What Have We Done: A Cyberpunk Action Thriller on the edge of LitRPG (When Tomorrow Calls Book 3)

by JT Lawrence

  Mezzanine Puzzle

  Kate’s consciousness is rushing and rushing as if she is being teleported through space and time and her heart is going mad in her chest—even though, looking down, she doesn’t have a chest (or a heart, for that matter)—until she reaches some kind of plateau where it feels as if she’s standing on top of a skyscraper, and then she tumbles—her soul tumbles—back down and into her body. It’s a soft landing, and it smells of rosemary blooms and bright moss.

  A version of her body, anyway, where neither of her arms is broken and her scalp is untouched. She stands up, dusts herself off. She can feel it’s not her real body: can feel that she’s not really standing. It’s like being in a super-realistic dream. How long has it taken her to get here? There’s no way to tell. All she can do is find Silver and get her out as soon as she can.

  Kate’s standing in an overgrown garden, rampant with new buds and tangled vines. Warm, humid air streams into her shocked lungs. No roses in sight, thank the Net. She’s never felt comfortable with them since what happened at the Luminary. The thorns always remind her of Bongi’s betrayal, of Mally’s almost-fatal injury at the hands of Lumin, and it paints her heart cold black. The plants here have the opposite effect: the promise and innocence of bursting blooms; the scent of citrus leaf and Penny Royal and apple blossoms form a soft invisible lattice, lifting Kate’s spirit. As she is lifted, she sees where she is.

  The Atrium looms large, glowing in the fading light. Kate makes her way through the creeping jungle, almost expecting the tendrils to snake up and around an ankle, keeping her back, not to consume her, but to protect her from the danger ahead.

  Kate’s relieved. She had pictured being delivered into some low-oxygen cosmos where she’d have no idea how to find Silver, but this is easy; she knows exactly where to go.

  Kate runs towards the Atrium. She rushes through the entrance, expecting to see the regulars jacked in at their pods, but the place is deserted. The whole floor looks disused, as if everyone left in a hurry and a dust-storm has swirled through. Kate climbs the stairs to Silver’s level, but before she gets there she knows it will be barren too. And indeed, Silver’s spot is as empty as the others’.

  ‘Ghost’ it says on the outside of her booth, ‘GK’, and Kate shudders.

  “Hello?” Kate’s voice bounces off the glass walls.

  Silver must be close. Why else would Kate be here? She trawls through the abandoned building, thinking, looking for a clue. She remembers being here earlier and talking about the basement. Wonders how Keke is. Kate’s loath to go down there—still spooked by what happened at SkyRest—but she doesn’t have a choice. Once she’s decided, it’s easier, and she makes her way past the stained mugs, half-eaten fauxburgers and forgotten lockets of snaffeine. She pockets a red lanyard she finds with an Atrium chipcard attached to it. The 4D mugshot is of the man she met here previously. She doesn’t remember his name, just the scent of his perfumed shirt: amber, pepperwood, juniper berry.

  As Kate descends to the basement the levels get darker. The dust is so thick here it’s like sand. Where does it all come from? She looks at the cracked windows and the vines that wind themselves around them and anything else in their path. Left to their own devices Kate is sure the jungle would consume the Atrium altogether. She follows the darkness down.

  “Hello?” Kate calls. No answer, and no echo this time, either.

  She reaches the basement door with the ‘off limits’ sign, holds up the chipcard and it clicks from red to green, just like she knew it would. This isn’t real life. Not a game, not quite, but somewhere in between: a mezzanine puzzle. She’ll take advantage of her virgin clover while it lasts. The heavy door swings open.

  Chapter 82

  Hot In Her Pocket

  In the Atrium underground, the only light is the warm buzzing coming from the occasional levitating lightbulb Kate passes. There are doors everywhere. How will she know which one is right? She walks along, minding her step, trying not to stumble on the mounds of sand that cover the ground. The sand is her reminder that this is not real, that her real body is passed out in the OR under the watchful eye of Morgan and Zack. Where is Seth? Being underground again makes her nerves fizz with the recent trauma of the SkyRest crim colony. Deep breaths of the musty, cool air keep her calm, or calm enough. It’ll take her hours, days, to check out all these private immersion rooms; hopefully she’ll strike it lucky.

  The first door Kate opens leads to a dark, sound-proofed room, with a VXR shell in the centre. One of many identical spaces, she guesses. She steps inside the capsule and reaches for her mandible but remembers now that she’s meshed, she doesn’t need one anymore. Kate brings up the interface just by thinking about it, and blinks ‘go’.

  She’s immediately transported to a dim, overcrowded, high-ceilinged hall of shouting creeps, mostly brawny men with popping veins, but some women too. Their skin is slick with sweat and oil, and the sour smell of body odour and liquor hovers like a low cloud. The woman next to Kate is shouting and pumping her fist in the air. Her dark lipstick is smudged; perspiration glints from her eyebrows. The navy scent of danger perfumes the air. Kate moves forward a little, trying to glimpse what they’re all shouting about, and then she sees the boxing ring in the centre. Batcam drones flap and squeal above the elevated stage, recording the action.

  Two men are up on the platform, but they’re not boxers. The man with a peroxided box-cut and emerald silk shorts slams his opponent—a man in red with a metal mouth—against the corner pillar then smashes his fist into his jaw with such force that it riles the crowd up even more. Metal teeth scatter like spent bullets onto the platform and into the crowd, and they cheer.

  “Finish him!”

  Kate tries to turn around so she can leave, but heaving bodies are pressed against her now, and they’re not letting her through.

  It’s a simulation, Kate tells herself, it’s a simulation. Keep calm.

  These are all real people. They may not physically be in the room with her but they’re all real somewhere, just like she is. The thought makes her feel sick.

  The box-cut drives his fist into the man’s stomach now, causing him to double over, and when he does so, the attacker knees him hard in the face, forcing him back again. He pins his opponent against the pillar and lays into him so viciously his eyes close and he slides to the floor.

  This isn’t an ordinary fight club. It’s some kind of death match. The audience screams and spits and gesticulates. “Kill him!”

  The man in the green shorts starts yelling and kicking his opponent’s unconscious body. He kicks him as hard as he can, shouting for the coward to get up and fight. The crowd boos the half-dead man for not rising to the occasion. Kate tries to leave, but the crowd’s noise and the flashing of the batcams interfere with her vision, and she can’t call up her interface to escape. Finally the fighter’s eyes open and he gets up on one elbow, and the box-cut jumps on him, smashing his head onto the stage’s white tarp.

  “Finish him!”

  Someone throws a knife into the ring. Without hesitating, the man in green grabs the knife and drives it with both hands into the neck of his opponent, and the crowd goes mental. There’s a jet of blood, a slow-motion arc of red mist that spray-paints the tarp. The killer stabs him again and again to the cheering, and just when Kate thinks the fight is over, the man who seems to be lying dead on the floor reaches up and grabs the box-cut and throws him a metre into the air. He roars and pulls the knife out and uses it to hack at the box-cut, who is now screaming and slipping in the crimson spill. The graphic violence shocks Kate, but it’s the colour of the box-cut’s blood that spins her head. The fluid that dribbles out of his fresh gashes is apple green. It forms its own splashes and smears on the tarp, which is beginning to look like a Jackson Pollock canvas. Kate tries to look away but the shrieking batdrone footage is projected everywhere. It’s impossible to not look.

  Red shorts hacks at the box-cut until his arm comes away from hi
s torso and he throws the limb into the hungry crowd, then he starts sawing the man’s neck. The green-blooded man gasps and gurgles as the tendons in his neck spring apart.

  Knowing that they are robots doesn’t make it any easier to watch. Kate’s been pushed to the front now, and she doesn’t know how to get back to the Atrium. The box-cut is dismembered, bit by bit, and fed to the baying crowd. Once there is nothing left of him, the remaining fighter throws up his arms and yells in manic victory, and the noise in the hall becomes deafening. In his excited state, the man drops the knife and it goes scudding across the platform with just enough momentum to drop off the stage, right in front of Kate. Without hesitating—without thinking, really—she quickly picks it up and slips it into her coat pocket. Her hand comes away sticky with green blood (Robo Sap).

  The winner is carried away while some feral-looking young kids—rat hunters—loosen the tarp at its corners, taking care to not step on the still-wet artwork, and clip one side of it to a rod, which is then lifted on a pulley system, displaying the painting for everyone to see. The creeps cheer and cheer, and then the auction begins. The street urchins disappear into the crowd: they move along by crawling along the floor, where there is more space to manoeuvre, and no doubt pick a few pockets on their way. Kate won’t judge them, her own plunder glowing hot in her pocket. Copying them, she goes down on her hands and knees and pushes her way out. Glass shards lacerate her palms, and some careless boots and heels find her head and back, but she just puts her head down and moves as fast as she can. Eventually Kate reaches the edge of the room and cooler air, and she covers her ears and calls up her dashboard. This time it works, and she blinks ‘escape’. When her eyes open again she’s sitting, with tight lungs, in the VXR shell. She leans back for a moment to appreciate the solitary cool, dim room, and when she opens her white fists they are clean and injury free.

  Chapter 83

  Doomsday Debris

  Fourways

  Johannesburg, 2036

  Seth is on his way to the Lipworth Foundation. Despite the clusterfuck that is the current satellite situation he somehow manages to receive the occasional bullet from Arronax. Mally is safe, they’re together, and they’re heading to the Lipworth. More than that: He knows exactly where in the building they’ll be, and he has the code to get in. There’s a specific room he and Arronax use there for their meetings. She hates hotels and feels uncomfortable in his apartment, so the safe room at the Lipworth is perfect for what Arronax has taken to calling her ‘layovers’.

  There’s the tastefully decorated office she gets to use when she’s in Jozi to consult, and the safe room is en suite. That’s where they usually end up, on the floor or up against the wall. Sex with Arronax never disappoints.

  Seth walks along the city street, dodging broken bottles, burning cars and litter bunting. There’s a feeling of wildness, of savagery. Seth reaches back and his fingers play on the automatic rifle he snatched from SkyRest. Jozi isn’t the prettiest or the safest place to be right now, but it’s better than being in that surreal, subterranean prison with the building weighing down on your every pore. He is still creeped out by it, as if he needs a sonic shower and memory detox to get those damn scuttling, biting beetles out of his head. Seth had searched and searched for Kate, but had just become more lost. Eventually he’d found the staircase again, and couldn’t resist climbing up and out, into the open air. He had to trust Kate found her way out too. His intuition was telling him she was no longer underground, and he had to trust it. They’ve always had an eerie sense of connection: those first milk years in Durban, followed by the gaping absence of each other, growing up. And now that they’ve been living together for sixteen years it’s as if they’re joined at the hip, telepathically speaking. This doesn’t mean they always agree. They drive each other insane sometimes. Seth knows his twin sister better than he knows himself, knows how strong she is. She would have found her way out. All he can do is hope he’s not wrong.

  Even the solartrams have stopped working now, despite their promise of 24/7/365. It’s always a problem, thinks Seth absent-mindedly, when companies use numbers as slogans. Numbers are steady, stable, incontrovertible. There are no terms and conditions attached; they are not punctuated by spinning asterisks. Not that it matters now. Not that anything matters anymore.

  A naked woman streaked with dirt ambles along the pavement towards him. Blood on her cheek, non-seeing eyes. Seth can’t tell if she’s human or droid. He skips out of her path. He’s five minutes away from the Lipworth, and he needs to keep going.

  Seth coughs into his face-mask. He blames the toxic-smelling smoke in the air. He’s had this irritating niggle in his chest since leaving SkyRest, like an itch in his lungs he can’t scratch.

  There’s a wolf-whistle from across the road. A flaming car passes in slow motion. The wolf-whistle again, this time louder. Despite his instinct telling him to keep walking, he looks around. He can’t help it. Monochrome cityscape and interactive street art. The rolling, burning car. Then he sees the man, a barbarian with a tank for a body, and he’s not alone. It’s a group of them—five? Six apoca-pirates—and they’re leering and passing around a bottle. The whistler holds a dirty timber baseball bat over his massive shoulders. It’s studded with nails and shards of glass. Doomsday Debris.

  The gang begins to cross the road, clearly headed in the direction of the naked woman. They whistle and catcall and call her a ‘pretty bitch’.

  Keep walking, Seth tells himself. Keep fucking walking.

  “What you doin’?” asks the biggest man, adjusting his pace to walk alongside her. He has rocky shoulders and a black vest that says ‘Fuck Robots’. The woman doesn’t answer him. Seth doesn’t even think she hears him, considering the state she’s in. Seth forces himself to ignore the situation and keep walking. He’s almost there.

  “Hey!” shouts the barbarian right into the woman’s face. “Answer me when I speak to you, bitch!”

  Seth slows down, his shoulders sag. He was so close to getting to safety.

  “Larry asked you a fucking question,” says one of the men, slapping her on her back. “Have some fucking respect.”

  Another man throws a crushed can at her, and it glances off her temple, opening up a dribble of new blood. Seth’s fury heats his stomach; his veins pulse. He is so goddamned sick of these entitled sadobastards.

  “You know what I think, Larry?” says a woman—there’s a woman in the gang too. “I think she wants to suck your cock.”

  The men laugh and make animal sounds: grunting; licking; laughing. Dirty tongues wagging. Seth’s hands turn into fists.

  “Slow down now, missus. Where are you going in such a hurry?”

  The barbarian with the baseball bat takes her hand. If Seth didn’t know better it would look like a loving gesture, but when she resists, tries to keep walking, he yanks her arm so hard it swipes her whole body sideways.

  “I said slow down!” Larry shouts, and now that Seth is closer, he sees the man’s saliva fleck her face, and she betrays her consciousness by flinching.

  Seth still can’t tell if she’s human. Does it even matter? He used to think it did.

  “Leave her alone,” says Seth, but the gang is so busy heckling and taunting the woman they don’t even notice him. He pulls the automatic rifle up and out of the makeshift holster on his back.

  “Leave her alone!” he shouts.

  The rifle is a powerhouse. Branded—appropriately—with the SkyRest logo, loaded with frangible bullets designed for maximum surface damage. That’s code for maximum pain. Designed to injure instantly, intensely, without the lethality of hollow points. Perfect for keeping prisoners on their best behaviour—perfect for trigger-happy guards who aren’t allowed to kill their charges but who like the feel of a large automatic weapon in their hands.

  “Who the fuck are you?” says Larry, twirling his bespoke bat.

  “Get lost,” says one of his henchmen. “Does she belong to you?”

&
nbsp; “She doesn’t belong to anyone. She doesn’t have to. Step away from her right now,” says Seth, the weapon thrumming with potential in his hands.

  “The fuck is that thing?”

  The naked woman tries to slip away, but Larry catches her wrist.

  “You don’t want to find out,” says Seth. “Leave now and you won’t have to.”

  The barbarian smiles. “Is that right?” He hands the woman to the pack and addresses Seth squarely, runs his hand over the nail- and glass-studded bat and squeezes, puncturing his own palm, and the blood begins to run. If he feels pain, it doesn’t register on his face. He’s even bigger than he looked before.

  Seth feels strangely calm. This might be the end, but, looking around at the air, thick with pollution, the immutable damage, the quick-breeding fires, the sorry excuses for humankind right in front of him, he feels at peace with the idea of dying. This world is broken. It’s been broken for a long time. Sure, he was used to some kind of privileged existence, binge-watching series streams in his air-filtered, temperature-regulated, drone-delivered-processed-food-on-demand apartment, but that is no way to live. It’s not really living, at all.

  His survival instinct is still strong, but his fear of death swirls up and away into the electrosmog that surrounds him.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time to keep walking,” says Seth, lifting the gun so he can look through the sight. He softens his shoulder where he’s expecting the impact from the butt. There’s that annoying tickle in his lungs, so he coughs hard to try clear it before taking aim. It’s changing from a tickle to a sharp prickling sensation: more pain that itch.

  One of the men starts touching the woman. His filthy, callused hands trail over the distressed woman’s stomach, then over her hip to squeeze her butt. His nails are outlined in grime. Another man begins to approach Seth, and he trains the rifle on him. The man gets closer. Deciding against a second warning, Seth pulls the trigger.