A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  23

  A Long Time After the Loss

  ‘Are … you … sure?’ Mr Hat left a long pause between each of the words. He wanted to emphasise the seriousness of the situation.

  ‘Who else could it be?’ Isaiah asked.

  Mr Hat was sitting on the throne-topped control column in the Amuser’s Command and Control centre. The transparent part of the smart hull, which he had configured into a window, was magnifying and displaying separate incidents of violent chaos all the way along the prison habitat, on all three strips of land. Some of the inmates had even managed to start a fire on one of the windows. There was more feed arriving from the cameras in Suburbia itself. The lizard found himself wondering if it was still being shown as a reality soapcom throughout Consortium space. He imagined so. They always found some way to capitalise.

  ‘Mr Isaiah, I am about to tell some very powerful people that Scab is either here, or on his way here, on your say-so and some very circumstantial evidence. If there has been an incursion from Red Space, does it not seem a lot more likely that the Church is involved?’

  The image of Isaiah being projected into Mr Hat’s visual cortex by his neunonics froze. ‘But you said Berger was the bait …’ Isaiah managed.

  Mr Hat moved the Amuser with a thought, sending it to the docking arm closest to where Berger lived. He requested feed from local nano-cams but found that the whole area was still overrun by a privacy nano-swarm. He switched to macro-cam feed, but all he saw was chaos.

  ‘I understand the need for catharsis, but imagine what they could achieve if they were to organise,’ he mused to one of his human-looking eyeless servant automatons. ‘Wake all my children.’ The automaton nodded. Mr Hat turned his attention back to Isaiah. ‘The Church also wants Scab. Has it not occurred to you that they might want to use inmate Berger as bait, too?’

  ‘We can’t fight the Church as well!’ Isaiah said, appalled.

  ‘Fight them, Mr Isaiah? We will need to erase the very fact they have this capability, lest we wish to be assassinated.’ Over the ’face link he actually saw the other man blanch. He felt the thud and reverberating clang of the Amuser docking. All the while he was analysing the macro-cam footage, looking for something out of place. ‘I want G-carriers or hoppers ready to transport my servants to Mr Berger’s residence.’

  ‘What? You can’t go in there!’

  ‘Why not? The inmates have no augments to speak of and rudimentary weapons. The only thing I have to worry about is being rushed by what would have to be, frankly, a suicidal horde. Otherwise all I will be doing is committing mass murder on any who bother me. Now, do you want to task the G-carriers, or would you prefer I waste time communicating with the board and have them tell you to do it once it is too late?’

  There was a moment’s silence. Mr Hat could see the sweat coating Isaiah’s face. The human made him feel faintly disgusted.

  ‘There will be G-carriers waiting for you,’ Isaiah told him.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Isaiah. The question is, what are you going to do?’

  ‘What?’ He sounded surprised that Mr Hat had even asked the question.

  The Amuser’s control column sank into the ground and one of the automatons carried Mr Hat to his bath chair, taking the time to tuck him in with the tartan blanket.

  ‘Shall we thaw our guest?’ the automaton’s collective mind asked as one of them started rapidly wheeling the bath chair towards the airlock. Mr Hat considered the question. If it was a false alarm, did he want to be seen to be wasting this person’s time?

  ‘Yes, but tell him it is a Red Space incursion, and that I believe the Church is trying to secure Mr Berger as bait for Mr Woodbine.’

  He felt the acquiescence of his loyal flock. One would stay behind to secure the Amuser and to take the blank from storage, and then contact their employer. He had almost forgotten about Mr Isaiah stammering his way through his delusions of adequacy.

  ‘Mr Isaiah, my advice would be to find the largest areas of unrest and use the automated weapon systems to make examples of them—’

  ‘But the damage—’

  ‘You need control before you can count the cost. If you turn over control of the facility to me …’ Mr Hat had reached the airlock door. It slid open. Now all the automatons were following him. They made their way down the docking arm.

  ‘Thank you for your advice, Mr Hat, but I think we can handle it from here.’ Isaiah’s ’face link had gone down and now he was hearing Al’s voice, and seeing his yellow cartoon smiling face.

  ‘Understood,’ Mr Hat said. He assumed Isaiah’s career with the Consortium was over. They had reached the maglev platform at the end of the docking arm where a carriage awaited them. He was wheeled aboard and the carriage moved smoothly away from the platform the moment all of his automatons were on board. ‘Mr Al, please be aware that we will be handling the Berger situation, and that I have board clearance that says I can.’

  There was a worryingly long pause that made Mr Hat wonder if the AI had become corrupt and was now making decisions based on ego.

  ‘Understood.’

  The maglev came to a halt. Mr Hat clambered out of the bath chair. Two of the block-shaped armoured G-carriers were waiting for them. They were armed with rotary strobe guns at each of their eight corners, with missile batteries locked away inside armoured housings. Mr Hat climbed into the rear G-carrier. Half the automatons went with him, and the others climbed into the front carrier.

  Mr Hat started receiving the feed from the vehicles as they rose towards heavily armoured doors that were in the process of opening. Suburbia lay beyond the doors. He could see clouds of smoke rising from the three land sections to pool in the centre of the hexagonal cylinder.

  Mr Hat’s neunonic search routines finally found what they were looking for in the macro-cam footage, something that stood out. A ground car that was still moving, albeit erratically, when Al was directly controlling all the others.

  Vic watched the columns of smoke rising into the sky. He wasn’t sure it was the way to go, but he could understand the outpouring of rage from prisoners whose experience had not been unlike his. The problem was that not all the prisoners were there as a result of committing violent crimes, or any crimes at all, in fact. Suburbia was where the Consortium punished people who had irritated someone powerful. This meant that some prisoners were considerably less able to cope with violent situations than others. It was rapidly turning into a two-tier system: the victims and their victimisers. Which was the same as anywhere else really, he supposed, just the line was a little better defined here.

  Elodie had her eyes closed, concentrating as she tried to steer the ground car via neunonic interface. The fact that they had a working ground car was drawing some attention.

  Vic flinched as a spanner hit the passenger-side window of the car, cracking the safety glass. He saw a bloodstained woman with a knife in each hand standing on the edge of her perfect lawn. She watched them go by. He caught a glimpse of man running between houses, hopping from back garden to back garden, pursued by a horde of children who had daubed themselves with blood, like some kind of lizard tribal markings. He watched a man sitting atop another on the pavement, beating him into a pulped mess of blood, exposed bone and flesh.

  Many of the prisoners, even with their personalities reasserted, were just milling around, not really sure what to do. A lot of them were drinking. Great pyres of belongings burned on lawns, driveways and pavements and in the roads. Elodie had to skirt around more than one bonfire while people hammered on the ground car. They saw rapes, murders and more than one large group of people who looked organised and were being led.

  In the distance they could hear gunfire. Occasionally, lines of red light connected the laser batteries on the window segments with the land segments of the cylinder habitat. Tracer-tipped cannon fire from track-mounted rail guns on the window sections lo
oked like a rain of violent light and explosions bloomed across all three land segments. Vic watched an S-sat fly by, skimming the roofs and treetops of the street they were travelling along, weapons firing.

  ‘They’re holding back,’ Vic muttered to himself. The car lurched as it drove over something lying in the road.

  ‘This is entertainment,’ Elodie said, her eyes still closed. On a nearby lawn, four children held a woman down while a fifth cut her face off. Three of the other children already wore dead-skin masks. The one without a mask watched them drive by. Vic found himself wondering how many people were still sitting in their houses, either out of fear or years of conditioning, and hoping this would end. He giggled a little bit when he thought of adding the canned laughter track to what was currently happening.

  ‘Scab would like it here,’ he said when he’d suppressed the nearly hysterical urge to keep giggling. He was finding human mood swings almost impossible to control without drugs. ‘It would remind him of home.’ Then he clapped his hand to his mouth to prevent more giggling.

  Elodie opened her eyes and turned to glare at him. ‘Look, it’s hard enough to control this thing without—’

  Vic felt the impact. His teeth banged together as everything slowed down. The concussion wave battered through the liquid in his body and squeezed all the air out of his lungs. The world started to spin and he found himself looking down at the cratered road from an aerial position. Much of the road appeared to be in the air as well, and reaching for the car. Then the second impact came as the car landed on its roof.

  ‘Too soon,’ Mr Hat muttered as he saw the mass driver miss the ground car. The G-carriers coming in from high above were still several moments out. He thought about ’facing a protest to the AI, but other than having it on record for a board review, he couldn’t really see what good it would do. ‘Now just let them run.’

  Vic opened his eyes. He was desperately gasping for breath. He started to thrash around, hanging upside down in his seat. Finally his lungs inflated before panic utterly overwhelmed him. He looked to his right. Elodie was hanging in her seat restraints, apparently unconscious. Vic took a moment to check she was breathing. She looked banged-up but otherwise okay.

  It took several kicks to get the door open before Vic could crawl out and stagger to his feet. The air was still full of dust from the impact of whatever had hit them. Everything hurt, and he couldn’t cut off nerve sensations or flood his system with sweet, sweet painkillers.

  Vic lurched around the car and spent some time trying to yank the driver’s door open. By the time he finally managed to scrape it open, Elodie was conscious enough to climb out of her seat.

  ‘Ow,’ was all she said.

  They started tottering through the dust. They were less than a block away from where the Alchemist had lived/been imprisoned. All they had to do was figure out a way to get past the S-sats.

  The S-sat’s weren’t going to be a problem.

  ‘How’d they do this so quickly?’ Elodie wondered. They were hiding in the still-smoking wreckage of a house.

  ‘Seriously, these people have almost as limited a way of expressing themselves as Scab does,’ Vic muttered.

  The street the Alchemist lived on was called Eden Street. A faceless corpse hung from every tree and lamp post that lined it. The street was filled with over a thousand people, all of them wearing dead-skin masks. They were standing surprisingly still, not even talking to each other. Vic, still struggling to control his emotions without drugs, found the whole scene very creepy. They were approaching the night cycle now and the entire street was illuminated by the hellish red glow from a number of bonfires.

  The Alchemist’s house was a collapsed ruin. It was littered with dead bodies, and among the pile of bodies was the wreckage of four S-sat’s. When Vic noticed that, he turned to stare at Elodie. She ignored him and continued scanning the crowd.

  ‘There,’ she said and pointed. Vic turned to look and saw their target tied to the bonnet of a ground car. He was naked, and it looked like someone had written all over his body in blood.

  ‘Charging S-sats until you overwhelm them. That’s fanatical bullshit, that is,’ Vic muttered.

  ‘Quiet,’ Elodie said. She was still looking all around, trying to figure out a way to get to the Alchemist. ‘The real question is, how did they know to grab the Alchemist?’ Vic looked both uncomfortable and preoccupied. ‘Did the Consortium imprison an entire gang, some heretic street cult? Why? And why imprison them so close together?’ Elodie contemplated that a bit longer. ‘I’m beginning to think the system here had already been hacked. I think the personality downloads were corrupted somehow.’ Then she turned around and glared at Vic. ‘What are you doing?’ she demanded.

  ‘I’ve actually wet myself,’ Vic announced.

  Elodie glanced down despite herself. ‘You need to get a grip,’ she told him.

  ‘Look,’ he hissed, ‘it has occurred to me that, frankly, without all the hardware and a vast quantity of fucking drugs, I’m just not that brave!’

  ‘I think you had too much brain surgery,’ Elodie hissed back. ‘Took all that nice smoothness and turned it into folds, and then filled it with human bullshit! Now fucking control yourself, because if you shit yourself I will just fucking leave you!’

  Someone cleared their throat behind them. Vic felt his heart sink. Elodie turned around to see seven of them, wearing the dead-skin masks, standing on the ruined lawn.

  ‘You know what you were saying about me shitting myself … ?’

  Through his fear, Vic calculated that at least one of the Dead-Skin Masks was deceased, another was crippled and the third would be unconscious for quite some time. After the first fight he had decided that committing acts of blunt-force trauma with a body that was both soft and brittle wasn’t a great idea. So instead he’d decided on viciousness as a tactic.

  The other four got them, however, and as they’d fought and struggled, more of the Dead-Skin Masks had joined them. They had taken quite a beating, and Vic was pretty sure something inside him was broken. Elodie’s body didn’t look like it was in good shape either. They had been dragged across the road and into Eden Street, and brought before another of the Dead-Skin Masks. He looked the same as all the others: a nondescript, suburban, generically bland adult male wearing someone else’s face. The only real difference was the six-foot-long stick he was holding. Bloodied bones and other grisly trophies hung from it.

  ‘Do you have any drugs?’ Vic asked the man. ‘It’s just I’m really struggling with everything that’s happening.’ He heard running and glanced to one side. He saw five children wearing dead-skin masks joining the throng.

  ‘I am—’ the man with the stick began.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Elodie said. ‘What do you want, and what will it take for you to let us go?’

  ‘Elodie!’ Vic hissed at her. Elodie glared at him. Vic groaned inwardly, having realised he’d just given her name away.

  ‘Well, either one of you cuts the face off the other and gives themselves to the Hungry Nothingness that waits just outside, or—’

  ‘Okay, let’s do that!’ Vic said, a little too eagerly. Elodie started struggling, mostly so she could do something violent to Vic.

  ‘Or we saw off both your faces and gang-rape you to death.’

  Elodie stopped struggling. She had one of the Dead-Skin Masks on either side of her, both gripping her arms tightly. She kicked the man with the grisly stick very hard between the legs. There was a wet popping noise and he started screaming. It was very high-pitched. Elodie was already swinging up and the high-pitched scream was cut off suddenly as she kicked him in the face hard enough to powder bone. He collapsed to the ground.

  ‘This is a child’s body!’ she shouted at the crumpled figure on the floor. A number of the Dead-Skin Masks scrambled for the grisly stick, which was grabbed by an inmate with the body o
f young girl. The scramble stopped and the other Dead-Skin Masks stepped deferentially aside.

  ‘This changes nothing,’ the girl said. ‘Make your choice.’

  ‘All praise the Hungry Somethingness!’ Vic shouted with mock enthusiasm.

  ‘I am going to kill you,’ Elodie told him.

  ‘Excuse me,’ a cultured voice asked, slightly stressing the sibilant. Vic saw people looking at someone behind him and eventually he was dragged around. He was surprised to see a diminutive lizard in a very tall cylindrical hat. He was wearing a black smock and holding an EM needler in each of his scaly, clawed hands. Vic was even more surprised when he recognised the lizard. His name was Mr Hat, and he was a bounty killer. The lizard hadn’t been too far below Scab and Vic in the ratings, before all their ex-colleagues had started hunting them. For a moment Vic was sure the lizard was there for them, and his bowels would have turned to ice had he not already evacuated them.

  ‘Look,’ Elodie whispered. Vic followed her gaze as she nodded towards the roof of a nearby house. Mr Hat glanced that way, too. It took Vic a moment to realise what he was looking at. A tall figure dressed in a pre-Loss-era suit, with tails, a waistcoat, a bow tie and a hat, similar in style and shape – though not size – to the lizard’s, was crouched, unmoving, on the roof. The figure was pale and looked human except for the lack of eyes. At first Vic thought it was an ornately dressed and peculiarly active blank but then he realised it was one of Mr Hat’s famed eyeless automatons.

  Movement in the periphery of his vision caught Vic’s eye, and he glanced up to see another automaton, this one female in design. The automaton was wearing a long, black lace dress that looked like a more chaste and reserved version of the sort of thing Talia wore sometimes. She/it leaped from the roof of a house and into a tree that had a faceless body hanging from it. The leaves shook, but she hadn’t made a sound when she landed.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry to bother you,’ Mr Hat continued, ‘but I am afraid I will be needing Mr Berger to come with me.’ He pointed to where the Alchemist was bound to the car. Berger was conscious now. He was sobbing and making begging noises, but little of it appeared to be in any kind of rational language.