by Guy Haley
"Your trainer speaks very highly of you," said the bureaucrat. "She tells me you have a chance at a medal."
"If she says so." Otto leant his elbows forward onto his knees and looked away from the men, across the gym to where a bunch of freshmen would-be boxers were being taken through aerobic exercises by the assistant coach. "What do you want?" he said. "I've been here all afternoon. I'm tired and I have to finish up a paper before Tuesday or I'll fail my course."
The two men glanced at each other. The bureaucrat nodded. "We have a proposition for you," said the military man, voice like tank treads rolling over gravel.
"Yeah?" said Otto. He cracked his neck. "What?"
"Come into the gym manager's office and we'll tell you."
"Tell me out here."
"I'm afraid we can't," said the bureaucrat. "It's classified, and that's as much as I can tell you without you signing an official secrets form." He smiled apologetically. "And we may need to perform a memory suppression."
This piqued Otto's interest.
"Please consider, it will only take five minutes. If you are not interested, you will never even know you lost them."
The target fragmented into pieces. Otto zoomed in with his new eyes. There was nothing left. He replayed the moment through his interface, watched the fragments fly. He smiled.
Otto ran, explosions around him. Mud sucked at his boots, but did not slow him.
The man was dead, his blood sticky on Otto's hands. He wiped them on his flak vest, the camolam pulsing with tactile feedback. His eyes fixed on the corpse's. The lights had gone out of them. Otto felt nothing. He thought he should, but he didn't.
"Otto, the mentaug really is no different to the human mind – superior, yes, but fundamentally the same," Ekbaum explained patiently, his long face sad. Otto was strapped to a diagnostic table. He wanted to shout at him: I'm not on the slab yet! "It is clearer, more accurate," continued the doctor. "But ultimately our histories remain of our own writing."
"Otto!" Honour laughed and ran to him and kissed him hard. She clung to him, her arms barely reaching round his neck, like a child's.
• • • •
Clear notes rang out, silver trumpets in the dark.
Honour.
"Wake! The! Fuck! Up!" Tufa. Icy water hit Otto. He hurt all over, spasms ticking in his muscles, aftershocks crawling along his nerves. His mind was jagged with pain and mentaug memories, faint and jumbled, overlaid on the present.
Tufa brought Otto back by hitting him very, very hard with a baseball bat. Otto's head snapped round. He was stripped to his waist, bound to a chair by heavy chain. He didn't know how he'd got there. Blood crusted half a dozen shallow cuts. Much more of this and his healthtech would be overwhelmed. Tufa had not ranted as long as Otto had hoped. Time was running out.
Everyone has to die sometime. Was that him, or the mentaug adjutant? It was hard to tell.
There was a shout outside, loud but rendered indistinct by the warehouse's soundproofing.
"What the hell was that…?" said one of Tufa's cheap cyborg henchmen, surprise creeping over his sausage-meat features.
"The AI?" asked the other hesitantly. Otto forced himself to focus, and was gratified to see a crease of worry form on their hormone-smoothed faces.
"Probably jaunters, flying through. It's prime territory," said the other. He looked unsure.
Tufa stopped hitting him. Otto leant as far forward as his bindings would allow and spat red onto the ground. He looked up, and grinned a bloody grin. "Tired already, Tufa?" he asked.
"Still smart. eh? Well, you hear that, Otto? They think it's your pal come to rescue you, but it's not. Old Launcey, I paid him well. There's not a thing he can use round here, not one. This place" – he gestured round the interior of the warehouse with his bat – "is electronically dead, nothing for that slippery twat to get into. And when he gets here, if he gets here, we'll be ready for him, won't we, boys?"
One of the cyborgs hefted a large EMP gun. "No number's going to cope with this," he said.
"You are an idiot. He'll be here with a thousand cops," said Otto. "You have not thought this through."
"No, he won't." Tufa cupped his ear theatrically. "I don't hear any cops. A thousand cops turn up for you? Fucking bullshit. They hate you almost as much as I do, with your bought badge and fucking superior attitude. Richards won't be speaking to anyone for a while. I suppose he will get here." He shrugged. "AIs are hard to kill, but he'll be here far too late."
There was the rattle of a broken engine from outside. The cyborg henchmen glanced at one another. Otto looked up and smiled again. "Fine, if you say so. Still, it wouldn't do your boyfriends much harm to check that out."
Subdued gunfire; the drones were shooting at something. The rattling machine noise drew nearer.
Tufa frowned, but jerked his head at the EMP-toting cyborg. He nodded and waddled the waddle of all over-muscled men towards the small door cut into the warehouse's rolling front. He reached for the handle just as the entire thing burst inwards with a great bang. The loader went up and came down hard, the door folding round it, crushing the cyborg and stubbing out his life in a trail of blood and sparks. There came a frantic clanging as the loader cast off the door, flattening half Tufa's torture chamber and narrowly missing Otto.
"What the…" said Tufa. He dropped his bat and reached for his gun. Otto seized his chance and flung himself forward. He'd been right, the bolts weren't up to the job. The chair ripped from the floor. He caught Tufa on the side of one knee, bending it a way it wasn't made to go. The Albanian's leg broke with a wet crack as Otto's full weight fell onto it.
The second cyborg was quick. He recovered and stitched a line of holes in the loader with his flechette rifle. Hydraulic fluid sprayed like arterial blood. The loader slewed as one of its wheels locked. The cyborg fired again as the cab swung round, arm raised, claw spread. It came down hard and squeezed, hefting the bulky cyborg into the air as if he were made of straw. The loader slammed him into the floor again and again, not stopping until the cyborg stopped moving.
"Sorry I'm late," boomed Richards over the crackle of dying electrics. "I got a bit held up."
"Get me out of these chains," shouted Otto, his head on Tufa's backside. He wiggled on the Albanian, eliciting a shriek of pain. "Now."
"OK!" Richards' borrowed hand descended; a pair of shears popped from one of the loader's claw tips and snipped the chain neatly in half. Otto stood up, untangling his limbs. He winced, rubbed his head, rotated his shoulder. It was not holding up well.
"OK," he said. "OK."
"You all right, big man?" said Richards. "You kind of look like shit."
"Ja, I'll be OK," Otto replied. "Ach." He probed his face; it was swelling up, one eye half closed. He looked down at his erstwhile captor, squatted next to him, lifted his head up by the hair, then let it drop and wiped his hand on his bloodied trousers with a look of distaste. Tufa groaned.
"You know, Tufa," he said. "I have killed over five hundred men in my life. But this does not make me like you. I have killed men in war, or because they tried to kill me. But I have never, ever, killed a man because I enjoy killing. I do not think killing to be wrong, but to do it for no reason… That is immoral, Tufa. You do it for the hell of it. You do not understand that lives are not to be taken for your sport. You do not seem to understand, Tufa, that you needed to go away, that you are a nasty bastard" – he spat blood and wiped his mouth – "because you do not understand these things that I understand. I did the world a favour when we handed you over in Laos. I like to think I do the world a lot of favours. I did you a favour. I could have killed you, but I did not. The law says that you do not deserve to die. I do not always agree with the law…" Otto looked up at the bright lamps around them, at the tables, at the scattered tools. "You have made me angry. I do not much care for pain, but I hate vomiting... Listen to me!" He slapped Tufa's head. "You should have stayed in your cell, that is where men like you belong. If you stay
ed there…" He shrugged. "But you have my MT cipher, Tufa, and no one can have that. I need to know how you got it. Do you understand?"
"Fuck… you…" hissed Tufa through clamped teeth.
"That is the wrong answer," said Otto stolidly. "I am going to make an exception to my usual rules." Otto stood. If his speech hadn't had the required effect on the Albanian, the look on his face did.
"Wait!" shouted Tufa, holding up his hand. It shook, hard.
"No waiting," said Otto. He began methodically kicking Tufa's broken leg. "Now, we shall talk about my MT cipher, and we will talk about Launcey, and if we talk about Launcey, and you are good, then maybe I will remember my principles and you can go back to jail alive. More or less."
Tufa screamed. "I don't know anything, I don't know anything."
"Wrong" – Otto kicked again – "answer. Who is he?"
Tufa screamed. "I never met him. I never seen him. We did it all through the Grid, I never seen him!"
"Um, Otto?" said Richards. His voice slurred.
Otto continued to swing his foot back and forth, one-two, one-two, driving it into Tufa's bent limb with robotic efficiency.
"OTTO!"
Otto stopped. "OK." It was Tufa's turn to vomit. He whimpered and dragged himself away across the floor.
"I only have one minute of battery power left. Do you think you can reactivate your MT?"
"Yes." Otto walked over to the table where Tufa's phone lay and smashed the device with the flat of his hand. "Done." He turned back to the sobbing Albanian.
"Now that's more like it," said Richards in Otto's head. "That's much better". He left the loader, went back to his base unit. Its resident One free, the machine rolled back and forward in confusion, cab swivelling, its lights dying as the fuel cells ran dry. "Now," said Richards. "Where were we?"
"He has passed out."
"Looks like there's plenty of drugs here. You want I should identify them so you can bring him round?"
"No," said Otto, dragging Tufa back toward the tables by his feet. "I prefer to work through trial and error." He picked up a pneumatic syringe and looked at it thoughtfully, put it down, picked up one with ten centimetres of needle on it instead.
"I think the first one you had?" ventured Richards.
"Ja, I know. This one will hurt more."
"OK. Er, I am sure you won't mind if I don't watch. And don't kill him! I'm calling the cops. Let's do this by the book. For once."
Ten minutes later, they stood in the adjacent warehouse behind the groundtruck, an unmarked, unregistered monster with fake Gridsig and no Gridpipe, and that was as black as a vehicle got. Within, Launcey's payment stared back. Goods, not cash. Tufa had, Otto had found, no real idea who Launcey was, blank Grid accounts, that was all. Tufa had led them down a dead end lined with responsibilities.
"We can't just leave them here," said Otto.
"No," said Richards, "no, I suppose we can't." He looked through Otto's eyes at the trailer's contents – two dozen or so frightened children, all bound for… Richards didn't like to think about it, but it might just have been better than where they would end up now. Looking at their faces, all Arab or sub-Sarahan or Berber, he could see once they'd been processed they were all going back on the other side of the Med wall, carted off to the Caliphate or the dying South. Each and every one was an illegal, of that he was sure. "Question is, what do we do?"
From outside sounded sirens and the thrum of turbofans as police cars settled onto the concrete apron. Shouting followed.
"If we do nothing, they will be repatriated," said Otto. Above them, ranks of pigeons looked on, heads turned sideways, eyes bright with idiot curiosity.
"Is that so bad?" said Richards, already knowing the answer.
"You know the answer to that, Richards," said Otto. He traced the electoos on his scalp with one finger. Blood caked his hair, but the skin was scabbed over and the swelling on his face was subsiding as his healthtech got to work.
"So what then? I am open to suggestions."
Otto shrugged. "You have many important friends."
"Well, yeah," said Richards reluctantly.
"One I am thinking of in particular, he owes us big favours."
"Who?"
"You know who. Very important," said Otto meaningfully.
"Oh, no, oh, no. You don't mean… What, oh, Otto, come on, man! You can't mean, you want me to go and see him?"
"He can fix this for us." Otto gave him what would have been, had they been face to face rather than sharing the same head space, a level stare.
The children were beginning to cry, first one, then another, until nearly the whole damn lot of them were wailing like the dead, all those bar the ones with eyes like empty windows. Otto purposefully stared at these damaged few, his internal countenance doleful. Richards held out for as long as he could before he caved in, which was, to his credit, only about two seconds.
"OK! OK! Just quit looking at me like that. I hate it when you look at me like that."
The police swarmed in. Their guns came down when they recognised Otto. He gave the cops what was left of Tufa, cuffed, bloodied and groaning but otherwise alive, and bummed a cigarette. By the time he'd lit it and sucked down the first of the smoke of the carcinogen-free tobacco, Richards had gone from his head off down the electric highway to see the EuPol Five, head of European internal security.
Or Hughie, as Richards called him.
He was, according to Richards, the world's most pompous ass.
Chapter 6
Qifang
The message clamoured in Qifang's mind, drowning out the world. He gripped his head and screwed his eyes shut. It would not be silent.
The alleyway stank. His feet skidded on things he didn't want to think about. His breath laboured; he was dismayed at his own feebleness. He'd taken the vitalics and anti-gerontics, used them since they were first available. A longer healthspan, that's what they promised. They'd done their job – only months ago he'd been as nimble at one hundred and twenty seven as he had been at fifty – but Zhifang cursed them just the same. Who else could he blame for his frailty? Time paid no heed to the complaints of old men.
His blood pounded hard, his heart and joints ached. A metallic tang filled his mouth.
He stumbled on. His mind was cloudy, words and thoughts hard to formulate, his memories hazy and broken. His mind was a mosaic of itself, put together by a well-meaning fool who'd smashed the original to pieces in error.
One of the last things he recalled clearly was heading down to the RealWorld Reality Realm House in the desert, driving down the ramp into its subterranean fastnesses, parking. Then, what? Detroit? Karlsson? He couldn't remember if that came before or afterwards. There'd been a flash, a fleeting image of himself over and over, then a tilting sensation as the floor fell from under his feet. No impact. Next he knew, there was some snakehead bellowing at him in Hakka to get out of the truck, get out, get out! He wasn't sure which city he was in, which country. He'd walked through weed-wracked farmland and young forest, until this dire warren, full of people from everywhere. They were driving on the left. Was he in Japan? His vision was too blurred, too jumpy to furnish him with more than the broadest detail, the world indistinct, soft. All except his message, bright and hard in his mind as a diamond, demanding that it be delivered.
The men in their anonymous suits of charcoal grey found him, and chased him. He'd given one the slip, a frantic tumble into an alleyway, a lucky blow with an elbow. His assailant had been a man, nothing more than that, and he'd gone down. Something sharp had found his guts by way of return.
Their struggle and the pursuit raised not so much as an eyebrow as he floundered through the crowds. English, they were speaking English, but what dialect he could not tell. He'd been in exile for so long, and yet he still could not tell English variants apart. If he got out of this, the third thing he resolved to do after taking a tub of vitalics and a hot bath was improve his English. He'd download it if he had to.
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A shudder passed through some organ within, and its presence consciously felt for the first instance in a lifetime as it reached the point of failure. Something tore. He coughed and doubled over, sinking to his knees in the unspeakable rubbish. One hand pressed up against the wall, his lungs burned. Thick slime dripped from his lips. His breath hiccoughed in his throat, he couldn't draw enough in to sustain himself. This is the end, he thought. Now I am going to die. This dismayed the message more than him. His last thought was that he could not remember what the message was about. It amused him, and he died with a smile on his lips.
As he sank into the muck, shouts came from the alley mouth over the traffic noise, echoing off the prefabbed foamcrete walls either side.