Walken gave a low, soft chuckle. “It’s the nature of the beast, I’m afraid.”
“That’s been my experience. I really haven’t done much fighting. I fly, you know, and it’s not like Aggie’s really a combat plane. But I’ve met the Reclaimed, heard stories. Just…flat as a strap, man. But you’re human inside, right?”
The eternal question. “Basically, yes, though I will admit that it’s not like it was. I don’t know if it’s brain damage or something else, but I don’t…” He considered how to describe it. “Well. It’s like I’m turned down to half volume, or on therapy drugs.”
“Maybe you’re crazy and they’re doping you to keep you stable?” Jacinto hurried to add, “but probably not. I mean, Cagliostro wouldn’t work with you if that’s the case, right?”
If only you knew. “Yes, you’re right.” The truth was, of course, that the line between sane and not had dissolved long ago. Perhaps this muted emotional capacity was the product of some internal drug pump whose reservoir would eventually run dry and leave him a screaming psychotic. Perhaps the consciousness inside of him gathered strength again, to the point it would someday soon take him over once more.
Ultimately, his situation was unenviable: he had gone from being the prisoner of a powerful, secretive alien race to working for a vast, fragmented computer intelligence that sought their downfall. Not exactly what he had intended when he made his escape. At least he would soon know what this synthetic body would be able to do, though he hoped it would not be a walking, talking bomb as Redeye had apparently been. He reasoned that the Mother of Systems would not put such hardware inside of him, though on the other hand, he could be inexorably maneuvered into the resistance in order to nuke them all. It would depend on how devious Mother was and just how stupid she imagined her opposition to be, he supposed. He would know soon enough.
Walken spent his time cruising the newsfeeds while the Agin court flew on toward Seattle. What Jacinto said rang true. There was little he would consider new and strange in the city. He’d heard of the murder of the famed architect, Thompson, and later that night, the drug-battle hit on the famous bridge that the very man had designed. The reclamation effort went on beyond the Verge to try and resettle the Old City, which nobody seemed to know if it was a Yathi plot or not. Walken imagined it was, on account of the increased funding pumped into Civil Protection and the involvement of certain corporations that even now he recognized as Genefex subsidiaries.
Genefex, for all of Bobbi’s attempts to discredit it, had remained one of the most powerful corporations on the planet, the sole provider of life-extension services. He wondered if they got people that way, promised them immortality and then did…something…to their brains. Put depressants in the mix, something to accelerate the downfall of their minds so that their faith would become that much more fragile. Or maybe they didn’t need to. He knew from experience that modern society had been designed as one vast soul-breaking machine, with the Mother of Systems gleefully pulling the switches.
Time passed as he continued his ruminations, and soon, the glowing neon heart of the New City pulsed on the near horizon.
“We’re just about there,” Jacinto said over the audio link. “I can’t land down there, of course. Gonna have to lower you on a zipline. You sure that you can do that?”
Walken looked down at his feet, for which he had borrowed a pair of Strikeboy’s heavy, puncture proof orbital boots. It made him look a bit more like he came from space, which by extension most of him had. Fitting. “I will be fine. Will there be someone waiting for me?”
“An ambulance,” Jacinto said. “Doc Knightley’s crew will be waiting to pick you up and take you to his clinic. Only I don’t recommend that you let yourself be seen by anyone in Tenleytown, looking the way that you do. The residents have an old hatred of people that look like you.”
Now there was some irony for you.
Jacinto banked the plane in a slow descent toward the Old City sprawl. Walken’s eyes rendered the rotting bones of yesteryear’s suburbs in exquisite detail, the crumbling roads that ran underneath the armored, gun-studded ribbon of the Interstate as it proceeded south. “I understand. Can you tell me anything else? The last time I met Knightley, it was under less than ideal circumstances.”
“Let’s just say his explorations into the world of Yathi technology have left him, uhh, a little less together than he was. But he’s on our side, and he’s harmless as far as we’re concerned.”
“Harmless?” Walken’s tone dripped with disbelief.
“Well, mostly harmless. What do you want? Nobody’s gentle in this world anymore.”
Walken snorted again.” Let me know when you are ready to drop me.” He closed his eyes to prepare for what was to come.
Jacinto’s voice filled his ears through the earbud. The howl of the wind and the sound of the engines gushing up from the plane’s open belly drowned out anything else, snapping at him with razor teeth. The harness around Walken’s body registered only as a measure of pressure. It offered no comforting snugness, only the mathematical values that told him he was well secure in its embrace. “Ready as I can be.” He spoke into the earbud’s jawbone pickup. “Drop the line.”
A panel opened, and a winch assembly slid toward the center of the bay on a rail that he had previously thought part of the superstructure. It stopped near the camera blister and locked into place. A pneumatic grapple dangled from the reel of cable that made up the winch. With a loud bang and hiss of pressure, the grapple’s harpoon head blasted downward toward the ruined urban landscape. He followed its trajectory into the middle of the street over which the plane now hovered. A hundred feet below, a black van waited patiently for him to descend.
The pilot chuckled.
Walken clipped his harness line onto the cable, looked down one more time…and jumped.
Though the Agincourt hovered at only a hundred feet, he felt as though he were falling a mile. Something about the way his eyes registered motion, perhaps, or some unknown mechanism of the brain triggered as he came down, sensing the fall with a strange slowness. The city swam upward at him at a leisurely pace, as if he could float down and say hello as if stroking the face of a lover. Only he remained in step with time – or so it seemed, though he had no breath or heartbeat by which to gauge. This curious effect persisted for a few precious seconds before reality reasserted itself, and he found himself braked not by a trick of the senses but his harness as its internal computer engaged failsafes to keep him from breaking his legs. He touched down with only the slightest jarring, and stepped forward as the opening harness ejected him. Within seconds, the Agin court drew up its tether, the harpoon left behind.
The van waited.
It was everything he would expect from something attached to a black-market clinic: plain, unmarked, painted matte black and with bigger tires than stock to conceal the weight differential from emergency gear and armor plating. He approached it with care, as if it might suddenly bristle with cannons and open fire, but it did not. Instead, the back hatch swung upward, revealing a well-lit interior lined with complex devices. He knew a crash-cart and a field surgery unit on sight, at least, and so felt less trepidation as he stepped up into the van and sat down on the long, shallow bench that ran along the right side of the bay. As he did, the hatch sealed closed behind him.
A man’s voice came from a speaker in the forward bulkhead. “Make yourself comfortable. We’re under way.” The van shuddered as it drove off, weight and ultra-strong suspension meant to keep patients immobile giving him a silk-smooth ride even on the blasted streets. Walken sat in the white vault, wishing for all the world he could sigh. He tried it out, but unfortunately had no sensation
to experience, only the sound that the machines inside of him synthesized. Most of the medical equipment around him would be useless for his new body. He was, in that way, a true alien. He looked at his hands, pale and perfect, with their fingers a little too long. He thought of the death that they had conjured when he tried to fight the Yathi machines, how they turned into blue suns. His body felt foreign even to him, and though he did not trust Cagliostro, or quite believe the scenario laid out for him, at the very least, he would be able to discover some of the dark wonders his new flesh was capable of. He aimed to master this body as much as he possibly could, whatever the events of the coming days put in his path.
Eventually, the van stopped. Its rear hatch unsealed after a few minutes, and Walken found the gray walls of a garage beyond the open portal. Two men appeared at the back, one tall and black, the other a stockier Asian. Both wore dull red medical scrubs.
“Mister Smith,” said the Asian man, “Come this way, please.”
“Of course.” Walken looked between each man in time.
His escorts remained expressionless in the manner that well-trained bodyguards do, merely serving as particularly dangerous gargoyles. He wondered if they knew what he was, or if they thought him some anonymous Genefex executive come to get surgery even the company would not field. They led him across the garage and through a small door in the back, down corridors of white, nonslip tile, up a flight of stairs and past a small receiving lounge. Finally, they arrived at a long hallway where a pair of double doors awaited. The two men conducted him through to a large laboratory suite, white walls surrounding countless machines and a series of steel slabs that ran down the center of the room. There, Lionel Knightley leaned against the table closest to the front of the room.
He had not changed a bit, save for his hair, which had gone white. The cruel, sharp gray eyes that had gone through him like scalpels before still slashed away as he watched Walken’s appearance in the doorway. Lionel wore a pair of red scrubs and a lab coat, all of which rumpled as if he’d lived in them for months. Walken got the distinct impression that sleep was something of a stranger to him.
“The Walker returns,” said Knightley, in a voice that surprised him. No accent, no inflections, a good approximation of his own tonelessness, if a human one. “I never thought that we would meet again, my friend.”
Walken fixed his eyes upon Knightley’s, matching him stare for stare. “Good evening, doctor. I appear to be delivered into your care this evening.”
Knightley’s gaze lingered on him for a moment longer before tearing away, sweeping across the laboratory proper. “I am at your disposal.” He pushed off from the slab to walk deeper into the room amongst the machines. “How was your trip?”
The man’s repressed malevolence was nothing new to Walken, but the man radiated something elementally different from what he remembered before. Perhaps six years had worked a dark sort of alchemy on him. He got the distinct impression of a dam straining its banks. Walken cleared his throat. “Fine, thank you. I take it that you know why I’m here?”
Knightley bent over a bank of monitors along one section of wall. “Patient Alexander Smith seeks significant analysis and retuning of malfunctioning body systems. A typical case, but one requiring a great deal of time. I’ll be busy all night with this one, it appears.”
Walken’s lips pursed. “And you are qualified to…perform this analysis?” Was Cagliostro keeping him in the dark? How much did he know?
“You’ll find that I’m very well qualified indeed.” Knightley looked up from the monitors. His eyes were not blades, but dark, spent hollows. “Lie down, please.” He gestured to one of the tables.
Walken lay on the indicated table and stared at the ceiling. The overhead lights dimmed. He looked down his cheeks at Knightley as the man’s hands busied themselves with consoles. Long, brown fingers dipped and weaved across holographically generated keyboards with fluid grace, calling up displays and putting devices in motion. Overhead, the ceiling panels shifted, recessed and then opened like a pair of sliding doors. From panels above the ceiling, a small horde of articulated arms extended as if from a horror film’s abyssal portal, each one gleaming black and tipped with a bewildering array of surgical tools. Some Walken recognized, and not for positive reasons. Some, he knew, were of Yathi design.
Walken was already halfway off the slab and reaching for a nearby surgical saw when Knightley stopped him. “Don’t be afraid. It’s all right! Nobody here is going to hurt you.”
“Those tools.” Walken tried to roar as he grabbed hold of the saw. “They aren’t human!” He jammed the activator, but the blade did not spin up.
Knightley took his moment of surprise to advance a step forward, hands up. “They aren’t, but not for the reasons I expect you’re thinking. Lie back down. I’ll explain everything.” The surgical array whispered back into its overhead recess, and the ceiling hatch sealed shut.
Walken stared at him, feeling the weight of the saw in his hand. After a moment, however, he relented. “Stand where you are. I will listen – but only that.”
“Considering what you’ve already gone through, I would think you’d understand that things aren’t what they seem at any time.” Knightley’s eyes had dulled. “We all work for the ghost. I’m like you. I discovered Babylon, as my former brethren would say – real, true Babylon, death from the skies. He came to see me, told me everything. Now I fight the way I know how.”
“And how is that?” Walken’s eyes narrowed.
“With the best weapon in the world,” Knightley said with a wide, sharp smile. “Science.” He gestured to the table. “Lay down. I’ll tell you what I know.”
He kept the saw in his hand, but did as he was asked. The machines did not yet unfold again, but Knightley came to stand over him at one side. “The short version of the story is that the girl that January left with me did not atrophy as I said. At least, the brain did not atrophy to the point that it could not be salvaged.”
Walken nodded, though he tried not to allow either the ceiling or Knightley out of his direct vision for long. “I figured that would be the case.” Knightley took up a sensor wand from another machine and ran it down his body.” Was anything you told us true?”
Knightley snorted. “Yes. Just because I say what I need to so I can keep a treasure doesn’t mean I lie about it all. We’re brothers now, so to speak, united against Babylon. You’ll get the truth from me – and the truth is that the girls had synthetic brains. ROM constructs, the biggest that I’d ever seen. That this would all be within a unit the size of a human brain…” He waved the wand over Walken’s arms. “You can imagine that I wanted to know just how such technology came into being.”
All too easily. “I understand. And at the time, where did you think the technology came from?”
“Wonderland, of course.” Knightley shrugged. “Where else? It was where biosynthetic computer technology came from in the first place. And yet as I continued to work, it was obvious that the constructs were far in advance of anything that I had seen, and I had a great deal of contact with the technology that came from there. I had to determine the nature of it, where it came from. I am a man of science, brother. My curiosity escapes the fear of Babylon on a regular basis, which is why I am, you may notice, something of a heretic to my roots.”
“Lapsed Rasta.” Walken recalled the words that Bobbi had used to first describe Knightley all those years ago. “I can see it.”
“Lapsed,” Knightley echoed. “Perhaps at one point. The brothers and sisters of the Black Star Nation would surely kill me as an apostate now.”
Walken knew the Black Star Nation as Reformed Imperial Ethiopia. Founded some fifty years ago in the shadow of the American Crusades, hundreds of thousands of people fled to the eastern African nation and settled there, completely overturning the government and transforming it into a modern nation. One land, united under green technology and a mingling of Rastafarian and Orthodox Ethiopian Christian faith, one
of the few religious societies left on the planet. They had the right idea, of course, considering what Walken knew now. Shame that the Nation was militant in its limitation of who came into the country or did business with them, but then again, given history, maybe they had the right idea there, too.
“Apostate,” Walken said. “I suppose that we’re all apostates in one form or another now.”
Knightley clucked his tongue, a certain grim sobriety settling into him. “It is why we were seduced by the enemy in the first place. But why we can fight them now. I consider it penance.”
“I can believe that,” Walken said. “Anything interesting picked up yet?”
“Patience, brother,” Knightley murmured as he ran the wand over Walken again and again. “This is only the cursory scan. I can’t do anything better unless you let me use the diagnostic suite.”
Walken frowned. “Tell me one thing.”
Lionel did not look at him. “Name it.”
“I want to know why you left.” Walken looked at him. “Tell me that, and then I will submit to your…examination.”
A frown flickered on Knightley’s lips as he paused in his scan. “An examination for an examination. All right, very well. I did say that I would be honest with you, didn’t I?”
“You did. And I am a captive audience.”
Lionel grunted.” I will spare you the details, but let us say that there was a man. There are several mansions in the faith – sects, you might call them. I was raised in the Twelve Tribes of Israel, a very liberal faith. My Marcus, however –”
“Marcus?” That was a name he knew. “Surely not…”
“Marcus, as in Garvey,” Knightley said. “His namesake. And he was…well. Let us say he was born to a far more conservative family. They believed that homosexuality was a sin popularized by Babylon, and that I in turn was of Babylon, not worthy of their son or even citizenship in the Black Star Nation. They ran me out.” Knightley shook his head and sighed. “As it turns out, of course, I am apparently far more a creature of Babylon than even they expected.”
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 16
