Soul Jacker

by Michael John Grist

  DO NOT READ THIS ALOUD

  ONE OF YOUR CHORD WILL KILL YOU ALL

  I say nothing, instead closing my mouth as the words swiftly fade from red to pink, from pink to nothing.

  "Well?" says Doe through the comm.

  Ray is looking at me with a mixture of amusement and surprise, like this is a much better game than singing to Far.

  "We'll wait, on second thoughts," I say sheepishly. "Keep up the recon. Out."

  Ray chuckles. "That's embarrassing."

  "It's unnerving," I say. "How did the writer know I would read it out loud?" I turn over the pack and look at the back as if there might be answers there.

  "Maybe they didn't. Maybe it's standard. How many of these have you opened before?"

  I strain to remember, because I know I've opened some, but where and when? Was I infiltrating then as well? Was it in the depths of the Molten Core, or some sunken one?

  I tuck the pack back into my suit.

  "So who do you think is the traitor?" Ray asks. "Who's going to kill us all?"

  "It could be you," I say.

  "Or it could be you."

  There's not much more to say after that. Ray goes back to his lullabyes and I look down into the molten blaze below, trying to think back on everything I know about the others, but there's nothing. Names, a few traits, a sense about them perhaps, but that's all. We could be complete strangers for all I know, not even tones in the same chord at all.

  D. CHARGER

  Ten minutes in, and there's a growing sense of unease writhing like a worm in the pit of my stomach. Nothing feels right in this place, not the chord or the mission. I need to look after my people, but who are they? Who amongst them would kill us all?

  The mission pack grows clammy against my chest, too hot and too cold at once. We have to read it. We have to move. We have to get this mission done.

  I switch on blood-mic. "Report," I order.

  "Nothing yet," Doe comes back, her voice a fuzzy crackle. "I'm past the far pole."

  "So?"

  "Nothing either, just girders."

  "La?"

  A moment passes before La replies. "Perhaps. I'm running a depth gauge now. It's not a door, but there's writing carved into the metal in the outline of a gateway. It's written in a different language; I think Gaullic."

  A chill runs up my spine. By my side Far shudders and Ray tamps him down with soft words.

  "What does it say?"

  "'Arrete! C'est ici l'Empire du Mort.' It keeps repeating. Do you know what that means?"

  I don't. Doe speaks into the silence. "It means 'Stop, this is the Empire of the Dead.'"

  The line goes quiet for a moment. Why not, I wonder? No one knows what the Solid Core is.

  "What do the depth gauges say?"

  "They say…" A pause while she checks. "Nothing. The material's impenetrable to all radiation."

  Another chill. That's not supposed to happen. It's what the depth gauges are meant to bypass. We'll have to do it the old-fashioned way. "Try hitting it," I say. "Sound it for hollowness."

  She does, and her suit's external mics capture the sound of it; a hollow bonging like some old clock tolling time.

  I look at Ray, and he gives a nod. He feels it too, that we can't stay here any longer; like the longer we stay the less real we become.

  "It's our way in," I say, "we'll blast it. Doe and So, end the recon and head to La."

  They Roger it.

  Ray clicks blood-mic to a private channel. "Not the way in, if it's sealed off," he says. "Somebody doesn't want us coming in."

  "Who ever wants to see us, Ray?"

  He grunts. It's not really a joke. I don't remember seeing anyone other than the chord, ever.

  "None of this feels right," Ray says, and pulls his grapnel. I can't argue with him.

  "You first," I say.

  He nods, his sharp green eyes already looking into the distance, and fires. A percussive slap smacks the air as his grapnel shoots off to loop around another girder far along the Solid Core's curved horizon.

  "See you at the Deathgate, Me," he says, locks the grapnel line in to his suit and shuffles off the girder.

  Together he and Far fall. The rope catches them and they arc down like a pendulum. The boy's long wail calls out like a siren fading, growing deeper until they are just a black dot against searing lava.

  I look back once more to the lava where we lost Ti, and can't help but feel that I'm aleady less, like I'm leaving a part of myself behind. Yet the rest of the chord lies ahead, and I'm responsible first to them.

  I fire my grapnel, the head snags on a girder and I fall.

  The Solid Core recedes, the lava of the Molten Core screams up at me then the line catches and pulls me into my own pendulum swing. Hot air rushes over my HUD, exhilaration drives out the cramp of waiting and then the tracer in my suit begins the in-reel. In seconds I'm sitting on the latch-point, refastening my cables to fire. Ray is there grinning widely through his visor.

  "You never said it was this much fun, Doe," he says on blood-mic.

  Doe comes back as flat as ever. "Say it's fun after fifty more swings."

  Ray's grin only widens. "The only way to travel," he says through blood-mic, then drops again.

  It is less than fifty swings to the Gaullic markings. We pull up to find Doe, So and La hanging from a brace of wires strung between girders.

  "Welcome to the Deathgate," says La.

  I lean in to study the 'gate'; the carving truly is remarkable. The Gaullic words are arrayed around a neat rectangle, like a picture frame. Each letter is as big as my shin, and scored so deeply into the black that they shimmer silver.

  I reach into one of the depressions. "What alloy is this?" I ask, flicking up my HUD and looking at So. The magma-heated air burns hot on my skin.

  "Something poly," she says, brushing black hair out of eyes, "and impossible. La?"

  I turn to La. She looks mildly distraught. We're all feeling it, I think. "The readings don't make sense, Me. These atoms seems to be bound not with the strong force, but with gravity itself."

  I frown. My molecular chemistry is weak, but not that weak. All elements are bound by the so-called strong force, as compared to the weak force of radioactive decay, the magnetic force, and gravometric bonds. "How can it be anything but the strong force?"

  La reaches between the tangle of our bodies, hanging ungainly there like bats in hammocks, to pass me a readout. I look at it and see numbers. "This just says its gravometric, which is macro-scale; we're talking planets, correct?"

  She nods. "Correct. What we're looking at are gravometric bonds working at an elemental level."

  "It's not possible, we know," Doe says, "it shouldn't exist, but here it is."

  "What does it mean?" I ask.

  Doe shrugs, enough of a motion to start us all bobbing on the cables. "What it comes down to, is there might be a black hole on the other side of this metal."

  I almost laugh. "A black hole?"

  "Could be," Doe repeats.

  The urge to laugh dwindles. "Can we blow it?"

  "We can, but it'll take most of our candlebomb and almost all our fuse. We can't be anywhere near this spot when the blast goes up. The whole Core could lose integrity. If it is a black hole we'll just get spaghettified in an instant. But if it's something else…" she trails off.

  I look around at the chord. Ray has flicked up his HUD and is running his swarthy fingers inside the carved metal letters.

  "Who would write something like this?" he says quietly.

  I look back to Doe. We're marines after all, and this is our mission. "Set it up."

  Doe sets to work, while the rest of us swing away to a safe distance. Soon Doe is with us, pressed next to Ray with strands of her white hair pasted to her damp cheeks. Ray leans over to peel one errant hair away, and she eyes him curiously, as though she can't quite comprehend what he's doing.

  "Excuse me," he says, "you had a bit stuck."

&
nbsp; Doe raises an eyebrow then holds out the fuse. I nod. "T-minus ten," she says, and sparks it with the gasjet barrel of her rifle. Far wriggles by my side and Ray pats his head. I see So and La are holding hands again. Ray takes Doe's free hand in his own and she pulls it casually away. The spark races up the fuse like a shooting star and we all tighten our grip on the metal.

  BOOM

  The spark strikes the candlewax and the explosion bursts like a lava bloom. Black shrapnel blows out and down in a broad trajectory, a fireball inflates then with a staccato snap sucks back into itself.

  A tsunami of sound crashes over us though my HUD quickly renders it silent, then the pressure wave hits and we all sway. Throughout I keep watch on the Core, barely breathing as the initial light and smoke dissipate, so that when a shape falls out from inside I see it clearly.

  A man on a white horse, dressed in a dark blue tunic with brightly burnished buttons that caught the magma like lens flare. He holds a shining silver rapier blade in his hand and there is dark blood on his bright white pantaloons, embroidered with yellow thread. Spurs glint on his long black boots as he spins down to the magma.

  "Charger!" he shouts, the sound reaching me seconds before the lava claims him.

  I let my jaw go slack and turn to Doe.

  "Gaullic," she says, her voice a cracked whisper. "It means charge, as in attack."

  I look back to the smoking hole in the Solid Core and wonder what madness lies within.

  RITRY GOLIGH

  5. POWER

  I wake in the afternoon with a pale gray light rinsing through the window of my apartment. The sky is brain-matter gray; rain clouds rolling over the Arctic Ocean. The smell of Mei-An is on the sheets still and one of her dark hairs shimmers on the pillow, but she is of course long gone.

  I hurt.

  Bruises on my face and cracked ribs tell a story of violence, and with it come intermittent memories of last night; Carrolla, and a fight, and wandering through some ruined Skulk where a dead body wearing a familiar face waits, and the long trek home.

  My breath stiffens involuntarily.

  A hot shower helps with my throbbing head. My node rings and I ignore it, probably Carrolla calling me to the jack-site. In my miserly kitchenette I locate the seaweed bread and force down two slices, then I look at the folder on the table before me.

  From Napoleon's tunic. I remember that much. Don Zachary's son. It's a red vinyl folder titled RITRY GOLIGH in embossed gold. It holds maybe a hundred yellowed pages of different sizes scrawled over with inky notes.

  'This is my gift to you,' Mr. Ruin said. I remember his eyes, his teeth and the almost magical way he fled from my spike.

  He killed Don Zachary's son. He sent Mei-An to me. I don't understand any of it.

  I pick up the folder and open it to the first paper, handwritten, and begin to read.

  MCAVERY'S SHARK-FIGHTING ARENA

  SKULK 53, QUAYSIDE

  I recognize it; it's where I ended up last night. Beneath the title and location is a map and a summary:

  Abandoned 2355, when the last tsunami warning came.

  I blink, remembering that warning. I was only three months out of the Arctic then, still wandering the streets every night looking for something I couldn't find, burning through my War bounties in women and liquor.

  A second birth for you, wasn't it, Ritry?

  This line, scrawled in red ink beside the title, must be from Mr. Ruin. But how would he know that?

  Back then half the people fled the Skulks in fear, paying everything they had to broach the tsunami wall into Calico. I never considered it; I was in the place I belonged. On the eve of the wave I sat at the edge of Skulk 1 with a crowd of other lost Souls, and together we waited for the wave to come wash us away.

  "Arctic?" a man to my right had asked. I could see he was a marine from the deadness in his eyes.

  I nodded. He pointed at himself. "Desert. Tar sands."

  That explained everything. He'd fought the new coalition nations in the sand, and I'd fought them in the ice. Perhaps we were on the same side, or opposite sides, but what did that matter to either of us then?

  "You're a Soul Jacker," he said, again reading it in me, as I read in him he was an arene engineer. Once he'd roved the Hollow Desert or the Darain sands in his massive suprarene tank, boring down to scavenge cities lost beneath the dunes.

  "I was."

  He pointed a thumb to the left. "The Jacker on Skulk 47 ran. His place'll be free, if you can use it."

  And that was all. There were criminals and killers all around us, god knew I was one, but we sat together and waited for the wave, gambling our lives on the weather. It was a high point and a turning point, the air thick with lost dreams and resignation. When the wave never came, it only seemed natural to move to the abandoned jack-site and start implanting memories. I've been there ever since.

  And somehow Mr. Ruin knew.

  I read on. Next come three paragraphs describing the shark arena; a potted history like something I could pull up on my node for any spot in Calico, though of course there are no records for places like this, out in the Skulks.

  It was owned by a man named McAvery, who started it with his bounty from the War as part of a dream to breed sharks to hunt porpoise. His dream failed. Instead he converted the podding bays into an arena and found a modest level of success starving his sharks into fighting.

  Somewhere in there he lost his way, and started to beat his wife and his daughters until they fled him. He became a rageful drunk, so deeply sickened by the deterioration of his dream that he grew cruel. He had loved the sharks, but now he tortured them every night for crowds he despised. Soon he made the fights more ferocious, longer and drawn-out, as though he was plumbing for the lowest ebb he could reach. The crowds correspondingly grew larger. What else was there to do?

  On the night of the wave he burned himself alive, taking half the Skulk down with him in an inferno which ironically left his most hated creation, the arena, completely untouched. At the bottom of the page there is another note in red pen.

  There is power here, Ritry, if you dare to take it.

  I set the papers down.

  What? I don't know what he's talking about, power. What power? At the same time though, there's a hint of something there. A feeling, maybe, hidden in the black spots of the fog of the night and lost within my drunken mind. A certain feeling from Mr. Ruin, maybe, in the moments when he seemed to disappear then reappear somewhere else.

  What happened? I've never seen anything like it. The uncertainty scares me and I begin to doubt my own memory, which makes the decision easy. I need to know for sure.

  I dress, slip the red folder into my jacket, and look over my sad apartment. This will be a ruin too someday, like McAvery's dream, crushed beneath the next great wave and driven to the bottom of the ocean. Divers will come to pillage my room for velour. Will Mr. Ruin scrawl an entry on a piece of paper about me and my forgotten life?

  Is there power here too?

  I step out the door.

  6. CONQUERING HERO

  Mid-morning, and the crulls are flocking through the blue tarp park as I stride by. The homeless marine is out and so is a mad old woman tossing seaweed crumbs. I watch them at their efforts as I circle the sagging lake of algae-scummed rainwater.

  The Skulk's main alley is quiet at this time. One of my favorite ladies waves at me from her window, two stories up in a wooden brothel, and I wave back. The jack-site is open. Carrolla is standing at reception poring over the reservation book, not looking hungover at all. He looks up when I come in and flashes me a grin.

  "Conquering hero," he says, "I heard about your exploits."

  I give a faint smile. I have no idea what he's talking about, but that's nothing new after a heavy night. "I saw yours firsthand," I counter, tapping into a lucid bubble of memory. "Did you take both of those girls home?"

  "I took them to the bar." He pauses. "And there were three."

  I can't
help but laugh. In all likelihood he spent hours explaining every detail of his 'bar' to them, which is currently a lean-to scaffold made of sea-bamboo, largely floorless and without a hint of alcohol in sight. I doubt any of the girls stayed long enough for romance to happen, though in the past some girls have found his passion for the project intoxicating. Perhaps they're imagining all the cash he'll one day make while slinging whiskey to freightermen.

  "I heard you fought off a gang off Armoricans," he says. "You OK?"

  I try for a smile. Is that who I fought? "Maybe. Aches and pains. I met a weird guy." I don't know how else to explain Mr. Ruin. "I don't remember much more, so I'm going to self-jack."

  Carrolla narrows his eyes. It's not normal, but I've done it once or twice before; times I thought I'd seen Ven or one of my old marines in the middle of a heavy bender. Of course I couldn't have, because they're all dead. But still.

  He just shrugs. "You're the boss."

  Five minutes later I'm lying down on the EMR input tray in the jack-room. Self-jacking is a lot easier than syncing up with another mind, but there are still risks. The Lag exists in my head just as it does anywhere else; go deep enough or stay long enough and it'll consume me just as surely as it consumes any other intruder.

  "Firing it up," Carrolla says, and the EMR starts to thump. I close my eyes as the electromagnetic soup builds, the tray shunts me in and I start the jack.

  The mind is like a planet, I've come to understand. Cut it in cross-section and you'll see concentric rings. The tough outer layers are like the planet's crust, followed by thousands of miles of dirt, rock and metal, which correspond to knowledge banks, muscular control, nerve centers and all the necessary systems that make a person work.

  Beyond that lies the Molten Core, the home of conscious thought, embodied for me as a deep ring of burning magma. This is where the Lag begins its guardianship, and the site where any engram or new memory must first be absorbed before entering long-term storage. It's where I've spent all of my professional life as a Soul Jacker, navigating those dangerous flows.