Authors: Christopher McKitterick
Should he shut them down? No. Herrschaft’s blitzkrieg needed EarthCo’s infrastructure running as smoothly as possible. He would allow the Brain to have its fun. When the war ended, so too would the Brain. Luke Herrschaft, most powerful man in the solar system, found himself at loose ends on the eve of his greatest victory.
Bored and frustrated and furious, he 3-verded faithful Lucilla.
“
I’ll be right there,” she answered.
Tiny servos in Herrschaft’s face made his robot smile. He transferred his virtual presence to another robot, in another room. This space was filled primarily by gelbed, hung with sheets of precious metal that shimmered in orbiting hololamps. He flexed the muscles of his legs, his abdomen, chest, and arms in an effort to trigger sensors in his robototic body that would send signals to the place where his body lay and manufacture the chemicals that might relax his fevered mind.
It would take his repair teams some time to reconnect him with the world. They were competent and efficient. In the mean time, he couldn’t control his empire. For the first time since he founded Feedcontrol, he couldn’t control his empire or the lunatic brain at its core.
To keep from going crazy while he waited to get back online, Lucilla would calm and comfort him. This she could do like no other.
Then—vengeance!
Worlds at War 2
>>Aboard the Deep Space Observatory L5, astronomer Josef Schweitz attempts to compensate for haze clouding the galaxy M82, which he is imaging as part of a galactic black-hole study. He is annoyed by what appears to be electronic chaff produced by a huge fleet of NKK ships coming in from the outer planets. “Gunter,” he 3-verds, “any luck clearing our view?” They are the only two humans aboard the module. “It’s destroying our observations!” “No, Josef,” says the other man. “I’m thinking about comming someone planetside to let them know. Maybe they can get them to turn off their radiant pollution. The ships won’t reply to me.”<<
>>Ms. Monique Benois just wanted to buy a pair of silk stockings. How difficult is that? She needs them for an intheflesh fundraiser the Institute is hosting this weekend. But just as she was about to check out, the connection to Macy’s went dead. When she tried to re-initiate her shopping instance, she got a message that, “ALL NET TRAFFIC HAS BEEN MILITARIZED.”
Darn it!
she thinks,
Now what will I do for nylons?
<<
>>Brad Vasquez wakes up from another bad dream about the wheat drying up before harvest. The dream didn’t wake him, though; it’s a 3VRD from his Army Reserves Boss. He sits up in bed and looks at Mary, his contract partner, breathing quietly in the gray just before sunrise. Her hair is black against the white sheets. He knows what the call is about; he’s seen the news about full-scale war. He’s watched the 24/7 footage of screaming, smoking citizens; the footage of colony domes pierced, precious air and plants blasting out into space; the pointlessness of throwing flesh against steel and plasma cannons. “I’m going to die,” he whispers to her. But can't tell her anything, not while she sleeps so peacefully. “If only they’d waited until it rained,” he says, thinking of the dead wheat in their field.<<
Blackout feed shatters Jonathan’s thoughts and blots out his view through the aircar’s windscreen. Static and hiss and a general numbness overwhelm him. A magnified voice screams in his mind, accompanied by white-hot glowing letters and numerals:
>>JONATHAN SOMBRIO, CREDIT CARD #SZ401678—ECo-, ECo-MINOR, YOU ARE UNDER ARREST FOR DESTRUCTION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. THE STOLEN VEHICLE YOU ARE USING WILL BE FORCED DOWN . . .<<
“
No way,” Jonathan says, though he can’t hear his own words.
I’ve got to be able to do something
.
The fight to ignore the Zone’s blackout feed occupies most of his concentration, but Jonathan blots out the signals from his meat and forces up new memories acquired through the Pilot and Captain, from the Nik Miru. Clean.
The blackout mess dissipates, and Jonathan finds himself alone in the artifact-space. Keeping himself from thinking anything coherent, he’s able to visualize the membranous walls between him and four others, great balloons of intrusion. But also by keeping quiet, he’s able to avoid making the others aware of his existence.
Odd
, he thinks;
I can see them but they can’t see me
. . . .
He fixes his thoughts on a single memory, little more than something Miru glimpsed.
There
—
All the places Jonathan has passed through, even some of those he only vixperienced—some of which felt more real to him at the time—flash to light around him. It feels sort of like the ECoNet landscape. . . .
He solidifies the thought, and as fast as he can picture himself in a place—
It takes Jonathan a moment to catch his balance, then he finds himself standing beside a heavily graffitied wall at the end of a street, Old Downtown Minneapolis. He glances down at himself, smiles when he sees the shredded boots and loose pants, the black jacket and even dirt beneath his ragged nails.
“
Did it,” he whispers. “Fuck if I ever go anywhere naked again.”
With a deep breath to shore up the remnants of his uncertainty, Jonathan steps toward the false wall to his left, the passage into the Malfits’ motherboard. The 3VRD bricks and mortar can’t stop him, not that they ever did even before he got the amp. Face to face with the grey shockplas door, he powers up his commcard.
“
It’s me, Jonathan. Let me in.”
Instantly, Lucas’ sharkform 3VRD appears, weaving a sinuous tail. “Jonny-boy, didn’t expect you so soon. Come on board, on board.” A smile splits the face and dozens of crystal teeth sparkle like tiny fluorescent lamps.
As soon as the door pops and begins to open, Jonathan says, “Right, Lucas, you fuck.”
The shark stops moving for only a moment, then the smile reappears. “Well, Jonny, I see we need to teach you some manners. I’ll let Blackjack know you’ve returned.”
“
Do that.”
Jonathan steps into the vestibule and hits his light enhancement program. Walls form out of the blackness, grainy and featureless, and Jonathan notices that a new doorway opposite the front entrance has been added. Among the rancid garbage in the small corridor, he sees a sprawled body of a girl—still breathing—and a second girl whose posture makes her seem to be studying the floor. He recognizes her and nods as he passes through the inner door.
Blackjack’s impassive face and red hair greet him a second before a sharp blow across his face. Jonathan gathers his bearing on the floor, but he’s semi-blinded by the still active light enhancement. As he shuts it down, something collides with his ribcage.
“
Knock it off!” Jonathan shouts, curling into a ball. This wasn’t what he’d expected at all. What if he gets beaten to unconsciousness before he can get away? What if. . . .
It was supposed to be so simple—
Thud
, four distinct, sharp knuckles bruise into his side. Jonathan whips his body around the arm as it pulls back to deliver a second blow, and as fast as that, he’s hooked his prey. While the dusty, hard-fisted world falls away, Jonathan holds tight to that arm, his fingernails sinking into the flesh. He hears himself laughing, and the sound trails out like a locomotive horn dopplering into the mountains.
A wall of cut stone rises up all around Jonathan, encircling him, but open at the top. His meat feels solid, as if he’s still on Earth, and terror grips him as he wonders if he failed, if Blackjack beat the life out of him before he was able to drag the gang leader away.
He closes his eyes and runs toward the wall, willing it away. For just a moment, he feels the impact of his face and chest against stone, but then the wall bends before his rush, and finally he slurps through something the consistency of mud. When he opens his eyes again, he’s bodiless, floating in the familiar star-filled space. Behind him rises his fortress, echoing and quaking and beginning to crack. Again, the sky crowds with the intricate spheres of Miru, Pang, Pilot Librarse and Captain Jackson. Even so, a portion of his mind wonders:
Is this part of Lucas’ torture?
A subsonic rumble passes through the whole universe, rippling across the membranes of those who carry the artifact within them, shaking the fortress behind Jonathan so that its stones come all unmortared and begin to topple.
Not yet, crash it, not yet! How do I stay alive but still strangle a man in a place where violence is outlaw?
Off in the distance, a flickering of light catches Jonathan’s attention. He walks across the featureless earth, over a hill, until he makes out what appears to be an electronics junkyard filling a shallow valley. Ancient television sets, tube radios, computer screens, early telecast receivers—all these things flash and spark in a great whirling heap, as if the detritus of abandoned technology has achieved such great mass as to form gravitational attraction. Screens and glowplates orbit a central dark area, gathering speed as they grow closer; tens of thousands of the things spiral inward, cracked and smoking, jangling and tinkling.
*Jonathan, what’s happening?*
The words are feeble and staticky. Jonathan recognizes the voice.
“
Welcome to hell, Blackjack.” He says it exactly as he had rehearsed, cold and sharp like a molecular blade slicing flesh at one degree Kelvin.
Before he realizes what’s happening, Jonathan glances at a nearby television screen. A moment later, he becomes Blackjack.
No!
he cries, but it’s too late to protest.
The luminescent screen drags Jonathan through scene after scene of brutality, beginning at the moment when Jonathan pulled the man unwittingly into the alien place. Back through an existence Jonathan hadn’t even imagined, filled with psychoactive feed that twists a mind into ropey contours, nearly snapping it in two time and again as emotions nearly surface; single words gush through his being: CREDIT, PUMP, FEED, ’BOARD; names reel off one after another, accompanied by a sort of
. . .
desire? Back through the early days before there were any Malfits, acquiring the abandoned building by slamming four fingertips through a shrank’s throat and tearing out his trachea, back, back, through time to less brutal days of pain,
Oh god!
pain in the guise of brothers and sisters—
I don’t understand
—terrycloth robes and momentary flashes of blood, of saliva, of wires protruding from freckled skin, revulsion cauterized by nonsexual lust; insane brief pulses of memory. . . .
It’s all stolen, where’d it go, help me Jonathan, I’m sorry, I’ll crush Lucas for you, don’t you see
—“I have no past! I’m no one!”
As the voice rips through his psyche, Jonathan grips hold of himself and drags his consciousness up from the black hole of swirling fluids and shattering electronics—such confused emptiness and heavy-gravity need—as Blackjack begins to rummage through Jonathan’s memories; up he climbs, up a cable of thought to where his past exists high above, the skin of his fingers burning with the effort to carry his weight, cracking eyes fixed on a circle of light high above. He’s not sure what it is, only knows he’s got to get there now, right this instant. . . .
That’s me
, he realizes—
And
slam!
He feels his mind twist and warp through corridors of Blackjack’s blooded, disordered, incomprehensible life,
slam
—he’s surrounded again by the walls of a primitive fortress. The uppermost blocks of stone are shattering and rising up, revealing that they’re not granite but cheap concrete with a laminate. As they shatter, Jonathan recalls who he is and what he has done to his gang leader.
Flashbacks of Blackjack’s life trigger in his mind, for here he is unprotected by his walls. Jonathan realizes he has added the bastard to his repertoire of self, and suddenly I understand. The sympathy created by having dipped into another’s life makes him real, and I regret.
He throws wide the arms of his mind, wiping away the fortress. Behind him, Blackjack’s whirlpool glares white-hot—now high over the valley—transformed nearly into a collapsing star, emitting a steady scream of self-loathing that tinges the edges of its accretions disk russet. Such need, need bred by a ravenous emptiness, a demanding loneliness, a wild aimlessness. . . .
“
What have you done to me?” the star screams. It flickers in such a way as to look like lips and teeth, speaking.
Jonathan begins to move toward the whorling junkyard again, but knows there’s nothing he can do now; Lonny—“Eyes” of the
Bounty
—had reached this point, too, and couldn’t be saved.