by Curtis Hox
When it was her time to try, her father slowed. “Now think of your uncle’s cabin.”
The dream continued as she flew with her father. She imagined they could circle the earth like this.
Uncle Pic’s cabin ...
A short time later, she saw herself descending over the familiar creek, moonlight glinting off its gentle rapids, just a ways from Uncle Pic’s forest cabin. They pushed through the brush, crossed the open space, and entered his porch.
“Now that’s definitely a perk,” she said. “How long did it take?”
“We beat the helicopters,” he said and settled into a rocker.
“No way.” She did as well, and kicked her legs, causing enough friction that the rocker moved.
“Nice trick,” he said. “I learned that one quickly, too.”
“I bet you’ve got a bunch.”
“I do—just don’t tell your mom.”
“She’s mad because you’re still a ghost?”
“She’s mad because I want to remain a ghost.”
Simone paused her rocking. “You do?”
“I love you and your mother. But I think ... the body is so limiting. We can connect in other ways, like you and I just connected it. That was real, wasn’t it? That was heaven to me.”
She nodded, considering that it did, in fact, feel as if they’d become a single person and could have remained that way forever.
“There’re many mysteries out there, Simone. We have to be brave enough to face them.”
“I’m brave.”
“How was Supertrans tonight?”
She remembered the emergence of her entity as a tidal wave of release, as if she’d been waiting for hours at the top of a roller coaster’s longest drop before going. “It was happy to be let out.”
“Still happy with your last arrangement?”
“It killed a deer in the woods.”
“They’re predators.” He continued to rock, and she followed, the chairs making faint creaking noises on the old slats of the porch floor. Beyond, the woods surrounded them in a comforting wall of darkness. “You know what is interesting about the fact that your mother, Hutto, and Nisson summoned?”
“Other than the obvious?”
He snarled at her sarcasm. “No, well, yes. The obvious problem with the fact that the entities arrive by changing our physical composition. Well, not ours, since we’re ghosts. But the embodied. When Myrmidon—”
“Mom’s entity?”
“Pretty name, isn’t it?”
“Mine’s corny.”
“I like it. Anyway, when we first began to summon our bodies changed.”
“Yeah, that’s how it was for me.”
“That was a big enough mystery, seeing as how our chemistries could change without being engineered to do it.”
“When I first learned that my body would get bigger—”
“You wore baggy clothes. Sure sign of an Alter. Your mother wears the Bodyglove.” He paused, as if he were working through mental files he had stored away, and found one. “At first we thought we were infected with nanosystems that didn’t show up in scans. How else could our chemistries change in such radical ways? The Rogues use this very technique to mimic what they find so effective in us. But we found nothing.”
He looked at her in such a way she guessed this was how her life with him would have been had he been present instead of being a Transhuman ghost warrior.
“What?” she asked.
“What’s the logical next question?”
“How?”
He shook his head. “That’s the ultimate question. The proximate question would be: Where do we go?”
“I was there. I didn’t go anywhere.”
“Exactly!”
“But where does ... the person go?”
“Even better!” He floated off the rocker, illuminated. “A disappearing person breaks a fundamental law of the universe regarding matter—that matter has to go somewhere. But where? The thing that is you stays, or links, or merges, with your entity. But how?” He looked like he might reveal the answer.
She waited. “How ...?”
“I have no idea.” He chuckled, as if he were the only one who got the joke.
They heard the front door creak open. Uncle Pic stood on the sill in old-man skivvies that hung to his knees and the top part of long johns that had been cut in half.
“I’ll tell you where the person goes.” He stepped onto the porch, no more bothered by the cold than would a polar bear. “It goes to some mystical, magical fairyland called Bullshitville where everyone sings songs and skips rope and plays Chutes and Ladders. That’s where it goes.” He walked to the free rocker and sat down, as if his back hurt. “You talking about the missing person issue?” Her father nodded. “Well, good, because it’s time she knows about these things. You told her what I think happens?”
Her father waved that away. “Making stuff up doesn’t help.”
“Tell me what?” Simone asked.
“Not now, Pic. We have more important things to talk about.”
“Don’t change the subject just because I’m out here.”
“A Rogue lieutenant took one of the students. Gramgadon did.”
Uncle Pic frowned as if you’d just told him he was going to get a toothache in an hour. “Goddammit, Skippard, a student? And Gramgadon?”
“I know. It’s not my fault. I think he got himself mixed up.”
“It’s Joss,” Simone said.
“The boy who was deformed?” Uncle Pic seemed to understand. “I doubt that’s a coincidence.”
“Looks like they remember him.”
“Of course they remember him,” Uncle Pic said. “Those dirty bastards never forget when it’s someone who knows you.”
“He doesn’t know me.”
“You understand what I mean.” Uncle Pic looked at Simone, as if she were too young to hear what was about to be said. “What’s she know about Cliff?”
Her father settled on the porch and diminished his glow. “Not much.”
“Well, damn, Skippard. Same thing’s happening again, and I bet Cliff is mixed up in this.”
“He is, somehow.”
“Mom never told me what happened,” Simone said.
“Cliff was a talented Interfacer,” her father said. “I found him when he was a teenager, brought him into our home. You hadn’t been born yet. Like Joss, he got branded, and I spent a year battling for him. I lost. A Rogueslave shot him full of nanojunk. Almost killed him. When we got him to the clinic, we succeeded in cleansing him but the technicians had to change him. He’s like Rigon now, but worse. He’s been reworked so much that something’s off in him. He went hardline Consortium agent all the way; he was feeding them intelligence about me. When I perfected my process of ghosting, he came after me.”
“You tried to help him?” She asked.
“I did.”
“He’s a bastard, then. What’ll they do to Joss?”
Her father shrugged. “I imagine they’ll give him what he wants, for a price, unless someone gets him back before it’s too late.”
“Too late?”
Uncle Pic snorted. “Those software gods up there in the cyber sky or whatever it is look for any way they can to reach down here and fiddle with the good and natural stuff of everyday life. They’ll use that boy to push into our world. They’ll toss him aside.” He glanced at her. “You be careful no one does the same to you.”
Her father rounded on his brother. “All right, Pic, don’t start with your personal attacks.”
Uncle Pic bared his teeth. “Hell, Skippard, we’ve been meaning to do this for some time. She’s here. I thought it would be Yancey who’d bring it out of us. But Simone’ll do. This ain’t no rational process you can control. I was there on the steppe, remember? Goddammit, I’m a Megamech captain, and I saw what those Psy-sorcerer pinheads created on the steppe. Those colossi took down most of our mechs, except for the one standing guard not far from he
re. And looky there: They go and capture another super-hacker right from Sterling. I know what they want to do with him. They’ll give him whatever he wants and put him on a path to becoming one of their Technowizards.”
“He’s young,” her father said. “He has no idea how to channel. Besides, he’s got a Consort brand on him. They’ll have to negotiate that.”
Uncle Pic waved in the air. “Ah, you and your technicalities. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place.” He looked at Simone again. “Do you realize your father thinks the rules he set years ago still dictate their behavior?”
“They do,” her father said. “They want the Protocols, Pic. That’s the prize.”
“What’s the prize for you? You just keep running? Getting away?”
“You still don’t get it, do you?” her father said while looking at her. “The Rogues are just practice, Pic. You know that. Wasn’t that why we started all this?”
Uncle Pic stood, now both arms waving. “I don’t want you bringing that up.”
Her father continued. “You know it’s true. We created those scenarios as simulations for real conflicts with real alien intelligences, and we created the enemies we feared … as practice.”
“Or the real enemies came because we were now interesting to them.”
“Either way, Pic, we saw what was happening. I’ve been trying to get us prepared ever since.”
Uncle Pic began pacing up and down the porch, and Simone watched her father watching him. It was as if Uncle Pic was on the verge of changing his mind or, maybe, ceding a point. He stopped, as if he were tired. He looked out into the darkness. “So now we’re taking children and making them into ghosts?”
“Not all, just some.”
“And the rest?”
“They summon the entities who’ll be our allies.”
“And the games continue.”
Her father nodded.
“You know that boy is not going to be given up right away,” Uncle Pic said.
“Probably not.”
“He’s going to be slaved and we’re going to see him get activated. If he does well, they’ll change him more, and use him to channel the worst sort of evil. It’s clear to me. I’ve always had a knack for knowing their strategy. That’s what you’re waiting on, isn’t it?”
Her father nodded. “I guess.”
“The glad game is now where it’s at, Skip, like you keep telling me. They ain’t contesting us in the field anymore or even in the mainframes. Nope, they’re going to do it in the arena. Easy protocol announcements. Easy rules. Easy winners. I see it like this: Your double wants you. So, you’re going to fight someone heavy in one of the big events in the arena. They’ll bring up Gramgadon to face you, for sure. Since they know the Sterling School will be entering its Alters, I just bet your daughter here will face Mr. Beckwith.”
“Joss?” Simone said. “They’ll make me fight him? He can’t even summon.”
Uncle Pic looked away, again, as if something in the dark had his attention. “He’ll be able to, I bet, before this over, Simone.”
“That’s if we don’t find him first,” her father said
Simone rounded on him “I thought you said—”
“I said he’d be all right.”
Uncle Pic waved at both of them. “Interfacers like him tend to see something appealing in the Rogues. Joss may be getting what he wants by being kidnapped.”
“What’s he want?” Simone asked, but she could guess. “He wants to summon?”
“Yep,” her father said, “like you and me and the other Alters.”
Uncle Pic leaned against the porch railing. “Right now what they change into is scary stuff. You get fiddled with enough … and it’s as if critters from outer space come calling. Some helpful, some not.”
“Stop calling them critters,” her father said.
“Bottom line, Skippard, is that they like it here.”
“Bottom line, Pic, is that we’re vulnerable without them.”
“What’re you going to do about the boy?”
“Yancey’s people—”
“—will take forever, and you know it. By then, what?”
“Oh, hell, Pic. He’s probably happy as can be.”
“If he’s not?”
“Hell, hell, hell.” Simone’s father looked at her. “You think you can convince that boy to turn his back on the Rogues?”
“Joss? He’s not branded by them anymore,” Simone said.
“I know, but I’m guessing he contacted them.”
“No way!”
“I’m guessing he may have asked for a summoning package.” He rubbed his temples as if he had a headache. “Your mother is going to kill me for this, but you and I are going to try to get Joss Beckwith back.”
“All by ourselves?”
“That’s not all we’re going to do. It’s time you meet the man who killed your brother, Jonen.”
Simone remembered a few pictures of Jonen around the house, the ones her mother hadn’t taken down, but her mother never talked about him anymore. As a young girl, he was on her parents’ lips often, but as time passed, her father’s disappearance caused a change in her mother. It was as if everything that happened before was forgotten. Simone had been told that Jonen had been a young glad-fighter who’d died in the arena, and not rejuved. They never told her why, just that he was too young and that somehow he’d suffered Real Death. Rigon said he didn’t remember much about what happened besides the fact that his older brother didn’t come home one day.
“Was he killed by the man who took Joss?”
Her father turned away. “That man goes by the name his masters gave to him: Gramgadon. He’s been refashioned so many times he doesn’t remember who he was. He rigged a glad fight and killed your brother to get to me years ago. A new fight lord named Zain let Jonen perish and never got him help. You’ll also meet Zain soon enough. He’s on top of the game right now. He’ll be patronizing the exhibition matches, no doubt.”
Uncle Pic bit his lip back with a grimace. “Damn those Rogues. Damn ‘em all.”
“Come on,” her father said, “let’s go, before your mother figures out what we’re doing.”
“Right now?”
“Might as well.”
SEVEN
SIMONE LET HER FATHER PULL HER deeper over the Chattahoochee National Forest. She was mentally tired, so she dozed as they flew above the tree line. She would open her eyes and see wooded hills spotted with compact, moonlit fields that ran toward ridges or dropped into ragged gulches. The mountains in the distance were dark, rounded domes lined in mist. It was wilderness, and deserted, and lovely. The Consortium kept development out because, they claimed, nature needed to be protected from humanity. She spotted a few prized dwellings, though—vacation homes for the rich and connected who’d fled the arcologies, people like her parents, and the parents of students at Sterling.
They alighted on the edge of a cornfield. The stalks were taller than her father, and they swayed in the wind. The yellow silk looked like frazzled hair. She and her father began to walk down a row, the green leaves sometimes setting off sparks.
On the other side of the field, they stopped at a split-rail fence full of jagged splinters. It separated the cornfield from a fallow field that looked like it hadn’t been turned in a few seasons. Beyond it, a nice-sized, three-story country home sat on a hill.
“Gramgadon lives there, the little prick,” her father said. “Proof the Consortium is corrupt.”
“Nice house,” she said.
“Paid for by dollars siphoned by the Rogues.”
“Joss is inside?”
“Not sure yet. My bet, by the time Gramgadon had Joss in a car, he was already convincing him that the Consortium brand was a mistake.”
Simone stepped back into the corn to avoid looking like a torch out in a field. She thought it was funny, that if someone peered out a window—maybe someone who always checked under the bed before they went to
sleep or who never left a closet door open at night—he or she would see two ghosts looking up at the house.
Her father stepped back as well. “We’ll wait until morning. I doubt he’s returned. Rogueslaves, even lieutenants like Gramgadon, won’t take helicopters, much less low orbit shuttles. Air travel is too conspicuous. The Consortium regulates flying. So, we wait.” He guided her into the cornfield a few feet deeper. “We’ll relax together, father and daughter.”
The two of them floated a few inches off the ground. She wasn’t so tired anymore; she could stay like this all night, just waiting.
“You want to play a game?” her father asked.
“Sure.”
“How good are you at moving fast?”
“Not good at all.”
“Chase me.”
A second later he was gone. He’d darted down one of the rows, trailing wisps of energy. It happened so fast that even with the tracers, she lost him.
How does he do that?
She willed herself to start moving, this time without the requisite lifting of her feet—something she did so people wouldn’t freak out. Most people were bothered seeing her float down the hall, even the other Alters who were used to it, but to move she only had to think go.
She started gliding forward with no more speed than if you’d shoved her on roller skates.
A flash of light darted by her. She caught her father’s smile, and turned to follow him. He disappeared into the stalks with a burst of sparkling contrails.
She followed, picking up speed, but couldn’t find the burst she needed to catch him.
He did that again and again. She bit back curses while laughing at the idiocy of trying to follow him. It was as if she were a toddler learning to run, and he an Olympic sprinter.
Soon, she found a rhythm. She couldn’t catch him, but she was able to keep up with his traces. These ethereal ribbons lingered in the air for a few seconds, like rippling water in the wake of a speedboat’s engine. She guided herself in and out of these wakes, the little sparks that triggered no more of a nuisance than if she were running through the field with protective clothing.