LoneFire

by Stephen Deas

  ‘Well, take a look around. There’s an ambulance outside.’

  ‘Do what you like, but I’m out of here unless you get the bomb squad.’

  I hear her sigh. Then:‘Whatever you say. I’ll be with you in a minute.’

  She’s gone. I ought to leave and wait outside but my curiosity has the better of me. The bedroom is sparse, just this bed and a table with a glass of water. I turn the filters down low, let the sounds wash over me. Don’t know what I’m expecting to hear– bombs haven’t ticked for centuries. But all I pick up is a heartbeat. Pike’s, slow and heavy.

  Nothing under the bed. No bulges in the mattress. Nothing taped to the underside of the table. I’m not touching Pike’s turban but there are no scars on the rest of him that might indicate unnecessary and bomb-related surgery. No bombs that I can see at all, but I’m still not moving him.

  I go outside. Jez is there with Su. Toni and Andreas are down in the alley, still filming. I duck out of sight. No wish to have my face plastered across the news. Paranoia, in case the Bratstva spot it and come looking again.

  ‘Where’s Doyle?’ I ask.

  ‘On her way to hospital,’ says Jez.‘Guinness put some rounds into her.’

  ‘Hospital or factory?’ I remember watching her leap over the railing. Three floors up and thinking nothing of it. Jester would have done the same. I wonder just how similar they are. At least she bleeds. Never saw Jester bleed.

  The bomb squad come and go. The flat is pronounced clean, Pike’s clean, Guinness is clean, everybody’s fucking clean and I’m still not going near any of them if I can help it. Toni and Andreas film and report as the paramedics from the ambulance stretcher Dr. Pike away. Su and I stay out of the way while Jez gives an interview, spinning some bullshit story about ransom demands. No, the lone terrorist responsible for the kidnapping would not be able to stand trial on account of being dead, and no, the attack was not related in any way to the recent spate of bombings and mishaps that have dogged both Cestus and the Longthorne family, and no, she wouldn’t like to comment any further on those. I see from the look she’s giving that Toni is pushing her luck.

  ‘Please go with Doctor Pike to the hospital,’ says Su.

  ‘Pardon? Why?’

  ‘Hospital security is good. Ambulance security is not so good. Doyle not being here, we must make best use of what’s left over.’

  I nod. That’s what I am. A leftover. Thanks.‘What about the seek and destroy team?’

  ‘In hospital with the other terrorist. Did a good job, got the woman alive. Unlike a person here who put most of a Tesla clip into a terrorist’s chest.’

  So I did hit him after all. I laugh and shake my head.‘I’m not a gunman. I’m a survivor. Are you sure the bomb squad put Pike through a scanner?’

  Su tries to look down her nose at me.‘Yes, yes, very sure. So please go with Doctor Pike.’

  Fuck that, I say. I’m no bodyguard. Never have been. Never will be. Needs a whole wrong kind of mindset, the kind of thinking that has you stand in the way of bullets meant for someone else. But there are other cameras coming, hungry for a scrap of the profit. And I really don’t want my face broadcast across the world and beyond. The back of the ambulance then. I sit there, slumped. Exhausted. Anyone tries to jump us, I probably won’t even notice. Shit. I’d forgotten how this takes it out of me. I wonder if they’ve got any stims I could steal.

  Pike lies there and moans softly, buried under a mound of God knows what cocktail of drugs. Paramedics unwind the foil from his head. Once its off they start on the bandages beneath.

  ‘Fresh scars,’ mutters one of the medics.‘Looks like field surgery to me.’

  ‘Like they tried to get his transponder out,’ says the other.

  ‘God, I hope he’s not a vegetable. Guess it must still be in there– it’s playing merry hell with the E-scan.’

  I snap to attention. We’re pulling into the hospital. One of the medics bangs on the drivers intercom.‘The patient’s stable. Might as well let our passenger out.’ He turns to me and smiles.‘Thanks for coming along. Appreciate the thought.’

  I smile back but something’s bothering me. I get out of the ambulance and start to walk away. The ambulance drives through the gates and into the hospital.

  Fresh scarring. Victor Longthorne had fresh scarring when we snatched him.

  Transponder interfering with the encephalic scanner.

  Is that anything like a bomb scanner?

  Fuck.

  I turn back, start to run, and then everything goes white, so bright it hurts. Something picks me up and hurls me back, way, way back, slams me into something hard and unforgiving. My legs crumple. I ooze to the ground, stunned senseless.

  When I can see again, the hospital is a crater.

  Vishmir, R. ‘A Gemini Gemini Experiment’. United Stars Science, 127, 67 (2298).

  Vishmir again, barely started on his doctorate if I figure my years right. This is just a letter answering an article (by the Gemini AI) that posed the question: An AI can be duplicated exactly, so why not a person? Vishmir proved that an AI built on a mixture of quantum and conventional processors actually CAN’T be duplicated exactly, and that switching off all its quantum uncertainties would reduce Gemini to a state akin to that of a coma. He then hypothesised that, no matter how perfect the equipment, the instantaneous state of a human brain could never be adequately recorded either because behaviours in the region of quantum uncertainty are fundamental to what makes up intelligence of any sort. This argument– Vishmir’s law– neatly sidesteps all those tricky questions about souls and whatnot and is practically enshrined in AI lore these days. There have been some interesting attempts to disprove this theory, none of them particularly successful.

  Twenty-Six – Victor Goes Splat

  A long time ago on a planet far, far away, a man called Charlemagne went looking for a man called Victor. And he found him, too.

  Jester whoops with joy. First time I’ve seen any emotion from him in a long time. Certainly since we started this clusterfuck. Behind us, the helicopter that’s been all over our arse for the last five minutes bounces onto the road and toppling end over end, dashing itself to pieces.

  ‘ Thank fuck for that! Who the fuck were those fuckers?’ shouts Mr Cray.

  I holster my Tesla, then quickly pull it out and drop it on the floor.‘Shit that’s hot!’ Jester shakes his head.‘What do you expect?’

  Moaning from the back seat. Victor.‘Jim, Jim, Jim…’

  ‘Shut the fuck up, arsehole!’

  ‘What do you reckon?’ I ask.‘Was that the Company?’

  ‘Jim, Jim, Jim…’

  Jester twists back.‘Who the fuck is Jim?’

  ‘Jim, Jim, Jim…’

  A sharp sudden movement, a thump. Victor goes quiet.

  ‘I hope you haven’t killed him. That would be just fucking great…’

  I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I don’t know where here is and I don’t know what I’m on. Some Bang Crash Wallop cocktail. My brain has fucked off to God knows where. We send each other postcards while I stare at a white plastic table, scratched and scarred by decades of abuse. I stare because I can’t do anything else.

  Drugs will kill me one day. If that happens then I’ll die happy, thinking of the bullets and the bombs that didn’t.

  I look up. A booth. Dim lighting. I’m in a dingy bar. Dingy is a good word. I run it through my mind, over and over. Dingy, dingy, dingy. I like its taste. I have a bad feeling I’m drooling.

  It’s the sort of bar where everyone knows everyone else, they all come here every day and a guy like me would stick out a mile even if he wasn’t whacked out of his skull. There’s a woman sitting opposite me. She has very wide eyes. Her mouth is open, stuck mid-sentence. She looks very young. Lots of earrings. Something about her clothes and hair isn’t right. I struggle with it for a while until I realise it’s simply that she’s normal. Not some gang kid in uniform, not some designer sex-doll. No
t exactly rich. Frayed at the edges, maybe, but not exactly poor either. An ordinary person. Shit. Don’t see many of those these days. Well, I don’t.

  High plastic walls. Dull brown light above us. My head seems to tilt further and further back of its own accord. I can’t stop it. I stare up at the light, trying to remember how I got here. There was a wall. A cold wall. People. Someone leaning over me, poking and pressing.

  ‘Shock,’ I hear them say. No shit.

  There were people after Pike blew up. They wanted to take me to a hospital. After what happened to the last one, I think maybe I objected. Think maybe I was quite strenuous about not wanting to go. Think maybe I ran off, popped a load of pills, puked and whacked my head into something a couple of times. Nothing like pills to bury a nasty experience good and deep inside…

  ‘M-mister? Are you OK?’

  I try to form a sentence that might make sense, but then the phone inside my head starts off.

  I remember someone screaming. Will you all, please, stop trying to blow me up?! Constantine, where the fuck are you?

  An effort of will and I look down from the sky. Outside the booth is an unformed hazy darkness full of funny shapes that might be people if I stretch my imagination enough. Or maybe they’re furniture. The world doesn’t exist when I’m not looking. My gaze holds things together. Everything else just falls apart. In the corners of my vision I can see it swimming, churning, starting to slip. But I’m on to it. I know its game. Raw chaos frolics rampant wherever I am not. My sight brings order and discipline. I am god. I am order. Maybe that’s all we are. Furniture.

  Where have I heard that before?

  Oh, for crying out loud. Hello? This is the human race calling– is anybody there? I stare at the woman. By looking at her this way, I allow her to exist. I protect her from the formless anarchy. She should be grateful.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  I give her a faraway look, mostly because I don’t have any other looks to give right now.

  She meets my gaze and can’t look away. I feel invisible rods of steel shoot from my eyes and through hers, pinning us together. The steel is grey; even though it’s invisible to me, she can see it.

  Jesus , what the fuck are you on?

  ‘Escape to survive.’ The words come out one at a time in a measured and orderly pace. With such conviction they change the truth to suit them. I think I meant that for me, not for her.

  The woman still stares at me, still can’t look away. I remember now what she was saying. How her life sucked and her job sucked and her parents sucked and her boyfriend sucked and she just wanted to jack it in and start again…

  Why does she tell me these things?

  The question upsets my thinking. The steel rods that bind us together crumble to ashes. The woman gets up to leave. She moves hastily, eager to be gone, scared of me now that I’ve learned to speak. But I see my words have touched her. Perhaps it’s the words she’s running from.

  She’s gone. Back into formless chaos.

  Constantine, for fuck’s sake get a grip!

  I sit bolt upright. Shit, yeah, the phone. Jez?

  Yeah, Jez. Where are you?

  How did Jez get inside my head? I never gave anyone the number to get inside my head. Not that that stops some people.

  You phoned me up, you silly shit. Stoned out of your tiny little mind. You drivelled something incoherent for a few minutes and then passed out. Wasn’t exactly hard to get the number you called from.

  I start to look around at the world outside beyond the comfort and protection of my booth. Blurry cosmic furniture-people move back and forth, slipping in and out of focus like fish under a rippling pond.

  Get up.

  I can do that? Not sure I want to. I like it here. My own private universe. Safe from harm. No exploding people.

  Alright , stay there. I’ll just sit here and do this. A vile screeching noise sandpapers its way through every cell in my head. I’m totally paralysed. Yeah– filters don’t work when I’m already inside you, huh?

  Turn it off! Turn-it-off-turn-it-off-turn-it-off! I’ll get up!

  The noise goes. You better. We don’t have time for this shit.

  Time. Little green digits appear and dance through the ripples. I watch them. They’re kinda cool, steady and sharp-edged stamped onto a writhing world. Almost too real. Late afternoon. I’ve lost six or seven hours.

  I fumble through my pockets. Can’t do jack shit in this state. Somewhere there’ll be some Purge. Never go anywhere without the stuff. Can’t do anything without a clear head…

  My fingers close around something. Wrapping. Thick medical foil. I take it out, peer at it. Red writing stamped on silver. Hard to read. Alert. Alert would be good. Might help until I find the Purge. Might even help me find the Purge. Would certainly make reading all these tiny words a whole pile easier if I could focus, right? I tear it open, suck on the capsule inside. It has a chalky taste…

  No warning. The world slams into shape, so tight and hard and clear it hurts. Blur and haze turn to knife edge lines that cut my eyes. I screw them shut. It hurts too much to look at anything now. Edges. Sharp. Too much contrast.

  Slow clapping inside my head. Bravo.

  Fuck off.

  Dammit, where’s the Purge? I find another tablet. I try to look at it, but the writing sears my brain and I can’t read. I open it. Sniff it. No idea what it is. I take it anyway.

  More Alert. Bugger. I can hear my heartbeat now, make out the thread of every conversation in the bar, deafening, a paralysing confusion until I turn the filters way, way down and block everything out.

  Deaf as well as blind. Sometimes I can’t figure you at all. Half the time I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have on my team, the other half I wonder how they ever let you out to contaminate the gene pool.

  This from a dead person.

  No, that’s Ortov.

  Fuck it. No point in messing around. I empty my coat of everything and pop the lot. Something must be Purge. Better hope so.

  You can be such a pain. Just stay where you are. Keep the line open and I’ll trace you and get a car to pick you up.

  Someone tried to blow me up. Again. What am I, some kind of fucking bomb magnet?

  I know. Look, someone started to go over your place. It’s not safe anymore, so just stay put, OK?

  Amongst the morass of misfiring neurons, something shakes loose.‘Jim, Jim, Jim.’ Victor Longthorne’s last words. Except he wasn’t saying Jim. He was saying Jem.‘Jem, Jem, Gem.’ Gemini.

  Stay put. I can do that.

  Pike, J. H., Stanton, A., Heston, C., et al. ‘Artificial States of Death’. Journal of the McKinley Institute, 33, 71-78 (2324).

  Pike again. To think I only looked him up because you were searching for him. This wibbles on about inducing death-like states and how they are and they aren’t like an actual death state. They never say it but the implication is that there might be a way around Vishmir’s law, that it might be possible to copy someone’s brain perfectly if there was no brain activity because then you could be almost infinitely slow. Like if they were totally dead. Here am I, totally dead, and so’s Pike. Think it’s time I talked to Mr Stanton and Mr Heston.

  Twenty-Seven – Dead Box Quickstep

  Quicksilver. We’d tried to hit the Network sixty-nine tower for the first time and fucked up bad. Never even got close. Stupid mistake and the next thing I know we’re banged up in a holding cell waiting to be exported to a prison asteroid. No way we’re having that. So we jailbreak, almost a hundred of us rushing the security guards. Charlemagne was born the night I killed Devotion, but he came to life there in that cell. Half the suckers he persuaded to rush the guards were refuse, street scum who’d strayed into the wrong place at the wrong time – drunks, junkies, people no one gave a shit about. People they’d let back onto the streets in the morning. But Charlemagne had the voice and they ran for him, charged the Teslas. He got out, Jester and Cray with him, hiding at the rear. Maybe h
alf the rest did, climbing between the bodies of the fallen, slipping on the blood, Charlemagne striding among them, praising their strength, sounding the war-cry for the next socialist revolution. They’d have followed him anywhere, but he really didn’t give a fuck about them, and sure as shit wasn’t having anything to do with a revolution. Not unless it paid.

  So he went to Quicksilver. Hard to remember he and I were the same person now. Doesn’t seem right. Went to Quicksilver with no money, found a hotel, seduced the receptionist into putting us up for a few nights until Network SixtyNine caught up with us. Charlemagne saw them coming, blew the receptionist’s head off and burned the hotel to the ground. Bought us some time. Constantine, the real me, would have called Jez for help, to get us the fuck out of there ages ago, but Charlemagne had made his pact with the Gemini devil by then. A madness is coming, it said. Play your part in it and I will pay you more than you need to live forever in luxury. But to do that you have to get out, get away from Cestus and the Company and the Longthornes and Jezebel Breen. Here’s a big wad of cash.

  That was it. Our deal. Charlemagne didn’t know much back then, thought the Longthornes were just some rich kids he’d never heard of and who happened to blow up from time to time. But he knew cash when he saw it; he thought he knew people, thought he could judge an AI just as well, thought he could screw anyone or anything. So he took the money and ran, dragging Jester and Mr Cray after him with no word of where or why. Right up until Network SixtyNine caught up a second time and Charlemagne left me staring at the sky with a bullet in the back. Charlemagne was a bastard. I won’t be sorry if I never see him again, but I know he’s still with me. I feel him sometimes, crawling and plotting in the dark corners of my mind.

  But what pisses me off most is that he sold our soul to Gemini. And there’s no getting away from it. Charlemagne is me, however much I wish he wasn’t.

  Purge. Fuck. I hate Purge. It’s a total bastard. Usual story– the better it is for you, the worse it feels, tastes, whatever. I can feel it marshalling it’s forces inside my guts. Regiments of complex designer pharmaceuticals. Sergeant-Major Overkill gives them their orders. Clean-up operation. Seek and Destroy and they’re off to work. Precise and disciplined and boy, do they know their job. The special forces of the drug world.