I don't say anything. I feel the rough timber boards beneath my knees. A little further only.
"You'll never have them again," I say.
His grin widens. "A family, perhaps. And how will you stop me? I'll say it again, I'm impressed, but to what end? You've bought a few hours for yourself. Now it's really about professional respect. You don't make a snake cough up its dinner then expect it to be friendly. You don't steal flies from the web and expect forgiveness."
"I thought you were a shark."
He chuckles. "You'll beg again, don't worry. I know how to make it happen." He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a glistening silver and glass cylinder. It is a Soul Jacker's syringe with a wickedly long needle, long enough to press through the eye socket and directly into the brain. Even in the dim light I can see the heavy silver liquid in the chamber, as certain as a bullet.
It is liquid memory, but a dose a thousand times larger than I've ever dealt. It could be language, skill, memory; it doesn't matter anymore since the contents must have been mixing for hours. It is a cocktail that will flood my mind in an instant, surging past the scarification maze around my Solid Core to sweep my Soul away like a tsunami.
I shuffle backward until I'm up against the rough plaster wall, sweating cold and hard. I hadn't expected this, and he luxuriates in it. "Oh, Ritry," he says. "You were never really ready for me. What shark retreats? They would stop breathing and die. For those like you and me, there is only forward." He takes the next step closer, and I brace myself into a small gap in the tower's metal scaffold.
He holds the syringe out to the side so it catches the last of the dying light. "This is from your old office, by the way. I had to raid all the new Jacker's supplies to get enough. Didn't you say this to me, that you'd drown me in my own mind?" He cocks his head thoughtfully. "I don't think it will be fast. It certainly won't be pleasant, because you'll still be in there, won't you? How far can you retreat before the rising waters get you? You'll have to give up yourself one piece at a time, just like you did in the War, until it's all gone. Can you imagine what that would be like? You'll do it yourself, Ritry, and I will sit here and watch."
The old arrogance is back. He takes the final step, then squats on his haunches to better see me.
"Unless."
He squeezes the syringe, so a tiny drip of thick silver liquid twinkles at the tip. His voice drops low and rough. "Unless you teach me how to jack the bridge. That would be worth something. A change of execution, maybe a little mercy, perhaps even a partnership of some kind, in time, if you're a good boy and know your place. Can you imagine the possibilities, Ritry?" He looks at me with the wonder back in his eyes. "I could Lag them all at once; I would never go hungry again. I would be King and you will be my jester, trusted member of my court. Come, Ritry, it's far more than Napoleon got."
He stares at me and I stare back. I can feel how eager he is now, how hungry, and I know that it will never end. Like a shark he will continue until everything is under his thumb, until everyone is reduced to begging on their knees. I would rather feed myself to the Lag than leave him alive in this world.
"Never," I say."
"Very well," he says, then lunges forth with both the syringe and his mind at the same time.
It is almost enough. His mind freezes me, the syringe flashes toward my eye, but there's enough of Far in me left to do what I have to.
I yank a lever in the scaffold and something gives.
The syringe bursts through the corner of my eye and penetrates down along the optic nerve. I feel Ruin's wild abandon as he starts to depress the punger, pumping millions of points of data into my mind.
Then the tower collapses.
It comes with a roar as so much brick and wood comes loose from its moorings. The rails below us tremble as the walls, stairs, floors and ceiling of my scar-tissue tower come crashing down like a tsunami wave, crushing Mr. Ruin and hammering off my protective metal cage at the edge like the Lag pounding at the door.
Control of my body returns as Mr. Ruin jerks into unconsciousness, buried beneath a heap of masonry, and I pluck at the syringe in my eye. It slides out with a kissing sound and I blink out the silvery excess, then close my eyes to fend off the first tsunami of information.
As the last chunks of my tower patter off the rubble pile I jack into the outer depths of my own Molten Core and summon the Lag. It is my beast now, a dog I can direct at will, and I set it upon the surging flood of data threatening to extinguish my Soul. It opens its many mouths to eat.
Hours pass while the world turns with me and Mr. Ruin at the center. The Lag works quickly and efficiently and I feed it like a trusted pet, leashed and collared. Every bit of nonsense knowledge cut away makes me stronger as the bonds break and convert to energy.
At the same time Mr. Ruin is dying. He can barely breathe and his blood is leaking out. He reaches out to me through the rubble and dust, but I pat his hand away. He reaches out with his mind but his strength is gone.
Soon the few drops of silver liquid he squeezed into me have been digested. I open my eyes in the darkness, to find his face lit by a few faint cracks of moonlight shining in through chinks in the rubble.
"A trap," he whispers.
He is staring at me with dark blood on his lips, caked with dust and froth. He tries to laugh and I feel his pain.
"Spider," he croaks. "Not shark. You did well, Ritry. I'm proud of you."
I stare at him through the dust, and scoop up the syringe. "You don't get to talk to me anymore," I say. "You don't get to say anything."
He sees the syringe and his eyes go wide. Fear blooms in him, and his body relinquishes control of his bladder, dripping piss down through the roller coaster timbers.
"You can't have them," he whispers in a hoarse cry, "they're mine!"
He's too weak to resist. He goes cold with rage and terror as I press the needle into his eye socket, then starts to laugh as I depress the plunger.
"You think you're free?" he whispers feverishly. "You think they didn't feel it too, when you broke through the bridge? They all know you now, Ritry!"
I lean closer, one hand on his hot and dusty head and one holding the syringe, and look into his gray predator eye.
"You don't know me at all," I say, and drive the plunger home. A million billion points of data swarm into his mind. His dark eyes widen and he mouths meaningless sounds as his brain is flushed clean.
CODA
I ride the Wall line back to the city. It's nearly dawn, and in the still dark glass of the train window I see myself reflected.
Ritry Goligh. This is who I am. A man made of a seven-toned chord. An Arctic marine, a Soul Jacker to the Skulks and to Calico, now husband, father and survivor.
I brush the dust on my suit away. I pull out the node from Mei-An and key in a number I memorized long ago. It rings and I feel them out there, my family, still trapped in the old nightmare and waiting for me to come home.
They've been waiting for such a long time.
Now I'm coming. The node rings and I reach out to their bonds through the air. The node rings, and the first glimmer of the morning sun rises up over the tsunami wall, eclipsing my reflection and the tears in my eyes with glowing orange light.
I'm finally going home.
EXTRAS
Thank you for reading Soul Jacker! Want more?
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4. There's my Author's Note too, with a little behind the scenes info on how I wrote the book.
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5. Finally, not an extra but a small ask – if you could review this book on the shop site where you bought it, that would be deeply appreciated. Reviews mean a lot to me and I read and take on board every one.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
Soul Jacker was one of the first books I wrote, after The Saint's Rise. It began life titled Mr. Ruins and was deeply inspired by my life in Japan. Ritry is a kind of glorified teacher, just as I was a teacher in Tokyo. He explored ruins and found a new strength within them, much as I did.
The rest comes from the imagination. From the aether, if you will - snatched down off the bonds. I wrote it a year before I left Japan to come live in London, UK, in 2014. I poured everything I had into it, using all my knowledge from my degree in Psychology, harnessing the complex ideas and puzzlebox narrative style I'd loved in movies like The Matrix and Inception.
I published it with great excitement, but it didn't catch on. In later years I learned some of the reasons: maybe the cover was wrong, the genre was wrong, the text itself was difficult. I had new covers made. I worked on the text to make it less dense.
Now I've gone the whole way with a major rewrite. The genre is plainly cyberpunk, and this is reflected in the new title and cover. The text and ideas are as clear and exciting as I know how to make them. The puzzlebox narrative structure of interweaving chapters remains, but it conjoins in a much smoother way than before. What we have here is Ritry and the chord's story; as clear and clean as it has ever been. It's taken five years but I think I'm there. I hope you've enjoyed it.
If you have, please consider reviewing it on your favored shop site - reviews are huge for me, not only in guiding how I write but also in helping other readers make their reading decisions. Links to do this are on the next page. You can also get a free copy of The Last by joining my newsletter, and if you swipe a little further you can read a glossary of all terms in the book.
In acknowledgement, I want to thank Rob Nugen for offering great suggestions, my Dad for encouragement, Matt Finn and many others for sharing great insights on how to streamline and improve the book, and my wife Suyoung for never failing to believe that this is the book they're going to make into a movie. Thanks for the faith, honey!
Also thanks to all the ruins I went to myself, in my days as a ruins explorer in Japan. They can't read this of course but I'm pushing my appreciation out over the bonds, so perhaps they'll get the message.
- Michael John Grist
BOOK 2 - SOUL BREAKER (EXCERPT)
1. BOOM
The explosion doesn't make a sound but it blows all my thoughts to shreds.
The train runs high and fast along the Calico tsunami wall. A commuter train late in the afternoon, I suppose, filled with a few fellow commuters. Am I commuter here, I wonder? The thought slips easily away. Opposite me sits a young man in the jumpsuit of a candy factory worker, embroidered with wrapped pieces of candy. His eyes are unusually wide, like he wants to tell me something.
I look past him and out of the glass, to the rippling gray of the Arctic Ocean where distant hydrate mines squat on the horizon; each a rusted red blot on the endless waters like swelling beads of blood.
All this used to be ice, I think sadly, before the resource War upended the world. Now it's a tomb for all our dead.
The pale disc of the sun passes behind a thunderhead and the window darkens, briefly reflecting my own face back at me. Ritry Goligh. I look so weary, written with the worry lines of an older man. My jacket is spattered with dust and what might be blood. Silvery flecks cling in my hair, and that confuses me.
Why? It's hard to think. I look up at the candy worker again and try to frame a question, maybe where am I going, but a noise interrupts me.
I look down to see a node ringing in my hand.
My hand is coated with dust and blood too. Several of the fingers are crooked with old breaks, and I don't remember why. A name flashes on the node's screen but my eyes are too bleary to read. I tap the screen and the node answers with a woman's voice.
"Ritry, is that you?" she says. "Are you coming home?"
Her voice is familiar. I know this woman, but it's hard to remember. She sounds worried, and I want to tell her everything will be all right, but before I can do that another silent BOOM rings out and I'm back where I started.
What?
The gray Artic Ocean stretches endlessly ahead. My aging face reflects in the glass like a ghost. I think about battles beneath the ice until the young man sitting opposite me, dressed in a candy factory worker's blue jumpsuit, slumps to the floor. Blood starts pouring from his nose and he jerks on the beige vinyl flooring, smearing it like thin jam on warm toast.
It's horrifying. I want to get up and help him, but for some reason I don't move. It takes all my effort to look along the length of the train, where the aisles are now littered with twitching commuter bodies, like worms wriggling in a hard rain. I should be shocked but I feel numb. That's how these things work, I think. On some intellectual level I begin to understand, because I've seen this kind of thing before.
It's a mindbomb.
Mindbombs kill. Every neuro-electric impulse in the brain overloads at once, like an Electro-Magnetic Pulse turned to the frequencies of the brain. They were outlawed in the waning days of the Arctic War, proving far too effective with every enemy soldier and civilian switched off at a stroke, leaving all their military and drilling infrastructure intact.
"Elba," I mutter under my breath, a word that seems important though I don't remember why. Images flash back to me and I strain toward them, of a mission through organic tunnels with my chord, escaping the Lag and seeking something, but-
BOOM
The next bomb drops and more bodies fall to the floor, but I have a little momentum now.
"Elba," I say again and rise to my feet, getting some control of my thoughts. I remember Mr. Ruin and the threat he made to me at the end, dying atop the Candyland roller coaster.
They're coming for me already.
I feel the next bomb falling; its signature Electro-Magnetic Resonance whining in like a mosquito, and I make the ruthless decision. The young man at my feet is dying, his Soul already liquefied under the onslaught, but perhaps he can save me. I reach into his mind and Lag his suffering away.
The power of his broken bonds rushes into me like shock-jacks in the Molten Core, and I throw the weight of it above me like a lava shield, taking the brunt of the next mindbomb burst.
BOOM
A tsunami of meaningless data floods the train. The anesthetic backwash of it rinses over my shield like spray off a broken wave, and then I see them: three black-clad figures padding down the adjoining carriage like marines in a sieged hydrate mine, carrying adapted Kaos rifles with large-gauge barrels, probably tranquilizer rounds. On their heads are tight Heads-Up-Display helmets, and I can feel the tinny thump thump of miniature Electro-Magnetic Resonators inside pulsing away, beating into time with the clacking of the train wheels over metal rails below. They're protected; each brain locked in a shielding Electro-Magnetic Resonance cage. The mindbombs can't touch them.
They see me and raise their rifle barrels.
I reach out and Lag the suffering of the whole damn train. The writhing of so many bodies stills as their dying strength floods into me; a hundred bonds snipped off at the root. I spin that strength and hurl it right at the three marines.
The blow doesn't make a dent. Protected by their EMR HUDs they don't miss a step. I can scarcely see even the burning outer rings of their Molten Cores.
Their rifles discharge. The fir
st impact takes me high in the left shoulder and spins me back into my seat. For a second I sit there dazed, looking at the black metal dart as it pumps toxin into me. Tranquilizer rounds. I pluck it out but the chemicals are already in my body. They're coming. I reach out but there are no bonds left to Lag; everyone here is dead.
Their footsteps thump closer and the whine of their HUDs crescendos. I have to do something but I don't know what.
thump thump
thump thump
Then they're right here, three figures standing in front of me with rifle barrels in my face and I'm sinking already, flailing desperately as another dart hits my sternum, another hits my stomach and my eyes close.
Then I grasp something; not a Soul on the train but one that lies far off, bound only by the tenuous link of my node. A woman's panicked voice asking if I'm OK, and I remember who she is and cling to her with everything I've got.
Loralena. Art and Mem our children. They've been waiting for me to come home for so long, and I don't need to Lag that love at all; it's so strong I can surf it like a tsunami. I open the floodgates and suck the love down.
One of the three figures prods my face with a rifle barrel. They think I'm out cold, and they should be right. Any normal human would long be unconscious. They probe at my mind; their thoughts like cold scalpels. They shoot me again to be safe, and dull thuds impact my body, but that doesn't matter now. Poisons flow in my veins but I'm doing alchemy here and nothing can stop the power from bursting out. I redirect the poisonous molecules in my blood, fusing them into clumps like chum for the Lag and focus.
My eyes flick open and I throw all my strength on the bonds at the one in the middle. I focus the blow tightly, not trying to knock him down or blow him apart, just veer his aim a little to the side.
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