Authors: Al Robertson
‘But how do we
get there now your mum can’t zap us over?’
‘
We swim.’
‘For fuck’s sake Jack, I’m made
of wood. I’ll swell right up!’
‘Fist, we’re
in a simulation.’
‘That simulates real physics.’
‘Then you’ll
float and you’ll be fine. Now, will the files
be OK?’
‘More worried about them than me?’
‘Fist,
’ warned Jack.
‘The rucksack’s completely waterproof. Unlike certain people
I could mention.’
Fist clung to Jack as they squelched
towards the black, oily lake, grumbling all the way. By the time they
reached it they were covered in mud. Its cold
, still waters stank of decay.
‘Can’t we find a
boat?’
‘Can you see one anywhere?’
Fist sighed and wrapped
his arms tightly round Jack’s neck. As Jack swam
, ripples rolled away from him, the only movement on the
lake’s dark surface. Fist’s head and upper body
were above the water. Jack distracted him by asking about
strategies for hacking into the prison cubes. ‘It’s going
to take a bit of creativity,’ he said thoughtfully, then
went quiet, fascinated by the problem.
Jack worked hard to
keep his own head above water, but couldn’t help
letting it dip below the surface. Bitter water slipped into
his mouth. A confusion of memories assaulted his mind. None
, he realised, were his own. He lifted his head up
and spat. Other people’s lives receded. ‘This isn’t
water,’ he said, his voice full of realisation. ‘It’s
memory. It’s what happens to fetches when nobody comes
looking for them.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Fist replied disparagingly
. ‘It’s like the sea round the outside of this
place – low bandwidth simulation. It’s
cheap servers and lazy programmers. It’s not very nice, but that’s the Coffin Drives for you.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘Bless you, Jack, you’re not used to being virtual. It’s easy to let your imagination run away with you in a place like this.’
‘Really?’ said Jack, and dived down.
For a moment Jack and Fist inhabited a thousand fragments of mind, individual life shards that had gleamed and then spun away from them with all the beauty of a shattering stained-glass window. It was impossible to pick out overall patterns, but here there was a soft kiss, there the touch of a raindrop, a sudden note of music or a glimpse of Station when it had been so much smaller. All these broken notes combined into a cacophony of consciousness that had its own dying beauty. The moment stretched out, because every individual memory was unanchored from time. And then they burst spluttering out of the water, and the riot of memory left them.
‘God’s shit!’ shrieked Fist. ‘You’re right. This lake is where fetches die.’
‘The Pantheon always said our memories were a resource too precious to lose. But if this is where they end up – so much white noise, and then I suppose they just fade away.’
‘Wow. More bullshit from the gods. Whodathunkit, eh?’
They reached the island and clambered on to the lower blocks. ‘Rucksack’s OK?’ checked Jack.
‘Files untouched. I’m rather good at luggage. Maybe I should do it professionally when all this is over.’
The blocks’ hard edges were decaying. The stone of each was soft, falling away where the water touched it. As Jack and Fist slithered over them, chunks slid off.
‘Fresh minds, melting away,’ said Jack. ‘They’re like sugar cubes in tea. I can’t believe they’d do this. They’re editing anyone who disagrees with them out of Station’s memory. Can you open the blocks?’
‘I’m building a programme that’ll crack them all. When it finds Penderville it’ll bring him straight to us.’
‘Ready to go?’
‘We need to get to the top. It’ll sink down into the pile from there.’
It was impossible to tell how long it took to clamber up the pile. The higher they went, the more individual blocks retained their integrity, until those at the peak were hard-edged and polished to a high gloss. It was hard to grip them. When Jack finally reached the highest one, he collapsed, panting. Fist scrambled up and sat down next to him.
‘All ready.’
‘Do it, Fist.’
Fist stretched his hand out, palm up. For a moment, it blurred. Jack peered at it, and thought for a second that it was covered in white dust. Then he realised that Fist had summoned hundreds of tiny versions of himself into being. He flicked his hand and the tiny horde dropped away, tumbling across the black surface of the topmost cube. As they touched it, they became so many shimmering flames. A few sank into the surface of the cube. The rest danced across it, flickering towards the others beneath.
‘How long?’ Jack asked him.
‘Here? Who knows?’
‘I wonder when they’ll notice topside.’
Lightning flared in the clouds above the city, then roared down in hard, jagged lines. Bolts ploughed into it, raising gouts of flame and clouds of smoke. There were maybe a dozen impacts.
‘They’ve realised someone’s digging up granny,’ said Fist, his voice full of glee, ‘and they really don’t like it. Pretty impressive diagnostics!’
‘That’s no diagnostic programme,’ replied Jack, sounding worried. ‘It’s an attack.’
Screaming drifted across the necropolis. The flames disappeared. Torn at by the breeze, the pillars of smoke they’d thrown up quickly lost integrity, falling away into nothing.
‘No it wasn’t,’ Fist told him confidently. ‘You’re getting rusty. That was just the insertion.’
‘And that’s what they’ve dropped in.’ Jack pointed at a small, dark mass, floating towards them across distant rooftops. As it came closer, he made out a bulbous head with a tiny body dangling beneath it. There was a single pale spot at the centre of the creature’s forehead.
‘Oh shit.’ Fist sounded genuinely shocked. ‘Fucking no.’
‘What?’
Shock became outrage. ‘It’s a puppet embryo. One of the six that survived. They really do exist. Get the fuck out of here.
NOW!
’
Jack was already slithering down the hard cubes, half in control, half-falling. Fist followed him, leaping from cube to cube like a small, brightly painted goat.
‘How can they hurt us?’ yelled Jack, surprised and worried by Fist’s reaction.
‘They’re like me before I merged with you. Code looking for content. They eat memories. They’ll suck the identity out of whatever they touch. And we’ve got more identity than anyone here.’
Three or four other figures appeared in the distance as they slid towards the water. ‘Fucking Kingdom!’ screamed Fist. ‘It took us a month to mesh, and the fucking doctors held me back every step of the way. Those things will do it in seconds. The overload’ll kill them, but they’ll eat us first.’
‘How do we stop them?’
They plunged into the water before Fist could answer. Fist grabbed Jack as he started swimming, hard. Holding his head up only slowed him down. Then he was underwater, and memories rushed over him. He felt that he was pushing himself through a thousand different lives. Random moments leapt through him, appearing as a broken kaleidoscope of centuries of Station life. It was impossible to find any coherence in them. He let each one leap up, then drift away.
Every few moments Jack broke out of the water, took a breath of his own coherent self, and plunged back down again. The past roared in his ears. He focused on holding himself together while moving in the right direction. He wondered how Fist was experiencing the waters of the memory hole. Every few seconds the puppet cried out, or his body shook.
At last they reached the dark shore. Jack stood and water fell off him. Memories drained away. Jack took a step and nearly slipped over. It was difficult to maintain balance on the lake’s muddy floor, harder still when the first of the embryos flew at them, screaming. Tiny limbs flapped excitedly. Its child body was a scribble of half-formed lines. The head tipped toward them. The pale dot in its forehead was a round, unclosing mouth, jagged with fractal swirls of teeth.
‘Don’t let it bite you,’ screamed Fist. ‘Get it into the water!’
Jack snatched it out of the air. The mouth grabbed for his hands, all hunger. He plunged the eyeless face down. A splash and it was deep in water. He imagined memories flooding the embryo’s little unanchored self. It quickly stopped struggling. Jack let it float to the surface. It was already losing form, black lines unravelling into dark water.
Fist was sobbing. ‘That’s me,’ he choked out, ‘before I was born.’
‘Are you all right?’
Another embryo appeared.
‘Fuck’s sake. RUN!’ screamed Fist.
They were hurtling towards a tiny alleyway.
‘How do we stop them?’ yelled Jack, staring wildly around. Fist howled as a shack wall dissolved into nothing and a third embryo attacked. Behind it, a shuddering figure collapsed, black liquid memories bleeding away.
‘They’re breaking fetches!’ Fist’s voice was full of grief and rage. He leapt off Jack and charged the embryo. Using a brick as a club, he smashed its body. Scribbles of darkness shimmered, then died away. The ravenous, broken head disappeared last. Fist wouldn’t stop slamming the brick down. Jack tore it out of his hands.
Then there came the sound of music, soft and distant and full of memories. ‘Can you hear that?’ said Jack. Fist didn’t answer, tormented by what he’d just done.
Jack snatched him up and set off again. ‘Where now?’ he asked. Fist didn’t reply. He half-recognised the music and ran towards it. It became louder and louder as they neared it. Fist wept on Jack’s back as he took the next two embryos, stamping one into an explosion of dark lines and smashing the other against a wall. Both were soaked in broken fetch-blood.
‘Why aren’t they hurting us, Fist?’
‘Your hands.’
Jack looked down and saw bruises, leaking black liquid. His fingers were nearly transparent. Fist too was becoming a ghost.
‘The files?’
‘Safe. They’re inert. Not like us.’
Memories bled out of Jack. Time spun and it was hard to know why he was running, what he was running towards. The music was an anchor, holding his identity in place. Andrea burned in his mind, but he often forgot her significance. He feared he was losing himself.
There was more screaming behind them. ‘No,’ Fist moaned, ‘not another.’ It darted forward but Jack ducked and it missed them. It cut through a wall, then a fetch. Memories crumbled instantly to nothing. The embryo fed and died. Jack ran. They burst out of the alleyway, into open space.
‘GO!’ screamed Fist. One final small figure was closing on them. There was a shining light ahead, a self-contained orb. The music throbbed with grief and anger and triumph. Jack felt himself beginning to lose coherence. Sound triggered memory cascades. A voice screamed ‘
JUMP!
’ He threw himself forwards. A circular jaw ground against his leg. He could barely breathe. Teeth cut into his skin and he felt a great, devouring appetite hammer at the gates of his mind.
Then the light took him, and for a moment nothing existed.
There was a woman in front of him, hanging in midair on wings made of song. They shone like an angel’s, but the feathers they were made of were barbed and spiked like a demon’s.
‘Hello, Jack,’ said Andrea, her voice full of care. ‘And Fist. You’re safe now. Thank you for the present.’
The wings surrounded him and there was a kiss. A new music at once exploded from and reasserted every memory he had. With a shock that stole the last of his energy he became himself again.
‘It was Kingdom,’ he said.
‘I know.’
And then there was nothing at all.
When Jack awoke, he was surprised and not a little relieved to find that he remembered who he was. He was lying on the cold earth, and there was a weight on his chest. He opened his eyes and saw Fist sitting on him. The puppet had his head in his hands and was shaking. The undamaged rucksack was strapped safely to his back. They were on the edge of the city of the dead.
In the air above them hung a snowflake.
Jack sat up, cradling Fist as he did so. The puppet let himself be held, falling limply against his chest.
The snowflake was floating directly over the centre of the city of the dead. Its lowest point brushed the top of the dark pile at the heart of the lake, which was substantially smaller than it had been. Jack saw shades swimming through memories to reach it. Others were clambering up the pile or clinging to the pure white of the snowflake, climbing slowly towards the sky. The snowflake’s peak broke through the clouds and into the weave. The dead were pulling themselves back into life.
Jack was awed at the sight. He wondered how the living would receive both the unadulterated dead and the fact of such direct Totality interference in Station matters. It was, he supposed, an act of war.
Fist kicked feebly against him, reminding him of more immediate issues.
‘Are you OK?’ Jack asked him.
‘Go away!’ Fist’s voice was at once aggressive and broken. Looking round, Jack saw why. The wind played at dying fragments of code, the lines that had defined the embryos. ‘They’re all dead,’ spat Fist. He’d stopped leaking memories. Jack assumed that Andrea had stabilised him too. He wondered where she was, if they’d now actually won. It was clear that Fist didn’t perceive the battle’s climax as a triumph. ‘They hadn’t even been born,’ he said hopelessly.
Jack held him close. ‘We didn’t have any choice,’ he reassured him.
‘So much waste.’ Fist was silent for a while. When he spoke again, his voice was low and quiet and hard with fury. ‘I’m going to kill Kingdom. I’ve got everything I need to break him and I fucking will. If I have to die I’ll fucking do it.’
Dormant machinery sighed and creaked in the depths of Jack’s mind. He was very glad that, for the moment, Kingdom was out of their reach. He tried to soothe Fist, but the puppet wouldn’t let himself be consoled. Jack gave up and asked about Andrea and Penderville. Fist said nothing, consumed by his own thoughts. For a moment, Jack wondered if Penderville too was climbing up the snowflake, if Andrea had used her wings to rise up and find him. But Fist had said that the search programme would bring Penderville directly to him. The thought that he might have melted into the memory lake hit Jack like a punch.
And then a fetch shimmered into being. It was barely coherent, lying like a man-shaped mist on the grey ground.
‘Look, Fist. It must be Penderville.’
Fist turned his back. ‘Fuck off.’
Jack left him to his pain and walked over to Penderville. The fetch was shuddering silently through multiple versions of itself. Child, teenage, adult selves sketched themselves across the opaque materials that life had left behind, emerging for a moment into clarity and then vanishing. Jack even recognised the vacuum-frozen corpse face he’d seen out in Sandal’s docks. Everything flowed in constant gouts of change, except for the mouth. It was always a gaping O, howling pain and loss. After Penderville’s death, his existence had become a perpetual scream.
Jack sank to his knees by the fetch, wondering whether it could ever have anything coherent to say. Andrea could help, but he didn’t know how to reach her. He stretched out to touch a shape that might have been a shoulder. There was nothing but pity in him. The silent scream continued as his hand sank into Penderville’s body. Cold bit into Jack, and then depression enclosed him. He’d never imagined that such density of guilt could be possible. He snatched his hand away, and immediately the pain was gone.
‘Needs stabilising,’ said Grey in a calm voice. Jack turned. Grey’s presence was shock enough. He was even more surprised to see his patron arm in arm with East.
‘What the hell are you two doing here?’
‘Not quite hell,’ replied Grey breezily. ‘Just the Coffin Drives. And we’re here because of the Totality, just like Andrea. They opened a path down here. We all followed them in.’
‘You weren’t just looking to avenge Corazon’s death,’ said Jack to East. ‘This goes far deeper than that. You’re in partnership with Grey.’
‘Why do you think I looked after little apostate you?’ purred East. ‘You were working for my lover, setting him free.’
‘I’ve been working on my own. For my own purposes,’ declared Jack, with as much conviction as he could muster.
East’s laughter rang out in the dead air. ‘Of course you have.’
‘Don’t tease the poor man,’ Grey told her. ‘He’s been through enough.’
‘Not as much as Penderville,’ replied Jack. He turned back to the broken ghost beside him. It screamed on. ‘We need to help him.’
‘Fascinating,’ said East, peering down at the fetch. ‘He’s all crisis. I wish my news producers were this focused.’
Jack turned to East. ‘You disgust me,’ he spat.
‘If you were onweave you’d be watching me, along with all the rest of them. Now,’ she said, turning to Grey, ‘where’s Andrea?’
Jack wished that he had a way of, for a moment, forcing them both out of existence. Their presence had polluted his determination to help Penderville, reminding him that it was driven by specific motive rather than pure altruism.
‘Andrea’s with the Totality,’ Grey replied. ‘Helping stabilise all those fetches before they reenter the weave.’ He turned to Jack. ‘That feather’s a pretty powerful tool,’ he commented. ‘She’s giving each of them an individually customised copy of it.’
‘Ask them if they can spare her,’ East told him.
Grey closed his eyes, then opened them again. ‘They say yes,’ he said.
When Andrea appeared it was without any fuss. One moment she wasn’t there, the next she was walking towards Jack. The air around her vibrated with the faintest suggestion of wings, folding themselves away. Her appearance had none of the dancing imprecision that Jack associated with fetches manifesting in the Coffin Drives.
‘We need you to stabilise Penderville,’ East said.
Andrea ignored her. ‘Hello Jack. It seems I’ve made a bit of a splash.’
‘What happened?’ asked Jack, reaching instinctively for her hand. Andrea took it. At last the matter of their bodies was identical. They could touch as equals. The gods were suddenly so unimportant.
‘Harry came to me, furious. He told me everything. He thought he was taunting me, that he’d be able to roll me back and I’d forget it all. I told him to fuck off, and then I came to find you. He couldn’t do anything to stop me.’
Jack smiled with relief. ‘The feather worked,’ he said.
‘It was a wonderful starting point.’ She drew in close and kissed him. For a moment, they lost themselves in each other. Then she pulled back and asked: ‘Where’s Fist?’
‘Over there.’
He was gaping at her. [God, Jack, if you could see her as I do.] All the rage had gone from his voice.
[ What do you mean?]
[Such coherence. Far more than I gave her.]
‘Your understanding of fetch data structures is remarkable,’ said Andrea, giving him a broad smile. ‘But you hardly know me at all. I had to restructure the feather to fit myself.’ Her wings pulsed in and out of existence. ‘And then I found I needed more than one.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Fist replied bashfully. It struck Jack that the puppet had never received such clear, unambiguous gratitude before. ‘I didn’t have much time.’
‘You did a beautiful job,’ Andrea reassured him. ‘Now I have complete control over every part of myself. I can travel anywhere in the Solar System. And now the Totality have opened the way, I can come and go from the Coffin Drives at will. We’re using my rewrite of your feather code to stabilise all the other fetches, so they can do the same. You’ve freed us all.’
‘What are the Totality up to?’ said Jack. ‘All that’ll restart the Soft War.’
‘They want the caged fetches on the streets of Station, telling everyone what Kingdom did to them. And they’ve always hated the Coffin Drives.’ Penderville caught her attention. ‘Poor man,’ she sighed.
‘Can you do anything for him?’ asked Grey. ‘It’d help us a lot.’
‘Oh, I can stabilise him. But not to help you, Grey. To help him.’
Penderville’s body was a manic scribble. Andrea knelt down by his head and placed her hands on his forehead. Jack was surprised to see that they didn’t sink in, as his own hand had done. She leant forward, putting her mouth close to where Penderville’s ear should be, and began to whisper. Jack had an impression of music, playing a slow, stately tune a great distance away. Fist watched, fascinated. Jack wondered what deep processes he was witnessing.
Penderville began to fall into something approaching definition. The speed of shift between selves slowed, until the changes matched the music’s slow, deliberate rhythm. His mouth still gaped open in a scream, but it shifted less and less between different versions of itself. At last, he was mostly his final self – a pale-skinned man in his late twenties, dressed in a vacuum suit that was only missing a helmet.
Andrea reached up and over her shoulder. When she brought her hand back there was a feather in it. She took it and, ever so gently, placed it in Penderville’s mouth. A convulsive shudder ran through him. He screamed like a newborn. His limbs flailed. Andrea’s hands were on his cheeks, her gaze steady on his own.
‘Hush,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all right. You’re dead now. Nothing can hurt you.’
She slowly soothed him through aching moans and then sobs and then just whimpering until he was lying silent, curled around himself. At last she looked up at Jack.
‘He’s ready,’ she said. Then she turned back to Penderville. ‘Stand up,’ she told him gently, ‘it’s time.’ She helped him climb to his feet. The vacuum suit made his movements awkward. Penderville wiped tears away from his face with a heavy gloved hand, leaving grey dust smeared across his cheeks. ‘This is Jack,’ said Andrea. ‘You need to talk to him.’
Then, she turned to Jack. ‘I have to go now. I’m working with the Totality to stabilise all the other fetches.’ Her wings unfurled. For a moment they seemed to be the size of the sky. There was a jagged blast of music, and all the best times they’d shared pulsed in Jack’s mind at once. ‘I’ll see you soon, my love,’ she said. ‘You too, Fist.’
‘If we make it,’ replied Jack.
Andrea laughed. ‘Fuck’s sake, Jack, enough with the self-pity. Didn’t I tell you not to get in too deep? You’ve only got yourself to blame.’ She winked, suddenly so truly herself. ‘You’ll be fine,’ she said, ‘I’m sure of it.’ And then she was gone.
Jack took a moment to pull himself back to the present. He turned to Penderville.
‘Hello. I’m Jack Forster. I’ve waited a long time to meet you.’ He wasn’t sure what else to say. ‘I’m sorry that Yamata killed you.’
‘There’s no need to be,’ Penderville replied hopelessly. ‘I wanted her to. But it didn’t change anything.’
‘What happened to you?’ Jack asked him. ‘Why?’
Guilt and pain had written themselves across Penderville’s whole body. He’d been a young man when he died, but now his hair was grey. Wrinkles scarred his face. The vacuum suit, a little too big, hung awkwardly on him. When he spoke, his voice was soft and sad.
‘I was glad when she killed me,’ he said, his voice bleak. ‘I knew I was going to be caged. I thought at least I’d never have to think about it again. I was wrong about that. I was only sad that nobody knew.’
‘Nobody knew what?’
Penderville put his face in his hands, and moaned. ‘Tell us,’ said Grey, softly. East cut in too. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Confess. It’s so much better to share these things.’
Penderville choked words out. It was difficult to make them out. He was looking down at the ground. There was such passionate shame in his voice. ‘I thought it would be nothing,’ he sobbed. ‘Yamata lied to me. She told me that the rock would just hit one of the abandoned moon bases, that it would just look like Totality sabre rattling. She said that Kingdom would use the incident to justify a fresh round of legislation against them. I didn’t know they’d aimed it at the summer camp.’
Jack looked from Penderville to Grey and East. ‘No,’ he breathed, profoundly shocked.
Words tore out of Penderville. ‘It’s true. I made the rock invisible to anyone on Station. They’d only see it when it actually hit the moon, and then they’d be terrified because they’d think that the Totality could bypass our defences so easily. I killed all those children. And I let Kingdom blame the Totality and start the Soft War, but then I couldn’t live with it – and I was going to tell – but Yamata killed me first.’
Jack swung round to Grey. ‘Did you know about this?’
‘I knew nothing, Jack,’ he protested. ‘I’m appalled. Those poor children—’
‘Oh, for gods’ sake.’ Jack turned back to Penderville. ‘So Yamata dropped the rock on the moon? On Kingdom’s orders?’
‘Yes. I met her when it was all being set up. I was worried about what would happen if I was caught. She told me that it would all be fine. That Kingdom knew. That it was his plan and that it had his full approval.’
‘They would have killed you whatever you’d done, once you knew that.’
‘We’re all tools of the gods. When they call we have to obey. Once I knew that it was Kingdom I couldn’t say no. He was my patron. I owed him everything.’
‘Oh, no.’ Jack stepped towards Penderville and put a hand on his shoulder. This time, it didn’t sink in. ‘That’s what you all do, isn’t it?’ he said to Grey accusingly. ‘You make us puppets.’
‘We’ve got your best interests at heart. We always have done.’
‘Grey and I had nothing to do with this, Jack,’ added East, stepping forwards. ‘We’re as shocked by it as you are. And we’re working with the Totality now. That’s why that snowflake’s here, that’s why we’re not stopping the dead from rising. We want people to know about all this. We want a fresh start.’
‘You want to bring down Kingdom and reinstate Grey. All this is a power play, nothing more.’