Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  That evening the first of my pawns reports back; she's found another of the brood-King's peer group, a woman. Like my cave-creature, she has Lagged herself with a flood of nonsense engrams then somehow immured herself within a ruined lowboat from a failed subglacic assault launch, lying at the bottom of a shallow ocean basin off the corner of Europe.

  My pawn cracked her open and dredged out what flotsam memories she still held of the brood-King, then coded those memories into data transmitted by the satellite link. I transfer them into silver engrams and inject them into myself.

  They surge through my Molten Core like incoming Dactyls.

  Sitting in the classroom again, I see the boy is clean of blood now, though scars mar his pale flesh, covering every inch of him. They are human bite-marks and rake-marks from sharp nails. One of his ears is mostly missing; a patch of hair on the back his head has been torn away. Two of his fingers are gone at the knuckles, and many of his toes are missing too, giving him an awkward gait.

  Still his eyes burn when I dare look into them. Over our lunch one day, I watch as he kills another boy who made a comment about his missing ear.

  "You look like a ragged tom-cat," he said, or something similar.

  The boy made his intestines erupt outward, just like the girl, though this time not through his mouth.

  Another memory crystallizes.

  It is an additional viewpoint on the moment we all self-syringed, flushing our minds with the bloody boy closing in. As I push the plunger, I feel the sense that perhaps he is watching, and knows we are doing this. Perhaps he wants us to do this to ourselves, just as he whipped us into line as a boy.

  He set an example once, twice, and let the rest of us learn. This self-destruction serves his purposes as much as any; yet it is too late then to undo the suicide I have committed by nonsense engram.

  I blink up out of the memory, waiting as the sloshing of the engrams settles in my head. The bloody boy, or the brood-King, is plainly an efficient leader who understands human nature like few others, guiding Souls down the paths he provides for them. He has the wisdom to use fear as both lash and leash, controlling his peers with the least effort possible. I cannot help but admire that.

  He is also colossally arrogant. He believed a simple self-syringing would be enough to still these brood members, to hide them away from me, believing I was truly dead. That arrogance may afford me a crack in his shield.

  I go to work on the tower with a vengeance while the world continues to thin. I draw my patterns in the air, swirled now with my memory of the brood-King as a boy. Over days more of my pawns report in, telling fragmented tales of the bloody boy drawn from his mad peers; of power and sudden brutality, of his deep focus and ruthless efficiency.

  I see that efficiency in the death of the world. There is so little of it left now. I lift my hand before my eyes and it is gossamer thin, glowing through with the setting sun. T-minus two days, I think, as the latest pluck through the aether almost pulls a piece of my fragile Soul away. Under such a draw, I wonder if Loralena and my children are even still alive.

  I stop eating and sleeping and put all my remaining hours and energy into the tower. It doesn't matter if I die. This body is nothing to me anyway. The tower climbs until the morning of the last day, T-minus zero, when at last I mortar on the last brick. The last of my pawns report in through air barely thick enough to carry the message, and I make their findings part of myself. Perhaps this knowledge will be enough to insert me like a key into the lock of the boy's golden shield. I climb to the top of my tower with fresh memories in my mind and look out over the dawn sky.

  Know thy enemy.

  Everything is to play for now. My cave creature is dead below, collapsed by the suck of the brood-King. The world is dying around me. I can barely see the sunrise, diaphanous against the bleached-white sky. He is going to remake us all. His next tsunami pull is coming even now, and I am ready for it.

  Fuck the brood-King. I am Me, one seventh of Ritry Goligh, and you do not get to become a god on my watch. I throw my EMR helmet down into the water below, place my hands on the walls of my tower and throw my mind open to the bonds.

  The brood-King rushes in like a tsunami.

  --.

  P. RUIN

  I know Ven is waiting for me on the subglacic with manacles and pistol at ready. I can feel it, as I stand with my marines by the huge crater of melted ice where the mine once churned and burned. The edges of the ice have run smooth and blue with the melt, like a waterslide in Candyland.

  Flashes of a different past, or future, bounce in my head like bondless gold atoms.

  "Good job, Rit," Ferrily says. She smacks me on the butt. "You should come fight more often. I don't know who put you in charge but you pulled it off."

  "I put myself in charge," I say to her. Her helmet's off now that the blizzard has died down, showing her blonde hair braided tightly to her skull.

  Tigrates comes over, her helmet off as well. She looks almost identical to Ferrily, another blonde with her hair in tight rows, bulkier than I am and built for war. They could almost be twins. I recognize La and Ti in them, my own crew.

  Ferrily laughs. "Put yourself in charge? Well all hail that. I guess fucking the boss comes with benefits."

  Tigrates laughs and punches me in the shoulder.

  I look back at the subglacic, far below and barely emerging through the water, its periscope a dark fin through chunks of ice, and understand that I can't go back. The War is over for me now. I can't bear to Lag Ven again, but if I go back I'll have to, because all she wants is to capture or kill me; I can feel her rage from here. I'd have to erase huge chunks of her mind on top of the massive damage I've already done. My manipulation has colored every memory she has of me, and I can't fix that. Even if I tried, she'd be a completely different person when I was done.

  I should have thought about this more. At least she's alive.

  "She didn't approve it," I say.

  "What?" Ferrily asks.

  I look at her. So this is how it goes. "She didn't approve it," I repeat, "she thinks I'm a traitor and I was trying to sabotage us all."

  Ferrily's face wrinkles, trying to discern where the joke is in what I just said. I make it simple and Lag her. I Lag Tigrates. I make it so they haven't seen me since the raid. I Lag the minds of my other marines, leaving the same simple memory:

  I died in the explosion.

  I turn away and walk into the white.

  For an hour I trudge through snow. Steadily the power in my suit wears down and the cold creeps in. I'm waiting, but there is no apotheosis, no sign of Solfeje, and no answers emerge. In the mindless white, I wonder if I've passed some kind of trial or failed it, or if there was never any chance at apotheosis and this is just reality. I keep walking but nothing changes.

  I sit down on a low crag in the ice to wait, and a blizzard folds around me. I wait a long time and think a lot of long, slow thoughts.

  I have still lost Ven. She may not be dead but she will never be mine again. Heclan and the others are still alive, but I can never go back to them. I am dead in their world. I am a hero now, or a traitor, but not the Ritry Goligh they knew.

  It gets colder as the suit power drains. I try to decide if any of this is matters. What would happen if I die here? What change have I really made?

  My suit beeps a warning.

  10%

  I could sit here and the dying would come easily. Would this be letting them all down, I wonder, or is an embrace of death the thing required to get back to the Hollow Star? I wonder if Solfeje has made a better job of it than me. I don't know any more if I care.

  I've made so many mistakes.

  I think of Loralena. I remember her first painting of me, the one she never showed, that showed Ritry Goligh's mind in beautiful, loving detail. All the tones of the chord were in it, as seamless together as any mother's pulse. In that she painted me too, Me as one tone in the chord, and it is that union which I think Loralena saw
when she first met Ritry Goligh. Though he was always alone, he was also always a tribe of many, with me included. Maybe it's what she loved about him. When he married her and bore children with her we all became a part of each others' tribes.

  She's my sister now. She's my wife. I owe it to her and the rest of the chord to get up and keep going. If death is the way out, it will still be waiting when I die.

  I stand and head for a blip on my HUD radar. With the last of the juice in my suit I hit upon a privateer mine. It is a small iron-pylon structure, bolted to the ice and drilled diagonally into the hydrate bed at the edge of the proto-Rusk rig. The crew is five-strong, shuttered in tight after the blizzard, and they are no match for me through the bonds.

  I take them and their little ship, an altered lowboat, and together we run away.

  Q. PROTO-CALICO

  I wash up on the Skulk-shores of proto-Calico, Lagging my new crew and sending them on their way. For all I've changed things, things haven't changed here at all. Walking up the swarming night-alley of skulk 47 I hear news of the neo-Armorican victory on the air, foiling an ambush plot. All around are drunken freighters, frazzled whores and crusty AWOL marines like me, little more than boys and girls running underfoot smoking haze and swigging CSF-booze.

  This is the world I was born into. It's all fucked; everyone looking out for themselves. No one cares about these lost marines, no one cares about these whores, no one cares about the lost.

  My jack-site alley is much the same; lined with broken buildings made from salvaged dreams, though it's more sparse than I remember because of course this is earlier than I was ever here, and they're still rebuilding after the last tsunami.

  I go to the blue-tarp park and sit. I see the homeless man sitting across from me, an ex-marine washed out of the service early. It's years earlier than the original Ritry Goligh came here, after global accords forced the proto-Rusk to release him. He came and found this guy was already here. Perhaps he's even more lost than me.

  I nod at him. He nods at me and holds out a clear bottle of liquor, like we're already old friends. Somehow he knows what I am. By his side are the low smoldering coals of a newsprint-roasted crull, and I feel caught between times. Ven and my crew are just as lost to me as they were to the original Ritry, so there's nothing here left for me. I get up and go over to the marine, take the bottle and swig it down.

  "What happened to you, Ritry?"

  I wake in a dim and rocking space of rotting wood and salt, lying on the floor; probably one of the abandoned fishing ships moored off the Skulks. I must have crawled here for shelter, too drunk to think. The hull creaks as the ocean laps it against the Skulk flotation barrels.

  I roll and see there's a man sitting on a chair nearby, illuminated by the faint glow of lamplight. I laugh out loud to see him. It comes out as a few spluttered wheezes, which he frowns at.

  Mr. Ruin.

  He's wearing his gray suit, he's holding his gray cane, but there's no corpse at his feet and no two-cornered hat on his head. Rather he's looking at me with intense curiosity and none of the all-knowing arrogance he had when we first met.

  Mr. Ruin. Strangely I feel happy to see him; like the old friend he always wanted us to be. Maybe he alone could understand what I've been through. I feel him probing me through the bonds, searching for answers. He must have noticed my erratic actions: leaving the subglacic in the middle of an engagement, coming here and doing this. All his plans for me are going awry. He gasps as I throw up a Wall on the bonds to block his tampering.

  "How did you do that?" he asks, his eyes widening.

  I get to my feet and some new understanding floods into my mind. Perhaps this is what I'm meant to do now, to change things in some larger way. I reach out to the bonds and see that I was always stronger than him, I just didn't know it. His eyes go wider still as I freeze him in place with the Lag.

  "You want to be my friend, don't you?" I ask, pushing my hangover aside. "Mr. Ruin, you call yourself. You want to know what it feels like to belong, to be so close to someone again like you were with Napoleon, and you've chosen me. You've been watching me since before I was birthed from my artificial womb, watching and waiting for the right moment to strike, is that about right?"

  It looks like his eyes are going to burst out with shock. For all my life he's been a cat toying with a mouse, biding his time. He was so patient. Now the mouse has become the cat, and he's my prey. He tries to speak but I squeeze his voice box closed.

  "You get what you always wanted, Ruin. I'm here. You're here. Let's do something amazing together. Do you remember the Suns?"

  His jaw drops.

  "That's right, your lord and master. We're going to kill him. And do you know his greatest general, the boy covered in blood?"

  If I wasn't holding him up I think he'd probably faint about now.

  "We're going to kill him too."

  ME

  21. MAKE ME PROUD

  I race the King to the bridge in my Solid Core, punching through the locks Far placed on my blast door to burst out into the aether, where everything has changed. I stare in horror; where once there were billions of Soul-stars like endless pinholes of light poked through a velvet black canopy, now it is nearly all darkness.

  The lights are winking out and all around me is the brood-King. The bloody boy. I feel him like dark matter in the aether, draining all Souls into himself. He hangs in the center as a massive red star, his golden shield billowing in space where King Ruin's twin red suns once revolved, shining like the end of the world.

  I soar out to meet him.

  RITY GOLIGH

  His voice rings within me, stripping at the strength I've mustered like lava burning away the Bathyscaphe's protective brick layers. There is no surprise in his flat tone, no anger that I am still alive, rather there is a sense of welcoming.

  YOU HAVE COME IN TIME TO WITNESS THE BEGINNING

  I jack harder still, streaming through the empty darkness where stars once hung. I have no time to look for Loralena, for Art and Mem; I can only hope they are still here somewhere as all the Souls die.

  I AM GLAD TO SEE YOU AGAIN. IT SHOULD BE YOU AND I AT THE END

  I stream through the aether toward his red dwarf Soul, cast now with a rippling reflection of his face; massive and covered in old scars, battle-worn and insurgent and unstoppable. One of his spears spikes toward me and cuts through all of my defenses with ease, puncturing my middle. I snap it off and rush on, so close to his golden shield now that his face warps like the thumping electrostatic of a guttering EMR.

  I AM SO GLAD TO SEE YOU

  He says it even as he tries to kill me.

  I thrust and arc through the airless aether, propelled by the tower and a lifetime of roots left behind. More of his spears shoot through me but I drive into the pain, because this is my aether and he has no right to steal it like this.

  YOU AND I AT THE END, VICTIMS BOTH

  His golden shield flickers before me, solidifying at my approach but still translucent, and I peer through to a scene below. There is a vast trebuchet on the surface of his red star, its one massive wooden arm groaning beneath all the stolen weight of the aether. At the other end of the arm sits the bloody boy, ready to bring on the end.

  The blood is fresh upon his face still, slicking down from his mouth. There are bite wounds covering every part of him. I see it and even as I see it, the voice knows what I know.

  YOU SEE ME NOW

  I feel the universe of his thoughts encircle me like the fist of his Soul around the girl who vomited her entrails. Before I was a fly at the periphery but now I fall under the full focus of his power.

  Four more spears spike through my shoulders and hips and pin me to the aether, but I have pieces of him inside my Soul now and I can't be stopped so easily.

  "You and me at the end," I shout as I rush closer, as proximity blows my image massive across the outer skin of his golden shield, and for a moment I feel what Doe must have felt when plunging into
the depths of King Ruin to die; these bonds are the strongest, which are given for love. These are the bonds King Ruin could only break once, because all he ever loved was himself. These are the sacrifices I have ridden this far, with all my chord lost just to reach this point.

  My reflection warps then pops like a soap bubble as I plunge into the thick of golden shield. Memories spray everywhere like bondless atoms from Doe's shoulder accelerator and I see it all, the boy's story rushing in just as I rush into him, beginning with an:

  Invasion.

  Every instant is an invasion of my Soul as they break in again and again, and I can do nothing but take it, my body so small, a year old perhaps, and always there is that-

  thump thump, thump thump

  -that is not a pulse but the hammering of the machine that clamps me open to let them in. They killed one half of me already and I'm so alone.

  Solfeje and Solmiz. We were made for each other, twin pillars of one pulse meant to always be together, and they killed him. His body crumpled under their endless invasions so long ago, he vomited up his innards with the poison they force-fed him, and what could I do?

  I tried to hold him in my tiny arms but I couldn't. They pulled the pieces of him apart then used them to jack deeper in, digging until my thoughts bled with a-

  THUMP THUMP, THUMP THUMP

  -that would forever echo with what I'd lost, each answering beat only an echo of the first, with his tone never sounding again.

  There is no place I can escape from their endless experimentation. I become what they want, just crusts of memory laid end over end with the tortured memory of Solmiz written across my spreading infant mind. My brain builds itself out of his loss, so his absence becomes forever a part of my Soul.