Empyre

by Josh Conviser

  “Sarah delivered,” Frank shot back.

  Laing shook off his annoyance. “It was coded? Targeted to specific people?”

  “We're not sure. Other than Dillon, everyone in EMPYRE is dead. And everyone she infected on leaving the building is dead. One hundred percent kill rate. Officially, Peters released anthrax . . .” Frank trailed into a silence that implied much more.

  “And—as usual—the official line has little to do with the truth.”

  “As fucking usual,” Frank agreed. “Whatever Peters is actually hosting is fast acting. When triggered, it strikes hard—anyone in her radius goes down. But it's also short-lived. The pathogen burns out quick.”

  “And somehow Dillon survived.”

  “Not in any way he's happy about.”

  A grinding spasm worked its way down the nape of Laing's neck and into the meat of his back. Frank hit Broadway and barged into traffic heading south. The move didn't help Laing's tension any. He shifted, trying to ease the kink. Around and above, scrapers misted into the muggy air. Claustrophobia settled on him in thick waves.

  Sarah, what the fuck are you into?

  12

  NEW YORK CITY

  Andrew Dillon drifted through a sea of carnal impulses, lost in a waking dream. Desire and gratification sloshed over him in a pulsing flux. In their grip, he could almost forget.

  In life, there were distractions, pieces of the puzzle that refused to move. Not here. Here, fantasy became real. Here, he indulged.

  A shot of pain rifled through him. He swallowed it down. That pain was from another place—a wracked body that was no longer his own. That wasn't here.

  A distant memory rose to fill his reality. A trip to Maui National Park when he was a boy. The class had hopped out for a day of “nature.” Dillon hated it. As the others milled around, eating their lunch, Dillon wandered off. He pushed deep into the jungle, trying for high ground—a place where he could find perspective.

  But the thick green hemmed him in, flipped his senses. In minutes, he was lost. After an hour of wandering, fear overcame his embarrassment and he screamed for help. Nothing. He yelled himself blue, crying thick tears of shame. Then, just as he thought all was lost, he recognized a stream from the hike in. Dillon followed it through the dense foliage. He found the trail. Relief flooded him as he reentered camp but, for days after, he could not wash away the shame—the knowledge that he had been so helpless.

  In memory, the trail led him back to camp. But here, in this nether world, he pushed shame away, turning from the memory.

  The foliage closed in around him, ratcheting down to darkness. When the iris reopened, the green was gone, the trail replaced by a hallway crammed with books—a Babel that was his to explore.

  Dillon floated down an aisle and pulled a book from the shelf. The book. Doing so opened a secret door, leading to yet another hall of books. He pulled another, opened another door, his access unfettered. Book on book, room on room, until at last he stood at the center of Babel itself, at the core.

  Standing in that place, contentment filled him. The point of clean perspective. He knew this was all simulation—a world constructed by integrating his memories with software designed to calm him. All so that his body could heal. But even if it was fake, there was no reason not to indulge in the mirage. Here, all doors were open to him. There was nothing he could not know. Here, he could relax.

  And then, reality tugged. Helplessness washed over him. He was back in the jungle. Lost.

  Fantasy slow-faded. Andrew opened his eyes. Over him stood Frank Savakis.

  Frank stared down at Dillon, trying not to let his revulsion show. Andrew lay flat, suspended millimeters over a mag bed. It made him appear weightless, ethereal. Dillon's eyes scratched open. Red ringed his dull brown irises. A rivulet of fluid drained from one eye, forming a piss yellow tear. It grew slowly, finally overcoming surface tension to drip down his pocked cheek.

  “Fuck me.” The words escaped Frank's lips before he could rein himself in. He almost regretted them.

  The words grounded Dillon in reality. His papery lips shrank to a thin line frown—a face set to weather the gale force of his pain.

  Andrew resolved Frank's looming form, his disgust evident. Dillon bridled under the scrutiny. This man was a cog in his machine. More than most, Frank had needed to be convinced of his place—forced into Dillon's perspective. Now, that carefully created reality had crumbled. He saw it in Frank's cold pity.

  Andrew pulled himself up. The magnetized platform beneath him shifted with his movement, taking its shape from his own. It curled under him as he drew into a seated position.

  Once settled, Dillon engaged the gyroscopic balancing system. The wheels under the bed arched up and went to vertical. It raised Andrew to roughly the height of a man—an unbroken, whole man. Dillon's mouth stayed set, his eyes boring into Frank's, daring him to say more.

  Before the test of will resolved, Dillon noticed a man in the corner. His grimace broke.

  “You found him,” he croaked. His vocal cords vibrated under a viscous coating of phlegm, sinking his normally high-toned voice into a deep gurgle.

  “Dillon, Ryan Laing.” Frank stepped aside and motioned Laing forward.

  Andrew leaned toward Ryan, the balance shift rolling him forward on the gyros. He closed in on Laing, who held still in the corner. Andrew's vision blurred in and out. With a herculean effort, he raised his hand.

  Laing watched the gangrenous appendage come toward him with a combination of horror and fascination.

  “Nice handiwork, wouldn't you say?” Dillon forced the words through cracked lips. “I'm starting to think someone doesn't like me.”

  Andrew's arm held firm. Ryan stepped in, the stink of dead flesh snuffing out the apartment's lavender-scented sterility.

  Ryan's fingers curled around the hand. Dillon's pressure surprised him. He saw in the man's twisted grimace just how much effort the act required.

  “Not worried about transmission?” Dillon asked, releasing Laing and sliding out of Ryan's space.

  “I've got a hefty immune system.”

  “So I've heard.”

  A white swarm invaded the room to Ryan's left. He made out four faces within the sea of coveralls. One of the med-techs approached, slamming a vial into the mag bed. The fluid filtered through the bed, gapped the distance to Andrew's flesh and entered through the pussing fissures in his dermis.

  “Sir! No flesh contact. Any contamination makes our job harder.”

  Andrew smiled stiffly, keeping his eyes on Laing. “You see what I have to deal with.”

  “Please,” another med said, this one a pear-round woman with a shock of white hair.

  “I know, I know,” Dillon broke in. “It's for my own good. Have to maintain that genetic integrity.” He looked himself over. “There might be a battle or two left in me—but the war is lost.”

  “Sir, our stats show marked improvement.”

  “We just need time to decode the retrovirus—”

  “Okay—I get the picture. Point made. Laing—you'll have to restrain yourself from now on.”

  The glint in Dillon's eye disarmed Ryan. He cracked a smile.

  “Come!” Dillon croaked. “We'll talk on the patio.”

  He shifted forward and the gyros fought to catch up. The meds chased after him in a flurry of worry. Ryan caught Frank's eye.

  “He's a good man, Laing.”

  Laing nodded and followed the scent of slow rot.

  80 South Street reminded New Yorkers that their city had a past. Designated a historical landmark, it stood under vaulting scrapers that couldn't quite manage to overwhelm it. Designed by Santiago Calatrava, its block and ladder design had become an intrinsic piece of the New York skyline—even if that skyline now dwarfed the building.

  The building contained ten separate domiciles, each a massive plexi cube cantilevered in an alternating pattern off a central support. Stabilizing spires ran up either side of the building
. The building resembled a set of blocks stacked by a child who didn't yet know that gravity negated such fantasies. The tension of form captured a moment in architecture. It had stood the test of time.

  Andrew Dillon lived in the penthouse. His life had evolved in a smooth progression to this pinnacle. He grew up an only child to Ellen and Oscar Dillon. Andrew had moved effortlessly through the dance of schools and societies that made up the bedrock of his parents' life. Each piece locked into the last—a succession of clubs and cliques leading him to the ultimate secret society, the CIA.

  Dillon loved that world, the gritty thrill of secret knowledge, the back-stage manipulation—the rush of shifting the world to his whim. As deputy director for intelligence, he assumed the control that was his right and used his power well. All the pieces fit.

  He wheeled through the massive living room, Ryan and Frank following behind. What had been perfect white—the chairs and carpet, the sofas and wall hangings—had now been smudged by the dull gray of med gear. Dillon couldn't abide hospital life. He refused to let others—civs—see him like this. And he had the means to force the issue.

  In the far corner, med-techs huddled over the rotating display of Dillon's genome. It spiraled before them, a three-dimensional holo of that which defined—and now destroyed—him. Somewhere in that genetic mass, Sarah's retrovirus had injected its code, which was now slowly, brutally killing him. The meds reached into the rez, pulled code from it, altered it and slammed their manipulations home, trying to engineer a way out of the slow death creeping through their patient. They looked up at Dillon as he passed, but only as another distraction pulling them from their hack.

  “Progress?” Dillon barked.

  “Slow,” one med responded. They all looked the same to Dillon. “The mutation rate has really slowed us down. The coding's genius. Getting at it means hacking into your most basic operational directives, both physical and psychological.”

  “You're digging into my mind?”

  The med-tech shifted away from Dillon and centered himself on the code. “The debugging may be worse for you than the virus.”

  “What could be worse than this?”

  The med-tech didn't reply. He turned back to the rez, dug his hands into the holo and resumed work. Dillon tried a shake of the head. The move drew belting waves of pain.

  “We can give you something to edge that out,” another med said quietly.

  “No.”

  “Only other option is to go back into the sim.”

  “Not quite yet.” Dillon pushed forward, bobbing toward a plexi shield that opened onto the patio. He motioned to Frank, who touched the release. The shield slid open.

  “Sir,” the head coat sputtered, “the contaminants out there...”

  Dillon wheeled around on the tech, gazing down with his pus-red eyes. The tech turned back to his holo. Dillon whipped back to Frank and Laing.

  “Join me,” he said as he slipped out.

  Laing followed Dillon into the heavy air. Before them, the East River cut a lazy meander into Manhattan's flank. Laing stepped to the plexi railing—the only thing marking the building's edge—and stared out.

  “Inspiring, isn't it?” Dillon asked.

  Laing found it difficult to respond. He could never live with such a view. “It's claustrophobic,” he said quietly. “Especially from this height.”

  At just over three hundred meters, 80 South Street was an ant staring up at a mountain. Before them, slicing down the river's length, the Wall vaulted into the sky. Its soft undulations mimicked that of the water running below. The Wall ringed Manhattan, cutting it from storm surges that had ravaged Long Island and New Jersey.

  The Wall's translucent biocrete allowed Laing to see the differential in waterline on the other side. He felt the water's mass crushing in on the city, longing to pour into this little enclave and expend its potential.

  Dillon wheeled to Laing's side. Even with the mingling city smells, the man's rot ran.

  “It won't hold,” Laing said.

  “It has for decades. The Wall allows New York to survive. To thrive.”

  Laing just shook his head. He looked up at the scrapers ringing them. He felt small—hemmed in. Finally, he turned away from the view and sat with Frank by a long narrow pool that ran the length of the structure. Dillon wheeled over, his bevy of med-techs hovering around him.

  “I've come for Sarah,” Ryan said.

  A grating cackle erupted from Dillon. Nothing resembling mirth. “You have?”

  “Andrew—” Frank tried to calm Dillon.

  “I think you've come to admire her handiwork.”

  “No. She didn't do this—she couldn't.”

  “You're here, Laing, to explain the why,” Dillon said.

  “I haven't seen Sarah in years.”

  “But you're so damn sure of her innocence.”

  “I know her. I worked with her.”

  “We know,” Dillon forced out. “She told us about Echelon. About you.”

  “She . . . ?” Laing couldn't believe it.

  “Oh yes. To have pissed such a prize away,” Dillon continued. “Shocking.”

  Laing couldn't hold back. “Always the planners, the manipulators, who think they have the right to play God.”

  “Right?” Dillon sputtered, the word drawing a trickle of bile which spilled down his chin. “We have the obligation! Without us, what would happen? Look around you, Laing. Look at this fine city. Without the Wall we'd be underwater. Humanity needs surgeons to slice away the gan-grene. You dulled the most perfect blade, Mr. Laing. Now, we're left with coarser methods to reach our ends.”

  “And Sarah helped you cut?”

  “She decided where to slice. Others did the surgery. But you know that, don't you?”

  “I know that Sarah is in trouble. I know you put her there.”

  “I put her there?” Andrew barked, his frustration boiling up. “Look at me! Look at the work she did! I want her, Laing. Do you get what she ruined? The game she cut short?”

  Laing turned to Frank, who also seemed surprised by Dillon's rage. “What am I doing here?” Ryan asked.

  Suddenly his field instincts, so long in hibernation, bristled. He sensed the strike coming but not in time to thwart it. In an excruciating instant the blade cut his spinal cord—cleanly inserted between the vertebrae at the base of his neck. Before paralysis, Ryan had managed to swivel just enough to see one of the techs holding the instrument. Pain lanced him, then dissipated to nothing.

  He couldn't move.

  Frank lurched out of his chair, unprepared for the attack. “The fuck?!” he sputtered.

  Even as he went to Laing, Frank felt the tip of the tech's blade at his own neck. He froze.

  “That's not a move I'd recommend, Frank,” Dillon said.

  Very slowly, Frank sat back down, the blade never leaving his skin. “What game are you playing, Dillon?”

  “That's not really your concern. You can sit and watch, or join Laing. But your spine won't regenerate.”

  Frank eased back and kept quiet—letting the scene play as he struggled to submerge his rage.

  Both men turned their attention to Laing. Andrew noticed Ryan's finger twitching manically. He wheeled forward, took the blade from the tech and held it to Laing's cheek.

  “The reports don't do you justice, Ryan. A full cord break and already the drones have you wiggling your fingers. Unfortunately, you won't be operational in time to help yourself.”

  Laing formed the word on his lips, unable to draw the breath to expel it.

  Why?

  Andrew's blood-caked lips extended into what had once been a grin and now made him look like a sentient jack-o'-lantern. He flicked the blade, slicing into Laing's cheek and gritting over bone. The gray-black ooze slipped out, stanched blood flow and retreated as quickly, sealing the cut and zipping Laing's face back to whole.

  “You're linked to Sarah.”

  Ryan's eyes swam. He mouthed words but Andrew cut
off even that.

  “We know you are. Now—I want her. You're going to make that happen.”

  Ryan found his voice, drawing huge breaths as his respiration rebooted. “It's . . . the connection fried.”

  Andrew drew back, shocked at Laing's recuperation. “You are a specimen, Mr. Laing. I'll give you that.”

  “Jesus, Dillon,” Frank said.

  Dillon's slow stare stifled further dissent. He turned back to his target.

  “I...can't,” Laing gasped out.

  The crease of Dillon's mouth only widened. He took a vacuum-sealed gel pack from the med. With the blade, he cut a hole in the packaging and a slow, transparent ooze slipped free.

  “Why don't you try? Call it my last request.” Andrew swiped the blade through the slick glop. He raised it to Laing's face, brushing it liberally over Ryan's lips.

  A sharp tingle broke through the other sensations warring within Ryan for attention. He closed his mouth, trying to eject the gel. Before he could, the med bent over him and traced the gel's path with a light stick, triggering the reaction.

  Frank watched in horror as Ryan's lips stitched together to become one continuous piece of flesh.

  “Bonding shells, Ryan. Something I've become intimate with over the last few days. Silica beads covered in gold. When exposed to infrared, the material fuses flesh to flesh. These men have used it to hold me together. I'm enlightening them as to its other possibilities.”

  Laing's eyes teared over, fear gripping him.

  “Link to Peters. Tell me where she is and this all ends.”

  Laing shook his head, attempting to rid himself of the shells.

  “No?” Andrew asked, his tone darkening. “Maybe you require deeper concentration. Let's remove some distractions.”

  In a slow swipe, Dillon ran the blade over Ryan's left eyelid. The med aimed the light stick and fired. The lid sealed instantly.

  “Dillon, that's enough,” Frank said. “This man came willingly. The fuck is wrong with you?”

  “The fuck you think?” Andrew replied, running a hand down his ghoulish form. He enunciated the expletive with the precision of a man unused to cursing. “Life jumped up and bit me in the ass. You were right all along. Hard times require hard acts. I'm sorry you had to do what I couldn't all those years ago in Prague. But you seem to have gone soft. A message must be sent. This is my medium.”