Against Gravity

by Gary Gibson

  Wreathed in shadows, she had looked like some half-imagined goddess yearning for a way back home into the sky. And then she had turned and looked at him, and he had tumbled into the deep abyss of her eyes, as if falling through eternity . . .

  He shook his head. Just a dream.

  A little over half an hour later, Kendrick stepped outside into bright sunshine. A bitterly chill wind rattled through the sparse trees that broke through cobblestones up and down the street. His taxi rolled up right on time and he slid into its warm, driverless interior, making it to the Clinic a few minutes early.

  The building was located in the Morningside area, a three-storey pile of nineteenth-century granite set behind black-painted iron railings. The plaque on the wall next to the front door identified it as home to a data-archaeology firm – all an elaborate cover story.

  As Kendrick climbed the half-dozen steps to the front entrance, his enhanced senses warned him that his retinas were being scanned. A few seconds later the door clicked open with a solid thunk.

  As he stepped inside, the building felt as curiously empty as on every other occasion he’d visited here. There were no pictures adorning the walls, and the hallway floor consisted only of bare, unvarnished floorboards. A winding staircase situated at the far end led both up and down. Apart from the hallway itself, Kendrick had only ever seen the basement. He reined in his curiosity, knowing that in the circles in which men like Hardenbrooke moved the less anyone else knew of their activities, the better. Such caution was wise, since the treatments and drugs that Hardenbrooke dealt in were stunningly illegal.

  Kendrick found his way downstairs, keeping one hand on the black varnished banister as he descended into the basement. He spotted Hardenbrooke at the far end of a long, wide room, crouched over a crumpled eepsheet monitor tacked onto a slant-top desk. Other eepsheets were pinned up on the bare, whitewashed walls, all showing variations on the same X-ray-like image of a human body, a variety of clearly non-biological components highlighted in primary shades of red and blue. As he got closer, Kendrick realized that the images were of his own internal organs.

  Hardenbrooke turned and stepped towards him, smiling. “Sure no one followed you here?” he asked, taking Kendrick by the arm and gently guiding him to an adjustable leather couch in the centre of the big room. Hardenbrooke’s badly scarred face twisted up in a parody of a smile; from just above the right ear and extending below the neck of his shirt, one side of his features had the look of melted plastic. Around the ear itself the flesh was hairless and smooth.

  Kendrick climbed onto the leather couch and waited while Hardenbrooke hovered over a wheeled aluminium trolley loaded with a variety of medical instruments, all neatly laid out on antiseptic paper. “No,” Kendrick finally responded, after running his journey to Morningside from Caroline’s flat through his head. “Is there some problem?”

  “Just professional paranoia. A black-market clinic in Glasgow got raided last week – didn’t you hear about it?”

  “Maybe.” A snatch of news footage flickered across Kendrick’s mind’s eye. “You’re worried about that happening here?”

  “Sometimes I reckon it’s more a case of ‘when’ than ‘if’. I’m not casting any aspersions on your good character, of course,” Hardenbrooke assured him with a flicker of a smile. “It’s just—”

  “Sure, I understand. But there wasn’t anyone following me.” Kendrick made sure to catch the man’s eye as he said this. “Listen, I’m not just here for the regular treatments. Last night I suffered two seizures in a row, plus . . .” He shook his head and sighed. “Look, I need you to check out my heart.”

  Hardenbrooke raised one and a half eyebrows. Something about the man’s scars made it hard to determine his age. What little Kendrick knew about him extended only as far as Hardenbrooke’s claim to be a survivor of the LA Nuke. Beyond that, the professional nature of their relationship precluded any personal knowledge about each other. Yet they were partners in crime as much as they were doctor and patient, and Kendrick had been paying Hardenbrooke a lot of money for a series of treatments that had so far proved surprisingly effective.

  Nonetheless, over recent months some other details of the medic’s history had filtered through, giving Kendrick an opportunity to fill in some of the blanks.

  “Two seizures? Last night?” Hardenbrooke echoed. “You should have contacted me immediately.” His tone was admonishing.

  “I know I should. But I’m here now.”

  The medic went over to a metal desk and pulled a drawer open, rummaging around inside, then stepped back holding an old-fashioned stethoscope in his hands as he fitted the earpieces into his melted-plastic ears. Motioning Kendrick to pull his T-shirt up, Hardenbrooke pressed the icy-cold metal disc against his chest and listened. Kendrick watched a look of consternation spread across that part of Hardenbrooke’s face still capable of registering emotion.

  Then Hardenbrooke stood up straight. “Let’s come to an agreement,” he said. “When I say call me if something happens, then call me instantly. Anything that looks like a setback, just call me. Otherwise you’re making it a lot harder for me to help you. Is that clear?”

  “Absolutely.” Kendrick nodded. “I’m sorry,” he added. “I was just a little—”

  “I understand.” Hardenbrooke paused, then, “I’ll be frank, Mr Gallmon, technically you should be dead.”

  A look of alarm crossed Kendrick’s face. “Hang on there.” Hardenbrooke raised a finger. “What I’m saying is, this is something I’ve never even heard about before, even among Labrats with totally runaway augmentation growth. This, Mr Gallmon, is unique. I need you to tell me everything you can before we go any further.”

  Well, maybe not everything, Kendrick thought as he began. “There were . . . hallucinations, a little like before.” He outlined some of the details. Hardenbrooke was already familiar with the visions of butterfly-winged children.

  “Anything else?”

  Kendrick thought of Peter McCowan. But the ghost – wasn’t there a better word? – had warned him against Hardenbrooke. Was that just some figment of Kendrick’s own anxieties?

  But then, figments of one’s imagination didn’t necessarily give out warnings about bombs in suitcases either. Seeing men who’d been dead for years – that was something Kendrick was more than willing to keep to himself for the moment.

  “That’s it: I collapsed twice, I saw things, and my heart stopped working.” He laughed nervously. “Nothing unusual, really.”

  “Look, you have to remember your augmentations are—”

  “Inherently unpredictable,” Kendrick finished for him. “I know.”

  Hardenbrooke shrugged, and made an adjustment to the couch so that Kendrick found himself staring upwards into a complicated array of lenses and sensors suspended from the ceiling.

  Hardenbrooke picked up one of the spray ’derms and paused. “We’re in unknown territory here,” he said. “I want you to understand that.”

  Kendrick nodded. “I do.”

  Hardenbrooke touched the ’derm to the inside of Kendrick’s bare elbow. Kendrick felt a curious coolness spread along his arm, a sensation with a peculiarly synaesthetic quality to it, as if he could taste peppermint through his skin.

  This faded quickly. Twisting his head round slightly, Kendrick watched as the medic unrolled a blank eepsheet and hung it from a hook screwed into the wall. Next he picked up a slim plastic wand that looked even more out of date than Kendrick’s own. He pointed it first at Kendrick, then at the blank eepsheet.

  Kendrick could see the eepsheet clearly from where he lay. Its surface strobed for a moment before resolving into a cloud of brightly coloured pixels spreading rapidly across a field of black. There was a vague sense of form and pattern to the movement of the pixels.

  Kendrick realized that Hardenbrooke had just injected him with a form of nanite – vat-grown molecular machines that would provide a wealth of information about what was happening inside his bo
dy. This process extended to real-time visuals and, over the next minute or so, the blurry mass of pixels resolved itself into a distinctly human-like shape.

  Kendrick twisted his head around so he could watch Hardenbrooke, who was meanwhile keeping an eye on the other eepsheets mounted above his workspace. Kendrick gazed with uneasy fascination at the outline of his own heart, the major blood arteries already clearly delineated by the flood of information flowing from Hardenbrooke’s nanites.

  Now other ’sheets had started to display full-colour video images of his blood vessels – from the inside. Tumbling camera views spun by arterial walls, and he caught occasional glimpses of smooth, metallic grey where, in any normal unaugmented person, there should have been no such thing.

  The first time Kendrick had seen these pictures, he’d expected them to make him uneasy. It could be a hard thing to get a high-definition tour of the sack of meat and blood that made up your body. Instead, he felt strangely reassured by it. He was still clearly human, whatever might be happening inside his body. He suspected that the reason the medic was letting him see these images was to make him feel involved in the consultation process, a psychological ploy intended to make it seem as if they were engaged together in a journey of mutual discovery.

  Hardenbrooke didn’t actually need to witness any of this process himself since it was the correlated post-examination data that the nanites provided which really mattered. But Kendrick was strangely glad of it all the same. He thought of the nanites as tiny agents of positive change, even though they comprised the same kind of technology as his augmentations. The “good” nanites roamed through his body like microscopic policemen, making sure that everything was in order and that no rowdy augments were stirring up trouble deep within his organs.

  On-screen the augmentations showed up as red patches, mostly clustered around his spine and major organs, which manifested as blue. Countless red filaments spread up the tube of his neck, reaching deep into his skull. More filaments surrounded the meat of his brain like a wire cage. There were also segments of red scattered throughout his lungs, his kidneys, through every major organ. Kendrick peered, straining to see if anything had visibly altered. Every now and then one of the video images afforded him fresh glimpses of the artificial organisms that had taken root in his flesh.

  But they were also intrinsically part of him, whether he wanted them or not. He thought back to the nightmares that had assailed him, ever since his incarceration in Ward Seventeen, of fine grey filaments extruding from his body like stilettos.

  Hardenbrooke too watched the progress on the screen, then turned back to him.

  “Your heart . . .”

  Kendrick sat up abruptly, the electronic map of his body on the screen changing in response, shifting, twisting and blurring as he shifted onto the edge of the examination couch.

  Hardenbrooke picked up another spray ’derm, one on which Kendrick noticed a sticky label with fine, tiny cursive handwriting. But the label was angled away from him, making it impossible to decipher the words.

  Hardenbrooke held it up. “How much did I tell you about this stuff?”

  “Last time I was here, you said it was something new from the States.”

  “Do you remember our other little chat, when we first met, about the current legal status of what’s inside this?”

  Kendrick took a deep breath. “Yes, I do.”

  “Remember what I said then, how this is strictly experimental? You know how tight the guidelines are regarding biotechnologies like these.”

  “But you’re sure it’s safe?”

  Hardenbrooke sighed. “It’s probably no worse than what you’ve already got inside you. I’m not going to give you any guarantees or false promises, but there’s every chance you’ll keep getting better. This stuff has already successfully stabilized much of the augmentation activity inside you.”

  “But it is working,” Kendrick insisted. “I’m getting better. I know I am.”

  “And you say you’ve suffered two seizures in rapid order. Perhaps that’s a sign of change – perhaps even positive change.”

  “But what about my heart? What’s happened to it? I need to know,” Kendrick demanded, his mind going numb.

  Hardenbrooke pinched his nose between two fingers and closed his eyes, pondering. “I’d need to analyse the information downloaded from the nanites and try to get some grip on exactly what’s happened to you but, from what I’ve seen, it’s clear your heart’s been bypassed in some way. There are new structures inside you. My guess is – and I stress the word guess – is that the new structures are now controlling the flow of your blood.”

  Kendrick absorbed this information without comment. Hardenbrooke had only told him what he’d already suspected, yet hearing it confirmed in this way stirred up a darkness deep inside him, something shrill and insane that was fighting to get loose. He pushed it back down.

  “I urge you to remember that this is no reason to start worrying,” Hardenbrooke reminded him.

  Kendrick laughed, hearing the edge of hysteria there. “Not worry? I’m not to worry about it? Are you crazy?”

  “Mr Gallmon, I never had reason to ask this before, but is there any history of heart problems in your family?”

  “What does that have to do with anything? I . . .” Then he remembered an aunt who’d died of a coronary. His mother had also suffered a mild heart attack in her early forties. “Some, yes, I have to admit. But why do you ask now?”

  “Your augments integrate with your nervous system and major organs, changing them as they do so, like soldiers building a fort out of whatever material they can find. They respond strongly to perceived threats and, to a very great degree, they come up with their own definitions of what they regard as a threat. That could include medical conditions.”

  Kendrick was thunderstruck. “Wait a minute, are you saying I . . . you mean I had a heart attack? That’s what this is all about?”

  “I’m saying just imagine, if you will, that your augmentations reacted to a heart attack, or some kind of coronary event, by taking over your heart’s functions. I’m not saying that’s what it is. I’m only saying that’s my best guess for now. If I were you, I’d thank my lucky stars.”

  “My heart—?”

  “Has been bypassed, but you’re very much alive. Focus on that: it means your augments are working for you, instead of against you.” Hardenbrooke held up the ’derm again. “So let’s make sure things stay that way.” He leaned over and injected its contents into Kendrick’s arm while Kendrick glanced over the medic’s shoulder at the pixellated views of his own internal organs.

  Hardenbrooke stood up straight again and smiled. “Remind me, then: have we had this conversation?”

  Kendrick sighed. “No, we haven’t.”

  “Have I ever set eyes on you before?”

  “No, you’ve never seen me before in your life. To suggest otherwise would mark me as a scoundrel and a lunatic.”

  “Just so we know where we stand, I’ve introduced new nanites into your body, which will implant their own override algorithms in your augments.”

  “So that’ll at least delay things for a while?”

  “To be honest, it might even cure you.”

  “That’s impossible. You can’t be ‘cured’ of augmentations. They don’t just go away.”

  “What can be made can be unmade,” Hardenbrooke replied. “Remember, experimental tech, but so far, so good. Right?”

  Kendrick gazed soberly back at the medic. If Hardenbrooke was in any way lying, it was the cruellest kind of lie: an offering of hope where hope had not previously existed. It occurred to Kendrick that he wasn’t really prepared to believe what Hardenbrooke was telling him now, simply because he couldn’t cope with any more disappointment.

  “You are aware,” Kendrick framed his words carefully, “that if this really works like you suggest, it would be the biggest news of the century.”

  “I never said it was a definite cure. It�
��s a possible cure, using experimental technology that doesn’t even officially exist. Apart from getting me deported and jailed, if the authorities found out that your augments had turned rogue and that you had been taking these treatments they’d throw you straight into a secure nanohazard ward, and you’d disappear as far as the rest of the world is concerned.”

  Kendrick felt his face flush red. Yet, for the first time in a very great while, he dared to hope. The simple reality of it was that, without Hardenbrooke, and without the possibility that Hardenbrooke was extending to him . . . without that, he had nothing.

  12 October 2096

  Edinburgh

  Once, when Marlin Smeby had still been young, his maternal grandmother had taken him on a kind of Grand Tour of Europe. At that time, back home in Florida, his parents had been busy yelling and screaming their way towards a grisly divorce. By that stage the family was already rich from his father’s lucrative engineering contracts with the governments of various minor Asian nations looking to rebuild after their nuclear squabbles of the 2080s.

  The jaunt had given him a taste for travelling, which had led to a spell serving in the old US Army. This in turn had led on to intelligence work, which had led to Marlin’s discovery that he had himself inherited every bit of his father’s ingrained cruelty and utter disregard for his fellow human beings. To him, Edinburgh had felt like it belonged in some other time, with its ancient brooding castle and those grey stone tenements squatting on steep hillsides.

  Still, much had changed since then, and it was no longer the city he remembered from his previous visit. Even as a child he’d been able to see how much bankruptcy had affected Europe. The old EU had almost given up the ghost, but hadn’t yet been replaced by the monolithic European Legislate that had risen from its ashes. He remembered people in their thousands sleeping in the parks and streets because there was nowhere else for them to go.

  Smeby looked out of the taxi window and realized he could quickly tell which of the city’s inhabitants were American. It was something in the way they dressed, the way they carried themselves. He wondered if they still considered themselves to be American. Did they all talk of going back home once things got better, or would they finally give up and decide they were now Europeans?