by JT Lawrence
“I’m ready,” says Silver. Pale, brave.
“How do we do it?”
Silver bites her lip. “You really don’t know?”
“No.”
“Zack didn’t tell you?”
“For Net’s sake, Silver—”
“He didn’t tell you what we need to do?”
“All he said was, it would be good practice.”
“What?”
“It would be good practice. I don’t know what that means. We were rushing—are rushing—to get you out in time.”
“I don’t think you would have agreed to come if you knew—”
“Of course I would have!” Kate takes her shoulders. “I’d do anything for you. Don’t you know that?” Her sinuses sting with new tears.
“But—”
“Just tell me.”
Silver blinks away her own tears. “This isn’t going to work.”
“We’ll make it work!”
Kate feels the time ticking away, and her mind is awash with blue watercolour: aquamarine exasperation. “You kept asking for Zack. How do you know him?”
“He comes to me in my dreams.”
“You have dreams in here?”
“Only of him.”
“He came to you in your dreams and told you how to get out of here?”
“I’ve always known how to get out. It’s the same as my games.”
Kate frowns. “Then why are you still here?”
“Because it’s not working. It’s like this place is some weird limbo that you can’t—”
Silver’s lost for words. Anxiety climbing, Kate motions for her to continue.
“—but then Zack told me that you’d be able to do it. That it would work if you did it. That he’d send you. And he did.”
Kate feels like shaking some of the urgency she feels into Silver. It’s time to go.
“In order to leave a game or an immersion when you’re still alive, you usually just say ‘escape’, right? Or blink the ‘quit’ button,” says Silver.
Kate nods. She thinks she may have known that.
“But sometimes it doesn’t work. Not often, but sometimes. Like, if the software hangs or there’s some kind of update blitz or whatever.”
“Right.”
“Then you have to force quit.”
“Right.”
“But this place … blocks your interface, blocks the voice commands. So you can’t force quit the regular way. You need to … action it.”
“Okay,” says Kate. “How do you action it?”
Silver looks at her. Electric eyes. Then Kate understands.
“Oh.”
“It gets a little more complicated,” says Silver.
“Tell me.”
“Ever since I started playing RPG with Seth when I was little …”
“You’ve always been so good at the games. He was always saying so.”
“But it’s more than that. It’s more than my skill set. It’s that … I realised that I couldn’t die.”
The understanding begins to snow down on Kate in large indigo flakes.
“No matter what. No matter which war I fight in, which bridge I jump off, I stay alive.”
“That’s why they call you ‘Ghost’,” says Kate. “Because you never die.”
“It’s always been a gift,” says Silver. “My secret weapon.”
“Until now.”
“I tried to force quit here. I cut my wrists in the bath.”
Silver shows her pale arms to Kate. The skin is flawless.
“When I woke up I was washed clean and back in bed.”
Kate’s heart swells in empathy. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. Especially on your own.”
“I’m starving myself—” She plucks at her loose gown. “—but it’s not working.”
Silver seems manic now. She opens a cupboard door and grabs her jacket, throws it on the bed, starts pulling at the copper buttons.
“What are you doing?”
Silver extricates a pill from inside the hollow button at the collar, then moves down to the next one, and the next, till she has a pile of capsules.
“I’ve been saving up pain pills. Hiding them. I have over fifty, now.”
“You were planning to take them all at once?”
“But it won’t work. I realised after the bath. It won’t work.”
“What I don’t understand is how I can help. If you can’t die, then what can I do?”
Silver picks up the dagger Kate dropped when they first embraced, and hands it to her, handle first. She closes Kate’s confused fingers over it. Kate looks down at it. The knife is brassy and intricate; a dragon with pearlescent eyes has been engraved into the metal. Its tail whips out the end of the handle and back to its mouth, forming a scaled loop.
“You know what Uncle Marko always used to say.”
“What?”
“That there’s always a hack for everything.”
“That’s probably true.”
“Mom,” says Silver. “You’re my hack.”
Chapter 88
Smoke & Shimmer
Lipworth Foundation
Johannesburg, 2036
“Come on, Kate,” says Zack, searching her face for clues. “Come on. You’re running out of time.”
Mally bursts through the operating room swing-doors and sees both his sister and his mother lying unconscious on the clinic beds. He freezes.
“What the fuck are you doing to them?”
“Take it easy, Mally,” says the DarkDoc, his palm pleading patience. “We’re helping them.”
Arronax and Vega enter the room too, then Keke limps in.
“Zack!” Keke says, eyes sparkling despite her obvious pain.
Zack looks up and smiles at her. “Keke.”
Arronax looks at the bodies. “We’ve got to move them.”
“We can’t,” says Morgan. “Not till they emerge. Too risky.”
“We have to.”
“What if there’s some kind of break in connection? It’s better to wait.”
“Listen to me,” says Arronax. “The world outside is mayhem, and it’s ramping up.”
“There are people after us,” says Mally, thinking of Govender and those whom he has no doubt told about Arronax. “It’s just a matter of time before they find us.”
“Which people?” asks Zack.
“Bot Hunters.”
“Because of me,” says Vega.
“Not because of you,” says Mally. “Because they’re mouth-breathing meatbags who have less intelligence in their whole body than you have in your little finger.”
“I killed a human,” says Vega.
Keke stares. “What?”
“It was self-defence,” says Mally. “Vega saved my life, but now they want her RTS-ed.”
Zack blinks and shakes his head. Despite his inherent knowledge of where he originally comes from, a lot of this strange 2036 world is new to him.
“Return To Sender,” says Morgan. “The Special Task force has been briefed to round up all the roguebots. The problem is, you can’t tell if an android is corrupt just by looking at them, so now they’re just arresting indiscriminately.”
“If they focussed on the Bot Hunters instead, things would be better.”
“Mally,” says Morgan, gently, “I don’t think you realise the gravity of the situation. The special police—”
“I do realise! I’m not a child! But if—”
“The V1R1S is spreading quicker than any pandemic in history. They’re saying it’s got an infection rate of one thousand. One thousand! Do you know what that means? For every one robot with the disorder they will infect another thousand.” The DarkDoc’s face is ashen, as if he, too, didn’t understand the implications of the V1R1S until he spoke it out loud. It’s all happened so quickly.
Arronnax moves towards the exterior glass wall, looks down at the city they have just traversed. Fires smoke and shimmer. Apoca-pirates throw rocks
at storefronts and grab jewellery they’ll never need. Roguebots and alt-tech nazis clash in the streets with vektors and tasers and roscoes and hand-to-hand combat. She watches as a few city cowboys look up at the building and decide to enter.
“We all need to move to the safe room right now.”
“You didn’t tell us there was a safe room,” says Morgan.
Sounds start emanating from the lower floors: it won’t be long till the security has been compromised.
“It’s not safe to move them,” says Morgan, “but it’s not as dangerous as staying in here.”
Zack unclamps the break on Silver’s gurney, and the DarkDoc takes Kate’s. Arronax leads the way.
“I expected Seth to be here by now,” says Zack in a low voice. “He needs to be here for it to work.”
Bernard grunts in agreement.
“For what to work?” asks Keke.
“Nothing.”
Keke whips around to face Zack. “It doesn’t sound like nothing.”
“I’ll re-phrase it. It’s nothing for you to worry about.”
Keke side-eyes him. “I’m watching you, Zachary Girdler.”
“Noted,” says Zack.
“I’m not fucking around. I’ve got my eagle eye on you.”
“Damn, I missed you,” says Zack.
Their eyes connect for a moment; they keep moving forward.
The steel gurneys rattle down the wide white passage.
Chapter 89
Skeleton Turns to Ice
Arronax receives an emergency email from an anonymous source at NASP. Thinking it’s about the security breach at the hands of Govender, she opens it, and immediately regrets her decision. She tries to close it, delete it, but it’s too late. Shaking, she switches off her interface. Whoever is hacking her is already boring his way in, and there’s no getting him out. He’ll find out who she is and what she’s done and broadcast it, and it’ll be the end of everything for her. Her whole skeleton turns to ice.
Chapter 90
Dragon Dagger
White Mezzanine, 2036
Kate feels the weight of the knife in her hand. “I’m not going to kill you.”
“It’s the only way,” says Silver.
“There must be another way.”
“There’s not!”
“It’s impossible.”
“You won’t be killing me. You’ll be saving me. If you don’t do it, I’ll be stuck here forever, and you know what? I’d rather die! I’d rather die a hundred times over than be in this place.”
At last there’s some colour in her cheeks; her eyes are feral.
“Please!” she says. “Please, Mom. I can’t do it myself. You have to do it for me.”
“You know I can’t!” Kate throws the dagger on the bed. “How could I?”
“How could you? Think of me! Think of me in the real world, stuck in my useless body forever.”
Kate holds her head as if her cool palms will stop her thoughts from exploding her brain.
This is crazy. This is so crazy. It’s all a dream. It must be.
Kate’s countdown timer clicks over to nine minutes.
“Nine minutes,” says Kate.
Silver scrambles for the dragon dagger, puts it back into Kate’s hand.
“We have to do it now. Right now.”
“How can I?”
“Straight into my heart. It’ll be the quickest.”
“I can’t!” shouts Kate.
“Stop being so selfish!”
Kate splutters. “What?”
“The reason you can’t do it is because you’re thinking about yourself! How it will make you feel. Not what it will do for me.”
Kate stutters.
“Please, Mom. Please. I’m asking you to set me free.”
Eight minutes.
Seven and a half minutes.
Kate swallows hard. “Lie on the bed.”
Silver sobs in relief and climbs onto the stretcher, eyes stunned wide. Pills scatter to the floor. Silver clasps her hands together over her stomach. Her hair splays: silver thread on the white pillowcase.
“Thank you!” She sobs. “Thank you, Mom.”
“Sh-sh-sh,” says Kate. “Don’t say anything else.”
Before I change my mind.
Don’t say anything else.
This isn’t real life.
I’m not killing her. I’m setting her free.
Still the dagger feels too heavy in her hands.
Seven minutes.
“I’m ready,” says Silver. “I love you.”
Kate’s eyes burn. She swallows again and lifts the dagger using both her hands.
It’s not real.
It’s a fairytale.
She is the huntsman after Snow White’s heart.
“I love you,” Kate says, and drives the knife into Silver’s chest.
Kate feels the blade penetrating the rib-bone, then with an extra push it gives way. Silver shrills in pain, and Kate lets go of the dagger as if it’s shocked her.
Fuck!
She instantly regrets what she’s done; she must be insane. Certifiable. To do something as depraved as this. Silver keeps screaming, thrashing on the bed. Blood begins to wick into the white cotton of her gown.
“I’m sorry!” Kate’s tears drip down onto the bed. She hadn’t even realised she was crying.
What have I done? What the fuck have I done?
Silver’s screaming transforms into a low moan, and her writhing slows. She’s half-sobbing again, relieved, her eyes alight as if she can see the other side. Her small damaged starfish of a hand searches blindly for Kate’s, and they hold onto each other while Silver’s chest bleeds and her heart drifts away.
Is she dead?
Silver’s image starts deconstructing. Blocks like giant pixels shift and dissolve. Right there on the bed in front of her, as she’s holding Silver’s hand, she fades away as if she’s a computer-generated dandelion blown in the wind. And just like that, the room is empty and Silver is free.
Chapter 91
Crimson Chemical Copper
Kate’s shattered. She needs time to recover, but there is none.
Six minutes.
She calls up her interface but it doesn’t work. She tries again.
“Escape,” she says. “Escape.” She’s still there in the white room.
I’m going to be lost inside here forever.
She tries blinking ‘force quit’ but the button isn’t there. Barbed tendrils of adrenaline reach up and unfurl inside her.
Don’t panic, she tells herself. You know what to do. You know how to force quit.
Kate reaches for the knife so she can open her own veins, but it’s gone—disappeared with Silver.
Fu-u-uck!
Desperate, she looks around the room. What did Silver use on her first attempt? Kate spots the mirror and tries to smash it, but it’s self-healing mercury glass and just knits itself back together. She casts around, trying to swallow her panic, trying to stay calm so that she can think clearly.
Five minutes.
Then she sees the pills on the porcelain tiles, knocked off the bed in Silver’s rush to climb on. Kate falls to her knees and begins to pick them up, starts shoving them in her mouth and looking for water before realising they will never work in time. And Silver said to not eat or drink anything here, anything that could tie her body to this place. She imagines Silver smashing the glass of water out of her hand. Kate spits the bitter blue pills out into her palm. She needs a quicker way, but they are all she has.
Kate thinks of Seth’s snaffeine, of Keke’s pexidine, knows how quickly and efficiently drugs can work if they’re inhaled. She put the mound of pills on the white tiled floor and smashes them under her boot heel, grinds them as quickly as she can into a rocky powder, then snorts the blue talc off the thumb joint of her hand. The first hard sniff is like a sapphire bullet in her brain. The sparks shoot up her nose and detonate. Kate cries out, covers her nose with bo
th hands—a reflex—and gasps in pain. Her eyes stream, her brain chokes.
Holy fuck, what is in these things?
Kate can hardly see what she’s doing for the second round as the sparks obliterate her vision. She does the best she can to line up the next dose and sniffs again. Another bullet, another explosion. The jerk of pain sends her body reeling backwards.
“A-a-a-h,” is all she can say as the drug burns into her brain. It’s like eating a fresh birdseye chilli and having brain freeze at the same time, squared, cubed, times a hundred, and in flashing neon blue. But it’s working. Kate can feel the synapses begin to shut off, the electrical impulses lose their juice. She has to get all of this in before she passes out. Her heart is slowing already.
Three minutes.
She lines up another shot, then another, then another, till all that’s left of the powder is a fine dust on the floor tiles. The last dose is the trickiest, but the least painful, because her whole face is now completely numb. Kate struggles to keep her eyes open as the drugs pull her eyelids down, start dragging her whole body onto the floor, as if gravity is leaking into the room and pushing on every part of her, even her cheek-skin into her skull, even her eyeballs into their sockets.
It’s working, she thinks, but then there’s a strange fluid sensation at the back of her damaged sinuses and Kate thinks it’s her body’s way of fighting back, that it’s all going to come back out again, and she can feel the pressure build and the next thing there is liquid gushing out of her nose and mouth. She expects it to be snot and saliva but when she forces open her eyes for the last time sees it’s blood. It flows out of her and puddles on the tiles. Liquid crimson chemical copper. Then an invisible tidal wave flattens her and she lies spreadeagled on the floor, waiting for oblivion. She doesn’t see the clock tick down to 00:00.
Chapter 92
Blood Handkerchief
The Lipworth Foundation
Johannesburg, 2036