"So," I shout through blood-mic as we run into the darkness off the map, tramping through the thrashing gore of a headless worm. The thumping is everywhere now, coming from all directions. "So, we need a new route!"
Only white static comes through my HUD. We race along at an incline headed inward, our feet beating a chaotic drumroll. I shout for So again and again but she doesn't answer. We reach another five-way intersection and now the Lag is already galloping down every tunnel toward us. There's nowhere left to go.
"Me?" Doe barks.
"Hold," I call, fashioning another memory-grenade from the taste of Heclan's CSF vodka while I ping So relentlessly. Doe drops to one knee and holds a spark to the cannon fuse while Ray dual-wields muskets.
thump thump
thump thump
They're everywhere around us and I don't know which way to run. So warned against turning off the route and we're already so far off I can't even remember the way back.
"We need to move, Me!" Ray shouts, hunkered sideways to shelter Far while firing twin streams of musketballs down two tunnels at once.
"So!" I shout through blood-mic, "So, in the name of La, help us!"
Only static returns. The tunnels billow like thin plastic sheeting as the Lag closes in.
thump thump
thump thump
thump thump
I pull up So's map and spin it, trying to calculate a route through it myself, but I don't have the first clue where to start. Without her flashing red dot I don't even know where we are.
BOOM
Doe fires the cannon and a worm right behind me explodes, its face mangled like the Deathgate, but there's another lolling along behind it only seconds out.
"So!" I scream and throw my grenade; it blows but not fast enough, and the worm's mouth snaps around my leg.
The pain is white-hot and only worsens as it slurps me in like a wet noodle. I am tossed to my back and my other leg is sucked in, and worse than the pain is the sheer horror of this eyeless, faceless, lipless thing swallowing me down.
BOOM
The cannon fires pointblank and a splatter of gore shivs off the thing's milk-white flank, slowing it. Ray falls upon it with his musket bayonets, driving the blades deep then firing them inside, and the creature shudders but still sucks me in up to my chest.
"So!" I cry into blood-mic, "please."
A second Lag hits and snatches Far from Ray's side-holster, gulping him down to the neck in a second. I forge the memory of La like an axe-head in my mind and swing it into the beast's shining intestinal side, cleaving it in two halves that disgorge green and black bile. Ray tears Far out, but the one holding me doesn't slack off at all; the last thing I see before its jaws close over my HUD is Ray staring back at me with disbelief in his eyes.
"Ven," I manage to gasp through blood-mic, before its acidic digestion short-circuits my suit completely. "Use Ven."
A burst of light follows a terrible shockwave, then Ray and Doe are hauling me out, dizzy and weak. Behind me the long pink mass of worm has bisected fully along its length, the two halves sagging in a slurry of purplish guts. Similarly split worms twitch down every tunnel, such was the power of that blast, but already more of them are coming.
thump thump
"Far," I ask urgently, wiping thick mucus from my visor. "Is Far OK?"
Blood and viscera coat him. His suit is synced to Doe and I tune in to feel the flow of fluids and shock-jacks passing between them. The kid is on the edge.
"We need to get out of here Me," Doe warns. "I'm out of ammo."
I'm out too. I don't know what we just blew, but it was big and there's nothing to replace it. I spin around the intersection looking down the five swelling tunnels trying to make the call, but there's no way I can guess it. I need help but without So I don't know what to-
"Me," comes the faintest hiss through blood-mic.
Relief floods through me. "So, thank Goligh, we need a route! Nothing matches anymore."
"I know," she says, fainter than ever, so quiet I have to boost the gain on her crackly voice over the thump of more incoming worms. "I'm having trouble focusing. Are you really there, Me?"
"So, please, we need that route!"
"I have one," she says, forlorn. "I understand, Me. I understand, but I feel like there's something important I've forgotten, some part of me."
I know how she feels, but there is no time. "The route, So!"
She slings another three-dimensional sphere to my HUD, but it's completely different from the previous one. Where that was a fairly simple series of shells and nodules, this is a labyrinthine mess of knots that doesn't even look like a sphere any more. There's still a flashing red dot in the outer layers, though, and a red line worming toward the center.
"What the hell happened?" I pant. "Where's the old map?"
"You went the wrong way," says So. "I had to recalculate."
Directly ahead a new Lag thumps into view, thirty seconds out at best.
"But is this rotational?" I protest, trying to figure out the degree of spin that could build this. "How did it get so complex?"
"Oh," says So, with a little sigh, like I've disappointed her. "You're right. It's not a rotational maze anymore, Me. It's fractal, and it's growing." She says all this in a reedy whisper, like these are her dying confessions. "Every moment you're there it grows denser, replicating in constant variations. There are islands around you where the whole maze is repeated in miniature, and within those mazes there are more mazes where it all repeats again. If you stray off the path into one of those offshoots you'll never escape." She says it like it's nothing, like the words don't mean all of our deaths. "Even if you reach the middle, it'll be the wrong middle, and even if you follow this route perfectly, I still don't know if you'll be able to reach the true Core before that path balloons in complexity too."
It sounds like wind and madness to my ears. "I don't understand," I say.
"Listen, Me!" she whispers, suddenly urgent. "What looks like a full-sized path now might only be one eighth of a path, or one sixteenth, or one thousandth! You have to go faster, but as you slough off mass for more speed I don't know if you can gain enough velocity. The calculations won't tell me if you'll be able to reach the Core or not."
I don't know what to say to that.
"Don't give me up too, please," So adds at the end. "I've felt the others go. I feel empty. Please don't give me up." She sounds like a lost little girl.
"I won't," I answer, even as I know that I will, if I have to.
thump thump
thump thump
Worms are encircling us. I spin the map and find the next leg in our route, sling it to the others then start off at a run. Far needs to rest and we all need ammunition, but there's none of that to be had here.
"This way," I shout, and together we charge at one of the Lag worms, concentrating cannon and musket fire on its eyeless face. I muster Ritry Goligh's memory of the old War-era nations and wield that like a jousting lance, which spikes through the bridge of the Lag's open mouth and pins it to the tunnel roof, allowing us by.
Ahead there's another nodule-room and I reach it first; the entrance is just a sludgy purple valve in the wall stopped up with a giant gumball-like clot. "The map leads through here," I say on blood-mic, then heave together with Doe and the ball pops out with a slop.
Inside is another RG-stamped metal room and another giant book. I usher the others in then pull the gumball back into the orifice after us. It jams satisfyingly into its slot with a disgusting sound and a froth of foul-smelling liquid. The thumping of the worms outside quietens.
So's quiet breath is gone from blood-mic. I look at the remnants of my chord. Four of us here and one lost behind. Far's suit armor has been deeply scored with acid, as has mine. He is shivering and pale-faced.
"We'll be OK," I say, putting my hand on his shoulder. "We're nearly there, I promise. Just a little further." Ray nods at me, pale as his blood infuses through the suit link
into Far. We're all flagging, and every second that we waste now allows the maze to elongate more. Those last few fractions could stretch out forever.
"Another book," Doe says.
"More weapons," Ray says.
I waste no time lifting the cover and starting to read.
K. YOUNG RITRY
I was born from an artificial womb, first child of a new genetic breed to survive, soon to be abandoned by the family who'd bred me to life.
They were the last few holdouts of a godly remnant after the cathedral ships fell, barely eking out a life in a world that had turned against their god in the global tsunami. They had wanted to test their faith with me, a vat-born baby.
Was I as much a living Soul in god's earthly creation as they, or was I less? Was I only flesh and blood without a Soul, or did I too come from their holy spirit?
They soon came to hold in their hearts that I was worse than the former. I was some kind of demonseed; alien in the most alarming way, with my seven-toned Soul. I was false and the way I looked at them, even as I burbled out my first few words, was never right in their eyes.
They put it down to the devil and gave me up.
The second family tried to kill me a hundred different ways. They were as far from religious as the melting ice packs, but equally as mad. They were stone-cold scientists, a family commune of three, two men and a woman who served each other however they saw fit. While they must have put a warm and fuzzy front to the disinterested organization that held me up for adoption until I reached War age, they were anything but warm.
They were Soul Jackers all, and brain surgeons to boot. Their specialty was the infant brain, and its gradual unfolding from a cluster of cells through the curling up of neural tubes like tongues fitting into grooves.
My brain was one of a few thousand like it, and invaluable, but poorly valued. There were other concerns in those days, as whole populations continued to shift away from the planet's fat hot middle, as the Arctic War began in earnest. I was born into war, and I was spoils of war as a child.
They jacked my Molten Core repeatedly. Before I had gained any real sense of self they jacked me together and serially, scratching away samples of thought and pulling them out on long sticky threads, further rupturing and altering my development. They jacked me day after day, sinking deeper to the source of my multiple tones, seeking answers which they sprayed out in experimental papers that no coalition cared enough to explore the ethics of.
These were the early days of Soul Jacking, growing out of slapdash memory-injection and experience massage. It was frontier science, and with everything they discovered from my unusual mind, my adoptive parents helped push the barriers out.
My first memory is of an orange rattle hanging above me. It shakes, and there is a smiling face. Then the rattle is gone. I have forgotten it, because unbeknownst to me the memory has been stolen.
The same rattle appears again, and now it is my second first clear memory, written over the scar where the first memory had been. This makes it deeper, but fundamentally unsound. My simple developing mind, that of a two-year-old, perhaps, mistrusts it.
It too is stolen, then replaced.
It was a simple experiment which they repeated hundreds of times, each one a reset button that sucked up vast quantities of my fledgling concentration. The scar tissue in my mind built up thick like a top-heavy tower, threatening to crush everything around it.
It must have been fascinating to them, to see how the cells of my brain shaped and reshaped themselves in new and alarming ways. My gray matter was not plastic like most children, it was fluid. Where a normal womb-grown infant would hit maximum capacity for regrowth at some point, after which unconsciousness or a total blind spot for orange rattles would develop, my mind did not.
The seven note-architecture allowed my mind to flow continuously, which meant there was no escape, and an almost endless capacity for this game. So my earliest memory is of an orange rattle, again and again, again and again, again and again.
I was helpless. They published papers. She had a shaven head and strange pink glasses that looked like an extension of her pink skin. The two men wore thick beards as if to hide their faces, and held clipboards. I spent my days and nights in an EMR-machine crib looking at orange rattles.
So it went. Their funding grew, and so did I. They were careful not to retard me too much, as that would invalidate their future research. They pushed me to the limits of plasticity, then relented.
It was the deepest torture I have yet been able to imagine. They made the shifting, constantly changing world of my infant perception into an utterly unreliable, nauseatingly insecure repetition.
After orange rattles the experiments grew more advanced. They ran the 'A not B' test on me a thousand times, substituting marshmallows for toy cars for sock puppets that whispered my name. They played with my developing sense of object permanence until I trusted nothing, believed in nothing. There was no consistent reality around me. I learned to endure, and survive all the same.
"Writ/read, go high," they said to each other, as they jacked into me, a shorthand for the binary options that went through my mind.
"Writ/read, go low."
When I grew up I took that mantra for my name, not because I loved it or because I loved them, but because I used it to kill them all, and that was the first solid thing I had to rely on.
Ritry Goligh.
They plagued me with spinal punctures to tap my Cerebro-Spinal Fluid, they tested my blood, they surrounded me with the glass and metal apparatus a condemned monkey might see, as it goes to have its eyes scoured out with acid.
More tests, more scratching on paper pads, written go high, written go low, and my mind adapted to it all, but in ways they could not see. Beneath the scar tissue. Looking for a way out of the torture. It was no conscious thing, more of a defensive reaction, so that underneath their tests I built a consistent reality where I could grow.
I grew into it gradually; watching what they did to me at a slight remove, seeing how it hurt me and scarred my growing mind, and not feeling the pain or horror of it so completely.
I was insulated within the scars, and that insulation only grew thicker as their jacks grew more invasive. Perhaps they sensed something was not right, perhaps my EMR readings gave me away, but they could not punch through the defensive wall of scars my mind built for itself.
In that space, as only a child of three or four who could barely speak, who had never seen a child his own age, I began to plan. I was going to make the torture stop, and I taught myself the way to do it.
They jacked me in pairs usually, with one left behind to man the EMR, never coming in all at once. I knew I had to catch all three of them together, so I waited and prepared. I got better at sensing hints of what was coming, as their slow motions were telegraphed through the lava of my Molten Core.
Then one day I opened the wall. They fell over themselves to Jack in. More than anything, this was what they wanted. Finally, they thought, the door to forbidden knowledge had opened.
So I drew them in. I drew them deep, and once they were inside I hooked them with the Lag.
They had no chance. Where they had two pulse beats each, lazy and weak things which had never been forged and tested, I had seven tones, far stronger for all the torture they had put them through. I bound them and wrapped them up in the Lag until they had to start spitting out memories of their own just to stay alive.
The EMR powered up around me, sucking hard like a magnet, but I held them still. It was my mind, and I was the master, until finally I let them slip free. They raced for the surface, but they were too weak by then to punch through. I let their screams for help leak through.
The EMR dialed down, the world went thump-thump, and the third jacked in to the rescue.
I snatched them all. I buried them in scar tissue so deep I couldn't even hear the screams, and that is how they died, and that is the best and worst memory of my young life.
Afte
r that things got better. It was luck, I suppose, to find a normal family, who allowed me to live a normal life. But I would never be normal again. In everything I saw, did and felt, there were echoes. Had I already done this once, like the orange rattle? My mind at its core was repetitive, unable to break out of its old patterns.
Nothing was solid. Everything was shifting. I bore the scars they had given me, the welts and weals of a thousand abuses, and though new brain-mass heaped atop that, I never felt like I truly belonged.
I finish, and now Far is looking at me with sad understanding in his eyes. I think back to the weals on his face and neck, and remember that they did this to him. They tortured him, this child-like representation of us, and he murdered them for it. This child was broken so many times that he learned to become a killer. This child is Me, too.
"I'm sorry," I tell him, even as Ray and Doe say the exact same words.
Far looks back at us with his chin quivering but jutted forth with pride.
Ray hugs him. I hug him, and Doe hugs him. We are all part of this boy, grown out of what he was. He is the heart of us, and the hardest part.
SAVE FAR
I remember the message in the mission folder. It must be true, because Far is undoubtedly the center of our chord, rooted in the primal power of the Solid Core in a way none of us can understand.
But there is little time for such comforts or revelations, as the thumping gets louder from outside and the gumball in the wall begins to shift.
RITRY GOLIGH
14. CANDYLAND
Things become a blur in the days that follow. To help me forget the look in Zachary's eyes, I drink. To help me wake up from the hangovers, I ride the ancient bonds back along the trail Mr. Ruin has left for me.
Access to the tsunami wall between Calico and Tenbridge Wulls is easy. Mr. Ruin's notes detail an ancient stop on an unbuilt Wall train line, where once they hoped to link the proto-Calico Skulks to Calico beyond. Now the station is a vacuum inside the core of the wall, locked off by great metal plugs.
Soul Jacker Box Set Page 13