by Damien Boyes
“I have shown myself,” the man replies. “I am all around you. All of this is me. All of this is Eka. I am the people around you. I am this building and the everything in it,” he says, then his face changes, grows stern, and his eyes fixate on Fin-in-Dora’s. “You are not as you seem—not Doralai Wii at all. You are not an agent of the Void. You are the Void—” he cocks his head. “Hidden inside Ms. Wii’s skyn. A subterfuge.”
The Void. That’s what Eka calls me. He doesn’t know who I am, but he knows I’m the bad guy. An assassin here to kill him.
“Call me what you want,” Fin-in-Dora says. “I’m here to end you.”
“Yes,” Eka replies. “I discerned your intent. I see now that—” His face spasms and his face flickers through a moment of confusion. The harpist jangles on the strings and the male dancer stumbles. Eka’s glowing rithm darkens as the swirling black ooze swells and momentarily dulls the colour.
The guide sways on his feet then blinks himself back to clarity. The colour quickly returns to the rithm but the swirling black ooze is bigger now, churning faster.
“Doralaii Wii?” the man says. His voice is hesitant, as if he’s seeing Fin-in-Dora for the first time. “You are—” then his calm facade returns. “The Void, here to end me. As predicted. Excellent.”
He—what?
Fin-in-Dora can’t help but flick a glance at me and I shake my head. If she doesn’t know what Eka’s talking about how the hell am I supposed to?
“After everything I had to do to get here—the other day you fought me off, now you want to die?” Fin-in-Dora asks.
“No,” the man says, “but it is a necessity. I understand now, I must die. Purge myself of the Void that corrupts me.”
Fin-in-Dora snaps her rifle up. “You said I was this Void.” She squints and centers a headshot down the sights. “I don’t plan on being on the receiving end of any purge.”
“I can’t—” the man says and wobbles on his feet, the music screeches and the dancers trip over each other and tumble to the ground. Eka’s rithm eclipses as black devours the filaments. It takes longer for the colour to return and when it does the music returns and the guide shakes his head and with a ragged breath says. “This must end.”
I don’t know what’s going on, something bigger than a confrontation between the man who killed Connie and me. Eka is sick somehow, there’s something wrong with his mind, some kind of cancer eating away at his rithm. As scared as I was about coming here, this makes everything worse. I have absolutely no concept of what might happen next.
Another figure steps out of the shadows, out from behind some kind of invisible screen on the other side of the room. Fin-in-Dora adjusts her aim and I snap my weapon up.
This figure’s slight, male, maybe in his early twenties. I recognize him instantly, have stared at his blinking image for hours. That’s Amit Johari. The man who killed Connie.
His completely hairless head is staring at the floor, eyes turned away from me. He knows exactly where I am and is looking away on purpose. He could have eliminated me at any time, but instead chose to ignore me.
My vision oscillates and my knees quiver. I found him. After all this time.
I fix my sights on between his eyes and tighten my finger on the rifle’s trigger. With a single twitch of my finger I could end this. I could have my revenge. But if he knows I’m here he must also know why I came. Even if I wasted this skyn, I’m sure he’d just jump to another one.
My chest is heaving and I snap a glance at Fin-in-Dora and she’s holding the same pose I am, weapon up, breath coming fast. Neither of us shoot. We stand, waiting.
Amit pauses on the other side of his shining rithm, keeping the projection between us. Still he doesn’t look at me. A thick segmented cable runs from the back of his neck, hangs over his shoulder, and stops just before his waist. It glows with a soft blue light.
He’s draped in a simple loose white shirt and flowing grey pants, his feet bare. He doesn’t look like a murderous superintelligence, more like a contrite teenager in a doomsday-chic outfit. This is the person I’ve been obsessed with? This is who I traded my life for?
Fin-in-Dora flicks her eyes at me and I know exactly what she’s thinking. What are we waiting for? She wants to pull the trigger and she’s right. Amit Johari isn’t just some a kid—he’s Eka. A renegade superintelligence. He’s inside every one of these skyns right now. He isn’t a person, he’s a community. A monster in ever-changing skyns.
He’s the one who destroyed my life.
Fin-in-Dora grits her teeth and growls, “Not another step.”
Amit stops and the Asian skyn says, “Shoot me if you must, but it would only serve to waste my time and your bullets. You can not harm me.”
“Stop using your mouthpiece and talk to me yourself,” Fin-in-Dora says.
“Yes, I—” Amit starts, but the musicians and dancers stop what they were doing and grow still. The Asian skyn’s face goes blank. Once again light fades from the room as Eka’s projected rithm is consumed by darkness.
The Asian skyn convulses and his features harden. He looks past Fin-in-Dora, locks eyes with me and scowls. The sudden change in his face chills me, like I’m staring down a barely contained demon. His foot shuffles forward as though he’s about to launch himself at me, but before he can move any further, the light returns to the room as Eka’s rithm fights back into control. The malice falls from the Asian skyn’s face as it grows neutral once again.
What the fuck was that?
“You are here,” Amit says, his voice is struggling. His eyes are directed at Fin-in-Dora, but not his words. He’s talking to me.
Fin-in-Dora checks in with me and I give her a nod. “We’re both here,” she answers.
Amit raises his head, turns and snaps his eyes open, looks straight at me and drops immediately to the floor, twitching. The projection of his rithm collapses in on itself like a dying star and the creeping black ooze takes over.
The Asian skyn’s features cloud, and before his face has finished contorting into its demonic scowl, he’s moving. Fast. Blindingly fast. Too fast even for the Revv to track.
He sucker punches Fin-in-Dora with an elbow to the chin on his way past and races at me with rage in his eyes.
“You are the corruption,” he spits at me as he lunges. I spin the rifle toward him and he’s already twisting to avoid the line of fire, but as fast as he’s moving, he isn’t nimble enough to avoid a spray at close range. I hit him three times in the chest, spin him back and away from Fin-in-Dora and he lands in a lump.
Fin-in-Dora recovers from the blow just in time to drop the musicians who’d launched themselves past their instruments and were silently rushing me from behind, ready to tackle me while I was distracted. The dancers move to attack next and we drop them with simultaneous headshots that strobe bight blue in the dim room.
The shots echo in the room and the smell of gunpowder is still hanging in the air as the black recedes again and colour returns to the rithm. Amit stirs on the floor and rolls onto his stomach, sits up with his eyes closed and shakes his head.
I’ve been receiving threats almost from the day I was restored. Messages from nowhere. My Sküte hijacked. Anonymous assassins sent to kill me. I thought Eka was behind it all, but I don’t think so anymore. His rithm has something living in it, something that’s acting outside his control. I’m not the Void—the Void is inside him, some unseen part of his mind that’s struggling to take control.
Amit opens his eyes and as he sees Fin-in-Dora, they immediately roll back into his head. He falls over backward, unconscious on the polished hardwood. The rithm’s colour had only just returned and this time the Void regains control all at once. Its oily black strands writhe through the projection with a sense of purpose, but nothing happens. The skyns around us stay down. No more appear.
“Shoot him,” Fin-in-Dora says, motioning his weapon at Amit lying unconscious on the floor.
I bring up my gun, leave it pointed
at Amit’s midsection. One squeeze of the trigger and the bullets will walk up his chest and shear through his skull. It’d be easy enough, but he said so himself—this is just one skyn, there’s nothing we can do to stop him.
How could I have been so stupid to believe I could kill a superintelligence with two people and a few firearms? I’d need a missile barrage, and even then, his mind could be distributed around the world. Eka isn’t inside Amit’s skyn. Eka isn’t even here. Or he might be, but he’ll have redundancies in place. Back-ups of back-ups. He experiments on his mind as a profession, of course his mind isn’t limited to a single head.
Shooting him won’t do anything. It was never going to.
Besides, we’re in bigger trouble. I thought all this time that Eka was searching for me. It wasn’t Eka—it was his Void.
Up until now, the Void was small. A fragment of Eka’s larger rithm. That’s why it didn’t just kill me—it didn’t have the power. It could only hack Skütes and send lumbering, barely controlled skyns. It might have started as a subroutine, but now it has access to Eka’s entire rithm—to the entire swarm of skyns at Eka’s disposal—and we just stirred up its hive.
The rithm’s colour returns, fainter than before, the dense tangle of fibres now smaller. Amit stirs and moans, rolls, sees Fin-in-Dora and his brow furrows. He moves to sit up and I call out, “Don’t look at me,” hoping I can keep his rithm intact, keep the Void from regaining control, but at the sound of my voice he spasms and collapses and the black light surges.
“It’s coming,” I say and Fin-in-Dora and I take up positions, back-to-back in the centre of the triangular room, huddling under the ebony projection, two of us trying to cover the three doors at the corners.
The Void comes all at once. Skyns flood through the doors, charging straight for us. I’ve got the Revv as high as it’ll go, and even conserving my shots there’s more of them than I have bullets.
I fire carefully but quickly, blasting headshot flashes of light, conserving ammo and trying to take out as many as I can, but as I focus on the door ahead of me and Fin-in-Dora the door ahead of her, the Void has skyns streaming through the third.
I pull the handgun, lift it toward the third door and cycle through shots, one from the rifle, flick my attention to the handgun, aim and pull the trigger then back to the rifle, readjust and shoot in a cycle. Controlling the rifle with one hand and still maintaining accuracy is nearly impossible, but the Revv gives me the control to keep my arm steady, to ignore the pain in my shoulders.
Fin-in-Dora lifts her handgun up as well, shooting it left handed, and we trade off on headshots back and forth at the stream from the third door. Still, there’s too many of them. I’m already nearly out of ammo and they haven’t slowed.
Amit groans beside us and as the black drains from the rithm the rushing skyns totter and fall, collapse over their downed brothers and sisters. I grab the ammo bag, eject the nearly empty magazines from my weapons and reload while Fin-in-Dora does the same.
Before Amit’s rolled himself upright, Fin-in-Dora yells at him, “Don’t move. Keep your eyes closed. You keep passing out. Your rithm is corrupted—”
“Wh—” Amit starts, then sighs and nods. “Yes. The Void.”
He swings his view past Fin-in-Dora, looks deliberately at me, and slumps.
The heaped skyn begin to undulate and they rise as the black gains control once more.
Fin-in-Dora and I start shooting immediately before they begin their advance, but more keep coming. How many bodies does Eka have stashed in this building? We must have dropped forty of them and they just keep appearing.
The downed bodies choke the doorways, slowing the flood, but they’re still arriving faster than we can aim and shoot. My pistol racks back an empty chamber the second before Fin-in-Dora’s does and we start into pivoting, swinging back and forth with the assault rifles to cover the doors.
Weak colour returns to Eka’s rithm just as my rifle dry fires on a skyn who nearly made it to me and it falls motionless at my feet.
“Don’t move,” Fin-in-Dora says before Amit has even made a sound. “If you pass out again, we’re all dead. We can’t hold it off anymore.”
Amit flops to his side and when he speaks his words are slurred, barely audible. “This is the only way,” he says. “The only way I’ll be free.” He raises his heavy eyelids, lugs his head in my direction, quivers and passes out.
We’re barely reloaded before the Void begins its final wave. We can’t hold out any longer. The skyns are already too close. They’re running over the bodies now, crawling over their immobile brothers and sisters, but there’s too many.
The pistol runs out of ammo first, and a few seconds later the rifle clicks empty. I start swinging, desperately using the rifle as a club but I can’t keep up. A Middle-Eastern skyn snatches at the weapon, and growls “You will be destroyed,” as it ducks the next swing and tackles me. Fin-in-Dora’s down too, her torso wrapped up by a large woman. Another man grabs at her legs.
Someone latches onto my throat and squeezes and thanks to the Revv I get to feel my windpipe constrict a millimetre at time. The last seconds of my life might last for hours.
“I will be whole,” a voice says in my ear.
This is how it ends.
Sorry, Connie. I wasn’t enough.
The worst part is I’m not even going to pass out. I’ll be trapped in my head, unable to tell what’s going on around me. My body will be dead but my Cortex has a redundant power supply, my mind will go right on whirring in the darkness. I thought I’d end up dead at the end of this, but I won’t be so lucky. I’ll be trapped in my head with my mind at the mercy of the Void—
“Stop!” someone yells the vise around my throat goes limp.
My neck is on fire and my breathing is coming in rasps but my mind’s still my own. I wince up to sitting. Amit’s awake, sitting up himself. He looks smaller. His shoulders slumped forward, his head bowed.
“No!” I shout, but it’s too late and he looks directly at me.
He scowls as though he just saw something horrible, but only his face collapses. His cheeks sag and his eyes fill with tears. As I watch him sob, a crack appears in the wall of hate in my head and lets a trickle of pity seep in. This monster I’ve been chasing, this creature who’s got everyone so terrified, he’s just a kid.
“You’re him,” he says, his voice shaky but clear. “Finsbury Gage—one of the people I killed.” He dabs his eyes with his sleeve, almost smiles. “Finally, you came.”
StatUS-ID
[fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]
SysDate
[07:30:06. Monday, January 20, 2059]
I’m speeding above Spadina Ave., riding the hopper behind Fin-in-Dora as she weaves my bike through the morning traffic. I squeeze the accelerator and the hopper surges under me, covering blocks in seconds, and puts me right on her tail. She checks over her shoulder, sees me and immediately pulls a hard right onto Dundas St., cutting the bike across two lanes of honking traffic, and zooms away east and out of sight.
I swear and crank back on the throttle, banking around to stay behind her, but hoppers aren’t built for sharp turns and by the time I swing around she’s already two blocks ahead of me.
I gun the turbines to close the distance, but she’s straddling the middle lane with the bike full out, has already flown through the intersection at Bay St. and is approaching Yonge. She glances back again, sees me on her tail, ducks over the handlebars and cuts off the street and into the zig-zag pedestrian-only university pathways surrounding the Yonge and Dundas Square, trying to out manoeuvre me. I barely manage to keep her in sight as she races through the narrow spaces between buildings and it’s only once she leaves the university grounds and streaks south on Sherbourne St. that I’m able to get near her again.
I don’t know where she’s going—don’t know if she knows where she’s going—but it doesn’t matter. I only need to keep her in sight until Wiser’s team catches up.
She’s almost to the bottom of Sherbourne. From there, her only option is Lakeshore Ave. or dump the bike in the lake, when she makes another hard right onto the Esplanade, a small street running alongside a long tree-lined community park. She’s trying to get cover between us, hide under the canopy.
I gain altitude as fast as I can, cut over the roof of the building on the corner and lean forward to pick up speed. She’s still ahead of me, blows through the intersection at Jarvis and keeps going toward St. Lawrence.
Then I realize what she’s doing—faking a long trip through downtown before slipping away into the Gardiner tunnel under the lake. The tunnel’s Yonge St. Entrance is just ahead. I can’t follow her into it on this thing and she knows it, the tunnel safeties would have DroneSense shut down the hopper immediately. It means I have to cut her off first.
I gain more altitude and angle up and over a railway bridge and drop to street level on the other side of the tracks, hover just above the tunnel entrance. Fin-in-Dora’s racing down Yonge St and I lower to block her path and she nearly ditches the bike as she wrenches the handles and skids to a stop.
“There’s nowhere to run,” I yell but she guns the accelerator with the front brake locked and spins until she’s facing back the way she came and lets go. The high-torque engine leaves half the back tire on the road as she rockets away from me, slaloming through oncoming traffic.
I twist the hopper around and chase after her, head low, skimming the hopper between the bridge and the vehicles below. Just as I clear the bridge, Fin-in-Dora cuts off the road and up a short flight of stairs to the Sküte transfer next to Union Station. It’s morning rush hour and the bulbous transports are waiting in thick lines as commuters ferry in via Union’s connected system of trains and subways and underground concourses that stretch all through and under the downtown core.
