A Fall in Autumn

by Michael G. Williams

  I ducked into the bathroom for lack of anywhere else to go. If there was a certain role expected of me, I would play along, for now. I needed to get out of sight, but I was every bit as exposed there as I was in the middle of the hallway, or would be, if they walked this far. So I kept going, slipping behind the shower curtain and pressing myself into the near corner, hoping against hope I would not be visible to her.

  “How did he even get this far?” The guy talking to her had the rich basso tones of an Upgrade, probably working security or possibly doing number crunching as a head job. “You’d think the patrols would have picked him up.”

  Their voices got steadily closer, and I noted the carpet was thick enough they couldn’t be heard walking toward me. The bad news was I would have no idea if anyone else was moving around in the place. The good news was, nobody would hear me, either. We both thought we were playing cat and mouse, but we both thought we were the cat. I shook my head. Maybe this was all a bad idea.

  “Who knows? I’m simply glad he’s gone. I don’t need shit like that this week.”

  “Nobody does,” the Upgrade said. They were almost to the near end of the hallway now, and I was waiting to hear them unlock the door and go through. Instead, they paused. “Hey, I’ll be a minute.” Great. The Upgrade needed to take a leak—or needed to telegraph that so I would let my guard down while she and he swept the place to find me.

  “Sure. I’m going ahead. I need to do some prep.” The receptionist made some rattling and clanking noises I took to be the door being unlocked while the Upgrade stepped into the restroom and closed the door. He didn’t bother turning on the lights—he probably didn’t need to. He would, of course, be engineered or upgraded to operate in the dark. I heard the clacking of things and a zipper opening and then the familiar sound of liquid relief.

  The door at the end of the hallway hadn’t been relocked—she’d left it unlocked for him. And then left. And now he was distracted, with his back to me.

  I am definitely not too proud for a cheap shot. Always take advantage of having the upper hand, especially when you know you’re walking into a trap.

  I waited until he was done, then as he was zipping up, I slipped back from behind the shower curtain. A slight rustling sounded as I did so. I heard him make a small murmur of curiosity. Before he could turn around, I leapt onto his back, got an arm around his neck, and clamped it shut against his windpipe with my free hand. In an Artie that’s a killing move—squeeze too tightly and you drop us dead, not unconscious, as you cut off the wind and the circulation of blood through the big vessels on either side of the neck. It’s an ugly way to kill someone, and it takes forever, and even though there are precious few good ways to go, I think it’s clear that’s one of the worst.

  This was an Upgrade, though, and I could tell from his frame he wasn’t only a head job: he had physical enhancements, too. He had muscle and height, and I would have flirted like hell with him in any other circumstance, but right then, I had other priorities. I heard him gasping and gagging, trying to get out a groan or a yell, trying to bat at me from behind. He landed a pretty good blow in the middle of my forehead at one point, and I saw stars for long, terrifying seconds. He nearly shook me off, but I hung on, and after a little bit, he started to sag. The gasping gave way to panting and then, in time, to one long exhalation as he toppled, unconscious, to the floor of the bathroom. I rode him all the way down.

  I kept my arm around his neck for a few moments, in case he was faking for me. If this was a trap, he either screwed up his part, or he was supposed to catch me here and beat the life out of me, or he was supposed to be the barrier that kept me from backing out at this point. No matter what, I had to know he was off the board entirely. I held on hard for ten more seconds, then twenty. I had to break off a few of the trap’s teeth. I let go and rolled up to my feet, half-crouched, on the chance he came up swinging. He lay there. I couldn’t see any details in the dark, but I could hear wind flutter softly between his lips.

  To be sure he wasn’t faking, I did the face-flick test. It’s exactly what it sounds like: I put my thumb over the tip of my middle finger, then flicked his face right above the top of the cheekbone but not on his eye. The reflexes that sensation activates are essentially impossible to control. They’re tied into the musculature and reflexes that keep us from getting jabbed in the eye, and those are very strongly involuntary. If someone is faking, the face-flick test reveals it. In the case of the Upgrade, I got a big fat nothing in terms of response. He was out, for real, no doubt about it.

  I had no idea how much time I bought myself, but with his physical enhancements, it couldn’t be much. There was a thing like a key ring on his waist, but with only one big key that glowed from within. I grabbed it, shut the restroom door behind me, then went through the unlocked door and damn the consequences. I was going to get something on these people, something I could use for leverage, and if I had to walk headlong into every trap they could imagine and half-asphyxiate every muscle-bound Upgrade in the whole Spiralist church, so be it.

  Through that door was another hallway, but this one wasn’t carpeted. It was tiled, clinical, with lights turned down low.

  Along one side were business offices. They sat dark, but the plass inset in them showed me desks, a few plants, bookshelves, a chair for a client or a colleague paying a brief visit. They weren’t fancy; they were for whatever passed for a worker bee around these parts rather than for a boss. The doors were all closed, and I didn’t even bother to see whether or not they were locked. If they were open, then they were another part of the trap, and I had violated the trap’s expected program by knocking out the Upgrade. My gut said I had to stay off-script to keep surprising them.

  At the end was a huge door with the universal symbol for a biological hazard, the ancients’ rather silly stylized sign of three large circles (the three visible phases of the moon, representing the body in various states of being well and unwell) and the miniature circle in the middle (symbolizing the spirit, which is not threatened by the purely biological but may recede or disappear if the body is too greatly harmed). I considered it a tad overwrought as nonverbal messages go, but it stood the test of time, so clearly it meant something to some people.

  ENTERING BIOCONTAINMENT AREA BEYOND THIRD DOOR, said the sign. INTRUSIVE PATHOGENS MUST BE MINIMIZED.

  I wondered what their version of the script said. Did they expect that to scare someone away? Did they hope that would steer me through a different set of doors, send me off in search of a way to go around? Or did they think I would see it as an invitation? Now I was thinking myself in circles. To hell with the script, I thought. I was too tired to play more checkers. I was already dying. What could they do to me? I’d come this far. I wasn’t going to turn around now. Not when I was possibly literal meters from what I needed. Not when I was this close to finding out whatever they wanted me to think I had sweat so hard to achieve, and maybe something real beyond that.

  I pulled on the door, but it didn’t open. It was locked, and locked tight. That… that I did not expect. I figured the door would open, welcoming me into the heart of the trap they had lain. Pulling on the door was like pulling on a wall: they used a magnetic lock, and a tough one. Running a system like that would mean a solar garden on the roof and a lot of extremely expensive equipment. No other clinic I visited—and I went to plenty in this City in search of a doc corrupt enough to take whatever favors I could offer—had something like this. A Spiralist clinic in Little Marseilles could be expected to offer plenty of cosmetic regeneration with the light touch of luxurious service, not huge warning signs and what looked like a secure research area. The door itself suggested whatever was behind it wasn’t something merely fancy: maybe something extremely dangerous, and danger was something unexpected here.

  There was a box to one side of the door, affixed to the wall, and it glowed with the same red light as the Upgrade’s key. I lifted the key until I heard a beep. A humming sound faded out fro
m the rest of the ambient noise. I tugged again at the door handle, and it swung open easily, perfectly balanced.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t believe they thought someone would fall for all of this. But my heart surged with hope at the idea the cheese in the middle of the trap might be real after all.

  The room beyond was brightly lit, with white panels glowing in the ceiling every meter or so. The lights were almost blinding after the semi-darkness of the office area behind me, and I had to spend a few moments blinking to adjust. The room was massively large, with spotless white walls and lots of long, low tables or display cases or something: big rectangles, square corners, thin white sheets draped over them. It gave the room the atmosphere of a disused surgery with the machines powered down and the cancer sniffing Mannies and the antibiotic microbe vats elsewhere for the night.

  There were maybe eight or ten of these draped rectangles, each encircled by a nest of pipes and hoses, phosphos indicating this or that on the wall behind them. These were treatment tanks, obviously, but why conceal them so?

  Sure, this was a clinic in the richest part of town. The people around here were exactly the sort who would be willing to pay what it took to get what they wanted. We all know the Church of the Infinite Upward Spiral of the Double Helix is, behind the free clinics and the personhood of humankind without limits rhetoric, essentially a cosmetic factory with a fancy set of religious justifications designed to let believers find in them whatever they hope to hear. It’s a pyramid scheme with some science-y inspirational posters. That’s true anywhere, though. In the rattiest clinic in the Shade, even, anyone with money—and a Plus genome, no matter how basic—can get anything they want on the menu. The Church doesn’t have a requirement of social standing to make its services available. Cash on the barrel and you get new genes, the end.

  So maybe this was the clinic where even Arties could get what we wanted, as long as we had the money. Maybe this clinic worked on Mannies, too. Maybe this was the one clinic in the whole City where the rules simply didn’t apply as long as you paid the cover charge. It would make sense to concentrate that sort of illicit activity in a space that was otherwise above reproach, surrounded by the best security in the City. This was a clinic I never tried. I made the incorrect assumption it was in too ritzy a neighborhood for that sort of thing. I figured this clinic probably offered plenty of off-books services and also that they would only be offered to the very top of the heap.

  Still, none of this felt right in my gut, and a detective has to trust their gut above everything else. Time to pull the plug on the whole game we were playing. If they wanted me to see this, I was ready to trip the wire. If they didn’t want me to see this, time to find out why—or for whom other than myself this whole charade was being played.

  I stepped up to a tank and pulled the sheet aside.

  I looked down at the person—the creature—in the tank, then looked up at the wall on the far side of the room. I drew a breath to steady myself. I let out that breath. I drew another. I let that one out, too. I looked back down.

  Yep, I said to myself. That’s an angel all right. No doubt about it.

  Imagine the most beautiful Plus you’ve met: skin tone perfectly to your preference, hair of exactly the variety you like, with cheekbones you could use to hang drapes, and a look of peace—no, more than peace, of contentment—on its perfect features. This one happened to be of caramel skin, with long, straight hair curtaining his face and fanned out around his shoulders. His hair started out black, but streaks of gold and copper ran through it like wire string. It was hard to know, given he was laying down, but I would have guessed he stood upright at two meters and change in height. He was thin but powerfully built with arms sculpted into bulging muscle and a wide chest tapering to an athletic waist. He was genetically perfect, what people sometimes call a “floor model” because they sell the rest of us on the idea of the whole process. In sleep—or whatever state this was—his lips were slightly parted, his eyes closed, long lashes the color of cinnamon sticks not even twitching as he rested. He looked oddly two-dimensional, sort of flat, like a poorly done holovideo, but it was an effect of the thick plass of the crate he was in. Looked at edge-on, the stuff was at least five centimeters thick.

  It had wings, of course. They were unformed, vestigial, maybe a meter long: not nearly long enough to let it fly. They were covered in what looked like down, as though they were new. The angel had the face of an adult but the wings of a baby. A possibility presented itself that froze me to the spot: what if this was a human being in the process of becoming an angel?

  I hung the draping back in place and looked around the room. Seven other boxes were spaced evenly. Phosphos glowed behind each of them. None of those indicators were flat or dead, either. They all looked more or less like the ones behind this guy—this thing. I may not have comprehended exactly what those indicators were meant to convey, but I sure as hell could figure out that eight more or less identical displays would be for eight more or less identical creatures.

  I was scared now, not so eager to look in the tanks as I had been moments before. I pulled out the length of mop handle Alejandro built into my disguise. Holding it like a long baton, I used it to lift the corner of a sheet over another tank.

  Another angel. It hadn’t fully formed yet—its wings were smaller, its body less developed—but, like a row of corn planted two weeks later than the rest, there was no mistaking it for something else entirely. And there were six more tanks just like these.

  Eight avenging angels—the most destructive creatures imagined in our modern myths, worse than the dragons in which many ancients believed, worse than the alien invaders the High Ancients convinced themselves were right overhead, worse than the massive weapons the ancients were said to unleash on one another when they failed to handle a crisis—and a Spiralist clinic was keeping them on ice in the back like they were the second round of beer for the latter half of a party.

  I turned around to—I’m not even sure what. Leave? Find a chair and sit down? Toss the joint? I needed to process this. I needed to get steady again. This was all still something they wanted me to see, right? This was all too obviously a put-on. But…

  I looked from one tank to another, around the room, and then to the door.

  The receptionist was standing in it. Beside her was the Upgrade I knocked out. The bruises I’d left around his neck were already showing, and he looked angry as all hell.

  “Kill him,” the receptionist said.

  “A nice day to you, too, sister.”

  14

  The Upgrade actually did that thing where the tough guy cracks his knuckles before stepping forward. I couldn’t believe it. For a mostly brain job, he wasn’t very original.

  “Don’t you want to know what I’m doing here?” I hoped it would buy me a second of time. It didn’t. He took four more steps toward me and smiled. He raised his fist back so I had time to admire the color of his blue eyes before his forearm shot forward like it was on a spring. I dove, throwing my body as hard to one side as I could, and he barely missed me. His knuckles thudded against the plass of one of the angel tanks, and his whole arm rebounded, shaking. He cried out in pain, his voice strangled, and the receptionist yelled angry noises at him.

  I didn’t give him time to swing again. I took off into the middle of the room, dove under one of the tanks, and slid cleanly underneath and out the other side on the room’s spotlessly micromopped floor. This place didn’t merely have the dirt eating bugs around: it had the ones that distribute the designer wax behind themselves. Class all the way, baby, in Little Marseilles.

  I rolled to my feet on the other side and could hear Upgrade chasing me. He still couldn’t talk, probably from when I choked him unconscious, probably also from his rage at having missed with the first punch. In some part of my mind not immediately occupied with my survival, I decided he must be a calculator. I was going to get torn to pieces, possibly literally, by a pissed off bookkeeper, and the r
eceptionist was going to watch. There wouldn’t be enough of me left to scrape off the sole of a boot when this was over.

  Upgrade tried to turn when he got to me, my back pressed against the wall with an angel tank on either side, but the microbial wax finish caused him to skid, and he kept going a half a meter. I saw just enough of a gap for me to jump through and go running right at the receptionist in a bull rush.

  She held up a gun and pointed it at me. My whole life flashed before my eyes, and I dove again as she squeezed the trigger. I heard a pop and felt what seemed to be something banging into me with the force of a spitball at most, or of a leaf spinning out of an Autumnal tree and bumping against my chest. There was a low hum, and my special coat lined with stuff to block the eyes from catching my bioelectrical signature made a crackling noise. The air smelled strange around me as I hit the floor, like burning pleather and the atmosphere after a lightning strike, or sometimes when a mag car breaks down. It was ozone. Instead of a bullet in my chest, I had two thin strings running from underneath my torso back to the pistol in her hand.