Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2)

by Michael Shean

  Scalli grunted. “Yeah, well fuck ‘em. I like to boil lobsters.”

  “Me, too,” she murmured. Lobsters and crabs were her favorite seafood. Would she be able to eat them again? Probably more now, given the situation. A tiny stab of revenge. “It’s more than that though. Like, they have three brains in their natural state. Can you imagine that? Three centers of thought all going at once. They’re all smashed together in human heads, though, and that slows them down a whole lot. And even then…” Bobbi sighed. “We’d be fucked if they were able to think like that again. Completely fucked. Consider the scale of what they’ve done, constrained as they’ve been— three hundred years of solid technological advancement, more than anything else in history, and it’s not even our own work. It’s those fuckers. And they’ve gone and made us dependent on them.”

  Another grunt from Scalli. “I don’t buy that,” he said. “We’ve been building shit forever, and even Cagliostro said that they only guide us in many cases. It’s not like they’re telling us all what to do, you know.”

  “Yeah.” Bobbi shook her head. After everything that Cagliostro had told her, it was easy to imagine that they’d all be drooling idiots without the cold hand of the monstrous behind them. That was part of their power, to make you feel smaller than you were, insignificant before their mighty knowledge. It was a damned good trick – even their architecture made the human spirit quail. She knew now what Tom had felt, why he had seemed half mad when he talked to her for the last time. He had seen a biological processing operation, Cagliostro had said. An assembly line of organ farming and dissection. She couldn’t imagine that that must have done to him. The ghouls had been enough through the camera, and to see them up close had been easily the most frightening thing she’d ever experienced. He had seen all that and killed one of the Yathi where they lived.

  He must have been magnificent, said the voice of an awed teenaged her inside her mind.

  But he was one of them, said a far more bitter version of the same. So, you know, not.

  And he had been, or so Cagliostro had said. All the symptoms which Ivan had suffered, Tom had too – but he didn’t turn into somebody that Hitler would have wanted as a pen pal. He had fought the impulse for three years, from beat cop to federal agent, and instead turned that nameless isolation into something that allowed him to protect people even if he hated them. That just spoke to the strength of his character, she felt, and she was fiercely proud of him even if it ended up being a line of shit. And, honestly, she really hoped that it did. She didn’t want to find him at the end of whatever road she had gotten onto, silver-eyed and horrible, and either her or Scalli having to put a bullet in him.

  “So they’re trying to colonize, to change everything. I get that.” Scalli was handling this much better than she had, something that she found both irritating and admirable at the same time. He had no problem eating his burger, after all, or drinking from his enormous jumbocup of Cola GaGa. “That shit, you know, that’s been going on for a long time, space or no. But what I don’t get is, why did he put you on to Walken in the first place? Why did he involve Walken in the first place? I mean, Stadil was Yathi, right? So he just…fried himself to say ‘fuck you’ to Merducci? Is that it?”

  Bobbi shook her head. “No,” she said. “That’s not it at all – see, look, it had to do with the story that he told me. You remember, he said that he had become something else, right?”

  “Yeah.” Scalli took another bite of his sandwich.

  “It’s like…a major flaw in the colonization program. Yeah, you can become Yathi, but Merducci thinks the human mind is completely destroyed after the alien mind awakens, right? Cagliostro says that isn’t so. The human mind is subsumed, pushed down under the weight of Yathi willpower, sure – but that doesn’t mean that it still isn’t there. And that’s the problem.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “You can’t be two different things at once, you’re saying.”

  “Exactly.” Bobbi turned toward him. “It’s kind of like oil and water, you know? Unlike oil and water, I mean, the two minds will mix for a while – but if the human mind has a certain degree of strength on its own, it will eventually reawaken again.”

  “And the two separate.” Scalli clucked his tongue. “So what happens then?”

  “Quantum disentanglement,” said Bobbi, looking out the window. In the distance, police flashers could be seen swarming thickly near a plume of what looked like smoke. “Sentience is a quantum process— the process involves mingling two separate instances of sentience and forcing them to work together, and that takes an enormous amount of power in the first place. Cagliostro said they cracked the crust of their planet just trying to get the power necessary to start the first reaction. Thousands burnt up straight away.”

  “You mean their planet which they were going to lose,” Scalli said, and he shook his head. “Get out of there or blow yourself up trying. Those people, they’re hard core.”

  Bobbi nodded. “That’s precisely the point – they’re willful on a scale I’ve never heard of before. Closest thing I can think of is how the Crusades were, both the American one and the ones back in the Dark Ages. So sure they’re doing the right thing that they don’t bother thinking anything else.”

  “Except your man Cagliostro.”

  “And that’s the thing, yeah.” Bobbi took a sip of her Coke Supra, letting the cola-and-melon flavor trickle over her tongue. “After so many years of being Anton, he just finally…snapped, I guess. Ivan woke back up inside of himself, and saw what he was doing. Memory’s coded chemically, you know, so it’s like he knew what the alien did. So they started fighting for control, and he won.”

  Scalli gave her a sidelong look. “And how did he do that? You just got done saying how willful the Yathi were. I don’t see that coming easy.”

  “It wasn’t easy at all, no.” Bobbi took another sip and nodded. “But I think…I think Ivan realized for the first time what had been going on, and he went crazy. It’s the same as those crazies that are running around with Redeye – they’re all former Yathi that resurfaced, then went nuts as both sides tried to reassert themselves. They don’t remember everything because their minds have gone rotten, or fragmented, or whatever. Cagliostro was the same way, only he remained sane enough to want revenge for what had been done. So when Tom…” There was silence for a moment as she struggled with the words. “I mean, when Merducci created this whole plan to try and break Tom’s will, you know, and wake up the seed inside of him, he saw a chance to do that. Tom was supposed to kill Merducci, did you know that? That’s what he had expected him to do.”

  “Keep him awake long enough to know what was going on,” said Scalli. “So Cagliostro screwed up her plans, then.”

  “No, he just forced her hand a little. I mean in the end it was the same, and it’s obvious that Tom didn’t kill her. Which leaves a big question as to what happened to him. Cagliostro sure as hell doesn’t know. He could be dead, like I had thought. Or he could be Yathi now, out spreading the same awful shit as the rest in that bitch’s name. I just…don’t know.” She looked down at herself, at her hands folded in her lap over the top of her soda cup. After all of this she wanted him to be dead, dead and buried under the remains of Orleans, so that he wouldn’t suffer the horror of being ridden by such a terrible thing. But now, knowing all this, he could have joined with Merducci. He could have…

  “Hey.” Bobbi looked up; Scalli was staring at her, concern in his eyes again. “Look. If we do find him, we’ll fix him. We’ll help him drive out whatever’s in him, if he hadn’t done it already. He’s a tough bastard, you said it yourself.”

  She took a deep breath and nodded. He was tough, she knew it – and maybe Scalli was right. “All right,” said Bobbi with a slow nod. “All right.”

  Scalli nodded in return, looking at least a little satisfied she wasn’t going to break down again. “So Stadil recruits Walken, puts him on the trail, hires you to be his rough guide because he knows y
ou will follow the clues and help him get to Merducci and drill her. Okay. But then what? Why did he just kill himself off?”

  “Well,” she began, “his human consciousness, I mean what was left of Ivan, had resurfaced entirely at that point. He knew that he could only be one or the other, and that the Yathi half of him had so much sway that it was only a matter of time before the alien mind won out again. So he decided to try and exorcise the thing. If he got killed in the process, well, that’s just what would happen. And by that time Cagliostro had replaced almost all of his brain tissue with biocomputer components, just like his bodyguards, see? He decided that he would kill the body by uploading his consciousness into the network, and hopefully either split off or cripple the weaker mind – or what was weaker at the moment – and allow his human consciousness to live on the network as a kind of free-floating program. You know, to carry on the fight.”

  Scalli let out a low whistle. “Damn,” he murmured. “But wait, if he could do that, why don’t they just stick their minds in new bodies? Like those Princess Dolls, you know?”

  Bobbi shook her head. “You aren’t supposed to be able to do it, at all, see. The Dolls were limited in that they could take a consciousness but they couldn’t grow or evolve at all. Very static. As for what Stadil did, Merducci tried it already and it hadn’t worked. Killed anyone who tried, or butchered their minds so that there was just, you know, a nonfunctional piece left. Stadil did something clever in that he made his Yathi fellows sacrifice themselves; they were eaten up entirely so he could get the boost he needed to make the transfer. The two minds were forced to do a kind of hard copy into the supercomps he had in the club, which merged them and then destroyed the majority of either because they didn’t have enough processing power to handle the whole thing. So what he is out there, wherever he’s based now, is effectively a shadow of what he once was. An intelligent shadow, but nothing like he was before. Like a ghost, I guess.”

  “And the lack of tissue in their heads? I mean, didn’t you say that their skulls were empty?”

  She nodded. “It’s the nature of the biosynthetic components,” she said. “The body dies, they decompose entirely in a matter of days. Extreme heat makes it happen in minutes. He was getting rid of the evidence of what they were, you see.”

  Scalli whistled again. “So almost everything you got on the Dolls in that archive was a story, then. About their being an experiment, that kind of thing.”

  “Well, to a point.” Bobbi wrinkled her nose. “I mean, it was set in a frame of reference that we’d accept, wasn’t it? That’s how he operates, or at least he did when he was still alive. So he sets up all this what he did more to try and give Merducci a final ‘fuck you’, I guess. At least to some degree.”

  Scalli didn’t have anything to say about that; neither did she, truth be told. So they sat there and tried to do their best to melt into the seat cushions for a few minutes. The wrapper of her sandwich rattled. Scalli’s cup announced it was empty through the wet sucking of the straw that scraped across its dry bottom. Finally Scalli put the cup aside and fixed his eyes on Bobbi, folding his arms over his chest like a dubious titan.

  “So we go see this crazy girl,” he said, nodding. “This Redeye. That’s pretty obvious, I think. Assuming the ghost isn’t lying, of course.”

  Bobbi looked at him with surprise. She still expected him to just up and take off, even having stuck with her this far along the road. It was a disservice, she guessed, but stranger things had already happened in spades. She was grateful nonetheless. “No, I don’t think he’s lying. I mean, I heard him talking about Ivan’s wife and daughter, and that wasn’t a joke or a trick. I think he honestly wants this shit to come to an end, but he can’t do it alone. Neither can we, come to that – but we can do what we can to make sure nobody else becomes infected with Yathi minds. I don’t like the idea of dooming an entire race to death by a fucking exploding star, but they haven’t given us any other options.”

  “You start something, you better be ready for someone else to finish it.” Scalli shook his head. “You think they’d have learned this, to be so damned advanced, but I guess they gotta learn the same as anyone else. Whole universe must be filled with arrogant motherfuckers.” Rain started outside, a thin silvery drizzle; he reached out and started the wipers running. “So we have to go into the Old City, find this girl, and…then what? I mean other than not get killed by every crazy fucker and feral in there.”

  “I don’t know,” she said with a shake of her head. “Cagliostro didn’t have a lot of information on that score, or at least that’s what he said. She was apparently some kind of experiment that they were working on in Wonderland, and she got out. She can shut them down here, and probably across the world – at least, keep them from sending any more of their people into the world. Shut down the invasion. Only…he doesn’t know how she’s supposed to do it. And whatever she’s doing, she’s spinning her wheels burning shit down while trying. He knows what she has to destroy in order to do it.”

  “And what’s that?” he asked around the last mouthful of his Maxi-Buns.

  “It’s called the colonial matrix,” Bobbi said. “But he doesn’t know what it is yet. Doesn’t remember what it does. He needs to talk to her, tell her how to shut it down, where it is. She’s some kind of a failsafe, he says, and he needs to give her the means to become fully functional.”

  Scalli considered that. He leaned back in his seat, brushing crumbs off his chest, picking them out of the slashes cut into his shirt. “These people are like movie villains. Source of their colonization effort in the middle of a metropolitan area. A failsafe in the form of a girl.” he said. “What is she, some kind of key or something?”

  “Don’t know that either.” Bobbi shrugged. “Or why she’s getting together all these ferals and crazies. Maybe it’s just a side effect of her being there, all those poor broken fuckers being drawn to her. Whatever the reason, she’s looking for the lock she’s supposed to fit. Eventually the Yathi are going to find her out there and take her down; we have to find her first, and get them together. Cagliostro says he can answer her questions, send her where she needs to go.”

  “Point her toward a target, in other words,” Scalli said with a snort. “This guy sounds like a general, not a benevolent spook. Or a politician.”

  Bobbi shot him a look. “Probably right,” she said. “So we have to make sure that we don’t killed in the crossfire.”

  Scalli nodded slowly. He looked like an animate mountain when he did that, she thought, giving serious consideration over the passing of ages. “So what’s the plan, then?”

  “The plan.” Bobbi frowned. She hadn’t really given it much thought yet— her mind was still spinning from her conversation with Cagliostro. Still, it had to happen. “Let’s go to the Temple and regroup. We can clean up and figure out where the hell to go after this. Whatever plan she’s got, Cagliostro and I agree on one thing.”

  The van’s engine hummed to life under Scalli’s hands, and he pulled out of the parking lot onto the highway. “And what’s that, my girl?”

  “Whatever it is, we got to get to her before she burns down the Old City to pull it off. She won’t stay there forever.”

  They came back to the Temple to find it as quiet as they left it, for which Bobbi was supremely grateful. She’d half expected for it to be in flames as revenge for what had happened at the Yathi nexus; the fact that the club was still intact made her wonder if perhaps she hadn’t been identified after all. It wasn’t like Brain Mother was a name anybody could pin a face on. Freida did, a voice nagged in the back of her head as she stood in the shower, letting the hot water scour the synthblood and the grime off her body. And she was just this human bumba. Why couldn’t they track her down?

  It was not what she wanted to be thinking about at the moment, so instead she thought about Freida. Standing under the steaming water, Bobbi wondered why Freida had been so willing to link herself into the Yathi machines. She kne
w the technology better, obviously, but there had to have been something else that motivated her to do it. For her part, Bobbi imagined that it was the desire to save her career – Cagliostro said that she’d woken them up, after all. Digging around for records about Yathi agents would certainly do that. It was just so stupid. Her career? Really? When everything else was so much bigger, so much more important than that…

  Well, that’s why she got killed, that treacherous little voice said in the back of her head. She got greedy, didn’t she?

  “We’re on the news,” said Scalli, nodding to an aerial shot of a collapsed hive of concrete steel in the middle of a desolate stretch of parking lot. Flames licked out from among the wreckage, sparkling like silver. The same bizarre fire as before, when Orleans burned.

  “…the city is reeling from an explosion that rocked northern Renton tonight,” Maya Frail was saying. “According to a spokesman for Civil Protection, the incident occurred at the Warner Business Circulator on Langston Road Southwest. The explosion, which police and fire personnel have determined was caused by an aging hydrogen collector in the building’s sublevels, was of sufficient strength to bring down the rest of its already collapsed upper levels. Civil authorities have declared the site a complete loss; however, Civil Protection has already lodged a bid with the city to convert it into further staging area for its containment efforts in the Decommissioned Suburban Zone…”

  “I bet they are,” Bobbi said with a shake of her head. She dropped into the chair next to Scalli’s, staring at network television’s pale Sibyl. “But look at all that damage. You might have brought down the building, sure, but you didn’t destroy what was underneath. I mean, did you?”

  She looked at Scalli, purple brows raised in question, but the big man only shrugged. “I dunno,” he said. “Maybe we set off a chain reaction or something. I mean, seven kilos of DX-47 isn’t anything to sneeze at. It’s possible, I guess…”