Firewalkers

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Lupé’s revelation was, “Where’s that goddamn robot gone?”

  They piled out. The inert body of Castille the butler had indeed vanished from the back of the ’Bug, the cables severed. Mao couldn’t even remember if the damned thing had been there after the last bug swarm; had it gone missing then, or had it been cut loose by the glass-edged leaves as they shouldered through the forest? The vehicle’s exterior, true to his expectations, looked as though some maniac had drawn a fantastically detailed map of an unknown country all over it.

  “Balls.” Not because selling Castille, whole or for parts, would have represented a nice bonus for them, but because now his mind was full of the image of Castille, reanimated and vengeful, relentlessly tracking them down.

  The Estate was surprisingly small, all told: just a white oblong dome smaller than the protein farms, smaller than the three-storey slum tenements in the older parts of Ankara Achouka, and in about the same state of repair. Of course, as Hotep said, that was because it was all underground. That was where the scientists had lived, where the work had been done, where the sonko overseers had talked about golf before being driven back to their big houses in their air-conditioned, all-terrain limousines.

  The Estate’s great shell was cracked, allowing them to drive the ’Bug right inside. Mao wished they hadn’t: the soaring interior was craggy with insects. They were roosting up there like bats, clinging to the concave wall so thickly that there was no wall to be seen. A couple of dozen dead locusts were mixed in with the general detritus of the floor, which was equal parts mounded sand, broken glass and jagged rusting metal. In the centre of the dome, the floor had given way entirely, funnelling down to the promised lower levels.

  Mao took some deep breaths. He had ducked back into the ’Bug as soon as he seen the bugs, and now he was having difficulty convincing himself to leave again. There was something infinitely worse about the things just hanging there above him. The actual voracious swarms he’d witnessed were somehow less upsetting, even though they posed more real threat. He felt his heart race, fighting something that couldn’t be fought, fleeing something that was hooked inside of him.

  “Chommie?” Lupé asked softly. She understood. “Hotep and me, we can…”

  “No,” he decided, but still he couldn’t move. In the end he closed his eyes, fumbled his way out, felt nameless things crunch beneath his boots.

  “What’s the plan?” Hotep was doing her lobster claw thing again, burning nervous energy, and he wished she’d stop because it looked like bug mouthparts.

  “Find the off switch.” Mao tried a weak grin. Gauging from Lupé’s expression, it didn’t come out well. “Something’s making this place go. Something’s making the bugs do their thing. Maybe we can reprogram them? Or just if we shut every damn thing off, we can shut them down too?” The thought of emerging back up here and just finding a carpet of dead insects wasn’t actually much better than his current situation, but he’d take it.

  “And if we can’t?”

  “Find out what we can, and hope it’s not us who gets to come back here. Maybe they can just drop a big rock on this place from orbit.”

  It went wrong about as quickly as he could have imagined.

  Hotep got to clamber down first, because she would never shut up about how good her night vision was with her goggles. She called up to them that everything was fine, loud enough to make the hanging garden of locusts above them rustle and shift, which nearly sent Mao back into the car for good.

  They had weapons: pistols and nine rounds each, hammers, machetes. Lupé had improvised a sort of Taser-on-a-stick arrangement with the avowed intent of ramming it up Castille’s nether regions if the butler tried to do for them.

  Below the cracked floor they found a mounded heap of broken concrete, chitin and dust. Lupé swore and pointed at the shattered body of a beetle-thing twice the size of the locusts, translucent and brittle. Mao dearly hoped it was a failed prototype, long discontinued.

  They went further down into what must have been a grand hall once. Holes in the floor showed where escalators had long since stilled and fallen into ruin below. The room rang with their every tread, every scuff and shuffle susurrating like distant waves. Mao glanced up nervously, finding that his fears were entirely justified: there were clots of insects roosting down here, too, though not quite the abundance of the dome above them. They seemed closer to waking, though, ripples of agitation passing through them, veined wings shifting lazily, unfurling in his torchlight and slowly refolding.

  Lupé jerked back suddenly, the beam from her own torch swinging wildly.

  “I just saw the robot,” she said.

  “There’s nothing,” Hotep insisted.

  “It was there.”

  “My goggles—” the girl started, with that lecturing air Mao thoroughly hated, and then she stopped, which he found was not the relief he’d have thought.

  “They turned off, didn’t they?” Lupé accused.

  Hotep made a little whimpering sound, frantically fiddling with the eyepieces.

  “Like something was listening and you had to go remind it,” Lupé went on, moving her light back and forth, hunting.

  “This isn’t fair,” Hotep whispered.

  Then the lights came up.

  They grew slowly, from a dozen places about the ceiling, an irregular pattern that was surely not conceived by any human architect. They were a ghostly blue-white and bled the colour from everything they touched, so that Lupé’s face seemed dark teal and Hotep’s bandages the colour of drowned things. The light came filtering through a hanging shroud of insects, too, so that the Firewalkers were surrounded by a forest of spiky many-legged shadows and the shimmer of gauze.

  “Fucker,” said Lupé, and there, at the far end of the hall, was the robot, Castille, gleaming new.

  “Welcome, children. M’bolani, brave Firewalkers.” The robot’s arm extended, gesturing about the subterranean vestibule as though it was lord of all it surveyed. The voice was not its previous servile tone, but something more androgynous, shifting towards the feminine even as it spoke.

  “Dzam!” Hotep shoved her goggles up, eyes brimming with tears. “Shoot the fucking thing.”

  “No!” Mao and Lupé both started, but the girl had her pistol out, levelled at the butler. It was their doubled shout, not any shot, that brought the insects down from the ceiling.

  Mao had thought he’d go to pieces, if that happened. Instead he came together; the worst had already occurred. Shouting for the others to follow, he ran for Castille, aiming past the robot for several doorways at the end of the room, each small enough to hold or barricade until the bugs exhausted themselves. The air around him was already wild with wheeling bodies, whirring blindly past him, ricocheting off each other, miraculously failing to just bludgeon him to the floor with sheer clumsy exuberance. He clawed for Lupé’s sleeve, failed to snag it, but she was still alongside him, and hopefully Hotep was on their heels. He had his machete out for Castille, but somehow the robot had vanished already, and he doubled his speed and ran for the middle doorway.

  It was occupied. He tried to stop running, but his boots skidded, sand drifts on the metal floor giving no traction. He ended up on his back, staring upwards at the thing forcing itself through the opening a limb at a time. It was a mantis; or that was the closest reference he had for it. A mantis that, now it was out in the open, towered over him, ten feet if it was an inch. Its hooked forelimbs were the size of a man, one held close to its body, the other trailing its sickle-claw on the ground. Its carapace was patterned with bright colours; he realized he was staring at some corporate logo repeated into meaningless infinity, killer-insect-business-casual.

  It raised its foreclaws in threat and he shrieked and bolted for another door, scrabbling on hands and knees, losing his torch, losing his machete, desperate only to get away. Three steps in he discovered a stairwell the hard way, pitching forwards into space before he could stop himself. Even in his mad panic,
he clutched at the rail, arresting his momentum at the price of wrenching his shoulder. Then the railing itself gave way, corroded metal snapping beneath his weight and sending him over the edge.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  GHOSTS AND MACHINES

  HE HAD VAGUE memories after that. Certainly he was out for a short while, but when he came to he was still being dragged through corridors intermittently lit by amber or death-blue or dull red lamps. He saw broken windows, doors of steel a foot thick hanging off their hinges; a room of mannequins that an old fire had twisted into contorted, terrified shapes. Perhaps they had been robots, not mannequins; perhaps they really had been terrified. Mao’s mind jumped and stuttered over what was possible and what wasn’t, and he reckoned he wasn’t much of a judge any more.

  He was dumped in a dim room, where he got a glimpse of his captor, assailant, rescuer, whatever. It was Castille, of course: not the gleaming robot he knew, but a battered ruin of its former self, such as might have been driven through a forest of glass-leaved trees. It dropped him and limped off without a backwards glance.

  “You’re a rubbish butler,” Mao told its retreating back, and promptly lost consciousness again.

  HE WOKE MOSTLY to the knowledge that he was lying on a pile of rubble and what felt like the pieces of an office chair, and every part of him was at the most awkward possible angle. He sat up and immediately regretted it, head pounding and muscles queuing up to complain about the treatment.

  Still alive, though. Which made it quite a few times that whoever was in charge around here could have killed him and hadn’t. He’d seen in the protein farm that the bugs were more than capable of making inconvenient, or just unlucky, people go away, and Castille the robot plainly had enough physical strength to snap his neck, given the chance.

  At least it was halfway cool, down here.

  He tried to raise the others, but there wasn’t even static in his earpiece. That formality done, he looked around, pitching his voice a little louder than conversational. “Well, I’m awake. You want me for something, I’m here.”

  There was a tilted desk next to him, which he used to lever himself to his feet. His left knee and right ankle felt hot and swollen, but both would just about bear his weight. Fishing about in the detritus yielded a metal pole that would do as a stick to lean on. For weapons, he still had a hammer and a set of decently stabby screwdrivers; the gun and machete were gone.

  He wasn’t alone. He never knew if he had simply missed the company amongst all the pain and the darkness, or if she hadn’t been there a moment before.

  She wasn’t shining as brightly as last time, because in this dark room that would have made her unreality immediately evident. Still, she glowed a little, because light was all she was. Juān, beautiful, wearing a crimson evening gown and staring at him, within arm’s reach.

  And he reached out instinctively, trying to grasp her bare arm. His hand passed through her; she stared down at where his fingers vanished inside her bicep and screamed, hurling herself away from him and—gone, like a snuffed candle.

  Mao swore and sat back down on the desk. “You want to play games, is that it? You want to fuck with me, right? That make you a big man?”

  “Games?”

  He jumped, rounding on the voice. It was her again, the same girl, now in a pale ivory blouse and cut-off denims.

  “Who are you?” she demanded, frightened, outraged. “Have I… Do I remember you?”

  “I don’t know,” Mao said honestly. “You’re not real. I can’t vouch for what you remember.”

  “Not real?”

  Despite his best intentions, he regretted the words. “You have to know that, surely. You’re not real, you’re… there’s no you. Or…” What had the damned robot said, after it had put away its toys in the Fontaine house? They are simulations. Each of them, individually. So there was a computer somewhere running a people simulator like some kid’s cheap VR might mimic a space fighter or a racing car. And did the space fighter believe in the space war it fought, the necessity of stopping the alien menace lest all Earth should fall? Was it possible that this image of a dead girl believed in herself, because that was how she had been designed?

  “You’re just saying what you’re programmed to say,” he told her, but his heart was hardly in it.

  Juān shook her head. “Are you… someone my father sent? Is this a test?” And maybe that was the cruellest little peep-hole on the weird childhood she must have had. Mao felt a kind of gravity well, dragging him down to some place where he’d end up talking quite naturally with this ghost girl, treating her like a real person just because she responded in all ways as a real person should, trading anecdotes about very different histories. Growing up, settling down, having kids… The absurdity of the thought filled him only with frustration. He knew she was fake, and he still couldn’t get past it. The simulation was too good, and he had liked her, back in the Fontaine house. He had liked her and she hadn’t been real, and hadn’t known it, and now he was being asked to care.

  He turned away from her, looking up towards one corner of the ceiling as though he’d find his tormentor there, clinging like a spider. “All right, enough!” he shouted. “Enough dumbass games, skommer! I don’t buy it. I know what she is.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Juān demanded. “Who’s there?”

  He sensed her at his elbow, saw the brightness of her in the corner of his eye. With a sudden access of fury, he slapped at her, flapped his hands frantically into her insubstantial form like someone shooing away a bird. She shrieked and fell back, trying to shield herself from his hands even though they went straight through her. Then—gone.

  His heart was in his throat, horrified more by his own reaction than her. “Damn you!” he yelled at the ceiling, because, even though he’d come from above and knew nothing was up there, that was still the direction that the powers of Earth resided, whether gods or just rich people in spaceships.

  “Why are you shouting?” She was back, crouched in the corner of the room, staring at him as though he was a madman. “Who are you? What am I doing here?”

  Mao stared at her, a hundred different curses and angers fighting for room in his mouth. Whatever she saw in his face terrified her. She crunched her shoulders back into the wall and he saw her clip the concrete without realising.

  He drew a deep breath, because nothing would be easier than to bellow it all out on her, to slap and kick the wall through her and pretend he had any control over what was going on.

  He let the breath out. “I don’t know,” he told her. “I don’t know what you’re doing here. Or what I’m doing here.” He blinked and, feeling like the world’s greatest fool, tried the door.

  It opened.

  “Are you leaving?” Juān’s eyes were huge. “Is this… Do you work for my father?”

  “Has a lot of people like me on the payroll, does he?” Mao asked from the doorway.

  “Some. I’m not supposed to know about them, or see them, but they come to the house sometimes. People who do… bad things. That’s what you are, isn’t it?”

  It should have been true, but Mao gave his past life a two-second run through and decided that it could have been worse. Back in Achouka he was practically a responsible member of society.

  And then, just as he was leaving the room, her voice from behind him: “Can I come with you?”

  She sounded so lost and alone, and of course he thought it was just some new-baited trap, that that was all Juān had ever been, at the big house and here. A carnivorous plant that feigned the flower, more than ever the flower itself could be. And that made him the bug, and he’d had quite enough bugs in his life recently.

  He knew there were computer systems designed to simulate being human, to make telling them what to do easier and more comfortable. They were programmed with a thousand little conceits and devices to aid in the act, but it was all fakery, no more real than a conjurer finding your card in your ear. Except, what if you made such a t
hing, made it superlatively well beyond all your digital assistants and virtual research tools, and then told it that it was the real thing? After all, a computer had to believe what you told it, even if you told it that it was human. Mao was two steps down the corridor, but he looked back and saw her in the doorway. She didn’t like him, he could tell; he wasn’t the sort of nice sonko boy she was used to. But she didn’t like her surroundings, either, and sticking with another human being was better than being alone.

  Another human being.

  “I don’t know,” he told her. “I don’t know if you can come with me or not.” I don’t know if they have projectors anywhere else but here. I mean, why would they? “But come on, if you’re coming.”

  She moved cautiously out of the room and stopped suddenly, staring at her hand. It was held out in front of her, and the fingers were gone, crossing an invisible line that marked the wall of her prison.

  “I…” She dragged her hand back, instantly restored. “I don’t understand.” Her eyes flicked from the digits over to him and something changed behind her face. “I don’t feel…” she whispered, at first as though there were more words to come, but then just, “I don’t feel.” She met his gaze. “It’s one of father’s tests, isn’t it? That’s what this is.”

  “Do you… know what you are?” he tried. Her expression was bitter, proud; somewhat contemptuous of the question, but he supposed he’d earned that.