A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘Hold still and stop being such a pussy.’

  Vic was aware of, rather than actually feeling, the neunonics growing through the soft matter of his brain. Telemetry started to appear in his vision as his mind expanded and all sorts of information became available. Skills were hardwired into the grey matter that he hoped the meat of the body would be able to live up to.

  ‘Why am I here?’ Vic asked. ‘You’re the intrusion expert.’

  ‘Muscle.’

  ‘You want me to do violence in this body?’ he asked incredulously. It was so soft and brittle he was worried it would explode if he threw one solid punch.

  ‘I’ve found the Alchemist,’ Elodie told him, ignoring the question.

  Elodie and Vic were lying under a tree looking across at a house. Vic was watching it carefully. Finally he saw it – a disturbance in the air that suggested a cloak. He nodded to Elodie and both of them backed away. It was only a matter of time before the cloaked S-sat would pick them up with passive scans, even at that range. They made their way back to Vic’s house.

  ‘How many, do you think?’ Vic asked.

  ‘I made three earlier,’ Elodie told him.

  ‘In these bodies, no weapons to speak of, we wouldn’t stand a chance.’ Elodie nodded in agreement. ‘So what’s the extraction plan?’

  ‘Basically, we didn’t know where the Alchemist was prior to getting in here, so we needed to locate him and then take him to an agreed-upon point at a certain time.’

  ‘How did you find him?’

  ‘I looked.’

  ‘So how are we going to get him out? The S-sats will just cut us down.’

  ‘What would Scab do?’ Elodie asked.

  Vic considered this. ‘Something violent and grandiose.’

  ‘No, he’d think laterally,’ Elodie growled.

  Vic was at a loss as to why she was irritated with him. ‘Okay, he’d do something violent and grandiose laterally.’

  Vic arrived back at the house to find the odd curved plastic machine in a cradle was vibrating and making a ringing noise.

  ‘What is it?’ Vic asked.

  ‘Some sort of rudimentary communications device,’ Elodie hazarded a guess. ‘Pick it up.’ Vic did as Elodie suggested. There was a tinny noise coming from the device. ‘Hold it to your ear.’

  Vic did so, though he was very much of the opinion that his antennas were vastly superior sensory organs. He listened to the voice on the end of the phone.

  ‘What would you like me to do about that?’ he eventually asked. He listened to the reply. ‘I see, and how would I do that?’ He listened again. ‘Okay, I’ll get right on it.’ He put the plastic device back down on its cradle. Elodie had an enquiring expression on her face. ‘It appears I have two human larvae, they are stranded at an institution called a “school” and I am required to retrieve them.’

  Elodie nodded.

  Conflict resolution worlds were easier, Vic thought, though they inspired similar genocidal thoughts. There was no assembler, and he had been expected to provide the larvae with nutrition that he somehow created himself. After muddling through that, he was expected to do the same for a male human mate. The male human appeared to think he was ‘acting strangely’, and kept pausing as if he was expecting to hear something after every time he said this.

  The meal preparation, which was decreed by all to be a horrible failure, resulted in water leaking from Vic’s eyes out of pure frustration. Vic’s human mate fed the larvae something called ice cream, which appeared to cheer them up. Vic was then subjected to several hours of mind-numbing tedium that passed itself off as entertainment, in the form of odd two-dimensional media that were played on a large device attached to a dumb-matter wall. When Vic mentioned immersions, everyone looked at him oddly.

  The worst came after the larvae retired to their rooms. Vic discovered that being a human female was great fun with a cucumber, but less fun with a human male. He then had to wait until his ‘mate’ was sound asleep before he could risk sneaking out.

  Vic was still a bit shaky when he met up with Elodie.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Vic snapped.

  ‘Look, I’ve been pretending to be a human kitten for days now, don’t get me started.’

  Elodie led them through the streets until she found what she was looking for – one of the automated ground cars on a driveway rather than its garage.

  ‘This car clearly belongs to some kind of radical free-thinker,’ Elodie muttered.

  ‘You can get us out of here, right? That’s why Scab recruited you, wasn’t it? Because you had a plan to get out of here if you were ever caught, right?’

  Elodie looked up at Vic. She’d heard panic, but she was pretty sure Vic had got the accompanying facial expression wrong.

  ‘Why? Missing your nat girlfriend?’

  ‘She’s not my—’ Vic started.

  ‘Keep your fucking voice down!’ Elodie snapped.

  Vic lapsed into silence. He wondered if explaining that practising with a cucumber had made him more responsive to her needs would impress Talia. He suspected he lacked the perspective to know for sure. He was coming to the conclusion that he just didn’t get human females, even if he was one at the moment.

  ‘And to answer your question – no,’ Elodie told him.

  ‘What?’

  Elodie turned on him. ‘Do I have to cut your fucking tongue out?’ she hissed.

  Vic looked down at the diminutive human larva standing in front of him, glaring at him angrily. He burst out laughing.

  ‘Oh, fuck you, Vic.’ Elodie turned and stalked away from him. She moved quickly up the driveway and knelt by one of the ground car’s doors. She hawked and spat on the lock mechanism.

  ‘Then seriously, what are we doing here? I can’t stay here – it’s like one of Scab’s torture immersions but without the fucking irony.’

  Elodie was concentrating on the nanites in the spittle she was using as the medium for the hack to unlock the vehicle, then spoof it into not contacting the AI to tell it that the vehicle was active.

  ‘We’re testing a theory,’ a somewhat distracted Elodie told Vic.

  ‘A theory? A fucking theory! Do you know what he put in me?’ Vic hissed. Elodie glared at Vic. ‘What theory?’

  The ground car’s door clicked open but the systems remained dark. Elodie climbed in and scooted to the passenger seat to make room for Vic.

  ‘Okay, so none of the inmates have neunonics. All the internal security, the control program, is soft-machine bioware. I mean, unless a house has been secured for murder, people leave their doors unlocked.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘All the security is on the outside. Who’d break in, particularly as it’s a total surveillance system?’

  Vic was staring at her. ‘This is a fucking guess?’ he demanded, appalled.

  ‘Pretty much,’ Elodie said as she produced a hammer, a screwdriver and a number of tea-towels from her coat.

  ‘And what do you do if you’re fucking wrong?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to attack the S-sats and hope they kill me, and eventually Scab will decide to download a backup personality into my body. I certainly can’t do another day of school without fucking murdering someone.’ She paused. ‘Possibly everyone.’

  ‘So a privacy swarm to buy some time, and then what?’

  Elodie took the hammer and the screwdriver and, using the tea-towels in an attempt to mask the sound, she started trying to drive the chisel point through the hard plastic case of the ground car’s central column.

  ‘I’m not saying there won’t be a lot of internal security,’ she said as she hammered the screwdriver through the plastic. ‘I think they’ll have amazing security. What I’m hoping is
that they’re overconfident enough that a good intrusion expert and some top-end Pythian programs will be enough to bypass it.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To create a diversion.’

  ‘And we’re in the car because there’s no ’face tech, but the cars are linked to the AI.’

  Elodie nodded. ‘Give me a hand with this,’ she said. Vic reached down, and the two of them pulled open the crack in the plastic that Elodie had made with the screwdriver. ‘It was either here, or try and use one of the comms or media devices in the houses, but I reckoned there was more chance of someone finding us there.’

  The central plastic column contained material that looked more like tech to Vic. A number of wires ran from a cylinder containing a blue gel. Elodie removed the kitchen knife she had taken from Vic’s house.

  ‘Hey! I could have used that earlier, when I was preparing dinner,’ Vic said. Elodie gave him a disparaging look. ‘Sorry.’

  Elodie hawked up another mouthful of phlegm and then used the knife to pierce the cylinder before spitting on it. The spit visibly branched out inside the blue gel, reminding Vic of arteries. The spittle also sealed the hole made by the knife. Elodie closed her eyes and started to concentrate. Vic watched her. His skin was starting to itch. It had turned red and blotchy in places, and he suspected this was the result of Elodie’s privacy nano-swarm, and whatever counter-swarm their jailers had released.

  ‘Well?’ Vic asked.

  ‘Vic, I need you to shut up.’

  Vic lapsed into a sulky silence and tried not to scratch his fragile skin. The porch light of the house they were sitting outside came on. A man in a dressing gown, wearing glasses and looking just like every other male inmate on Suburbia, was walking down the drive towards them. He opened the car door. Vic looked up at him and tried to smile, but ended up sort of grimacing.

  ‘Hi there, can I help you?’

  ‘This is your problem,’ Elodie muttered, her eyes closed, still concentrating.

  ‘Do you want to have human sex?’ Vic blurted.

  Elodie actually opened her eyes and turned to stare at Vic.

  He shrugged. ‘I panicked,’ he told her. The man was confused, since he had expected canned laughter.

  ‘Well, gee, I’d love to but I’m—’ He stopped, his expression suddenly fixed and blank. The whole cast of his features became more calculating and malevolent. ‘This isn’t going to last, is it?’ he said.

  ‘Er, what?’ Vic asked.

  The man grabbed him by the hair – Vic was surprised by just how much that hurt – and dragged him out of the car.

  ‘I think I’ll take you up on your offer.’ He threw Vic to the ground. Vic turned it awkwardly into a roll and came up on his feet. His body still felt very awkward, too fleshy and with not enough limbs.

  ‘It was just a distraction!’ Vic shouted desperately. ‘I didn’t really want to do it.’

  The man advanced on Vic. Vic hooked a kick into the back of the man’s leg, sending him staggering down onto one knee. Vic threw a punch with his left lower arm. Too late, he remembered that he didn’t have lower arms. The man got back to his feet. Vic kneed him in the groin, the chest and the face in quick succession. As the man staggered back, Vic hit him with a right-fisted haymaker, then back-fisted the man with the same hand. There was the solid, flat sound of meat hitting meat at velocity. The pain that shot through Vic’s hand surprised him. The skills may have been hardwired into this body, but that didn’t mean the body, though healthy, was conditioned for combat.

  Something glittering and made of steel flew through the night air towards him. Vic caught the kitchen knife Elodie had thrown by its handle. As the man turned back towards Vic, he rammed the blade through his neck so hard that the point of the knife came out of the back. The man dropped to his knees drooling a lot of blood from his mouth, the neck wound bubbling. Then he slumped to the ground.

  ‘Cucumbers are better, motherfucker,’ Vic told the corpse.

  Elodie was standing in the passenger doorway of the ground car. Despite the violence, and the dead person, the night appeared quiet and still.

  ‘Well?’ Vic asked. ‘What did you do?’

  It started with the sound of grass breaking – the universal sign of impending chaos. Then the screams began.

  ‘I just woke everyone up.’

  Isaiah’s vision was red. It was filled with warning symbols from the habitat’s systems. Through the transparent wall of the control room he could see the first explosions blossom as fires sprang up in all three sections. The Church wouldn’t do it this way, Isaiah managed to think through the drug-suppressed panic.

  ‘Inform Mr Hat,’ Isaiah told Al.

  21

  Ancient Britain

  There were more than two hundred horse-mounted warriors in the broad, shallow trench. Tangwen had walked up and down counting them. She was sure some were from the Regni, others were definitely from the Atrebates, but many were from tribes she did not know. There were no spear-carrying landsmen or -women with them, only the warrior nobility. Most were men, though the scouts who wore the lynx headdresses appeared to be mainly female.

  ‘Not like this,’ Tangwen muttered to herself.

  The warriors had mostly ignored her. She was a small, wiry female with a scarred face, of no interest to them. Some were nervously preparing for battle, others talking a bit too loudly, using bravado to mask their fear. Many who had seen war before were just waiting grimly for it to start. The whole area carried the stink of horse, leather and sweat.

  The horses, seasoned though they might be, were obviously nervous. They knew something unnatural was coming. Many of the warriors had dismounted to calm their horses, and would mount again at the last moment. They intended to charge into the forest and face the monsters. It was madness, but Tangwen knew the warrior mindset. She would no more be able to dissuade them from their actions than teach them to fly. Many would need to die before the rest understood what was happening.

  Tangwen heard cries from where she had left the rest of the survivors. She turned and ran down the line, still ignored by most of the warriors present. Then she heard angry shouting, the unmistakable sound of metal hitting flesh, hard, and then more cries.

  Ahead of her through the trees she could see a number of the bear-skull-wearing warriors surrounding Kush, who was crouched low, his red-dripping axe at the ready. She watched as one moved towards him. Kush swung the axe. Even as she ran, Tangwen saw the bear-skull-wearing warrior’s shield break, and the warrior was taken off his feet by the force of Kush’s blow. As she closed on them, she saw another of the warriors lying on the ground, his chest a red mess of split bones.

  ‘So you’re one of the demons,’ she heard a warrior say. He started turning as he heard Tangwen’s approach. Tangwen caught him just below the chin with the butt of her spear, forcing the leather armour around his neck into his throat. He went down choking. Another of the warriors turned and swung at her. She rolled under the blade and up on her feet, back-to-back with Kush.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded furiously.

  Nearby, Essyllt was lying on the ground, close to her litter. One of the two Brigante who’d been helping to carry the litter was lying senseless next to her, a livid red mark showing where he’d been hit in the head. The other litter-bearer had a bloodied mouth, but was trying to help Essyllt back to her pallet.

  ‘Who are you to speak to us like that, woman?’ one of the warriors demanded. His nose exploded and spread itself across his face as the butt of Tangwen’s spear crushed it. He staggered back. He looked ready to use the heavy iron blade he was holding easily in his right hand.

  ‘I’ll have courtesy, or you’ll have the sharp end of my spear,’ she told him.

  The man glared at her and then smiled through his thick, white-streaked, bushy beard. He was a large man, about
equal parts fat and muscle. A half-closed dead-eye, two fingers remaining on his left hand and a patchwork of scar tissue on his face told of a long life as a warrior. His boiled-leather armour was also well scarred, and had been stained black at some point in its past. He started to laugh, a low, rumbling sound.

  ‘I like you, but I want to kill the demon,’ he told her.

  ‘So did your friend, and look where that got him.’ She nodded to the corpse on the ground. ‘And this is no demon. Don’t make excuses for your people’s weakness.’

  ‘They wanted to burn Essyllt and some of the others,’ Kush managed.

  ‘Why?’ she demanded of the thick-set bearded man. The man she’d hit in the throat appeared to be recovering and more warriors were surrounding them. Back in the trees she could see the other survivors advancing. Some of them had makeshift weapons and looked just about desperate enough to use them. Germelqart had his club. She saw Mabon, knife in hand, moving and ready to attack one of the armoured warriors. It would be a massacre.

  ‘They have the sickness,’ the bearded man said.

  ‘So?’ replied Tangwen.

  ‘We burn them, it doesn’t spread.’

  ‘They have travelled with us, and none of us has caught it. It comes from the spawn of Andraste, abominations of the goddess, not the afflicted themselves.’

  ‘Are you a dryw, to know this?’

  ‘Are you?’ Tangwen demanded angrily.

  The warrior opened his mouth to answer.

  ‘Nerthach acts under my orders.’ The voice was quiet enough, but carried. Tangwen risked a quick glance in the direction from which it came. The speaker wore the black robe of a dryw, one of the sacrificers. The robe was open – he wore armour underneath it – and although he leaned on a gnarled staff, a sheathed sword hung from his belt. The hood of his robe hid most of his facial features, but a long beard with a braided moustache hung down from it. He was built similarly to the warrior with the dead-eye but looked to be less fat and more muscle. Tangwen was pretty sure she knew who he was.