by Tony Corden
“When Suzluk is satisfied that you fully comprehend your fate and its finality, Billy will take a specially modified hand-held stun gun, well, it’s actually a high powered taser, and he will apply it directly to your chip. Besides bringing an unthinkable amount of pain, the current not only completely destroys your chip but it fuses the slag left behind to the bone of your skull. It also heats the micro-filaments which extend into your skull. Experiments have shown that the heat permanently destroys the sections of the brain which surround the filaments. You won’t be able to see, hear, smell, move or speak ever again. The only sense which seems to remain is the ability to feel pain. However, there is really no way to express it except in mindless silent screaming. Suzluk wanted me to leave you like that, but I don’t need the complication of you being found alive.
“Instead, let me explain what will happen after you are made into a vegetable. Earl and Billy plan to rape you, then they’ll take you and your father to the Brisbane River where they will tie cement around your still breathing bodies and drop you in. The ties they use are water-soluble, and after a few days, you and your dad will float to the surface. The police will find you killed your father in the same way they did the imbecile Troy. They will conclude your dad had been abusing you. Somehow, in shame and remorse, you decided to end his life and yours.”
As Nathan was talking, Leah could see Meredith smiling in the background and Suzluk gloating. Even as her heart sank, she steeled herself to let none of that show on her face. Then, as Nathan paused to see the effect on Leah, she sub-vocalised to Gèng and said, “Have you recorded that?”
“Yes.”
“Save it to one of the safest storage sites and transfer yourself there as well. John knows about the sites, and I want you to make sure that he gets the information. He’ll check it at an autopsy.”
“Leah, I can make a copy of myself, but I can’t leave you.”
“You can, even if for no other reason than to take the additional stress off me. I don’t need any more pressure than I have already. I know the copy will be you, but there is no need for you to feel what it is like to die even if you’ll never remember it. Also, how did you go at having the nanites form a physical breaker in case of an EPIC attack?”
“It is still under construction, and besides, it wouldn’t be any help for what Nathan described.”
“I see. Please put the schematics for the chip on my vision. If he wants despair, then I’ll give him hope. If I have to die, I’ll do it fighting with everything I have. I have a few ideas for John and Jimmy, which I want to write down. I’ll also save a letter for Mum and Conner. I don’t have a will, so I’ll write one of those.”
Leah’s perceptual speed increased to maximum, and she co-opted three of Gèng’s processing cores to work on the tasks simultaneously. She reviewed the chip to try and think of some way to short circuit it before the threatened taser was applied. She dictated letters and plans to all her friends, including more detailed instructions for Leon, Peter, John, and Jimmy. She also wrote out a will and wrote a goodbye letter to Thad which tried to express her sadness at leaving him. All the time, she worked to keep any expression from her face.
Leah discovered that the increased perception allowed her to make minute corrections to her facial muscles to stop any hint of her state of mind from showing. Just as she had when she’d concentrated in Dunyanin as a glitchwolf, Leah slowly became aware of the smallest details around her. She could feel the slight draught from the door behind her and sensed when one of the men passed in front of it, changing the airflow. Leah also realised that the slight hum was the current in the electromagnetic shield constructed around the room. Leah slowly flexed the muscles along her arm and was able to feel the straps which held her down give just a little as she moved. Her mind calculated angles and stresses. She asked Gèng to show the detailed structure of her chip and its position in her skull.
Leah shifted her legs minutely and started to gather data of the amount of movement she had in her legs, thighs, chest and head. Gèng began to add details from her database, and they built up a comprehensive view of Leah’s body and her surroundings. As Leah made small movements, Gèng began putting together a model of how all the different motions interacted across her body. Nathan couldn’t see a reaction in Leah so he waved Meredith forward, she began to deride Leah and suggest all sorts of things that would happen to her. With her perception increased, Leah could see small micro-movements as they played over Meredith’s face and compared them with Nathan’s reactions. She slowly built up a way to measure his agreement or disagreement with the things Meredith was saying.
Her conclusion was that while Nathan and Meredith were in agreement that Leah and her dad would be killed, they disagreed about her being abused before she was executed. Meredith revelled in the idea, but Nathan would have preferred a clean emotionless death. When Meredith slowed down, and Leah’s face still hadn’t reacted, Suzluk began to rant. Moments later, Leah saw Nathan’s eyes briefly focus behind her. She saw him give what she imagined he thought was an infinitesimally small nod but lasted for what seemed like a minute to her. Leah felt the air moving against her change as Billy stepped forward. On her wireframe model, she showed his arm and the most likely configuration of the electrodes which would be applied to destroy a PAI chip. Gèng suddenly added some notes about the difference between Leah’s chip and the standard PAI chip. The differences were negligible on the macro scale, but processors and the connections were in slightly different locations. Even a millimetre could change the way the current moved. Leah contracted her neck muscles, bringing her head as far forward as she could. As Leah felt the two prongs of the taser touch her skin, she rotated her head slightly then shoved back as hard as she could. She was hoping to get the current to pass through the chip along a particular path and heat the processor in just the right spot so her backwards movement would force the prongs to …
Leah never finished the thought as the electricity arced through the chip and turned it to slag. The current raced across Leah’s body, making her muscles contract violently. The new growth of hair on the outside of the chip flashed into flame, and where the chip’s electrodes had been etched into the outside of her skull, the skin blistered. Leah’s left leg had contracted then extended so violently that it snapped the tie and almost dislocated her knee. Her increased perceptions overloaded her system with messages of extreme agony, causing her chest and abdominal muscles to contract as a scream was forced from her throat. The strap across her chest broke four ribs, and the strap around her skull stretched with the strain then snapped back, driving the prongs of the taser into the molten slag. Moments later as the current was turned off, Leah’s body slowly stopped shaking, and she dropped into unconsciousness.
2
December 19 2073
REAL WORLD
Leah’s second journey into awareness wasn’t the long drawn out affair of the last time. This time, she was dragged into reality over a matter of seconds as someone dropped her from a position on his shoulders and tilted her backwards into the back of a van, slamming her shoulders into the steel floor. This was followed by her head coming down hard on the red and raw blisters which now covered her skull. She tried to scream as the pain washed in waves over her, but each wave interacted with the previous one to set up a discordant pulse. This surging pain never gave her time to take in a big enough breath to do more than croak out a moan before the next wave made her battered and broken ribs rub against each other and add to the agony.
Leah tried to open her eyes, but all she saw was the same endless darkness she’d first been aware of. As understanding hit her, she realised her eyes had been open all along. She couldn’t see anything and what she thought of as moans were just her imagination, for no other sounds penetrated the void that surrounded her. She must have had some success in her attempts to protect her senses because she thought she could smell the stench of burned flesh. As soon as she tried to catch the scent though, it faded and then
there was nothing, nothing but pain in every part of her body.
No, that wasn’t quite true. She could sense the motion as she swayed minutely back and forth. Her inner ears and her sense of balance seemed to work. She was lying in a car, no, a van. After concentrating, she could feel the cold steel under her shoulders, and she slowly built up a picture of her surroundings. Remembering her experience just before she was tasered, she let herself once again fall into her perceptions. She still couldn’t see, hear or smell, but she began to listen to the smaller senses, the ones that were usually at the very edge of her awareness.
She concentrated on the temperature across her body, and to some extent, that of her insides. Her shoulders were warmer than the rest of her, and her head was still trying to shed heat from the burns which splayed out from the melted chip like a tangled, broken, and rather misshapen spider. Leah became aware of how her body was positioned. She felt not only the swelling in her left knee from the massive contraction, but she could feel that it wasn’t quite in the right position. Slowly, she tried to flex the leg muscles to pull it into alignment only to have the leg snap out to its fullest extension, then contract suddenly bringing her bare foot to press against her thigh. The added carbon fibres in the muscles not only strained the knee but also threw her onto her right side and against another body.
Leah decided it was a body as she felt the warmth and softness. She had no way of knowing who it was, but the lack of movement almost guaranteed this was her dad. Her experience made it clear that even though she could feel where her body was, she had little or no control over it. The only thought she had, though, was hope. If she could still make the muscles move, then some part of that area of her brain must have survived.
With that, Leah tried again to use those parts of her which still worked. She could sense her heart beating, she could feel her stomach churning from hunger and the pressure in her bladder and bowels. She was surprised she hadn’t soiled herself with her previous convulsions. With her sped up and increased perceptions the time between the waves of pain spread out, but when they arrived, they were now a tsunami which threatened to tear down her defences every single time.
Leah persisted for what seemed like hours but was only a few minutes. She knew when the van turned into a driveway as she felt the electric motor stop and the current from the bed of batteries under her ceased. Leah felt the van joggle as the back was opened and through the changes in air currents and the slight differences she was almost certain it was Earl. He grabbed her legs and threw her onto her back. She couldn’t see or hear a thing, but every nerve along her legs shuddered as he reached in and grabbed her panties. She waited until they were at the top of her thighs before sending a message to contract and flex both legs.
Before, when she’d tried a small movement, her legs had flipped her over. This time the left knee dislocated as it came under her thigh. The sudden contraction of both legs lifted the lower half of her body off the inside of the van’s flooring. Earl, and she hoped it was Earl, had no warning as Leah’s knees lifted up above his shoulders and then her legs extended fully. The carbon fibres holding her knee together stretched and just before her leg reached its full extension, her foot came in contact with a head. Leah’s knee was forced back into its right position by her contracting muscles and the contact. She bounced once before settling on the van’s floor, her legs slowly shuddering to a stop.
Leah passed out momentarily from the sudden pain in her left foot, but the endless waves of pain throughout the rest of her body brought her back. Someone slammed the van shut, the door caught her feet, bending her knees and adding a fresh wave to the tidal surges along her pain receptors. She felt the van rock, but Leah recognised it hadn’t moved because she couldn’t feel the current flowing to the motor.
Not knowing how to tell the time in her hyper-alert state, she resorted to counting her heartbeat. It seemed to her that it beat every few minutes, but the reality was it was in a hyper-excited state and running at over one hundred and forty beats a minute. Leah counted to five hundred and thirty-six when the doors were flung open, and something heavy was dropped inside to land beside her. After that, it was another ninety-eight heartbeats before the current started to flow beneath her again and the van began to move.
Leah hadn’t been idle while waiting and had been practising trying to open and close her hand. She must have done it hundreds of times before she felt confident to either hold it open, her finger’s splayed wide in a fan or have it closed, her fingers clenched into a fist with her nails cutting into her palm. Just the two positions, open and closed. More than half the time the thumb was caught either inside the fingers or threaded between them. Leah wasn’t sure, but she thought she may have fractured it.
It was another six-hundred or so beats before the van pulled to a stop. By this time, Leah’s awareness had grown until she believed she could almost feel every vibration as the front cabin door was opened and then slammed shut. The van continued to rock even though it was stopped and Leah wondered what was happening until the van doors near her feet opened, and she could sense the wind rushing past the opening. It was colder than before, and it felt moist on her skin.
As the wind flowed past the open doorway, she could sense the eddies as what she imagined was a person blocked the doorway. Leah imagined he was watching to see what would happen. After what seemed like an eternity, there was a sudden movement and she felt a strap fall around her calves. She forced herself not to react as the strap was pulled tight, locking her legs together.
Whoever it was used the strap to pull her from the back of the van. She felt every ridge as she slowly slid off the edge, then as gravity took hold, she sped up until her lower back hit the ground first followed by her head and then her legs. Everything in her wanted to scream, even if it was one of the silent moans, but she focused all that desire into not reacting. Leah needed to get closer to whoever it was. Leah had expected two people, one at either end, but whoever it was, they seemed to be alone because they used the strap to drag her over the uneven surface until she was leaning up against a series of hard cold metal rods. She imagined it was a fence of some kind.
From everything she’d heard, she pictured herself lying against the edge of one of the bridges. If Gèng had been right, then it was most likely the old Story Bridge. Renovation work had been going on for almost three years when work had stalled over the use of old steel instead of the newer stronger alloys. Environmentalists, engineers, and the historical society had been locked in a battle for several years, and the bridge was still closed to most traffic. This is where Akia had suggested Charlotte had been thrown from.
If Leah was right, then most of the internal fences and rails had already been gutted, and this was the outer fencing. From here it was a thirty-metre drop to the water below. Leah could feel vibrations as the wind shook the bridge slightly and then another stronger vibration as something heavy was dropped on the ground near her. Finally, the strap around her legs was used to lift her legs slightly. She could feel the change as thinner stronger bonds were slipped under her legs and took the place of the strap. Her thighs were then heaved off the ground, and another thinner material was used to force her legs together. Leah remembered what Nathan had said about ties which dissolved in water and rocks.
A cold knobbly material was passed between her calf ties and her legs before being looped around the legs and threaded through the ties around her thighs. It was hard not to do anything, but she hadn’t felt whoever it was move her dad yet, so she waited. Leah hoped for a chance to grab whoever it was and deal with them before they could hurt Michael even more.
Leah was left lying on her back and leaning against the rails for a time but with her legs and thighs tied, and almost no control over her movements, there was little she could do. Whoever was trying to throw her over the rail walked up behind her and reached down to lift the top of Leah’s body. She tried moving to dislodge herself from his grip, but her lack of control and her over-exagg
erated movements were so violent that she almost lifted herself over the rail before falling back through his hands and hitting the ground. This sent another flood of pain messages along her spine.
Finally, after several attempts, the man used the original strap. After forcing Leah’s arms by her side, he tightened the strap and slowly pulled her upright to lean against the rail. She teetered on the edge, but he didn’t let her fall because he now needed to remove the strap which wouldn’t dissolve in water. Leah was positioned with her back against the top bar, and as he stepped in to loosen the strap, Leah felt his hands on her shoulders. As he raised the strap over her head, Leah threw her arms forward and forced her hands to lock closed on whatever was in front of her. Her forward grabbing motion sent her body backwards, and as her hands tightened around what felt like a jacket edge in her right hand and a wrist in her left, she tried to throw herself even further backwards at the same time as pulling the person towards her.
Leah’s upper body swung out over the rail where the sudden addition of the man’s weight above the edge of the railing meant that Leah slid head first off the bridge holding onto the man, whom she assumed was Earl or Billy. Leah had no idea what the weight at her feet was, but nothing was holding onto the man’s feet. His angular momentum saw his legs fly out and away from the bridge while Leah was pulled back toward the bridge by the chain and the weights. As he flipped over Leah, she still gripped his wrist and jacket. Just as happened with Hugh Westmorten, his head was stuck against Leah’s shoulder, and as his body fell away from her, his neck couldn’t stand the strain, and his spinal column snapped at the base of his skull.
