Against Gravity

by Gary Gibson

  A smear of graffiti strobed across a wall, its hue flickering from green to red to yellow; Fuck off back to the US, someone had scrawled. Another read Europe for the Europeans.

  Smeby sat back and let a smile steal across his features. Europe for the Europeans ? Not so long ago it would have been Britain for the British, or maybe France for the French. Their mutual hatred for the flood of American refugees had finally driven the Europeans to embrace each other as brothers.

  “Mr Hardenbrooke, I trust you are doing well?”

  Hardenbrooke nodded and smiled as best he could, given his difficulties in that area. There was a distinctly pale flush to his skin, Smeby thought: he was clearly nervous about something.

  “Business is good,” Hardenbrooke replied, glancing around Smeby’s hotel suite. Draeger’s money had secured him an entire floor of the Arlington, a large part of it taken up by the conference room in which Smeby had arranged for them to meet.

  “How has Mr Gallmon responded to your treatments?”

  “I believe this is all detailed in my report.”

  “Yes, but I’d like to hear it from you in person.”

  “Well, there’ve been some interesting developments. When he first came to me, his augmentations had clearly gone rogue. There were no visible signs yet, none of the characteristic scarring around the neck and skull, but that was only a matter of time. The treatments have worked in retarding runaway growth.”

  “Any ideas concerning these seizures of his?”

  “He still reports the same associative hallucinations and I have no idea what’s causing those. If you could tell me if anything similar happened with other Labrats, assuming you’ve actually tested this stuff out on others apart from Gallmon . . .”

  “I can’t disclose that,” Smeby replied.

  “Okay, fine,” said Hardenbrooke, looking a little nettled – and also nervous. Smeby had given the medic no warning that he’d be in the country. Maybe Draeger had suspicions concerning Hardenbrooke’s loyalty. “But there is one other thing.”

  Smeby waited.

  “I didn’t put this in my report, because it was just a personal feeling, but since you’re here . . . I have the feeling that Gallmon is holding something back, like there’s something he’s not telling me.”

  And there’s something you’re not telling me, either, Smeby decided. But there’s enough time for me to find out.

  14 October 2096: 1.45 p.m.

  Edinburgh

  Kendrick hovered outside his flat in Haymarket for over an hour, then took a chance. He headed around to the other side of the block by a circuitous route until he came to a small side window, now conveniently hidden behind a skip, through which he could crawl.

  This led him into an underground car park for the office complex that occupied part of the building above. Next he found the service stairs that led up into his own part of the building. He’d once scouted it out as an escape route when he’d suspected that he might one day need one.

  However, he hadn’t expected to be using it in reverse. Still, there were things upstairs that he needed.

  Kendrick hadn’t yet risked returning to the Armoured Saint and he’d already outstayed his welcome at Caroline’s flat. So home it was, at least for long enough to pick up what he needed and until he could find somewhere else. The flat was tiny, just a rented room and kitchen in a part of the city that had become an American ghetto over several years. But once he got inside and closed the door behind him, all the stresses and fears of the past few days started piling up on him. He collapsed onto his narrow bed, listening to the silence where his heartbeat had once been.

  After a little while, he closed his eyes.

  Kendrick floated in the air and his daughter Sam stood on a grassy plain far below, waving up to him. Beyond her, a kite jiggled in a sudden gust and he watched as she ran after it, laughing.

  At first he didn’t notice the truck. It was painted olive green, its engine humming gently as it clanked across the grass.

  “Hey,” he shouted – then again, a little louder. Now he too was standing on the grass, and he started to move towards Sam. He saw his wife there, too, seeming oblivious to everything but their daughter. Neither of them seemed to get any nearer to him.

  The truck rolled to a sudden stop, and uniformed men piled out of it. They grabbed at his wife’s arm, and the thin sound of her scream carried far across the grass.

  They had seized his daughter now and she was screaming too, her kite lost, adrift on the wind. Kendrick just ran, untapped reservoirs of energy he never knew he had propelling him. Sam fell to the ground, the soldiers beating her with the butts of their rifles, the grey metal barrels turning shiny and sticky with splashes of her blood . . .

  Kendrick fell out of his bed, his body slick with icy-cold sweat and his throat hoarse. He must have been yelling aloud in his sleep. He staggered out of his bedroom and spotted something by the front door. It was an envelope, and he picked it up. It hadn’t been there earlier when he’d returned, and he didn’t get much in the way of mail.

  He studied the name on the envelope for a long time. His name – his real name, Kendrick Gallmon – was hand-printed on expensive-looking rag paper. Kendrick felt an immediate and deep sense of foreboding flood through him. He was not registered as the flat’s occupant under his real name, therefore somebody was telling him something. They were saying: We know who you are, we know where you live.

  He thought hard. Not the police, not the European Legislate. Sending him expensive-looking mail wasn’t part of their remit. They’d just barge in and get him. So someone else, then.

  Kendrick opened the envelope and found that it contained what appeared to be a simple business card. The letters, printed on textured cream plastic, read Marlin Smeby. He didn’t recognize the name. However, as soon as his fingers touched the card itself an image sprang up uninvited in his mind: an image of a man, seen from the shoulders up, hair thinning across the top of his scalp, jet black to wavy grey around his ears.

  The card slipped from Kendrick’s fingers. He leant down and picked it up again, this time holding on to it more firmly. He decided that he hadn’t hallucinated that image.

  The second time around the experience was only mildly unsettling. The face he saw now in his mind’s eye had to be that of Marlin Smeby. Touching the card brought a sensation not unlike a memory, long buried, suddenly re-emerging, or the spark of recognition someone might feel when a vaguely familiar person passed them in the street – except Kendrick knew that he’d never met Smeby in his life.

  Kendrick focused now on the card’s surface, his augmented senses allowing him to detect the faint filigree of microscopic silver circuitry woven into its surface. The technology was unlike anything he’d ever come across before, and to place it in a mere business card . . .

  It had to have been designed with augmented humans in mind. He felt sure that someone unaugmented, like Malky, would experience nothing on handling it.

  So, someone also wanted him to realize that they knew about his past. In this respect the card carried many intimations: of wealth, and of power – certainly the power to expose him.

  Kendrick found a local grid address printed on the card’s flip side. He could wait and see what happened next, or he could do something now. He couldn’t help but wonder if this was somehow connected to what had taken place in the Saint the night before. But, at the very least, if someone had set out to get his attention they’d done so effectively.

  Kendrick tapped the grid address into the query screen of the eepsheet stuck onto his refrigerator door with a fridge magnet. It supplied him with the location of the Arlington, a hotel near the centre of town. Big, expensive-looking place – he’d passed it innumerable times.

  The Arlington rested between tall buildings constructed from the same quarried sandstone as the rest of Edinburgh, but unlike the structures in the narrow, crowded streets of the nearby Old Town this was an edifice entirely of the late twenty-first c
entury. The mirrored surfaces of its windows were visible between broad aluminium interstices jutting out at strange angles over the street below, giving the whole a malleable, almost plastic appearance. From the opposite side of the street, Kendrick leant back, gazing up at the broad expanses of glass that reflected anything but the buildings around them. The hotel’s windows were programmed instead to reflect other city skylines – perhaps Milan or Hong Kong. He saw the reflection of a building impossibly sculpted in the shape of a sickle, as if designed for a world with little or no gravity, and a view totally in opposition to the reality of the staid architecture behind him. The effect wasn’t very subtle, he decided, and spoke more of money than of taste.

  Kendrick stepped across the street towards the hotel’s wide entrance. Now its glass doors displayed a different view, one that cleverly integrated both Kendrick and the people walking past him into yet another environment . . .

  When he stopped and stared at the broad expanse of the main entrance, a chill ran through him as he recognized the landscape displayed. His reflection appeared to be standing on a wide grassy plain, while behind him the ground curved distinctly up into the distance.

  The illusion was well programmed, so that the closer Kendrick came the more he could see. Despite himself, he glanced round at the ordinary street surrounding him as if to check that it was still there. Then, looking back, he moved his head from side to side, finding he could see a little way further along the plain on either side before the illusion shattered into unfocused rainbow colours. Curving walls slid off into the far distance before they became shrouded in cloud and mist. It was the same terrain he’d been seeing during his recent seizures.

  Feeling shaken, Kendrick passed in through the door. Instinctively, he reached into his pocket and touched the business card that nestled there.

  The receptionist smiled and shook her head. “I really don’t know, sir. The building has a range of programmed window environments, but I couldn’t tell you who programmed any particular one. It’s just not the kind of information we would possess.”

  “You don’t know any way I could find out who was contracted to design the current environment?”

  The girl wore lipstick like gluey fire, and Kendrick’s augmented vision picked out the fine grain of face powder on her cheeks and her neck, even the fine pattern of capillaries just below the surface of her skin.

  She smiled again. “That’s not exactly the kind of information we’d have to hand.”

  He sighed and shook his head. “I’m here to meet a Marlin Smeby. Could you let him know I’m here, please?”

  “Mr Gallmon?” said a voice from behind him, and he turned. A woman stood there, dressed in an immaculate suit of night-blue wool, smooth ebony skin stretched over well-trained muscles. Kendrick recognized her voice, since she had taken his call an hour or so earlier. She looked like the kind of woman who might equally well be an ex-athlete or ex-military – perhaps even both.

  She extended a hand. Her grip was strong, assured. “My name is Candice. If you’re ready, I’ll take you up to Mr Smeby now.”

  He glanced down at his own green T-shirt and casual slacks, and shrugged. “Please, after you,” he said.

  He reckoned her accent was maybe that of a native New Yorker. Life there was hard these days, and the city had become a neglected and forlorn shadow of its former self. Rumour had it that snipers still hid out in certain deserted Manhattan office buildings, preying on passers-by.

  He followed Candice to the bank of lifts beyond the reception area, admiring the way in which the fabric of her trousers slid across her buttocks as she walked, seeming to reveal more than if she’d worn nothing. She stepped back, allowing him to enter the open lift first. Its doors slid shut silently, and she touched a floor button. After that they rode upwards in silence for a while.

  Smeby’s . . . bodyguard, secretary, aide, whatever she was finally turned to him. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing what you said to the young woman at the desk.”

  Kendrick looked at her, surprised. “You mean about the programmed windows?”

  Candice nodded. “Yes, the Archimedes. I was up there once. Very hard to forget.”

  Kendrick was thunderstruck. “The Archimedes? You were on board?”

  “Part of a rotating detachment, before the station was abandoned.” The lift started to slow down.

  “That must have been quite an experience,” he said carefully.

  A smile played at the edge of her lips. “Quite an experience, yes. Doesn’t it make you wonder what’s up there now?”

  “I can’t begin to imagine. The whole thing was . . .” He paused, not sure what to say.

  “Crazy, I think you were going to say.” Candice smiled, as if to suggest that she didn’t mind.

  Of course, Kendrick had realized all along that he must be seeing something like the Archimedes during his seizures. But that was all it was – a figment of his imagination. Something like the Archimedes, but not bearing any relation to anything real. Just some random environment that his augments had dredged up from his subconscious as they wove themselves ever more inextricably into the stuff of his brain. Nothing more than that. Yet seeing it there, externalized, as if it had been ripped from the recesses of his mind and reproduced so precisely, that had been shocking, even frightening.

  And it raised the question he’d been asking himself all those long months: why, of all things, would he hallucinate about the Archimedes?

  The elevator doors opened and Kendrick stepped into a room large enough to house a medium-size conference. A long, low table, set up near the windows, had a variety of computer equipment scattered across its surface, including some expensive-looking gridcom gear. Smeby himself stood by the wide window, staring absent-mindedly out over the people walking in the street far below. His arms were folded across his chest, as if hugging himself. He turned and stepped forward when he noticed Kendrick standing there.

  Kendrick heard the elevator doors close behind him and turned to see that Candice had left them alone together.

  Kendrick held the business card between his thumb and forefinger, where Smeby could easily see it. “You could have just given me a call,” he began.

  Smeby laughed, as if appreciating a point well made. “But then you wouldn’t have wanted to satisfy your curiosity by coming here, would you?”

  “How did you find me?”

  “You are Kendrick Gallmon, aren’t you?”

  “That depends.”

  “Your identity is entirely safe, Mr Gallmon. My employer wishes to speak to you.”

  Kendrick stuffed his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders; the room felt immediately cold. “I don’t see anyone else around, unless you mean Candice.”

  “I work for Max Draeger.”

  “Draeger? You work for Max Draeger?” Walk out now, thought Kendrick. “Then we have nothing to say to each other.” He turned and headed back towards the elevator.

  “Mr Draeger wants to know if you’ve been suffering from any seizures recently,” Smeby called after him.

  Kendrick stopped to turn and stare at Smeby. “Fine – you’ve got my attention. But why should you care?”

  “Another question. You know there are upwards of two thousand still-living Labrats. Are you still in contact with any of them?”

  “That’s really none of your business.”

  “We know of Caroline, of course. And your friend Buddy.”

  “I think you already heard my answer, Smeby.”

  “You were kept in Ward Seventeen during your incarceration in the Maze, and you’ve been involved with some interesting people since your time there.”

  “What about you, then? Were you one of those running the Maze?”

  Smeby smiled. “I think you should be aware that Mr Draeger is offering you his aid.”

  “Draeger?” Kendrick laughed. “Perhaps you should just tell me what he wants.”

  “He wants to help you.”

>   “Why would I need his help?”

  “Your augmentations have turned rogue, Mr Gallmon. There are ways for us to find such things out, even before the effects manifest themselves visibly. Mr Draeger has extended an invitation for you to visit him at his home and primary research facility. He’s very interested to meet you. He believes he may even be able to cure you.”

  14 October 2096

  Above the Armoured Saint

  Malky was rich, though no one would be able to tell from the external appearance of his home. Squeezed on either side by the new housing complexes that had sprung up all over the city to house the waves of refugees, the five-floor tenement looked as though it was being beat up by the silver and glass towers that now surrounded it. But appearances could be deceptive. Malky owned the entire block, including the Armoured Saint, which was situated on the ground floor – and Kendrick knew that it had been far from cheap to acquire.

  He also knew that Malky’s full name was Mikhail Konstantin Vasilevich, a third-generation immigrant whose great-grandparents had arrived from the Chernobyl region in the 1980s. Malky had used his ill-gotten gains from a wide and spectacular variety of illegal pursuits to set himself up in style. His particular speciality, however, was producing fake ID, a booming market since America had slowly begun to emerge from civil unrest and a considerable number of people had found an urgent need to disappear.

  People like Kendrick, say.

  “Stop worrying. You’re fine.”

  Kendrick glanced nervously out through a tall window and into the street running in front of the Saint. They were in Malky’s cramped office, a room on the floor directly above the bar.

  “Does that mean you managed to cope with the security systems?” Kendrick asked.

  “Of course.” Malky shrugged. “Otherwise the Saint wouldn’t keep its reputation for being a safe place for all kinds of people. So you’re clean. And, while you’re here, maybe you can tell me again exactly how you knew there were explosives left in the building.”