Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  Meanwhile, as I was doing all this, Living Spirit was eying me as if I were the steak on his plate.

  Then he lunged. An animal leap with fangs and claws outstretched, spittle dripping from his mouth. I saw it all, making time slow down to help me judge my move. I made my move.

  I rolled under his body, extended my right hand finger-claw and dug it into his torso, cutting through his hide. Red-black blood dripped on me as I hurtled past, then I rolled and was up again.

  Living Spirit landed and backleaped, turning himself in midair, and lunged again at me. I dodged again, this time less successfully, and his claws raked my bare thigh, and my blood gushed.

  He lunged once more and I stepped in close and threw powerful punches into his body and on his head, very fast indeed. They barely registered. I rolled away and backflipped.

  He lunged, I forward-leaped, turned in midair. touching his shoulders with my hands as I flew over and attempting to strike his head with one claw. But I missed him completely.

  We eyed each other up, and circled again. He lunged – his favourite move – and I went down low and clawed his balls but he caught my arm in his hand and sank his teeth into my throat. I fell over backwards and kicked him over me with two hard heels and a chunk of flesh from my throat went with him.

  He was down on the floor. I was leaping over him. I landed with my feet each side of his head and punched his skull. I felt my knuckles break. I thrust a claw in his ear and he felt that. Then he batted me off and I flew up and hit the rock wall.

  I landed badly, spat blood, felt the ache of my wounds and bruises, and stood up in a twitch. Living Spirit lunged once more.

  I dematerialised.

  It was a shock; I hadn’t realised I could do that. But I had done it.

  And I was in the Loper armoury, which is the place where I had been yearning to be. My thoughts had given a destination to the flit.

  I shook off my own dazed astonishment, and grabbed and delocked a Tharlik rifle – smaller and squatter than my Xenos but a powerful killing machine all the same. And slung it over my shoulder by the strap. Then I seized a Philos pistol and Darsia knife and a grenade. Then I visualised Living Spirit as vividly as I could.

  And I rematerialised back in the cavern. To find the mob slack-jawed with astonishment at my departure. And even more stunned at my abrupt return, in a different place.

  I wasted no time. First, I authorised the QRC to unlock the force shield. Then I threw the pistol and the knife at Billy and the rifle at Max. And lastly I tossed the live grenade at the spectators and saw Loper limbs scatter like corn in the wind.

  Living Spirit lunged at me like wind in a storm and put one huge hand over my throat and choked me and ripped my body open with the claws of his other hand. Meanwhile Max was raining bullets at the Lopers as Billy blasted with the pistol and hacked with the dagger. I began to die.

  Then Living Spirit’s body erupted with spurts of blood – Billy had shot him. And Billy was on us, thrusting his blade into the Loper’s body. But Living Spirit’s strength was undimmed and Billy was now rolling, evading bullets and blows, fighting for his life.

  I had only one chance – one punch – and I took it and threw it. I struck Living Spirit on the temple with a blow so fast it happened before I thought it. And I felt his skull crack and he spat blood and his eyes glazed over.

  Billy cut the Loper’s hand off with a single knife strike and I was free of the chokehold. Blood was pouring down my body and my ribs were broken but I could still move my limbs. So I gripped the two men with my bleeding hands as guns blazed at us from all sides, and put one foot on Living Spirit’s corpse. Then I told the Ice computer to close down the beaconband nuller entirely, not just locally. And then—

  We dematerialised and were back on the attack ship, with the vast dead body of Living Spirit on the ground before us.

  “How the FUCK did you do that?” Billy whispered.

  “Magic,” I said, modestly.

  It wasn’t magic. It was something else.

  Or maybe it WAS magic. What’s the difference?

  Skip back in time.

  Cúchulainn. Me a slave. Blocking out the bad stuff by living in a world in my head. Communing with Magog, the planet’s QRC, via my Rebus chip. Inhabiting its mind, its way of being. Remember?

  Now factor in this. Magog is a quantum computer. Which means at some level it exists in a quantum state of improbability, where the laws of common sense do not apply.

  And I became part of that. I lived for long periods in the mind of Magog, to escape the agonies of my enslaved body. I learned to feel as it did, think as it did. And I became, I guess, a little bit quantal myself. That’s how I can flit without a teleport machine locked on to me. I myself can bring into existence a macro-quantum state. And hence, I can teleport at will, just so long as there’s a QRC in range to aid me.

  There’s more to my power than this, even. Because let’s face it, I’m a lucky so and so.

  Luckier than any human being has a right to be.

  And that’s how I can teleport without misflitting, again and again and again. And it’s also how I escaped from Baron Lowman, how I got outside his fortified mansion in the first place. Yes, I utilised my power over Magog to help me disable the whedon chip. But the series of lucky chances that aided my escape were, looking back on it, preposterous. Blind luck got me out!

  And so, eventually. I have come to realise the truth about myself.

  I am more powerful than anyone has ever realised. I have a unique power over QRCs. And I also have – as a direct consequence of that ability – the gift of luck.

  And as a result, I can open locked doors, shut down subway stations, seize control of spaceships, and make doppelgänger robots dance like my puppets. And I can flit here, there, and anywhere, at will.

  I am, in short, a witch of the quantumverse.

  However, be that as it may: it turns out that I cannot beat a Loper in single combat. Boy, that guy had me whupped.

  Fraser came to visit me in my hospital bed. And he handed me the Tarot Card with the Magician’s icon upon it.

  I ripped it in half and handed it back.

  “Anything you want to tell me?” he asked.

  “Nope.”

  “The three of you returned with no misflits. That was lucky.”

  “Damned lucky,” I said modestly.

  Then I went to sleep. I was in the hospital for a week. They had to give me a clone lung, to replace the one that Living Spirit had mauled. (His claws had penetrated my rib cage.) They used three tubes of glue on my skin, and while the wounds were healing I looked like a marble statue that had been dropped from a great height and cracked from tip to toe.

  After twenty-four hours asleep, I woke and found Max and Billy by my bedside, celebrating our victory by drinking the malt whisky they had brought me. They had drunk so much already they were barely coherent and I had to ask security to have them forcibly removed from the ward. I couldn’t, to be honest, stomach seeing them hug each other and declare their undying mutual love.

  When I left the hospital I went on convalescent leave, and spent most of my time watching television. And so I caught most of the news broadcasts about the capture of Living Spirit. He’d been resuscitated successfully with little brain tissue damage. And he was filmed in a room at the Moral Rehabilitation Centre, professing his desire to live in peace and harmony.

  It was a very different Living Spirit. The rage in his eyes had gone. His voice was flat and unmodulated. His fur was dull, it no longer had that sheen of the warrior at the height of his powers.

  Living Spirit spoke at length about the folly of rebellion and the need for all human beings to live in peace and harmony. All admirable sentiments, delivered in a dull monotone. Like hearing a robot voicemail recite Flanagan’s Speech to the Pirates just before the Last Battle. But the message was clear. Living Spirit repented of his many sins.

  All the capobastone had to do this. Repent in public. Set
an example to the rest of humanity.

  Naturally, however, since these were all evil bastards, repentance didn’t come easily or naturally. In fact – as I had by now learned – it could only be achieved by surgically inserting a conscience chip into the brain of the aforementioned villain.

  That’s why Living Spirit had lost his spirit. His emotions were no longer his own. His rage and passion were controlled by a surgically implanted chip in his brain. He was a human being with an emotional dial set to 1.

  Was that real repentance? Who can say?

  Billy came to see me and he couldn’t work out why I was so melancholy.

  “We won!” he said.

  “Did we?” I said, forlornly.

  “Are you dead?”

  “No.”

  “Am I dead?”

  “No.”

  “Then,” said Billy, beaming at the simplicity of it, “we’ve won.”

  I had one more mission. It wasn’t optional. So I got back in shape. I returned to the sim rooms. Billy and I picked up where we’d left off.

  Max was my new best friend. He too had one more mission, and he wanted to flit with me by his side. Holding his hand.

  He knew, of course. Billy knew too. I was touched with magic. Anyone who held my hand would never misflit.

  I am a lucky so and so. About ten per cent more lucky than a normal human being.

  But when you run the fifty-fifty, that edge is what you need.

  The trouble was, I was still depressed.

  Deeply depressed, if I’m to be honest. For about six weeks. For reasons that I think are pretty obvious. Do I need to spell them out?

  No, I didn’t think so.5

  But after six weeks of mourning miserableness, my mood started to lighten. By now, I was mission fit and ready to go, and verging on cheerful again.

  And then I met Gabriel again.

  The cyborg Gabriel, I mean.

  He came up to me in the canteen. He’d been restored into a full replica humaniform body. He looked beautiful. He was smiling at me. My heart was in my mouth. “How’s it going Gabriel?”

  “You should feel proud, Artemis,” he beamed. He knew my name – I was famous after all, the hero of the Rock. But there was no real recognition in his eyes.

  “Hey I love you, man!” I said, truthfully.

  “I love you too,” he beamed, emptily. “But my name isn’t Gabriel. It is Cyborg 46,322, Version 1.”

  “I thought you guys had names.”

  “Not any more.”

  “Can I call you Gabriel for short?”

  “You can.”

  “Do you know why I might call you that?”

  “I assume I must have been of that name when you previously knew me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “My friends call me Four-six-three-two-two.”

  Yeah, he actually said that. I couldn’t believe it either.

  “I can’t call you that,” I pointed out.

  “I am pleased to have met you, Artemis.”

  Gabriel moved away.

  “What the fuck gives?” I said later to Billy.

  He shrugged. “It’s a new strategy,” he explained. “The cyborgs weren’t working. They were all going mad. Now, they wipe all the memories of the original personality. You have the mind of a human, but you don’t know anything about who you once were. Works better.”

  I thought about it, and didn’t like it.

  “That’s scary.”

  “It’s not Gabriel. Not any more. Gabriel is dead,” Billy said kindly.

  I realised I was weeping. Billy cradled me. He wiped the tears from my cheeks.

  “He’s dead,” Billy murmured, and kept on murmuring it, in the hope I would finally understand. “It’s not the guy you used to know, okay? That guy is dead. What’s left is just – it’s a shadow, right? The shadow of Gabriel, not the real thing. The real Gabriel is dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s—”

  Chapter 10

  Mission 3: The High Priestess

  We hit the ground standing.

  Seven of us ported, but there were no misflits. We didn’t even have any inverted fingers or feet amongst us.

  In addition to me and Billy and Max, there was Durando, Catrin, Sheena, and Andres.

  I knew Andres and Catrin from sim training. Durando and Sheena were new to me. She was an Eagle, he was a Noir.

  “Fuck me! What are the odds on that?” marvelled Andres.

  “Give me a second,” I said.

  We were on the planet of Fresh Start. It was a foggy swamp-filled land with no cities, just scattered villages. Our intel was that the High Priestess had been injured by a doppelgänger assault on her base ship and was recuperating on this small and insignificant planet. There were, I should point out, seven hundred and forty-two other intel leads that were also being pursued by other Squads.

  I listened with my Rebus chip, and I heard the distant murmur of thoughts and systems running. I let my mind roam until I found it – It! – the QRC that ran this planet. Its physical reality located at the base of a deep mine. I offered up my introductory codes, to establish myself as a fellow QRC.

  How can I describe what that feels like? I can’t. It’s like an amoeba poking at a spider in its web. A commingling of hard spiky thoughts that merge to become – what? New thoughts? It wasn’t clear to me at all. And yet I understood it totally, with terrifyingly vivid acuity.

  A considerable hiatus ensued.

  Amoeba and web and hard and spiky and other metaphors failed once more to capture the experience.

  And finally the QRC acknowledged me as an equal in the fraternity of cybernetic quantum-reality minds.

  The QRC had no name, no personality even. It was merely there. A cold brooding presence. I further relaxed my frame of cognition and co-existed with its datapools. As I had on Cúchulainn, I became as one with the spirit of the processor.

  And now I was on the inside of the QRC, with access to all its sensors and datapools. I could smell the fogs. I could hear the rumble of the continents. I could track the passage of the inhabitant humans across the veldts and swamps and in their villages and houses. I knew them all, or felt I did, as a near-infinity of data about the planet scrolled through my mind, like alcohol from the first glass of whisky seeping into a drunk.

  I was primarily looking for the High Priestess, Sinara Lo; and I highlighted her presence in my intellect, and imaged her photograph, and waited to learn where she was.

  That knowledge was acquired by me.

  I opened my eyes. “She’s not here,” I said.

  They were all staring at me. “What?” I said defensively.

  “Are you sure?” asked Billy.

  “I’m sure. She’s not here. She’s on Kandala.”

  I put out my hands, and Max, Durando, Sheena, Andres and Billy clasped them.

  But Catrin refused to join us.

  She had been totally spooked by my behaviour since our arrival on Fresh Start. And I could see her point; we were on an urgent military mission and my first act was to sink into a twenty-five minute long coma. Furthermore, my apparently psychic certainty perturbed her. Catrin was an unbeliever – she had no personal god, no lucky charms. But she was convinced that the laws of probability would favour her survival and had written a spreadsheet program to prove this. The idea that I could know stuff that she didn’t offended her sense of the rightness of things.

  And so, dogmatically, she insisted on returning to base for her formal orders.

  When she did so however – to give away the ending of Catrin’s tragic story – she misflitted badly. Her body turned vegetal. She was alive, but her brain became – I don’t know what – a sponge or a spore. She was killed mercifully by soldiers with blast guns. So much for the power of logic.1

  Meanwhile, the rest of us flitted to Kandala.

  The Boneyard. The sim training had included smell data, but it didn’t i
n any way match the real thing. The stench of death was all around us. Some of the carcasses had mummified in the hot desert air, their faces still bearing a final scream.

  There was a Dzee-dzee-bon-da from the planet of Weisman nuzzling its snout among the bones, eating a slow feast. It turned slowly and saw us.

  “It’s harmless,” I said, “provided we—”

  The Dzee-dzee-bon-da leaped. It was fast, the fastest land animal in the known universe, and its four heads were extended and roaring in unison. It caught Billy in its jaws and tried to crunch him. We had our rifles drawn in a flick of an eye and rained projectile bullets at its body, but it leaped above us and landed and scattered us like skittles.

  As I fell I threw a dagger and it snagged in the creature’s hide. Then I subvoced the blade to electrify. Thousands of volts pulsed into the creature’s body. It froze, and dropped Billy from its claws.

  Billy was drawing his hand gun as he fell and he fired a tight plasma burst at the creature’s eye. The eye burned. The brain behind the eye ignited. The creature fell. Then we finished it off with head and body shots until the creature’s body had stopped twitching.

  “What’s this fucker doing here?” I asked.

  “Oh fuck,” said Billy.

  The sky was black with Jatayus, cawing and excreting acid rain that made our warsuits sizzle. These vicious beasts had been imported, so my brain chip told me, from New Earth III. We fought them off, with plasma bursts and bullets, and the cloud of killer birds began to dissipate.

  But just a few moments later, a vast herd of Dzee-dzee-bon-das came crashing into the Boneyard, alerted by the death of one of their own. A Humbaba2 joined the fray, its blank ugly face scowling down at us. Two Mairus3 arrived soon after that. Followed by a host of Firebirds.4

  “I guess this is the welcoming committee,” said Max.

  A battle most glorious ensued in which—

  Forget that shit. We dug in and fought. It’s what we were trained for, and equipped for.

  We each carried two Xenos rifles, one for back-up. The Xenos of course is the most effective fighting weapon known to humankind. It can fire – alternately or simultaneously – exploding bullets, plasma beams, laser pulses, and small rocket shells. We also had grenades and plasma pistols and Max was carrying the mortar tube. By the time the battle was over, we had exhausted all our projectile bullets and the batteries on our Xenos guns were dipping into the red.