Transcendence (9 page)

“
Jonny, I haven’t been the greatest sister, but it’s been hard around here with you gone. You don’t know what it’s like to have to share a server with Mom and Dad.”

“
You think you’re telling me something new?” he asks.

“
I’m sorry. Of course you know what it’s like,” she says, quieting to a whisper, “but with me all alone, with no one for Dad to take out his frustrations on. . .”

She sees his hardening face and quickly continues. “Come on, Jonny, give me a chance. I’ve had some time to think, you know, and I think this family’s crashed out.”

What?
Jonathan thinks.
This is the moment I’ve been waiting for?

“
That’s it?” Jonathan asks, still careful to avoid her eyes. Even as he speaks, he regrets the bitter tone. Still he can’t stop it; it’s too familiar, and too much resentment stands between the two of them. His regret mounts as he wishes he hadn’t attempted to talk to her at all, not yet.

Jonathan takes a step away, into the entryway. “I’m very proud of you for recognizing the obvious. Man, Josephine, you ever heard of the word ‘denial’? Look it up.”

Jonathan’s father, a tall, thin man in his 40s, bumps into him. The man’s face temporarily tightens, then falls slack. His jaw moves subtly, as if chewing at something small. His eyes are defocused and pointed over Jonathan’s head. His father is probably 3VRDing. A second later, the man’s bald forehead wrinkles in frustration and a sneer twists his upper lip. Then he continues to walk, moving as if in a dream.

Jonathan sees Ms. Sombrio farther down the hall, plucking at something invisible under her chin. She is slumped against the dining room wall where it joins the carpeted hallway, her head absently lolling from side to side. Her lips move mutely, and her face is a coiled mass of naked emotions, as if snakes seethe beneath the pale, brown skin.
Man, and they called me the feed addict. Guess it doesn’t matter once you’re an adult, consuming citizen with the credit to pay for your subscriptions
.

Jonathan swivels on his heel and looks back at his sister. “I’m sorry, Josephine,” he says, finally able to apologize. He had honestly wanted to change things between them, and she had seemed receptive, even taken the initiative. But he had let the past get in the way. “I didn’t mean what I said. We’re cool.”

Josephine’s face has changed. Jonathan frowns, not quite sure what it is that makes her look so different.

The eyes. He realizes her eyes are now vacant, safe to peer into, but hollow. She no longer painfully returns his stare, instead looking right through him.

“
Josephine?” he repeats, audio-only.

A chill races up Jonathan’s spine. Suddenly the house seems so empty, not only an antiseptic shelter for a crashed-out family, but completely devoid of life. His father shifts along the hall like an automaton, avoiding unseeable objects, touching non-present items or people or god-knows-what. His mother is involved in her own waking fantasy or nightmare, her body merely an obstacle or a trap. No human sound fills the apartment’s hollow except the rasping of his father’s shoes on the floor tiles. A background of unlocalized static. The distant boom of sonic grenades. A nearby scream of pleasure or terror, coming from an adjoining apartment unit. Heavy scraping along the street outside. A jet’s roar. A whining machine buried in one of the walls. Underground explosions. Wet noises coming from his sister’s silently moving lips. The scattered evidence of death and decay.

Jonathan squeezes his eyes closed so hard they ache, then opens them again, trying to see this place as home. Though burdened with the soundtrack of Jonathan’s nightmares, the world feels terribly silent. He fights the desperate urge to power up and splice in. His eyes cast around and finally settle upon his sister, alone on the pink couch. Again, regret prickles Jonathan’s scalp for having spurned her. He had so wanted something other than this, but look what’s happened. Look how the past creeps into the present and wrecks everything. Change is the hardest thing of all.

He takes a few steps closer to Josephine, his hands unconsciously extended toward her, his eyes pleading, staring into hers. Her lips are so beautiful, full, he wants to kiss them. But he knows that isn’t what he wants to do. Though he begins to shake with the need to communicate with a living human being, a real person intheflesh, he can’t think of a thing to say. Her final words begin to echo through his head.
Crashed out, crashed out
. . . .

The words echo and muffle, begin to transmute into other words, then sprout red thorns and bushy black fur. Yellow eyes flip open in his mind as the creature growls the words, “Crashed out, crashed out,” over and over, a curse.

“
No!” Jonathan yells, clasping his hands to his ears, once again shutting down the blackcard that had initiated itself without his command, realizing that he’s not crazy, that it’s only electronic intrusion again. Every emotion within him swirls and whirlpools stronger and stronger until they gather into a vortex of only one, the way a bowl of paint stirred together ends up brown or black: the color of terror.

More than anything else he doesn’t want to engage his headcard again, he doesn’t want to admit his feed-dependency, but he can’t stand the barrenness of this reality, can’t stand the worse-than-loneliness of being home.
Isn’t there anything more?
he wonders.
Nothing? Nothing?

All at once he 3VRDs and splices in full fivesen revmetal, then overlays
Lone Ship Bounty
from the pov of the bombardier atop reality.

The image of his sister—gold-skinned and entwined with bands of rare metals—appears to dance with the Captain as he struggles with a Nik, an NKK soldier. In the background, ten men scream songs; the musicians are swathed in ultrablack robes embroidered with intelligent colors that shift across the spectrum and tug memories from the show’s subscriber.

Memories: Jonathan hears rifles firing and feels bombs concussing and sees a girl falling into a heap of trash as his sister’s beautified face smiles and talks on and on about nothing he can understand in a voice overpowered by music and the thunder of memories he hadn’t realized were so traumatic. Then he realizes why:

érase. Long-lost love, if it had been that at all.

Like a punch to the gut, Jonathan feels the flesh element of his body collide with something hard and splices an overlay image of his intheflesh reality in halftone—an editing applet he snapped-in to his blackcard. It takes a moment for him to recognize that he is staring down at a sidewalk, that he has fallen to his knees against the weedy concrete. This image is blurry, as if something has gotten in his eyes. He blinks hard and thrusts himself upright. He curses. It’s been many years since his meat took a tumble just because of overstimulation. Then his anger fades and he realizes he still hasn’t lost himself in feed or he wouldn’t care about this.

Guilt and regret and panic drive a need for more external stimulation, for more overlays and realities, for thicker mental insulation, so Jonathan slams the CityNet landscape atop the crowd of people yammering in his head. The UI he prefers delivers rivers of color-coded and digitized data webbing his pov like electronic veins, lending a solid sense of reality none of the others could. Jonathan, as he existed minutes prior, begins to fade. This is his turf. He is master here, much more than just another boy. Now he begins to relax.

A quick query along CityNet lets him know the Malfits are still a cohesive gang; their subtle signature-notches mark virtually every major netway intersection like graffiti. He had consciously avoided thinking about them until now. But now they are, if nothing else, the handhold he so desperately needs, and he can’t avoid them forever. He still owes Blackjack, and Jonathan’s been gone for a long time. He clenches his mind shut like a fist and moves toward them.

What feels like someone else’s hand numbly pushes open the steel gate surrounding the apartment house just before he would have run into it. A few seconds later, his feet carry him along a well-known path to the gang’s ’board—their motherboard, their hangout, where their black-market server resides—in an abandoned house on Chicago Avenue. He doesn’t look forward to seeing them, hell no, but neither does he fear the encounter. He won’t let himself feel
anything
about them, particularly about Blackjack, their head man. Least of all will he allow himself to fear. The fist of his mind tightens.

“
Fuck you!” Jonathan sends the 3VRD curse like a ripple along the netways for anyone who happens to be tapped in at the moment, a bump of feed to wash over the city’s cumulative brain. He uses a copy of his father’s 3VRD as the narrator. His face twists in a snarl of a grin.

“
Fuck you all!”

Clarisse Chang’s security station hung stationary in Neptune’s upper atmosphere, nearly in orbit around the pale blue gas giant—high enough from the planet’s center of mass so that onboard gravity barely exceeded Earth’s. Even at this altitude, winds could be potentially destructive. Roiling clouds swept past like mountains, as if the station were hurtling across smooth white and blue terrain, flying over hundred-kilometer valleys and then crashing through liquid cliffs. The tiny disk of the sun shone at a steep angle, tingeing the sky’s horizons a faint purple while, overhead, stars pricked pure blackness. Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, was rising. For a moment, its larger disk partially eclipsed the sun’s.

The village-sized craft, essentially a flying wing, faced into the constant winds, engineered so that it rose with a force nearly equal to the downward drag of gravity. A net of charged monofilaments spread below the belly of the station, collecting methane and hydrogen.

Inside, irritably flicking through a multitude of orbiting instruments’ points-of-view, Clarisse watched the renegade EarthCo fighter/bomber approach Neptune system. It looked like no more than a ball bearing set on a velvet table scattered with diamonds. No, she chastised herself, not a ball bearing but a bullet, fired at her from the Western devils on Earth. Once more, EarthCo was trying to rip her open. Clarisse struggled to suppress the out-of-control hate, gathering around her only the good hate, the useful hate.

She wondered if EarthCo Feedcontrol would tell its citizens their beloved soldiers had turned against all reason; Feedcontrol’s leader had informed her on a secure line ten hours ago that the craft had gone renegade. Ten hours! Its crew must have planned this months ago. She had responded as cordially as she could to Herrschaft, the man she blamed for her family’s death and the nightmare that followed. It had been necessary to behave well with him; she knew, if she didn’t control herself in this opportunity to fight EarthCo, that she would destroy her chance to build upon it. She would be cordial to the Destroyer himself, if that’s what it took to punish EarthCo.

“
302.5 by 102.7, mark,” she muttered to herself while mentally tapping a key that dispatched another remote-control hunter rocket. She flicked to the pov of the hunter, peering through its tiny optics at the ship’s growing silver disk. The previously dispatched hunters were invisible to her or anyone else looking through normal-light optics, infrared sensors, or even some higher-wavelength receptors. She hoped the EarthCo ship wasn’t fitted with sensors of her hunters’ generation. But then EarthCo always seemed a step ahead in military technology.

“
Chang,” a man’s voice sounded in her head, “you have not been acknowledging my calls. What is your information regarding threatening—”

“
Moment, please,” she snapped at the intruder. Momentarily, she was drawn out of full concentration on the center splice through which she’d been working, and she noticed the physical reality surrounding her body.

Shen-lin—the civilian head of government of Neptunekaisha’s stations—stood to one side of her, a thin man with arms crossed behind his back. This was no 3VRD projection; he had come to her intheflesh. She reveled in the power of having forced her civilian superior to appear in person. Now, with a defense situation imminent, she could afford to treat him in whatever way suited her. Many powers were granted to the Coordinator of Protection out here, so far from NKK on Earth, or even its bases on Saturn or Uranus; at the highest level of threat, she was even granted autonomy as martial ruler over Neptunekaisha, which owned all of Neptune and its ostensibly private-corp moons.

EarthCo had never dared attack here before, never so blatantly. Now they were about to, even though it would be only a renegade attack. No longer would she endure Shen-lin’s complaints. No longer would she be considered less a person than this . . . civilian.

A grin curled her lips when she noticed that the 3VRD splice of space, which her headcard projected into her forward field of vision, cut off one of his arms and moved it to the right 30 degrees, where her natural pov resumed. The shelves that lined the plastic walls of her room sat empty. Only a desk, a server cabinet on the floor, a chair, and Shen-lin cluttered her space.