Life After Wartime

by Paul McAuley

  For a moment, my hardwired reflexes had kicked in. For a moment, I had been considering whether or not this man had blown my cover, whether or not I should kill him. I carefully manufactured a smile, and said that I hadn’t realized that I seemed so odd.

  ‘Most of us have secrets,’ Willy said. ‘That’s why we’re out here, my brother. We’re just as much prisoners as anyone in our sticks. They don’t know it, but those dumbasses blundering about in the files are trying to find a way of escaping what they are.’

  ‘And there’s no way you can escape what you are,’ I said. The moment had passed. My smile was a real smile now, not a mask I’d put on to hide what I really was.

  Willy toasted me with his bulb of tea. ‘Anyone with any sense learns that eventually.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me how you would catch the assassin.’

  ‘I don’t intend to catch him.’

  ‘But speaking hypothetically . . .’

  ‘For all we know, it’s the warden. He can go anywhere and everywhere, and he has access to all the security systems too.’

  ‘The warden? Really?’

  Willy grinned. ‘I’m pulling your chain. But seriously, I’ve done a little research about these things. They’re not only stone killers: they’re also real good at disguising themselves. The assassin could be any one of us. The warden, you, me, anyone. Unless this thing makes a mistake, we haven’t got a hope of catching it. All we can do is what we’re already doing – deploy more security drones, keep the prisoners locked down when they aren’t working, and pray that that’ll keep a lid on any unrest until that team arrives.’

  ‘I guess you’re right,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t try to be a hero, my brother. Not even hypothetically.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ I said.

  But one of Willy’s remarks had given me an idea about how to reach out to the assassin, and my mind was already racing, grappling with what I had to do.

  * * * * *

  I decided that if the assassin really was keeping an eye on the people who were hacking into the files, then he (or at least, his demon), must be lurking in the root directory of the data system. That was where I left an encrypted message explaining what I was and why I wanted to talk, attached to a demon that would attempt to trace anyone who looked at it. The demon phoned me six hours later, in the middle of the night. Someone had spotted my sign and wanted to talk.

  The demon had failed to identify the person who wanted to talk, and it was infected with something, too: a simple communication program. I checked it out, excised a few lines of code that would have revealed my location, and fired it up. It connected me to a blank, twodimensional space in which words began to appear, emerging letter by letter, traveling from right to left and fading away.

  >>you got rid of the trace function. pretty good for an old guy – if that’s what you really are.

  >they trained us well, I typed.

  >>you think you know what i am. you think that i am like you.

  Whoever was at the other end of the program wanted to get straight down to business. That suited me, but I knew that I couldn’t let him take the lead.

  >we are both children of the vat, I typed. that’s why I reached out to you. that’s why i want to help you.

  There was a pause as my correspondent thought this over.

  >>you could be a trap.

  >the message got your attention because it is hardwired into your visual cortex, just as it is hardwired into mine.

  >>that kind of thing is no longer the secret it once was, but let’s say that i believe you . . . .

  A black disc spun in the blank space for less than a second, its strobing black light flashing a string of letters and numbers, gone.

  >>do you know where that is?

  I realized that the letters and numbers burnt into my brain were a grid reference.

  >i can find it.

  >>meet me in four hours. i have a little business to take care of first.

  It was the middle of the night; the time when the assassin did his work.

  >please don’t kill anyone else until we have talked.

  My words faded. There was no reply.

  * * * * *

  The grid reference was at the precise centre of a small eroded crater sixty klicks south of the facility, an unreconstructed area in the shadow of the graben’s eastern rimwall. Before I headed out, I equipped myself from the armory and downloaded a hack into the security system so that I could move freely and unremarked. I was oddly happy, foolishly confident. It felt good to be in action again. My head was filled with a fat, contented hum as I drove a tricycle cart along an old construction road. The rendezvous point was about an hour away: I would have plenty of time to familiarize myself with the terrain and make my preparations before the assassin, if that was who I had been talking to, turned up.

  I want to make it clear that my actions were in no way altruistic. The only life I wanted to save was my own. Yes, I knew that I was dying, but no one loves life more than those who have only a little of it left; no one else experiences each and every moment with such vivid immediacy. I didn’t intend to throw away my life in a grand gesture. I wanted to unmask the assassin and escape the special team’s inquisition.

  The road ran across a flat terrain blanketed in vacuumcemented greybrown dust and littered with big blocks which over the eons had been eroded into soft shapes by impact cratering. The graben’s wall reared up to my left, its intricate folds and bulges like a frozen curtain. Steep cones and rounded hills of masswasted talus fringed its base. To my right, the land sloped away toward a glittering ribbon of fences and dykes more than a kilometer away, the boundary of the huge patchwork of fields. It was two in the morning by the clock, but the suspensor lamps were burning as brightly as they always did, and above the western horizon the sun’s dim spark was almost lost in their hazy glow.

  I was a couple of klicks from the rendezvous, and the road was cutting through a steep ridge that buttressed a great bulge in the wall, when the assassin struck. I glimpsed a hitch of movement high in a corner of my vision, but before I could react, a taser dart struck my cart and shorted its motor. A second later, a net slammed into me, slithering over my torso as muscular threads of myoelectric plastic tightened in constricting folds around my arms and chest. I struggled to free myself as the cart piddled to a halt, but my arms were pinned to my sides by the net and I couldn’t even unfasten the safety harness. I could only sit and watch as a figure in a black pressure suit descended the steep side of the ridge in two huge bounds, reached me in two more. It ripped out my phone, stripped away my utility belt, the gun in the pocket on the right thigh of my pressure suit and the knife in the pocket on the left thigh, then uncoupled my main air supply, punched the release of my harness and dragged me out of the lowslung seat and hauled me off the road. I was dumped on my back near a cart parked in the shadow of a housesized block and the assassin stepped back, aiming a railgun at me.

  The neutron camera I’d fitted inside my helmet revealed scant details of the face behind the goldfilmed mirror of my captor’s visor. Its demon made an extrapolation, searched the database I’d loaded, found a match. Debra Thorn, employed as a paramedic in the facility’s infirmary for the past two years, 22, unmarried, no children . . . . I realized then that I’d made a serious mistake. The assassin was a doppelganger, all right, but because she was the double of someone who hadn’t been an adult when the war had ended she must have been manufactured and decanted much more recently than me. She wasn’t insane, and she hadn’t spent years under cover. She was killing people because that was what she’d been sent here to do. Because it was her mission.

  A light was winking on my headup display – the emergency shortrange, lineofsight walkietalkie. When I responded, an electronically distorted voice said, ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  I’d stripped all identifying tags from my suit before setting off, but th
e doppelganger who had killed Debra Thorn and taken her place was pointing a gun at my head and it seemed advisable to tell her my name. She was silent for a moment, no doubt taking a look at my file. I said, ‘I’m not the doppelganger of Roy Bruce, if that’s what you’re thinking. The person I killed and replaced was a gene wizard by the name of Sharwal Jah Sharja.’

  I briefly told the assassin the story I have already told you. When I was finished, she said, ‘You’ve really been working here for eight years?’

  ‘Eight and a half.’ I had made a very bad mistake about my captor’s motives, but I must have piqued her curiosity, for otherwise I would already be dead. And even if I couldn’t talk my way out of this and persuade her to spare me, I still had a couple of weapons she hadn’t found. I risked a lie, said that her net had compromised my suit’s thermal integrity. I told her that I was losing heat to the frozen ground, that I would freeze to death if I didn’t get up.

  She told me I could sit up, and to do it slowly.

  As I got my feet under me, squatting on my haunches in front of her, I glanced up at the top of the ridge and made a crucial triangulation.

  She said, ‘My instructors told me that I would live no more than a year.’

  ‘Perhaps they told you that you would burn briefly but very brightly – that’s what they told me. But they lied. I expect they lied about a lot of things, but I promise to tell you only the truth. We can leave here, and go anywhere we want to.’

  ‘I have a job to finish.’

  ‘People to kill, riots to start.’

  The assassin took a long step sideways to the cart, took something the size of a basketball from the net behind its seat, bowled it towards me. It bounced slowly over the dusty ground and ended up between my legs: the severed head of an old woman, skin burnt black with cold, eyes capped by frost.

  ‘The former leader of the parliament of Sparta, Tethys,’ the assassin said. ‘I left the body pinned to the ground in one of the fields where her friends work, with an amusing little message.’

  ‘You are trying to start a war amongst the prisoners. Perhaps the people who sent you here are hoping that the scandal will close the facility. Perhaps they think it is the only chance they’ll have of freeing their comrades. Who are you working for, by the way?’

  ‘I’ll ask the questions,’ the assassin said.

  I asked her how she would escape when she was finished. ‘There’s a special team on the way. If you’re still here when they arrive, they’ll hunt you down and kill you.’

  ‘So that’s why you came after me. You were frightened that this team would find you while they were hunting me.’

  She may have been young, but she was smart and quick.

  I said, ‘I came because I wanted to talk to you. Because you’re like me.’

  ‘Because after all these years of living amongst humans, you miss your own kind, is that it?’

  Despite the electronic distortion, I could hear the sneer in the assassin’s voice. I said carefully, ‘The people who sent you here – the people who made you – have no plans to extract you when you are finished here. They do not care if you survive your mission. They only care that it is successful. Why give your loyalty to people who consider you expendable? To people who lied to you? You have many years of life ahead of you, and it isn’t as hard to disobey your orders as you might think. You’ve already disobeyed them, in fact, when you reached out to me. All you have to do is take one more step, and let me help you. If we work together, we’ll survive this. We’ll find a way to escape.’

  ‘You think you’re human. You’re not. You’re exactly like me. A walking dead man. That’s what our instructors called us, by the way: the dead. Not “Dave”. Not anything cute. When we were being moved from one place to another, they’d shout out a warning: “Dead men walking.”’

  It is the traditional warning when a condemned person is let out of their cell. Fortunately, I’ve never worked in Block H, where prisoners who have murdered or tried to murder fellow inmates or guards await execution, so I’ve never heard or had to use it.

  The assassin said, ‘They’re right, aren’t they? We’re made things, so how can we be properly alive?’

  ‘I’ve lived a more or less ordinary life for ten years. If you give this up and come with me, I’ll show you how.’

  ‘You stole a life, just as I did. Underneath your disguise, you’re a dead man, just like me.’

  ‘The life I live now is my own, not anyone else’s,’ I said. ‘Give up what you are doing, and I’ll show you what I mean.’

  ‘You’re a dead man,’ the assassin said. ‘You’re breathing the last of your air. You have less than an hour left. I’ll leave you to die here, finish my work, and escape in the confusion. After that, I’m supposed to be picked up, but now I think I’ll pass on that. There must be plenty of people out there who need my skills. I’ll work for anyone who wants some killing done, and earn plenty of money.’

  ‘It’s a nice dream,’ I said, ‘but it will never come true.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I profit from what I was made to do?’

  ‘I’ve lived amongst people for more than a decade. Perhaps I don’t know them as well as I should, but I do know that they are very afraid of us. Not because we’re different, but because we’re so very much like a part of them they don’t want to acknowledge. Because we’re the dark side of their nature. I’ve survived this long only because I have been very careful to hide what I really am. I can teach you how to do that, if you’ll let me.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like much of a life to me,’ the assassin said.

  ‘Don’t you like being Debra Thorn?’ I said.

  And at the same moment I kicked off the ground, hoping that by revealing that I knew who she was I’d distracted and confused her, and won a moment’s grace.

  In Ariel’s microgravity, my standing jump took me high above the assassin’s head, up and over the edge of the ridge. As I flew up, I discharged the taser dart I’d sewn into the palm of one of my pressure suit’s gloves, and the electrical charge stored in its superconducting loop shorted out every thread of myoelectric plastic that bound my arms. I shrugged off the net as I came down and kicked off again, bounding along the ridge in headlong flight towards the bulging face of the cliff wall and a narrow chimney pinched between two folds of black, rockhard ice.

  I was halfway there when a kinetic round struck my left leg with tremendous force and broke my thigh. I tumbled headlong, caught hold a low pinnacle just before I went over the edge of the ridge. The assassin’s triumphant shout was a blare of electronic noise in my ears; because she was using the lineofsight walkietalkie I knew that she was almost on me. I pushed up at once and scuttled towards the chimney like a crippled ape. I had almost reached my goal when a second kinetic round shattered my right knee. My suit was ruptured at the point of impact and I felt a freezing pain as the smart fabric constricted as tightly as a tourniquet, but I was not finished. The impact of the kinetic round had knocked me head over heels into a field of iceblocks, within striking distance of the chimney. As I halfcrawled, halfswam towards it, a third round took off the top of a pitted block that might have fallen from the cliffs a billion years ago, and then I was inside the chimney, and started to climb.

  The assassin had no experience of freestyle climbing. Despite my injuries I soon outdistanced her. The chimney gave out after half a kilometre, and I had no choice but to continue to climb the naked iceface. Less than a minute later, the assassin reached the end of the chimney and fired a kinetic round that smashed into the cliff a little way above me. I flattened against the iceface as a huge chunk dropped past me with dreamy slowness, then powered straight through the expanding cloud of debris, pebbles and ice grains briefly rattling on my helmet, and flopped over the edge of a narrow setback.

  My left leg bent in the middle of my thigh and hurt horribly; my right leg was numb below the knee, and a thick crust of blood had frozen solid at the joint. But I had no time to tend
my wounds. I sat up and ripped out the hose of the water recycling system as the assassin shot above the edge of the cliff in a graceful arc, taser in one hand, rail gun in the other. I twisted the valve, hit her with a highpressure spray of water that struck her visor and instantly froze. I pushed off the ground with both hands (a kinetic round slammed into the dusty ice where I’d just been), collided with her in midair, clamped my glove over the diagnostic port of her backpack, and discharged my second taser dart.

  The dart shorted out the electronics in the assassin’s suit, and enough current passed through the port to briefly stun her. I pushed her away as we dropped towards the setback, but she managed to fire a last shot as she spun into the void beyond the edge of the setback. She was either phenomenally lucky or incredibly skillful: it took off my thumb and three fingers of my right hand.

  She fell more than a kilometre. Even in the low gravity, it was more than enough to kill her, but just to make sure I dropped several blocks of ice onto her. The third smashed her visor. You’ll find her body, if you haven’t already, more or less directly below the spot where you found mine.

  The assassin had vented most of my air supply and taken my phone and emergency beacon; the dart I’d used on her had crippled what was left of my pressure suit’s life support system. The suit’s insulation is pretty good, but I’m beginning to feel the bite of the cold now, my hand is growing pretty tired from using the squeeze pump to push air through the rebreather, and I’m getting a bad headache as the carbon dioxide concentration in my air supply inexorably rises. I killed the ecosystem of East of Eden by sabotaging the balance of its atmospheric gases, and now the same imbalance is killing me.

  Just about the only thing still working is the dumb little chip I stuck in my helmet to record my conversation with the assassin. By now, you probably know more about her than I do. Perhaps you even know who sent her here.