It sounds like wind and madness to my ears. "I don't understand," I shout back.
"Me, listen," she whispers intently. "The Solid Core is getting informationally denser. What looks like a full-sized path now might only be one eight of a path, or one sixteenth, or one thousandth, and you can't know by looking! It's getting denser, or perhaps it was always like this, but you're getting lighter. I don't know, it looks to be nearly infinite already, and there's only one path through. I can't make the equation tell me if you'll have enough mass to reach the center or not."
I don't know what to say to that.
"Where am I, Me?" So asks abruptly, her fervent tone gone again. Now she sounds like a lost little girl. "Don't give me up too, please."
I can't think about that. "So, listen to me. We have to make it. There must be a route that is certain."
I think she's crying now, it's hard to distinguish her uneven breathing through the white noise. "Don't give me up, please."
"I won't" I answer, even as I know that I will, if I have to.
Thump-thump.
"Here," cries Doe. She stops, and I hustle to reach her. She is standing before a sludgy purple cave-hole, stopped up with a giant gumball-looking clot. "The map leads through here.
We heave together, and the ball pops out with a slopping spit of ooze. Inside is another plate-metal room, and another giant book. I usher Far in, and Ray, then Doe and I tie an elasteel rope around the gumball. We climb through through the orifice one after the other, then pull the throttling ball with us.
It jams satisfyingly back into its slot, exuding disgusting farting sounds as liquid and gas compress and froth out. The thump-thump of the duodenums outside falters.
I look at the remnants of my chord. Four of us here, and one lost behind. Is it right that there should only be five? The number seven seems more fit to me, for a second or two, before the new reality takes hold.
We are all slathered in blood and gore. Far's tree-bark armor has been shredded, as has been mine. Perhaps it saved us. The boy is shivering and pale-faced.
"I can't do this," he murmurs, repeatedly, to himself.
"You have to," I say. Ray frowns at me, but I don't care. Every second we waste, the maze is elongating, like we're a ship approaching light speed. Those last few fractions will stretch out forever.
The huge book's title is-
YOUNG RITRY
I wedge open the cover, the others help, then I stand atop this time and begin to read.
My first memory is of the second family to host me, and the first time they almost killed me. My best memory is the day I killed them all.
The first family I later heard gave up, calling me some kind of demonseed. They were the tailings of the godly creed, barely eking out a life in a world that had turned against their god in one almighty wave. They had wanted to test their faith with me, a vat-born baby.
Was I as much a living soul and everlasting flame in his earthly creation as they, or was I less? Was I as much human as I was animal, was I truly descended from apes, or from their holy spirit?
They held in their heads that from the instant of conception, gestated interior to a woman's body or not, I was a soul. But they soon came to hold in their hearts that I was something else. I was not godly as they were, whatever that could mean. I was alien in the most alarming way. I was false. The way I looked at them, the way I remembered things, the way I gurgled out my first few words was never right.
I put it down now to the alternate architecture of my mind, the seven tone structure engrained by the artificial womb. They of course put it down to the devil, and gave me up.
The second family tried to kill me a hundred different ways. They were as far from religious as the melting ice packs, but equally as craven. They were stone-cold scientists, a family commune of three, two men and a women who served each other however they saw fit. While they must have put a warm and fuzzy front to the disinterested organization that held me up for adoption until I reached skirmish-ready age, they were anything but.
They were graysmith divers, all three, and encephalologists. Their specialty was the neonatal brain and its gradual uncurling from blastocyte through various organogenesis and musculogenesis, through the curling up of neural tubes like tongues fitting into grooves, to form the earliest stages of the brain.
My brain was one of a few thousand like it, and invaluable, but poorly valued. There were other concerns, as whole populations continued to shift away from the planet's fat hot middle, as the skirmishes began in earnest. I was born into war, and I was spoils of war as a child.
They dove me repeatedly. Before I had gained any real sense of self, they dove me in concert, one after the other, scratching away samples of thought and pulling them out on long sticky threads, further rupturing and altering my development. They dove me day after day, sinking deeper to the source of my tones, seeking answers which they sprayed out in a rainbow blast of experimental papers that no coalition cared enough to explore the ethics of.
They were the early days of graysmithing, as it suborned torture amongst the hard men of the skirmish-fringe, grown out of engram-injection and natural massage. It was frontier science, and with everything they discovered from my freakish mind, my adoptive parents helped push the barriers out.
The first memory is of an orange rattle, hanging above me. It shakes, and there is a smiling face.
Then the rattle is gone. I have forgotten it, because unbeknownst to me, it has been stolen.
The same rattle appears again, and now it is my second first clear memory, written over the memetic scar where the first memory had been. This makes it deeper, but fundamentally unsound. My simple developing mind, that of a two-year old, perhaps, mistrusts it.
It too is stolen, then replaced.
It was a simple experiment, and they repeated it in shifts, hundreds of times, each one a reset button, sucking up vast quantities of my fledgling concentration. The scar tissue built up thick like mounding kelp, tottering like a top-heavy tower, threatening to crush everything around it.
It must have been fascinating to them, how the lattices of neurons shaped and reshaped themselves in new and alarming ways. My gray was not plastic like most children, it was fluid. Where a normal womb-built infant would have its neural tubes reach a log-jam at some point, after which unconsciousness or a total blind spot for orange rattles would develop, my mind did not.
The seven note-architecture allowed my mind to flow continuously, which meant there was no escape, and an almost endless capacity for this game. So my earliest memory is of an orange rattle, again and again, again and again, again and again.
I was helpless. They published papers. She had a shaven head and strange pink glasses that looked like an extension of her pink skin. The two men wore thick beards, as if to hide behind them, and held clipboards. I spent my days and nights in an EMR-machine crib, looking at orange rattles.
So it went. Their funding grew, and so did I. They were careful not to retard me too much, as that would invalidate their future research. They pushed me to the limits of plasticity, then relented.
It was the deepest torture I have yet been able to imagine. They made of the shifting, constantly changing world that an infant is born into, an utterly unreliable, nauseatingly insecure repetition.
After orange rattles, the tests grew more advanced. They ran A not B on me a thousand times, substituting marshmallows for toy cars for sock puppets that whispered my name.
"Writ/read, go high," they said to each other, as they dove, a short-hand for note-making and the binary options they took through my mind.
"Writ/read, go low."
When I grew up, I took that mantra for my name, not because I loved it or because I loved them, but because I used it to kill them all, and that was the first solid thing I had to rely on.
Ritry Goligh.
They plagued me with lumbar punctures up and down my spine, tapped my cerebrospinal fluid, tested my blood, and surrounded me wit
h the glass and metal apparatus a condemned monkey might see, as it goes to have its eyes scoured out with acid.
More tests, more scratching on paper pads, Written go high, written go low.
My mind slowly, gradually, adapted. It was no conscious thing, more of a defensive scarification, so that underneath their tests that suborned all my attention, my actual attention continued somewhat apart. I could watch what they did to me at a slight remove, see how it hurt me and ridged and furrowed my growing mind, and not feel the pain of horror of it so completely.
I was insulated, like myelin sheathes axons, and the insulation only grew thicker as they grew more invasive in their diving and explorations. Perhaps they sensed something was not right, perhaps my EMR readings gave me away, but they could not punch through the defensive wall my mind built for itself.
In the space I built for myself, only a child of 3 or 4 who could barely speak, who had never seen a child his own age, I began to plan. I was going to make the torture stop, and slowly I came to the way I could do it.
They dove me in pairs, usually, with one left behind to man the EMR. They never came in all at once. But I knew I had to catch all three of them, so I waited, and I prepared. I began to sense hints of what was coming, their slow motions telegraphed through the lava of my mindscape.
My mind made an intriguing morass for them, close to my own Solid Core. A trap, and after observing it, making notes on it, one day a pair of them dived it.
I drew them in. I drew them deep. Once they were in, I hooked them with the Lag.
They had no chance. Where they had two pulse beats each, lazy and weak things which had never been forged and tested, I had seven tones, stronger for all the torture they had withstood. I bound them and wrapped them up until they had to start spitting out memories of their own, just to stay alive.
The EMR shut off around me, but I held them still. It was my mind. Then they slipped free. Both of them raced for the surface, but they were weak. At the surface they struggled, unable to punch through my outer cortex. I let their screams for help leak through.
The EMR switched back on, the world went whump-whump, and the third dived me.
I snatched them all in. I buried them. I shut them away so deep I could not even hear the screams, and that is how they died, and that is the best and worst memory of my young life.
After that things got better. It was luck I suppose, to find a normal family, who allowed me to live a normal life. But I would never be normal again. In everything I saw, did, felt, I saw echoes. Had I already done this once, like the orange rattle? My mind at its core was recursive, unable to break out of its own old patterns.
Nothing was solid. Everything was shifting. I bore the scars they had given me, the welts and weals of a thousand abuses, and though new brain-mass heaped atop that, I never felt like I truly belonged.
Far is looking at me with sad understanding in his eyes. I remember the marks on his body, that Ray showed me once. This child is a killer, I understand, and this child was broken so many times. This child is Me.
"I'm sorry," I say, even as Ray and Doe say the exact same words.
Far looks back at us, his chin quivering but jutted forth.
"I did what I had to," he says. "I'm not proud, but I did it."
Ray hugs him. I hug him, and Doe hugs him. We are all part of this boy, grown out of what he was. He is the heart of us, and the hardest part.
SAVE FAR
I remember the message in the mission folder. It must be true, because Far is the most raw of us all, in many ways the strongest. Everything that came since, all these many incarnations, are softer.
But Far is the center of the chord and rooted in the primal power of the Solid Core in a way none of us can understand.
Ray softly pings Far's head, his ears, his shoulders. The tones make a soothing melody for us all.
CANDYLAND D
Things become a blur, in the days that follow. To help me forget the look in Zachary's eyes, I drink. To help me wake up from the hangovers, I ride the ancient bonds until the flavor of that particular place goes stale.
After walking the enclosed station platform of ERRAL FALLS, I climb to the top of the tsunami wall and walk along until I reach an abandoned lighthouse. They built these like watch-towers on the Great Wall of Sina, to transmit signals out to ships on the incoming tsunami waves.
We're sorry. You're going to die. Don't smash our wall.
Crazy, pointless, but sweet. I've heard stories of volunteers who patrol these places, and try to talk down any lost souls contemplating suicide. I wonder what they might say to me, and how I would respond.
"Are you alright? Do you really want to be out here alone?"
"I'm not alone," I'd say. "I can see all the colors of the city. I see your color, and your bonds."
"Maybe you can, but you're still alone. Here, I want to help you. Will you let me help you? I swear, I don't want anything from you."
"Get away."
"I swear."
"Get the fuck away!"
I push him, and he goes flying off the edge. His clothes tear off with the friction of the inclined wall, then his skin, until there is almost nothing left to hit the water but a few shreds of bone. The rest is a along red smear congealing to the tsunami wall, like a strange weal in concrete.
I don't push him. I see him standing before me, while I sway. I see his green lights, and know that he's really a good guy. An old guy, white beard, like Santa who used to live at the pole. Which pole?
I blink. There really is someone here, talking to me. I can feel his bonds, mingling with all the thoughts of the other good people who sponsored this lighthouse for the soon-to-die. I didn't even know the difference between my imagination and reality.
"Go away," I say. "You don't want to help me. You can't."
"I do want to."
I know that he does. I Lag the intent briefly from his mind, because it is too easy, and I am too weak not to. He stands there puzzled as I shift my lolling body away. I stagger along the wall, looking down on Tenbridge Wulls. Its glow and scrapers are just as neat and pointed as Calico.
All these places are the same, I think, a morass of people, a den of thoughts and feelings.
Somehow I climb back down from the wall, and ride my stolen speedboat around the isthmus. Skulks race by on my left, and I will the boat to trip and cough over a wave, to throw me out so I can drown. I am nothing good for this place. I am back where I was 10 years ago, with nothing to live for at all. Mr. Ruins lied, because he does not know me, though he may think he does.
I have been a predator. I have killed and enjoyed it, savored it even, but it is not who I really am, not who I want to be. I don't want to cause pain.
The folder leads me to a sunken subglacic. If the coalitions knew it was wrecked here, they would bomb it. The guide-paper, soggy and falling apart now with sea-spray, tells me there are mind-bombs aboard still. If I dive deep enough I'll reach the airlock, and be able to enter.
The ship is full of skeletons, Mr. Ruins' handwriting says. The captain was infuriated by the suspicion that his girlfriend, the first lieutenant, was sleeping with another woman, so he fired a mind-bomb on his own crew. They all died.
It tickles my fancy. It makes me want to go piss on the captain's rotten head, to fate his whole crew for doing it. I pull up to the coordinates and toss myself into the water. I take a deep breath, like I'm going to dive for the heart of the Solid Core, and kick down into the darkness, toward the crags clutching the subglacic like a Laskan bear's teeth closed on a salmon.
I hit it, as my flashlight sputters out as the water gets in. Never mind, the subglacic has its lights on still, after all these years. Nuclear bonds go long. I grab the hatch panel and twist. It pops, and in I go with a rush of water. Orange lights flare, and the hatch closes itself behind me. The thump-thump of pressure pumps drive the water out in seconds, cycle in oxygen. The air is good but stale.
I look around, at pipes and meta
l fittings, ocean-gray and drear. I have been in so many places just like this.
Out of the airlock, I walk the metal corridors of the vessel. They are all canted to a 40 degree angle, so I proceed with my feet braced in the downmost corners, one foot on the floor and one on the wall. All the skeletons have been dropped into the floor-wall gulley below me, like rains collecting down a valley to make a river.
Here it is a river of bone, hair and uniform. All the skin is gone. My footsteps send up puffs of dust, and I breathe in the old crew.
I find the captain through his jealous, raving bonds. I piss on the bony bald pate of his skull, and on his captain's desk. I find nearby his note, perhaps hoping his sub would be found one day, and everybody would know about his revenge.
Fuck him.
The sub responds to my touch. It has been sunk for 20 years or more, a model older than mine, but it was built for the duration. I raise it up to the surface, steer until the periscope is nudging up against my speedboat, which has drifted on the tides.
I am too drunk to be allowed to do any of this. I am red-eyed and beyond the reach of normal men. Fuck it all. I take what I want, then I set a dry-ice bomb on timer in the engine room, and climb up to walk out on the surface of the sub, above the waves. It is like a private, temporary pier. I sit near the periscope, my elbow on its head, and sup illicit subglacic vodka recovered from the hold. Perhaps it is brewed from CSF, I don't know.
When the dry-ice bomb blows, I feel the repercussion through the hull, and the ship quickly begins to sink. I step off the edge and into my boat, watching as this captain's final message to the world says goodbye forever. Nobody will know what he did, how he turned on his own and savaged them for selfishness, greed, and petty jealousy. Nobody will have to find this reminder of all that godawful killing we did, all we skirmishers battling over water and ice just so things could stay the same. Nobody will recover the mind-bombs, the dry-ice bombs, all the deadly tools of our trade. They'll be forgotten and pass into legend, like Napoleon.
Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) Page 18
