Soul Jacker

by Michael John Grist

  I roll away from Mei-An and look up at Carrolla. He reminds me so much of someone I used to know.

  "Fine work, really excellent," he says, words more to key me back to my body and sense than for anything else, "and you bedded it in too. How was the Lag?"

  I slide my legs woozily off the EMR-tray and sit up with my back to Mei-An. She'll need a few hours of medicated sleep for her mind to fully settle.

  "Not bad," I say. My tongue feels as thick as a wodge of dry seaweed in my mouth. Carrolla hands me a glass of water and helps me sip it. Better. "Have you got any more of those Arcloberry juice boxes though?"

  He frowns. "You sacrificed the juice? Dammit, Rit. What's wrong with water, do you not have enough memories of drinking that?"

  "It came to mind."

  He laughs. "I heard they've got vodka mixes out at the Skulk-end, some new seed-blend. We'll hit it later. Now let's get you to recovery."

  He helps me up and together we hobble out of the gray jack-room and down the polished corridor, to the glass-walled outlook space at the building's edge. Here there's a massage chair with a cerebro-sonic bath, overlooking the green-gray Arctic waves off the edge of our floating Skulk.

  I settle in the chair, looking out at the gray sky and level sweep of empty ocean. Beyond the glass the Arctic spreads north into endless nothingness, into spaces where there used to be ice.

  "Switch on your favorite music," Carrolla says, guiding my head into the sonic bath-well in the chair's head. He makes a good nurse, better than he'd ever have been as a marine. That's a small mercy. "You'll be up in time to party, unless Don Zachary comes for you first."

  I snort, but already I'm fading as the sonic bath takes hold with a pattern of its own, attempting to mimic the sound of my mother's pulse and put me into the same womb-like state I used for Mei-An.

  It's a poor imitation for most, but works well for me, since I never had a mother and the pulse I grew up to was the seven-tone chime of an artificial machine womb. In a few hours I'll wake up feeling better, and so will Mei-An. We'll probably have sex, part of the contract for those who need a little extra context to frame the re-structuring of their Soul, and that is not an entirely unpleasant notion. I drift off thinking of the War, and the few good times I can still remember.

  I rouse hours later with Carrolla's steady hand on my shoulder, odd memories flitting up from the remnants of the bath; who I am and what I've done.

  "You're up for it?" he asks, as he lowers the thrum of the sonic bath. "We can always dose her a bit longer if you need more time."

  I blink, looking out of the window to the dark water. Still night.

  "I'll do it," I say, patting Carrolla's hand. "Give me a minute."

  "No problem. She's in recovery."

  His footsteps clank away, and I'm left looking out of the glass again, waiting as my mind gets itself together. It's all darkness beyond, waves lapping against the Skulk's quays, but for a few buoy lights on the kelp-farms and the faint lights of ships out in the distance. All so fragile and tenuous, like newly grown strands of coral.

  I get up.

  Mei-An is waiting for me in the recovery room, overlooking another open swathe of gray ocean. She smiles when I come in.

  "Alsh bevral I ferraqu," she says. "Kalin Very."

  I nod, because she's speaking Afri-Jarvanese, one of the languages in the engram I injected. "Very good. Do you know what it means?"

  "Not really. Just a feeling."

  "You said good morning and wished me well. I suppose it'll be morning soon enough."

  She brushes a strand of dark hair from her face. For a long moment she looks at me, sizing me up and down. It's not an unfamiliar sensation, and not entirely uncomfortable. Soul Jackers have always used sex as a balm; the fastest, safest way to bed in an engram. Back in the War, working with men and women who'd constantly needed the trauma of close-quarters combat excised, I hardly breathed between jacks and the rush of sex that followed.

  "Carrolla said it'll make me feel better," she says at last.

  "How do you feel now?"

  "Bad. Nauseous. Like I'm not myself."

  "Then it will," I say. "Or we can sit here and talk through the night, holding hands. Both will do the same."

  "I don't want to talk. I don't have the time. But you don't mind?"

  "It's my job." I smile, which always helps.

  She raises an eyebrow, clipped like a silkworm, and walks over to me. Each step is measured, a careful gait she surely learned at one of Calico's schools of manners. She's plainly from the Calico Reach, the uppermost crust of the wealthy across the tsunami wall.

  "I remember what you did," she says, taking my hand. "In the War."

  Her hand is soft, small like all the Reach girls, modified to be that way. I know now why she first came out here to the Skulks; seeking adventure. She's a tourist who got pulled down into the mire, and now she wants to be free. Of course she knows something about me too, some piece of my marine life glimpsed through the EMR. This is why the post-jack physical contact is so important; to add context to knowledge that would otherwise be corrosively unsupported, helping the memory engram sprout roots in her Soul.

  "Don't think about that," I say. "Come on, let's go."

  Hand in hand we exit the jack-site. Carrolla gives us a nod from the reception.

  Outside the air is thick with salt and rot from the off-Skulk kelp farms. Stars glimmer faintly through Calico's polluted glow. A desultory alley winds down to a nondescript dock on the left, flocked with nesting crulls, genetic half-breed of gulls and crows, and a shark-tiller's coracle. The dirty gray Arctic Ocean laps steadily at the dock's barnacle-crusted plastic flotation barrels, as dark and rhythmic as sex.

  On the right the alley leads up to the tsunami wall through a gauntlet of cheap pink and purple neon, signs glowing off the Skulk's three B's; brothels, bars, and barrios. Each is lit in their own lurid fuzz like a row of hungry divas lusting for applause.

  Mei-An looks at me. I know she's used to finer things; life inside Don Zachary's compound, and before that Calico itself. "How can you live here?" she asks.

  "How could you?" I answer.

  In places the neon is interrupted by dark gulches of shadow, lean-to escarpments and scaffolded construction projects, squat boat-holds and opium dens built out of rotten-hulled boats, much of it flotsam salvaged from the last tsunami. My jack-site doesn't look out of place here, about as equally squalid and dingy as the rest. It even has its own neon sign, chosen by Carrolla, though it's gray like brain matter and only says 'Souls Jacked!' I'm not sure if that's a joke or not, but it seems to amuse him.

  With her small hot hand in mine, we head up the alley. Underfoot the Skulk fabric shifts, as the flotation barrels it rests upon flex with our weight. Ahead of us, rising above the crock-pot chimneys and uneven lines of the Skulk, stands the implacable off-white shank of Calico's tsunami wall.

  It's vast, of course, as big as any dam in the pre-War days, enough to stop the fifty-foot tsunamis that churn up from quakes in the Arctic fault lines. It's been over ten years since the last big one, and we've been due another for as long as I've been here.

  We're all living on borrowed time.

  "You don't belong here," says Mei-An, catching me looking up at it. "You belong on the other side, in Calico. You paid your dues in the War."

  "I paid enough to stay wherever I want."

  She doesn't say any more, and I'm glad of it. I wouldn't want to fall out over this, not when the job is still unfinished, nor do I want to learn any more of her life with the Don's son. I have enough life histories weighing me down already.

  The massage boys, whores and touts leave us alone as we pass by their neon dens, each a cave to forbidden pleasure. Some give me a wink. These are the people I drink with most nights, after the Mei-Ans are long gone to whatever life my engrams build for them.

  "You must like it here," she says, as we turn off the alley and into one of the blue tarp parks. The resident hom
eless man, once a marine I think, shouts out something as we pass by. A few stunted trees reach upward toward neon from soil-pods dropped amongst the barrels, branching like brain cells. I imagine messages passing between their roots, electronic charges popping on-off, on-off, as the trees build the seeds that will outlive them by far. We skirt the sunken pond, where rainwater trapped in the blue plastic sheeting sags, and I wonder how I can best stem her curiosity in the fewest words.

  "You know about the Lag," I say.

  She nods by my side, clutching my arm more tightly now. I don't blame her, it's dark here in the Skulk-slums where the sex workers and ex-bountymen go to burrow in and ride out the daylight like vampiric worms under a rock.

  "The thing in your brain that protects you by eating invaders. You know sometimes the Lag turns on itself, on its own home? People get old and they forget; it means the Lag got old too, it couldn't recognize the things it was supposed to protect. You end up with large empty expanses of memory, blank canvases where nothing more lasting can take root than what you had for dinner that night."

  I pause for breath and we cross a section of sparse yellow grass. "It's like that. This whole place is a Lagged zone, a doldrums in space that doesn't mean anything to anyone. You can do anything you want out here and none of it matters, because none of it's going to last."

  "And that's what you want," she says.

  I shrug.

  We reach my two-story building and enter through the back door. The canvas walls flex as I lead her up the dark, narrow stairs. It's sad, and poor, and it's the life I've chosen.

  "I don't understand," she says, with an excited flutter in her voice. Of course she doesn't understand. She's been hurt and she's lost a lot, but it's nothing compared to what I lost in the war.

  I ease off my jacket as we enter my bedroom, a square space in the air held together with rope and sailcloth. There's my bed, freshly made, a television which I never use and a glass wall looking out over the park. The red glow of an alarm clock casts a lurid glow over the neat, hollow rest of it.

  "It's so empty," she says. I feel through her touch that she is crying. The engram has played havoc with her emotions.

  "It's not empty now," I say. "You're here."

  Her gho comes off easily, and now she's weeping against my chest. She pulls at the buckle of my belt and starts to kiss my face frantically. Her lips crush against mine and she pulls us to the bed, tugging at me so hard it hurts, squirming off her stockings, pressing her hot flesh against mine.

  3. SHARK ARENA

  After Mei-An leaves I lie awake for a time, watching the glow of the alarm clock flick between digits. Through the window I can just make out the half-circle encampment around the man in the moon's left eye.

  These are water projects built in a bygone era, before global tsunamis on Earth swept the old order away; NASA and the Sino-Russian compact, leaving us with our Skulks and our tsunami walls. I've heard the solar reservoirs up there are as big as the great wall of Sino-Rusk. I imagine the last few humans on the lunar surface starting their own civilization built out of craters and moondust, and wonder if their lives hold any more weight than my own.

  I get dressed.

  It's warm out despite being some time after three, and the main alley through the Skulk is raucous, packed with a horde of boisterous Inuit offshoring in the Skulks. The smell of frying squid hangs on the salty air. The alley will chew them and their money up and spit whatever's left out soon enough.

  At the alley top I cross the low-slung rope bridge into the deeper shadow of the wall, joining the flow of people on the jetty-way. A dozen Skulks pass by as I walk, each a city block-sized raft of flotation barrels lashed together, filled with bars and tattoo parlors and slums. My node beeps as I get near Carrolla.

  I find him on Skulk 65 in a third-floor bar called the Aeternum, decorated like an under-ice subglacic ship with metal bolts and hatches cut from sunken boats. He's sitting at a bar made of five periscopes laid flat, shouting blearily at a man in a rubber diving suit. The bar is about half-full and I slide into a space at Carrolla's side.

  "…it's a boudoir," he's shouting at the diver. "You know? An ocean-themed boudoir!"

  I tap him on the shoulder. He turns and gives me a big, bleary grin. "Rit! Glad you made it." He squeezes my shoulder and calls to the barman for Arcloberry shots.

  I look to the diver. I've dealt with him before, though his name escapes me. He's a salvage artist, diving the wrecks around the Skulks for useful materials. "What's he trying to buy?" I ask.

  "Velour curtains," the diver says, the exasperation clear in his voice, "to line the walls of his 'boudoir'. I've told him there's not a shred of velour on any wreck I know!"

  "Velvet then!" Carrolla adds. "Anything plush, to make it sexy."

  The diver shakes his head. I laugh. I palm him some money and lean in close. "Get it from Calico. Tell him you dredged it up."

  The diver chuckles and heads out.

  "I heard that," Carrolla says sulkily, and hands me a full shot glass. "It's supposed to all be salvage."

  I laugh. "You won't remember in the morning."

  He grunts and knocks his shot back. I hold mine up to the light; Arcloberry vodka. The liquid is a pale purple and smells sandy, kind of like raspberry mixed with red chilis.

  I love these new seed-blends, Arcloberry and the others, pleasant side effects of our War and the pack ice melting. I like to imagine all those seeds blown from the dustbowls of millennia ago trapped in the ice like hidden messages. When all the surface ice thawed and the huge blue bergs rose up from the depths, they were just the sugar frosting on the hydrate fuels underneath.

  I swig it and slosh it around my mouth: a spicy berry with a kick, this message from a pre-Jurassic era. Is this what dinosaurs ate? I slot the taste into the space where the missing memory was, then rub at the reddening in my eyes.

  Carrolla's already wandered off to find some girls. I've got some hard drinking to do, to get the thought of Don Zachary's son out of my mind along with all those old, sad memories of the War stirred up by Mei-An. Good thing there's a bar here, and fresh money burning a hole in my pocket.

  Hours later, I come back to myself stumbling through the dark alleys of a Skulk I don't recognize, with no sign of Carrolla or the Aeternum. The rest of the night beyond that is a Lag; spotted with flashes of memory where I was drinking, flirting, maybe fighting, but nothing clear.

  The usual.

  My ribs and head hurt. My hands feel tacky with somebody else's blood. I touch the built-in spike in my node; clotted with blood. Abruptly it chimes, and I hold it close to my eyes but can hardly resolve the tiny screen. Arcloberry packs a punch. A message came in, but is it from Mei-An? I can't read it. Something about the Don…

  "Ritry Goligh," a voice whispers nearby.

  I spin to see.

  What?

  There's only darkness, bar the glow-light of the coming dawn over the wall. My jacket is gone and it's cool.

  Did someone call my name? I turn and totter, then it comes again.

  "Ritry Goligh."

  I stagger after the sound, as the rising sun flashes through gaps in this Skulk's low skyline. There's a swell in the decking ahead and I climb it, following the phantom voice. Perhaps up here I'll find Ven and all my old friends from the war, and they'll still be alive, and I won't have to live this way anymore.

  I crest the top and turn. An abandoned Skulk spreads around me, all jagged black shadow and sinking alleys. There's no people, no sound. I hear the voice again and take a step, then there's a sound like a gunshot as the rotten deck gives out and I fall through. For a second I tumble, then my feet smack off hard concrete, my knees punch me in the chin and I almost black out.

  Lying on rough old wooden beams, I breathe in sour dust and taste my own blood. Tentatively I pat myself down for wounds, but right now it's mostly just the pain in my jaw. It'll hurt to talk for a week. Leaning to the side I vomit a little purple liquor, and feel a litt
le clearer.

  Rubbing my eyes, I peer into the darkness, lit only by the moon through the ragged hole above. There's a wide circle cut into the deck here, filled with seawater. In places the railing circling is broken inward, and there are windblown leaves crusted over the frothy scum on the surface. Perhaps ten rows of seats spread around the rail, tiered like a stadium.

  A shark-fighting arena.

  As with everything in the Skulks, shark fighting's not illegal, but it rarely happens anymore with sharks being so rare. I glance up to where the scoreboards would've been mounted, but see only the faint outlines of red and white wires trailing from the wall.

  I went to a shark fight once, when I'd just got back from the north. It was vicious; the animals plainly starved and dying, their blood splashing across the crowd. Everybody was cheering and holding up their tickets but I felt empty, like I'd only swapped one pointless war for another.

  I scan the darkness for a way out, but see none. Instead I see a man in the darkness. My heart skips a beat and my gut goes cold.

  He's sitting in a ringside seat, wearing a ridiculous two-pointed hat and dressed in a dark gray suit, staring right at me. He's maybe forty years old, turning some kind of cane slowly in his hands, with eyes that are intensely white in the dark.

  I flick out the spike on my node, watching him all the while, but he doesn't move.

  What the hell?

  "You won't need that, Ritry," he says, pointing his cane at the spiked node.

  "Who the hell are you?"

  He smiles broadly, displaying gleaming white teeth as bright as a shark's. "You can call me Mr. Ruin."

  4. MR. RUIN

  A long moment passes as he looks at me and I look at him. It's dark, and somewhere far off there is the lapping of the Arctic Ocean against this abandoned Skulk's shore.

  I push myself to my feet, wavering for balance. I lean on the arena railing and almost fall in as it gives way. The metal bars slap into the water and sink slowly, cutting lines through the foam that reseal themselves like hot wax.