by Cody Sisco
A voice boomed inside his head—except he had no head, so how was he hearing? “The shape of the future,” it said. “Cross over.”
“I am over,” Victor grumbled, without a voicebox to vocalize.
And then he was back. In a drug hut, holding a stunstick, standing over Samuel’s prone body. The limbs made a circle, hands meeting above the head, eyes open and glazed. Red foam leaked from the lips, formed a trail down the cheek.
Samuel was dead, and Victor had killed him.
Victor had fired the stunstick and then went blank. Or he went blank and fired the stunstick. Samuel had made him do it. Or had he?
Victor glanced around the room. He had the feeling there was another body. Always two. Two was the best. Two was the answer. He looked again. There was only one body on the ground: Samuel’s. He paced the room. Why did it feel as if there were two?
He’d seen two bodies in the blankness, but that was a dream or a vision or whatever. The room had been different. That couldn’t be what was bothering him.
Victor stood there, looking at the body, trying to make one equal two, not sure what to do. He looked down. His hand, still holding the stunstick, felt numb, like an alien body part grafted onto his arm.
Shocks. The word ran through his head again and again. Shocks. Shocks.
What now?
He left the room. The guards were still unconscious.
Time, which seemed to be oozing along at a snail’s pace, began to accelerate. His heartbeats jammed together. His breath sped up. He had little time to make things right before he was swept up in the consequences of his action.
Start with the stunstick. He disconnected the quantum trigger and shoved it in his pocket. He replaced the discharge impeder and swapped the high-powered energy cell for the standard one. Finally, he put the stunstick inside his shirt, tucked the shirt into his pants, and went outside.
Think. Think!, he told himself. His mind was sludge.
The drug hut next door housed Florence. Beyond it was the one where Alia was being kept under guard. With leaden steps, he walked toward it. A plan began to take shape. He knocked and entered. The female Lifer with the cloud-like bosom sat on the living room couch, hands clasped, praying. A male Lifer was out on the balcony staring at the Caddo mudflats. They both looked over when Victor walked in.
“It’s over,” he said. His voice, when it came out, was surprisingly calm. The female Lifer closed her eyes and whispered something.
The male one stepped inside. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“I’m the Avatar, right? I say it’s over now. Go home.”
“What does Wonda say?” the woman asked.
“I haven’t told her yet.” Victor raised his hands, the way he’d seen them do it in the pavilion when listening to Estrella Burgos’s writings—his great great great aunt’s writings, that is. “You are the first. The witnesses. Hear me: Samuel Miller crossed over.”
Both of the Lifers looked at him, stunned.
“It’s your job to spread the word. Tell everyone. Samuel is gone, and it’s time to leave.”
The female Lifer picked up a book from the table, swept her gaze around the living room, and started toward the door. The male Lifer moved to follow, then stopped. “What about—er, the Effendi woman is in there. Should I—”
“I’ll take care of it,” Victor said. “Find Wonda and Tosh and tell them to meet me in the administration building with Circe and Karine. Mía too. Tell them, ‘A solution has emerged.’ I’ll be there soon.”
The man looked at the door to the room where Alia was kept. He seemed torn between his duty and Victor’s orders.
Victor put a hand on the man’s shoulder and said, “Don’t stand in the way of Emergence. Let it happen.”
The man bit his lip, nodded again, unlocked the door to the room where Alia was by typing his code, and then went outside, where the cloud-bosom Lifer woman waited.
Victor opened the door. Alia, sitting on the couch, looked up at Victor and jumped to her feet. “Are you getting me out of here?” she said.
“Yes, you’ve got to hurry and get help. Find your way out of here without being seen. Use the path above the construction site maybe.” He reached into his pocket and put the quantum trigger and energy pack in her hands. “Dump these in the first canal you find.”
“What are—”
“There’s no time,” he said as he took her arm and walked her outside.
“Get rid of those, and go get help. The Lifers are assembling at the admin building. I think you can make it.”
She looked down at the gadgets in her hands, questions pursing her lips.
“Please,” he said. “This is almost over.”
Without a word, she stuffed the gadgets in her pockets, turned, and headed upslope toward a dirt track that wound around the BioScan campus and ended in Pond Park. Victor watched her until she disappeared behind a stand of trees, and then he headed downhill.
***
Back at the administration building, the Lifer guarding the door saw Victor approaching and let him inside.
“You can go if you want,” Victor said. “This is over.”
The Lifer snorted. “I’m not going anywhere until Wonda says so.”
“Fine. Come listen to what she has to say.”
Victor walked to the center of the atrium, where Wonda stood flanked by Tosh and Donya. Mía, Circe, and Karine were off to the side, guarded by four Lifers with their stunsticks out.
In the polished floor he saw two shadows reflected, but they vanished as he approached. Two shadows. Two bodies, curled together, crushed. He had seen Samuel’s body, alone in the drug hut, missing its other half. Why two?
Wonda ran across the atrium, her shoes clacking on smooth gray synthstone. “What happened?” she asked. “Is it true?”
Victor announced the news in a loud voice: “Samuel Miller is dead.”
Wonda’s mouth fell open. “No!”
Karine and Circe exchanged a glance, and then both looked at Victor with unreadable expressions. He knew they would have questions for him before long.
“In the drug huts,” Victor started to explain, “I found him—”
Found him and killed him. Not on purpose. The blankness made me do it. Victor knew better than to let the truth pass his lips. He took a breath and began again. “It looks like he killed himself,” he said, a half-truth that would make his family proud. “There was a drone but no weapon.”
“Oh, laws,” Wonda said. “Oh, life. No! We were going to get him out of here.”
“It’s too late,” Victor said. “You can tell everyone he crossed over.”
Wonda looked at him. “You sound relieved. How can you be so cruel?”
“He got what he wanted. This is over,” Victor said. “Everyone is going home.”
Wonda looked at him with naked hate. “It’s not over. Not until I say.”
“The authorities are on their way,” Victor told her. He noticed Tosh’s stance harden. He said to Tosh, “You know this has to end now.”
“They can’t touch us,” Wonda said. She gestured at the stunsticks in the hands of the Lifers. One of them had taken off his Venetian mask and dropped it on the ground. The man’s face was lined with weariness, the bags under his eyes heavy.
“Think, Wonda!” Victor said. “What does a fight get you? The only way this ends well for you is if you leave now. I’m willing to make you a deal.”
Circe gazed at Victor with cold fury in her eyes. “We will never agree to their demands.” She looked at Wonda. “You have nothing to win. Leave.”
“No!” Wonda fired back.
“If you leave now,” Victor said, “we’ll never speak of the care our hemochromatosis patient received. The kind of care that could constitute a felony.”
Wonda licked and then chewed her lips.
“And,” Victor added, “you can have Samuel’s body.”
Wonda furrowed her brow, confused.
Tosh
stepped forward, put a hand to her ear, and whispered something that Victor barely caught, something about a “continuing ritual.”
A spark lit Wonda’s eyes, and her mouth curled the way it did when she was about to make a pronouncement. She closed her eyes, brought her fingers to her lips, kissed the tips, and blew on them.
“We need to pay our respects,” she said.
Victor felt a nauseating mixture of disgust and admiration. The way her brain worked terrified him, yet there was still sweetness there, a gentleness that came into flower when she let it, when she wasn’t fighting for some ephemeral sense of honor stronger than any logic he could wield. He held out his hand, met her round-eyed gaze, and wrapped his arms around her.
Tosh watched them embrace and then rushed out the front door.
Karine looked relieved, while Circe looked inscrutable as always. They were safe in their power, now that the Lifers had no reason to stay.
***
The Lifers gathered at the new harbor. A group had run up to the Pond along the same track Alia had taken and brought down a flotilla of kayaks. Mía watched stonily as they laid Samuel’s body in a kayak and covered him with clothes. Wonda pushed the kayak away from the dock. It rocked on the waves, losing momentum. In death Samuel was lingering far too languidly for Victor’s taste.
Enforcers were arresting the protesters at the construction site. They had been waiting for Circe to file a complaint. “Next time I see you or any Lifers on this campus, I’ll have you arrested, your homes repossessed. I’ll have you shipped to the R.O.T. and let the Corps do what they will,” she’d told the crowd.
The Lifers boarded their kayaks and set off downstream. They’d appeared sad but grateful that the siege was over.
It was then Victor realized he hadn’t really thought things through. The Lifers had gained a totem. Wonda could no doubt spin a new thread of crazy focused on Samuel’s discarded husk.
In any case, the sheriff was going to be asking a lot of questions.
44
Comparative advantage leads inevitably to conflict. In an economic context, this means wasted effort and money down the drain. Symbiosis requires a different approach—mutualism, openness, and integrity—but the rewards are much greater.
—Circe Eastmore’s Race to the Top (1991)
1 August 1991
New Venice, The Louisiana Territories
Concrete sludge laced with StoneStrong microbes surged through pipes big enough for a person to stand inside. The gray material, like thick unappealing porridge, filled gaps between wooden frames and rebar lattices, rising quickly, a flood of foundation, soon to dry and harden. Piles of steel beams waited to be assembled into spindly fingers reaching toward the sky, the skeleton of the BioScan towers. Construction was on schedule. The future would arrive soon.
The LT Council blamed recent troubles on foreign meddling—without naming the King explicitly—and refused to alter their plans. They passed Mía’s two-speed Classification Act and cracked down on the resultant protests in New Venice and elsewhere.
Neither Karine nor Circe had confronted Victor about Samuel’s death. He thought that was far more disturbing than if they had. Maybe it had something to do with the sheriff’s inquiry, which had yet to solicit any statements from the hostages and seemed to face repeated delays thanks to BioScan lawyers.
The drug huts were being torn down to build proper in-patient facilities. The Human Lifers’ settlement had been repossessed, part of the two-speed Classification Act’s largesse. The addicts would live there, side by side with MRS patients. Mesh IDs would be fused to their bones. Legal wrangling over adjacent parcels continued. The whole complex would expand to a footprint ten times its original size.
Wonda had sent Victor a message. The Lifers were squatting on Caddo mudflats downstream. She wanted him to see how they were living, what he’d accomplished by betraying them. He didn’t respond. There were too many urgent pleas from people who needed help. He’d never imagined a sanctuary to be such a busy place.
Victor tried to keep up with the deluge of tasks needing to be assigned, new staff asking where they should get started, and an endless stream of complaints, prayers, bribes, and invective from Broken Mirrors and their legal custodians hoping to be transferred to New Venice.
The cramped BioScan administration building—though its expansion was complete with new office wings, an expanded emergency room, and a cavernous, glass-encased atrium—didn’t have enough room for all the functions that were due to move into the towers. The hallways were jammed, the rooms were jammed, Victor conducted business from a desk crammed into an alcove, everyone had to make do with hardships, and there simply wasn’t enough space.
Victor’s Handy 1000 chimed. Time for the staff meeting. He downed a fumewort tincture, as much out of habit as anything else. Something had changed in his head: the resonant episodes still came on suddenly, but he was better able to manage them and never went blank—unless he wanted to. He tried not to think about crossing over.
Mía grunted a greeting when he walked through the door. She sat next to Karine, who was wearing emerald green glasses. Idiot Blair the finance guy pecked at a MeshBit, oblivious to anything else. Marilyn paced in a corner. Alia smiled at Victor and pulled out a chair for him. He sat down.
The meeting proceeded at a blistering pace. Questions, answers, commands, and requests bounced back and forth faster than a pro ping-pong ball match. No talk of Samuel. No mention of the Lifers. Everyone was getting on with the business of helping people, not looking back.
Tosh had left town, but he’d be back. Victor was certain.
They were close to wrapping up when a young man with a shaved head and chunky black glasses came into the room. He apologized, “So sorry,” made a half bow, and searched out Victor with his gaze. “Could you please come with me, Mr. Eastmore? So sorry to bother you.”
“What is it?” Victor asked, rising from his seat.
“Sorry to interrupt. There’s a woman and a—patient downstairs who are asking to speak with you.”
“Why me? We have protocols for—”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t think I should—”
“Let’s talk in the hallway,” Victor said. He turned to Karine and the others. “I’m sorry about this. I’ll take care of whatever it is.”
“We’ve already paused,” Karine said, “and I’m curious.” She raised her voice, directing it at the young man: “Why have you interrupted our meeting?”
His eyes went wide behind his glasses, looking like a vidscreen magnification. “It’s the young woman. She says her name is Elena Morales, and the man with her—he looks bad. Some kind of jaundice and fever.” He looked at Victor. “She says it’s your fault. Something to do with a kennel?”
Victor gulped, feeling as if he’d swallowed a hot slug of lead. He glanced at Karine. She nodded toward the door.
“Come on,” Victor said, taking the young man by the elbow.
“I’m coming, too,” Alia called behind him and joined them in the hall.
Downstairs, before they’d rounded the corner to the main reception, he heard Elena shouting. “I don’t care. Get him in a stretcher. Put on a fucking space suit if you don’t want to touch him—just get me some help.”
In the waiting area, Elena was holding up Chico as best she could. His face looked drained of blood, replaced by some combination of mustard and sulfur. His neck flushed red. Victor and Alia rushed over and helped support him by the arms.
“Finally!” Elena said. She was sniffling, wiping tears off her cheeks. Relieved of Chico’s weight, she walked around randomly, almost a birdlike wandering. “We were in the car for eight hours. I was so worried he’d stop breathing and I’d be—”
“What’s wrong with him?” Victor asked.
She stopped, put her hands on her hips. “You tell me! He was working in the kennel. I barely saw him for days on end. I went away for a day and a half and came back, and he was like this. He’s on fire!�
��
Alia had already put on gloves. “We have to treat him. Now.”
Two attendants arrived with a stretcher. Their arms flexed as they hefted Chico up and onto it. His eyes, which had been half-open and heavy-lidded, closed as soon as he was lying down.
Alia led the attendants toward the emergency room.
Victor approached Elena and put a hand on her arm gently. “We need to take a look at you too. Just in case.”
“It’s Jefferson,” she said. “Whatever he did to those dogs, it’s happening to people now too.”
Victor blanched. He could almost feel the color run out of his face. Jefferson had used the Lone Star Kennel in Amarillo as a bioreservoir for something, “a tool,” he’d said in his message.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go figure out what we’re dealing with.”
“Fucking Eastmores,” Elena said as Victor led her toward the emergency room.
TO BE CONTINUED
Afterword
Thank you for reading Tortured Echoes. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the book. Head on over to Goodreads or to the retailer’s page online to leave a review.
This novel was written throughout 2016, and much of the latter half of the book took shape in the final stages of the U.S. presidential election. Readers might recognize the toxic blends of fact and fiction, belief and rhetoric, stated purposes and secret plans that run through New Venice as disturbingly familiar. I never intended the world of Resonant Earth to be utopic; the problems facing Victor and his fellow seekers aren’t easily resolved. But, in a time of geopolitical uncertainty and realignment, a world without guns, where “skin is skin,” and there is no risk of nuclear war, it seems readers might want to escape to Resonant Earth for as long as they can.
The third book in the series promises to be darker, to show more of the American Union and beyond, to explore the frontiers of blankspace, and to ask the question: how far will Victor go to get what he wants?
