The synth did not translate the surge of fury that drove his reply. His voice came out in a tepid wash. “You hold me here against my will. How am I alive in the first place? I shot myself in the head!”
“You tried to shoot yourself in the head.” The correction came gently, and she smiled. “Fortunately, you failed at the last minute. Your wounds were critical, but we salvaged you.”
“That wasn’t what I wanted.”
The Mother canted her head a bit. “You say that, but is that really true? Your people are exceedingly stubborn when it comes to the desire to avoid extinction, yes – but I think you rather changed your mind there at the end.”
He wanted to shake his head, but could not. “It was …it was the one of you, who…it wasn’t me!”
She smiled slightly, her pale lips curling at the corners. “Come now. You don’t believe that, do you? You said you weren’t going to let them in. You fought them.”
“But it didn’t do any good, did it?” Even dreaming, he winced at those words. “You gave me that…stuff. And now you have me here, you put me in a body that looks like you, and you cut up my brain—”
“I repaired what was wrong with you,” she said calmly. In the dark, her eyes shone like they did at the penthouse, gleaming green in the dim light of the gestation floor.
“What was wrong with me,” he roared back at her, angry all the more he couldn’t elevate his voice above that irritating, flat tone. Back then, he could still feel emotion, still generate anger and outrage. “What was so terrible about me that you had to change everything that you could while keeping me alive?”
His words drew another sigh from the Mother of Systems, who smiled at him again as she stepped up and placed her hand against the glass. “Oh, Thomas… Don’t you understand? What is wrong with you is that you are human.”
“Hey man, you awake?”
Jacinto’s voice rang over the plane’s intercom so loudly it shook Walken from his sleep. Like televisions snapping on, his eyes registered the bay once more, and though the vibration of the engines still carried through the hull, he did not sense any motion. They must have landed.
“I am.” Walken swung his gaze toward the crew station down the bay. Its panel displayed a view of the sky outside. “Why have we stopped? Have we not landed?”
“Nah, brother. We’re over the target destination and waiting for landing clearance. Aggie’s just rock solid – she was designed to be a gunship, you know, rockets and artillery and all. Needed a really stable platform for the guns.”
“I see.” Walken looked for the camera, finding it in an armored blister in the bay ceiling. Behind tinted transparent alloy, the eye of the security system seemed to bear down upon him. “How long until we land?”
“Soon as I get the word, maybe ten minutes. We’re up high, but she’s a fast bird.”
“All right.” He could do with something that would further drive out the dream-images from his mind. Even now, he found himself filled with a revulsion and fear he could not articulate even to himself – or at least a poor echo of it, for he felt emotions more then, four years ago at the time of his first escape. Now, they’d become muted. Like the man he’d once been was muted. And still, she smiled on in his head.
Walken was grateful when a klaxon rang a few moments later. The plane dropped out of the sky, a lance hurled earthward from the heavens. He would have vomited in earnest if he still had a digestive system. Nonetheless, even his heavily augmented body shuddered beneath the g-forces building on the plane like layers of stone, yet he felt light as gravity’s hold left him. Sensors in his body marked the rapid increase of velocity with alarm, but he gripped the harness of the drop seat with both hands and trusted in the ability of the wired-up pilot. This had the feeling of a long-practiced maneuver, and anyway, he had survived so much that night already. The possibility of anything else truly astonishing taking place was truly astronomical.
Famous last words, he realized, but they would serve for the moment.
Somewhere through the stone-plunge into oblivion, Jacinto regained control. Slammed hard into the seat by the ancient hand of gravity, Walken could only hang on as the plane pulled out of its incredible dive, shuddering through axes of motion as its engines screamed to keep it steady. His body rattled in the harness. Daggers made of treacherous probability tore holes in his calm as the plane dipped and bowed through the air, but blunted as gravity normalized and the descent smoothed out.
“All right!” Jacinto whooped into the bay, “We’re clear. Touchdown in twenty seconds. You still alive back there?”
“Yes,” Walken replied, distracted not from the forces that had assailed him, but because he tried to quantify the skill required to navigate them. “Clear of what, exactly, that you had to pull that maneuver?”
“Civil air defenses. Aggie’s got some of the finest stealth systems in existence, or at least that we can produce, but it’s a goddamned race trying to keep ahead of the government here.”
The plane’s descent halted with a gentle lurch as it landed, as gracefully in motion now as it had been violent minutes before. Another buzzer sounded and Walken’s harness unlocked. He slid from the seat and stood on the deck. “Where are we?”
The hatch to the cockpit unsealed and opened. Jacinto emerged, sans helmet, his jumpsuit unzipped to reveal the hex-scale material of a bulletproof shirt underneath. “Cuidad del Carmen.”
“That’s in Mexico,” Walken said.
Jacinto snorted. “I told you, man, she’s fast.”
Mexico? Walken tried to calculate what sort of an engine you’d need to cross the Atlantic like that, nuclear-powered or no, in what, five hours? “You will have to tell me more about your plane should I find myself cleared. But consider me impressed.”
“We’ll talk about it later, yeah.” Jacinto walked over to the crew station and hit a few buttons. The belly hissed open, revealing a field of aged concrete down to which its gangplank unfurled. “But everything’ll be a lot easier once we get the big man’s seal on things, and prove that you’re not a psychotic alien robot or some shit like that.”
Walken looked at him. “Has that happened before, in your experience?”
A haunted look flickered over Jacinto’s features. “Let’s say it’s nothing we’d ever want to happen again.”
“Fair enough,” said Walken, and he descended the ramp to the ground below.
All around the plane stretched the field of concrete, which turned out to be a central lot for an industrial complex. Most of Cuidad del Carmen consisted of industrial sprawl, made up of factories, storage, and automated refineries for the vast oil fields that seemed to never drain. A company city, as far as Walken knew. But here, surrounded by rusting pipes and long-forgotten stacks, he wondered how much attention the companies paid out this far from the Gulf city’s polished core. He stood at the end of the gangplank and stared, drinking in every detail his laser-sharp vision could provide him with.
Jacinto came bounding down the ramp and stopped next to him. “Here we are. It’s not much, I guess, but it’s home.”
“This is home?” Walken shot him a glance before scanning the area again. “It’s a complex setup that you have here.” Among the pipes and tanks, a few industrial buildings squatted low, mean, and rusting, one of them a warehouse he estimated large enough to host the plane. “Have you been here long?”
“Long enough.” Jacinto clapped a hand on Walken’s shoulder. All his previous tension seemed gone. “Come on, the big man’s waiting.”
They headed to one of the low structures, made of corrugated steel and braced with seemingly ancient rebar. A façade entirely cosmetic, Walken noted, for as they grew closer, the smooth gray of concrete peeked out beneath gaps in the rusting metal. He found no sign of a lock plate or sensing mechanism, but as Jacinto stepped up to a thick door sheltered under a ramshackle awning, it buzzed and swung inward, beckoning them.
Jacinto led him into the bunker – the only thing he c
ould call it, a structure with inches-thick concrete walls. The antechamber they entered resembled the waiting room of a clinic, small and filled with chairs, battered, streamlined plastic affairs that looked as though they had been salvaged from one of the last century’s medical boutiques. A desk sat in one corner, similarly worn, that matched the chairs almost entirely. Another heavy door was set in the back wall.
“Have a seat,” Jacinto said. “I’ll be back in a second.”
“All right.” Walken settled into one of the beige plastic chairs as the back door slid open and Jacinto passed through.
Alone, Walken an anxiety he could not quite explain settled over him. This soon passed as Jacinto returned, followed by a lanky young man in a pair of black jeans and a smock-like shirt of white material emblazoned with tiny Sony logos. Deep black hair made his pale skin seem all the more so, gelled into a several small crests that looked like crashing waves. Like Jacinto, his skull bristled with input jacks, though his were tinted a rainbow of colors. Walken looked at the two men, who he noticed were walking hand in hand.
“This is Strikeboy,” Jacinto said with a voice warm with pride and affection. “My man.”
“Your man,” Walken said placidly. “Congratulations. Is he the ‘big man’ in question?”
Jacinto smirked. He shared a look with Strikeboy. “Not in the way that you’re referring, I suppose, but Strikeboy’s the one who’s gonna connect you.”
Walken looked between the two of them, wheels going on in his head, which, given whatever had been done to him, was a considerably accelerated affair. “I see. So he isn’t here?”
“He’s everywhere, man.” Strikeboy gave Walken a wide, dreamy smile, his teeth gilded with a network of gleaming platinum wires. His pupils were enormous. “The big man goes where he wants, does his business and all, but he talks to us over the network.”
Walken suppressed the urge to cringe at the reply. Mysterious voices had guided him here already, but he had dearly wished for something biological, or at the very least physical, to talk to. “All right, well, how should I speak with him?”
“Down the hall.” Strikeboy nodded to the door in the back wall, which hissed open yet again as if by magic. He seemed to have wireless control of the building’s systems. “First door on your right. Just sit at the console, and he’ll do the rest.”
With a profound sense of suspicion, Walken rose and walked through the open doorway. Sure enough, beyond it a corridor ran for some fifty feet, set on either side with several more heavy doors. The first one on the right slid open as he approached it. Beyond this, he entered a small room with walls and floor made of bare concrete, like the rest of the building. Holographic projectors and audiovisual pickups ran along the top of the walls, and in the center of the room stood a simple desk and chair of the same vintage as those in the antechamber.
Walken approached the desk as though it might transform into a beast and eat him. Considering all that he had been through, he did not want to take the chance that Mother’s face may well spring up in front of him and say hello before Yathi filled the room and dragged him away. He had not yet ruled that possibility out, especially regarding the ghost-voices that had brought him here in the first place. When he took his seat before the desk and folded his hands upon the desktop, he was prepared for anything. Of course, why would the Yathi stage such an elaborate ruse, plucking him from the grasp of the centipedes they controlled, only to ambush him in Mexico?
As if on cue, the holographic emitters came to life, and a figure did indeed appear before him. Gorgeously realized in high resolution, with every wrinkle of fabric and skin rendered with the utmost precision, the image of Anton Stadil stood on the other side of the desk, Anton as he had been in life, not the burned-out corpse he’d last seen.
“I should be surprised,” said Walken, belying with that synthetic voice the screaming in his brain.” But I suppose that I am not.”
Stadil’s image nodded once. “You should not be, no. Not after everything that you have experienced with the Mother of Systems.”
“I suppose that I am more surprised to see you here, considering that you had been dead when last we met. Was it a clonal substitute?”
Stadil smiled at him. “No. You saw my body; I am, for all intents and purposes, dead. But there is a great deal more to it, all of which you should know.”
Walken frowned. “To what end? What is it that you intend by facilitating my escape from that place?”
“I never wanted you to be captured in the first place, Thomas.”
Walken hadn’t expected to hear that. “I don’t know what you intended, then.” His anger manifested as an impotent throb in the back of his head. “I only know what I have learned from the Mother of Systems and my own prying into the Network.”
“You can do that?” The image of Stadil seemed surprised.
“I can do that, yes, but it takes some time. I don’t have the same knack as the Yathi do, and I need an electrode connection. But…I’m able to interface directly with machines, if in a somewhat limited fashion, as long as they have a wireless receiver.”
“I see.” The hologram gave him a fantastic approximation of a weighing look. “I suppose that we are getting ahead of ourselves. I am sorry that you were captured. I had not intended for that to happen, as I have said.”
Walken smirked. “All right, I will play. What did you intend?”
Stadil blinked at him. “I had intended for you to kill the Mother of Systems, of course. You were never intended to survive.”
Walken rose to his feet. “I will have better chances on my own, I see.”
“Stay,” snapped the hologram, and Walken found himself pinned by the authority in that synthesized voice. “Sit down, please.”
“So you can tell me how you manipulated me into being a patsy?” Walken frowned. “I am what I am because of you.”
“You are what you are because of the Mother of Systems,” Stadil said. “And, yes, because of my manipulations. But I doubt that you really want to walk out through that door and be brought back in to her custody, something which we both know will be inevitable without help.”
Walken frowned more. “I know enough about the Yathi to understand why she should be killed. You could have told me all of this already. Through Bobbi, even. I would have tried.”
The hologram shook its head. “You would not have believed me.”
“You should have tried.”
“Yes.” ‘Stadil’ fixed Walken with a pained look. “I know now that I should have. I did not have the capability to gauge you as I should have then. I was still…in transition.”
“Perhaps it is you who should tell me what you have become. And why we are where we are now.” Walken eased himself into the seat again, still not quite trusting the apparition of a dead man. “It would appear that I have plenty of time to listen.”
A few moments passed, before Stadil nodded. A chair appeared beneath him as he moved to sit, a mirror image of Walken’s. Once he sat, he folded his hands upon the desk before him. “I knew you were bound to find her. I was once one of them. Formerly human, that is. I was responsible for a great many services in the name of the colonization effort.”
“I gathered that already.” Walken narrowed his eyes. “Go on.”
Stadil told him the story of his former self, of Georgia and the obliteration of Tbilisi, how his faith fell and the alien wormed its way in. He told Walken all about the attempt to slip from the bonds of the Yathi consciousness, how he killed himself to become something more. “Only, it appears that I have become something different than what I had intended.”
Walken sat quietly as he stared across the table at the hologram. It was quite a story, one that he certainly could see happening. After all, his faith had been broken, such as it had been, when Anna had died. And at the same time, of course, it could still all be fiction. The man was a spider on a scale that he had never even heard of before, and now, transformed….
“
You have become something else,” Walken repeated. “A digitized consciousness. I would think that would provide you with everything you need to make change happen.”
The image chuckled. “Perhaps you would think so, but translation hardly equals omnipotence. I am not perfect.”
“You don’t say.”
“Indeed,” said Stadil. “But it would appear that you do not suffer the same deleterious effects as others have upon being separated from the Yathi consciousness.”
“I shot myself in the head. Then they replaced the parts of my brain that the bullet trenched. Not the best method to replicate, perhaps.”
Stadil tapped a finger at his chin in thought. “Indeed. And you are not the only person who has experienced the integration of large portions of biosynthetic brain matter with their own and not been lobotomized.”
“Were they perhaps dead beforehand? Like a drone?” He had no reason for sass, of course, but still it came. Perhaps, Walken reasoned, the lack of adrenaline only increased one’s intolerance of mysterious horseshit. It certainly seemed the case with him. On the other hand, it was hardly characteristic.
Stadil cocked his head. “You certainly aren’t what I had expected. You have changed a great deal.”
Walken shrugged. “I don’t have a voice in my head telling me that people are all horrible. On the other hand, I don’t really know myself much anymore, either. I’m sorry if I seem too rude for your liking.”
“Quite the contrary, you seem quite self-assured. Very different from the last time we met.” Stadil’s image rose, standing by the illusory chair. “Tell me, what do you think about this situation?”
“I think that I’ve been through quite a lot tonight, sir, and I’d really just be grateful if you got to the part where you told me what was going on and what you wanted of me. I’m reasonably sure that we can fill each other in on other things later.”
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 12
