Uprising

by David Ryker

  The woman’s face twisted into a grimace. “Oh, my sweet girl,” she croaked as tears began to flow from the corners of her almond-shaped eyes and trickle down her doughy face. “You don’t even recognize me. God damn him. God damn him to hell.”

  “What…?”

  The woman raised her face to the ceiling in anguish. “And God damn me, too,” she moaned bleakly. “It’s my fault. How could I have abandoned you to him like that?”

  Chelsea swallowed hard, feeling a sudden throb of emotion in her throat without knowing why. This woman was clearly insane, and Chelsea should call for the guards—orderlies, not guards—but something about this unfamiliar woman was—was what? Right was the word that entered her head, but what did that even mean? How could she be right?

  “You need help,” Chelsea said, her voice finally starting to return. “You’re sick… like me…”

  That set off another round of sobs as the woman clutched Chelsea’s hand again.

  “Oh, my sweet baby girl,” she snuffled. “Always thinking about others. You were always like that, even when you were just a toddler. So different from the rest of the family. But darling, you’re not really sick.”

  Toddler? Not sick? What?

  “I—I’ve been… I’ve been having some trouble lately,” Chelsea stammered. “Trouble remembering. Do I know you?”

  Face it, Chelsea, you’re not just having trouble remembering, you’re having trouble thinking,

  The woman responded with a hurt look that brought with it a fresh flow of tears. She leaned closer, her wide face looming in Chelsea’s peripheral vision as she placed her lips to Chelsea’s ear.

  “Hush little baby, don’t say a word,” she sang in a halting, tremulous voice. “Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird, and if that mockingbird don’t sing…”

  “Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring,” Chelsea finished for her. The sound of her own voice startled her, but it was nothing compared to the sense of sudden panic she felt as the room slowly began to shift and flow around her with all the bizarre fluidity of Zero’s nanite-enhanced face.

  Zero? What the hell is Zero?

  Her mind raced in time with her heart as new sensations flooded into her eyes and ears, and new thoughts assailed her mind. Mockingbird. Hush little baby. Images of her childhood, warm and safe and comfortable in loving arms. She turned to the woman next to her, and what she saw both thrilled and repelled her: the facial features began to change even as the body shrank, the spiky black hair growing out and changing to a platinum color, the skin lightening, the eyes growing wider and turning a pale ice-blue. A few moments later, Chelsea was no longer looking at the Asian woman she had been talking to.

  She was looking into the face of her own mother.

  It was haggard and careworn, with the telltale broken blood vessels of a veteran alcoholic, and her eyes looked confused and haunted, but Melinda Bloom was still beautiful nonetheless. She seemed to have aged decades somehow since the last time Chelsea had seen her. When had that been?

  “Mom?” Chelsea breathed.

  “Yes!” Melinda leaned forward on the bed, grasping Chelsea’s hands again, her eyes filled with desperate hope. “Yes, sweetheart, it’s me!”

  Chelsea scanned the room—she was back in the hospital suite in Bloom Tower. But that meant… it took a moment for her to draw the connection in her mind. That meant that the hospital room was the suite in the Tower. She’d never been in the hospital at all, that was all just an illusion. A different reality.

  Cortical reality, said a voice in her head.

  What? No, she was sick. The doctor had told her so, several times.

  How many times? She couldn’t remember.

  “This is all my fault,” her mother whispered bleakly.

  “What? No, Mom, I’m sick…”

  Melinda went on as if she hadn’t heard. “I was too deep inside my bottle to see what he was doing, and when I finally crawled out, it was too late.” She let out a harsh sob. “I know him better than anyone. I should have protected you.”

  Deep in the recesses of what passed for her memory, Chelsea saw images of her mother doing this before, in her childhood. Every once in a while, her mother would stumble into Chelsea’s room and launch into a tearful apology, telling her that she deserved better and that it was all her mother’s fault. Chelsea hadn’t understood back then, either: she was a Bloom, she had the best of everything. What did she deserve that was better? She eventually learned that it was best to just listen quietly until Melinda either fell asleep or stumbled back out of the room.

  “Shh,” she whispered. “It’s all right, Mom. I’m going to get better…”

  “No.” There was that strangeness about Melinda’s voice again. She sounded—well, not drunk was the only way Chelsea could think of to describe it. “No, you’re not. And he won’t stop. I have to stop him.”

  Chelsea watched with detached fascination as her mother’s hair began to shorten and darken again. Her face began to widen and the shift she wore had changed colors and was expanding. She was turning back into the woman she had been before, but it didn’t upset Chelsea nearly as much as it had before. She was finally starting to get used to her hallucinations now.

  “Brain parasite,” she breathed absently.

  “What?” The Asian woman peered at her. “What did you say?”

  Chelsea gave her a sleepy smile. The velvety blanket of unconsciousness was wrapping itself around her mind, taking away the confusion and offering its blessed darkness.

  “Just worms in my brain, Mom. It’s okay.”

  She felt one last sensation, of a pair of soft lips at her ear, and the faintest whiff of elderberry, and heard two words before the darkness took her: Hold on.

  “I told you what had to be done at the start of this, Oscar. Now we’re dealing with an exhausted mind, and I can’t guarantee the results.”

  Chelsea’s eyes swam as she tried to focus on the room around her. She was still in the family medical suite, not the hospital.

  They’re the same thing, said a voice in her head. Just like the big woman and your mother.

  Whatever, she sighed to herself. At least the hallucinations are over for now.

  Her eyes came to rest on Dr. Copeland and her father, who were in the middle of a heated discussion several meters away.

  “I’m paying you a fortune for results,” said Oscar. “Not excuses.”

  “I can’t change the laws of physics or psychology, no matter how much you pay me. So we can either call this a failure right now and I walk away, or we can finally follow the original protocol that I laid out for you when we began this.”

  Her father sounded angry, though he kept his voice low. “The risks are too high. You said yourself she could end up losing her mind.”

  “What I said was that full immersion could possibly cause her dissociation to become permanent,” said the doctor. “But the current treatment isn’t deep enough. She keeps clawing her way out of it, and her latest scans show that it’s starting to cause damage to her temporal lobe. That’s one of the symptoms of a syndrome that occurs in people who become addicted to cortical reality. Once it progresses, the patient can no longer distinguish between reality and CR, and they end up having to live entirely in their own heads. If they don’t, they could suffer a fatal psychotic break if they’re ever forced back into reality.”

  “You told me the drugs would compensate for that!”

  “They have, to a degree, but I didn’t account for Chelsea having such a strong will. She fights against all of it: the drugs, the implanted reality, the narrative.”

  Narrative? Chelsea’s sleep-addled mind had barely been following the conversation, but that word seemed to stand out.

  Her father sighed. “That much I should have realized. She was always a headstrong girl.”

  “My first attempt to go deeper was almost successful,” said Dr. Copeland.

  “Until she realized what was happening and fought her way out!
” said Oscar. “You said the results of that were what caused these problems in the first place!”

  “That’s because you didn’t allow me to go all the way,” the doctor said thinly. Even through her confusion, Chelsea could tell the woman was barely keeping her temper in check. She noticed a lot of people talked like that around her father. “By doing things piecemeal, we’ve set her up for failure. The constructs just aren’t holding; she’s starting to see through the cracks. If we had done full immersion from the start, the process would have been a success and Chelsea wouldn’t be on the verge of a psychological breakdown right now.”

  Breakdown? Oh, God, when was this going to end? Chelsea felt a sudden stab of despair in her belly. She was so tired of all this, of not knowing what was real and what was being generated by her fevered mind. It would almost be better just to slip off into the warm, velvet darkness and stay there forever. At least there she couldn’t feel anything.

  “Fine,” her father said tersely. “Do what you have to do. But know this: if you permanently damage my daughter, I’ll sue you and anyone associated with you for every credit you have.”

  “She’s truly blessed to have such a loving father,” said Dr. Copeland, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

  The word barely registered in Chelsea’s mind as she finally gave in to the gentle but relentless tug of unconsciousness, the sweet warmth that it offered. Within moments she felt the familiar sliding sensation that meant she was slipping into the depths of sleep, but even as she did, she heard two words, echoing faintly in some deep recess of her mind.

  Hold on.

  11

  Traffic at 30,000 feet above Moscow was thin, so Gomez set the Raft in a stationary hover with the cloak still active. They had decided over the course of the flight that Gomez and Shane would stay with Maggott on the ship and fly it to Seoul while Quinn, Han, Bishop, Ulysses and Elliot would do the jump and complete the ground portion of the mission. Of them all, only Elliot had any significant experience in skydiving, and that was only as a thrill-seeking hobby.

  Maggott was anything but happy with the decision.

  “I’m s’posed tae have yer back, sir,” the big man argued. “It dinnae feel right leavin’ ye here.”

  Quinn clapped a hand on his former sergeant’s cannonball shoulder. “You’re just mad that you have to miss out on all the fun.”

  “That, too.”

  “There are only five suits,” Bishop said with a shrug. “And none of them are Mountain Troll size.”

  “Hardee-har.” Maggott sneered, crossing his arms over his wide chest.

  Quinn double checked the straps on his own suit as his companions did the same. Outside of the boots, the suits were pretty standard paratrooper uniforms, though the musty smell indicated they had likely been in storage for some time. Not surprising, given that skydiving had become more of a pastime than a military tactic since the advent of drone airships some fifty years earlier.

  Ulysses dropped the polycarbonate visor on his helmet, which immediately turned gray until he slid a lock in place on the collar, activating the oxygen supply and clearing the fog.

  “This is a lot like the environment suits on Oberon One,” he said, popping the visor and lifting it again. “Jes not as heavy.”

  “And not armored,” Quinn warned. “Something hits you in this, it could easily breach containment. If you lose your air at this altitude, you’ll pass out.”

  Ulysses rolled his eyes. “An’ if yuh breached it in space, yuh died. This ain’t m’first rodeo, Quinn.”

  “Just being thorough.”

  “You fuckin’ Marines, man. Y’all think yer the only ones who know anythin’.” He shook his head. “Oorah. Shee-it.”

  “Let’s go over the plan one more time,” said Han.

  Quinn wasn’t surprised that she wanted another review, just as he hadn’t been surprised that she was the first one to get her jump suit on. She’d always been the sort to organize her foot locker and straighten her cutlery at the mess table. It was that trait that had made her such a good lieutenant during the war, since her style was the complete opposite of his own—she helped keep him grounded when he was flying by the seat of his pants.

  And then she betrayed us.

  Quinn scolded himself—they didn’t have the luxury of living in the past. They had a mission to complete, and he needed all his attention on the here and now.

  “I dunno what needs goin’ over,” said Ulysses. “We drop, we land, we meet our guy, we put on our monkey suits, we go to a party at Oleg’s and get the body, we get out and get on this vacuum train thingy. Easier’n Morley Drake’s mama on a Saturday night.”

  Han ignored him. “We have to keep tight formation when we drop; we’ll dive for the first fifteen thousand feet or so. Your visor display will signal you when we’ve reached the sensor grid, which is basically a cube of intersecting lines around the city.”

  “About that,” said Bishop. “How can we possibly miss the grid lines in our freefall?”

  “The lines are set about ten meters apart, so we can’t avoid them unless we were somehow able to drop straight down, and that’s impossible. But Zero’s intel says the sensors are programmed to ignore organic tissue. If they weren’t, they’d constantly be getting set off by birds.”

  “We’re not entirely organic tissue,” Quinn pointed out. “We still have our boots, our helmets, our suits, not to mention the clothes in our packs.”

  “But there’s very little metal in comparison to our bodies. They’re looking for weapons or airships, not people dropping from the sky. No one would attempt to parachute into Moscow because their chute would immediately set off the sensors, so they’re not set to scan for skydivers. They should ignore us.”

  “Especially once we turn off the cloak on the Raft,” said Gomez, joining them from the bridge. “We’ll have to appear for at least fifteen seconds so that you can all jump. That should get their sensors buzzing, and when we disappear again, it will register as an anomaly. The AI will most likely send a drone up to our position to investigate, but by that time we’ll be hundreds of miles away and you should be close to the ground.”

  Quinn frowned. “I don’t like the word ‘should,’ I like the word ‘will.’ There are a whole lot of variables in this.”

  “That’s kind of a funny thing to say, given your history,” said Han. “Jumping out of the sky without a parachute into the most secure city on Earth probably wouldn’t make the top five on the list of craziest things you’ve ever done.”

  He opened his mouth to argue, then closed it again. She had a point.

  “Zero’s contact will be waiting for us on the ground,” she continued. “We’ll change clothes and he’ll get us into Oleg’s party in the Fedorov Tower. After that, we’re on our own. We split up, avoid contact with the locals and find the cryochamber.”

  “Why the hell did Zero time it so’s we’re goin’ in durin’ a party?” asked Ulysses. “Ain’t it easier to just break in when everybody’s asleep?”

  “There’s always a party at Oleg’s place,” said Han. “Literally, it’s all day, every day. Mobsters, politicians, sports stars, celebrities, you name it, they come and go at all hours.”

  Ulysses breathed a low whistle. “Damn! I toldja, Oleg knows the score. Whut a lifestyle.”

  “Target extraction will be the biggest on-the-fly challenge,” said Quinn. “We have to find the cryochamber and get the body out of the building without being seen.”

  “There’s a service elevator that we can use to get the chamber down to the street level,” said Han. “I don’t have schematics, but our contact says it’s somewhere near the kitchen, which makes sense. Once we’re out, he’ll meet us with a transport and get us to the underground vactrain terminal.”

  Quinn remembered back to their own experience with the vactrain on their mission with King. It was a well-kept secret among the ultra-wealthy, incredibly expensive to use, and the tunnels were only accessible from a select h
andful of Towers in Europe, and a few hidden entrances used by maintenance crews and others with clearance. The Moscow terminal would likely be well hidden in plain sight, given the exceptionally dense population of the city’s slums.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s focus on the here and now. Is everyone clear on the drop procedure?”

  Ulysses nodded. “Dive position until the visor display says we’re at nine hunnert feet, then roll over so we’re standin’ up. Figger I might as well kiss m’ass goodbye in the process, jes in case.”

  “How are we going to keep from landing on top of someone?” asked Bishop.

  “That’s what the freefall dive is for,” said Han, tapping at her wrist panel. A red circle appeared superimposed over the map projected on the inside of each of their visors. “We use it to position ourselves over Gorky Park. It’s one of the few empty spaces in the city.”

  Quinn raised an eyebrow. “What makes it so special? Everywhere else they’re packed in like sardines.”

  “It was the site of a large-scale massacre of slumdogs back in the early ‘80s. Tens of thousands were slaughtered by government troops.”

  “Fookin’ hell,” Maggott breathed, his eyes wide. “Why, fer the love o’ God?”

  “The official story is that there was an influenza pandemic,” said Han. “But Zero doesn’t believe it. He thinks if that were true, the government would have simply let the virus decimate the slum population. More likely it’s a cover story for a violent military response to an uprising against the government.”

  The image of thousands of people being mowed down by soldiers froze Quinn’s guts. Wasn’t that what they themselves were ultimately headed for? An uprising on a global scale? It was the only way to deal with the threat from the Gestalt—that much he was sure of, especially in light of how Drake had reacted to the situation—but at what cost? How high would the price be for uniting the world against a common enemy?

  “So much of Russian history is a lie, it’s impossible to ever know what really happened,” Han continued. “But Muscovites think of the park as sacred now, and they stay away from it. It might have something to do with the stench from the Moscow River, too. In any case, it’s our best place to land.”