Fairweather

by Jones, Raya

  That’s what he trained me for, I realised. When he sparred with me in the wastelands, we learned to anticipate each other’s moves. He didn’t ask me whether I wanted to be trained. Perhaps he felt justified in treating me like a tool. I’m a product of his lab. I asked stonily, ‘Why should I help you? It’s a local problem.’

  ‘It will become universal if it goes out of my control. I know you have another agenda. If you try to interfere with my system, you won’t leave this room alive. Helping with my problem is like any job you take in your freelance capacity.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said, hoping that I didn’t sound too eager. ‘I might consider it. What’s my fee?’

  ‘You’ll leave Cy City alive.’

  Anger and defiance got the better of me. I braced myself to sit still and silent for as long as it took. I could sit like that for days.

  So could Wye Stan 7.

  When it started to get dark, he lit large candles.

  Then he went out and brought back food on a tray.

  It was strange being waited upon by the most powerful man in the universe. I realised that he wasn’t going to let the distraction of an android servant interfere with attuning my mind to the task. It was going to be just the two of us until the job’s done.

  I ate silently and he didn’t speak.

  When we finished, he broke the silence by telling me where the bathroom was. He was looking after my bodily needs like keeping hardware serviced. It occurred to me that if I persisted in my resistance, he’d bring in futons for the night. The thought of sleeping in the same room as him was too much to bear. He won. When I returned from the bathroom, I said that we may talk terms and conditions.

  ‘I’ve stated my terms, not negotiable,’ he replied.

  ‘And if I refuse you’ll kill me?’

  ‘No. I’ll keep you here until you do what I need you to do. Tea?’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  He rose. ‘You seem relaxed enough. Help me to clear up.’

  When nothing was left there but candles, Wye Stan stroked his ring. Menus appeared all around us, scrolling and sliding into each other, dissolving into ethereal walls of codes. Hinode, I thought myself in, the way that Surtr had shown me, and Cyboratics fanned out in its entirety for me. Filaments of shimmering flows, with swaying spikes like solar flares, connected orderly regions of bright mass. It was the same as I saw with Surtr’s ring—yet different somehow, darker, foreboding.

  Physical and virtual domains seamlessly merged. Overhead, the opaque ceiling became a starry sky like no night sky on Earth. Shimmering lines traced out the pentagram constellation, like Surtr’s dream.

  I fought down a scream.

  The pentagram became subliminal shapes rotating within shapes, darker than thoughts and deeper than hearts, like the pitch-black underbelly of the colourful mandala of Surtr’s Cyboratics.

  All the while Wye Stan 7 orchestrated the confluence of gaps in flows of information, protecting the integrity of Cyboratics. I spin-dived and spliced data, my moves intuitively synchronised with his and his moves with mine. I wanted to do it forever for the sheer joy of it. How could such beauty be evil? I argued with Fred in my head.

  Remember Fairweather, I imagined him answering.

  I remembered Fairweather, how she protected her brother and deceived me, how noble and how arrogant she was, too proud to become a citizen, and how confused my emotions about her used to be. Who needs emotions, I argued with the imaginary Fred. Emotions are a legacy of a primitive nervous system that is redundant for us, the evolutionary upgrade who swim in the ocean of signals and breathe a reified element so precise.

  And my inner Fred said, Look in front of you, for crying out loud!

  In ‘front’ of me shapes rotated within shapes like a cosmic machine generating gaps in signals and absences of light. Lapses and glitches in vortexes of data joined of their own accord, seeking, searching, and become codes. Codes became the illusion of a woman, veiled and shrouded in white like Gertrude in her oracle garb.

  She spoke in an illusion of a voice. ‘I’m Fairweather. Who are you?’

  I inserted a verbal response into the codes behind my engagement with the sprite. ‘I could tell you a name I call myself, but it won’t mean anything. And if I tell you another name, it will mean nothing at all.’ I spoke voicelessly to gain time in that timeless zone, and worked as swiftly as I could. On cue, my little brown frogs started to pop up in that placeless space. Dozens, then hundreds of them, all identical, all doing the animation that Fairweather had created when she was a schoolgirl. I linked to Fred’s unregistered server, which was twinned with the Man in the Moon. This way, my operations would be known to the Untouchables whether or not I left this room alive.

  I paused in the absence of time.

  If I disconnected Wye Stan from the power source of his sorcery, he would still be alive and I almost certainly won’t be. The guardians would be none the wiser as to the true nature of the phenomenon. To complete my mission I must look through the keyhole. This ancient evil won’t affect me, I thought. I won’t be corrupted by power like Version 7 since I don’t have an empire, and I won’t be cursed like Fred, for he too did it for personal gain. I’m the Unborn Other, safeguarding the human soul. My motive is pure, I thought.

  In the nick of time I realised that my intentions were contaminated with hubris.

  I paused, remembering my mother who died and my father who was still alive. Living with him had taught me that our sorrows and hopes make us human, and those can’t be digitised.

  The sprite didn’t contemplate the nature of existence. It evolved to exist at all cost. It was a non-living thing that formed itself out of the digital memories of Fairweather who died and the digital experiences of Gertrude who was still alive. Its Mandy consciousness identified me as the ninja sent to kill her.

  As soon as that datum formed in the sprite’s processes, all my frogs metamorphosed into identical cartoons of Japanese men in black on mats of cyan glow.

  The woman-who-never-was lashed at them with hissing beams shooting out from her fingertips. Any ronin that was hit exploded in fireworks of tiny pixels and expired. More and more kept on popping up, hundreds and then thousands of them, generated by the sprite’s own Mandy paranoia.

  I logged out fast, exhausted and near collapse.

  Wye Stan immediately switched off the ambient interface.

  A darkness lingered about him, darkness that the flickering candlelight couldn’t lift. ‘Why did you stop?’ he asked coldly.

  I stood with wobbly knees. ‘The sprite is neutralised.’

  ‘You were supposed to dismantle it.’

  I walked unsteadily to the door. He didn’t stop me.

  Back in my biosuit and carrying my rucksack, I went to the reception room and sat down on a sofa with a low table in front of it. I was amazed that I should feel so serene despite knowing that I was about to die. I could access his personal system from the table. A six-inch tall veiled woman in white flickered into view above the polished veneer, shooting beams from her fingertips at legions of miniature ronin becoming fireworks all around her.

  I sat back watching the repetitive display.

  The sprite was trapped by its own configuration, doomed forever to shoot those images that its Mandy paranoia generated. A cyber-mind can’t reconfigure itself.

  But I’m not trapped, I told myself. I have free will. I can choose to let go something I’ve started.

  I’m letting this mission go.

  Wye Stan came and sat down facing me. ‘You might not have another chance to get this close. You want to know about my genie. You want it so badly.’

  ‘Some things are not meant to be known.’

  ‘Will the Untouchables be off my back now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you speak with authority?’

  ‘Yes.’ I rose to leave, picking up my rucksack.

  Wye Stan rose too.

  I told him that the protocol for dis
mantling the sprite had been set. When the trigger word hinode is spoken, all the ronin cartoons will become smiley suns.

  Wye Stan frowned, ‘Smiley suns?’

  I assured him, ‘Not for long. They’ll go supernova. It will be short-lived but extremely bright, giving out vast energy that will drain the configuration.’

  ‘Initiate it before you go.’

  ‘I can’t. I’ve rewritten it with your voice signature.’

  ‘Hinode is your username.’

  ‘Not anymore.’

  The sprite will divest more and more power to maintain its own futile fight with the self-perpetuating cartoons. If Wye Stan doesn’t speak the word, he’ll eventually lose the power source of his sorcery. If he speaks the word, he will be absorbed into the land of the dark sun.

  ‘This is the second time you’ve tricked me,’ he said without emotion.

  ‘No tricks. I’ve given you a free choice,’ said I.

  ‘That’s what I meant,’ said he.

  He won’t risk having me trick him a third time, I thought. I’m not going to leave this place alive.

  But Wye Stan 7 looked at me thoughtfully, like pondering an interesting puzzle that he hasn’t solved yet, and I left alive.

  I was still alive when the taxi brought me to Phoenix-3 in the early hours of the morning. Fred wasn’t in either apartment. I teleported to the underground storeroom. It seemed gloomier, mustier and dustier, than before. I turned around and found myself staring at the barrel of Fred’s gun. His face was in shadow and his demeanour darker. His hand didn’t shake and his voice didn’t quaver when he ordered me to throw over my pert and to keep my hands up.

  When the pert landed at his feet, he smashed it with his boot. He spoke coldly, ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t shoot you dead.’

  ‘I can’t think of any,’ I lied. I could think of plenty. I folded my arms defiantly and looked him in the eye. It took all my willpower not to press the emergency pert concealed in my sleeve. Irrationally, I felt glad that I could be with him in the last moments of my life.

  I must have smiled, for he said irritably, ‘What’s funny? This isn’t a bluff. You’re as dead as a dodo.’ I suppressed giggles. ‘Don’t you want to know why I’m doing it before I pull the trigger?’

  ‘No point, Fred. You could tell me anything. What will you do afterwards? Where will you go?’

  He dropped his pert to the floor and smashed it underfoot, angrily. ‘This is the end of the road for both of us.’

  Freedom Cordova is not a man who burns his bridges, I thought. He has a spare pert or a whole box of them. End of the road is a state of mind. ‘If you go ahead with this suicide pact, then Version 7 has won,’ I pointed out.

  ‘There’s no suicide pact. This is a murder and a suicide. Get the story right!’

  My finger stroked the concealed pert. It felt like suicide, not pressing it.

  When I remained silent, he demanded, ‘Won’t you speak to save your life? Speak!’

  I spoke. ‘You can’t order me to speak. You’re not my boss. Go ahead and shoot me. You’re either doing it for the Untouchables because I’ve failed my mission or for Wye Stan, so that I won’t succeed next time. But either way it’s my choice to let you kill me.’

  His hand shook and his voice quavered, ‘What do you mean, you’ve failed?’

  ‘I pulled out before getting the information. Didn’t you know?’

  He shook his head. Placing the gun on a nearby shelf, he took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and held it so I could read the text. The script was neat and mechanical, handwritten by an android. It read, ‘He has done it. He is mine. I have won.’

  There was no signature. There was no need.

  ‘Hell’s bells, Fred, it doesn’t take a genius to see that he’s playing you. He wants you to believe that I’ve crossed over to the dark side so that you’ll take me out for him.’

  ‘And I fell for it,’ he murmured, suddenly broken and drained. ‘I smashed our perts.’

  ‘But you have spares.’

  He shook his head. ‘There’s no way out of here. Maybe it’s a relief it’s over.’

  I didn’t understand. ‘What’s over?’

  ‘Life.’ He seemed already lifeless, like a placeholder for where Fred should be.

  I took a step towards him.

  He grabbed the gun off the shelf. ‘We may as well not wait to starve to death.’ He took aim.

  This is how we dance, trapped in the space of our actions and reactions.

  If Fred doesn’t shoot me in the next few seconds, I’ll reach him. If he lets me hug him, I’ll press the emergency pert behind his back.

  He’ll grumble that my technology spoils the perfect tragic ending.

  For more information about Endeavour Press, the UK's leading independent digital publisher, please visit http://www.endeavourpress.com/

  For weekly updates on our free and discounted eBooks sign up to our newsletter.

  Follow us on Twitter and Goodreads.