He was sure. The enemy had faulted; perhaps it had been deliberate, and those who had done it were dead or worse.

  Siah melted from the circle, loathing burning like spirits. He turned his path in a great arc, weaving along the old road, choosing his path from one second to the next. He wanted to damage the enemy, not deliver his sister’s acquiescence. He fingered the blade at his thigh, then the revolver with its two pitiful rounds. It wasn’t enough to damage them, even if he had been feeling suicidal.

  But the wanting to hurt them would not vanish. He rubbed his face as he meandered, thinking of their Hold, deep in the wastes, even as he sought value in the debris. Not much could be found on the numbered routes anymore: brittle grass had consumed the pavement and the car bodies were useless rust and sun-fractured plastic. Once, they had found books, or preserved electronics in the wrecks. But those days were gone.

  A break appeared ahead: an old fuel station, its roof fallen in over the pumps. Siah knew the petroleum had long been salvaged from the ground, but he changed path anyway, pulling out his knife. Maybe he would carve his name with the others on the flaking painted wall, or maybe he would loop around, cutting the long grass as he went.

  He was twenty feet from the wall when the first ripple coursed through his senses. His vision crisped. Instinctively, he dove behind a car husk, a metallic scent flooding his nose and tongue, his heart squeezing. He cursed as he waited. The ripple was a foreshock. Somewhere in time ahead, probabilities had shifted. Something unlikely would occur, and the shift, destroying alternative futures, propagated as a shock in space and time.

  Siah tried to breathe deep and slow, but his panic had legs under it. This was how it started. Always, a precursor. Foreshocks had come before every time he’d made a quantum switch. And every time, it had ended badly. His thoughts scrambled for his sister. Her face, her voice, her calm. He squeezed his knife hilt until his knuckles cracked, making himself be still. Be calm. And wait.

  Two more foreshocks rolled through, but each was less intense. Siah stayed as long as he dared in one place, and nothing more came. Perhaps the probability had diminished. Perhaps, he had beaten it.

  He rose and stepped out.

  His foot had not touched ground when causality upended. Instantly, Siah left the ninety-six. His feet met earth below an old city tower, rising raggedly skywards from its shed concrete skin. Acid burned his throat. Oh no …

  Reality reversed; he was back beside the car husk, striking off towards the city, beginning the journey after it had ended. Reversi. Siah’s mind whirled with a helpless, unvoiceable scream. The tower appeared again, then he was somewhere between: an old mall, and this time walking backwards. Siah collapsed internally; the nausea crested while the anomaly bent his senses. But his body was not in control. Back and forth, the reversi dragged him, accelerating between states like a spun coin at momentum’s end. The sky ripped. Then Siah saw the towers as they had been before the Event: smooth columns lit from within. These were ghosts of past futures. Impossibilities for this world.

  Then abruptly, it ended.

  The reversi dumped Siah by the mall ruins, their familiar, vine-clad walls blocking out a chunk of night sky. He tripped backwards on a broken pavement and fell on his side, barely missing a great sinkhole, his insides a mess of sensory overload, guilt and fear. He rocked, his watering eyes finding the blurry moon. It had barely moved, though the journey to the mall on foot was at least an hour. Reversi.

  Fuck.

  In a great heave, he emptied his stomach over the sinkhole’s edge, the splash far below. He rolled on his back, holding out his hand to check the shakes. Oh, gods, had he unwritten? Memories surged forward.

  He’d surfaced like this once and found the room on fire. It had been the cold dead heart of winter, they’d lived in a salvaged house, with rotten boards like sponges and icy damp inside everything. He’d been dreaming, shivering, wishing it warm. There’d been a pain in his head; he’d woken in the fire, his body convulsing in odd staccato rhythm. His sister had pulled him outside, but their parents had been a floor above. Siah had stood with her, shaking, as the improbable fire melted ice to feed itself, burned sodden boards like no fire should. And finally, he’d seen the fire rings, expanding to the horizon like pond ripples. And the fire was burning snow.

  Siah gripped his wrist. His hand kept shaking, but no patterns emerged. Just the regular terrified shakes. It wasn’t him, not this time. Reversis happened, especially near the old city; everyone knew that. Some of the kids thought it was fun. It scared Siah shitless.

  So, it took time to get level. Slowly, he creaked to sitting, his body aching as if he’d been fighting all day. His stomach was a hollow pit, the cold bit his cheeks, the world fuzzy and uncertain around him. The great bulk of the mall ruin was ringed with black sinkholes and crevasses, and bordered with a crumbling, cinderblock wall. After a minute, this wreckage momentarily crisped into hard white lines, as if his sister had brushed him by. Aftershock.

  Siah blew out a great breath, and hauled himself together. It was over now. He unfolded the message in his lap, dosing on reality. Yes, it said, in quill-scratched ink, the Seer accepts. He tapped the paper against his chin, knowing what these four words didn’t say. Accepts a man twice her age, just to make the peace. She couldn’t really want that. Accepts another Hold, with all their mouths to feed, and just before winter … she couldn’t abide that. He knew her better.

  So what was she doing?

  Go, brother.

  Slowly, Siah got upright. He crept away from the sinkhole and towards the cinderblock wall. He heard skitter-tink and his vision tightened. Silence, then a soft thuck. Blurry again. A pebble into a sinkhole.

  Factors coalesced in Siah’s thoughts. This message, the reversi … they bothered him now. This world connected threads you didn’t want connected. He frowned and paced, the paper between his fingers.

  Go, brother.

  She’d had that look in her eye. The one that said she knew what she was doing. She knew he hated peace at this price, that she knew he might disobey … yet, she had sent him.

  Siah refolded the note. Did she just expect him to walk into the enemy Hold and hand it over, like he was the defeated?
Compromise them all before winter? To look the enemy leader right in the eye and—

  Siah stopped, a chill gathering between his ribs. Look the enemy right in the eye. She had made him a messenger. And a messenger could walk right in. He could come before the enemy leader, easily within strike range.

  She had given him a way in.

  Siah stuffed the note back in his leathers and scanned the dark wastes, grim but satisfied he had worked it out. Another skitter-thuck dyad echoed from the mall, chunks breaking loose from the roof. Siah counted it, and his first problem. His blades and revolver would be no good; the enemy would disarm him at their gate.

  He needed a concealable weapon.

  He prowled the derelict mallground, intent on a solution, even from this long-since-looted place. He checked behind rubble piles, thick with white bird shit, avoiding the dark corners where wild scents warned him of bear dens. But it was something simple that made him stop.

  One wall was soot-splashed from an old fire, and when the breeze lifted his hair, he smelt char, and he remembered. In the first Hold war, before he was of age, the hunters had tapped fuel from underground tanks and stirred it to jelly with white plastic foam. The Hold’s Old Man had shown them how.

  The stuff had made Siah dizzy, and he’d still been high when they’d loosed it on the enemy. The stuff had burned like unholy fire, scaring him with memories of that icy cabin he told no one about. When they were done, the forest wastes and the enemy had burned to a black pock in the trees.

  Siah fingered his water flask. He knew where to look for petroleum; the flask would carry enough charge for the enemy Hold.

  He skirted a crevasse, where the pavement had fallen into the underground parking lot, and headed for the mall building. This site had been scavenged over and over, but he could try to find entry into the lot. Sometimes, in the dark, dry corners you could get lucky: find a car with a plastic fuel tank. And if not, he counted a half-dozen other sites to try. He mapped them out in his head, tracing the shortest route, making a plan, confident he could have what he needed by morning.

 

‹ Prev