by Laura Lam
‘No one will even know you’re here,’ Roz says in a soft whisper, her hand coming up to cup Carina’s cheek. ‘Downstairs, the bots are at work repairing the broken windows, removing the bodies, sweeping up shattered glass. Tomorrow all will go on as normal, except the world will never know your name and what you tried to do.’
‘Just like Nettie,’ Carina whispers, and Roz jumps at the name. She gestures at the guard.
Carina’s entire body jerks and goes limp. He has a Stunner against her neck, but it hasn’t hit her off-centre, like that dark Los Angeles night just after Mark dumped the info in her head. The guard drags her along the lab and deposits her in one of the Chairs. Not just any Chair, either, but the one she used to study Subject B and Subject E. At least it’s not the one that Roz used to mould her into someone new. Scant comfort. The Stunner hasn’t affected her adrenalin glands, and terror rushes through her. She’s lying right where two of her victims lay during those SynMaps trials. Trying to speak, she only manages a rough moan.
Roz puts on the various electrodes, though she doesn’t bother strapping Carina in as she can’t move anyway. ‘Now,’ she says, all brisk business, ‘I can’t pretend I haven’t been looking forward to this. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent planning this moment. So many ways it could go.’
Carina wishes she could warn Dax and the others. Carina wants to ask Roz what her plan is. Roz likes evening the scales, meting out her own form of justice. In that way, they are the same. Carina has humiliated her. Threatened to destroy her work, her career. Carina has failed Roz by not keeping that code perfect in her head, by daring to become human again, even if that humanity was scarred with the monstrous. Roz is not the type to let anyone forget they’ve wronged her.
‘Are you going to kill me, then?’ Carina says. The thought of death does frighten her now, when a few weeks ago it wouldn’t have. She has more to live for. The hope of a life.
‘Not yet. That’d be too easy for you.’ Roz leans against the edge of the Chair. Carina imagines her hands unbound, reaching out to scratch out the other woman’s eyes. She would enjoy every scream. She’d pop Roz’s eyeballs like blueberries.
Focus. Focus.
‘I debated killing you quickly. Or giving you seizures like the ones you gave Subjects B and E. Seemed fitting. I found all your dreams. I know exactly what your worst nightmare would be.’ She leans over Carina’s face, grinning. On the Chair, Carina shudders.
She holds up a syringe. ‘I’m going to do what I tried to do at Sudice that day you left. I’m going to reset you.’
Carina’s pulse spikes. ‘You are not dampening me again.’
‘This is ironclad. It won’t break down. In fact, you’ll be so loyal to me that if anything does go awry, I’m the first person you’ll come running to. I’ve learned so much, Carina, and it’s thanks to you, in a way. I’ve never hated anyone as intensely as I’ve loathed you.’
‘Thought . . . emotions made you weak,’ Carina grinds out through numbed lips.
‘They do. I locked it away, in the end. The memory of it is still there. That hate made me stronger. It made me willing to do anything to win.’
‘Like butchering a teenage girl,’ Carina says.
Roz does not flinch this time. She’s close to Carina again. If Carina could move, she could arch up and bite her. Carina craves the taste of Roz’s blood against her teeth and tongue, the satisfying scream the woman would give.
‘You see, Carrie. Watching all your dreams at the Green Star Lounge means I understand you, perhaps more than anyone else ever could.’
Carina feels a strange rushing in her ears. She knew Roz had found some dreams when she planted one of them in Dax’s head; but she hadn’t anticipated that she had seen all of them.
‘It’s time to leave all that behind. Emotion is a weakness. Aren’t you tired of it overwhelming you, clouding your decisions?’
Carina can’t help it; she lets out a sob. Roz reaches out and presses a fingertip against the tear that has leaked down her cheek. ‘Oh, Carrie. I will make you strong again. And, side by side, we will do such great things. Now it’s time to go back to Greenview House, just for a little while. And while you’re screaming in your mind, I’ll go kill your friends.’
Roz begins to prep the code. Carina struggles against her inert body, the panic rising. The emotions frightened her, the urges almost overwhelmed her, but they didn’t. She kept them under control well enough that she didn’t kill. She was able to grow closer to the Trust, to Dax. She doesn’t want to look at him and feel nothing. The idea of being trapped at Roz’s side, her cowed lackey, is worse than any nightmare within Greenview House.
Roz presses the button.
Greenview House feels like the actual house, not the recreation she made for her Zealscapes. It seems so real and solid, like she’s there as a child again. The afternoon sunlight filters through the windows, dust motes like golden glitter in the warm air. The fear she felt in the Sudice headquarters is all gone, as if it never existed. It’s as if she’s gone back in time, to before everything went wrong. When her father hid his violence behind the closed doors of this house, and her mother tried so hard to protect her from the reality of the monster in their midst.
She smells toast and honey.
‘Mother?’ Carina calls. She walks through the hallways, small as a child. She wants to find her mother and curl up with her on the couch in that warm patch of sunlight, have those arms wrap around her and breathe in that scent of peppermint.
Her mother is not there, yet the wallscreen in the living room has switched on.
Carina perches on the sofa, wrapping her arms around her knees like she used to do as a child.
Her memories roll out on the wallscreen, slow and steady. They’re out of order. One moment she’s seven, turning up the music in her auditory implants so she can’t hear her parents fighting. Even as she watches, the vestigial fear she felt on that day disappears into nothing. Another memory of her mother helping her with a school project, spending ages gluing together the parts they’d ordered through the replicator to make a small spaceship she’d be able to launch with the other children in the field behind the school. Her mother had glue on her cheek and Carina had reached out and pressed her fingertip to it.
‘Oh no,’ her mother had said. ‘You’re stuck with me.’
‘That’s OK,’ Carina had said shyly, with that hint of a lisp her father hated so.
The warmth around that memory extinguished, until she felt nothing. More memories went by, and Carina watched them, feeling more and more impassive.
No, some part of her thought. She ignored it, watching a memory of her father hit her, feeling it no longer sting. Perhaps this wasn’t so bad.
No. The voice is a little louder. Then: NO.
‘This isn’t real,’ Carina says aloud. ‘This isn’t real. I don’t want this.’
Nettie appears on the wallscreen. Her lips draw back from her teeth. Her sutures are weeping. ‘You don’t get to escape my fate,’ she says. Some cruel part of Carina’s subconscious, punishing her.
Greenview House twists, buckles, becoming just like it was in her Zealscapes. The colours are darker and harsher. Shades of grey instead of gold. Carina stands up from the sofa and wriggles her fingers and toes. She lets herself take one small moment to pretend that this is just another Zeal trip.
Everything has changed. The house is no longer that sanctuary rebuilt from her terrible childhood memories. She knows she has to go through the corridor and open the door, to see what Roz has left behind, to reach the front door. Maybe if she leaves the house behind, she can wake up. She doesn’t know how she knows this, or if it’s true, but it’s all she has to go on, so she moves forward, doggedly.
She holds out her hand and tries to call forth a gun from thin air. In any of her Zealscapes, it’d only take a fraction of a second. No gun appears. Her empty hand falls to her side. Her fear roars to life, but she’s pathetically glad she can sti
ll feel it.
She feels so small. So alone. Like that little girl watching the bonfire out back behind this grand house, seeing that burned skull of her childhood pet. The first memory that set all of this in motion. She no longer feels that fear at the sight of the cat skull in the flames. Are her emotions still breaking down with every moment she spends in here?
Carina opens the first door. There’s one of the victims she created in the Green Star Lounge. A man based on her father’s physiology, but changed enough that the sight of him didn’t make her shudder. She’d peeled off his skin, inch by inch. He staggers around the room, muscles weeping old blood, his empty eye sockets staring at her, his mouth open in a scream. The white room is splattered with blood and connective tissue. He points a finger at her. She slams the door shut.
Her breath rushes in and out. She’s changed since she was in her personal Zealscapes like this. The sight of that old victim did not fill her with delight at violence, but sickness and guilt. Do all of these doors contain the reanimated ghosts of her fictional kills?
That is what Roz has decided to do to her while she files away all the rough edges of Carina’s personality. She started the program sweetly, but if Carina dares to fight back, it will turn into a nightmare.
Carina opens the next door. There’s the woman Roz showed to the rest of the Trust after Carina neurohacked Dax and stopped him from being a sleeper agent. Her chest is a gaping, dark red hole, and she can’t stop screaming, high and pure as a banshee. There’s a tall, skinny man with old-fashioned glasses. Carina had smashed the lenses and pressed the glass shards into his flesh to kill him. They’re still there, half-submerged in his skin, dripping blood.
They shouldn’t scare her as much as they do. They are not real. They are only her creations, brought forth just to be destroyed. Yet their screams hurt her in a way nothing else ever has.
She has to find a way out. She has to return to reality, to save the Trust. To save herself.
‘Wake me up!’ she cries. Of course, nothing happens. No failsafe. She doesn’t know how else she can break through, or how big a dose of Zeal or Verve flows through her system. When she does wake up, if Roz doesn’t simply kill her while she’s under, the drug is going to mess with her. She’ll be worse than that night at the silo, when she wanted nothing more than to kill anyone who crossed her path. Even if she wakes up, there’s no guarantee she’ll be able to do anything to help the Trust. And she’s fast running out of time.
The reanimated corpses of her Zeal kills scratch against the closed walls of the hallway. She fears that soon they’ll break through and overwhelm her. Is that what Roz plans, to have her killed by her own creations? A fitting way to go, Carina supposes. Not that far off her original plan of staying in the Zealscape until she starved to death. This, though, she has no control over, and emotions are still roaring through her, sharp as scalpels.
Falling to the ground, she curls up, wrapping her arms about her head. Everything’s too loud, too bright, too real in a world she knows is made of pixels and code. The doors are opening, the dead trailing through Greenview House, coming for her.
Something shifts and turns. She feels someone standing over her.
It’s Nettie again. She’s uninjured this time and she offers her hand to Carina.
‘You’re another one of my victims, too,’ Carina says, voice hoarse. ‘If I hadn’t broken, she wouldn’t have broken you.’
‘Neither of us is responsible for what she did to us,’ Nettie says.
‘You’re just my subconscious,’ Carina says, her voice thick with tears.
‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Go home, Carina. You know how.’
With Nettie’s help, Carina pulls herself up to standing. She moves forward, passing through Nettie, who disintegrates into a flood of pixels. Almost like Mark’s AI, but dredged up from her own fear. A phantom that appeared when she needed it most. She reaches the front door and pushes it open, leaving behind her nightmare childhood home.
She collapses on the front path, surrounded by rose bushes. A bee lands on a blood-red bloom.
‘Wake me up!’ she whispers, and closes her eyes tight.
Carina wakes up, alone in the lab. They’ve left her unattended. She was meant to be asleep for hours yet. Her face is wet with tears. She’s shaking with fear.
‘I’m still me,’ Carina whispers. She breaks down into sobs. ‘I’m still afraid. I can still feel. She didn’t win. She didn’t win.’
Some damage has been done. Many of her childhood memories feel remote and distant, including the ones Mark tied information to. There’s no time to mourn.
Carina can move her muscles again, but only slowly. It takes too long to sit up and find a way to stand on shaky feet. Her gun is gone, but at least she still has her Kalar suit. Her body thrums with leftover emotions from the Zealscape. The urge to kill is dampened, as it should be. One scant comfort, but as ever, she’s not looking forward to withdrawal and the urges that come with it. As soon as she seems to kick the habit, back into the Zealscape she goes. With any luck, this will be the last time, and not because she dies tonight.
She looks around the lab for something to use as a weapon. In the process, she finds a bottle of beta blockers, similar to those Chopper gave her the night she briefly became Althea Bryant. The scientists used them on subjects sometimes, and they’re still stored in the same place. She downs one, hoping it helps her shaking hands.
The knives are in the same drawer as always, and though the drawer is locked, with a decisive tug she breaks the cheap replicated wood around the lock. She chooses a nice, pointy knife, and feels better with a weapon in her hand. Then she totters to the frozen cupboard and opens it. Aha. The liquid nitrogen is still where it was when she worked here. They didn’t need it often, but it was always on hand. There was even a small, handy portable dewar. That’ll do. She tucks the knife into the belt of her Kalar and takes the cryo-gloves from the hook outside the cupboard, slipping them on before picking up the canister.
She stumbles from the lab, the dewar of nitrogen unbalancing her. Though she’s still not exactly sure how she woke herself up, she’s glad to be away from Greenview House. If she never sees that fucking place again, it’ll be too soon.
Trying to ping the Trust is useless; her implants are still blocked. She’s alone inside her head.
Carina takes the stairs, trying to remain quiet. Her heartbeat is still pounding like a drum in her ears. She hears the gunfire long before she reaches the level with the server room. Keeping to the darkest part of the hallway, she peers around, afraid of what she might find.
Roz has taken cover behind an open door opposite the server room. Carina is at a terrible angle and can’t see the remaining guard. Someone’s shooting at Roz from behind the door, back and forth in a metallic standoff.
Carina starts to crawl along the hallway, as low to the floor as she can. She has an idea, though it might only get her a bullet in her skull for her trouble. She’s out of options, and out of time. The Trust can’t have much ammo left. When she’s close to the door, she unscrews the top of the dewar. She takes a deep breath, holds it, narrows her eyes to slits, then twists around the door and throws the liquid nitrogen at Roz.
Kalar suits are bulletproof, but not immune to corrosives. It burns through, and Roz begins to scream. Carina sets the dewar down and grabs her arm, dragging her into the server room, not breathing in case the liquid nitrogen turns to nitrogen gas in the hallway.
‘Fucking hell,’ Dax says, looking at them both before darting for his med kit.
The shooting has stopped. Carina hopes that means the last guard is either dead or knocked out. No Waspbots have swooped down on them, so Raf’s patch on them must have held.
Dax sprays medicine onto Roz, neutralizing the acid. He begins to clean the cold burns. Carina personally wouldn’t bother, but she leaves him to it, although not before ensuring Roz’s hands and feet are tied. Her Kalar suit has partially disintegrated.
There are a few blisters on her neck and along her jaw, but the worst injuries showing are the angry burns on her stomach and left leg. Dax rummages in his pack again and begins spraying an epithelial autografting spray onto the wounds. The mix of keratinocytes, fibroblasts and melanocytes will protect the burns and promote rapid healing. So Carina’s little trick with the liquid nitrogen won’t kill Roz, but it definitely hurts like a motherfucker. Good.
The beta blockers have kicked in, and between that and the Zeal after-effects, Carina feels calmer than she has in a long time.
‘Roz said that even if you can send things from this server, it’ll be caught by another firewall,’ she says to Charlie, who’s crouched in front of a small screen connected to the server, tapping onto an ancient keyboard. She didn’t even know those things still existed.
‘Extra work for us then,’ Charlie says.
‘Where’s Raf?’ Carina asks.
‘Injured,’ Kivon says. ‘And badly. We need to get out of here.’
‘I think I found the recent block they’ve done,’ Charlie told them breathlessly. ‘It’s a little messy. I might be able to unravel it.’
‘How long?’
‘Probably longer than we have. That press junket is going to start any minute now, and the implant upgrades are set to instantly download in about half an hour.’
‘Shit.’ Carina takes in the damage. Charlie seems relatively unharmed. Kivon’s face is badly bruised. Raf is alive, but desperately needs medical attention. Most of the servers are dead. No alarms sound, and no police have arrived. Was Roz really so determined to catch the Trust on her own that she didn’t notify anyone of their presence?
Carina is surrounded by death and gore. She can smell the blood. She hopes the Zeal and beta blockers hold. She doesn’t want to turn feral, like the night of the silo. She wants to help, not have to be tied up right next to Roz to prevent her hurting anyone else.
‘Let me see,’ she says. ‘I’m rusty but I might be able to help.’
