“No!”
“Hush now.”
He held her firmly, his weight pressing down on her, and she felt a sickening prick as the scalpel punctured the skin at the crown of her head. She wanted to kick and flail, but her limbs wouldn’t respond.
The blonde girl watched her. Their eyes met.
“Vic, help me!”
The girl looked to Nguyen, and back, but otherwise remained motionless.
The blade moved, slicing obscenely downwards, and Victoria screamed as she felt the skin of her scalp part. The tip scraped bone and Nguyen straightened his back. His gloved hands were red with her blood.
“I’m going to need the saw,” he said, and stepped into the adjoining room.
Victoria felt tears rolling down her face, to join the hot blood soaking into the sheet beneath her head. Too many men had had their fingers in her cranium. Why couldn’t they leave her alone?
Why couldn’t they just let her die?
Hopelessly, she blinked up his window and enabled the sound.
“Paul?” she said.
His eyes were wide and his knuckles were red where he’d been chewing on them.
“I’m here, Vicky. I’m here.”
“What should I do?”
“I don’t know.” He sounded almost hysterical.
“I’m out of options, Paul.”
He screwed up his eyes in thought. His fingers tugged at his beard.
“Try talking to the robot?”
“Vic? She can’t help.”
“We haven’t
got
anything else.”
Victoria took a breath. The android still watched her, its face devoid of expression.
“Okay,” she said, and raised her voice. “Please, help me, Vic.”
The android tilted her head. From the adjoining room, Victoria could hear Nguyen moving equipment.
“Please?”
Without a word, Vic stepped up to the bed, and Victoria’s heart jumped as she took one of the scalpels from her tray.
“What are you doing?”
Vic put her finger to her luscious red lips. Then she placed the scalpel in Victoria’s numb hand, and wrapped the unresponsive fingers around it.
“Wait,” she whispered, and then stepped back to her former place.
Nguyen appeared in the doorway, carrying an electric saw. His eyes narrowed, and he looked from Victoria to the android.
“You can ask her all you like, but she won’t help you. She can’t. She’s programmed to obey me, and me alone.”
He carried the saw over to the work surface and plugged it into a wall socket. He revved it a couple of times and then, seemingly satisfied, he turned back to the bed.
“I’m afraid this will hurt,” he said. “But don’t worry, the hurt won’t last. And when you awake, you’ll be just like her.”
He flicked the switch and the blade whined. As he moved to bring it down on Victoria’s head, the blonde spoke. With a Japanese curse of irritation, Nguyen flicked the saw off again.
“What did you say?”
Vic turned and set her tray down on the side. When she turned back, her expression had hardened.
“I said, ‘Osaka’.”
Victoria felt her limbs twitch. Nguyun frowned in puzzlement. Then his eyes opened wide as he realised what was happening.
“No, don’t say—!”
Freed from her restriction, Victoria stabbed upward with all her strength. The scalpel caught the doctor under his chin and punched up, through the roof of his mouth, into the base of his brain. He staggered back with a roar, and Victoria rolled off the opposite side of the bed. Her arms and legs were a flaming agony of needles and pins, but at least they were working again.
She crawled to the feet of the blonde girl, and pulled herself up on the material of her white coat.
“Thanks,” she gasped.
Nguyen leant on the bed, the scalpel’s handle still protruding from beneath his chin. Fat blue gobs of fluid dripped from the wound.
Vic watched him dispassionately. “He shouldn’t have let me into his files,” she said. “I found all the command words. Now quickly, repeat this after me. Tango. Honshu. Hellas. Basin.”
Nguyen turned his head in their direction, fury burning in his eyes. His thumb activated the saw in his hand. Victoria ran her tongue over her dry lips.
“Tango. Honshu. Hellas. Basin.”
The android smiled. “Thank you.”
“Those were your command words?”
“Oh yes.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What do you think?” She reached into the pocket of her lab coat and pulled out Victoria’s quarterstaff.
“Where did you get that?”
“He gave it to me as a souvenir. He thought it was funny.” She shook it out to its full length. “Now, get down.”
She pushed past Victoria and lunged across the room. The staff’s tip caught Nguyun in the chest, pushing him off-balance, but he responded with a swipe from the whirring saw. The girl parried, and brought the other end of the stick around to connect with the side of his head. Nguyen staggered and went down on one knee.
With her back to the wall, Victoria recognised the moves Vic used: they were the same ones she’d been practising herself, over and over again, for the past six months. She felt her fingers grip, and her arms twitch in sympathy with every thrust and parry.
For a moment, Nguyen seemed to gain the upper hand. He caught hold of the girl’s sleeve and delivered a couple of resounding whacks to the side of her head. Victoria looked around for a weapon with which to help, but all she could see was the steel tray. She clicked herself into command mode and dialled everything up to eleven: heart rate, adrenalin, metabolism, the works. Then, with every ounce of her amplified strength, she took the tray and swung the narrow edge of it at the back of Nguyen’s neck. The hacking blow jarred her arm, but she felt something crack. The doctor’s head lolled forward. His grip on his opponent loosened, and Vic skipped back, out of reach. She raised the quarterstaff to her shoulder and smacked it end-first into Nguyen’s face. The blow sent him reeling against the bed. A second snapped his head back; and a third severed whatever was left in his neck, tearing his head from its mount.
The head hit the deck with a solid clump, and rolled in a small half-circle before settling. Victoria and Vic stared at it. Then Vic walked over and kicked it full in the face, slamming it against the wall, leaving a dent. Then she kicked it again, and again. On the fourth kick, Victoria reached out and took her arm.
“I think he’s dead.” The head had split, revealing a mass of wiring, circuitry, and oozing gel; and beneath all that, something greasy, pale and organic. Vic stood stiffly, glaring down at the mess she’d made.
“You don’t know what he did. What he made me do. What it was like.”
Victoria gave Vic’s shoulder a squeeze, and mentally issued the instructions to drop herself out of command mode.
“It’s okay now. It’s over.”
Vic gave a snort. She retracted the quarterstaff and dropped it onto the bed. “It’s not over. It’ll never be ‘over’. Just look at the state of me.” She took hold of her over-sized breasts. “Look at these stupid things. If he wasn’t already dead, I’d tear them off and choke him with them.”
“He is dead,” Victoria said. Vic ignored her.
“When I was you, I didn’t know whether I was properly human. Think how I feel now.”
“You are still me.”
“No, you don’t believe that any more than I do. I’m the back-up, same as Paul. Just a ghost in a machine.”
Victoria wanted to comfort her, but didn’t know how. How were you supposed to hug an android?
“I remember being you,” Vic said, “but I also have new memories, memories I don’t want to have to live with.”
“You could help me,” Victoria suggested, trying to massage some feeling back into her forearms. “We could put an end to all this, forever.”
Still looking down at the glistening, oozing remains of Nguyen’s shattered skull, Vic shook her head.
“No.” She sat on the edge of the hospital bed. “No, I don’t think so.”
“You know what’s at stake?”
A shrug. “Some of it.”
“Don’t you care?”
Vic turned to her, eyes narrowed to slits. “Don’t you dare, okay? Don’t you dare. You do
not
get to lecture me.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“I didn’t know you’d survived. I thought you’d died in Paul’s flat. I thought I was all that was left. And that bastard wrapped me in this stupid body and raped me, over and over again.” Fingers spread wide, she ground the heels of her palms into her forehead, just above her right eye, in a gesture Victoria recognised as one of her own.
“I’m just the back-up,” Vic said. “I’m not the real Victoria Valois, you are. And I can’t take it anymore.” She looked down at her synthetic body with a lip-curl of disgust. “Honestly, I don’t want to live this way.”
Victoria clenched her fists. The pins and needles were wearing off.
“What are you saying?”
“Oh come on, you know exactly what I’m saying.”
Victoria stopped rubbing her arms and hugged herself. She could tell the girl was hurting, and hurting badly. All her doubts had fled. Despite what she’d said to Nguyen and Berg, she now knew beyond all question that a back-up’s pain could be every bit as raw and deep as a human’s.
“Please,” she said. “Please help us.”
“No.” Vic gave an emphatic shake of her blonde head. “I’ve killed our personal Frankenstein, the rest’s up to you. All I need you to do is deactivate me.”
Victoria glanced down at the head lying smashed on the deck at their feet.
“I’m not sure I can.”
Vic turned to her. She reached out to touch the stubble on Victoria’s scalp, then drew back her hand.
“All you have to do is repeat a few words.”
“Another deactivation code?”
“
Oui.
”
The two women held each other’s gaze for several seconds. Victoria felt as if she should have something profound and comforting to say, but nothing came to mind. She just sat there, trying not to cry. Eventually, Vic took her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze, rubbing the knuckles with her thumb in the same way her mother—
their
mother—used to do.
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
“We’d better make this quick. You need to get out of here before someone finds you.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“Nevertheless.” Vic sat up a little straighter. “I’m ready. I don’t want to think about it any longer.”
Victoria felt a tear welling. She switched her focus away from the emotion, into the comforting detachment of the gelware, and wiped her eye with a forefinger.
“All right,” she said.
Vic smiled, but there was pain behind it.
“Repeat after me. Corduroy. Home. Champagne. Cherry blossom.”
Victoria pulled breath through her teeth.
“Corduroy. Home.” She gripped Vic’s hand in both of hers. The walls of the infirmary seemed to fall away into non-existence.
“Champagne.” The world collapsed around them and, in that single moment, nothing else mattered. They were alone with their humanity.
Vic whispered, “Take care of Paul.”
Victoria nodded. Vic’s irises were discs of pure cobalt. Perfect black singularities burned at their centres, behind which dwelt a creature who shared her memories, a creature who, up until a few days ago, had been her. She’d come here to get her soul back, and here it was. She had so much she wanted to say, so much she felt she could learn. And yet her lips moved seemingly of their own volition, wanting nothing more than to end this poor girl’s suffering.
“Cherry blossom.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
HARD REBOOT
A
CK-
A
CK
M
ACAQUE WOKE
face-down in a cupboard, head pounding. Moving carefully, he flexed his arms and legs. They seemed to be working again, although they felt bruised, as if he’d been roughly manhandled. But at least he was no longer paralysed. Whatever Nguyen had done to him, unconsciousness seemed to have sorted it out, resetting his system to its default state. Was that what K8 meant when she talked of a hard reboot? Simply turning the system ‘off and on again’? If it worked for her SincPad, why shouldn’t it work for his gelware?
He pushed himself up into a sitting position.
Where the fuck am I this time?
The cupboard was cramped and smelled musty, lit only by light leaking around the closed door. The floorboards at its base were rough, untreated wood, and he shared them with mops, buckets, and a selection of cleaning products, which added their own sharp ammonia tang to the air.
He felt around the door, leathery fingers brushing the wooden frame. The door had no handle on the inside, but it seemed to open outwards, and he thought he could probably open it with a kick.
But what was out there? He guessed they were on the
Maraldi
, the Duchess’s floating super-liner. Nguyen had given him that much. But what if Nguyen was out there, waiting for him? The man could cripple him with a single word.
Ack-Ack Macaque pulled one of the mops from its bucket. He took hold of the damp, stringy head and snapped it off, leaving a jagged wooden spike. If Nguyen tried to speak, he’d ram this makeshift spear down the bastard’s throat, and keep pushing until it came out of his ass.
With one hand on the wall, he pulled himself upright. The drugs were still loose in his system, but he had a weapon now, and that made him feel a whole lot better. He was back in control, back in the kind of situation he could understand: outnumbered and outgunned, but armed and ready to break a few heads.
He gave the door an experimental push, and felt the resistance of a catch. Still, it didn’t feel too solid. He braced himself against the rear wall of the cupboard, and kicked. The door cracked. It moved in its frame, but the catch held. Spear at the ready, he gave it another whack, and it sprang open.
White light streamed in, bringing with it a wave of antiseptic hospital smells. The room beyond the cupboard was obviously some sort of sickbay. Victoria Valois sat in the centre, cradling the head and stroking the hair of a tall, blonde girl. She looked up without surprise, her eyes red-rimmed and haunted.
“She’s dead.”
Ack-Ack Macaque stepped through the doorway and waddled up to the bed. He gave the girl a sniff. Her eyes were open, but un-reactive.