by Al Robertson
‘Still just a ghost, old man!’ he chortled. ‘Can’t touch me, can’t touch me – only if Jack says so, and he won’t.’
Fist turned to Jack.
‘I don’t want you to let Harry mesh with any of my systems, under any circumstances. If you promise that, I’ll tell you how to find Yamata.’
‘You little bastard,’ said Harry.
‘With what I know,’ Fist told Harry, ‘you won’t need any part of me to track her down. So why are you so upset?’
‘Because you should do what Jack tells you. And because this isn’t over yet.’
‘Bullshit. You just want to control me like you do Andrea. You want another slave.’
‘She’s not a slave, she’s a fetch, and that’s what you do with fucking fetches. I do what venues do, I just bring out the best in her. And I’d bring out the best in you too. I’d use you to find things, break into them, then destroy them. That’s what you’re for.’
Jack struggled to hide his anger. ‘Harry’s not going to do anything like that to you,’ he told Fist.
‘What?’ said Harry.
Fist bounced up and down gleefully. ‘You promise?’ he chirped.
‘I promise.’
‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’
‘For gods’ sake. I’ve said no, that’s that. Harry will never get any access to any of your systems.’
‘Hurrah!’ shouted Fist. ‘You’re not the boss of me, Harry!’
‘If I could get my hands on you, you little shit …’
‘You never will now.’
‘Stop bickering, you two,’ snapped Jack. ‘We’re after Yamata, not each other.’ The hard command in his voice took both Harry and Fist by surprise. They fell silent. ‘Now,’ he said to Fist. ‘Tell us where she is.’
‘Akhmatov told us that Yamata works with a security firm in Sheltie. I think I’ve found it. Harry, you’ll need to check it out – here are the details.’
Harry’s eyes fluttered as he read the file.
‘Got it. I’ll scope ’em out, test their defences. Once we’ve found a way of getting you and the little fuck into their servers we can solve all our problems.’
‘You’re very confident. You won’t get caught?’ said Jack.
‘I’ve been hiding in the weave for two years. Travel in the pipes, disappear in doorways, lose myself in shadow. You don’t need to worry about me. But we’ve got to find a way of getting you into Homelands without InSec spotting you.’
‘It’s not going to matter whether or not they can see me.’
‘You’re bolder than you used to be, Jack Forster.’
‘Not bold, Harry, just well connected. The Totality can help me.’
‘Those useless bastards. Would be nice if they turned out to be good for something.’
‘They will be. How long before we move?’
‘I’m going to have to tread carefully. It’ll take a day or so.’
‘It would take me half an hour,’ said Fist.
‘Then you should fucking help me,’ said Harry. He turned back to Jack. ‘Think you can be in Homelands the day after tomorrow?’
‘I’m sure I can.’
‘Good. I’ll be in touch.’
Then Harry was gone. He left the last of his cigarette smoke behind him. It uncurled in the empty room, shaping itself around invisible air currents, then fell away to nothing. Jack felt himself relaxing.
‘What was all that about just now?’ said Jack.
‘I don’t want Harry using me. I don’t want him inside me. I don’t like being controlled.’
‘He just wants to mesh with some of your subsystems.’
‘He’ll do more than that. Count on it.’
‘He can’t hurt you. That’s just bluster.’
‘Fuck’s sake Jack, you really haven’t thought through what it means to be software. Remember how Grey nudged me? Once someone gets into me, they can start playing around.’
‘I wouldn’t give him permission.’
‘Do you think that’d stop him? East could have fried me if she’d wanted to. She didn’t because she won’t break the terms of the software licence that binds you to me. It’s a legal agreement, and that’s what the Pantheon’s built on. Harry doesn’t give a damn about any of that. Once you let him in, he’ll do whatever he wants.’
‘He’s a fetch. They can’t do that.’
‘No he’s not. He’s rebuilt himself. When I was close to Issie, I saw how fetches work. It was one of the secrets she shared with me. He’s structured differently and his lag times are all wrong. He’s not hosted on the Coffin Drives.’
‘He broke out of them, and he’s spent the last few years in hiding. He’s not going to work in the same way as someone like her.’
‘No. It’s more than that.’
‘Have you tried to track him back? Work out where he’s really stored?’
‘I couldn’t probe without him finding out. And we don’t want that.’
‘You’re afraid of him.’
‘Of course I fucking am. If things go his way, he’ll fillet me and fry me like a little Fisty fish. Just like our rogue Pantheon friend would, if they got their hands on me.’
Jack laughed.
‘Don’t you dare find it funny,’ said Fist. ‘I thought that bitch East was going to kill me. I want to break the bastard that’s got it in for us before he or she or it gets a chance to break me.’
‘They want to keep you safe.’
‘And you said that’s bullshit.’
Another voice cut through their conversation.
‘What’s bullshit?’ Andrea wasn’t wearing makeup. The memory of the last time Jack had seen her naked face caught at his heart. Her dress was a deep, clotted red. Her skin was pale and far too young. Jack couldn’t answer. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she continued. ‘I just found a message I left for myself. It told me to watch this with you. It’s a screenshow, I think.’
Jack said, ‘Wait.’ But she waved her hand and there was music. At first, there was only a soft, insistent beat, scratching at Jack’s hearing. It tugged at his attention but it was very quiet, so he had to concentrate carefully to hear it. It caught noises that drifted in from outside in its meshes, pulling them into song.
‘What is this?’ asked Jack.
‘Ssssh,’ whispered Andrea. ‘Listen carefully.’
There was a burst of static. A broken riff lanced out and settled on the beat, like a glitched image of a bird diving again and again into choppy water.
[ It wants to share visuals,] hissed Fist.
[Let it.]
Images started appearing on one of the room’s blank walls. Most were black and white. The few colour ones pulled Jack’s attention to them. More instruments had joined the music. Speech was woven in with it too. Jack heard Harry’s voice. One of the colour photos expanded to fill most of the wall. It was a shoulder lying on rumpled sheets. A woman’s hand caressed it. A second or two passed and then there was a window, seen from below. Soft spinelight made the raindrops on it shimmer like diamonds. Another sudden cut and there was a handwritten card. It disappeared too quickly to be read. A cat pounced on a sock. Just as quickly, a new image flashed up. The music began to feel out of sync with the film. Speech darted out between rapidly shifting rhythms, broken clauses stripped of context. Harry was still talking. There was a light joy to his voice that Jack had never heard before. Caressing fragments whispered into the room – soft endearments caught late at night, loud in the sleeping silence of Station. Then Jack’s own voice started to appear in the mix.
He sounded so much younger. New images flickered by. A kettle boiled. There was a garden, with a soft toy hanging from a tree. Hands pulled a shirt out of a dryer. He recognised his own hands, and memories came. They pulsed through him as the images continued. Meshed with the music, each vignette called up more of the past, creating a record of his time with Andrea seen from her point of view. A clock shone out from a bedside table. It used to wake him ever
y morning. A hand knocked over a glass of whisky. It had the Vista Club logo on it. Andrea had drenched herself. There’d been a taxi ride home, and then a fumble out of her soaked clothes before they made love. Harry had been away. It was the first full night they’d spent together.
The soundtrack muttered broken sighs and laughter. Sounds and images fused into a series of precise invocations. It felt like commands were being written directly to Jack’s memory, triggering a mode of exact recall that summoned the past straight into his mind’s eye. A kaleidoscope of yesterdays sparked into life, overwhelming the present and replacing it with something, richer, deeper and far more structured. For a few moments, Jack felt himself rolled all the way back to his time with Andrea. For a few moments, joy filled him and he forgot everything that had come after. Then, the film’s focus started to move on. Memory shards still pulsed hypnotically, but they no longer reached Jack so directly. He fell back into the present.
[Amazing stuff, Jack.]
[ Yes – really evocative.]
[ No. Look at Andrea.]
She was still rapt in the flickering world of the past. But her clothes and hairstyle had changed, looking more up-to-date. Her face had aged too, time’s passing recarved into it.
[ It’s bringing her back to herself. How?]
[ The music’s doing it, and the images. They’re triggering memory cascades that are rebuilding her most recent self. Quite the achievement!]
Jack thought about the other times he’d heard the same broken music. At the club, Andrea must have been restoring herself after her performance. And he’d thought she’d been rehearsing in her upstairs room. Perhaps she’d in fact been composing, weaving a few new hours of life into the music that would so effectively and precisely reverse any rolling back.
[Oh look!] said Fist. [ It’s all about the moon!]
Jack was snared again, although not in quite the same way as before. Now the experience was less personal. He watched a culture’s grief come to life before him. The lament still tore into him, though. And the music was about far more than dead children. Andrea had shot this sequence through with a flash-forward to her own murder. Corazon’s memories blazed in Jack’s mind. He turned away from the screen, letting the moment pass.
When he looked back, the flash-forward had ended. The film and music moved through the two years before the end of Andrea’s life. It touched on the slow death of her relationship with Harry, and the increasing artistic independence and confidence that paralleled that loss. Finally, it skipped back to her post-death self, filling the wall with images and the air with sounds that recapped her life as a fetch. At last it wound down and there was silence. Jack turned to Andrea, now once again fully herself. Her head was down and her eyes were closed.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked.
She opened her eyes and looked round at him, once again fully herself.
‘I hate having to do that,’ she replied. ‘Fucking clubs. Fucking Harry.’
‘Why do you let him stay here, then?’
‘Oh, Jack.’ She moved to one of the sofas. ‘He was my husband once. He’s a shit, but where else is he going to go? And he’s helped me a lot over the last couple of years, in his own way.’ She brushed her hair out of her eyes. ‘And I have so few other people to talk to. You’ve seen what the clubs are like. I hardly see my friends, they only care about the living. And my family prefer me much younger. Much younger. I was so far away from them as an adult.’
‘You’ve got me to talk to.’
‘And you don’t think I’m really Andrea, do you? I tricked you. That’s one of the first things you said to me. Do you still believe that?’
‘I didn’t trust you. You didn’t tell me the whole truth.’
‘You should have understood why that was impossible by now. Perhaps there are even people you haven’t told the whole truth to?’
Jack winced. ‘Maybe. You do seem to be so much her.’
‘Seem to be?’ she said. ‘Only that?’ Jack said nothing. ‘Which is why I wanted you to see all this,’ she continued. ‘Because I knew you’d say that. You’ve just watched my memories laid out as code, pulling me back to myself. I’m built on memory, Jack. And so are you.’
‘But I haven’t died.’
‘Think about your body. Every single cell is replaced, every seven years. You’ve been away for that long. What remains of the man who left?’
‘I’m still me, Andrea.’
‘You’re a pattern of memories running on a dynamic platform that’s constantly renewing itself. The pattern is all that persists, the self looking back on all it has been and knowing itself from that. That’s what makes you you, Jack, not the passing fact of your flesh. And that’s what makes me me. I may be running on a different platform, but the pattern of me is unchanged and I fight hard to protect it. I am Andrea, Jack, I’m the same person as that different person all those years ago, just as you’re the same person as that different Jack who loved me then.’
[Oo, philosophy! It’s making my head hurt. I say cut to the chase and snog her.]
[Shut up, Fist.]
[Grabbing a glass of champagne … Activating your sub-dermal presence simulators … Now she can touch you! Over to you, lover boy!]
Andrea noticed Jack’s distraction. ‘Fist?’
‘He has strong opinions.’
‘Is he real?’
Jack smiled. ‘He’s certainly got a mind of his own. And he’s going to be around after I’m gone. So yes, he’s real.’
[Of course I am!]
‘He’s quite excited about this,’ continued Jack. ‘About you.’
Andrea leant towards him. Presence simulators showed him her warmth. Virtual breath brushed against his skin. She touched the side of his face.
‘And is he right to be?’ she said.
Chapter 29
It was just before dawn. Jack kicked open a door which led to a stairway that had wrapped itself around a construction which might once have been a gas storage cylinder. Now, it was some sort of scrap-metal recycling centre. Looking down into it from the walkway on its rim was like looking into an iron maw studded with broken teeth. Spotlights pulled vaguely identifiable machine shapes from drifts of rust-tinted tangle.
[ I can’t believe I’ve got an automatic intimacy shutoff!] grumbled Fist. [ I didn’t even know it existed.]
[ Never triggered it before,] replied Jack, turning away from scrap metal to look out over Docklands.
[Oh well, at least I got to see you and East together. I suppose you can’t really be intimate with a god.] He popped into view just next to Jack, perched on the railings. [ I ended up playing Andrea’s memory code back again. Remarkable piece of work. She’s sharp, that girl of yours.]
[ I know that.]
Dim streets curved up and away in front of them, losing themselves in height and darkness. Lights glowed softly – some from windows, some from streetlamps, some from flyers and cars. They sketched in the places around them, hinting at different kinds of buildings, different kinds of lives. In its dormant state, Docklands was a city of implications.
[Seeing it without the weave seems so natural now,] Jack commented. [Gods, I used to think quiet rooms were peaceful. But even in them you’d have a few sprites buzzing around, to remind you it was all still out there. To stop you from panicking.]
[ We can activate any time you want. You really should get back onweave, Jack. It’s been seven years. With me behind you, you’ll see everything.]
[ That’s why we’ve come up here.]
The soft whine of distant flyer engines pulsed down from above. The spinelights were still dark, silhouettes defined by the lights of the city beyond and behind them. A series of loud cracks rang out from them.
[ They’re waking up the spinelights,] Jack explained. [A few minutes and it’ll be daylight. Take me onweave while they come online.]
[ What?]
[ Wake me up with the city, Fist.]
[ I could have everything open righ
t now.]
[ No. Do it step by step. I want to make sure I remember all the details.]
At first, it seemed that nothing was changing. Then the soft darkness began to lose something of its density. Dawn was dusting the city with presence, pulling definition into being. As it emerged from the gloom, Fist unveiled the first, most basic component of the weave: the grid that lay over the city, providing a spatial reference point for every single active weavepoint. Straight white lines threw themselves across Docklands, imposing horizontal and vertical regularity on urban chaos. Pale grey lines leapt up from the corner of each square, striating cylindrical airspace into an infinity of cubes.
[ What scale are we on, Fist?]
[ Ten by ten metres. The spatial mapping goes right down to millimetres. But if I showed you those gridlines, you’d see nothing else.]
[ Fair enough.]
[ Now, locations. I’m assuming you just want to see the major ground tags? I can show you descriptors for all the cubes – but the data’s so dense, you wouldn’t see anything past thirty or forty metres away …]
[ Just the tags, Fist. And street-level detail, nothing more defined than that.]
Where there had been a vista, there was suddenly content. Red and yellow lines streaked across Docklands, parsing space. Letters danced into words, defining streets, squares, neighbourhoods, buildings and stations. A patchwork of colours leapt across the landscape, shouting information into the gathering day. They flowed from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, shifting shade with each one, turning the city into a vast artist’s palette.
[ That’s lovely,] Jack told Fist. [ Now let’s see the people too.]
[ What level of detail?]
[ The basics.]
[ I’ll break them down by sex – red for men, blue for women.]
[Show me the sweatheads, too.]
[OK – black for them. Minimum scale. One pixel, one person.]
Fist waved his hand and the great patchwork before them was dusted with tiny dots. Many of the red and blue pixels were clumped in residential areas. Many were still in bed, or at least at home. Some were already travelling to work. Streets were lightly spotted with red and blue. Trains showed as moving lines of colour, leaping between the long, thin scatterings that were station platforms.