EMPATHY: Part 5
The blood was on her hands. It felt wet and sticky and it covered the upholstery of their stolen car, no matter how hard she pressed down on Jock’s limp body. Bomber swore under his breath at the wheel, pulling into a back lot at an abandoned corner shop. The car squealed to a halt and Bomber was out onto the pavement before the wheels even stopped turning.
The blood was still on her hands. She still applied pressure to the seeping bullet wound, still felt the ragged, meaty hole under her fingers. Forceful hands detached her and hauled the body away inside. She sat there, unthinking and unmoving, until someone shook her and made her stand up in the cold night air.
“Gina, I need you,” a voice said. She raised her tear-stained eyes and saw Bomber through the haze. “Listen, I need your help. I can’t fix Jock on my own. I gotta have a nurse, and you’re her. Come on.”
Time passed. How much time or what happened during it, she couldn’t say. She remembered a dirty operating table. Surgical steel. Cracked, flaking plaster and a single bulb casting light into the ragged hole in Jock’s gut. Screaming. Too much screaming.
She could feel the blood even through her plastic surgical gloves. It was warm, and she hated it. She hated the soft resistance of the flesh as she pulled it apart with the barbeque tongs. She hated the humid smell of blood. She hated the click of the bullet as Bomber let it fall into the plastic tray. She hated Jock as he cried and strained against the handcuffs holding him down. He babbled feverishly, hopped up on painkillers and stimulants that would keep him from drifting off.
Later, she looked up to find herself sitting in a corridor, tired in body and soul. Cold on the inside. She couldn’t remember if she’d slept any, but her eyes felt like lead and there was a hint of greyness outside the corridor’s high, lonely window. She wiped at the dried blood on her face, but the surgical gloves were still on, and fresh slashes of red streaked across her forehead. She heaved a dry sob. Then she got up to find a washroom.
After she’d scrubbed herself, she left the gloves in the rusted, leaking metal sink and went in search of Bomber. Her boots clacked emptily against the dirty grey tiles. Plasterboard walls no longer gave any hint as to what colour they’d once been.
“He’ll live, I think,” said Bomber, throwing his own gloves into a corner. He too was covered in blood, but he didn’t seem to mind. “Be a while before he gets unfucked though.”
“That’s good,” she replied. Exhaustion leeched all emotion from her voice.
“Get some sleep. You look awful.”
“So do you.”
“I always look awful. Seriously, get some sleep. No telling when we’ll get the chance again.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to see.”
She nodded. “I guess so.”
He smiled at that, and whispered, “Goodnight, Gina.” He kissed her forehead and went back to check on Jock.
She nodded again. Then she found an unoccupied gurney, slithered onto it and passed out. When she woke up, Bomber was gone.
Gina carefully checked the manual for each step in the long process of changing Jock’s bandages. Bomber had left her a sheet of instructions, and Jock was eager to give her further suggestions along the way.
“Don’t do it like that!” he squealed. “Fuck, that hurts.”
“Do you want to do it yourself?” she shot back and held up the bloodstained gauze for emphasis. Jock swallowed and fell back on his pillows, nearly fainting. Gina continued, “That’s right, so shut up. I’m not exactly enjoying myself.” She deposited the repulsive bit of gauze into a plastic bag, then quickly wiped her fingers on a piece of cloth. The sight of the swollen red bandages made her sick. To the touch they were even worse.
The job went by agonisingly slowly, and Gina felt like hitting Jock every time he made a noise. He could not stop talking or complaining or asking her pointless questions. One thing she liked about Bomber, at least he knew when to shut up. And he didn’t whinge.
“Where do you think he’s gone?” Jock asked her when she was giving him some water.
Gina sighed and said, “I don’t know. Doing what he does, I guess.”
“Can’t believe he left us here alone.”
“I’m going to kill him. As for the money . . .” She eyed the wad of cash lying limp on the dirty steel table. “I guess we’re supposed to buy food with it and stuff.”
Jock smiled at the mention of food. “That sounds like a great idea. Why don’t you go?” he said sweetly, then flinched as she turned to glare at him. After a long, healthy build-up of anger, she snapped up the cash and headed outside, pulling her jacket back on. Of course she slammed the door behind her.
The blazing grey sky made Shanghai feel like the inside of a pressure cooker. Her sunglasses kept the burning sky at bay, but nothing could protect her from the smell. Even the Street couldn’t rival the sewer-stench billowing in from the seaside.
Despite the weather there were hundreds of people out on the streets doing people things. Running food stalls, drinking down the pubs, pissing in alleys. She was offered the finest fried dog in all of Shanghai, the finest beads, the finest imitation silk and crocodile skin, the finest cloned organs and cybersofts. If she wanted anything implanted, she need only show her wad of cash.
Her shoulders relaxed once she’d inserted herself into the crowd. Here she was invisible. Not even an AI could pick her face out of the mass of moving flesh, just one of many Caucasian faces mixed in with the Asians and the blacks and those with a little bit of everything.
She was in China, so she bought a couple of hamburgers and a tub of deep-fried chicken from the nearest fast-food shop. She wolfed down her share at one of the plastic tables, then gathered her bags and rejoined the throng of people. If she timed her shopping right, the food would be good and cold by the time it got back to Jock.
For the first time in days, she didn’t feel hunted or watched. Hundreds of eyes glanced over her face and never saw it. It’d be a miracle for anyone to remember what she looked like, a random passer-by on a crowded street. She could probably disappear into it and never be found again, not by Bomber or Jock or Gabriel or any two-bit gang.
The bubbling sensation of freedom almost swept Gina up, but then her sense of realism reared its ugly head, and she hunched her shoulders as if against the rain. She’d just end up on the Street again sooner or later, whoring out her body or her mind, or both. If you combined the two, some people would offer frightening amounts of dollar for a Spice fuck, but . . . Gina shuddered at the thought. Even though the image she affected on the Street practically promised it, she’d never quite sunk to offering sex for money. Life as a freelance telepath was enough to get by, although a self-destructive spiral into inevitable madness, but less frightening than the idea of giving up her body for nothing more than a credit chip.
Besides, it might be the only job in the world where Gina would be appreciated for her brain.
She resisted the temptation of cheap watches, overpriced perfume and glass jewellery. Scanning the chaotic displays, the place was obviously a tourist trap of immense proportions. The thought amused Gina. Tourists, coming to the City. What would they think of next?
The only item that caught her attention was a small, elegant silver flick-knife laid out on a stall counter-top, surrounded on all sides by tacky jewellery. Something compelled her to pick it up and tested the blade. Against all expectations, it was well-constructed and razor sharp, and she found herself considering it. Despite the reassuring weight of the Mk5 in her purse, the last few days weighed heavily on her. She needed something more than just the taser.
The cash left her hand without thinking and the knife was there moments later, silver and steel against her fingertips, ready to be concealed anywhere. Gina gave a lopsided smile and tucked it into her bra.
She headed back to the abandoned shop feeling satisfied, treasuring the small nugget of new confidence resting coolly against her chest.
The hole in Jock’s gut was red and ragged, but it was slowly starting to close. Watching it with morbid fascination was Gina’s only weapon against the mind-numbing boredom of the abandoned shop. When the sun went down, the only thing they could do was hide and watch the shop’s aging, derelict TV set as it flickered and warbled the news in six different languages all night long. It could only receive the one channel, and Jock seemed to find it fascinating. So fascinating that he took the opportunity to annoy her with it as much as possible.
Faded wood panelling covered the massive thing all along the sides, dating it at about a century old. She tried unplugging it, but the plugs were firmly rusted into their ports. She tried throwing it out the window, but she couldn’t even lift it off the floor. Trying to cut the wires just got her a nasty shock for her trouble. No doubt the evil thing survived out of spite, just to get at her.
She glared at it from her rickety chair next to Jock’s gurney. She could’ve sworn it glared back.
“–space station should finish construction within the next three months,” said the newsman with the obvious toupee, smiling his bland, TV smile. He was almost lost behind a wall of blurred subtitles. “Back to you, Louanne.”
Down to her last nerve, Gina made a vicious lunge for the remote, but Jock won the battle by lying on top of it and presenting his wounded side. Gina couldn’t do much without causing him surgical complications. Of course, when she thought about it, the idea of causing Jock some complications wasn’t so bad, but she hadn’t dared to try it. Yet.
She turned away from him and hissed, “Would you turn that crap off? We’ve been watching the same goddamned show for three days.”
“No,” said Jock. “It’s all I’ve got to do in this fucking dump. I got shot, remember?”
“Oh, I remember. Prick.” A thought struck her then. “Speaking of which, isn’t it about time you told me what happened that night?”
The temperature in the room dropped abruptly. His eyes were like orbs of ice as he looked at her. “The only one I talk to around here is Simon.”
“Well, he’s not fucking here, is he? So tell me!” Gina snapped. She was standing over him, voice raised, but Jock didn’t seem afraid of her. He was afraid of everything else, but not her.
“No.”
He reached for the remote control again, but anger was making Gina quicker and nastier. She caught his hand, tore the remote out of his fingers, and threw it skittering across the room in a mass of shattered plastic. The old TV popped, then turned itself back on, tuned to a dead channel.
“Let’s get something straight here,” Jock said slowly. “You think you’re in charge around here? Well, you’re not. I’m here because I’m too valuable to lose. That’s the way it is. The only reason you’re still around is because apparently Simon thinks you must have some kind of use, an opinion which I don’t share, except maybe for a good blowjob. I’m sure he’s already taken good advantage of that. So, why don’t you take your dolls and go die in a corner somewhere and stop pretending you matter?”
Absolute silence followed his words. Gina’s joints were made out of stone, his voice still ringing in her ears, and it took an effort of will to move her frozen limbs. She hit him. Her hand made a dull, meaty slap as it connected with his face. She took her jacket and her purse and ran out the door, disappearing into the night.
She pushed herself away from the bar, her drink untouched. She didn’t want it. She was sick of it all, sick of Bomber, sick of Jock, sick of her situation, sick of life. A thick miasma of anger, fear and hopelessness hung over her and she wallowed in it.
But then, as she gingerly made her way to the door on trembling legs, sobering thoughts started to creep into her mind. She had nowhere to go, no one to turn to, and the whole world had it in for her. Where was she going to go?
There was no way she’d be going back to the shop. She decided that early on, and she intended to stick with it. Keeping that in mind, her first order of business would be to find a place to stay. Bomber’s money should be plenty to rent a cheap coffin somewhere in Shanghai. That was the number one priority.
She felt a little bit better for having cleared that up. Knowing what to do next. She smiled, patted herself on the back, and walked back into the bar.
The place seemed to have transformed since she stepped out just a second ago. Where there had been a seedy-looking pub with a lecherous bartender who kept stealing glances at her chest, the grease-stain was now busily sweeping the floor with an obsequious grin on his face, chattering nervously at two Asian men nursing drinks at the bar. All the other patrons seemed to have cleared out in a hurry, leaving glasses half-drunk on their tables and cigarette butts smouldering on the floor. The two men never spared the barkeep a glance. They just sat there, smooth-shaven and immaculate, as if the dust and dirt of the Earth never touched them. Graven images of human perfection with their grey uniforms and gleaming silver buttons.
Feds.
Gina’s heart skipped a beat. Cold fear wormed down her spine as she watched them. Out on the Street, you counted yourself lucky if you ever saw a Fed without getting thrown into a cell and disappeared. Even the local police trod very very softly if there was a Fed in the neighbourhood. A hundred horror stories spun in Gina’s mind, but some of them got so wild, you never knew how much to believe . . .
“Are you coming in, miss?” asked the Fed nearest to her, his glass paused exactly halfway to his mouth. “Either way, please close the door.”
She panicked all over again. She couldn’t stay here! Not with them! But leaving would make her look suspicious, and if she looked suspicious they might ask her questions, and she was too afraid to lie.
She was trapped.
“I am, actually,” she murmured with feigned confidence and shut the door behind her. Her heels clacked ear-shatteringly against the floor on her way to the bar. She put on an inviting smile and sat down at a respectful distance. “I was just looking for someone to buy me a drink. Maybe one of you gentlemen would be kind enough to help me out?”
The two looked at each other with unmoving faces. Then they looked back at Gina, and the one who’d spoken gave her the slightest hint of a smile. He raised his glass to her and said, “We’re friends of the owner. Please consider your drinks ‘on the house.'”
“That’s mighty generous of you,” she replied. “I’ll have a gin and tonic, thanks. With lemon.”
The greasy bartender muttered something and got to work at the bottle rack. The other Fed reached over the counter and pumped himself another beer without consulting anyone else, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. Gina’s drink was in front of her within seconds, and she raised her glass.
“To friendship.” The Feds echoed her toast and set to work on their pints. She drained her glass in one go. It didn’t really help; she was still dead sober.
She licked her lips and leaned forward on her elbows, swaying slightly towards the Fed. “So, my gallant saviour, d’you mind if I ask your name?”
“Not at all,” he said politely. His voice was cultured and soft-spoken. “Matthias. My comrade here is Jeffrey. And you?”
“Beauty.” The lie came to her without prompting, smooth and easy. “I know, I know, please don’t ask. My parents were from a commune, see.”
“Mm. And what brings you out to such a neighbourhood on a night like this?”
“Just . . .” She shrugged, buying more time to find an appropriate lie. “Just feeling locked up, I guess. It gets so humid around here. I feel like I can’t breathe sometimes.” That seemed to satisfy the Fed. “What about you?”
“Trying to unwind a little,” said Matthias. The way he said it, that simple sentence was loaded with hundreds of possible meanings. “It’s been a long day for us. Lot of bad things going on.” He fixed her with a look of casual interest that, under the surface, was anything but casual. “Did you hear about that warehouse fire the other day?”
She looked away to hide her initial shock, then turned back with a vapid expression on her face. “No. Sorry.”
The tiniest hint of surprise or suspicion crossed his face, but he banished it with a shake of his head. “Never mind. It’s not important.”
“Sorry, I wish I could help. I’m not from around here, really, just up visiting friends. We don’t really watch the news.”
Matthias cocked an eyebrow. “American?” he inquired, not because he cared about the answer but because etiquette demanded it.
“Just my parents. I grew up in Hong Kong district, on the south side, y’know? We used to–“
Booom, went the explosion outside, cutting her off before she even had the chance to make up an anecdote. The bulletproof windows cracked and squealed from the force of the shockwave. The Feds were on their feet and at the door in an instant, as if they’d been expecting it. They headed outside with trancelike calm, grey helmets covering their faces, long wicked-looking batons and plastic riot shields in their hands. The equipment had come out of nowhere. There didn’t seem to be enough room inside their uniforms to stash so much.
Gina picked herself up off the floor just in time to watch them leave, and ducked again as a burst of machine gun fire ripped through the bar. Splinters flew like shrapnel. Glass shattered. The bartender hopped out from behind the counter, emitting a banshee wail as he clutched his thigh. Red liquid spurted through his fingers like wine. Then another bullet bored into his chest and he went quiet.
“Stay,” Matthias said to Gina, dark eyes staring into hers. His voice had the command of a king. She shrank back and covered her head as the Feds turned and stepped out into the chaos. Outside, the noise suddenly stopped, as if some giant heart had paused in its beating.
“This is the Federal Police,” boomed an amplified voice, speaking in Conglom. “Put down your weapons and surrender or we will be forced to use stern measures.”
She could see everything through the bar window. The two Feds stood in the middle of the street, flanked on both sides by buildings crawling with confused and apprehensive gang troops. She recognised their colours. Yakuza on the left, Triads on the right. The Feds had interrupted a skirmish.
“Yaks don’t come to Shanghai,” Bomber had told her once. “Lot of killing, lot of bad blood still around.” And now the Emperor was dead.
But they hated and feared the Feds even more than they hated and feared each other.
Another explosion ripped through the ground, even larger than the first, blowing out windows all along the street. Someone roared a war cry, and then gunfire consumed the street outside. All of it aimed at Matthias and Jeffrey.
The Feds split up and casually walked into either camp. Bullets seemed to bounce off them without even slowing them down. Then they were in amongst the gangs, and the sound of shots turned to screams, cries of such pure agony that they rang in Gina’s ears like breaking crystal.
She felt their pain. She felt it without Spice, without VR. She tried to block it out but couldn’t. It was primal and terrible, a cold shock down to her animal hindbrain, filling her with adrenaline and the need to act. Every muscle trembled with terror as she crawled behind the counter, climbed over the dead body of the bartender with tears in her eyes, and quietly slipped out the back door.
Black helicopters thundered into the sky behind her and cut loose with machine guns. Spotlights bathed the scene in halogen light. Gina didn’t even notice, lost in her own panic. It barely registered when a missile split one of the helicopters in two, lighting up the sky like a fireworks display.
The screams echoed behind her as she ran.
The sound of guns and shouting followed at her heels. It was as if the whole of Shanghai was in flames. Gina remembered gang wars around the Street, small scuffles where both sides exchanged a few expendable foot soldiers and did some posturing, then returned to the status quo with a few bits of territory changing hands. They seemed like playground scraps now compared to what was going on around her. This was a blood feud.
An RPG hissed into the air from the rooftop to her left. Gina paused to look up, then darted away in panic as a Fed gunship turned its autocannons on the offending roof. The night sky became suddenly bright again as flaming rubble shot into the air, then rained down into the street. White-eyed and wild with fear, Gina dove into a lean-to for shelter and huddled against the wall, shivering.
Two men came staggering out of the building barely two yards away from her. Their arms were locked together at shoulder height in a struggle for life and death, constantly trying to land the killing blow. One wore Yakuza colours, the other those of the Triads. The larger Triad man held his knife in a death grip, slowly forcing it down into his enemy’s neck, while the Yakuza man fought to bring his pistol down.
They staggered backwards into the road, where the Yakuza man lost his footing and stumbled. The Triad man let go instantly and disembowelled him. He grinned in triumph as the Yakuza man inched back, looking down in horror at his life leaving his body. Then, trembling, the Yakuza man raised his pistol and blew the Triad man’s brains out.
The two lay next to each other like toppled statues, and Gina choked when she saw their clothes and skin start to flake away, revealing the charred ash underneath. Horror squeezed her throat until she couldn’t breathe. The sky was red above her.
Another man in a Fed uniform came walking down the road to investigate and took a machine gun burst to the back. He stumbled from the hits, going down to his knees, but then he stood back up without showing any sign of injury. He just turned around, hefted his baton and trudged grimly towards the source of the shots.
All the while the screams went on, roaring through her head like a waterfall. There was only madness in those streets.
There seemed to be no passage of time at all between huddling under the lean-to and stumbling into the abandoned shop. Water streamed off her, dripping from her chin and her nose and her fingers and every stringy strand of her drenched hair. Her shirt clung to her body like a vice. Torrential rain pounded the pavement behind her, but she didn’t know when it had started or how she’d failed to notice it before now. The fires seemed far behind her, beaten down by the rain, each explosion no more than a muffled thump to Gina’s ears.
She dragged her feet into the corridor, found the cracked plastic chair bolted to the wall, and sagged into it. Dry sobs shook her body. She gasped out with each one, but her eyes were dry.
“Gina?” Jock’s voice echoed from the doorway. There was a statue there, leaning heavily against the plastic doorframe and holding its belly with one hand. It was made of black, flaking ash, and embers fell from its mouth as it spoke.
“Stay away!” she shrieked at him. She hid her face in her hands, didn’t want to see.
“Look, you need to come in here,” the statue said. Its tone was urgent, and it emitted a grunt of pain as it tried to move towards her. “Hurry! We’re in trouble!”
She let out a wordless scream, then curled up into a ball and covered her head, blocking out the world until a rush of tranquilisers filled her bloodstream.
Jock pulled out the syringe and moved back. It took him a second to work up the nerve to speak again. “These should work instantly. How do you feel?”
Gina opened her eyes, looked up, unsure of what had happened. Tried to remember how to speak. Her voice was cracked and hoarse as she said, “Like . . . Like waking up from a nightmare.” Then she glanced around. “Only it’s still going on.”
“Well, clear your head and get over here right away. You need to see this.”
He took her hand, and she followed him into the bedroom, too confused to protest. Unsteady legs carried them into the room with the ancient TV, which seemed to have restored itself to operation despite the shattered remote control.
The sputtering device didn’t catch her attention until Jock set her down in front of it and pointed. The news anchor burbled through the haze of static, something about Hong Kong police arresting a major criminal. It soon cut to a video clip of a man being thrown into a paddy wagon by the local police. They ripped his hood off moments before the doors slammed shut, and Gina gasped as she saw his face.
“It’s Bomber,” she blurted.
Jock stared at the screen, the light reflecting off his face in the dark, expressionless. His voice was dead level. “Get me to a VR terminal.”
All arguments were forgotten for the moment. With a walking cane made out of an old chair leg, they hobbled out through the rain-soaked night and into the nearest public GlobeNet booth. Flatscreen only, no VR, but it would have to do.
She asked him, “What are we looking for?”
“Help,” he replied. “Lots of it.”
EMPATHY: Part 4
The morning smog smelled sweet and fresh. It was so unlike the sweltering afternoon smog that choked the life out of plants and people alike, or the tired evening smog that tasted of smoke and oil. Dewdrops glittered in the haze like crystals, cool wet fingers where they touched Gina’s skin. Looking up, she could almost see the sky.
She walked hand in hand with Bomber down the beachfront. Poisoned silver sand crunched under her boots and filled up her socks, but she didn’t mind. It made her feel like a little girl again, six years old and playing by the sea.
“Do you think we’re being watched here?” she asked.
Bomber glanced around, squinting as if against the wind. Of course, there was no wind here, not a breath. The air never moved.
“Possible,” he said neutrally. “Can’t see any cameras, but that don’t mean they ain’t there. At least they ain’t built the satellite that can see through this crap. Not yet, anyway.” He snorted and gave the sky a flippant salute.
“You’re really not from around here, are you?”
“Mississippi. Before the bombs, anyway.”
She nodded sympathy and fell silent. Nuclear annihilation was the last thing she wanted to think about, not with the twisted city and its ash people hovering on the edge of her awareness, waiting for a moment of weakness.
A brightly-painted beach house rose tall and blue out of the mist. It was a high and narrow building roofed with dark ceramic tiles, probably larger than it looked from the outside. Gina smiled to herself, remembering. One time, two years ago, she’d stayed here a few days getting away from the Street. Later, saying goodbye again, a voice told her she’d always be welcome here, but she never came back. Funny thing. She couldn’t say why.
Someone stood waiting for them outside in the gallery, dressed in a thick red jacket and long brown skirt. The gallery around them, however, was the colour of the sky, the way Gina remembered it from when she was a girl. There had been birds in it back then, real birds, and it had been safe to walk in the sun without blocking cream.
She was too distracted by the house to notice the figure rushing towards her. Suddenly she found herself engulfed in a pair of strong, wiry arms. The woman embracing her was a full head shorter than Gina but had no problem holding on, her skin tanned like a ripe olive, gleaming black hair hanging down to her ankles. Gina put her arms around the woman and bit back a sniffle.
“It’s good to see you too,” she said. She glanced up at Bomber, who stood awkwardly to one side, and smiled to let him know everything was all right.
“Never thought I’d set my eyes on you again,” the woman sighed. She stepped back but still held Gina’s hands, beaming. “Look at you! Two years and you haven’t aged a day. It’s shameful, you make the rest of us feel old.”
Gina shook her head. “I could never make you look old, mei-mei. Where’s Onounu?”
“Inside. You know how she hates the cold.” The woman grinned and gestured them towards the front door. Her prominent Chinese cheeks and the crow’s feet around her eyes made her look like a merry little goblin. “Come on, come on! We’ve got a fire going and some soup, fill you right up, I know how bad you eat, and don’t pretend it’s not true. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”
Rolling her eyes with exasperation, Gina went ahead and surrendered in advance. She knew there was nothing on this Earth that could dissuade Mashei — the determined, some would say relentless mother-hen of the house — from being who she was.
“Mashei, this is Bomber,” she said patiently. “He’s the one that’s been getting me into trouble.”
“Oh, I’ll be having some stern words with him later.” Mashei smiled warmly as she closed the front door behind them, sealing out the wet and cold. She unwrapped herself and threw her heavy jacket on the coat rack. “Please take off your shoes. They’ll be safe here, don’t worry.”
Bomber and Gina followed her example. The air inside tasted of smoke from a stove in the corner of the living room, merrily burning driftwood. It filled the house with cosy warmth. Gina shuddered with pleasure and hugged herself, hands gripping the rust-stained elbows of her borrowed suit. Here was a place that felt like home no matter where you were from, its walls panelled with rough, honest wood and bearing hundreds of old photographs of the people who gave the place its life.
Before they even had a chance to protest, the two of them were pushed down onto a tired old sofa and handed ceramic bowls full of steaming hot broth and dumplings. “I’ll go get Onu,” Mashei said and disappeared upstairs.
While Bomber sat blinking at what had just happened to him, Gina stared into her bowl and made a face at it. She smiled wryly when he gave her a questioning look. “Won ton soup, she’s been trying to feed me this ever since we met. I hate won ton.”
“I’ll take it if you don’t want it,” he said, digging into his bowl with relish. She put hers on the table in front of him.
“Knock yourself out,” she announced.
The broth was gone in seconds, and he let the remaining dumplings fall into his mouth like doughy ping-pong balls. He mumbled through a full mouth, “Never give up a free home-cooked meal.” Then he swallowed and let out a contented sigh. “Best food I’ve had in months.”
“Thank you,” Mashei whispered humbly from the doorway. She stepped back into the room, arm-in-arm with a much taller but similarly Chinese woman, two polar extremes of oriental physiology. Where Mashei was short and sturdy, Onounu was thin and delicate, with a heart-shaped face and eyes that seemed to go straight through you. Gina still felt a stir of unease whenever she gazed into those deep brown pools. Eyes that had looked a little too far.
“It’s good to see you, Gina,” said Onounu, “we’ve missed you.” Her voice was soft and musical, and her eyes pierced Gina like she was transparent, made of nothing more than smoke. “I’m glad you came. There may not be much time.” She gestured at a side door without any change of expression. “Come, let’s begin.”
The thick smell of incense stung Gina’s nostrils. She knelt on the red carpet of the chamber and waited. The borrowed robe swished across her shoulders like silk. Mashei had insisted on washing Gina’s suit, if not burning it, and Gina was happy to wear something else for a while. Bomber looked vaguely uneasy from his seat in the corner, and he coughed into his hand, finding the pungent smoke hard to breathe. A thin film of sweat covered his skin. Gina could see it glisten against the candlelight. The room was stifling humid and getting hotter by the second.
“This ain’t really necessary, is it?” he whispered to Gina as Onounu lit the last stick of incense.
“No,” Gina replied with a lopsided smile, “but I think it makes her more comfortable. Now shut up, would you? I’m supposed to be clearing my head.”
Mashei stood watching the whole preparation from the doorway. She wore a serious expression that seemed out of place on her smile-worn features. At last, when everything was ready, she hugged Onounu and the two shared a long kiss. Then Mashei retreated from the room, leaving the others to get on with things.
“So is anything wrong with her?” Bomber asked despite Gina motioning for him to shut the hell up.
A gentle smile creased Onounu’s face. “That’s what we’re here to find out.” The grey streaks in her thin brown hair seemed to writhe in strange patterns as she moved about the room. Once the curtains and candles and everything was in place, she knelt in front of Gina, placed a capsule of Spice on her own tongue, and swallowed it dry. Again she smiled. “Just like old times.”
They waited in silence for the drug to take effect. Onounu breathed in a deep, regular rhythm. Then she opened her eyes again, and this time they were empty of expression, nobody home inside. She was somewhere else.
“I will talk you through this,” she said in a flat, detached voice. “Gina, bring me to the nightclub.”
Gina nodded and called the scene up from her memory. She concentrated on each sensation until it was a part of the larger vision that maintained itself without requiring her attention. First the beat of the music, the pulse of the crowd. Smell of sweat mingled with alcohol. Light flickering in rainbow colours. Bodies rubbing together. Lust, raw and animal. Gina’s pulse quickened as that surged through her, but she bit her tongue and kept control of the vision.
It was all there now, the club, down to the finest detail. She found herself walking to the tables in the back, but this time they were all empty save for him. Gabriel sat there with his mocking smile and lit a cigarette. Shadows pooled around him under the flickering light of the match. A lump of cold terror shot into her throat, she turned to run, and–
“Don’t,” Onounu said. Gina froze. “That’s not what happened. Don’t break the framework, relive it as it was.”
Swallowing, Gina forced herself to turn back. The other men were there now, talking amongst themselves in her vision, and the woman, Gina couldn’t quite remember her name. Gina sat down at their table, her head swimming with drugs, and touched Gabriel’s mind.
The twisted city flashed into her mind as sharp as the first time she touched him, crystal-clear in its horror. This time she was prepared for it. She retreated into an emotionless grey state, so she felt nothing at the frozen people and their children slowly flaking in the breeze. She hurried through that memory, and slowed down again when she came to the white place. A cold dagger of fear pushed through her detachment, and that terrible voice rang, “You shouldn’t do that.”
A strange sensation gonged through her head, like a burst of mental static, and everything went dark. Onounu cried out.
Gina snapped out of the memory and opened her eyes, finding Onounu limp in Bomber’s arms, pale and breathing hard. Gina rushed forward — to do what, she wasn’t exactly sure — and anxiety trembled in her hands as they fluttered over her stricken friend.
“No,” Onounu panted. “No, I’m alright. Just give me a moment.” She closed her eyes, then gave Gina a weak smile. “Same old Gina, always getting yourself into trouble.”
“What was it?” she asked desperately.
Onounu lost her smile, and her expression darkened. “You definitely picked up an artifact, a bad one. It almost got me too. No wonder, a shock that hard . . .” She shut her eyes tight as if fighting off a terrible headache. When she reopened them, she fixed Gina with a deadly serious look. “You’re playing a dangerous game, girl. That man has some bad things locked up inside his head. Plans, memories or fantasies, I don’t know — but I don’t think he likes people looking at them.” She hesitated, licking her suddenly dry lips. “He was inside you as you were inside him. He’s strong. God, he’s strong, maybe stronger than me. You . . .” She hesitated again. Then her face softened and she touched Gina’s hand. “Please, be careful.”
Before she could say anything more, the curtains flew, and Mashei whirled into the room like an angry mother bear whose cubs were under threat. Things seemed to materialise into her hands, first aid kit in one and a pillow in the other. She quickly banished Gina and Bomber back to the living room and bent over her wife, determined to be worried despite Onounu’s reassurances.
For the moment, Gina and Bomber were left to their thoughts and to hot bowls of soup.
“So he is a telepath,” Bomber said, scowling in deep thought. “But that don’t make any sense. He’s got his own fuckin’ AI, but he takes Spice? Why not just hire someone else and let them burn out their brains?” Hissing in frustration, he turned around and resumed pacing the other way. A few more laps and he’d start putting holes in the carpet, thought Gina.
Gina shrugged. She lay on the sofa while Bomber padded across the room, pausing occasionally to warm himself by the little stove. “Maybe he doesn’t trust anyone else.”
“No,” he said flatly. “No, this whole thing stinks. There’s somethin’ here I’m not seeing. I mean, he’s got gangs waiting on him like busboys. Anyone with that much power leaves a trail.”
“So we go back to Jock?”
Bomber stopped in front of the stove and snorted, sending up a flurry of dust and ash. “That yellow son of a bitch? Geek’s probably holed up in some bar pissing himself. He acts tough, but he’s really just terrified all the time. That’s how the Emperor controls a guy like him. He’s more afraid of the Emperor than anything else.”
Gina rose to join him by the fire, suddenly cold herself. She mumbled, “Probably with good reason.”
“No doubt. But as these guys go, the Emperor’s pretty okay as long as you stay on his good side.”
“How do you live like that, Bomber? Hanging out with gang lords and killers, fake names, always on the run. Never able to show anyone the real you. I don’t understand.”
He said nothing for a few seconds. Then, “My name’s not Simon.”
A sad smile twisted her lips, and she gently took his hand, side by side in front of the warm stove. “Never thought it was.”
“Listen,” he said, turning to face her, “I need to do a little investigatin’ on my own. You’ll be safe at the Emperor’s base. You can lay low there until I check out a few sources, maybe find somethin’ we can use to get clear of this. Can you do that?”
Anger flared in her as his words started to sink in. She abruptly let go of his hand and backed away, scowling up at him. “What? What the hell do you expect me to do in the meantime, sit around and wait for hubby to come back?”
He blinked in complete astonishment. “That’s not what I’m sayin’!” he protested. “I just need to do this alone. I’m serious, I don’t think you’d be safe.”
“Well maybe I don’t need you to tell me what I can and can’t handle!” she snapped, jabbing a finger at his chest. “I’ve survived on the fucking Street for three years without you to look after me, I can damn well take care of myself!”
Bomber just stared at her, uncomprehending. The emotions rushed out of her as suddenly as they’d come, and her shoulders sagged as she turned away, twining her fingers into her hair. She said, “God, this whole thing is driving me buggo.”
“Guess how I feel,” he replied.
“Yeah, well, you’re the only one who seems to know the first thing about what’s going on here,” she snapped. A thought struck her then. “What did you do in Seoul? It’s got something to do with this, doesn’t it?”
The scowl returned. “That was personal.”
“There’s something you’re not telling me,” she said flatly.
“There’s a lot of things I’m not tellin’ anyone, a lot of things you’re better off not hearin’ about. Believe that. But on this job, you know as much as I do. Maybe more.”
“More?”
He looked at her as if she was dense. “Christ, girl! You were inside his head. Unless it was all just some weird mind-fuck, whatever you saw in there has to have a meaning.”
A cold wind blew through Gina as she recalled the memories. She shuddered, crawling back on the couch and pulling her knees up to her chin. “What it means is he’s insane,” she said.
“Maybe,” Bomber admitted, “but there’s gotta be a trail. Jez wouldn’t let me find out anything my way, afraid of makin’ waves.” He smiled darkly then. “Me, I’m plannin’ on makin’ some goddamn waves.”
Footsteps came clumping down the stairs, and Mashei returned to the living room, her usual smile only slightly dimmed. “Onu’s resting now,” she said. “She’ll be fine, but you won’t be able to see her again today. I’ll make some cots for you to sleep on tonight.”
Bomber reluctantly left his spot at the stove to talk to Mashei face-to-face. “What about the thing in Gina’s head?”
“There’s nothing you can do about an artifact, Bomber,” Gina sighed. “You either survive it and it goes away or you go buggo.”
“Right,” he said, and the subject was closed. He obviously didn’t like dwelling on things beyond his power. “Probably best if we don’t stay here, don’t want to put you in danger. I need to go back for my stuff anyway.” To Gina he added, “You’ll be safer at the base.”
She sighed and got up, started putting her shoes back on. “Alright. Alright, I’ll go.”
They went despite Mashei’s protests, but not before Gina would accept a bag of old clothes in and around her size. There was sniffling and a number of hugs before they finally made it out the door.
The Emperor’s warehouse was burning merrily by the time they got back.
“Shit,” Bomber muttered under his breath. He glanced around, cataloguing possible escape routes as more onlookers crowded in behind them. Disasters always attracted their own suite of spectators. The fire roared high, belching thick black clouds of smoke, and threw flickering shadows across the walls like the dancing darkness of the burnt city. Gina could feel its heat on her face even from across the street.
He continued, “We gotta get out of here. They’ll have people circling. Cameras. Fuck, we gotta get out of here.” He had one hand deep in the pocket of his grey-and-black anorak, and his eyes darted around like a caged animal’s.
Gina felt the need for action rising in her blood. Without warning she took his arm and dove into the mass of people, slipping through it with learned ease from her years on the Street. Bomber reacted with a start but allowed himself to be led. Gina knew how to go unnoticed in a crowd, and hoped Bomber would trust in that competence when he could see it right in front of his face.
Sure enough, people seemed to drift naturally out of their way and then refilled the gap behind them without losing a beat. Nobody even noticed the pair swimming upstream like salmon. At last they flowed out into a side street and kept on walking, same pace, same rhythm, arm in arm and never looking back. They might as well have been part of the scenery.
Somewhere along their unbroken stroll, Bomber squeezed her arm to get her attention. She forced calm into her muscles and casually turned her head to look at him. He pitched his voice low for her ears only, saying, “Don’t look back. Shop window, five fronts up, see the reflection. Across the street on your seven o’clock.”
She nodded, keeping her eyes on the upcoming mirrored window. The moment came; she caught a glimpse of a shadow just where Bomber said, keeping pace with them from across the street. Brown overcoat and a low, broad-brimmed hat.
“I see him,” she whispered, swallowing the stab of fear. “What do we do?”
“Turn the next corner. Hide when I give the signal.”
“Hide? Hide where?”
“Wherever. Just get out of sight until I’m done.”
Gina’s senses were on overdrive when they turned the corner. She imagined she could see every glint reflected by the dirty mirrored windows, every poorly-lit cobblestone, every grain in the cracked asphalt. Sound of cars in the distance, faint sirens, the oohs and ahhs of spectators at the warehouse. Hints of kerosene and ammonia prickled Gina’s nostrils, part of the City’s own unique smell, dark and acrid like oily smoke — tonight only with real smoke.
One thing was clear as she analysed the street around her. Bomber knew the neighbourhood. He’d picked the perfect getaway destination, empty of all life except the rats, no one to witness or tell. Only old flat blocks still lined this road, abandoned by everyone but squatters and other suicide-seekers. The entrance alcoves were lined with yellow warning tape, the doors boarded up with great red signs pronouncing each building to be condemned. Hundreds died in these glass-and-concrete crates every year, by accident or by design. One more death wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.
When Bomber flashed the subtle hand signal, Gina bolted for the nearest concrete pillar and ducked behind it for safety. It was big enough to protect her while peeking around the corner, so she glanced past it and saw Bomber already across the street, pistol in hand, wrestling a brown overcoat into the shadows. The soft puff of a silenced gunshot echoed across the silent street. A pig-like squeal rang out from underneath the coat, and Gina gasped at the sound, crying out, “Stop!”
Bomber froze, looking down at the fistful of overcoat, and furrowed his brow.
“Jock?” he said, his mind refusing to accept what was happening. The overcoat collapsed sobbing to the pavement. The stones underneath were staining dark red.
“Help me,” it sputtered.
EMPATHY: Part 3
“The first thing we gotta do,” said Bomber as they crowded together in Jock’s machinery-packed room, “is figure out how they tracked us. Every bit of ID I got is fake, even the Feds would need at least a day to match my picture to a real address. No crime org could have that capability.”
Gina had been right about her identification of Jock. She couldn’t guess his age; his chocolate skin was free of wrinkles, but his eyes had a vicious squint to them that would suit any bitter old man. Now he sniffed, indignant, and said, “I could do it.”
“We ain’t counting you, Jock,” Bomber growled.
“Fine, fine.” Muttering under his breath, Jock reached for a pair of black goggles studded with electrodes and slipped them over his head. A small black wire ran from the headset into the huge bank of processors along the wall. Gina marvelled at it. This was the first time she’d seen a modern VR crown for real instead of on a TV screen, and it fascinated her. The last time she’d used VR equipment was as a little girl, ten or twelve years old, in–
No, she told herself. She didn’t want to think about that, she was done with all of it, all the old things dead and buried.
Furtive fingers passed her a crown of her own, and Bomber helped her put it on. “Jock hates spectators,” he explained. Jock only grunted.
“What was all that about owing the Emperor a favour?” she asked, only an hour late. Bomber looked at her silently through the semi-transparent goggles. Then Jock threw a switch, and they exploded into another universe.
Everyone in the modern world knew about this place. It had been described to her a thousand times in exquisite detail, but now it proved that mere words couldn’t do it justice. The splash of riotous colour before Gina’s eyes almost blinded her. They called it ‘the Forum’, the central communications hub of the entire GlobeNet network. Rumour had it that the Forum had been around since the late 20th century as a primitive, communal bulletin board for written text. Hard to believe for someone like Gina who had grown up with the bright three-dimensional graphics of what people fondly called ‘cyberspace’. But even she had only ever experienced the Forum on a screen, like the majority of people who couldn’t afford VR. Now she was standing in the middle of it, shocked and awed.
Everything was glitzy, glossy, shiny like plastic. When she looked up, the sky flashed advertisements at her in three different languages. Bright colours and white smiles beamed down at her from the little gods of TV. The actors were Asian, Arabian, black and white, yet so relentlessly bland that Gina couldn’t tell them apart. The only thing they said was “Buy.”
Skyscrapers of every shape and colour towered against the neon sky, unburdened by gravity or other mundane restrictions. Orange spirals rose miles high next to straight-laced black office buildings and Roman temples more fantastic than anything the ancients could’ve imagined. Further down the street, things only got crazier. Glowing blue pyramids stacked on top of each other which constantly rearranged themselves, a medieval stone tower so tall and thin that a mild breeze would’ve knocked it over, a giant eyeball supported by columns of gooey green flesh. Geometric spheres and cubes hovered around the cityscape like blimps, shouting out their corporate logos and offering access by the illusion of long rope bridges hanging down to the surface. The only limit to their imagination was bandwidth, and bandwidth was cheap.
“Wow,” she said, full of childish wonder at the spectacle before her. She turned to Bomber, but where she ought to find his face there were the generically handsome features of a well-known actor, all dressed up in a black tuxedo and bow-tie. Then she looked down and found herself covered by layer upon layer of thick Victorian frock. A reflection in a nearby glass panel told her that she, too, wore the carefully-sculpted and utterly generic face of a film star.
“Here’s the rules,” said Jock. She heard both his real voice and the words vibrated into her skull by the VR crown. It sounded like an echo without background noise, the same words only separated by a slight time delay. “Don’t say your name, don’t try to touch anyone, and don’t try to change your avatar. We’re completely anonymised through fifteen nodes, so don’t fuck that up.”
“What’s this skin I’m wearing?” Gina asked, watching the reflection as she touched her face. The flesh seemed to respond like her own.
“Your avatar,” he replied. “‘Julia’. Half the goddamn ‘Net uses that goddamn avatar. We’ll look pretty nondescript while wearing these, a custom avatar’s a dead giveaway and a perfect lead if you want the Feds to track you down. And I am not in the mood for that.”
Gina made an ‘ah’ with her mouth and went back to studying her reflection. She could certainly understand wanting to avoid attention from the Feds, also known as the Federal Police or, more colloquially, the government’s jackbooted enforcers, stormtroopers and secret police all rolled into one.
She didn’t much want to think about them, though, and her attention was quickly drawn back to the incredible simulation. Even her fingertips believed the illusion as she ran her fingers along the mirrored glass — she could feel everything, the crown sent a convincing sensation of force-feedback into her brain. Now she understood how people got VR addiction. Tearing herself away from the face she wore, she feasted her senses on the places around her, trying to take in and comprehend as much as she could.
The entrance area resembled a garden gazebo encased in glass, and the path leading out of it looked like real gravel, disappearing into the perpendicular black line of the central avenue. She immediately knew it for what it was, recognised it from a thousand bad TV dramas. Main Street.
Even from a distance, Main Street was perhaps more shocking than the skyline. Literally hundreds of avatars crisscrossed it in every direction, a river of human and inhuman shapes flowing both ways. Gina wondered how they kept it from getting congested, then saw it explained as a large walking tree turned down one of the side streets. It waded through other avatars as if they were ghosts. Whenever avatars touched they simply passed through each other and turned transparent to allow their users to disentangle themselves.
Gina had to hurry to catch up when the others started down the path. There was something unnatural about their gait, subtle cues that broke the illusion of reality. Every step they took was the same and their identical avatars moved at exactly the same speed. There was no variation, no hint of individuality at all.
“You two’ll need names to get onto Main Street,” Jock said. “They’re important. Pick one.”
Bomber’s avatar shrugged. “I’ll stick with ‘Bomber’.”
“Beauty,” Gina murmured. She twirled and watched the frock spin around her in a way that was almost realistic. A moment later she noticed Bomber’s nickname floating over his head. The letters popped into existence whenever she looked at him, and disappeared again when she turned away. That’d be a handy feature in real life!
Jock rubbed his hands together and snapped his fingers. “Done. Follow me.”
“Where are we headed?” asked Bomber.
“Everywhere,” Jock said with a thin smile.
Main Street faded into a distant echo as Jock led them off the central avenue and into a side alley. Despite its utterly clean appointments and plentiful sunlight, there was something shady about that alley. It reminded Gina of places leading off the Street of Eyes. The kind where the old-timers told the greenhorns gross-out stories about whose toes and fingers you could find if you looked in the storm drains.
She was so busy looking at the tall, dark office-type structures around her — they were so drab and lifeless they had to be Fed buildings — that she almost missed Jock pulling a small credit card out of his pocket. He slotted it straight into the wall and said something she couldn’t make out, a password of some kind. A hole appeared just large enough for them to step through and Jock beckoned them inside.
The building was apparently empty. The three of them stood in a space as large as a football field, two stories high, which contained nothing except a single computer terminal in the middle of the room. Gina snorted at the irony, a computer terminal inside VR. They approached it while the wall closed itself behind them, sealing them in.
“Don’t ever tell anyone we were here,” Jock said curtly. He took his place at the terminal like a master pianist getting ready to punch out a symphony.
“Where is here exactly?” asked Gina. She positioned herself so that she could look over his shoulder.
“Fed database, logs of everything that’s ever happened on the ‘Net. I hacked in that entrance when I was thirteen. It’s crude but it works.”
Gina allowed herself to look impressed. “So you could, like, take people’s passwords from here? Or see their credit card numbers, or how much money they’re stealing from the boss, or find out the name of the prime minister’s mistress?”
“Yep,” Jock replied. “They let the Feds monitor pretty much anything nowadays. Some of the stuff in this database is so hot, maybe five people in the world have full access to it. Officially.” He smiled. “And now we’re going to find the source of your little problem. We can talk freely here, the room is clear.”
A wave of his hand summoned three floating displays into the air, flickering blue screens like holograms, all requesting a password. Jock slotted his card into the console and the password request disappeared, replaced by a gateway into the deepest guts of the system. The interface was grey, basic and functional, typical Fed design, and it gave its user the power to do anything. After this Jock’s hands moved too fast for Gina to follow.
“Let’s see where you’ve been, buddy.” He sifted through the data with quick motions of his wrists and fingers, absorbing it all with near-superhuman speed. “Got some camera footage from the Hilton. Looks like your friends already raided your room, made a real mess. Hope you didn’t leave anything there.”
“Nothing that can’t be replaced,” Bomber replied.
Jock nodded. “What else have we got here . . . Oh! My oh my, you’ve been a naughty boy, Simon! That was definitely you, it’s got all your hallmarks. Why Seoul?”
“Seoul?” asked Gina. “What were you doing in Seoul?”
A warning growl rumbled out of Bomber’s throat, and Gina was instantly reminded of his stone-carved face half-hidden in the dim lantern light, moments after he’d executed two people in cold blood. A cold shudder crept up her spine. Bomber said dangerously, “None of your damned business. Either of you.”
“Fine, fine.” Jock continued the search, unworried. He had a powerful crime lord backing him and no cause to feel intimidated. More data flashed on the screens, scraps of video footage and grainy photos. Gina couldn’t imagine anyone’s brain working fast enough to follow all of it. It was as chaotic and disturbing as poking around inside someone else’s head.
“Here we go!” Jock zoomed in on several highlighted lines of figures, access records and ‘Net identifiers. “Someone has been casting for you in the past two days. Damn, he’s a quick one, too . . . He had you down to your birth records in ninety-seven minutes.”
“All fake,” Bomber reminded him.
“Doesn’t matter. There’s maybe three people I know who can track someone this fast, and I’m one of them.” The tuxedoed avatar rubbed its manly stubble, then pointed to a single isolated bit of shaky video. “This is where he nailed you. Amateur vid, a couple of backpackers sent their travel log to someone on the ‘Net, and there’s the pair of you going into this building here. Once he got the street name . . .”
The scowl on Bomber’s face could’ve curdled fresh milk. “Fucking tourists.”
“Don’t feel too bad,” Jock half-teased. “It took some serious talent to pin you down so quick. What do you say we pay him a little visit, maybe trash his system?”
“That sounds lovely,” said Bomber with revenge in his heart.
Jock pulled his card out of the console and let his arms drop, killing the screens. The next moment they were somewhere else.
There was nothing visually affronting about the blank hallway where Gina found herself. At first glance it could’ve passed for a corridor in any number of ordinary tourist-class hotels, all drab colours and uninspiring fittings. However, the similarity broke when you looked further, noticed how the corridor stretched on and on into infinity in both directions. Gina and the others seemed to be standing in the middle of it, with endless numbered doors on either side.
“Would it be bad if I were going to be sick right now?” she asked in a small voice.
“Yes,” said Bomber. “Very bad.” He blinked into the distance a few times and shook his head as if to clear it. “Where the hell are we?”
Jock stepped past Bomber and counted down the room numbers. He explained while he walked. “Visual representation. We’re inside my system, these doors are all just ports, possible connections from my machine to the one your guy’s using. Right now I’m listening very quietly to see which ports he’s got open to the ‘Net and what kind of data he’s pulling in. There’s a lot of ways to hack a system, but it’s easiest to masquerade as legit data.”
As soon as Jock finished his sentence, a loud pinging sound rang down the hallway, and one of the doors glowed red. It seemed a mile away to Gina, much too far to walk in any kind of useful timeframe, but suddenly, with a sickening visual effect like a TV camera zooming in, the door was right in front of them. Or they were right in front of it. Gina’s brain simply wouldn’t accept this kind of motion. She caught herself on the wall, her head spinning, trying to fight the crawling sensation between her ears.
“Come on, no time to lose,” Jock said as if there was nothing wrong. He opened the door and stepped through. Bomber took Gina by the arm and followed.
Into blackness. Gina could still see herself and the others with perfect clarity, but she was walking on ink-black air in some no-place between computers. She felt her own footsteps distantly, as if through a haze of sedatives, all simulated by the VR crown. It carried the same subtle undercurrent of unreality. Nothing in this world existed, not the identical avatars of Jock and Bomber, not the doorway fading away behind, not even the near-perfect sensation of touch being fed into her brain.
As they went in deeper and deeper, the dark seemed to fill with horrifying sounds and images from her experience in Gabriel’s head. The words “you shouldn’t do that” rang impossibly loud through her head, and she clamped her virtual hands over her virtual ears to try and shut them out.
Maybe I finally pushed it too far, she wondered. One too many pills, one too many eyes. Am I going insane?
Then it stopped. The black fell away and Gina blinked in shock as she felt sunlight on her face. Smell of fresh grass and flowers, the green glow of perfectly-rendered vegetation, all the sights and sounds of a jungle pulsing with life. All these forests were gone from the world, Gina knew, chopped down or burnt or bombed to ash. This was just a fantasy, a place that couldn’t exist in real life. But, she had to admit, it was certainly impressive as fantasies went. She reached out and held a leaf in her hand, tracing her finger along the dark, asymmetrical veins. Its intricate detail took her breath away, far more intense than anything she’d seen in VR. Her gaze travelled up along the back of her hand — her avatar’s hand, pink and perfectly-manicured — and realised she could now see every pore in the skin.
Somewhere in the background, she heard the growing whine of Jock’s computer cooling system, struggling to cope.
“God,” Jock said, breathless. “Who the hell coded this? It’s . . .” He gave up trying to describe it. No word in his vocabulary would do.
“Jock? Is this supposed to happen?” Bomber asked. Even he sounded impressed.
Jock shrugged. “This is the lobby, I think. I’ve never seen architecture like this.” He glanced around, then parted the foliage in the direction of what looked like a path. “We better move quick, tying up this much power for long won’t go unnoticed.”
They walked, and Gina realised she could even feel the breeze on her face. Distant, but sweet all the same. Her avatar walked with supreme grace, never in danger of tripping or falling on the uneven path. It wasn’t programmed for accidents. She dragged her fingertips across the wet leaves and rubbed the dewdrops between her fingers just because she could.
The path turned into an overgrown road of yellowed marble tiles, then into a gently curving stairway carved into the rising promontory in front of them. Gina had to stifle a gasp when they reached the top. The promontory looked out over an ocean, but not one that ever existed on Earth. The cliff they stood on was impossibly high, the drop completely vertical, the ocean such a perfect blue that it shone like a great sapphire. The distant sky burned gold with the setting sun.
Ruined columns of the same yellowed marble lay strewn about the promontory. The centrepiece still stood, however, a small tumbledown temple right at the edge of the cliff. Once it would have been impressive, but little was left of it now, just a circle of crumbling statues arranged around an altar stone. Grass and shrubs grew out of the cracks, and colourful insects made their home in the pits and holes of the marble. It filled Gina with a powerful sense of loss, sadness, something beautiful now gone from the world.
Again, the detail got to her. She could see every whirl of colour in the marble, every elegantly-chiselled flourish. And even more beautiful than the columns and statues was the serene marble face protruding up from the altar top, gazing sightlessly at the sky.
“Welcome, weary travellers,” it said in an androgynous voice as smooth as silk, stone lips moving fluidly. “The Angel recognises you. Please present your offering.”
“Our offering?” Bomber and Gina echoed in near-perfect chorus.
“Password,” Jock said dismissively, drawing the little credit card out of his pocket. He placed it on the altar top, tapped it smartly with a finger and stepped back. Gina frowned at it. The way Jock used it, there had to be more to that card than met the eye.
The stone face puffed out a happy sigh. “The Angel accepts your offering. Pass, and be blessed.” The card hovered off the altar top and deposited itself back into Jock’s pocket.
A shimmering doorway of light appeared between the two farthest columns right at the cliff’s edge, a portal into another world. Gina caught a glimpse of bright colour on the other side. In the real world, anyone trying to step into that illusion would plummet screaming to their death on the rocks below, but in VR the illusion was reality.
They moved through one by one, Jock leading the way. Gina blinked at the sudden and complete change.
The blue sky gave way to pure black, starless, the colour of a dead monitor. The ground was the same except for a grid of silver lines drawn across it to give it perspective, like some ancient video game. The only piece of scenery was a giant blue cube hovering in the distance, larger than most mountains. It was connected to the ground only by a small silver line.
The vastly different environment bewildered Gina, a bit lost from the new images thrown at her in rapid succession. There were no limiting factors in design or construction in VR. Anything could be built here, and anything got built here. It took another moment to adjust her senses into accepting what she saw.
Squinting, she realised there was movement, so far away that it became hard to make out. Parts of the cube were shifting and moving around inside the main body, rearranging at lightning speed, never using the same shape twice. And, mounted on a tall pyramid on top of the cube, a lidless electronic eye surveyed the landscape from a god’s eye point of view. It turned around its axis several times while Gina watched.
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Jock’s ashen expression, wondering what might upset him so much. When she followed his gaze back to the cube, a surge of alarm jolted into her system. A moment later the eye abruptly stopped spinning. A deep voice boomed out of nowhere, and the eye whipped around to regard the group with terrible judgement.
“I am the Angel’s Sword,” it said. The words choked all breath from Gina’s throat. The voice was Gabriel’s. “In His name, I recognise you. What do you require of me?”
“Jesus Christ!” Jock shouted. He got the card out of his pocket again and yelled into it, “Run program Black Watch, condition red, execute!”
Everything spun and whirled in front of Gina’s eyes. Agony and sickness threatened to overwhelm her as the virtual world seemed to fall away from her, tumbling into nothing. She saw Gabriel’s smile waiting for her, his skeleton city littered with ash under its dead sky. Gina cried out and violently tore off her crown. It skittered into a corner and hung limply by its wire while she curled up on the floor and wrapped her arms around her head. Fumes of burning plastic filled the room. Another fan went on somewhere, slowly sucking the smell away. The molten remains of Jock’s networking hardware congealed into a clear glass bubble by the door.
The sound of shouts and argument intruded into her private pain. Jock’s voice was near to panic. Bomber sounded pale and rusty. She didn’t want to listen, but her ears would not obey.
“That’s an AI!” Jock bleated like a distressed sheep. “What the hell are you messing with, Simon?! What have you done?”
“I don’t know!” said Bomber. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
“It’s bigger than you, Simon. It’s bigger than you, it’s bigger than me, and I don’t want anything to do with it!”
“Come on, Jock, you’ve got to help me figure this thing out, we made an agreement.”
“No.” Teeth chattering, Jock paced around in a circle and rubbed his hands together. “No, no, you’ve got to go. I need to get to a terminal, a public terminal to wipe out the logs. If I’m fast enough I can intercept it before it can trace anything to my connection. And then . . .” He turned on Bomber again, furious. “Out! Get out, leave me alone! And don’t come back.”
Brow curled into a deep frown, Bomber picked Gina up in his arms and left the room, leaving Jock to grab his coat and gibber to himself in pure terror.
Later, alone in the room prepared for them, Gina sipped a cup of tea and stared at the wall. It was hung with interesting tapestries, but Gina never saw them. She was much too preoccupied with her own woes. Bomber sprawled on the bottom bunk looking as deflated as Gina felt.
A sour smile crossed her lips. “So I’ll be going home tomorrow, huh?”
He glanced at her with his simple, guileless brown eyes. “Sure, if you wanna be hacked into a million pieces with a machete. No problem.”
“Well, we’re not going to find out anything sitting here,” she pointed out. Her head still throbbed from the virtual nightmare. She couldn’t close her eyes anymore without seeing ash statues in the streets, smoking and crumbling in the acid rain. Small wonder she couldn’t sleep. Just lay awake shivering and sweating on her sheets.
“Nope,” he agreed. Of course he said nothing else. Gina thought about it with black humour, and quickly lost count of the silent seconds slipping away. Finally he stirred again. “You saw somethin’ back there, didn’t you? Again?”
Gina swallowed, putting her cup down. “Yeah.”
“Wanna talk about it?”
“No.”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
A flash of irritation crept up her spine. She’d been putting up with this bullshit for some twenty-four hours now, and one Bomber was just about annoying the fuck out of her. She was tired of it, all of it, pushing to her feet with wrath on her face.
She started off at a shout, saying, “Why the fuck do you even ask if you’re not going to press for the answer?! Do you even care?! God!” It only got louder from there. “You got me into this, it’s your fault, I’ve never done any wrong to anyone! I don’t believe this! I, I just,” her voice cracked, “I want to go home . . .” A dry sob forced its way up her throat. The rush of emotions was too much to contain. Moisture filled her eyes, and she covered her face with her hands, sniffling.
“Hey now, no need for that,” he said, standing up to put an arm around her shoulders. “Listen, we’re gonna get through this. We are. First thing, though, we gotta get you some help.” He put a finger under her chin and made her look up at him. “I think maybe you picked up somethin’ while you were inside his head. I don’t know. Somethin’ like that. D’you know if there’s anyone on the Street we could go to that knows about this stuff? That maybe can find out what happened to you?”
Scrubbing at her eyes with the heels of her hands, she rallied herself, getting her feelings back under control. She took a deep, sniffling breath, and let it all out. It relaxed her a little.
“Not on the Street,” she said, turned away from him to dig a paper towel out of her purse. “Someone, though. Retired. Used to show me the ropes when I was new there.”
Bomber raised an eyebrow. “Retired? Ain’t many telepaths that make it to retirement that I know of.”
“I know. I wasn’t planning to, myself.” She bit her lip, wondering why she’d said that. “Anyway. She might know something, if we can get to her place without running into any machetes.”
“They’ll keep their heads down for a while. They know we’re dangerous now. No, they won’t make their move until they’re good and ready.” He seemed to reach a decision. “We’ll head on over there in the mornin’, first thing. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said, unsure of how to show gratitude. It wasn’t something she had cause to do very often, not on the Street.
In a rush she kissed him on the cheek and whispered, “Thanks,” then dove headlong back into her bunk without waiting for a reply, too afraid of what it might be.
