Against Gravity

by Gary Gibson

  He touched the door once more and this time it swung open easily.

  Someone was letting him in.

  Kendrick gazed across the familiar hallway: stairs ascended and descended in a tight spiral at the far end. He stepped in and the door closed slowly behind him, shutting off all sounds of the street.

  “Hello?” he called out. There was another door just ahead, on his right. He’d never been through it before. He stepped up to it and pushed. It opened smoothly.

  Somewhere behind him he heard a faint tip-tap sound. He glanced over his shoulder to see a security device of a kind he vaguely remembered from some technology-obsessed gridchannel but had never encountered in real life. It moved across smooth cream plaster on tiny insect-like legs, suspended there by no obvious means. Tiny lenses reflected light as its head swivelled towards him. It was safe to assume that his every move was now being recorded.

  Fine. So be it.

  Kendrick walked back out and along to the stairwell, then called Hardenbrooke’s name loudly. He waited for several seconds without hearing an answer, gazing down at the steps curving away below him.

  Fuck it. He walked back to the door he’d opened earlier and entered to find himself in a room entirely devoid of furniture, equipment . . . anything.

  Peeling wallpaper curled down from one corner of the ceiling, and a thin layer of dust coated the white-painted sashes of the windows overlooking the street.

  A large empty packing crate stood over to one side, while a greyed-out eepsheet lay in the dust beside it, its internal power source long since dead.

  Behind the crate he found a chair, its plastic grey and scarred, the fabric of the seat stained and torn.

  This room clearly hadn’t been used in a long time.

  Tickety-tap, tickety-tap. The spider-device had somehow made its way all the way down from the hallway ceiling and around the door frame, following him into the room. Or was there more than one of them?

  Kendrick peered up at it, noting a tiny metallic platform, with a range of minuscule equipment mounted on top, propelled by six cruel-looking jointed legs. It had the smooth metallic-organic appearance of vat-grown molecular technology. Tiny, perfectly machined gears and joints slithered in perfect accord, shifting to follow Kendrick as he stepped back out into the hallway.

  He stood again at the top of the stairwell, watching with a certain degree of foreboding as the device negotiated its way back out of the empty room to continue watching him.

  Then he heard it: the distant muffled sound of a smothered cough, inaudible to anyone with normal hearing. It had come from below, from the rooms where Hardenbrooke held his regular appointments with Kendrick.

  He laid a hand on the black-painted banister and went down. “Hardenbrooke?”

  Below, the clinic was wreathed in semi-darkness, the leather couch and the apparatus that surrounded it in the centre of the room resembling some esoteric high-tech sculpture. Next to them stood the familiar wheeled tray of surgical instruments and sprays.

  Someone was here – Kendrick had heard them. So why were they hiding?

  At some point in the past the basement area had been partitioned to allow the addition of a small office, the interior of which Kendrick could now see through a long rectangular window with half-closed shutters. He stepped towards it, seeing nothing more exciting through the glass than the corner of a desk and a tall steel cabinet.

  He entered to find two large wooden crates stuffed with cardboard folders, as if Hardenbrooke had been in the process of packing. Ever since the LA Nuke, people paranoid about losing data through EMP weapons tended to keep hard copies of everything. Considering Hardenbrooke’s own history, it wasn’t surprising that he shared this tendency.

  Okay, nothing like a little breaking and entering. Whoever had coughed could wait. Kendrick scanned the contents of one cardboard folder and recognized a name: Erik Whitsett.

  If his heart had still been working, it would have skipped a beat then. There’s a name that keeps cropping up. He dug around some more, coming up with yet more names. Some he didn’t recognize, others he did. All of them Labrats – but maybe that wasn’t so surprising.

  Kendrick dug further down, finding more names. Again, one or two of them were recognizable. He started on finding Caroline’s name listed there. But Caroline had never received any treatments from Hardenbrooke. Or had she? And why hadn’t she told him about it in that case?

  He studied her file. Augmentations in highly accelerated state, he read. A polite euphemism for turning rogue. More names, soon scattered across the floor. Then – Buddy Juarez, with exactly the same words: Augmentations in highly accelerated state.

  He couldn’t be sure about any names he didn’t recognize or was uncertain of but he was willing to bet every last one of them had passed through Ward Seventeen, down in the Maze. He studied more records: every one of them dead or dying from their rogue augments.

  Just outside the office, something moved with a metallic click. Kendrick froze, then carefully stepped back out into the main area.

  Tickety-tack, tickety-tack.

  He glanced up towards the shadowed ceiling, catching the glint of light on a lens . . .

  And then it was on him.

  It landed right on his upturned face, tiny needle-legs catching onto his cheek so that he yelled with pain and surprise. He reached up to rip it off, but even the gentlest tug, he knew, would take skin and flesh away with it. The tips of the device’s legs were icy, and a numbness began to spread through his face, his mind. And then Kendrick slid into blackness, lost in a deep, fathomless night.

  Consciousness seeped back only slowly.

  At first Kendrick saw only dim shapes, their edges blurred. Then his eyes focused more clearly. He did not like to think too deeply of the biosynthetic tendrils that sprang alert along his optic nerves, allowing his vision to snap into such remarkable, almost surreal clarity. In this state, he was entirely capable of discerning the tiniest cracks in the plaster ceiling above his head. It gave him a sense of sharing his skin with some other being whose intent and purpose he could not really know – which was maybe as good a definition of Labrat augmentation as any.

  He couldn’t yet move, although a distant tingling and dull itch was beginning to make itself felt in his limbs and face. Apart from that, every muscle was frozen. When he tried to speak, only a thin mumble passed through his lips, which refused to part.

  Kendrick could hear someone talking upstairs. He was picking up sounds better – and from further away – than he ever had before. Rather than being good news, this was instead an indication of how unstable his augmentations had become, altering his flesh and his nervous system in new and alarmingly unpredictable ways.

  At first, the words from above were muffled, but his augments filtered and boosted the sound of them until he could listen with relative ease. Even with such enhancements, however, only a small part of what Hardenbrooke was now saying made sense.

  “I don’t give a shit,” he overheard. Was Hardenbrooke speaking over a line? Then a brief exclamation, as of someone else about to raise an objection: so Hardenbrooke was not alone there. “We’ve got to get rid of him. Smeby must have told him something, otherwise why would he sneak around like this?”

  Another voice: “Maybe because you let him in to go wandering around? Jesus, how paranoid can you get?”

  Malky?

  A pause as Hardenbrooke’s voice faded then came back again, as if he was moving about on the upper floor. “. . . Take care of making sure he’s still out, okay? So if I leave you here, sure you can’t screw up?”

  Soon cautious footsteps echoed down the basement steps, sounding to Kendrick like dustbin lids being smashed against a wall.

  Kendrick’s body tingled as he imagined the machine-growths entwined with his flesh and blood filtering the drug out of his body according to some complex set of heuristic rules, as if his body was a fortress and the nanites its defenders.

  Which possibly exp
lained why the tingling sensation grew exponentially for several seconds before Kendrick found that he could both feel and move his arms and legs again.

  One moment he was strapped to the basement couch, the next he was crouching in the shadows just behind it. The leather straps that had bound him now hung loose. He smelled blood, a powerful, rich scent that filled his nostrils. His own blood.

  Kendrick glanced down and saw the deep abrasions in his flesh where he had torn away from his restraints. Without volition, without thought. Now he was simply here.

  He waited with his knees bent, his hands ready, like a hunter waiting for his prey to show. At least for now he was merely a passenger in his own body. Kendrick watched the door by the stairwell in anticipation. The hate he now felt was cold, pure, artificial. Even though he understood that this feeling came from his augmentations, a means of tweaking and controlling the emotions and desires of a fully augmented warrior, the hatred felt like his own – as if it had always been inside him, waiting to be tapped.

  Hardenbrooke pushed open the basement door, the motion seeming slow and languid to Kendrick’s accelerated perceptions.

  A fraction of an instant later, Kendrick found his viewpoint propelled towards Hardenbrooke so rapidly as to seem instantaneous, the medic’s eyes only noticing him when it was already far too late.

  Kendrick caught sight of the harsh metal glint of a spray ’derm gripped in Hardenbrooke’s fist. The medic’s fingers unfolded and the ’derm rocked there, miraculously remaining in the cup of Hardenbrooke’s palm as Kendrick’s forward momentum slammed the other man’s back against the door, the rear of his skull slamming noisily against the wood.

  Kendrick watched his own hand slide upwards to grasp the medic around the throat.

  “Was it you, Hardenbrooke? Did you kill him?” Kendrick snarled.

  “What? Oh Christ, please, let go of me,” Hardenbrooke croaked in fright. “There’s been a misunderstanding.”

  “I don’t think so. I think you were about to kill me too. I heard you both talking about how you know I met Smeby. So what’s going on here?”

  Hardenbrooke twitched, struggling to breathe in Kendrick’s iron grasp. His mouth opened a little and Kendrick eased off the pressure so that the other man could speak. The spray finally slipped from Hardenbrooke’s hand and clattered onto the floor.

  Leaning over to one side, Kendrick reached for the spray. Hardenbrooke surprised him by twisting around suddenly and almost scoring a direct hit to Kendrick’s testicles with one knee. Kendrick, however, slipped deftly to one side and avoided injury. Unfortunately, this meant letting go of the man, just for an instant. Once he had secured the ’derm he reached out for Hardenbrooke again.

  To his surprise, Hardenbrooke bit him on the finger.

  Kendrick screamed and jerked away, dropping the ’derm in the process. He felt an impact on his shoulder, and immediately a deep numbness began to spread through the flesh of his back.

  Kendrick lashed out at Hardenbrooke, the force of his blow sending the medic slithering several feet across the floor to crash into the side of the treatment couch. Hardenbrooke had been carrying more than one ’derm, and the contents of the second one were already dulling Kendrick’s senses.

  It was probably the same drug that the security ’bot had shot into him, but it was taking longer to take effect this time. Still, he only had so much time before he slipped into unconsciousness again.

  Kendrick stepped over and wrapped a hand around Hardenbrooke’s throat again.

  “I came here because I want information about whatever the hell it is you’ve been pumping into my veins for the past year. I came here because someone told me you’d set me up in some way that frankly doesn’t make any fucking sense to me. I’m inclined to think my sources were right, so now I want you to tell me why.”

  “I can’t,” the other man croaked. “They’d kill me.”

  Kendrick placed one palm over Hardenbrooke’s forehead and, with the precision and care of a basketball player, bounced the back of the medic’s head off the hard floor. Hardenbrooke’s teeth clicked together hard, his eyes briefly rolling up into the back of his head.

  “Details,” Kendrick demanded. A wave of nausea spilled through his thoughts and he released Hardenbrooke once more, swaying uncertainly.

  If he didn’t get out of here now there wouldn’t be a second chance.

  So he ran.

  Kendrick’s vision was blurring as he reached the clinic entrance and stumbled out onto the street. There was no sign of Malky, and he was obscurely grateful at not having to deal with any further obstacle. He caught glimpses of staring faces, shocked as he pushed his way past them in the street. He ran across the road, his limbs starting to feel like putty.

  Somehow he kept moving, trying to get away from the Clinic – away from Hardenbrooke.

  Kendrick woke to an early-morning sky.

  The scent of grass and dog shit filled his nostrils. Something wet and rough slid against his face and he lurched upwards, wondering if he was again under attack. He found himself staring into the hairy muzzle of a small terrier. He pushed the animal away and lifted himself up from where he lay sprawled on neatly mown grass.

  Bushes? He was lying behind some bushes. He heard a woman’s voice calling the dog, which ran away with its stubby tail waggling stiffly in the air. Kendrick could hear traffic somewhere nearby.

  Kendrick staggered upright and pushed his way out through the bushes, finding himself in the middle of a small well-tended park that fronted a large office building. A green-painted iron fence separated the bushes and a row of carefully tended yew trees from the street beyond.

  He remembered fleeing the Clinic now, and ran his fingers through his hair, suddenly conscious of how dishevelled he must look. A snatch of memory of himself running erratically across a road full of heavy traffic flashed into his awareness.

  Kendrick winced, feeling lucky to still be in one piece.

  He glanced down at arms streaked with soil and grass stains, as well as with copious quantities of dried blood. Wondering just how much of a nightmare he must look, he let his shirtsleeves flap loose in a half-hearted attempt to hide the injuries on his arms.

  Locating his wand, he called up Caroline, keeping back from the street while he waited for her to answer.

  “Kendrick! Oh God, about what I said – I’m sorry I drove away like that. But, look, what happened? I mean, did you find anything there?”

  “I’ve had some problems. Can you come and get me?”

  “What kind of problems? Where are you?”

  “I’m not sure, but I don’t think I’m far from the Clinic.”

  “Set your wand’s signal to mine and I’ll come and find you.” Her voice sounded terse and worried.

  Kendrick stepped back into the shadows and waited.

  Caroline’s car appeared twenty minutes later, following the GPS locator signal in Kendrick’s wand.

  “Jesus, Kendrick, I mean—” she exclaimed, climbing out of the vehicle and seizing him by the arms. “You, you . . .”

  “Look like I’ve been through a war?”

  For the briefest instant he saw the tiniest hint of a smile, but then it was gone. “If you like, yeah,” she said more coolly. Her earlier concern was now well hidden.

  Suddenly, everything was back the way it had been between them for so long now.

  18 October 2096

  Above the Armoured Saint

  “Haven’t seen Malky since last night.” Lucia let out a puff of blue smoke, the cigarette dangling from bejewelled fingers. A tattoo on her left arm glittered kaleidoscopically as she climbed down from the neck of her machine-monster sculpture. The tattoo she wore was a holographic design: twisting braids that changed colour depending on which way she moved.

  “Last night? Did he seem – I don’t know – worried or something?”

  Her gaze flicked down to her cigarette and then back up at Kendrick. A small cool smile spread across her fea
tures. “You sound just like something out of a cop show. You look a bit rough too, if you don’t mind me saying so. Everything okay?”

  Caroline had helped Kendrick clean up and had bandaged the worst of his wounds, now hidden under a sweater. Once back at his own place, he’d crashed solidly for the rest of the day and had stayed in bed for most of the next day as well.

  “I’m fine, but I’m concerned about Malky. I think he’s in trouble.”

  Lucia cocked her head to one side. “Okay, what’s he done this time?”

  “Look, I just want to find him. I thought you might have some idea where he is.”

  “Right.” She nodded slowly. “You just want to speak to him. That’s why you look like you’re ready to headbutt a gorilla.”

  “Okay, fine, you’re saying he’s not in.” Kendrick turned to walk away.

  “Ask Todd. He usually knows where Malky is, if anyone does,” Lucia called after him.

  “Nope, ain’t seen him. Ain’t like him, though,” Todd commented. “Mind if I ask you a question?”

  Kendrick looked at him closely. “Go ahead.”

  “Mikhail – he’s mixed up in something, isn’t he?”

  “I think so, yeah. Know anything about it?”

  Todd shook his head. “No, but I can make guesses. Malky’s brighter than most people give him credit for, but he has a habit of getting into some things deeper than he intends to, till he can’t necessarily get out.”

  “You’re a close friend of his, so why are you telling me this?”

  “Because he’s a friend. He’s helped me enough in the past. Sometimes you have to return the favour.”

  “So you know what’s going on then?”

  Todd sighed. “Can’t say I do.” Then he smiled. “I was kind of hoping you were going to tell me.”

  Kendrick shook his head. “Look, there’s something you can help me with meanwhile. I need to find somebody.”