The Eternal Prison (34 page)

 

I didn’t look at it, keeping my eyes instead on the red brick walls across the square, impressive enough except for the two big gaps where the bricks crumbled away, like a shell had exploded, revealing white rock beneath. Hauling two man-shaped lumps of alloys and silicone, one functioning and one basically luggage, halfway around the world hadn’t been easy. The hardest part was listening to this one prattle on and on, liking the sound of my voice.

 

I didn’t want my imprint functioning. The idea of another me… of
me,
floating around out there, separate and becoming alien with each passing moment, was unacceptable. Grisha and Marko had argued hard against it, but I’d forced them to rip the brains out of my avatar. We’d kept the physical unit, though; I didn’t care about that. They could make all the dummies that looked like me that they wanted, and I wouldn’t care. It was the
me
inside that made me angry.

 

Dick Marin was famous, so we’d switched his imprint into my avatar and we’d been carting the Marin unit, empty and lifeless, around in the large metal cube that floated behind us, its mini-hover engines sputtering and jerking, making the cube drift wildly, a few inches up, a few to the left, then settling down again. It still made almost no noise as it floated, though.

 

Shivering, I stamped my feet into the crusty yellowed ice that coated the cracked pavement, looking around. It was an impressive sight, so much open space being wasted. Five hundred people could live on this space, I thought, though why they’d ever want to escaped me. Moscow was more or less deserted, as far as I could tell anyway. I looked to my right.

 

“What’s that?”

 

It was a ruin, the remnants of a colorful facade hanging onto the walls for dear life. Several intact spires sprouted from it, topped with half-destroyed domes that rose to a strange point at the top.

 

“A church, Mr. Cates,” the avatar said. I admired the workmanship on the avatars—this one actually looked bruised and beat-up, like a real human being that looked just like me had taken a few shots. Its mouth didn’t work so well anymore, so it spoke with a rubbery tone. “We keep meaning to tear it down. The locals get ornery when we try, though, so it’s been easier to just leave it.”

 

I looked around the square, thinking,
Locals?
We’d seen signs of people actually living in this frozen hell, but I still refused to believe it.

 

Fuck, it was cold. I stared at the ruined church for a while, an inky outline against the rotted ice of the street and the rotted atmosphere beyond, all subtle shades of yellow, some of it almost white. Russia made me think fondly of Chengara, of the endless baking sun that stayed with you even at night, radiating out of the sand and stone.

 

I looked back at the ruined red walls. An impressive tower sprouted up across from us, soaring up and ending in another jagged edge. From what I’d heard the Russians hadn’t gone into Unification willingly. “So this is the center of the universe,” I said. “Why here?”

 

The avatar cocked its head slightly, as if listening intently to someone else, someone invisible. “It’s a fortress, of course,” it said. “It’s been here for a very long time, Mr. Cates. And —” It paused, a slight smile pasted on its fake face. It was strange to see my own face and body doing things I’d never do. I kept wanting to smack myself. “There’s no reason to believe it won’t be here long after
you’re
gone,” it finally finished, turning on a sudden, unfortunate grin. “Besides, it’s got a nice history of autocracy.” The avatar’s smile inched up a bit on the annoying scale. “That’s —”

 

“Don’t,” I said, holding up a hand, “fucking define it.”

 

The avatars were made by the System, so naturally they were a fucking nightmare, filled with all sorts of technological chains, overrides, and surveillance. All the System Cops, their meat bodies long ago burned in huge, nighttime incinerators, were not much more than robots in a lot of ways—the brass could flick a switch and shut them down anytime they wanted to, or beam commands into their virtual underbrains and make them march up and down, whatever. With Amblen’s help, Marko and Grisha, muttering to each other and sweating like pigs, had taken my avatar apart and put it back together again with a new brain—still a slave, but a slave to us.

 

“Come!” Grisha shouted, further away than seemed possible. “It is not safe to stand here, in the open.”

 

“Seriously,” Marko echoed. “What is that smell? It’s like… like…”

 

“Quickly!” Grisha shouted, giving the Techie a shove.

 

I fell in behind them, the avatar doing likewise. The crusty ice cracked and crunched beneath me as I limped through the abandoned streets. Moscow had the look of a deserted corpse, licked clean long ago.

 

You are an insect.
I
am an insect. Scuttling about. But you and I have time. You killed me? Yet I am here. Time. We are masters of it, and thus can do anything, if only we have patience.

 

I closed my eyes for a second. I had a working relationship with two of my ghosts. I wished Squalor would stop popping up to preach every half hour, snippets of the
Mulqer Codex
whispered in my inner ear, like a line of ants crawling up my auditory nerve.

 

I imagined the glass walls again, me on one side, everything else on the other. After a few blessed seconds with only the sound of our feet tearing into the snow, I opened my eyes again and turned my head to look at the Kremlin as we crawled past it. Yellow ice like scum clung to the roof of the building rising above the walls.

 

We’d started smelling Moscow before we’d seen it; a char smell that clung to everything, greasy and thick. Getting back into Europe hadn’t been too hard—I’d done it often enough now—especially with everything gone to shit with the war. Getting from Europe to Moscow had been a fucking death march. The old rust bucket SSF hover we’d boosted out of Liverpool had never been intended to operate in this kind of cold, and three hours out of Dover it had frozen solid and dropped us just outside of Helsinki, just a few miles from the front line of the civil war. The army had swept through northern Europe, Marko’s weak, staticky Vid reports told us, and then hit the snow and the gathered might of the SSF Northern Europe and Russian departments, and there things had stayed for weeks now, everyone cheerfully freezing their nuts off with half a mile between them, each line spread so thin we’d had no trouble at all slipping through them. No trouble stealing one of the army’s fancy troop transports, either, a huge hunk of metal with tracked wheels like a tank that chewed up the ice and moved at the stately pace of twenty miles an hour, at best, without heat. Crunching through northern Europe, we’d come across more abandoned matériel than seemed possible, pristine tech and vehicles just left on the sides of roads like presents. Grisha had driven, and I’d had to send Marko up front every now and then to clear the frost from Grisha’s eyes.

 

Now we’d made it, and I thought we might freeze to death before we got any work done.

 

The avatar liked to remind us that it had an estimated life span of until the universe contracted into a heavy dot and crushed everything down to infinity, and I liked to remind the avatar that we were working on changing that. So far all I got was that fucking smile, so goddamn familiar, even on my face.

 

Grisha led us along the river heading west for a bit, then turned north again, circling around the walls of the Kremlin. He turned onto a wide road, filled with rotting barricades from riots past, everything encased in layers of cloudy ice. The buildings on each side were gray and brown boxes, mostly windowless, some half-destroyed by explosions. This wasn’t age; this wasn’t time. This was recent, and violent. Moscow hadn’t been a happy city not too long before. Now it appeared to be an
empty
city, though Marko assured me that Marin’s Prime, step one in an exhausting chain of events that would lead me to Michaleen Garda so I could strangle the old man, was still in the Kremlin. You didn’t up and move a server farm the size of an entire neighborhood just like that. At least not with half the SFNA deployed a few hundred miles away.

 

Most of the buildings sported complex graffiti, usually in red paint. One stylized group of words repeated constantly, several times per wall. I studied them as we crept past. To me they looked like
neogeon
. They were paired with drawings, surprisingly beautiful and detailed anatomical studies of human body parts: a severed head with veins and tendons dragging beneath it, eyes up and mouth open as if in an expression of dismay; a foot, long white bone jutting from the ankle and tapering to a jagged edge; an eye, muscles and nerves trailing behind it like a squid. The art was all fresh and skilled. The fucking Ivans liked their art.

 

“Hey, Grisha,” I shouted, my voice echoing grandly down the canyonlike road. “What does this mean?”

 

Moscow was huge but felt tiny. Every move you made came right back at you, amplified, like we were under a glass that moved with us, keeping us exactly in the center.

 

The skinny Russian stopped and spun on his heel, storming back toward me, face red, snot running freely from his nose as he crunched and struggled. When he was just a few feet away, he raised his hands.

 

“Be
quiet,
Avery,” he hissed. “Fucking hell. It is not
safe
to draw attention to us.”

 

I looked around: ice and air, dead concrete. The whole city was made of frozen rock and empty spaces, it was just a bad, burned-fingernails smell held together by habit. “Grisha,” I said easily. “Don’t tell me what to do, okay?”

 

Grisha stopped suddenly, his breath panting out of him. He stood there for a moment and then spun away again. “Quickly,” he muttered, his voice carrying easily on the thin air and bouncing off the buildings. “Quickly.”

 

We crossed a wide, gray stone bridge over the river, the wind howling and underscoring the creepy silence of this almost-abandoned city. Where exactly an entire city of people disappeared to when everything around it was fucking wasteland, I didn’t know. I walked as fast as I could, feet sinking into the crunchy ice and leg aching, and caught up with Grisha, sending Marko fading back to join my avatar—my face, dented and mashed from our first meeting in The Star, with Dick Marin’s brains inside—with a look.

 

All the buildings were massive, huge square hulks rising up on either side of the street, all with complex, fancy facades, columns and fluting, and intricate masonry everywhere. They’d all been brightly colored at one time, with flecks of yellow and red paint still clinging here and there, but time had worn them down to a near-uniform gray and brown. The streets were paved and in good shape, the only sign I’d seen so far to prove that this city hadn’t been abandoned decades ago. But I’d been to Newark and Paris; I knew what a dead city looked like. Moscow was too clean, too neat. Buildings hadn’t collapsed, and there weren’t fields of debris and trash the size of city blocks. It was sterile, clean and neat, as if everything and everyone had been plucked up and teleported somewhere else, instantly. Burned out. The ice clinging to every surface, dripping down like teeth from the vacant windows and cornices.

 

The streets were too wide, too. They didn’t offer any cover.

 

As we crossed another huge, empty intersection, the distinct noise of gunshots startled us. After the absolute lack of noise, the three shots froze us all in place, heads whipping around just in time to see a group of people, distant to the north, like tiny shadows flitting past us. They kept coming and coming, bursting from behind one monolithic building and disappearing behind the next. As we stared, a small group stopped and stood in the street, staring back at us.

 

“Fuck,” Grisha growled, rushing back toward us. “Move, move! Come, come! This is not good, Avery. Not good.”

 

He turned and marched off, and Marko, the avatar, and I slowly turned to follow him. The dim figures were too far away to be of immediate concern, and I had no desire to actually meet people who lived in this dead fucking city. My nerves were sizzling, and I spent the next ten minutes twitching this way and that, spinning at every sound of cracking ice and almost murdering Marko every time he cleared his throat. The Techie was thin and sweaty, and had been for days now, looking like some sort of prototype of himself.

 

Outside an abandoned cube of a building behind a sagging chain-link fence, Grisha stopped and flagged us to follow him. Over the narrow and uninviting front door the awning still held rusting letters: . In my mind I pronounced it
rock-hila.

 

“This was hotel,” Grisha said as he pulled the creaking, rusted door open. “Back when there were visitors to Moscow.”

 

Back when there were
people, Salgado suddenly whispered.

 

I took his word for it as I stepped inside, smelling mildew and rust. Maybe before the civil war there’d been visitors, but now with the System of Federated Nations Army locked down a few hundred miles away across the snowy desert, it was just an empty box without power, heat, or charm. And the SFNA was making sure it stayed that way.

 

We entered a small foyer of some sort, a grimy-looking desk front and center. Spikes of ice hung from the desk, evidence that in the warmer months our hotel leaked like a gutshot. The walls were all peeling green wallpaper, brittle and frozen, and the floors were bare concrete with a million tiny tacks in place where carpet had once been. I realized bitterly that I was going to have to keep my boots on all the time, my feet turning into white mold within them. Getting shocked out of sleep and running down here onto this would be a fast way to infection and amputation.

 

“Close the door!” Grisha snapped as the floating cube struggled in behind us, scraping the walls and making my skin crawl. “Quickly, we must explore and fortify.”

 

I turned and walked deliberately back to the front door, slamming it shut. It banged loosely and jumped back at me. It was a good, heavy metal door, but the lock had been torn out and there was no obvious way to secure it. “Who are you worried about getting in here, Grisha? Those nice folks we saw running?”