“No. No! I left you monsters at Prime behind ten years ago and I’m not going back now, I don’t care how much money you offer me. You’ll have to arrest me.”
Through all this, the woman hadn’t even poked her head up.
“I’m not from Prime,” Jules said.
“Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I can’t see your armor, or your guardcore friends?”
“Yeah. That’s… complicated, I guess. Look, I’m not the techhead here, but my boss is interested in your research. No restrictions. A team to call your own. They need a leader. Your dossier says that’s you.”
Impulsively, Jules reached up and pulled the helmet from her head, then tucked it under her arm. “Look. See? Here’s my face. Do I look like the kind of Prime hardboot that’d be coming to throw you in jail or whatever they do?”
It took longer than Jules expected, but slowly, Liao lifted her head above the desk and met Jules’s eyes.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“My name is Jules Valentine.”
A dart whisked past her cheek, ruffling her hair, and embedded itself in Liao’s chest. The doctor had only until a count of five to look outraged and betrayed, then the sedatives kicked in and she slumped into a heap against the desk.
Jules sighed. “Was that necessary?”
“Protocol,” GC1T7 said.
The GC entered the lab, still in that three-point formation, and painted up every object in the room with their sighting lasers before one finally decided it was safe enough to drop to one knee and throw Liao over their shoulder.
Jules popped her helmet back on so that the others wouldn’t hear her say, “Sorry, doc. At least you won’t remember any of this.”
CHAPTER 5
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
ALWAYS RISK PERSONAL SAFETY FOR GOOD NOODLES
Graham insisted they get food in their bellies before he answered Tomas’s question, and as much as it annoyed Sanda to have to wait, she could see the wisdom in his plan. Not only were they likely to have their conversation recorded in the autocab, Sanda was way more likely to throttle either of them if they pissed her off on an empty stomach.
Graham punched in an address, and the autocab blipped a warning chime. “That address is within the Grotta district. Are you sure? I can recommend an excellent noodle shop not five minutes away!”
“I’m sure,” Graham grumbled to the cab and jabbed away the warning.
Sanda thought she could hear the car sigh, exasperated, as it slid into the steady flow of traffic. She definitely heard the doors double-lock.
“What’s wrong with the Grotta?” she asked.
“It’s where I grew up,” Graham said.
“Oh.” She fiddled with the seam between the cushioned arm of the wheelchair and its metal body.
Graham had said little about his childhood, but what he had shared wasn’t pretty. Laguna had all the facts stashed away in her tablet, and probably a long arrest record she hadn’t read to them out of an attempt to be polite, but it was what filled in the cracks between the facts that gave Sanda pause. That made her belly clench and her fists grip.
Her grandparents, whoever they were, had at least had the decency to drop Graham in a hospital before disappearing into broad daylight. When he reached majority, he could have had his DNA pulled and searched them up, but he’d never done so. Said they didn’t owe him anything but the body he had, and that was fine by him, but Sanda and Biran had always wondered.
When they were kids, they dreamed their grandparents were royalty on the run, hiding their only child away to protect him. When they were teenagers, they hacked into Graham’s records to find out for themselves. The arrest—and injury—record they found there made them never talk about it again.
The sleek polish of Alexandria-Atrux fell away, and the Grotta grew up around them. There were poor neighborhoods on Ada. Nothing desperate, nothing really dangerous. Just places where the people who earned only basic income lived. It wasn’t something Sanda had ever thought about. Most of those people moved in circles she never crossed with. They seemed… content, she’d thought. Prime provided, after all: basic income, housing, medical, and food. No one went without in the united worlds of Prime Inventive.
The Grotta was not content.
Its streets and buildings jagged and sagged, growing off of one another with the haphazard rapidity of a cancerous cell. Garbage—she hadn’t seen stray garbage in her life—collected in the gutters of the streets. She recognized the brilliant orange flash of a candy wrapper stuck in a drain cover. Those few people who walked the streets either lingered or rushed. The cameras in the light poles—ubiquitous in Prime cities, but usually impossible to spot—glared with uncovered, silvery eyes.
“What happened here?” she asked Graham or Tomas or the universe at large.
“I’ve been asking myself that for a long time,” Graham said.
The autocab pulled up to a curb alongside one of these burned-out husks Laguna had showed them and rang out the cheery “you’ve arrived” tune. Graham reached for the door.
“Hold on,” Sanda said. “There’s nothing here.”
“I doubt that.” Graham let himself out of the cab and stretched, then pulled Sanda’s door open. “Come on, kid. Let me show you one of the few good things of the Grotta.”
She wheeled out onto the muddy street and set the wheelchair to follow at Graham’s side. The autocab was only too happy to pull away, leaving the three of them standing on a dirty sidewalk looking over a pile of charred and rotting rubble.
“This was Udon-Voodun,” Graham said, and nudged at a piece of debris with the tip of his mag boot. “Best damn noodle place in Atrux, no matter what the snobs downtown think.”
“Was,” Sanda said.
His sour expression wiped away and he ruffled her hair with one hand. “The Grotta grows.” He tipped his head back like he was sniffing the air, then nodded to himself. “This way.”
Half a block along and the structure of the streets started to lose meaning to Sanda, but not Graham. He’d been born to this, and it’d shaped him, rearranged something essential in his DNA that made him feel the city like an extension of himself.
It would have been impressive, watching him slough off the old-merchant persona and blend back into the streets, into the life he’d left behind, if he hadn’t been her dad. Dads weren’t supposed to change like that, right before your eyes. Weren’t supposed to shake off everything you thought you knew about them like an old blanket, as if the life of domesticity you’d known with them was only temporary—water droplets caught in fur. The real man lay beneath. Waiting. And not even that deep, judging by the speed of things.
Ten minutes in the Grotta, and her dad was walking like he’d never left.
“Here it is,” he said. “Knew it wouldn’t fold.”
Sprouting out of the side of a water-stained concrete building was a structure that had started life as a lean-to. The corrugated metal roof clung in place, patched with algae-based plastics. A counter with a row of seats formed a line of defense between the kitchen and the patrons, but more benches and tables had popped up on the outer fringes. The roof reached greedy fingers across the narrow strip of sky, offering some shelter.
The place could have been made of tin cans and toothpaste, and Sanda’s stomach still would have tried to climb out of her mouth and pilot her chair to the counter. The scents coming out of that kitchen were unlike any she’d ever encountered before. She swallowed excess saliva.
“Oh yeah,” Tomas said. “Place like this would never die. I can’t fucking wait.”
“Sit,” Graham directed them, and Sanda crammed her chair under a beaten-up old picnic table while Tomas perched on an alarmingly wobbly plastic lawn chair.
Graham came back with three noodle bowls balanced along his arm, curls of steam wafting from each. Only one thing on the menu at this place. That meant it was definitely good.
Two bowls later, Graham said, “You knew
Arden?”
Tomas slurped down the last of his broth. “Knew of them. The Nazca courted them for a while, but they dropped off the grid shortly after taking payment for a job completed.”
“Sounds like Arden. They never liked being tied down, even as a kid. Maybe especially as a kid. I’m surprised they stuck with Harlan so long.”
“Will either of you please explain to me who Arden Wyke is, and why I should care?”
Graham gestured expansively to Tomas. “Your people probably have deeper intel than my brief acquaintance can account for.”
“That’s all I’ve got, actually. I didn’t spend much time in Atrux, and personnel wasn’t my forte. Finding people was. Ask me anything about one of my targets—”
“Excuse me.” Sanda raised her hand. “Target right here.”
He grinned and squeezed her knee. “Yeah. I know Graham ran—” He paused, caught Graham’s eye, asking implicit permission to reveal what he knew. Graham nodded. “Drugs and grey tech through Atrux into Ordinal and Ada. I knew of the Harlan connection, but didn’t think it relevant to dive too deep into that side of things. I surmised that the chances of Sanda seeking shelter with your old contacts was slim to none. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. I started to poke around—just in case—but most of those records had been scrubbed, or otherwise obfuscated. Curious, but you weren’t my mark, Graham.”
Graham smiled to himself, swirling a steaming cup of tea. “You’d find digging much deeper into my past difficult, and that’s Arden’s doing. They’re the best I’ve ever known, or heard of. Could have been working for the Keepers if they weren’t so damn curious all the time. The Keepers need a neat little mold to put their chips in. I think Arden scared them.”
Sanda scratched the back of her head. “Why would Arden scare them?”
“It’s not a normal curiosity. When I say curious, I mean about everything. When Arden starts asking questions, they don’t stop. Got on a kick once when they started to doubt that the universe was real. They used to joke about us all living in a simulation, refer to their knowledge as leveling up a skill set. Harlan wanted to keep them around, but even as a kid they spooked him. They had a way of looking at you like… like you were bundles of DNA and what was that but code, anyway? I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.”
“No,” Sanda said, thinking of the way Lavaux had looked at her before he put the razor blade to her neck. “I get it. I know that look. It’s not pretty.”
“Forgive me,” Tomas said, “but when you saw that picture of Arden, it wasn’t just recognition I saw in your face. You looked scared.”
Graham made a deep study of his empty noodle bowl, pushing a piece of stuck-down green onion around with a chopstick. “The Nazca trained you well, spy, but you missed something. I didn’t just recognize Arden. I recognized the man, first. Nox. He’s a gunhead like no other. I don’t know what the girl has to do with it—either of them—but if Nox and Arden have put their skills together, then Atrux is not a safe place.”
“You mean the dead Keeper?”
Graham flicked his gaze from side to side and lowered his voice. “If Arden has found an anomaly in the structure of the world—its government, its net, anything—they’ll worry at it until it unravels all around them. The fact that unregistered Keeper chips are floating around, and Arden is mixed up in a Keeper death? I don’t like it.”
“There’s only one unregistered chip,” she said, ignoring the clench in her chest.
“Lavaux knew about it. It stands to reason others will, too, and I have a hard time believing it’s a one-off.”
“That’s a whole lot of speculation,” Tomas said in that easy drawl he affected when he wanted to defuse a situation. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “And maybe not something we should talk about here, eh?”
Graham flicked his gaze toward the kitchen and sighed. “Right.” He scrubbed his mouth with a paper napkin and crumpled it, dropping it into a bowl. “Let’s check in at that hotel of yours, Mr. Galvan.”
“Grand idea.”
Tomas stood, then bent double. The veins of his neck and forehead bulged, skin going red as a radiation burn. He clenched his jaw and braced himself—one hand on the back of Sanda’s wheelchair, the other on the table.
“Tomas?” Sanda grabbed his arms. His skin was hot, the muscles taut and veins throbbing. She contorted to get a look at his face, his eyes. They were squeezed shut.
“What the hell—?”
He grunted, tried to force out a word, but just wheezed. His fingers curled against the table, crunching up the scattered napkins. Her wheelchair squeaked under the pressure of his grip. Slowly, as if moving against an intense g-pull, Tomas pointed his chin at his wrist.
A green-brown blob pulsed on the view of his wristpad, a cancerous mole throbbing to his rapidly increasing heartbeat. Sanda slammed her palm onto the symbol. It fizzled out around the edges, and for a moment she thought she saw the suggestion of thin lines tracing the shape of a bird through the amorphous blob.
Tomas let out a long, ragged breath and sagged against the table. Graham grabbed him underneath the arms and helped him back onto his chair. Tomas folded his arms on the tabletop and dropped his forehead against them, breathing hard.
“What the hell was that?” Sanda pressed her palm against the back of his neck. His skin was hot to the touch.
“Nazca.” He wheezed the word. “Been too long off-op without checking in. Getting antsy. I have to report. Soon.”
“That was antsy?”
Graham caught Sanda’s eye and directed her to look around. She did, slowly, taking in the wary faces watching them.
“Can you walk?” she whispered.
“Yeah.”
“We gotta go. Come on.”
Graham levered Tomas to his feet and wrapped his arm around his shoulders, helping him onto the main street where they could call an autocab. The murmur of conversation drifted back to the restaurant as people brushed off the incident. They probably thought he was withdrawing from some drug or another.
Sanda couldn’t shake the feeling of eyes on her, and wondered who else was watching them from the cameras of the Grotta. If Tomas could be hit with whatever that was remotely… They needed to find a way to those coordinates in her head.
Not just because she needed to know what waited there, but because they needed to get out of this city. Atrux didn’t want them here. And this city, she felt, would chew them up and spit them out as easily as Bero had if they weren’t very, very careful.
INTERLUDE
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
THE INTELLIGENCE
Arden fit the goggles over their eyes and subsumed into the digital space of the net. They didn’t visualize themself there, personhood was dangerous, and that was part of why they liked it in the net. There, they weren’t anything but a collection of thoughts and emotions—no meatsack dragging them down, impeding the flow of thought with petty needs like food and sleep and pissing.
In the early days of the virtualized net, some fiend of an engineer with a taste for the dramatic had set the default colors to glaring shades of Prime Inventive cyan. Maybe the engineer had thought the colors would be a warning: This was Prime space, not free space, watch yourself. But Arden hated blue, so they’d overridden the universal defaults and shifted the wireframe landscape to a soft, mauve rose. They’d never seen a real rose, but they’d seen enough CamCasts to have a pretty good idea.
That’s when other netheads had named them The Gardener. They’d done that at age six and still hadn’t been caught. If they got caught for anything, it wasn’t going to be an upgrade to the universal color palette.
The intelligence wasn’t there. Their chest gripped, fearing they’d imagined it. Fearing that yesterday, when they’d tripped over the nascent being, it had been a figment of their imagination. Or worse, Prime had already found it and scrubbed it from existence.
But Arden had taken precautions, wrapped the being in layers of misdi
rection. Few could find something in net space that Arden did not want found. And the being had felt… distracted. As if the circumstances that had created it were wearing away at it, drawing its attention elsewhere. What was a being of thought, if not defined by that which it cast its attention upon?
They pushed that idea aside. It must have wandered, and they would find it, for while they hadn’t risked tethering the being in place, Arden could easily track the layers of code they’d swaddled the being in. The finding was just a matter of time.
Focus. Focus was key, because Nox would be out for only a few hours, and he got pissed if Arden was checked out in the net too long. Thought it was dangerous. Nox was right. He just didn’t know why he was right.
Arden’s immediate sphere of influence was tailored to their needs. Data clusters they used often appeared around them in tight double helixes, their ode to the biology that’d given rise to their being. Arden may bemoan the limitations of their meatsack, but they weren’t blind to the fact that they wouldn’t exist without it.
They weren’t here to manipulate that data. They spread themself thin, dangerously thin, pushing out of the sacred, locked-down space that was theirs into the rattier, forgotten parts of the net. The corners where they’d caught a glimpse of the intelligence.
There, they felt a tingle of recognition. Not from the intelligence—that being didn’t seem to be aware that Arden existed—but from its tendrils of thought. The intelligence had a certain vibration to it that tickled Arden’s neurons. They pursued.
Space was irrelevant in the net. They arrived, a cloud of electronic impulses that congealed on the periphery of the intelligence’s space.
Arden wished they could stop thinking of themself as a cloud, or a bundle of anything at all, but that was the downfall of being born into a body. You thought of yourself as contained, even when such definitions were pointless.
The intelligence didn’t have such constraints. Arden wondered what it had been born into, if it could be said to have been born. It strained the very edges of Arden’s comprehension. Somehow they knew it was dispersed (but even that wasn’t right, because dispersed implied a previous state of togetherness) and that space in the conventional thinking didn’t matter. They knew that, academically. Sensing and understanding it were an entirely different matter.
Chaos Vector Page 5
