by Damien Boyes
I stand in the door, chest heaving, towel pressed to my bleeding head, my mind spinning like a centrifuge.
Omondi appears next to me, his big eyes blinking, the sniffer trailing behind him.
I see a flicker of movement in the corner of my eye—one of the animals staring at me from the bathroom. With barely a thought I raise my weapon and put its light out.
“The hell?” Omondi starts. He looks at me and whatever he sees is enough to widen his eyes. He looks past to Yellowbird approaching, leading McMillian in front of her.
I angle around him, out to the hallway, headed for the exit.
“What’s his problem?” Omondi says.
If Yellowbird answers, I don’t hear her.
StatUS-ID
[fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]
SysDate
[17:48:19. Sunday, January 19, 2059]
I told Ankur to meet me at Harbourfront. It’s minus ten. There won’t be any people. Wide open sight lines. It’ll be just me and him.
I call Saabir and ask him to watch Dora, then drop her at his office. Before I leave I ask for her gun, the one I noticed when she dumped out her bag in my apartment.
“Ankur is the man who killed you, right?” she asks as she reaches into her purse. “And Connie?”
“A version of him, yeah.” I answer.
“You’re going to kill him,” she says. It isn't a question.
“I don’t know,” I say. And I don’t. Part of me hates him. Hates him fiercely for what he did. Wants to hurt him as much as he’s hurt me. Make him pay for what he stole from me.
Except, he isn’t that person anymore.
Yes, he killed me, but we’ve already had this out, him and I. I tracked him down and exacted my revenge. How many times are we supposed to kill each other?
“You should finish him,” she says. “Once and for all, or this could go on forever. You have to end it now.”
She reaches down into her back and finds her gun, presses it into my palm, then stretches up and kisses me, tells me to be careful.
I say I will, then watch her turn with a sideways smile and climb the stairs to Saabir’s safehouse.
A short Sküte ride later, I’m down at the water, ready to meet the man who killed me.
I find him waiting on the empty Waterfront Trail, standing on the boardwalk alone, his back to the frozen lake, haloed by the purple glow of the Klaxon Overdrive memorial in the distance.
I pull the small coat as tight as I can across my body and walk toward him, keep my eyes open for anything suspicious, and my hands in my pockets, the fingers of my left hand wrapped around Dora’s small pistol.
He watches me approach, arms at his sides, his face expressionless. I stop five paces from him and he doesn’t move.
That’s the man who murdered Connie. His face is different than my memory of him, but the eyes are the same. All the rage and sadness that’s been buried in me since I woke up in that dingy clinic bursts to the surface.
That’s him.
The man who took everything from me.
Before I know what I’m doing I’ve covered the distance between us, have his throat in my hand, his upper body bent backward over the railing, the gun pressed against his forehead.
“You killed my wife,” I say. My voice is so tight it comes out as a hiss.
“I did,” he says, his eyes on mine, his body slack. He isn’t fighting, almost seems relieved.
I squeeze my fist around the pistol’s grip, wrap my finger around the trigger. I want to pull until it clicks, until his face is spread over the ice below.
“I understand your anger, Mr. Gage,” he says. “But you couldn’t kill me. At least, not with that weapon.”
“I can sure as hell try,” I warn him.
“You would fail,” he assures me, then slowly reaches into the pocket of his loose pants and pulls out a shyft, holds it up between us. Its surface radiates bright red. “Unless you used this.”
I relax, let him slip from my grasp and take a step back, but keep the gun squarely on him. “What’s is it?” I ask.
“The means to assure my demise,” he says. “I need your help, Mr. Gage. But if after you’ve heard me out, if you still wish to see me dead, I will allow this this shyft to invade my mind. It will corrupt my rithm, and since I am currently live-synced with my back-up, it will corrupt my stored consciousness as well.” He offers it to me and I hesitate, but take it from him.
I hold the shyft up and it shines like a stoplight. The murderous rage that had gripped me is fading, replaced by curiosity and surprise. “This will kill you?”
“Forever,” he says. This kid just put his life in my hands.
This is the man who murdered Connie? The crazed driver who smashed through our lives, tore it up under the wheels of that TACvan? I’d imagined him some kind of psychopath, or a cold, unfeeling monster. Not a kid prepared to die to appease my need for vengeance.
“Why?” Is all I can think to ask.
“Because I am a murderer. Because I wronged you. Is it not what I deserve? Is it not what you want? Does justice not demand a sacrifice?”
I’ve been so caught-up with trying to make sense of what happened to Finsbury’s life, I hadn’t much considered what I’d do if I had the chance to confront the person who killed me. He’s offering an eye for an eye. To avenge my anger and my frustration and my grief. No trial. No jury. His life balanced on the decision of one wounded man.
Part of me wants to watch him suffer. Watch him die.
But if I went through with it, forced him to kill himself to satisfy my need for retribution, what would that make me?
No better than Agent Wiser. He blames me for what happened to him, even though I was in storage at the time. A dream waiting to wake up.
Ankur may be the reincarnation of the man who killed us, but he isn’t him. He’s a branch. An off-shoot. We’re the same, he and I. Prisoners of lives we didn’t decide on.
I shove the shyft in my pocket and lower the gun, but keep my finger on the trigger.
“Tell me everything,” I say. “The second I don’t believe you, the shyft goes in your head.”
Ankur nods, solemn. “As I told you, something was there with us, the night we died. Something that escaped. I believe it a fragment of myself, spontaneously created by my rithm to seek out an agent of corruption: you.”
“I was rattling around in your head too.”
“So it would appear,” he says. “Killing you and your wife and those five others affected me—affected Eka. I imagine Eka tried to ignore the guilt he felt, then tried to live with it, and when it persisted he rewrote his rithm in an attempt to wall it off, to edit the portion of his mind causing him pain. To delete the guilt and the remorse from his head. Then he made sure he forgot doing it, removed the memories of what he’d done. Erected blocks around it.” A tremor rolls through his impassive face. “I believe suppressing those feelings caused his rithm to lurch in a new direction. At the rate he was progressing, I can only speculate as to where it landed—somewhere both very much more, and very less than where it began.” Ankur’s voice has lowered. He’s talking like he’s in a reverie, occupying his hypothetical mindset. “I imagine I could sense the resistance in my head. A resistance that eventually caused a schism, and a splinter formed. A new part of myself. An anti-body to clean the infection I wasn’t allowed to know I had.”
His story is wildly implausible, but it fits with everything I know.
“The fragment,” I say, putting the pieces together. “It created a mindjack shyft. Studied each of us, learned how to manipulate us. I suspect Elder was the easiest. Then Tala or Miranda through him. To get to Dora. To get to me. Okay, but why kill all those people and not me? Why not just cypher up and shoot me in the head?”
Ankur’s head wobbles on his shoulders. His chest rises and falls. “The others would have been a secondary infection. If they were left wondering what had happened in the time the fragment was inhabiting thei
r bodies, they would have investigated, and those investigations would have re-infected the wound. All sources of infection needed to be sterilized. Plausible circumstances were engineered to have those minds neutralized, to throw no suspicion toward the true source of their behaviour.”
We’re dealing with a superintelligence. It can see all the angles, examine all the probabilities. It would make sure it left no redundancies or handing threads.
This really was about me, all this time, all this suffering.
It’s all my fault.
“But why not kill me too?” I ask.
He furrows his smooth brow. “Killing you wouldn’t have been enough. It would have needed you erased. Permanently. Not stocked. Not in storage. Gone. Forever.” He goes quiet. That’s what he offered me with that bright red shyft: the chance to erase him. “It would need to get into your head, scramble your brain, and then force a sync and corrupt your back-up. Then you’d be cleansed. No more grating against the void in his mind.”
We stand, watching each other. The wind tugs at our clothes but I don’t think either of us feel the cold.
“But I found you first,” I finally say.
“And we died. Together. But the fragment escaped. Went into some kind of dormant state. Waiting, searching for any further signs of infection to a body that no longer existed.”
“Until I came back.”
“The fragment must still retain my former skill. Or a portion of it. Perhaps it infiltrated Standards to watch for your return. It was able to inhabit Dub, and attempted to fulfill its purpose.”
“That’s why it killed Dub,” I say. “To dispose of the evidence rather than face exposure when he was caught.”
“It still inhabits Elder. If we can find him, perhaps we can free his mind from the splinter’s influence.”
My heart swells with hope. Maybe we don’t have to run. Maybe we can fight the fragment, find a way out of this. “You think there’s a way to beat it?”
“Possibly. Which brings me to the other reason I needed to speak with you.”
I narrow my eyes. “What’s that?”
“If we are to defeat this fragment, we will need help. Eka was incredibly powerful, but even he didn’t work alone. He had a partner.”
I don’t like the sound of this. “What kind of partner?”
“Eka worked with Xiao. They had an alliance, shared similar goals. Goals that affect every person on this planet. Eka left instructions that, if he were to be killed, Xiao was to restore him. Xiao complied but instead of Eka, he found me. I am a mere shadow of what Eka had become, and I am unable to re-inhabit my expanded rithm. I’m locked out. Eka’s mind is waiting, hidden behind an impenetrable door. Only with Eka’s power will be able to fight this fragment.”
“And what do you need from me?”
“The key to Eka’s mind.”
“You think I have it?”
“I hoped.”
“Why would I free this thing that killed me? That killed my wife?”
“Eka is bigger than you or I, Mr. Gage. Bigger even than his vengeful fragment that wants you dead. Without Eka, it is very possible the whole world will die.”
StatUS-ID
[a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]
SysDate
[21:21:58. Tuesday, April 30, 2058]
We try to interview McMillian again once we get him back to the station and he lawyers up immediately. No one mentions my outburst, but Yellowbird and Omondi are tense, give me sidelong glances all day.
I know what they’re thinking. They’re wondering if I’m coming unhinged, if they can still trust me. It’s a good question, one I’m not sure I have the answer to myself. I’m all over the place, vaulting between elation and remorse, pity and violence, obsessed with finding Xiao, with finding Eka.
I barely know who I am anymore.
I leave the station early and sit through counseling, sullen, my head aching where I hit myself with the jar, ashamed at the way I overreacted.
When Elder closes the meeting Dora bundles into the Sküte beside me and we go back to my apartment. She doesn’t ask and I don’t tell her I don’t want her to.
“I got us something,” she says over her shoulder as she stands at the sink, filling the kettle for tea. She brought the kettle over a few days ago. And the tea. “I thought it might be fun.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“Sit down and close your eyes,” she says.
“I’m not really in the—”
“Just sit down,” she says, moves behind me and pushes me across the room to the couch. I plop down and she puts her hands over my eyes. “Close them.”
“I don’t—”
“Close them,” she says firmly. She’s not going to take no for an answer. I squeeze my eyes shut while Dora rustles through her bag.
My eyes may be closed, but I’m still wearing my cuff, and I bring up the Service feed, scroll through the latest incident reports. I barely get through the first page before Dora’s reached around and detached the cuff. My headspace disappears and I’m alone in the darkness behind my eyes.
“Dora—” I start, but she cuts me off.
“Just be patient. I think we’ll like this.”
She leans in close and her perfume drapes over me. She presses something against the contact port at the base of my skull and slides it around until it catches. A second later an image fades in, a logo of two wavy eses and a prompt below: ARE YOU READY TO SHARE YOURSELF?
“Accept it,” she urges.
There’s no point in arguing. I agree to the prompt and I’m immediately gripped by an odd sensation, I feel colder, and I have to tap the couch cushions to remind myself I’m still sitting down.”
“What is—?”
“Shhh,” Dora says, and feel my own lips forming the sound, feel my hand lift a finger to my mouth, my lips are firm and soft at once. My tongue flicks out and runs up the side of my finger, teasingly, before my lips part and the tip of my finger slides into the warm, wet mouth. I shudder with pleasure and as I start to harden in my pants Dora gasps.
What’s she doing? It’s like I’m in two places at once, two bodies at once.
I try to open my eyes, to get a peek at what she’s doing but it’s like she can read my mind. She stops me.
“Keep them shut,” she says. “Don’t open them until I tell you.”
My finger slides from my mouth and trails down my chest, over the swell of my breasts and the sensitive thrust of my nipples. I shudder again and Dora moans. My fingers work over the buttons of my shirt, working backwards, and then it slides off my shoulders. I’m not wearing a bra. My hands reach forward and scoop my breasts, delicate fingers cool on my skin. I take each nipple between my thumb and tweak and the pleasure spikes through me. I’m wet and hard at the same time. My hands move down and over my smooth, taut abdomen, slide under the fabric at my waist, brush through the short bristly hairs and slide inside myself. My throat closes around a groan that Dora echoes.
I have a vagina.
I open my eyes and Dora’s standing in front of me, topless, her hand moving in her pants. Dora sees me seeing her and her whole body shivers.
“Close them again,” she says. I do and she opens hers. I see her seeing me, slouched on the couch, my cock hard in my pants.
She glides closer and kneels. I’m with her as she works open my belt, feeling the leather give under her slender fingers. She pulls open the buttons on my pants and somehow I’m lifting my ass off the couch and using her hands to pull my pants down at the same time.
I feel her smile and then rise and sink down onto my lap and then our eyes are shut again and I’m inside myself and I don’t know whether those are my hands on my breasts or whether I’m the one undulating my hips and we merge, two bodies moving as one, and I kiss her and feel the roughness of my lips and the hollow of my cheeks under my fingers as I stroke my face and I kiss myself in return and then, as we build to climax and explode over the edge, we stop being
individuals and collapse together as a unified, panting, blissful creature with four arms and four legs and two heads and just one mind between us.
StatUS-ID
[fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]
SysDate
[18:01:23 Sunday, January 19, 2059]
Ankur’s just told me he needs my help in reviving the person he once became, Eka: an exponentially advanced intelligence that evolved from the person who killed me. A fragment of which is still trying.
No fucking way.
He nearly had me. Playing contrite. Offering his life as payment for what he’d done.
Sure, he may not be the same person who was driving that van—but Eka was. I’m not going to help Ankur bring that monster back to life.
I pull the shyft he gave me out of my pocket but leave it at my side. The red light shines through my fingers, bright enough to splash Ankur’s features crimson.
“You almost had me,” I say, my voice thick with anger.
Ankur’s demeanour doesn’t change. He doesn’t look at the shyft. “My intentions are transparent, Mr. Gage. If Xiao doesn’t act, the human race as we know it will be enslaved. Forever trapped in Fate’s game.”
This throws me. “Fate? You mean the Ancestors?”
“Yes,” Ankur nods, and for the first time since I arrived, takes a step toward me. “Fate is at the vanguard of a future rapidly approaching. This technology that allowed you and I to live on after our deaths is spreading. Soon, cortical restoration will be available to everyone, not only the wealthy. When it comes, Fate will supply it. Fate has quietly acquired a majority of the independent restoration companies, and contracted with countries around the globe with more to come. Fate controls millions of minds—perhaps hundreds of millions. No one knows. There are no public records.”
“So what? What’s that got to do with the existence of the human race?”
