Virology

by Ren Warom

  He tries to talk again, but the connections between brain and mouth are cycling too hard. His mind is a spinning top filled with the whir and hum of system failure. Bloodied arms curl around him then. Warmth beside his ear. The soft trickle of tears falling into his hair, down his neck. Amiga. Her whole body hunched over his. She needs to move. He has to make her listen. He can’t fail her too. He needs to talk.

  He tries to IM, finds that he has no voice there, has to swallow several times to find his voice IRL, and even then it’s so hard. Every word feels like a battle, but he’s determined to win. “Get out of here, Tanaka.”

  Still crying, she touches his face. “Gold eyes in blue. Oh fuck, Shock. Baegchi Pao. Machi naega neol eul tteonal su-issneun geos cheoreom.”

  He blinks away tears. Hers, not his, blurring in his eyes. “You speak Korean?”

  She laughs, hugging him closer. “That’s what you get from this? Shit. Shit, Shock.”

  “Please go,” he says, lifting a cement-heavy hand to touch hers. The effort sends shivers of exhaustion through his whole body. He’s disappearing back into unconsciousness. Disassembling. “Be safe.”

  “It is safe. We have her,” she says, rocking him a little. “We could go. We could just go.”

  Zenada laughs. “He’s not safe,” she says, not bothering to struggle against the Hornets holding her back. “Neither are you.”

  Amiga twitches. Then Ravi collapses, just missing Shock’s head. Amiga topples backwards, pulling Shock with her. The Hornets holding Zen slump to the floor. He can’t tell if they’re breathing, he’s sinking back to unconsciousness by degrees and he can’t stop. If he had a voice left he’d scream, but it’s all gone and he’s crying now. Weak body. Weak mind. If he was stronger, smarter, less selfish, this wouldn’t have happened.

  He’s learnt nothing.

  Zenada’s delicate hands frame his face. She leans in close, wordless, her head tipped to one side as she watches him sink backward from his eyes. He can see it reflected in hers, the gradual fading of gold to blue, and then all he sees is darkness blossoming inside of him. She follows it in, trying to wrestle him away from Emblem, to separate them out like wheat and chaff.

  Finally, in frustration, she tries to overwrite a tiny portion of him, no more than a handful of neurones, and it works after a fashion. That part of him is threefold: Emblem, Shock and her. He wants to scrape her off like fungus, like a scab. Pushing hard, Zen tries for more. A cluster. A whole section. It hurts so fucking much. Too much.

  Shock can’t conceive how there’s enough of him to register this level of pain, a bright-red light smouldering inside the remaining shreds of him, turning him to smoke and embers. Small pieces of him flaring and simmering heat like teeth. A jaw yawned wide and full of razors. A pink throat, ribbed and gleaming.

  Shark.

  Not pain but Shark, the essence of it, that untamed conflagration its loss left behind, thrashing away inside of him. Red, red rage and heat and fury. He could laugh if there were voice or mouth or will to laugh with. Better late than never, but it’s too late. Surely. Still he welcomes it, teeth, red, rage and all, sinking into it, allowing it to curl around him, warm as Amiga’s arms, strong and reassuring even as he wishes some of Puss were here too, even if it were only the weight of her gaze, settling his heart.

  And rage speaks for him, through him, without need for thought. Lashing out, it latches into the drives around him: Hornets and Zeros and patrons in the bars and museums and restaurants, families in the oceanarium. Given no time for relief that his friends are okay, he connects through them all, networking them together as Zen hits her stride and speeds up, swirling into him, bringing all she is. Worse than the Kraken. Than Queens. It’s like harbouring disease, the black rot of necrosis.

  A bit like dying.

  He felt Shark dying like it was his own death, and that loss is on replay in some deeply buried corner of his brain, a rat on a wheel, paws agile and agitated, burning from too much movement and desperate to stop. Is that grief? Never being able to forget the moment of loss, the savage snap of life as it leaves?

  As it happens, the difference between not dead and dead is only a single breath, a moment of absolute stillness that becomes gaping emptiness, because what was there can never be replaced. Death is erasure. Excision. Once you’ve been close enough to it to fully understand that, you can never forget it. Never pretend that life has no full stop moment, that it might roll on forever if you just look at it sideways and ignore the darkness waiting on the horizon.

  And maybe that is grief. A loss of innocence.

  Disappearing into her, under her, his sensation of himself thins, leeches to a membrane of self laid too deep to have any effect on his body, his mind. He understands then what it will be like to have her driving him, and wants instead to find that memory of Shark’s death—recreate it as his own. Will himself out of existence.

  He’ll be saving more than his autonomy; he’ll save the minds the Shark part of himself has connected together. Fucking stupid. Once she’s done swallowing him, she’ll move into them. And through them. She’s a tsunami in human form. A sickness. Viral and vile. That’s what she was doing with the Zeros, what she intended to do with Mollie and Maggie—he sees it all clear, her thoughts as his own, the offhand appropriation of life nothing to her.

  Mere convenience.

  Whatever the Shark part of him wants to do, it’s too dangerous, risks too many. If it doesn’t work, they’ll all be gone. They don’t have an Emblem to protect them. He’ll be engulfed by her, alive and suffering, alive and knowing they’re all her puppets. He tries to stop his Shark self, but like it was in the hangar, it’s listening to nothing but rage. Lashing back, it pours all that power, all that concentrated force from a thousand drives and more into turning the tide. Into writing Shock over Zenada.

  She snarls. Fights back in the same way she’s being fought, reaching out for minds, screaming frustration when the only ones she can reach are the infected. Her answer is to pour energy into the virads, force them to evolve, to spread faster, further, taking as many minds as she can, so many innocent lives swallowed all at once he screams somewhere deep inside to see it.

  The reversal process stops. Turns back in her favour. She rams her fingers deep into his head and twists. Punishment.

  His head flares pain and light. Red rage.

  Into the red and the bright flare of light comes gold. He opens his eyes. Sees Polar Bear towering over her, huge. Two metres of furious ursus risen up to crash down with its jaws around her neck, teeth breaking flesh, drawing blood. It pulls and her fingers pop out of his head with a sucking crack. Those golden eyes fixate on him.

  Carry on. Write her over. Quickly.

  Unable to respond except by complying, Shock casts out as far as he can, connecting to more drives until he feels strong enough to fight back. It takes a lot. Thousands more. Block after block of New York Hub connected to his drive. When Shock’s gathered enough to be able to fight her, Zen resists for endless seconds, clawing at Polar Bear, her fingers sending gold sparks to hit the carpet and fade, until, abruptly, the tide begins to turn. Bit by bit, then in a rush like breaking out of deep waters.

  And that’s when the battle stops. Freeze-frame. No more loss and gain. Just him and the red heat of Shark’s rage seething over her, taking back everything she overwrote and turning the tables. It happens fast. Much faster than it was to him. She’s not inside him and then she is. Part of him. A scrap of Zen in every cell, like a memory. He can access everything she is, and she can do nothing. She is nothing, her body limp in Polar Bear’s jaws.

  He feels Polar Bear too. She’s light. Gold and pure. Effortless grace. Sizzling with knowledge like electricity. And every part of her, every atom-small snippet of code forming the immense bulk of her being, is imbued with self. Having no physical distinction, no definite body/mind synthesis, the one being the cup of the other, she’s all self, no barriers, no safeties, no protections and her vulnerability
is startling, appalling.

  The way it’s been exploited even more so.

  Untold swathes of damage rupture her, fissures and schisms and splinters raw as wounds in flesh. She’s a mass of untended agonies. Raw and bleeding, running on pure emotion, all of it hurting, raging, howling. He recognizes this. Felt it every day, waiting on life to gift him Sendai somehow—the desperate harrowing of need.

  Breaker did this? He understands the imperative, but abhors it. Nothing this beautiful should suffer as she’s suffered.

  Polar Bear lies down next to him on the carpet, her head rested on his torso. He’s exhausted too. Every last cell. He doesn’t think he’ll ever not be this exhausted. It feels like there’s no way to come back from this. Inside him, Zen’s aware of having lost. Her rage is a poison, a pathogen in his body. She is. She slides under the surface of him, seeking cracks. Cringes away as he looks into her.

  With Zenada all through him, Shock sees her memories as clearly as his own. She wasn’t always like this. Younger. Far more innocent. Soft. Polar Bear was her first avatar, her given avatar. Her softness is what was once Zen’s. The Queen is what Zen became after Kamilla pushed her to create and took all she made, giving her no recognition. Controlling her every move and thought. She made Zen feel worthless. Then furious. It was the fury that changed her. The injustice.

  But it’s how you respond that defines you, and Zen chose the worst possible response—she became the worst version of herself. Combined herself with bio-ware and embraced the lack of emotion, the loss of conscience, riding minds like cattle. Using them. Playing with lives. Playing god with the Queen, who she created to expand herself. With them at large, Slip became dangerous. Deadly. Her family were left with no choice but to contain her.

  They stole my freedom. Her voice is tiny, a wisp.

  After what you became? They did what they had to.

  And so would I. So will I. You realize this is the worst you can do to me. I’m here for good. Don’t think I’ll accept it. I’ll seep into you and one day, you’ll wake up inside me. I’ll use your mind to tear the last of the world apart.

  He thinks of the mountains of Shandong, the trees and towers of Sendai. The glistening roll of the ocean under sunlight. Under moonlight. The extraordinary beauty in the juxtaposition of steel and stars against the night sky. The impertinence of it, the astounding contrast, fighting with and acquiescing to, how the fight becomes surrender sometimes and therefore unbearably beautiful.

  I can’t let you do that, he says, and believes it more than he’s ever believed anything.

  She laughs. And how will you stop me? You can’t. You’re a ruin. Your drive is damaged. A large portion of your brain. You do realize that even Emblem’s hard work may not have rescued all your faculties?

  He does realize. But she’s wrong. He heard what Bear said to Amiga when she shot the glass orb trying to kill Zen. Sees the truth of it from here on the inside. The infinite connections between Bear and Zen, a fragile cat’s cradle entwining them. In making Bear a prison, Breaker tied her to Zen impossibly, intimately, made them a self-sustaining circuit. Interdependent. Did he know you could kill one by killing the other? Probably not. Breaker wasn’t a killer. But Shock is. Zen underestimates him. She has no idea what he’s willing to do.

  He lifts his hand, placing it on Polar Bear’s head. There’s this awful, wrenching shift and he’s surrounded by gold, by Bear. Her belly is indescribably warm. It tingles. Ripples over his skin like electricity. To kill her, he has to dismantle her chain by chain. It’ll be arduous. Painful. May kill him as well as her considering how melded they are. The only things he’d wish for are to know the Hornets and Amiga are okay and see Puss one last time so he can tell her why they might have to die.

  He misses her. He doesn’t want her to think he died for nothing.

  Deep breaths, he says to Polar Bear. He’s offered no choice to her, but he feels her acceptance of it, and that’s enough to ease him.

  You breathe for both of us, she says. I’ll do my job and keep her locked up.

  Reaching into the gold all around him, he begins to pluck Bear apart at the seams, unspooling tiny portions of her, pieces that briefly flare before they fade. She’s like stardust in his hands, she shimmers as she dies. Somewhere inside of him, feeling herself disintegrate, Zenada starts to scream, to struggle. It’s awful. A full body shudder too deep to ignore. Willing himself to endure it, Shock carries on pulling Bear apart.

  He thinks at first that he’s okay, that he’ll be okay, or as much as he can be given the huge damage to his skull, his drive. Then parts of him begin to flicker, sputtering like lights in rain. And one by one, they go out.

  The Shape Of Things To Come

  Evelyn Tsai wakes to a world changed. A world without Tsai Holdings. Her world in ruins. Thanks to her preference for solitude, no one is there to see her less-than-controlled response, the scream she lets out, the items from her dressing table flung across the room and shattering on the far wall. All her work, from desperate beginnings clawing her way to the heights of success. Gone.

  The streams are full of it. Tsai Holdings was burnt to embers sometime last night. Not physically. Digitally. But not before the release of any incriminating information about the Corp, all her underhand dealings, her criminal ties. The truth of her wealth and acquisitions laid bare. She can never show her face in polite society again. And Keel is gone, taken with Disconnect no doubt.

  Fucking Hornets.

  She wants their heads. She wants to see them destroyed slowly, with painful precision. To administer such destruction herself. But all she had is gone. Her reputation, the most important mask she held, ripped away before the whole of Shanghai Hub. No one of any worth will deal with Evelyn Tsai again. She’s already seen interviews with at least ten of her most respected patrons and investors severing all ties.

  She’s done. Finished. The best she can do for herself now is to gather her dignity and leave. Go somewhere she can safely plot the ruination of her new enemies. Throwing clothes and beloved belongings into her cases, Evelyn begins the long process of accessing the first of her secret stashes, the accounts she’s filled with flim over the years.

  It’s empty.

  In place of the tens of thousands she’d accrued are digital receipts—proof that the funds therein have been distributed to the charities of her choosing. Evelyn has never and would never choose charity. Abandoning her cases, Evelyn accesses other accounts. All equally raided, bearing identical receipts. This is what finds her screaming again. Why her belongings, even the most beloved, hit the wall. Evelyn has been played. Bested. Outmanoeuvred. But worst of all, she has been laughed at. No one, but no one, has had the guts to make a joke of Evelyn Tsai for decades. Those who know the woman behind the mask wouldn’t dare and those who believe the mask wouldn’t dream of it.

  Yet the Hornets have. Comprehensively.

  She only realizes the full extent of their mockery when, twenty minutes after accessing her account, Shanghai’s security forces smash into her apartment and arrest her. They tagged them. The bastards tagged her accounts. They knew she’d try and use the flim to run.

  Faced with a squad of security, Evelyn abandons all pretence. Abandons any control.

  Grabbing a shard of broken glass from the carpet, she launches herself at them, screeching and slashing at their eyes, at any vulnerable flesh she can find. Fighting with all her might right up until the moment she’s slammed face down on the floor and restrained, heavy bodies sat on her legs and her back. They grind down until her spine creaks, until her bones begin to ache.

  “I’ve been here before,” she snarls at them, her voice muffled by carpet. “I rose up and built an empire. I can do it again. And all of you, all of you will pay.”

  One of the guards has the temerity to laugh. She crouches down and whispers into Evelyn’s ear, “I liked having an avatar. So did my friends here. I wonder if you can tell me who’s going to pay? I wonder if you can tell me who’s no
t going to make it all the way to the Security HQ?”

  As she’s lifted, Evelyn starts screaming again, calling for help.

  Usually restrained, obsessed with propriety, every last occupant of her exclusive tower comes out to watch her pass. To applaud. She hisses at them. Spits at their feet. In her last moments alive, Evelyn Tsai abandons all semblance of civility and curses them with every word she ever learnt in Pínkùn Dìqū—in her last moments she is more herself than she’s been in decades.

  * * *

  Groggy consciousness creeps across Amiga’s mind, brings her out in tiny revolutions from darkness to the dazzling white walls of Zen’s prison room. Zen. Shock. Amiga sits up, groaning, her body is sluggish. EMP. Must have been. She’s seen people get hit with handheld EMPs, the meshes Sec Forces have on the Gung. Ain’t pretty and, yeah, she sure as hell feels ugly. Worst hangover ever combined with a head cold.

  Turning to look for Shock, seeing the state he’s in, is like being tazed to wakefulness. She’s up and around immediately. Has him in her arms. Somehow, she feels him in her drive, connected to her, and he’s disappearing. Dying. Why? Why is he dying? Gold scraps float around her. Around the room. She blinks, confused. Realizes a second later that there’s the bottom part of a belly. Legs. Bear paws behind and in front of her.

  He’s dismantling Bear. Killing Zen. And because she’s inside him, it’s killing him too.

  How the hell? Emblem’s taken him over, with him in her drive she can feel the strangeness of him, the presence of Emblem a complex pattern that only becomes more confusing the harder she tries to understand it. Beneath that, the remains of Zen, still somehow fighting, still somehow screaming. Amiga knows she’ll carry on until the last chain of Bear fades into white carpet.

  Shock shouldn’t be dying though. The wound on his head is fucking terrible, yes. Deep and dire. But Amiga’s seen him in worse shape. She’s seen him cut up like an apple pie casing, gaping to yellow fat, the shining coil of intestines visible through gaps in his abdomen. He survived that. He hung on. Shark and Puss wouldn’t let him die.