Authors: James Knapp
They were easy because they never talked. They never ate, shit, or slept; they just always had your back, day or night. When the command spoke was lit, they did what you wanted. When it was off, they watched, and waited for it to come back on.
“They do what they’re told,” I said.
“My men always—”
“It’s not the same. They get imprinted. You could use them for target practice, as long as the spoke is lit.”
“Ever worry the command spoke would drop or the imprint would fail? That you’d lose control of them?” Buckster asked.
“Only every day.”
“That must be nerve-racking.”
“It isn’t. The controls don’t fail. You could shove a bomb up their assholes and point them at a schoolyard; they don’t care. They’ll do it.”
It was nerve-racking at first. I slept the first few months with one hand on my gun, but after a while I got to like the quiet. You spend enough time with five guys, even jacks, and you get used to them. You get used to the smell of them and they way they act. Each one is a little different, but they’re all wired to you, like extensions of yourself. In a weird way, I missed it. I missed my extra eyes and ears.
“You really do that?” Buckster asked.
“No, man,” I said. “Revivors don’t have assholes.”
He didn’t talk for a while. He just drove.
“They didn’t have that many revivors in the field when I served,” he said when he piped up again. “I think they’re relied on too much these days.”
“Then why you pushing bums into jack service?”
“Homeless,” he said. “The military won’t take them on active duty if they’ve got physical or mental problems; with revivors filling out the ranks, they don’t need to. If you’ve got issues like that, the best you can do is tier two, because if you’re just going to get reanimated, it doesn’t matter. What are they supposed to do?”
“You got me.”
“Besides, it beats being dead.”
“It is being dead.”
“They still have the memories and experiences they had when they were alive. They have consciousness, of a sort.”
“Yeah, well, trust me. It ain’t the same.”
He shrugged. “What are you going to do now that you’re back?”
I’d thought about that some, but not much. At first I thought I’d hit the fights for extra cash, but Eddie said my left hand counted as an augment, and it disqualified me from the ring. There were back-alley bouts that pit man on revivor, but those weren’t strictly legal, and I knew better than to go bare-knuckles with a goddamned jack.
“I heard you guys got a job program?” I asked.
“We do,” he said. “Come by and we’ll get you signed up. It won’t be a dream job, but we’ve got a lot of contacts. I can’t promise a time frame, but I’ll set you up with something.”
I watched the rain come down until we got to the place. It didn’t look half bad. It was a long walk from Bullrich.
“Here we are,” he said, handing me a set of keys. “You’re on the tenth floor, unit 3B. You sure you don’t need any help?”
“I’m sure. Thanks.”
He popped the trunk, and I lifted the door open.
“Hey, Leon,” I said. “Thanks. For everything. I mean it.”
“It’s why we’re here.”
The rain was blowing into the car. I went to get out and he stopped me.
“Can I give you one piece of advice?”
“Shoot.”
“Stop wearing the glove now,” he said, “before you get used to it. You were wounded in service to your country. Don’t hide your scars.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You’re tier one now; you can do better than what we can offer, but you’ve got to do the legwork. You got any contacts, use them.”
“I know one guy.”
“Ex-soldier?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. You have my card. Call me if you need anything, or just feel like talking. Take care, Cal.”
I got out and got my pack, and he pulled away. The rain was worse by then, so I hustled in through the gate. At the door I fished out my ID and held it up.
“Flax, Calliope. First Class,” the door said, and the light turned green. I wouldn’t admit it, but it felt good to hear that.
I pushed the door open and went inside. It was warm in there, and it looked clean. I took the elevator up to the tenth floor, then hauled my bag to my new unit. There was a note taped to the door.
Welcome back.
I pulled it down and stuffed it in my pocket. I put the key to the scanner, then pushed open the door and took my first step into my new place.
There wasn’t much, but all my shit was there, in a pile. The room looked like a prison cell, but it was big and it was clean.
I dropped my bag and kicked the door shut behind me, then walked up to the biggest pile of boxes. There was note on the top box.
The storage fuckheads let us take all your shit, so I guess you’re lucky it was us and not a bunch of goddamned thieves. Welcome back.
—Eddie
There’d be no more fights for me; I was off the roster, and I’d never go pro. The note was pretty much good-bye.
“Fucker.”
I think it was the one nice thing the asshole ever did. It didn’t make me happy, exactly, but it did make me smile.
It made me feel like I was home.
Nico Wachalowski—Mercy Greaves Medical Center
A long, deep unconsciousness brought me back to the grind, like it often did. I’d stopped trying to make sense of it or make peace with it a long time ago, but it had a way of creeping back in when I didn’t expect it. While someone, usually Sean, worked to put my body back together, my mind turned those memories over and over like a puzzle still missing a piece.
“Sean?” I said, but I couldn’t hear myself through the ringing in my ears. My head was still spinning from the concussion grenade, and the stars wheeled by above me as I was dragged through the dirt on my back. Someone had me by one of my ankles and was pulling me behind them. When I lifted my head, I saw three men.
Two flanked the one who had me, and I saw a flash of light as the one on the left glanced back. All of them were naked, and all of them had skin that was starting to wrinkle and pock.
I reached for my gun, but it wasn’t there. My knife was gone too. I struggled, and yellow eyes turned back to stare at me from above. I tried to kick free, but one of them grabbed my other leg. They dragged me out of the brush onto damp, soft soil. I heard the creak of wood, and then I was being pulled downward.
I craned my neck back to see the mouth of a tunnel getting smaller behind me, the earth swallowing the sounds of screams and gunfire. Dirt went up the back of my shirt and I could feel insects scrambling against my bare skin.
They’d dragged me into an abandoned underground supply dump, with dirt walls reinforced by wood planks. An electric light hung from an extension cord, and it still glowed weakly. They pulled me into the middle of the floor, then let me go.
There were bones down there. Whoever deployed the revivors left them out there to eat whatever they could find. I could see a human rib cage in the dirt a few feet away, picked clean.
Revivors came back with what they called a cognitive disconnect. They didn’t exhibit human emotion, and they couldn’t recognize it in others. They didn’t understand fear or pain. Their old moralities and taboos were gone. They only knew their wants. If I wanted to get out of there alive, I had to act, but I couldn’t move even when one of them crouched down next to me. The look in its eyes made me think of an animal staring at fire. There was a primal fascination there, with something it didn’t understand.
The others surrounded me. Fingers slipped in between the buttons of my shirt and tore it open. A string of cold saliva touched my neck.
Move. You have to move.
I didn’t, though, not until the first set of teeth bit down. Pain bored into my shoulder as the thing’s wet, grimy hair brushed my neck and face. I heard the crunch and I screamed. By the time it raised its head and I saw a chunk of my own flesh clenched in its teeth, the next one had already crowded in and bit down where the blood was pumping out. They were eating me. They were eating me alive.
You have to move.
I pushed against them, but the space was too tight. I had no leverage, and they were too heavy. A knee bashed into my ear; then a thumb went into my left eye. I tried to twist my head, but they had me pinned.
The pressure on my eye built up until I felt something cold slip into the socket. Warmth gushed down my cheek, into my ear. With the eye I had left, I saw one of them pulling a big strip of skin away. In the dim light, I could make out the chest hairs sprouting from it.
I’m going to die,
I thought. Everything went black for a second; then I heard a faint voice.
I’m going to—
“Wachalowski!”
The voice was Sean’s, coming from back up the tunnel. He’d found me somehow. The fingers and teeth that had borne down on me were gone.
“Wachalowski!”
I turned my head and looked across the dirt floor. With nothing but darkness on the left side, I saw blood and many footprints. I could still hear them nearby, but they’d left me. I tried to lift my head, so I could see. . . .
I opened my eyes. I was lying on my back in bed and I could hear a vitals monitor somewhere behind me. Normally if I hit trouble in the field and needed attention, I’d end up back at the tech center with Sean, but that wasn’t where I was now.
Looking around as best I could, I saw someone in the room with me. A man in an overcoat sat at a console to one side of me, watching information scroll by, his face turned away. According to my JZI, it was well after visiting hours.
“I take it you’re not my doctor,” I said. My voice was hoarse.
The man looked over at me and smiled weakly. He was middle-aged with wavy hair that had grayed at the temples. I’d seen that face before.
“I know you,” I said.
“Bob MacReady,” he said. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”
MacReady worked for Heinlein Industries, the UAC’s largest government contractor and sole controller of revivor technology. It had been largely based on technology discovered by Samuel Fawkes. When my investigation two years ago pointed me at Heinlein, he’d provided a lot of information to me. I couldn’t prove it, but I was sure he also had a hand in transferring Faye’s newly processed body to me too.
“How did you get in here?”
“Money talks,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I got hit by a train. What happened?” The last thing I remembered was lying next to the curb.
“From what I can tell from your records, you were injected with some kind of custom tetrodotoxin variant,” MacReady said. “It causes paralysis even in very small doses. It’s not easy to get.”
“It was a revivor,” I told him.
“Our revivors can be outfitted with injectors capable of administering a payload like that at short range,” he said. “Usually they’re loaded with something a little more deadly, and cheaper, than that.”
I checked the FBI logs; Vesco and SWAT had arrested the survivors at the hotel, and all the revivors at the site had been impounded. No one had found the man, Takanawa, though, and no one had managed to intercept the cloaked revivor. Wherever it came from, it got away carrying eleven tactical nukes. Each one was about the size of a cell phone, and could take down a skyscraper.
I checked my buffers, but the information I’d pulled from the computers at the hotel was gone.
With some difficulty, I sat up and faced MacReady. The only light was from the glow of the monitor, but I could see he had aged visibly in the last two years. He looked tired.
“I assume this isn’t a social visit,” I said. “Why did you come here? Are you here representing Heinlein Industries?”
“No,” he said, “but I am here to talk to you about one of our former employees, Samuel Fawkes.”
Fawkes was officially dead, and even his revivor was considered destroyed, at least on record. Two years back he had orchestrated the largest terrorist attack ever executed on UAC soil. From an unknown, remote location, contained inside a metal stasis crate, he had managed to infiltrate Heinlein Industries. With the help of revivors smuggled into the country, he was able to kill hundreds of people and cause millions of dollars’ worth of damage.
He’d done it, so he claimed, because of information he uncovered while employed at Heinlein. It was there that he learned of the existence of people like Zoe Ott and Sean Pu.
“What about him?” I asked.
“We believe he is still operating.”
“You believe he is, or you know he is?”
“I believe he is,” he said.
“Why?”
“No one was able to trace it, but some weeks ago, his identifier was picked up, attached to a long-distance communication.”
“If that’s true, then why didn’t you report it?”
“I only just became aware of it, and I’m reporting it now, to you,” he said. “It wasn’t reported previously because I assume the recipient of the communication doesn’t want anyone to know.”
“Who was he talking to?”
“I don’t know that either, I’m afraid. But I’m telling you—Samuel Fawkes is still out there and he’s still operating. The events of two years ago are not over.”
I nodded. I’d known Fawkes was never found, but he hadn’t tried to communicate with me since. I had been starting to hope he’d been uncrated and destroyed in the field, but never really believed it. He’d made his intentions clear the last time we’d spoken.
“How much do you know about his motivations back then?” I asked.
“Very little I could verify,” he said. “I know he infiltrated Heinlein’s systems, and used it to gain access to the information he’d amassed on Zhang’s Syndrome back when he’d been alive. I also know he used our systems to analyze huge amounts of recorded brain-wave data.”