Soul Jacker

by Michael John Grist

  Nestled within the center of the Molten Core lies the Solid Core, a hard, mysterious dot in the middle of the mind. Some researchers say it's the seat of the soul, but for most it's just a myth. To even get near it requires intimate knowledge of every inch of the Molten Core. The Lag is stronger there, and can eat a Soul Jacker in a single gulp.

  I know my own mind better than any. I've jacked deeper and longer than anybody else alive, close enough to glimpse the Solid Core through the inner surface of the magma, but I've never gone inside. Nobody ever has, though many have Lagged themselves trying. It's the brain's final mystery, and within it may lie the key to all divinity, or the seed of sentience, or perhaps nothing at all, merely a fixed point about which all else revolves.

  I don't need to go that deep to recover last night. I jack in and find the memory captured as a pattern of electrical pulses stored across my visual and auditory centers. It's grimy, and I isolate it for cleaning with a blast from the sublavic ship's sonic cannons, then I set my team of seven working to pick out its contours, like archaeologists salvaging an ancient piece of pottery from the earth.

  In the memory, I see and hear Mr. Ruin with crystal clarity. Sitting in the darkness of McAvery's arena, resting his feet on Don Zachary's dead son dressed in Napoleon's clothes, I hear again what he has to say: insults, challenges, strange ideas. He suggests he was responsible for Mei-An and boasts of knowing me in ways that aren't possible; he hopes I'll try to kill him and that somehow we'll still be friends; then he does something I've never seen before, outside of an EMR.

  He Lags me.

  Within the magma of my own Molten Core I watch the memory play through again. In the moment I remember it felt like disappearing; a blip where he was one moment here, the next moment there, but now I see it is not that.

  It was an actual Lag of my memory. I can feel it still, as I inhabit again my own skin for those seconds in the lead up, charging with my spiked node out. The electromagnetic soup rises up around him in a split second, as if generated by an invisible Electro-Magnetic Resonance machine, then the memory just snips. Content and frame both are gone, leaving an uneven join where the memory halves have been slotted together again.

  I stare at the memory of his face, standing at the top of the stairs and haloed by the pink dawn beyond. It isn't possible. Souls can't be Jacked outside of an EMR. But then what…

  I run it again. I lean in and really listen to the changes as he works them. Something in the air around him is responding. In moments only the electromagnetic medium appears, but it doesn't come from him. I can be certain of that, because I can feel him coaxing it out of thin air.

  It is impossible.

  I replay it and delve closer, but there is nothing to see except the trimmed edges. Seconds lost, perhaps. Minutes, maybe, but no way to know. I watch in wonder at this phenomenal magic trick. I watch five times more, then lock the cleaned memory back in place and give the signal for the sublavic to surface.

  I need to think, and the Lag is already circling tight. The trim tanks release their pressurized ballast gas and the ship rises up through the molten lava of consciousness, until at the edge we encounter a block. This is not uncommon, as random shiftings of the mind can shift the boundaries around, cutting off an entry path. I reverse course and try for another exit, one through the nerves for my left hand, but find a block there too.

  Strange. I try another, out through a memory of Mei-An, but that is blocked too. Another and another still are blocked, and I begin to worry. I've been trapped like this before and it almost killed me. The Lag is close on my trail.

  "Carrolla," I shout inside my sublavic, with all the crew calling at once. "Carrolla!"

  Once when jacking the Soul of an enemy marine in the Arctic, searching for secrets on resources and their deployment of force, I got trapped in his mind when our ship was attacked and my EMR operator was killed. I survived for half a day inside the man's dying mind before someone shut the EMR down.

  The man was dead, because I gave up everything he had to the Lag. I gave up half of myself too, everything I ever knew, just to stay alive. I was a zombie for months afterward, re-learning how to do the simplest of motor actions; elementary skills I'd sacrificed to save the core frame of my mind, while adjusting to the gaping wounds in my memory.

  The Lag remembers this, too. It has a taste for me already, and already I feel it rooting behind my sublavic, teeth snapping at the fins. I spin on, racing around the Molten Core like a ricocheting bullet, looking for the way out, while members of the crew begin preparing a walk through Carrolla's half-built bar as the first sacrificial offering.

  'Carrolla!' I shout through the link. 'Carrolla!'

  Finally the outer surface yields and I burst through. I jerk onto my elbows with a gasp inside the EMR machine as its thumping sound cycles down. I see a restraining hand on my chest, but it's not Carrolla's. I blink, then the hand drags me down the input tray and out of the machine, to look up into the blunt-nosed face of Don Zachary himself.

  7. FINGERS

  He's an ugly old man with cataract-rheumy eyes and a craggy red alcoholic's nose. As ever, he wears an outfit that looks like pajamas, bright red and purple like he's just gotten out of bed. He's as vicious as anyone I ever met in the Arctic, and last night I found his dead son.

  "Where is he?" he asks.

  I blink and push against the stubby hand holding me down. It relents, letting me sit up, but there is nowhere to go. There are three of them in the room, big guys I've seen escorting the Don around before. At the operator's panel is Carrolla, his face turned white with a bloody clump of tissues held to his hand.

  Oh no. He lifts the tissue away to reveal his index finger is missing. It has been replaced by a long rusty nail, driven into the wound.

  Holy shit. It's horrific and comical at the same time, like he's turned part mechanical scarecrow. I feel my gorge rise. The poor bastard is so pale.

  "Sorry, Rit," he says weakly. I don't know how he's even conscious. "They wouldn't let me bring you up."

  I turn back to the Don. All the stories are true; I never doubted that. Now I have to play this right if either of us is going to survive. Whimpering and begging won't mean a thing to him. A finger swapped for a nail and some Lag-time are really just his way of saying hello.

  "Don Zachary," I say, forcing a smile. "What a pleasure. Can I offer you a cup of tea?"

  He doesn't smile. In the past, on the few occasions he's come by to collect his tithe in person, he's seemed amused by my cheeky irreverence, but plainly not now. I dump it.

  "Where is he?" the Don repeats, holding up what can only be Carrolla's finger. He wags it at me. "Tell me what you know or your boy'll not get this back. I might even take a few more."

  I try to fake it. I'm a good liar. "Where's who? I don't know who you're talking about."

  The Don looks at me a long moment, then sets the bloody finger down by my side. "My son. He's been here for collections before, as ugly as me but fat too. You know him."

  The memories are all there now, freshly cleaned. Don Zachary's son is as clear as ever in my mind, dressed in death as Napoleon Bonaparte.

  "I haven't seen him. I don't know."

  The Don frowns, though there's a hint of a smile about it, as though this is something he enjoys. "I know you jacked one of his girlfriends last night. Mei-An? You like to play the white knight, I see that, to rescue the maiden fair? You screwed her, OK, I could even forgive that, but now both her and my boy are gone and that requires an answer. Where is he?"

  Another piece clicks into place, about Mei-An and her DZ tattoo, explaining why a Calico Reach girl would come here of all places for a Soul-jack. There were parts of herself she kept hidden, and I didn't pry. This was the reason.

  My thoughts swirl like blood down the drain. Mr. Ruin's set me up. Mei-An, the son, the Don. I'm in his game now.

  I look up at the Don, unable to get the disbelief out of my eyes. The Don nods sagely, seeing only what he wants
. "Take another finger," he says.

  After the screaming, Carrolla stares dumbfounded at the two nails in his hand. They shift faintly as he works his remaining fingers. That's when he vomits, but they don't let him leave. The smell makes me sick, too, with the hangover still sweating off and only stale liquor and seaweed bread in my gut.

  "Once more with feeling," says the Don calmly, belying the calm, procedural violence we've all just witnessed. "You've got to understand I'll do anything to get my son back. He's a fat shit who sticks his dick where it isn't welcome, I'll admit that, but he's my son. There's such a thing as respect. What did you do?"

  "I didn't do anything. I swear it."

  Don Zachary considers. "Would it help if we took your fingers instead of his? Something else perhaps?" He waggles his pinkie.

  "God, no," I whisper, trying to calculate how much to act and how much to show. "I didn't do anything. The girl came for a Soul jack, you're right, and sex is part of the contract, but that's it. I didn't know she was your son's. I went out drinking afterward."

  He frowns. "You're a Soul Jacker and you didn't know? And seems you got yourself beaten up pretty bad?"

  I look down at the bruises on my arms. I know my face must be puffy and dark around the eyes. This is condemnation. "It was freighters, asshole Armoricans in some end-Skulk bar."

  Zachary frowns. "Not a man fighting for his life?"

  "Why would I want to kill your son?"

  The Don shrugs. "You fell in love with his little bitch, maybe? What's her name?" He turns to one of his hulking men, who whispers in his ear. "Mei-An, that's it. I heard about her climbing over the tsunami wall with a head full of new knowledge. You were helping her escape, yes, a lovers' pact, but you couldn't leave without paying my son back, a little off-book justice? Will we ever find his body? Did you burn him or sink him?"

  "I wouldn't be such an idiot. I didn't even touch him."

  The Don surveys me with a new interest. "Really? Now, you had me until that. But that was a very specific lie, wasn't it? Now I'm interested."

  One of his men hands him a bat, and without any warning he slams it into my stomach. I barely have time to tense before it lands and it drives all the air out of my lungs. I gag on my own spit, cough and try to curl up over the pain but they won't let me. It hurts so bad I can't think.

  "I'm not playing around here, son," says the Don, toying with the bat. "Tell me everything you know, or you and your boyfriend are going to be stroking each others' dicks with nails for the rest of your short, miserable lives. Now."

  I concede this has gotten beyond my ability to control. I tell him everything that I know; about Mei-An, his son dressed as Napoleon, the shark-fighting arena and Mr. Ruin.

  8. SKULK 53

  They let Carrolla pick up his fingers, drop them in an icebox and flit off for the nearest hospital. There are several on the neighboring Skulks. He'll have no problem getting credit, because they'll know I'm good for it. Whether the Don's men will actually let him get any further than the front door and out of my sight though, I do not know.

  Me they hold on to. Out of the jack-site, we turn left down the sad alley to the grimy plastic-mat jetty. Shored off the edge is a gleaming white speedboat.

  "I believe you," the Don says, standing beside the speedboat. He looks strange in his pajamas, here on the battered Skulk's fringe. "I could get some other Calico jacker in here to jack you for confirmation, but then you know that don't you? If we don't find what you've promised, I expect I will. Now, after you."

  His thugs in dark suits manhandle me onto the boat. Perhaps I could drop one of them, if I had my spiked node. Maybe I could handle all three if I was in peak condition, but I'm pretty far from that and they know it. I'm hungover and in shock, can hardly get my wind back after that single blow to the stomach, and they have guns.

  "Mr. Ruin," says Don Zachary, reclining in a leather-padded chair facing the speedboat's nose, while I hunch unceremoniously on a storage box facing the engine. "It's too strange to make up."

  He leafs through Mr. Ruin's folder as his bodyguards unmoor the boat, holding up a hand to stop them from starting the engine. An interesting part, I guess. We all wait, cramped and uncomfortable in the boat, until he looks up at me with a strange light in his eyes.

  "I think we're doing you a favor here, son. Looks like this guy has a major hard-on for you. You'd have been wearing your kidneys like bloody pompoms in a couple of days, if not for us."

  I nod. I'm not about to argue with anything he says, now.

  "And now he's gonna die, hard. All things come, you know."

  He gives the signal and the speedboat engine roars to life, black scum fountaining up from the propeller as we lurch forward. I barely just catch my balance on the speedboat's side.

  The Don is impassive, studying the folder as the boat races into a choppy glide over the water.

  "I am sorry about your son," I say.

  He waves a hand. "Don't be. I have others."

  Infamously, he does. It's one reason I didn't recognize the man posed as Napoleon earlier: the Don is rumored to have over one hundred children. To my knowledge they are all exactly as ugly as their father.

  "I don't know why this Ruin got you tangled up in this," I go on, "or why I'm involved either."

  "He's mad," says the Don disinterestedly.

  The boat whips over the waves with a thumping regularity. The spray of Skulks grows clearer as we get some distance, like dark bacterial growth clinging to the Calico tsunami wall. At last count I think there were ninety Skulk barges in proto-Calico, but that number is constantly in flux. There's always one foundering, its flotation barrels failing, with one going up in flames and another being added. There are always boats getting rigged into the mix as well, in the gaps between the Skulks: yachts, coracles, catamarans, schooners, deck-frigates, in one place I believe there's an old Ananzi-Rusk subglacic. Some charge tolls as new bridges while others offering some variation of bars, barrios and brothels.

  It makes the Skulks a feverish, ever-shifting place: a proto-city for proto-people all living in the shadow of the next global tsunami.

  The Don continues leafing through the folder. "Did you know that the godship fleet wrecked on hidden reefs somewhere near here?" He doesn't look up. "I thought they were totally destroyed."

  "I didn't know," I say, "I hadn't read that far."

  "Might be good plunder there. I'll send a crew."

  I look out to sea. In that direction there is only the gray of waves, spiked in places by a few hydrate mines like spinning tops on the horizon. Here and there I catch the green of a kelp farm. Go the distance a few hundred miles after that and you'll be at the Arctic Pole, where once there was ice.

  I watch the Don, intent on his reading. There is no hint in his wrinkled old eyes of whether I'm to die today or not. I consider throwing myself off the boat, but it would do no good. They'd only swing around and pick me up again, maybe chop off a few of my fingers and drive in nails.

  Or something worse.

  Soon the charred exterior dock of Skulk 53 rushes by on our left. In some places the framework is gone entirely, in others the bones of it still remain, splintered with blackened metal girders. The speedboat pulls up to the flagging dock. I remember it, half-sunken and lined with a few tilting bars. From this angle the shark arena looks like a bloated mushroom, its once brown exterior faded with the rain to a sleety gray. It's a wonder it never burned along with the rest of this doomed Skulk.

  The engine kicks out and a silence falls over the dead Skulk and us. Perhaps respectful of this, the Don's thugs get out wordlessly to tether the boat, and the Don follows. Bar the ceaseless lapping of waves, it is silent. There is nothing left on this abandoned Skulk but the mad shark-master's creation and us.

  "Come on," says the Don. "Nothing to be afraid of, if it's what you said."

  I refrain from asking for that in writing. Instead I get out of the boat and start along the half-sunk jetty ahead of him, lead
ing the way.

  "It's intriguing stuff, all this about the power of memory," says the Don behind me, holding up the sheaf of papers as we shuffle carefully along. "Do you credit it at all?"

  I wonder if this is a chance to prove myself useful. Perhaps it is a tactic to keep me talking so I cannot plan an escape. To either end it behooves me to talk, because I can plan at the same time.

  "I may," I say. "It chimes with some religious theories, that consciousness is more of a great flame than a million tiny little flames, and we're all just parts of the whole, experiencing itself."

  The Don grunts, and we turn off the jetty and start down the wooden side of the shark arena. "I've heard of that. Go on."

  I think on it some more, the ideas building latently since I realized Mr. Ruin ran a Lag on me without an EMR. "Well, those theories suggest there are actually invisible bonds between all of us. More than bonds really, because we're all actually pieces of the same thing, like radios tuning in on a specific frequency to this grand consciousness bandwidth."

  Don Zachary laughs. "I ain't no radio, son."

  I ignore him. "Add to that, some people think that at the core of the brain, where no Soul Jacker has ever successfully jacked before, there's a kind of bridge that can reach across to every other mind, like a back door through the bandwidth. Some say there's enormous power there, if we could just reach it."

  The Don grunts again, and I don't say any more. We arrive at the ladder leading up to the shark arena. One of the Don's men shoulders in front of me and starts up, leaving me with the Don and the other two. Another of them pulls his gun and points it at my head.

  "Precautions," the Don says.

  The guy above reaches the top and his footsteps thump over the wood. There's tense silence for a few minutes, then he's back leaning over the edge.