Prime

by Nate Kenyon

  Interesting. What exactly it all meant, he didn't know. But it seemed that there could be a lot more behind the scenes than New London was letting on.

  It had been long enough, Bellow thought. Time to get back in the saddle.

  He was going in.

  —

  The feeling of impending construction; a vast, skeletal presence lurking out of sight, feelers snaking out on all sides.

  Bellow stood on the edge of a virtual wasteland of expectant space, listening to the rustling hiss of code coming to life. This was New London Tower exactly six months before it opened online, preserved forever in the saved files. At that time it had existed only inside the planning software, but soon it would be firmly planted in concrete. A web presence had been registered, and the address had already logged a million hits. He caught occasional glimpses of the digital faces of those passing through, curious users who could not wait, or those who had stumbled upon the construction site by chance.

  New London Tower built its online presence even as its real walls were reaching up above the sand of Southern Beach. He crawl-scanned through two months of records, watching the scene create itself in moments instead of days, feeling intersecting layers lay themselves like snakes upon one another, huge virtual walls climbing up into the sky.

  He looked for anything unusual. If the original problem was bound in the underlying code, he could catch it here. A simple mistake could lead to a hole where a hacker could wriggle through, even an instability that could manifest itself much later as a full-fledged bug attack.

  Whoever had built this place was no average programmer. Bridges and connections were being made that streamlined the server's duties, commands so perfectly imagined they were intuitive. Bellow scanned through another month before he began to see the beginnings of a functioning network. The server was logging fifty thousand hits an hour. Game rooms opened for business. Power grids glowed; data began to flow in streams of neon light. Somewhere deep inside the matrix, light pulsed like a heart. He slipped into a conduit and bled through rooms of coded floors and under firewalls. It was a static system, of course, all recorded, and it did not interact with him or even know he was there. He peeled away layers of data in search of the source of bright light.

  Suddenly he found himself entangled in a dense web of code. He struggled to find his balance. His inputs were gone, everything empty, his eyes and ears and mouth filled with cotton. He fumbled blindly as bad memories began to close in, tried to reverse field in a world gone dark and silent.

  Somewhere in the darkness, he felt the system stir and reach out for him.

  He blinked back into the cool, static air of the private cubicle and focused on the wall, regaining his balance, his heart drumming. Something had sensed his presence. But that was impossible in a recorded datafile.

  He blinked back in and crawled farther through the past, into an under-realized world of hatchwork and shadow. Something was coming at him through the fog. He sensed a multi-limbed creature moving at impossible speed; he blinked out again just as it reached his virtual presence.

  Searing heat made him gasp. He smelled burning flesh and smoke, and looked down his arm at a blackened claw where his hand should have been.

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  -9-

  Bellow awoke inside a medical trauma unit. He flexed his fingers and felt the tingling of nerves as they reattached themselves and settled into place. Surgeons had removed his damaged hand at the wrist. Using cultivated stem cells from his body, they had teased gene paths, tweaked growth hormones, and grown him a new one on the back of a laboratory clone.

  What the hell had happened in there? He'd never seen anything like that before. Someone—or something—had sensed him inside the recorded histories and come after him in a way that defied all logic. It had moved with a speed and agility he had only come close to seeing once before, at a time he'd rather not think about if he could help it.

  Not exactly true, though, is it? The real truth was that he couldn't remember much of what had happened in Mexico City at all.

  The door opened, and a medical technician entered the room. “Glad to see you're back with us,” he said. “Feeling okay?"

  "If you call feeling like I've been run over by a Carrier okay, then yes."

  The tech smiled. “Your hand was like a charcoal briquette. What happened anyway, did you reach into a rocket thruster or something?"

  "Something like that."

  "We've given you a quick body scan, and I have to say, you have the cells of a teenager. Remarkable. Deterioration of tendon and cartilage is minimal, and your telomerase are unusually long. Work done?"

  "Does it look like I've had work done?"

  "Hmmm. I suppose not. I'd say you were in your late forties except for the scan.” He checked Bellow's new hand, tested muscle growth rates and responses to stimuli. “I'll leave you to rest now. You'll need to give your new hand a few hours to regain full strength. Try to stay in bed for a while. You might be in great shape, but nobody recovers from losing a limb in one day."

  The tech left Bellow to the hum and hiss of machines. He drifted off and dreamed of floating helplessly through black cotton, eyes and ears and skin void of any feedback, as something came for him. The thing had many arms and legs and looked something like the goddess Lakshmi, and he had the feeling that whatever this thing was, it could open up and swallow the world.

  Prime.

  He woke up to a soft knock, the word still echoing in his head. He opened his eyes, bathed in sweat and heart thumping, still half in the dream.

  Kara slipped through the door. She looked beautiful. Something deep inside him was glad she'd come, and he didn't bother to question it.

  She came over to the bed quickly, padding silently on the balls of her feet. “I had to see you,” she whispered. “You've been set up."

  "What the hell are you talking about? And how did you get in here without someone noticing?"

  "Shhh. There's no time for any of that. Chin-Hae says they're listening. They've probably got this room bugged right now. We've got to get to a safe place."

  "I'm not dressed."

  "Hurry up, then. I'll help you.” She got him to sit up and pull on his old hotsuit and overcoat, her long fingers lingering only a moment on his naked chest, then ducked her head into the hall. “It's clear. Come on.” She pulled him through the door.

  "Somebody else died last night,” she said as she led him around the corner and down an empty flight of stairs to the next floor. “They say you're the one responsible. You'll be tried for murder."

  He tried to shake off the cobwebs of anesthesia. “Hold on a minute—"

  "There's no time,” she said. She was nearly frantic. “Are you going to trust me or not?"

  "Do I have a choice?"

  —

  The streets were wet with warm rain. Gutters steamed gently in the heavy air as Bellow and Kara slipped in and out of a sluggish crowd. He heard someone shout somewhere behind them, and Kara increased her pace until she was running.

  Something was wrong, but he couldn't stop to think long enough to figure it out. His mind was still fuzzy from the drugs and whatever else they had done to him. He thought he probably should check for implanted chips, but Kara wouldn't stop long enough for him to do so.

  They darted into an alley and through a dental surgeon's office, then back out through the emergency exit. More voices behind them.

  "They're tracking us,” she said. “Can you see them?"

  He blinked into streaming datapaths and found three satellites turning to follow his infrared signature. Chin-Hae could handle things such as this. He placed a mental note in a drop box, put a flag up and exited back into the network. The satellites turned, turned ... then began to swing the other way.

  He ran a quick check on the latest death and found nothing. Maybe it hadn't been reported officially yet, but he found that strange.

  He blinked back out. “Done."

  "Not
good enough,” Kara said. She was leading him along the narrow, crowded streets of Chinatown, the smell of chicken and fish thick in the air. He recognized the area; the pub where he'd met her just a few nights before was ahead on their left.

  Bellow's head was finally starting to clear, and he wanted some answers. He followed her down another street, through the familiar smells of the leather shop, and out the back door to the little alley with the hidden entrance. When she pressed the thumbprint lock and the door clicked open, he pulled her back.

  "You keep showing up in the strangest places. Something I should know?"

  "I'm just trying to help."

  "Am I the rabbit, or are you?"

  "Neither.” She pulled down the edge of her Lycra shorts to show him a tiny pink scar on the inside of her hip. “See, my chip's gone. I'm off the grid, like I told you."

  "What about the people chasing you yesterday?"

  "We came to an understanding. I had Charlie and his friends talk to them."

  "So the resistance is playing bodyguard now? Good to know."

  "Charlie's a little sweet on me. He's just trying to help."

  She put a hand up to his lips. “You and me, we're the same. Trying to escape."

  "I don't even know what I'm running from."

  "New London is planting rumors that you've been hacking into their server and killing those people. They're saying it's all a scheme so you can ride in and save the day, regain your celebrity status. Don't you get it? They need someone to take the blame. Why do you think they replaced your hand?"

  Sounds from the street, running footsteps. Kara swung open the door. “Come on."

  Bellow ducked into darkness. The hallway he remembered was empty. He listened for the laser sentries and heard nothing. Kara was already disappearing around the corner.

  He followed quietly, his senses on edge. A dim glow came from the room where the vats were kept. He slipped around the wall and moved further down to an area of the room he had hadn't seen before and faced the vague forms floating in bloody fluid. Far above him, the arched beams of the ceiling blended into shadow. Kara had vanished. He took a step closer and touched a finger to damp glass. Blinked into the web, searched through layers of data for the blueprints to this building. The space on the grid was nothing but a black, empty hole.

  He blinked out again as a shadowy figure twitched inside the closest vat, and the face of the clone floated gently through the fluid and came into focus.

  This one was almost fully formed. Bellow stumbled away from the milky, lifeless eyes and familiar line of the jaw, a terrible churning in his belly.

  He was still trying to make sense of this new development when Kara screamed from somewhere deeper inside the building and two shadows approached from between the hulking vats to his left.

  The boy from New London Tower and a twin. More clones.

  "Howdy, folks,” Bellow said. He showed his open palms in a gesture of friendliness. “That looks an awful lot like me in there. Somebody want to tell me what's going on?"

  The two clones looked at each other. “Sorry,” one of them said. “But you're in over your head."

  "Where the hell am I? Can you tell me that?"

  "A private incubating room,” the other clone said. “It's ours, because we like ourselves. We're the only ones we trust."

  "Seems to limit your options quite a bit,” Bellow said. “What about Kara? She one of yours too?"

  "She's lost focus. She needs to be brought back in line."

  "What have you done with her?"

  "Enough questions.” One of the clones launched himself at Bellow and he slipped sideways, but then someone had wrapped arms around him from behind and the other came at him again.

  Bellow twisted upward and pushed off the approaching clone's chest with his feet, flipping up and over, twisting hard with his arms as he did so. He heard a bone snap as the clone holding him fell hard onto concrete. He thrust an elbow backward, felt it connect with something soft, and rolled off and away. The second clone had regained his feet and held a laser blade in his hand. The cutting end flashed red before Bellow was on him with a rage that burned up through his stomach and out through a vicious chop to the wrist and throat.

  The clone dropped without a sound, the laser blade clattering to the floor. Bellow reached to pick it up and turned to face the other one, but he was already vanishing around the shadowy vats at the far end of the room.

  Enough fucking around, Bellow thought. What the hell is going on? They had copies of him growing in there. He thumbed the kill switch on the blade and stuck it into the pocket of his overcoat, then ducked around the vats, listening carefully for any sound.

  Kara had screamed. He thought of the clones and what they might do to bring her back in line, and he thought he might be sick. He reached the far wall and found another door, which led into a narrow metal staircase leading down.

  Bellow scanned the darkness below and then went in low and fast, stopping once on a landing halfway down to make sure the rest was secure. At the bottom was a concrete-floored basement room full of old props for some kind of theater: a backdrop painted to look like barren trees in the winter, wardrobes of dusty old costumes in bright colors, and a broken unicycle leaning in a corner.

  A life-sized clown holding balloons stood alone, draped with a sheer burgundy cloth; it took a moment for Bellow to realize it was a statue and that the balloons were painted plywood.

  In the center of the floor was a drainage grate left partially ajar. He slid it aside to reveal a ladder going down into darkness and the smell of earth and wet rock.

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  -10-

  Back down, into the sewers.

  There were lights every ten feet, dim bare bulbs behind metal cages built into the low ceiling. This section of the tunnel was older and it looked like a medieval torture dungeon with its rough-hewn stone and ancient stained brick. This was all that was left of the old London after the structures above ground had begun to crumble in the constant rain and heat and then been razed to the ground by New London's giant automated building machines. A city of centuries gone in less than a year, and a new one growing up like magic in its place.

  Bellow checked himself over as he jogged down the passageway, testing his new hand and finding it sufficiently up to speed. He searched his body carefully for any sign they had implanted a tracking chip or subcutaneous slow release drug. He found nothing sore or swollen. There was no time to look for breeders; he'd just have to hope he was clean.

  He'd noticed from the condition of the ladder's rungs that someone had descended recently, and there were fresh footprints in the muck at the base of the first tunnel. They turned right at the first junction, then he lost them when the floor turned into six inches of slow-trickling, brackish water.

  By then it didn't matter—he could hear them.

  He followed at a safe distance, far enough away to keep anyone from knowing he was there, but close enough not to lose the clones. They didn't talk much—or at least he couldn't make out anything they were saying—but he heard their footsteps. They weren't trying to remain quiet; maybe they thought he wouldn't come down after them.

  Or maybe they didn't care. Bellow was itching to break into a run, but he held back. If they had Kara, they might hurt her before he could stop them unless he used the element of surprise.

  And if they don't have her?

  When he realized how important she had become to him, he almost turned back. A feeling like that was deadly. He couldn't afford to have any point of weakness, and she was a big one.

  You've only known her for a couple of days, he told himself. That's crazy. It can't be what you think. You can't be in love with her.

  The ache in his chest when he imagined not seeing her again told him otherwise.

  The tunnel joined a larger central artery and the series of bulbs in cages above his head ended. The clones were using their own light. He followed the faint glow ahead to a f
amiliar set of broken iron bars.

  Chin-Hae.

  Bellow stood in the quickly spreading darkness and considered what that meant.

  The glow from the space beyond the bars was fading swiftly. He had to move or risk lighting a glow stick and giving himself away. He wasn't easily frightened, but the idea of stumbling around alone down in the pitch black was not an option. He stepped through the bars and into darkness, and once he'd become satisfied that the clones were gone and he was alone, he lit a glow stick and kept it cupped behind his hands, releasing a few beams of light.

  The way was familiar to him, and he navigated through the remaining tunnels until he reached the iron door with the ancient spin lock. It was partially ajar.

  This had the appearance of a trap. Appearances could be deceiving, Bellow reminded himself, but in his experience it was far better to be cautious. And yet, what choice did he have? Return to the surface and leave Kara behind? He couldn't bear the thought of it, and he had never been one to back down from a challenge.

  If he was going down, he would do it fighting.

  Bellow swung the door open and stepped inside.

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  -11-

  The small room was empty.

  He held up the glow stick. The light reflected back nothing but bare stone. No Charlie and his friend with weapons, no clones. No Kara. The newer steel door on the other side was also partially open, and he pushed through into the huge chamber.

  Here were the people. It was like walking into the middle of a whispered private conversation. All voices stopped, and he felt hundreds of eyes on him from the main alleyway through the maze. The feeling in the air was different this time; heads ducked back into cubicles and out of the way as he passed; people hid from him as if he were someone to fear.

  He found Chin-Hae alone in his office. The big man didn't seem surprised to see him, but Bellow noticed the thin sheen of sweat on his skin, the way his eyes showed more white than usual, and the shallow, fast pace of his breathing.

  "The Librarian, twice in one week? This is an unexpected pleasure."