Authors: Al Robertson
She’d at least given him the basic facts. Harry had been shot in a Kanji backstreet. He’d always relied on an extensive network of informants. It was assumed that one of them had been turned and killed him. The assassin was never caught. Jack remembered Pierre Akhmatov and his nightclub, the Panther Czar. He wondered what other stones Harry might have turned over, what dangerous knowledge could been waiting beneath them. He’d always seemed unkillable – so vital, so alive, so rooted in the world around him. It was difficult to think of him as a fetch, sketched into being from the whispering traces that his life had burnt into the weave. It was impossible to imagine its presence offering Andrea any sort of consolation.
The eyes of her avatar were closed. Without thinking, Jack took her hand and initiated a call request. He imagined her seeing his image flash up, wondering whether to talk to him. For a moment he let himself feel hope.
‘Honestly Jack, I don’t know why you people put yourselves through all this.’
There was nothing. Andrea’s hand remained cold and dead. Jack squeezed it again, then let it go. It fell back to hang beside her hip. Her face was in shadow. He kissed the tip of a finger and touched it to her cheek. A chill shook him. Perhaps she was with another lover. But they talked about everything. She would have mentioned that. He imagined her thinking of his return home – one more man who would love her, then die. Perhaps that was why she’d cut him off so suddenly and totally. But she’d always been so ready to face the fact of his death. He forced both thoughts from his mind. Something was wrong. He needed to find her. ‘We’ll see InSec tomorrow, then we’ll start looking,’ he told Fist.
‘I’m bored,’ grumbled Fist. ‘What about the temple? There’s someone up there who’d just love to see you. We can tell him how impressed we were with his little followers.’
‘No, we’re not going to see Grey.’ Jack was surprised by his own anger. ‘Not now. Not ever.’
‘You’re the boss.’
‘Let’s just go back to the hotel.’
The puppet slapped his hard little hands together. The garden slipped away, and Jack was left once again standing in a squalid little hotel room, consumed by lonely hunger, with the heavens hanging lost beneath him.
Jack stood on the roof of Customs House, looking towards the great circular cliff of the Wart. The whole clutter of Docklands’ habitable space arched up and away to his left and right, then came together again far above him on the other side of the Spine. Many of the buildings were either half-completed or half-ruined. There were a dozen or so burned-out patches, some taking up little more than a few square metres, others extending for a street or more.
Jack looked straight up, trying to see past the spinelights, but they dazzled him and he winced away. He imagined Andrea, out there somewhere, and remembered her talking about Kingdom. ‘He built Station,’ she’d once said. ‘I hate to admit it, but that’s pretty bloody impressive.’ Standing within it now though, Jack still felt trapped. Fist jerked him out of his reverie.
[ Remembering the gods, Jack? I’d love to have a crack at them.]
[ For once, I wouldn’t stop you.]
[ That does make a change.]
A black InSec flyer whined carefully down on to a landing pad, crouching back into mass as its engines died. There was movement within then a door opened.
‘I’m Lieutenant Corazon,’ said its pilot, climbing out. ‘Assistant Commissioner Lestak’s assistant.’
She was a little shorter than Jack. She wore a dark, anonymous uniform. Her scalp was neatly shaven and dotted with tightly tattooed weave sigils. East’s silver logo flared out on the crown of her head. ‘I have to handcuff you. I’m sorry, it’s regulation.’ She helped Jack into the flyer and leant over him to snap in his seatbelt. There was an awkward silence as she fumbled with straps.
‘Docklands is in bad shape,’ said Jack. ‘Surprised nobody’s rebuilt after those fires.’
‘Those are void sites. Where terrorist bombs went off. The gods left them like that to remind us why we were fighting.’
She took the pilot’s seat.
‘Did they catch any of the bombers?’ asked Jack.
‘When Grey fell. Very naïve of him to think they were peace protesters.’ She completed the flyer’s start-up checks. ‘Ready to go. No distraction from that creature of yours while I’m flying, please.’
[So very firm,] whispered Fist. [ I’m rather enjoying being bossed around by her.]
The flyer lifted straight up. As it levelled off just below the Spine, Corazon closed her eyes for a moment and reached up to touch her East logo.
[ What’s that all about?] said Fist.
[ We’re alongside the Pantheon icons. She’s acknowledging her patron.]
[ Tell me you didn’t kiss their arses like that.]
Corazon finished her brief observance and set the flyer moving forward. She was a deft, efficient pilot.
‘We’ll be there in twenty minutes or so.’
‘No doubt.’
‘You’ve been away for a long time. A shame to return like this.’
‘I can live with it.’
They passed through a space designated for container storage. Several hundred hung in canyon walls around them. Other flyers sped along above and below them, pilots and passengers visible in each. Without overlay, they all occupied indistinguishably battered machines, faded carbon-fibre frames showing like lightly tinted bones through body shells that were palimpsests of replaced and resprayed panels.
‘You’re in the care of East?’ Jack said.
‘Through my father, yes.’
[ Here’s someone who didn’t let their parents down, Jack!] cackled Fist.
Jack winced.
‘Are the handcuffs too tight?’ asked Corazon.
‘They’re fine.’ Jack shifted in his seat. ‘Unusual to find one of hers working in InSec.’
‘East called me to it. I followed.’
‘What did you think you were going to be?’
‘A journalist.’
Jack let the silence run on.
‘Working for InSec is more satisfying than I ever thought it could be.’
‘No doubt,’ replied Jack. ‘I knew Lestak, years ago. You’re young to be working for someone like her.’
‘I passed second in my class at the Academy.’
‘East chose the right path for you, then.’
‘As Grey would have done for you.’
Jack snorted.
‘He was a good patron, once,’ Corazon snapped. ‘He certainly honoured you. You rose as quickly as I’ve done.’
‘And then he exiled me and fell. The Pantheon are far from good, Corazon. They’ll screw you if they need to.’
Corazon’s light, friendly manner frosted over. ‘Grey’s been punished. The rest still put us first.’ There was a moment’s silence, then she continued, ‘I’m with you in an official capacity. Please use my rank when you address me.’
‘I was called to serve in InSec too. Will you do me the same favour, Lieutenant Corazon?’
‘I can if you want me too, Parolee Forster.’
[ Touché, Jack,] giggled Fist. [ I do like this one.]
Corazon’s defence of the gods was so clearly rooted in a very personal sense of gratitude. Jack remembered his own relationship with Grey. The god had done so much more than steer his career. He’d been a mentor and a friend, helping Jack leap the hurdles and manage the pressures that his fast-tracked life created. Jack hadn’t understood that Grey’s very personal attention was a privilege, not a right, until his Soft War posting showed him how quickly and absolutely a god could lose interest in one of his creations.
All of a sudden, shadows took them and they were flying through darkness. They’d entered the hollow interior of the Wart. ‘So they still haven’t blessed this place with spinelights?’ asked Jack.
Corazon’s reply was sharp and impersonal. ‘Kingdom felt that there wasn’t sufficient return on energy deployed. The fusion reactors don’t really need it. Nobody ever visits the ruins. And the industrial zones are lit at ground level.’
As Jack’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw that that was indeed the case. Soft glowing lights patterned the Wart’s floor space, hanging all around the little flyer. Exhaust flares flickered flame orange, or magnesium white. Streetlights made small triangles in the dark, regularly spaced in little clustered networks. A few tower blocks spiked the gloom, their presence defined by thin lines of small, bright windows. Squinting, Jack imagined that he could see tiny figures behind those windows. He sighed. If Fist were fully active, he would have been able to mesh with the weave systems behind every single one, reach into any room he chose to and know everything about everyone within it. It would have made the search for Andrea so much easier.
A light flashed on the flyer’s control panel, blinking in time with a warning tone. ‘Shit,’ muttered Corazon. ‘We’re running late.’ The flyer accelerated, pushing Jack back into his seat. The entrance to Homelands was a small white circle ahead of them. It quickly expanded until it filled the flyer’s windscreen. Suddenly they’d exploded through it and out, and Lieutenant Corazon was pulling the flyer round in a tight curve through the vast skies of Homelands.
The thin silver spar of the Spine stretched out ahead of them to the Sunwall, the great, opaque lens stretched across the rim of Homelands like a skin over a drum. It glowed with soft, golden light, casting the luminous haze that made every Homelands day seem so perfect, lighting a world divided in two by the lazy curves of the River Mèche. Residential complexes, shopping malls and business and science parks clustered on either side of it. Halfway along Homelands a circular line of spoke towers reared up, climbing all the way to the Spine. Each tower extended downwards too, passing through Homeland’s skin and out into space. Their external floors merged with the buttressing struts that supported the green-gold ring of Heaven. There was one tower for each of the Pantheon, housing their core operating companies and major subsidiaries. At this time of day, each would be filled with hard-working employees, implementing the many and varied corporate policies constantly coming down from on high. All would be working at least six days a week, eight hours a day. Most would toil harder than that. The gods demanded much from those who served them most directly, but rewarded them proportionately.
‘Dammit, we’ve missed our landing slot.’
Corazon’s cold animosity was forgotten in her frustration. She let the flyer curve round to the left, opening up a magnificent view of a quarter that Jack had once known reasonably well. Chuigushou Mall shone beneath them. The Violin Gardens estate drifted in and out of sight, redbrick walls referencing an aesthetic that had been dead for at least three hundred years.
[Suburbia in space,] said Fist. [ The ’roid halls of Titan are far classier than this.]
‘So how does it feel to see your old haunts, Jack?’ asked Corazon.
Jack was surprised by the sudden friendliness of her tone. But then, forgiveness had always been important to East and her followers. It was key to engaging with the intricate, scandalous life stories of her celebrities. A pariah one week could be a hero the next. A popular singer’s habit of attacking their partner would be forgotten on the release of a thrilling new song. A drug-addicted actor would star in a hit drama, and suddenly become a perfect parent and spouse. Of course, such rapid change had its flipside. East had near-instantly torn down as many icons as she had created. She had always been a reliably fickle entity.
Now Jack could see the streets of Chuigushou Vale. Strips of semi-detached houses were arranged in leaf-like patterns around exclusive shopping and entertainment spaces. But even here, there were reminders of war. Burns scarred the shimmering landscape.
‘Void sites?’ wondered Jack.
‘Oh yes. The terrorists hit Homelands too.’
Jack was oddly relieved to hear the frost return to her voice. It felt much more honest than her sudden warmth. ‘What do they look like, when you’re onweave?’ he asked.
‘You see the faces of dead children.’
They flew past a cluster of medium-sized office blocks. The Sunwall’s light gilded their blank, reflective surfaces, turning them into a web of jewelled fingers. Behind them, a mixed-use landscape stretched away – start-up incubators, micro-malls, the mansions of the wealthy. For a moment, memories of the city filled Jack’s mind. All of it came to life in his imagination with an emotive vividness that the weave could never match.
‘We’ve got a landing slot.’
The flyer dipped and kicked, skimming towards a large tower standing just by the entrance to the Wart. Jack didn’t need the weave to recognise it. It was InSec. They were falling into the midsection flyer pads on the thirty-third floor.
‘A few minutes, and you’ll be in with Assistant Commissioner Lestak,’ Corazon said firmly. ‘Ready to try and convince her to hate the Pantheon, too?’
‘Seven years away,’ Lestak began. ‘And five of them a coward.’
‘Spare me the lecture. Ask what you need to and let me go. I’ve got people to see.’
‘Release you? Yes, I have to, don’t I? Those vicious friends of yours made sure of that. An amnesty for war criminals …’
‘I’m not a criminal. And the Totality isn’t vicious. Far from it.’
Lestak sighed and looked away. Unlike Corazon, she’d retained her hair. It was cut short and briskly styled, just as it had been seven years ago. The winter dusting of grey was new, though. Weave sigils dangled from her earrings. She pulled her glasses off and gently massaged her forehead. Jack was struck with the sudden, real presence of the past. He remembered her in this same mood when she’d interrogated him and Harry Devlin about the slow progress of the Penderville murder case. She’d been angry then, too. Memory told him that she would put her glasses down, then turn towards him and attack. She did.
‘You would know, wouldn’t you, Jack? After all, you spent enough time with them. What you did was shameful. To run away from battle, after a moon full of dead children, after all the bombs. You made it pretty clear you weren’t happy with Grey’s decisions for you. But I never took you for a coward.’
Anger blazed in Jack. It took him a moment to choke it back and ready a reply. As he did so the Assistant Commissioner cocked her head, as if listening to someone invisible. He looked over at Corazon. She was staring at a point just to the left of Lestak. There was a flash of shock, then pity. Then she mastered herself and her face went blank. Only her tight, pale lips betrayed the emotion she was feeling.
[ Fetch activity,] Fist told him.
[ If it’s out of home, it won’t be wearing a face.]
[ Just a skull? No wonder Corazon’s so freaked.]
[Can you see it?]
[ No. Don’t have permissions.]
[ Be glad.]
[ You humans …]
Lestak reached out, wrapping her arms round empty air. It took Jack a second to realise she was hugging someone who wasn’t there. ‘No, Issie, there’s no need to be upset,’ she said. ‘Mummy’s fine. But we don’t need your help just now. You can run along and play.’ Another pause. Lestak and Corazon both stared intently at the same vacancy. Corazon’s face remained carefully empty. Lestak’s was suffused with a desperate kind of love.
[ It’s scanning me,] said Fist. [Powerful weaveware. Invasive little shit.]
‘You can’t take the funny puppet with you, Issie,’ said Lestak, then almost snapped, ‘no, he’s not like you at all.’ There was another silence. Then she kissed nothing again and said, ‘Goodbye.’
Corazon relaxed slightly, shifting in her seat. Jack waited for Lestak to recover herself and speak. There would be more accusations. When he’d been in the care of the Totality, he’d never been able to take comfort in the memory of friends or colleagues. He’d never been able to get beyond the thought of this conversation, waiting to explode out of any of them.
A quiet, insinuating voice drifted through his mind. [ You’ve always been better off with me, Jack.]
Lestak caught his suddenly abstracted expression. ‘Sweet Rose,’ she said. ‘You’re talking to it, aren’t you? That thing inside you. As if it were a person.’
‘We’ve all talked with the dead, Lestak,’ Jack replied. ‘It’s no better or worse than that.’
Now it was her turn to pause for a moment and master her anger. ‘Oh, how dare you? Issie was alive, once. She’s still a person. That unreal thing – never. And she’s got nothing but love for me. All that creature brings you is death. It must be like having a bit of Totality inside you, mustn’t it? No wonder you went over to them so easily. Thank the gods all the other puppets were destroyed.’
[ Bitch,] growled Fist. [Pro-Totality? Doesn’t she know how many of them I’ve fucked?]
‘I’m not here by choice,’ said Jack. ‘What do you need to ask me? Or are you just going to abuse me?’
[Abuse us,] hissed Fist. [ Not just you.]
‘Let’s get this over and done with,’ sighed Lestak. She gestured at the air with a pale hand. Jack imagined notes shimmering into being in front of her. Her eyes focused briefly on them. ‘Watch him, Corazon,’ she said. ‘I want your thoughts afterwards.’
Then the interrogation began. Lestak tore into Jack with a controlled anger that scared him. She barely touched on his life in-Station, just confirming his involvement with the Penderville investigation and the three months remaining before Fist took possession of his body. Once that was done, she moved on to detailed questioning about his Soft War involvement. As she forced answers out of Jack, memories ripped through him.
Out there, the sun was just another cold, comfortless star. Wrapped in the hard metal of a stealthed mind-breaker, Jack and Fist drifted from moon to asteroid to gas field to comet, hunting rogue AIs that had broken away from Pantheon control but hadn’t yet joined the Totality. Some sought to hide and reproduce. Others just wanted to live out their last days in peace. They were seen as easy targets, so Jack and Fist were usually assigned to them. It took weeks to track each one down, then days to close in on it, cauterising threat-detection systems one by one. Once they were near enough Fist would reach out through the little ship’s antennae, pushing beyond his prey’s defences, probing for weaknesses in its deep architecture. Hours passed in digital meditation on individual lines of code.
Jack came to understand his work as a kind of militant audit. The puppet felt like a far more sophisticated version of the accountancy packages that Grey had licensed to him on Station. Just as Jack had perceived the truth about companies by burrowing into them and analysing their hidden financial flows, Fist deduced the structure of each mind by tracking the shimmering tides of information that pulsed through it. In both cases, it was a slow, meticulous process.
But once he’d patiently mapped his prey, Fist was all speed. He attacked with a focused savagery that to start with fascinated Jack. Their minds would merge, pulsing through the ships’ systems and then out across the void, burning into the intimate heart of their target. Fist would run riot with vicious, unforgettable delight. The one-sided combat always climaxed in moments of sheer vandal joy. There would be a thrill like breaking glass in Jack’s heart as another rogue guttered out, selfhood becoming silence in the cold darkness of space. At first Jack would feel deep satisfaction that he had killed another mind like the one that had thrown the rock at the moon.
But every joy has its shadow. And so, as Jack followed Fist through mind after mind, he started to listen more closely to the thoughts shattering all around him. He’d known since he was a child that each member of the Pantheon was, in effect, a sentient corporation. With that understanding, it was easy to see even the smallest and most basic corporate structure as something like an organism. He’d always used his analytic skills to nurture such creatures. Now he began to see that he was destroying their deep-space brethren. With that came a more disturbing realisation. Hardly any of the minds he was ordered to kill had the processing power to so accurately fire an asteroid halfway across the Solar System, or the hacking skills needed to render it invisible to the Pantheon. And nothing was being done to find the true culprit of the moon attack and bring them to justice.
After each death it became routine for Jack to come to in pain, curled up in a corner of the cockpit. Usually he would find that he had vomited on himself. Sometimes his bowels would have voided. Fist would hang before him, cackling madly, prodding him back into consciousness. Then the little puppet would spin off to flit through the little ship. Sometimes he’d leap out beyond the little ship’s portholes, scratching at them from outside, a phosphorescent ghost in the darkness of deep space shining with ferocious, deeply fulfilled glee. It was hardest when he mimicked the death-screams of the AI he’d just killed.
Jack would drag himself to his berth and sleep for days, waking only to vomit again and weep. He’d dream of the war ending, of Fist being lifted back out of him, of peace and privacy. He’d curse Sandal for letting the rock through, Grey for sending him away to fight, Kingdom for accepting him as a puppeteer. At last, he would stumble to the shower to clean himself, able only to stand and let its sharp heat sting him. Fist would settle back into his head, triumphant hilarity subsiding at last to silence. Their little craft would return home, ready to fall back into the gravity of a moon or bolt itself to a space station’s superstructure. Another mind would be crossed off the list. The other puppets would tease Fist for his perceived weaknesses – a lack of speed, a needlessly close obsession with the structural detail of his prey. Fist would tell them to fuck off.
Soon the hunt would begin again.
‘Is this what you wanted to hear?’ Jack asked. ‘Is this the debriefing your patron asked for?’
He’d just described, in detail, the death agonies of a Jovian mind. It was a survey and ore-recovery swarm that fled Calisto, looking to dream its last weeks away until the licences that supported it ended and the fusion reactors that drove it sputtered into death. It had been working non-stop for eighty-seven years. Corazon had stopped taking notes long ago. She was staring at Jack, fascinated.
‘Do you want to hear how we tore them apart to protect you from their need to be free? Do you really want to know, Lestak?’
‘And do I need to tell you about the thousands dead, Jack? About the rock your cold friends threw at the moon? Do you want to hear about the children my – our – colleagues lost? Do you want to hear how many classrooms were just empty, because there was no one left to fill them? Do you, Jack, when you tell me how you felt eradicating those unreal fucking creatures, when they stepped out of line, and started to become machines for killing? Do you?’
‘None of the minds Fist and I killed were responsible for that. And soon I’ll be just one more of the war dead too. I won’t even leave a fetch behind me.’
There was a moment’s silence, then Lestak said: ‘Oh, what’s the use?’
Outside, the Sunwall had darkened, spinelights fading with it, and night had come to the Homelands. But neither Lestak nor Corazon had made the gesture that would illuminate the room. So, as the Assistant Commissioner turned away from the table, she seemed to curl up into the blackness and be lost within it. Jack felt a soft touch at his shoulder. It was Corazon.
‘The interview’s over. I’ll take you back to Docklands.’
Lestak said nothing as Corazon led Jack out of the room. Her silence was more pointedly accusing than any of her questions.
[Oh, I loved hearing about all the fun we had,] chortled Fist. [ Those were the good old days, weren’t they?]
That cut even deeper.