Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  Without saying a word of warning I activate the mindbomb.

  I stole it from the sunken subglacic ten years ago; a heavy gray tube pried out of the missile-loading bay. I wired it into the house and programmed its destructive frequencies to shield the Souls of my family. I set the detonation pattern to a thought triggered over the bonds, and ensured the walls and ceiling of our apartment were sufficiently insulated to contain it.

  The bomb explodes and the shockwave buzzes over me like hard static electricity, rebounding back off the insulated walls and swamping Mr. Ruin in the middle.

  He drops flat to the floor. I drop to my knees under the onslaught. Ten, fifteen pass as the last reverberations rattle back and forth in the echo chamber I've made.

  Then there is silence; only the soothing sound of Art and Mem sleeping. They'll have bad dreams, but that's nothing compared to what the mindbombs were designed for. I push myself to my feet, looking down at Mr. Ruin lying flat on the carpet. My heart throbs hard as the shock of what I've done hits me. He's dead; his mind erased.

  Then he moves. My heart skips a beat and all feeling drains from my body as control is taken away. Lagged.

  Mr. Ruin stands up. It is impossible, he should be as dead now as Ven and Heclan, but he is not. On his feet now, he dusts down his jacket and looks at me with an expression approaching remorse. "Anything else, Ritry?"

  I send the signal to detonate the bomb again, but of course it is spent. I try once more to be sure, because now there is nothing else I can do. The shock of my victory gives way to an all-pervading terror. He is here in my house. He is standing between my children. He survived a mindbomb?

  I try to charge him but he Lags the weight of my intent away with ease, as though I am a weakling child, and my body does no more than lean slightly forward. The strength he can muster is awesome and I can do nothing underneath it but tremble.

  "Oh, Ritry," he says, disappointment in his voice. "I do feel badly about this part. But dear boy, who do you think gave you the location of that subglacic? It was me, wasn't it? Everything you've got and everything you've made of yourself is because of me." He nods gently, agreeing with himself. "You see that now, don't you?"

  I realize then how thoroughly I have lost. In a second I have lost everything, and now I am helpless. I am Don Zachary lying in his opulent bed, able only to beg for the lives of my children. A cold emptiness hollows me out and squats like a solid lump in the center of my gut, thick and curdled and impossible to ignore.

  I am prey.

  My throat tries to gag. I realize with sudden certainty that I should never have allowed myself to love Loralena, should never have allowed myself to have children. I was arrogant and a fool to believe one mindbomb would be enough, and now I am going to pay. I want to sag to the carpet and vomit all of this up, but Ruin doesn't let me move. I want to close my eyes and wake from a nightmare but I can't do anything, can't move, can't fight, can't even close my eyes.

  Tears stream down my cheeks.

  "Ah," says Mr. Ruin, his voice transcendent, like this is the most beautiful thing he's ever witnessed. "At last you see who I am."

  I gather what strength I have to bark a single word. "How?"

  His smile is sympathetic. "You only took one bomb, correct? Yes." He takes off the Napoleonic hat and turns it so I can see the interior. Inside there are winking lights on a machine built around the brim. Now I can hear the tinny little thump thump of the electromagnets doing their work; smaller than I've ever seen before.

  A portable EMR. A shield.

  I almost laugh. He prepared. All of this has been his trap.

  "I will kill you," I manage to say through gritted teeth.

  "I've heard that before. You had your chance. Now it's my turn." He reaches down to stroke Mem's sleeping head. I try to scream but I can't make a sound. "Look around you, Ritry. Wouldn't you say this is fair compensation for all that I gave you? Isn't it only just I take my share? And what's to stop me? I could Lag your whole fucking family and drop myself in your place in a heartbeat." He snaps his fingers, the sound obscenely loud in the quiet room. "Did you ever think of that?"

  The lump in my stomach only gets harder, thicker, sicker; so repellent I can scarcely breathe.

  "I could be fucking your wife, Ritry," he whispers conspiratorially. "Your beautiful painter wife, and she'll call out your name while I do it. How would you feel about that? Your kids will call me papa. Art and Mem, what kind of names are those anyway? We'll change that. And do you know the best thing? Nobody but you and I will know. They say Job had it bad. Ritry, I'll make it so you never existed."

  I gasp. A second flood of tears mists my eyes.

  "Come now, be reasonable," he says. "You must know you owe all this to me. When I first found you you were despondent, only waiting to die. I gave you the world and you turned me down, but you kept everything else, and how is that fair? I'm only here to claim my due, and put you back where you belong. You were nothing then, and so you would have stayed. Don't look at me like that, Ritry. Ask yourself, is this what I, Mr. Ruin, wanted? I didn't want this. I wanted you at my side, a partner in the great mission to jack the Solid Core, but you rejected me. I can't allow that to stand."

  "Please," I manage to whisper.

  He laughs. "That's a beginning. Perhaps in ten years? In twenty? I might relent. But until then, I need you to understand. You take your punishment like a good boy. You don't try to end it prematurely, because if you die then so do they. You don't Lag the memories or the pain away, because if you do they'll die. You don't even try to jack for the Core, not until I say so, because first you have to pay for your crimes. If you do anything other than roll belly-up and take it until I say it's enough, they all die."

  More tears come, so thick I can barely see. If I had control of my body I'd be gasping.

  Ruin nods appreciatively. "Good. Now, to a point of order. You said before that I couldn't break your mind, and maybe you were right. There's just too much scar tissue built up inside. But them?"

  He nods to my children. I want to tear out his eyes. I want to drop on my knees and beg for forgiveness.

  "There's nothing special about them."

  I let out a sob. The misery is already too strong for him to Lag.

  He notices. "That's more like it. Come on, Ritry, let me hear you bawl. Didn't I say it would come to this? You poor child, didn't I warn you? I gave you everything and you threw it back in my face, and now you're going to pay."

  I push back with all the strength I can muster, and speak. "Kill me."

  He looks pleasantly surprised.

  "Really? Do you know, that is exactly what Napoleon said to me? When I told him what awaited him, alone on a stinking hole of an island to while away his piss-ant life in ignominy and dishonor, unable to even kill himself, that is exactly what he said. And do you know what I said to him?"

  He leaves this hanging. I am only standing now because he wants me to.

  "I told him, where would be the fun in that?" His eyes glow hot. "But alive? Ritry, I'll feast on this for as long as you live. Have you any idea the strength I'm going to get from your misery? You're a seven-toned freak, and breaking those bonds is going to be a-fucking-tomic. You will be my masterpiece. I fitted you for a suit and for the past ten years you've put it on, piece by piece, and I've watched. Gods, how I've watched and waited. Every delicious kiss, every touch on your children's hair, every kind word, every bit of it gone!"

  He is red-faced now, working himself up, and I am shrinking down to a sick little nothing deep inside myself, full of shame and disgrace. "You put the suit on for me, Ritry. You did it by yourself, and you thought it was a rebellion." His smile widens, his eyes shine with happiness. "Then when the time is right, you will jack the Core for me. You will find the bridge to beyond." He pauses, perhaps overcome with his own victory. "Really, it's too much, Ritry. And you once had the gall to threaten me? Who's the predator now, you fucking idiot, who's the true shark?"

&nbs
p; He lets his grip on me loosen. I can barely breathe, barely move, but I can speak.

  "Say it," he says impatiently. "Come on, spit it out."

  I know what he wants; he'll have read it in my Soul as I now read it in his. I am Don Zachary fallen to nothing. I give it to him.

  "Please don't hurt my children."

  He laughs. "I'll do whatever I want."

  16. NEW MAN

  He banishes me to the Skulks, and there I drink. I cannot drink enough. I drink until I vomit and pass out, then I drink some more.

  Still I dream. There can be no escape. I cry and groan, I roll around in the filth and dirt of a new floating park on a new Skulk in a new proto-Calico, gnashing my teeth and covering myself in ashes.

  I beg and I wail at the skies until the locals come and beat the frustration out of me, then I huddle in a freezing ball and whine, blood running down my burst lips and chest, as I feel every bit of everything Mr. Ruin does.

  My family forget me. They forget every piece of me, and just like he said, he takes my place.

  "I'm sorry!" I shout up at the sky, "please, I'm so sorry."

  He does fuck my wife. He does change the names of my children. He treats them like shit and he makes them think it was me, then Lags the weight of it away so they never realize and can never escape, and he does it all over again. He turns the love we had inside out and feeds off the pain.

  No one can help me. There's nothing I can do but drink, so I drink. When the locals come to beat me I don't fight, I only keep myself alive.

  My ribs break, and I drink a hundred bottles of Arcloberry. My fingers break, and I drink all the gene-spliced rye in the world. My teeth break, and I drink all the rum. My hair grows long and shaggy, I stink, I'm wearing whatever ragged clothes I can scrabble for and I weep or whisper every night, begging him to let it end.

  It doesn't end.

  He twists the things we used to do to make them awful; treasure hunts purloined to torture. He beats them. He torments them. He breaks them, and they weep too, and beg, and he Lags it away to begin again.

  I can do nothing but drink and sob and break my body on the rack.

  A year passes.

  Skulk 12. The pain is numb but always there. I wake with the pain and I sleep with it. When I'm lucky, when I can steal it or beg it, I drink. Some of my fingers don't work as well as they used to. It's not as bad as it was, almost tolerable, but there are always spikes.

  He left my family, mostly, but he goes back. They live a normal life for weeks at a time, missing me, until he gets hungry and goes back to dine. He has his favored tortures perfected to a routine, which he always Lags at the end. He tells them these are business trips he goes on, and every time they wait for him like they would wait for me, eager and ready. Every time he comes back and he hurts them, and every time it is just as bad. Unlike me, they can never get used to it.

  I am inured. I still sob and drink when they're in the thick of it, but in the between times, when they miss me but not too much, there is some relief.

  I share the park with another homeless man. He hunts crull using complex traps, just like the marine from before. We watch each other warily across the fake grass of this sad, sagging park and I wonder if he is the same man I once waved to. Hours I spend wondering this, as though the answer will solve something or help in any way.

  He eyes me back. Perhaps he wonders if I am the same Ritry Goligh who once looked at him from my apartment window, Soul Jacker to Skulk 47. But this is not Skulk 47; it is Skulk 12, after the tsunami came.

  I saw Carrolla once, I think. I was roaming this Skulk's back-alleys scrounging for liquor to steal, like a sickly ghast, and I saw him. He was noisy, happy, walking with a woman on his arm and talking loudly about his restaurant.

  It had to be Carrolla, but wasn't he planning a bar? I wondered if he remembered me fondly. Did he ever think of our days together?

  Night comes, and I've spent another day staring into space, waiting for the wounds in my mind to heal. I feel like less and less every day, like I've forgotten something I ought to know and my mind is hiving off into constituent parts. Perhaps I'm forgetting who I am, or perhaps this is madness.

  Maybe it will be a relief.

  The marine across the way has been roasting crull for an hour. The seaweed newsprint he rolls it in smells like burning hair. He wears rags like me. I wonder if a subglacic suit would fit him anymore, or how he might look holding a Kaos rifle as he attacks a hydrate base atop the ice.

  He waves. Perhaps he has liquor. I roll to my feet and trudge across the park. The barrels underfoot list and bob. Everything is falling apart. Soon there'll be a lake here, and soon there'll be another tsunami, and soon we'll all be wiped clean.

  Napoleon, I think. Napoleon on Elba.

  I grunt as I draw near. By firelight he looks filthy, his face grimed with old sweat. He hawks and spits.

  "It never gets easier," he says. His voice sounds like sandpaper on chalkboard, deep and abrading and mottled with phlegm. Probably tuberculosis.

  These are our first words after a year, but the meaning is clear. I know him as he knows me. We are the same in some way.

  He hands me a jar of clear liquid and I take it eagerly, knock back a heavy swig. It is sharply acidic, perhaps some kind of medical cleaner. It strips the feeling from my tongue and throat and blooms heat in my stomach. Every bit of it helps to dispel the cold, if only for a little while.

  They miss me, I feel. They think I'm coming back.

  "It's good," I manage, shuffling close to his fire. It's cool out now, perhaps it's winter. I barely notice anymore.

  He shrugs. "Finish it. Stole it from the Soul Jacker."

  I laugh. I look again at the jar and recognize it. It's got a CSF label, fermented from a Soul Jacker's Cerebro-Spinal Fluid. For a moment I'm back with Heclan, Ferrily and Tigrates on the subglacic again in the midst of the War, distilling in secret and slowly drawing closer to Ven.

  Past lives, almost forgotten. I finish it in hungry gulps. The fumes burn up my nose and make my eyes water. When I'm done I sway.

  "Sit," he says. I sit.

  He pulls a chunk of crull apart and hands a wing to me. It is greasy and brown, spotted in places with feather stubs. I realize I am famished; how long since I last ate? I tear into the meat and swallow it in gristly chunks with juices running down my chin.

  "I knew it was you," the man says.

  I look at him and see that he is indeed the same man. I nod. I wonder how he survived the tsunami, or if I've somehow slipped back in time to that old park on 47, and just across the way is another me in another life, behind a kind of glass I can never break.

  Memory. We're always looking in from the outside.

  We eat, and he produces another jar of fermented CSF. We sip it and the world swirls pleasantly. As ever, I begin to forget. Leaning back to watch the stars, I wonder which Ritry Goligh I really am. Am I the boy who had no parents, or the marine who lost his crew, or the man who told Don Zachary what to do and lived, or the man who lost it all?

  Am I Napoleon himself?

  "Come on," the ex-marine says. His face is lined and haggard, but there's something like brotherhood in his eyes. He's pointing to his hut, hidden amidst the poles and floating trees, built out of blue tarp like a tent. "Let me show you."

  I don't care. If he wants to screw me, let him try. I'll either kill him or let him, and either way it'll be a kind of forgetting.

  "It's OK," he says. "I know."

  On my knees, moving in a blur, I crawl through the bushes to his home. I kneel before the opening and he pulls the sheet wall aside.

  There is a lamp glowing within, illuminating a small cave-like space that looks like a shrine. It dizzies me. The canvas walls are covered in old photographs, taped and tacked into place. There are bits of faded yellow paper with childlike drawings on them; crayon outlines delineating a house, a tree, a mother and father and two girls.

  In the photographs I see his two
daughters and his wife. He is dressed as a marine, standing by her side in their wedding clothes in front of some shiny Calico church. They are happy and smiling and proud. I look around the shrine and see his family everywhere, covering every surface so the blue tarp beneath looks like lines of mortar in a structure built of memory. Scattered around the floor are numerous items; a small and singed teddy bear, a pack of plastic toy marines, child's clothes.

  It is a tangle of bonds so hot I can feel it buoying me up, with every one pointing at the man standing behind me. Tears well into my eyes; for the first time in a year not for my own suffering, but for the suffering of another.

  I turn and see him standing there, tears in his eyes too.

  "It doesn't make it easier," he says, pointing at the shrine. "But it helps."

  I nod and rub the tears away.

  "Thank you," I say and lurch to my feet. "Thank you."

  Staggering away, I feel some part of me change. The part that has been shearing off for months, a part that I once hid behind a wall made of my own scar tissue, begins to plan, and I give over control to it. For the first time in a year I sense a sliver of hope in the darkness. I don't know why and I don't know how, but I know what I have to do.

  17. THE REACH

  I go at once. Drunk and stinking, dressed only in rags, I cross the wall into Calico. People stare at me as I ride the Wall line to the Reach. They step away and turn up their noses, and I do not blame them. I need this. A man in a suit with a briefcase jostles me hard to my knees. When I drop, he uses the case to hit me in the face.

  My nose breaks. That's OK.

  Mr. Ruin feels me coming, and he tightens his noose of control around my family's throats. It's a risk, but the only thing I can do.

  Nobody stops me as I walk into my old building. I ride the elevator in silence, halfway between terror and elation. I might see them again. I might get them all killed.

  The door is ajar and I walk in. It is my old home. Loralena is standing in the middle of the room with Mem and Art either side of her. They have grown so much. When they see me the hope in their eyes peaks, then sinks as he Lags them.