Soul Jacker

by Michael John Grist

  HABITATION

  CANTEEN

  NETTING

  CHAPEL

  On the first HABITATION deck landing three flights up I hear something. It sounds like a whisper, or a set of overlapping whispers, perhaps calling my name.

  I stop, heart pounding, and listen. Above the low breath of the wind, the drip of water percolating through the ancient decks and the creak of doors swaying on their hinges I can almost make out what the voices are saying.

  They are very far off, yet they're all around me still, like bubbles of memory bursting in the lava of a Molten Core. That's not possible though; I'm nowhere near an EMR.

  I walk through the stairwell door, beyond which stretches a long upside down hallway. The roof is lined with red and gold carpet, the walls are furnished with white picture rails and paintings of ships at sea, interspersed with dark wooden doors hanging from the ceiling, all marked with upside down numbers. The floor is gray metal lined with gray pipes and the nubs of old light fixtures.

  A wave of feeling rises and hits me then, like fountaining data from a living mind; some indistinct emotion I barely recognize but am powerless to repel, a kind of nostalgia for a past I never knew.

  The feeling grows and the voices get louder as I advance, swelling over me so I catch fragments of their conversation on the air: talking about how the dinner service went, about that sweet old couple at last night's Waltz for God, about whether Stacy was sleeping with Reg or Clancy. Interspersed are the sounds of voices rising in ecstasy, then in panic, then a deep low grinding as the ship is lifted in the air and flipped like a crull on a griddle.

  I shudder and slump against the corridor wall as my legs turn to jelly. What the hell? I feel like I'm high, but this is no fun at all. It's terrifying, like being trapped in a dying mind.

  "Dammit, shit," I mutter, trying to get control back. I close my eyes and focus. None of this is real. Did the Don inject me with some kind of hallucinogen?

  Gradually the voices quieten, down to a distant tickle in the back of my mind, and another thought strikes me. Mr. Ruin was talking about something like this; the power of memories left behind, and I recognize this distant buzz of foreign minds in the air, like the empty frame of a memory lost to the Lag.

  I rub my eyes and walk further down the corridor. "Hello," I call out, though I know no one's here. I throw open the first door and look in on a room filled with junk. There is a large rectangular window cut through the outer hull, illuminating a bed covered in tangled sheets, clothes on the floor, a wooden dresser tipped on its side and assorted toys everywhere.

  Whoever squatted here after the ship was wrecked never meant to leave, I realize. They had no time. I think back to the last tsunami warning, when half of the Skulks of proto-Calico were abandoned and empty, when I walked into the old jack-site and claimed it for my own. These squatters must have fled too, with no time to gather their possessions.

  I'm too hungry and hungover to think clearly. I head back to the stairwell and climb until I find the floor for CANTEEN. It's a large hall with open oblongs where windows once stood, covered now with frayed white sheets. There are long red benches and tangled blue chairs, a service counter and beyond that the outlines of kitchen equipment and cabinets still clinging to the ceiling.

  I kick a path through tumbled chairs and throw the first cabinet door open, to find it is stocked with cans of pineapple slices. In the next are meatballs, dry pasta and cans of stored vegetables. I grin. This must be the ship's larder, enough to feed the thousands in their ark until the floods dispelled and their God showed them the way forward.

  I snatch up a can of pineapples, scrabble for an opener and spoon the first ring into my mouth. Heaven, and my hangover melts away. Unfortunately the whispered voices do not.

  As it grows dark, and I work through three cans with different contents, their babbling gets louder, as though someone is steadily upping the dial on a speaker. I hold my hands over my ears but it does no good at all.

  They start to say my name. They say names I haven't spoken for a decade, as though reflecting my deepest secrets. I catch the name Ven on the air and try to snatch it back before it spreads any wider, but soon they're all saying it, in all their different voices.

  Ven.

  I've avoided thinking about her for more than ten years, not since I Lagged the weight of her away just to survive, leaving me hollow inside with only these frames and guilt for company. Ven who I lost in the Arctic, who died just like most of us died, in meaningless wars against people who looked just like us, who wanted just what we wanted, like soldiers trapped in filthy black trenches just holding the line. She is the ghost who haunts my life.

  Ven. Shit. The voices press her onto me and I punch the table, go back to the cupboard store and come back with a bottle of ancient godship vodka.

  Short of an EMR, it's the only way I know.

  ME

  I. VEN

  I open the giant book and begin reading to the chord.

  Three years in to my time as a Soul Jacker in the Arctic War, I met Ven. She was officer class and a cold cold bitch. Everybody hated her. Heclan my assistant in the jacks said, "I heard she eats ice and shits out Freon."

  I remembered it because later on when I told it to Ven in bed, she said, "I'll have him demoted two classes," which was funny in itself, then she said, "Freon is a gas, the idiot, it'd have to be frozen CO2," which was funnier still. "You can't eat a gas."

  Ven had some kind of social disability, perhaps one of the mild Autisms gene-coded to make her more palatable for service on a subglacic.

  Accordingly, she was a genius of administration and management, able to quantify the output of a threat-matrix faster than any unmodified conscript. Because of her, our subglacic evaded any number of dry-ice bombs left to percolate in the icepack, as well as several mindbombs dropped via depth charge from the Schooner-class warships overhead, until the last one took us all, which was my fault.

  She and I were unlikely to ever cross paths as anything more than resident Soul Jacker liaising with the captain, and then only after a successful raid on an enemy outpost or drilling rig, when the prisoners would be shuffled into the thumping pulse of my Electro-Magnetic Resonance machine and I would jack them for secrets.

  We met because of Heclan, and CSF vodka, and one of the days I nearly died.

  Heclan was my assistant and he made vodka fermented from artificial Cerebro-Spinal Fluid, in a complex filtration system he wangled together by buying parts from the marine twins Tigrates and Ferrily, who stole them from the outposts we raided.

  Before every raid Heclan would ruffle back his thick mop of brown hair and draw up an illicit brewer's shopping list filled with laboratory retorts, round-bottomed flasks, tiptration condensers, hose-tubing and reflux drums, then deliver it to the twins, who would try to hunt those items down and claim them as spoils of the War.

  CSF vodka tasted like piss with vinegar, but we toasted our own health with it, toasted the bounties tallying up in our accounts onshore, toasted the amounts of icepack we'd blown apart and the other idiots we'd blasted to make a few yards distance, then drank ourselves paralytic.

  I met Ven when Heclan screwed up by labeling a fermented bag of CSF in place of an unfermented one, then inadvertently loaded it into the coolant channels for my next jack.

  Both the target and I were three thousand sheets to the wind and piss-drunk beyond all conception within a matter of seconds. Our brains were bathed in raw alcohol to a level pretty much unheard of in history, so much that it flooded the three-layered brick shell of my sublavic ship to the tip of the conning tower, screwing me up beyond all recognition.

  Chaos was inescapable after that, having breached the blood-brain barrier. Even unconsciousness could not get it out. After a few moments of utter chaos as my mind ballooned and shrank, I died, as did the target.

  Naturally Ven was called. One glance at the readings told her what had happened, and she tossed both me and the target into
artificial wombs to keep our hearts going and replace our corrupt CSF, then with a hammer and surgical chisel cracked open our heads one after the other like eggshells, to let the poison out.

  Then she jacked into me. I can't quite imagine what that phantasmagoric freakscape must have been like, or quite why she decided to do it, but probably it had something to do with the threat matrix and needing whatever insights I'd already jacked from the target's Soul.

  She managed to tap my Solid Core for the seven tones of my Soul which she chimed throughout my brain. That kept my mental architecture alive long enough for the womb to bring me back around.

  I was drunk for days afterward. There was no one left to jack the target, and he died despite the artificial womb. Heclan explained the accident away on a batch of faulty CSF, which was just believable enough as it had happened other times too, and in private offered to quit the War and pay me all his onshore bounties as restitution.

  I told him I'd kill him if he ever did it again. He nodded his brown bob solemnly and we toasted the pact with a fresh batch of foul liquor. They were different times, in the thick of the War. Death was always a bad ice floe away.

  Then Ven came.

  I thought it must be for the information I'd gleaned, but it turned out to be the opposite. She was there about information she'd gleaned in me, and how it had disturbed her. She was not a Jacker in any more than certification, as all captains were then required to be, and she wasn't used to the influx of another person's mind.

  She suggested we have sex, and I consented.

  Lying in each others' arms afterward, after the rhythmic pulsations were done and all our hollering was finished, she wept, which perhaps she hadn't done ever in her life. It was my gift to her, perhaps, my broken Soul holding up a mirror to hers.

  The sex became regular. I came to see the beauty in her, despite her fierce and analytical front. She was never soft in front of me, never self-piteous, but always raw. She lit up my emotions like a blowtorch, kept me guessing at every step. I never knew if she would kick like a wild horse or wrap me up in hot passion like a choking squid. She was as irrepressible as a force of nature.

  Our affair was wild, heady and it changed us both. While she never grew soft, she softened. Humor crept into her dealings with the crew, while a little of her fierce intellect infected me. Our mutual passion endured while a solid core of loyalty, faith and even love crept up between us.

  "You're the ice king now," Heclan said. "Do you shit Freon too?"

  "It should be frozen CO2," I corrected him.

  Tigrates and Ferrily thought it was great, and constantly teased me about what she'd do to me once we broke up. Perhaps I'd be left as a target after the next raid, or abandoned floating on a tiny raft of pack ice, drifting away across the Arctic.

  We didn't break up. After six months we began to talk about a future away from the ice, making a home and having dozens of children and to hell with the population controls, behind a tsunami wall on one of the high latitude mountains of Calico.

  "You bear one, then I'll bear one, then one for the artificial womb," she said, pointing between us. Even then it was a possibility for a man to bear a child.

  "We'll name them after our missions," she said.

  "What are our mission names?" I asked, because I never knew, I was always too deep down in the ship and drunk to care.

  She reeled off the lists from memory, each named after a population center closest to the infraction zone:

  Yakut Even

  Kutchin Hare

  Yukagahir

  Naskapi

  Iquliat

  Chukchi Koryak

  Athabascan

  Places where ancient Inuit peoples once lived, dark-skinned snow-dwellers that we turfed out like we turfed out everyone, as the habitable belt of our world shifted north and the oceans rose.

  We talked about morality and death, about the War and the point of it all. I explained how it always seemed that all our efforts merely flexed at the territory lines, pushing them out and pulling them in like the tide.

  "We never gain," I said. "Marines just die and it's pointless."

  "Maybe death is the point," Ven answered. "There are too many people on this planet."

  She knew all the details of deaths and square acreage, had figures at the ready, and I think they helped convince her that the War was a good thing. Besides, if we didn't fight then one of the other coalitions would win, and that would lead to an unacceptable monopoly of power and wealth. In that sense, we weren't fighting for victory, but for a stabilized détente amongst a reduced number of competitors.

  I came to understand that from her, as she came to understand from me that détente was a hard proposition to ask people to die for. We both changed, molding to fit in each other's worlds, to both of our benefits. The softness I nurtured in her made her a better, more empathetic captain. The cool outlook she brought to me made me a better, more analytical jacker.

  In the end, I think it was my softness that led her to get us all killed, and her hardness that kept me alive while everyone else died.

  The choice was to bomb a civilian ship skirting the old Alaskan perimeter. Every sign it gave showed its age and the presence of refugees aboard. It was not even over the boundary line, merely on the edge.

  The old Ven would have sunk it without a second thought, and scavenged amongst its survivors for some targets to jack for intel. The new Ven hesitated and gave the ship time to turn around, perhaps thinking of the children we had promised each other.

  It was enough.

  They dropped a mindbomb on us, an Electro-Magnetic Pulse for the nervous system. They were banned weapons even then, similar in scope to the biological weapons of the past that killed everything organic but left the enemy's infrastructure in place, ripe for annexation.

  The mindbomb disrupted electrical and magnetic fields at a level so minute it would not cause a subglacic's engines or systems to falter. Perhaps a few digital clocks in the crew bedrooms would overload and fuse. Along with them, every bit of human matter controlled by electrical impulse was overloaded at once.

  Grand mal seizures killed every member of the crew. Their brains stopped functioning, their hearts stopped pumping, their limbs stopped holding them up and their breath halted as they were simply switched off.

  That is how Ven and all my friends died.

  I alone survived, caught in the middle of an EMR cycle. Along with my jack target, I was protected by the EMR's electromagnetic field, which thumped on as Heclan died at the controls, as Tigrates and Ferrily died, as everyone died.

  I was left trapped, with no one to switch off the machine and let me out, but thanks to Ven's analytical influence I didn't panic. I hid from the Lag within my target's mind, tossing what memories of hers I could to buy time, until there were none left. Then I fled back to my own Molten Core, and fed the Lag all the non-essential things I could afford to lose, the weight and frames both in the end, until I had to make real choices about what I most needed to keep.

  I held onto the memory of Ven and my friends, but perhaps I had other friends that I gave up. I will never know, because now they're gone. I gave up all the fringe parts of my childhood, keeping in place only the worst of it and the best of it, to prevent permanent change to my Soul. I gave up my knowledge of everything; how to walk and breath and run and talk. I fed off pieces of myself to the Lag like a cannibal dressing his own limbs for dinner, all the while calling through the EMR links for Heclan to let me out.

  The enemy let me out two days later.

  Marines switched off the EMR and finally I surfaced, to their disbelief. No one had lived that long in the middle of a Soul jack. They kept me alive in a womb as a scientific miracle, perhaps sustained due to the odd architecture of my seven-toned mind.

  They studied me and jacked me, hunting for the reason I had survived for so long. Even after the War came to its anticlimactic end, researchers continued to come to my recovery pod, begging me to make a ru
n on the Solid Core and open the door to the hidden knowledge within. If anyone could do it, they felt, it would be me.

  But I had no interest in that. I had nothing left, having cored myself of who I was, leaving only a skeleton for ragged clumps of meat to hang upon. I had a heart filled with Ven, and some organs that lived for Heclan, Ferrily and Tigrates, and that was all.

  But they were all dead.

  I was a freak, worse than the jackers who'd Lagged themselves to death in the Solid Core, because I had come back, and was massively diminished. Once I finally learned how to speak and to move again I fled and kept running until I hit the neon Skulks of proto-Calico, where I drank and whored my onshore bounties away in stupor and flesh until the tsunami wave was forecast to come, promising to bring its final, lasting erasure.

  I stop reading, and a long silence fills the aftermath. There are tears in Ray's eyes. He reaches out to Far and takes the boy in his arms. I look to Doe, blurry through the tears in my own eyes.

  I remember Ritry Goligh, now. I wrap my arms around Doe, working them underneath the shoulder-cannon and accelerator. Perhaps she even cries too. I remember who Ven is, and what she means. I feel again the surging righteousness of this mission we are on, to take back all these things that have been stolen from us.