How to Beat Tomorrow

by J Foster Ward

  “Sacred buddha on his mountain!” Owem Gee wailed, clutching his talisman of Martian sand.

  “Shit,” Whiteman said. “So I guess we know it won’t work on a corpse that damaged.”

  “What?” Jake almost shrieked, eyes bugged out. “What won’t work? What the FUCK was that?”

  “It’s a white ray, what do you think. The conceptual opposite of the black ray. Actually the white ray was invented first; a beam of energy capable of reviving recently deceased beings. They reverse engineered it to develop the black ray. Black ray’s really just a weaponised version of this.”

  “You unimaginable bastard,” Jacob shouted. “You did this to her for what? A –an experiment?”

  “Of course. What does it matter?” We’ll wait for the synthetic to try again.

  “Fucking why?” Jacob demanded.

  “Look, dirtworm. I know life outside the claves is brutal, fast and short but if your kind had shown up to the party when the Skyfall had brought co-prosperity to the world instead of forming an axis of evil, cowardly striking from the shadows, you’d know that your primitive views of life and the soul are the Neanderthal ramblings of cultural throwbacks not fit to rule themselves.”

  Tide of opinion in the room was changing back on Jacob again. Jones joined in with clear disgust on her face.

  “Yeah, neothall, just because you think everyone should live and die once because it’s the way nature intended humanity to be, well then, why did nature let us create personality downloads and make UE-242 and allow us to invent cortical stacks and remote storage?”

  Jones was on a roll. “Fuck I hate you throwbacks. “

  “Get your head checked,” Whiteman chimed in, making a gun motion to his forehead at him. “Before I do.”

  It was all Jake could do not to shoot them all. But what good would it have done? Instead he waited by the door until he heard approaching footsteps in the water. Soon Americano emerged with Synthetica behind him.

  “Good, get to work!” Whiteman ordered.

  The android girl looked around the room, eyes finally resting on the still twitching corpse of Bitchmurder. “You attempted to use the machine without first engaging the regenerative circuits.”

  “Whatever.”

  “That would have been extremely painful. The subject may have undergone extreme mental trauma.”

  “So sue me.”

  Synthetica met Jacob’s eyes for a split -second and then she crossed the room to the control panel and leaned past Whiteman to engage the controls.

  “Regeneration controls are here,” she said mildly.

  But Whiteman took it as an insult and grabbed her wrist. “Shut it and do your job.”

  “Of course,” she said professionally.

  Jake almost charged across the room to teach the sub-officer another lesson, but forced himself to control his anger. Plenty of time for that later.

  Again the machinery of the clamshell came to life with a high pitched whine. Various control and meter lights coming alive as the clamshell of folded around Bitchmurder’s twice-dead remains. Again the tone and frequency of the machinery rose, the pair of huge metal globes rose, the arcs of electrical power bouncing off them to strike an antenna in between. When it reached its peak the entire thing discharged the blast of white light into the clamshell.

  This time when the hydraulics of the clamshell opened to reveal Bitchmurder in a cloud of escaping steam there was no horror-show of torn flesh. The clone stirred feebly, sat up and looked perfectly whole. With a convulsive heave she leaned over the edge of the bed to hurl stomach contents into the soupy water, but once she was finished she looked around the room with bright eyes, trembling.

  “This isn’t the re-cloning facility,” she said weakly.

  “No, it’s not,” Whiteman said happily. “We reanimated your corpse. Good as new. Now we don’t need the resurrection services.”

  Whiteman turned to give Jake a triumphant look. “Now none of us needs to go through the re-cloning. We can take it off-line. No more messing around with re-imprinting again.”

  The clones seemed to be nodding approval but Jake suddenly knew Whiteman’s plan. If they took Circe offline, all they’d have to do to make sure Jake stayed dead was not put his corpse into the White Ray machine.

  If Whiteman couldn’t convince Circe to sideline him, he’d make her obsolete.

  But… Cool Breeze would figure it out, wouldn’t he?

  Only if he knew what happened. And this entire level was offline to the computer’s sensors. A perfect place to kill Jake and lose the body.

  Except the genetics lab. That still had power. All he had to do was get there.

  Movement caught his eye.

  The last minute jump to the side was all that kept his head from being sliced off. Instead the laser beam cut off his arm. One moment it was there, the next it dropped to the water, leaving a cauterized stump. Whiteman swore, took aim with the laser pistol he’d yanked from Americano’s holster, and tried to shoot again. This time there was an insufficient charge light on the gun and the sub-officer had to start searching Dean’s web-belt for a new power cell.

  “Don’t just stand there! Get him! The dirtworm is a traitor!”

  Jake didn’t wait to see if they obeyed the order, just ran.

  Whiteman entirely lost his composure. “Go ahead and run. Dirtworm. You’re all fuckin cowards anyway. I feel sorry for you and your cake; too bad you voted for Fodor, Red Lantern!” he shouted after him.

  Fodor? Red Lantern? Future-insults were so weird. And Jake wasn’t in the mood for them.

  “Where do you think you’re going, ganz?” Whiteman shouted after him.

  ***

  Chapter 10

  : Hell and High Water

  Within a few steps the savage pain from losing a limb started screaming into his brain, but he couldn’t stop running. He managed a staggering rush through the swamp when he heard Whiteman shouting from behind him.

  With fumbling fingers, Jake drew the revolver from his holster and fired behind himself without looking. There were screams and panic and nobody shot back. All too busy ducking for cover. It gave him enough time to round the nearest corner and get out of line of sight.

  He had to break contact. Get to the genetics lab, or maybe even out of the entire module and back to Delta or Echo.

  But first he had to do something about his arm.

  The first pair of wide double doors he came to was long ago forced open and had frozen that way with accreted gunk underwater. Had to get out of the corridors. He sloshed through the swamp to the first doors he saw.

  “Hydroponics lab,” Jacob read of the sign outside the door with some difficulty. It actually was printed as: ‘HIDROPAWNIKS LABB’.

  The chamber stretched out beyond the range of his goggle sensors; it was filled with six rows across, three tiers high, of suspended hydroponics tubing and overgrown with a hanging jungle of plant life vanishing in the ghostly grow-lights. The bottom-most layer of tubing was just below the surface of the standing water.

  “Now we know why there’s so much living skudge in this filth,” Jake mumbled to himself. “The filtration and water cycling systems in here are treating the entire flooded area.”

  Gun in hand, he did a quick sweep of the lab and didn’t find anything but the picked-clean bones of a human submerged in the gunk still wearing the shredded remains of a hazmat suit and near to its gloved hand was a chainsaw-like pruning tool that still showed a green indicator light.

  Under the grow lights Jake tugged open the latches of his personal first aid kit and drew out a pencil sized tube of painkillers.

  As soon as the seal was split on the pen, faint blue LED's began walking down the length of the tube:

  Hurt Me! (tm.) IS THE FINEST IN BIO-REGENERATIVE NANOTECHNOL-

  OGY TODAY...SIMPLY APPLY ANAESTHETIC END MARKED PINK BEFORE

  INJECTING NEEDLE TO ANY MAJOR ARTERY...GUARANTEED 100% USEFUL

  IN TREATMENT OF PHYS
ICAL INJURY (SEE PACKAGING FOR EXCEPTIONS)

  ...NANYTE HALF-LIFE OF 3.6 MINUTES...NOT RECOMMENDED FOR USE WITH

  PREGNANT WOMEN OR CHILDREN UNDER AGE 6...Hurt me! (tm.) IS

  Pressing it to his neck he felt the rush of hypospray flooding his system with artificial endorphins and let out a long, easy breath as the pain receded.

  That’s when he heard the splash of boots in water approaching not far away.

  “Fuck.”

  Slowly, making as little noise as he could, Jake made his way down the long rows of hydroponics and found a side door that was also stuck halfway open.

  He exited the far side into another flooded corridor and Jacob began to notice aquatic life around his shins. Little albino fish. Scuttling crabs and finger-long cuttlefish of some kind covered in tiny stipples of bioluminescence.

  The next chamber was ‘SPESSIMIN KONTANEMINT’ and as he squeezed through the half-open door panel Jacob expected preserved jars of tissue samples, like a medical biopsy storage, or maybe cold storage. But it was cages. Rows of kennels and clear-plastic sided containers. All the cages were torn open, the terrariums cracked apart and the aquariums long-ago tipped on their sides in the water. Now the mystery of where the pond-creatures came from was solved.

  “I found something!” a clone yelled from not too far away. “I found the cave-man’s pain injector!”

  Dammit, he’d dropped it and the things probably floated. He had to hide.

  Sloshing through the rows he found a series of terrariums that hadn’t been overturned and found one of them that was still, apparently, sealed. Sealed up, squeezed inside with head on knees and arms around legs, was the decomposed and desiccated body of some sort of lab tech. The terrarium environment system had mummified it so the look of horror on the dry skin stretched over the skull was still visible. Jake couldn’t look away from the grisly scene. In his hand was some sort of gun.

  Had he been forced inside? Someone with a gun didn’t let themselves get forced inside a little glass coffin. No time to figure it out.

  Jake suddenly had a plan. A bad one, but better than nothing. Grabbing the latch to the terrarium he forced it open and let out of mild stench of spoiled meat. Grabbing the tech by the lapel of his coat he dragged the body out one-handed. It was surprisingly light. With all his strength he pulled the ancient corpse behind a row of glass cages and set him more or less upright, then put his goggles and mask on the desiccated skull.

  With any luck they’d think it was him.

  Crossing the room again Jake managed to wedge himself inside the now empty terrarium and pull the door almost entirely closed. Gun in hand, he waited. He had four shots left in the revolver-shotgun. It would be impossible to miss at close range.

  He didn’t have to wait long. Less than a minute later lights shone into the room and the clones arrived.

  “Split up. Fan out.” Whiteman said.

  “For what?” Sabotage asked. “Shouldn’t we stick together?”

  “He’s in here somewhere,” the sub-officer snapped. “The world does not stop and start at your convenience, you little shit.”

  “Cut your wrists and die, Rocket.” Jones gave him a rude hand gesture that involved pressing her two thumbs together.

  “I think she just jazzed in her pants a little,” Americano chuckled and waded further into the lab. “I hear she’s gone all organic in the vertical smile.”

  “Hey cave-man, come on out!” Whiteman called.

  Jake watched through the stained glass of the cage as the clones went through the room. Bitchmurder was looking over the skulls of several animals tucked together inside a mucousy sphere of hardened slime. Whiteman, as if expecting him to be hiding in a shoe-box-sized enclosure, was looking through each of the top row of tiny cages.

  Americano rounded the corner and walked right past Jacob, turned to see the corpse huddled three metres away, and almost tripped over backwards.

  “Go big guns!” Americano shouted and started blasting with a revolver.

  He emptied the gun into the corpse and it practically disintegrated under the rain of acid-gel rounds, steaming into a liquidy soup on a blackened skeleton.

  In moments they figured out the ruse and all the clones gathered around the remains. Jacob controlled his breathing and prepared to push the glass case door open with his knee and come out blazing. This was too good to be true. All the targets clumped together with their backs to him.

  “I don’t get it,” Bitchmurder said, looking at the corpse.

  “Shut up.” Whiteman said. “You’re not here to ‘get it’. Chucklehead.“

  “Well, maybe I’m not some diehard scientist who spent forty years in school. But you don’t got to talk shit about my beliefs in the Five Elements.”

  “Yeah, wub you too!” Jones called at her. “Chuckleheads are the worst,” she said.

  “You don’t even know what yer talking about!” Bitchmurder yelled back. “How d’you know spirit aint a real element? It’s the god particle, ganz. Why else would they call it that?”

  Jake was about to slam the door open and start shooting, but before Jones could reply to the insult something else happened.

  It had ten limbs covered in organic razors and swung from an exposed pipe in the ceiling behind the four clones. Jake watched in horrified fascination as it flung itself like a weighted net, limbs splaying out and struck the back of Bitchmurder’s head with a wet slap. The limbs immediately constricted and began trying to saw their way through her breather mask and face underneath.

  “Not again!” she screamed, lurching upright. “Gedditoff, gedditoff!”

  From that bloodcurdling comment Jake had to assume this was the same thing that had just killed her. Talk about unlucky. The slimy mass of tentacles couldn’t cut through Bitchmurder’s armor, but it wouldn’t let go. While four of the arms stayed wrapped around her head, preventing Bitchmurder’s frantically scrabbling hands from tearing it loose, the other four limbs whipped around, searching blindly for some other soft spot. When one of them found the gap between breastplate and shoulder guards in the armpit of her suit, it eagerly slithered inside and before anyone could do anything the rest of it followed.

  “It’s in my suit! It’s in my suit!” the clone woman screamed.

  She pounded at the armor, slapped to try and find the release catches and spun, dancing it place, kicking up water. Her yells ended as her vocal cords were cut and she staggered sideways into a row of cages, trying to rip the cuttlefish loose and slicing her hands to the bone on its razor sharp cartilage spurs.

  “Open the suit!” Whiteman yelled, struggling to get to the latches that held the breastplate shut. He found one, then the second, and finally had the third undone.

  He was almost done the last one when Bitchmurder’s cries began to sound more and more like she was gargling water, and she dropped to her knees. The sounds of her horrific rasping made Jacob’s hair stand on end.

  “Hold still!” the sub-officer shouted, trying to open the last latch.

  But the agony had taken control of Bitchmurder. When she yanked the corrosion shotgun from its pistol holster and shoved the barrel of the revolver down the neck-hole of her breastplate, Whiteman swore and scrambled back.

  The shot went off with a dull fwump-bang inside the armor, and with a single jerk the woman’s scream ended. As steam and smoke poured up out of the seams in her armor she slumped sideways into a row of cages.

  A second razor octopus splatted onto Jones’ shoulders, narrowly missing Americano Dean Jr.

  Jacob saw it was at least a meter across from tip of tentacle. As a third creature flung itself at the clones suddenly Americano was firing his shotgun without aiming. The corrosive shot spray caught the third spinning organic missile and blasted it aside to land in a hissing pile of corrosion. The wounded thing jetted away at high speed in the water.

  “Help me!” Jones wailed.

  In reply Whiteman fired his laser, slicing through tentacled creature and any b
its of Jones that weren’t protected by armor.

  Americano joined him, and while the laser sliced things apart, he gripped pistol shotgun and fired, emptying acid rounds into the other clone’s body.

  The slippery body of the creature on Jones vanished in a foaming wave of corruption. It went limp and slid off the woman’s mutilated shoulders. Then Jones fell over dead, most of her head missing. From the yells and gunfire deeper in the containment locker there were more of the things.

  “Fall back!” Whiteman called.

  Americano was already running.

  Jacob now knew what had trapped the dead technician inside the cage, and if he didn’t move right now, he would suffer the same end. Before Whiteman could even back up Jake shoved open the door, fired a blast of acid pellets in the sub-officer’s direction that resulted in a scream of pain and anger, then was running as best he could for the far door.

  Whiteman had a five-meter head start but Jake fired one of his last four acid gel rounds and took the sub-officer right above the knee. Whiteman pitched forward on a leg suddenly dissolving to the bone and floundered, clawing his way out of the swampy water on hands and knees.

  “You one-armed miscegenation!” Whiteman spluttered. “I’ll wipe your sequencing from the data banks for this!”

  “Good luck getting facefucked by razor tentacles,” Jake gasped.

  From the back of the room the ceiling came alive with movement. A dozen shapes at least, like a writhing mass of tentacles, swung down and began swinging from shelf to shelf, towards them. Rounding the corner for the exit Jake lost sight of the sub-officer. He did see the flickering reflection of the laser pistol and heard the nasty crackle as it cut the air while Whiteman began continuously firing.

  There were no more clones between Jacob and the door, only angry, writhing piles of limbs and muffled shrieks from humans wrapped tight in slimy limbs. Jake edged around them as close to the wall as he could and staggered into the hallway.