A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  Silas opened the door and climbed into the carriage. There was something predatory and insectile about his movements, as if he had unfolded himself into the train. His face was a shimmering blur. Du Bois had no idea how the killer had achieved that particular effect, but even with the masking of his face du Bois recognised the tall, thin frame and unmistakable movement of Silas Scab.

  In the film running in his mind, Jaggard still hadn’t looked up, despite the open door. Du Bois enlarged the image of Jaggard’s face and then used an intelligent program to add resolution, effectively filling in the blanks left by the initially grainy footage. Jaggard’s face was a grimace. It was clear he’d already been paralysed and was struggling against it. All his facial muscles were contorted as he tried to look up at the figure walking down the carriage towards him.

  Silas was crouched over Jaggard now, his frame partially obscuring du Bois’ view of his victim. Silas took his time. With unerring accuracy he drew a line in the skin with a scalpel, cleaned up the blood, then drew another line in the tissue with a heavier blade, paring the flesh down to the bone. Then he drew the bone saw from his bag.

  ‘It will feed some part of his fantasy,’ Grace suggested.

  Du Bois watched as Silas quickly but skilfully sawed off the top of Jaggard’s head. Blood and tears poured down the young man’s face.

  ‘It’s not a fantasy,’ du Bois said quietly.

  Silas removed the brain.

  ‘It’s always fantasy to these sick bastards.’

  ‘Yes,’ du Bois conceded. ‘They try to make their fantasy real, but Silas may actually have the ability to do so.’

  Silas turned to the camera and walked towards it until his shimmering, vibrating non-face filled the screen. Then the screen went blank. Du Bois turned to Grace.

  ‘He doesn’t want us to see what he’s doing with the brains,’ Grace said.

  Du Bois nodded. ‘And the CCTV footage was meant for us?’ he asked. Grace nodded in agreement. ‘Which leaves us where?’

  Grace shrugged. ‘Well, I’m for looking under bridges to see if he’s living there like a troll,’ she suggested. ‘No sign of him on the New Street cameras. Frankly I’m surprised he didn’t stuff his cock between his legs and do a little dance for us.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘So he got off the train—’ du Bois started before one of his search routines turned something up. He sent the footage to Grace. It was from a CCTV run by a private security company on top of one of their clients’ workshops in the Digbeth area, just south-east of the station. It showed a tall, thin, darkly clothed figure leaping from the raised railway line that ran above the area’s decaying industrial rooftops. The figure dropped quickly out of view.

  ‘I don’t think he meant for us to find that,’ Grace said.

  Du Bois accessed the information his search routines had turned up about Jaggard, half-expecting to find another history of schizophrenia.

  ‘He was an artist,’ he said superfluously. Grace had access to the same information. Du Bois was running through reviews of the victim’s most recent exhibition, which used words like ‘disturbing’ and ‘unease’.

  ‘That’s a bit of a coincidence,’ Grace said. Jaggard’s ongoing exhibition was being held in a gallery in Digbeth.

  Du Bois walked. He met Grace in the Old Crown pub for lunch. He had long since stopped being surprised by how places changed over periods of hundreds of years. He had never quite liked the feeling of violated nostalgia he felt revisiting them, but he still always went and looked. He was less than impressed with the quality of the wine and the food, however. That didn’t appear to bother Grace. She ate, as she always did, as if she didn’t know where her next meal was coming from.

  Digbeth was a run-down and crumbling area. It was the city’s industrial past paved over with ugly concrete from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Weed-encrusted brick bridges carried the trains above the area’s rooftops towards New Street and the city’s other stations. The graffiti that covered many of the buildings looked like an alien language, or modern cave paintings with their own complex codified meanings.

  To get to the gallery, du Bois and Grace walked through a brightly coloured redeveloped factory that had been turned into a series of trendy shops, cafes and bars. Something about it reminded du Bois of a cavalry fort he’d once visited in Apache territory, if the cavalry soldiers had enjoyed lattes and impractical-looking footwear. A large statue of a Green Man, half-human, half-tree, caught his eye. Something about its pagan countenance took him back to the earthen cave and the last night he had been truly mortal, truly human. He stopped to look at it. Grace had to backpedal and drag him away from it.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she demanded. It was a good question.

  They found the gallery close to where Heath Mill Lane crossed the Grand Union Canal, where trendy galleries competed with garages for space. The gallery was a one-storey building, the same red brick as everything else, opposite a wall made of compacted cars. The gallery looked a little like a community centre or village hall on the outside. Inside it was a wide-open space painted white. The white contrasted with the dark colours of the canvasses Jaggard had created.

  Grace and du Bois stared at one of the pictures. Predominantly black, at first sight it looked like a nebulous starscape, but it lacked the grandeur that such images often displayed. Instead the artist had managed to imbue the picture with a sense of anima, as if the space itself was alive with an unseen malevolence. The oil painting gave such a sense of depth, of existing in three dimensions, that it almost looked like an optical illusion, as if the picture moved with a life of its own when it was in the periphery of their vision. Jaggard had instilled a sense of hunger into his starscape. The critics had been right – the images were unsettling. Even more unsettling was a feeling du Bois couldn’t shake that the artist had instinctively understood something about the world that he and Grace inhabited, about the true nature of reality.

  The other canvasses were all variations on the same theme. Jaggard’s genius wasn’t in what he painted, it was in what he implied. That and the sense that he was painting from life, painting things he had somehow seen.

  Grace glanced up at du Bois. She looked unsure, almost frightened, and it wasn’t an expression he was used to seeing on her face. Not for a long time.

  Stredder shouldn’t have felt anything. The L-tech device had altered itself to fit in with his reconfigured flesh. He knew that the feeling of having a foreign body inside his stomach was largely psychosomatic, regardless of the actual truth of the matter. Carrying the oldest piece of L-tech the Circle owned, particularly one with so much history to it, always felt different from the other courier jobs he did.

  He shifted uncomfortably in his spacious seat and looked around the first-class cabin of the 747. He didn’t like any of this at all. Normally it travelled on one of the stealthed orbital transports. These came with their own set of risks but were considered worth it given the value of what he was now carrying inside himself. After all, it provided all of the Circle’s operatives with the templates for their augmentations. He had drunk from it himself on one of the Circle’s orbital stations after the Siege of Paris.

  The chalice had been used in the Pacific, he presumed in connection with the city, and was on its way to London having come through Tokyo. The use of an unsecured civilian aircraft was very irregular, but there had been a sudden increase in recruitment. Stredder was worried that this increase was due to the end becoming a lot more nigh.

  He had his blood-screen spread throughout the entire aircraft like a spiderweb. The best hope for safety lay in secrecy. He remained convinced that if the Brass City knew what he was carrying, they would almost certainly try to take it. The healthy paranoia that was part and parcel of being a good courier had him wondering if that was the point. Was Mr Brown using him as bait, for some r
eason?

  The Brass City was not the only threat, either. The situation in Birmingham had caught his attention. He had worked with du Bois a number of times, and with Soggin on fewer occasions. She was undisciplined, in his opinion, but capable, and du Bois was more than competent, though given to questioning Control too much. That this madman, Silas Scab, had managed to so effectively escape the pair of them worried him very much indeed. Less than two days had passed since Silas had last killed.

  The stewardess offered him another drink; he accepted. His augmented body would break the alcohol down into sugar, and then efficiently convert that into actual useful energy before he could feel any effect from the alcohol. That didn’t stop the stewardess from looking at him like he was an alcoholic.

  Once again he glanced around at his fellow passengers. As he looked from one to the other, the information he had on them cascaded down through his vision. They were upper-echelon executives, playboys and -girls, children of the rich, one mid-range celebrity. If any of them worked for the Brass City or one of the independents, their cover was immaculate.

  Something snagged his spiderweb. He allowed himself a moment. He closed his eyes before standing up.

  ‘Sir, you must remain seated,’ the stewardess told him firmly. They were on their final approach into Heathrow. ‘Sir!’

  Stredder ignored the woman and moved down the narrow corridor between the seats into the business-class section. His enhanced hearing blocked out the stewardess trailing him, and he could hear another similarly one-sided conversation going on in the economy-class section of the passenger jet.

  He felt the stewardess grab him and swung around to face her. She took a step back from the violence of his action. He wanted to tell her something but couldn’t think of anything to say. Instead he grabbed the chairs on either side of the isle. The soles of his shoes melted and he began sinking into the floor as his fingers dug into the seats, pushing into their matter as if it was putty. His vision was full of the 747’s technical schematics. There was only so much matter he could steal before the airframe became unstable and fell apart in the sky.

  ‘Sir, return to your seat now!’ The voice was all male authority. Stredder wrenched himself free of the now putty-like consistency of the seats and the floor. Already the molecule-sized alien machines that lived in his body were converting the matter sucked in through the pores on his skin and turning it into muscle mass. It was reinforcing his skeleton, toughening his skin. It was being broken down and converted into energy.

  Stredder turned around and took a step forwards as if he was trapped in sucking mud. As he suspected, the authority in the man’s voice was bolstered by the automatic pistol in his hand. Stredder watched the man’s confidence turn to fear as he grew in front of him. He pushed now-clawed hands into another row of seats so the transformation could continue. He heard the screams start. Screams had accompanied him throughout his life.

  The air marshal fired. A frangible bullet exploded into harmless powder against Stredder’s armoured chest, which was now covered with short bristly fur that may have looked canine but had more in common with sharkskin. Just touching it would draw blood. His clothes had sunk into his body now, their matter adding to his bulk.

  ‘You are all going to die,’ he growled before his elongated maw, full of canines, robbed him of the ability to speak. The air marshal fired again, and again. The low-impact bullets were useless against Stredder’s armoured half-human, half-wolf form. He had only meant to warn them, but now the passengers were climbing over each other to get away from him. He wanted to reach out and turn the air marshal into a red mess as chemically and neurally programmed rage coursed through his body. He could smell the little man’s fear.

  He felt the pain for a moment. He saw the point of the blade appear through his chest. Then the nerve endings were locked down. The information that was pain was transformed into fury.

  ‘I even coated the blade with silver,’ the voice said from behind him. It didn’t matter. Stredder was beyond understanding anything as complex as language.

  Stredder tore himself free of the now mud-like matter of the aircraft. He had absorbed several of the seats and left progressively larger and more animalistic footprints in the cabin floor. The blade was pulled out of the wound as he swung around. His system was already trying to heal the wound, but the blade had impregnated it with nanites that were already attacking his own systems.

  The figure in front of him was tall and slender, dressed in dark clothes, pale, and his narrow head with its painfully sharp-looking features and dead eyes was utterly devoid of hair. He had a long, silver-bladed knife in each hand and was looking up at Stredder quizzically. His lack of fear gave the courier pause for a moment. Then he raised his foot and kicked the tall, thin man very hard.

  Silas flew backwards, battering himself against the corner of the partition between business and economy class. He landed on the ground by the steward’s compartment. He had a momentary glimpse of a terrified-looking steward and stewardess as he tried to pick himself up. He wondered if they knew who the monster was in this fight. Then the courier was on him, tearing at him so viciously he was lifted off his feet and carried back into the economy section. Claws tore into his flesh and injected tiny venomous demons into his system. His own demon-infected blood whispered to him, telling him that the invaders were eating him from within. Chunks of his flesh were torn off by the raging technological hybrid. He laughed, spat blood and stabbed the courier time and time again. Teeth dug into his shoulder and he was flung across the central aisle of the 747’s economy-class cabin. He hit his back on the top of one of the chairs. Terrified passengers tried to scramble away from him and the air filled with the smell of faeces. His own spilled blood tried to find its way back into his body. The courier’s demonic venom was trying to prevent this, making his blood smoke. His wounds opened and closed like mouths. His skin crawled and muscles contorted as his body became a battleground for the tiny demons. He heard screams, but one of the first tricks he had ever taught the demons in his blood was to turn the sound of screams into music.

  Silas tumbled off the chair backs and hit the floor. The courier was standing over him now, bloodied claws raised. Silas knew it was over. He was not sure that this death would be good enough. Suddenly it was much colder. A raging wind blew. Everything tipped sharply and he was falling, bouncing painfully off things. So was the hybrid. Tears appeared in the fabric of the aircraft.

  They stopped falling. They had landed on something, a wall with moving pictures on it. Silas wasn’t sure how it had happened but he was on top of the courier. He found himself laughing as he stabbed and slashed down into the hybrid as it thrashed beneath him. Silas made the creature red. He could see the night sky now.

  The courier was being eaten from within. The demonic venom on Silas’s blades had won their battle inside the technological hybrid’s flesh. Silas pushed his blade into the creature’s body, burying it so deep that his hand was inside the courier. With a thought, he cast his spell through the blade. Controlling the courier’s flesh, demanding it reveal its secrets. Around him the aircraft bucked and lurched, the airframe flexing dangerously. The courier was flopping weakly beneath him now. Silas pushed sharpened nails and then his long, powerful fingers into the creature’s flesh, and curled them around a metal stem. He tore the Red Chalice out of the courier’s flesh and the dying thing beneath him howled in agony. He lifted the hot metal to his lips. He had a moment to feel the pain of the molten metal pouring down his throat, then the plane tore itself in two.

  She stood on top of an aircraft engine in a large trench where part of suburban Isleworth used to be, leaning on her staff. She was surprised how quiet it was, although she could hear the sound of sirens in the distance. There was the crackle of flames, of course, a sound that was welcoming more often than not. It was a comfort to her. Even in this age when she found herself standing around with other unwanted
people, sharing borderline poisonous cheap alcohol.

  She leaped the twenty feet down into the trench with ease and started making her way through the wreckage, ignoring the burning pools of aviation fuel. She walked across what used to be a railway line and found herself gazing at something that didn’t look very human. It was little more than half a blackened face fused with the equally blackened fuselage of the 747. It was still moving.

  ‘You risked death. Why?’ the bag lady asked.

  An eye turned to look at her. ‘I am dead,’ it managed in a voice full of pain.

  ‘I don’t think so, my dark little boy.’

  ‘I don’t like what I am.’

  ‘Change, then.’

  The laughter was a truly horrible sound. ‘Let me die,’ the fused mess that was all that remained of Silas managed. The bag lady said nothing. ‘Are you real?’

  ‘No. You’re insane, you know this. What if I told you that none of this mattered? What if I told you it was coming anyway? What if I asked you to stop now?’

  ‘I … I … just want to see god.’ There were tears now. The bag lady turned away, a look of profound sadness on her face as, without thinking, she walked into a large pool of burning aviation fuel.

  ‘Aren’t you going to take the chalice?’ His voice was stronger now. She heard the sound of metal straining. She stopped and looked over her shoulder.

  ‘I don’t need it. It didn’t work. I just don’t want them to have it,’ she said as the flames licked all around her. She started walking again, slowly sinking into the burning earth. ‘Though I’m not sure I can tell the difference any more.’