by Brian Trent
There were layers of shapestone armor, however, and she helped Gethin fit loosely into Silent Rajnar’s slacks and shirts.
“Just follow my lead and do what I tell you.”
He took her hand, squeezed it, his gaze bright. “Good luck to us.”
To her surprise, she squeezed his hand in return. “Yeah.”
They disembarked the invisible ship. If anyone was watching, it was as if a pair of interdimensional mercenaries were popping out of empty air.
Celeste strode briskly alongside him, scanning the hangar for activity. They passed a series of abandoned security booths. A lone cleaning bot patrolled the lobby carpet, swallowing skeins of dust.
Gethin felt his breath coming hard and fast. When a message from McCallister arrived to his optics, he nearly jumped out of his skin.
“We’ve done all you asked,” she insisted through his comlink. “Shimizu security has verified that Peisistratos is having dinner, alone, in a Sakura restaurant. He’s renting a room in CW-0782. There’s more: I’ve confirmed that a large number of unregistered pures are in Shibata Ward. Sending you their biosignals now.”
“Let me guess,” he said. “Is that around the corner from CW-0782?”
“Yes.”
“Domo,” he said, receiving her emailed list and handing it off to his Familiars. “And standby.”
They proceeded to the inclinator, hit the call button. Celeste adjusted the strap of her rifle. “You said you had friends here? Those people you contacted…?”
“They’re not friends, but they’ll aid us against the Stillness troopers here.”
“Who are they?”
“A bunch of very dangerous lunatics.”
“Figures.”
Gethin felt the gentle ping of Id and Ego latching onto the local security grid, sifting each dataflow, worming into every electronic niche, evading countermeasure software, settling into various cubbyholes to provide logistical and technical support.
The inclinator descended and the doors slid aside. Gethin and Celeste hurried aboard, feeling small and exposed on its airy platform. The lift began its implacable ascent to one of the many smaller pyramids comprising Shimizu’s inner structure. There were no personal vehicles anywhere in the pyramid beyond security jeeps, maintenance buggies, and ambulances; the local populace moved by lift, escalator, people-mover, shuttle, and tram.
Ego spoke in his head:
“Sixty-one Stillness troopers.” He shook his head. “Fuck me.”
The inclinator opened onto a courtyard of rock gardens and shops. Bright daylight filtered through high windows, suffusing the chamber with an overexposed quality, like a photo with the contrast dialed up too far. A crowd of roughly fifty people milled in the open stores, or drank at the café, or studied train schedules, or mingled like teenagers around benches and gardens, or stared with open contempt at the technical display of advertisements that turned the air into an aquarium of holos.
Id hijacked the security cameras and Gethin’s optics splashed with overlays. Most of the crowd, it seemed, was packing heat; Id drew silhouettes over distinct bulges in their neo-Victorian coats, or the suspiciously cumbersome loads in carry-on satchels. Beneath their coats, thin nanomesh armor betrayed itself with the muddy rainbow of oil-slick reflectivity.
Gethin felt his resolve weaken. “About half of these people match McCallister’s list. Looks like every single one of them is armed and deadly. Tanner’s imposter must have cordoned off this entire wing from security so they could roam free.”
Celeste considered that. “And your friend Doros?”
“He’s not with them,” he insisted. “He may or may not know they’re shadowing him. I think they’re here to try killing him.”
“If this fucking professor really is Apollo the Great—”
Gethin held up his hand to silence her, pointing to one of the holos. A dragonfly the size of a condor flew high into the air, glided towards them, and broke apart into a blizzard of moths. The moths, however, were each a different color; they swarmed into the pattern of a pixie-like, androgynous face…bald and with violet eyes.
He waited for the visage to speak, but when the discomforting silence persisted, he hazarded a greeting. “We still have an agreement, right?”
The face made no expression. “And we will hold you to it, Mr. Bryce. Your last meeting with us was most unpleasant.”
“Water Basilisk could use lessons in tact.”
The face scowled. What Gethin had taken for a genderless quality went deeper, suggesting an amalgamated entity grown from numerous individuals, stirred into a melting pot until their distinctions boiled away, then poured into a human-shaped mold. Even the violet gaze was comprised of a multitude of other eyes. Gethin imagined he could see the future bottled up in this gestalt thing: a gout of humanity ejaculated into the cosmos…all the bad seeds and darker appetites, the sadism, tyranny, and fundamentalism set free upon the universe after centuries of careful IPC dictatorship.
Gethin twisted his grimace into a grin. “If you don’t help me now, I won’t be around to lead this revolution of yours and—”
“Count to ten,” the face intoned, “and then walk to the escalators.”
Gethin scanned the busy concourse. He spotted the escalators two hundred meters away.
The moths burst into their individual components and were gone. The air, however, was thickening with something other than holography; sensoramics, like the pegasus and chimera in Athens, only much smaller: butterflies, wasps, hummingbirds. First a few dozen, then dozens of dozens.
With security standing down, the Faustians were hacking every sensoramic in the pyramid.
“Eight seconds,” Celeste reported in a flat tone. She was making finely tuned notations of enemy positions. Potential targets leaned against overhead terraces, shop entrances, park benches, and amid the pedestrian traffic.
“Five seconds.” Gethin felt himself turning to lead. What do the Faustians have in mind? The hacked sensoramics were useless; they would explode harmlessly off an armored soldier.
One second.
He grasped Celeste’s wrist and began crossing the courtyard. Instantly, eyes fell on them. A disproportionate number of Caucasians made up the crowd, and they were taking a keen interest in the armed couple strolling past them.
Then the crowd began to cough.
The vents of Shimizu housed fleets of microscopic devices like miniature submarines, programmed to cruise the currents of air viscosity. Not dissimilar to the highly specialized castes of an ant colony, they formed an unseen freeway of nanite cleaners tasked with removing rust, algae, and fungus off struts; nanite warriors to hunt viruses of either organic or mechanical origins; nanite engineers to comb the length of pylons and cables for stress damage; nanite recyclers and processors. There was no arcology on Earth as hive-like, and no people so willing to submerge into the veritable gravity-well of networked intelligence, as the pyramid dwellers of the Rising Sun.
Locals rarely reflected on this invisible, behind-the-scenes traffic. Even if you inhaled a cleaner or sentinel, you might sneeze or piss or belch it out without ever realizing. A single nanite was undetectable.
However, a cloud of nanites surging into your airways, acting under the same puppetmaster…that made for a somewhat different prospect.
Like a thunderclap, the loosely disguised Stillness troopers began hacking, clutching their throats, staggering into rock gardens, running about like people chased by bees. One woman dashed from an ice cream parlor, her eyes gouged out and thick jets of bright blood flowing down her cheeks. She raced sightlessly for Celeste and Gethin, crossed their path, and tried to hurl herself to a lower level. Instead, she succeeded only in colliding with the rail. She tumbled backwards and screamed, slapping the floor with her hands.
“Make i
t stop! Make it stop!”
Celeste unholstered her sidearm and blasted the woman’s brains onto the tiles. She and Gethin broke into a dash for the escalators. A stampede of men appeared, hollering and shrieking and rushing down.
She stepped aside to let them pass…but they didn’t pass. They died on the escalators en masse, as nanites burst them from the inside out.
The upper ward was deserted. Sort of. At the end of the corridor was a dead teenager, shotgun in mouth, still clutching the trigger he had pulled moments before. Blood and tissue dripped in a gory nimbus behind him.
Gethin felt sweat again on his upper lip. He went to the door marked CW-0782.
“Override.” The word half stuck in his throat.
The door popped open. They went in.
* * *
They didn’t have long to wait. Within ten minutes of the massacre, Ego reported that Gethin’s old professor had departed the restaurant by way of the smoking lounge and was proceeding by lift to the CW wing. Heading back to his rented room, presumably. He wouldn’t see the horror of the concourse massacre.
Just as well.
Or does he somehow know what just happened?
Gethin led Celeste up more escalators, trying to outpace the lift. They reached Doros’s hotel room door before the professor did, and Gethin overrode its lock, drew Celeste inside, shut the door.
Only a few minutes later, the door swung inward. Professor Peisistratos, former senator, former paleontologist, former friend, entered the murky suite.
Gethin and Celeste emerged from their shadowed corners, rifles trained on their target. The bearded professor saw them and halted.
“Doros,” Gethin began, “kindly take my advice and make no sudden moves.”
The professor nodded. Celeste went to the door and drew the dead bolt.
“This is not entirely unexpected, my friend,” Doros said. “You remain my friend, no?”
“That depends on your answers.”
“Then ask your questions.”
Celeste circled the man, keeping him in her rifle sights. “We know you’re Apollo the Great,” she pronounced.
Doros made no reply.
Gethin exhaled with some force. “Warlord Apollo from four hundred years ago. History said you died before immortality was available. I don’t know if you can die, but you don’t need technology to pull your tricks.” He tried to see something of the legendary warrior in this fat, bearded, cherubic figure. “The conqueror became a senator, then a teacher full of sage advice and honeyed lies.”
“Men lie about their age,” the professor said with a shrug. He chanced a smile, resembling an overweight, impish Zeus. “And sometimes their nature too.”
“Sophistry won’t save you. The IPC believes you’re involved with Stillness.”
“Do you?”
“No.” Gethin lowered the rifle. “Apollo the Great allying with anarchists? Doesn’t fit.”
“‘Anarchists’,” Doros quipped unpleasantly, “is woefully inadequate to describe Stillness. Anarchy still implies life.”
Gethin gazed at that familiar bearded visage. He remembered the evenings of dinners, drinks, walks, and fiery classroom discussions. He knew every kindly wrinkle in that antiquarian visage.
How do I reconcile this jovial Kris Kringle with the Warlord Apollo, conqueror of nations, founder of one third of the Republic?
“You didn’t establish the Republic by yourself,” said Gethin. “There are at least two others like you. Enyalios and Lady Wen Ying.”
Doros nodded.
“The three of you worked together to end the wars and pull civilization back together. It was part of your grand plan.”
“Yes.”
“But you have enemies. Like this Apophis.”
Hideous thoughts pierced Gethin, and he was afraid to ask his next question, desperate to ask it, though it was Celeste who beat him to it: “Can they be killed?”
“There were once thousands of us. Yes, we can be killed.”
Gethin interjected, “What the hell are you? What do you want from any of us?”
The old man took a breath, made up his mind. “Long ago I made something. I’m proud of what I made. I don’t want to see it destroyed.”
“What did you make?”
“Life.” His eyes twinkled in the room’s blue-shadowed gloom.
* * *
Doros’s beard was vanishing. It neither pixelated away like a diminishing holo, nor dramatically retreated into his face like reverse footage of follicle growth. Rather, the bushy hair surrounding his mouth lost its distinct outline, like a mist burned away by the rosy-fingered dawn. The professor’s face was suddenly as smooth as new leather. He had simply willed the hair away.
He was growing too. Taller by inches, as if cybernetic joint extensions were raising the level of his head. His portly torso altered, thinning in places, swelling in others, muscles sprouting along his arms and chest. His hair thickened and flowed over his shoulders. It occurred to Gethin that this manner of shapeshifting was as easy for him as metamorphosing a slouch into an upright posture. His friend’s molecules reshaped themselves in swift, nimble metamorphoses.
Celeste gaped. Doros’s face was altering, the bones sliding into new configurations. And then she realized.
Warlord Apollo was gazing at her.
The entire transformation had taken mere seconds.
Apollo held out his hands, palms up. “Let me assure you that despite our differences, Gethin, we share a great many things in common. We are both children of this world. We oppose those trying to ruin it. In the beginning…” He gave a start at his choice of words, then he laughed freely. “Yes, that is the proper way to explain this, no?”
Celeste swallowed hard. “What the fuck is he, Gethin? Tell me what’s going on!”
The air seemed to grow heavier and darker. Apollo was changing again…but this time, into a decidedly non-humanoid form. He collapsed into a mist that billowed around them like tendrils of dry ice. The room’s aquamarine carpet wavered into ocean swells; Celeste instinctively tried recoiling from the threat of falling. Gethin grasped her hand, arresting her retreat.
Ego said, falling back to its factory default response.
“I do,” Gethin breathed.
Apollo had melted away, yet his voice tickled their ears as if he was standing right beside them. “I need to show you the truth. This is my body, memory, and history. This was the Earth when I was born.”
The vapors had spread into a radius of several meters. At some hidden command they ignited into mad colors and geometries. Orange-red landmasses blazed and steamed, managing to achieve both translucence and opacity, like stained glass. Gethin gained abrupt new insight into the abilities of this new – or very old – order of life.
They are truly amorphous beings, he thought. They condense their energies into matter when they wish. They project onto that condensate whatever they desire, the non-mechanical equivalent of a holobox drawing a digitized image through the calibrated tangle of laser light. Apollo was no more a corporal entity than a mythical ghost. He could disperse himself and become anything he wanted. Any person. Multiple persons. A quivering mass of tentacles or a burning bush or a living screen.
“Uplink and record,” Gethin mumbled on his subvoc channel, and connections were established with Keiko Yamanaka and Donna McCallister.
It was suddenly raining in the Shimizu apartment.
A thick downpour slashed diagonally into the molten landscape below the floor. Apollo’s outline manifested amid the deluge, little more than a phantom saturated in the primordial dusk. Geysers of steam erupted, converting the rain into super
heated gas. The black sky was split by vermillion lighting.
“Nothing could live in such a place,” Gethin muttered.
Apollo’s voice snaked into his ear. “Nothing could live on such a place, perhaps. But I was born above it.”
The view ascended to the sky. Colossal cloudtops rotated in hypercane eddies. They looked like monsters stabbing at each other with electrical lashes. Like sped-up footage of Jupiter on a particularly nasty day, the entire firmament choked by a twisting, churning maelstrom.
“We were born in these clouds,” Apollo explained. His voice felt very near, though when Gethin glanced sidelong he only saw Celeste beside him. Gold light played across her face. Two search-beam eyes appeared near her, alighting on her angular jaw, slender throat, catching her eyes in a crystalline glint, and vanished.
“I and the others were the birth of consciousness on Planet Earth. How can I articulate the experience? I became aware. Anticipating Descartes, eh? I gradually discerned my existence, and that of the neighboring globes of plasma around me. The storm was our mother. She birthed the ten thousand thunders that were us.”
The clouds enkindled. A jellyfish-like shape of a thousand vibrating colors emerged. In time another followed, and then a third, a fourth, a fifth, moving like a shoal of fish drawing together for protection. It reminded Gethin of an aquarium he had seen in the London stalks, where a cylindrical tank displayed jellyfish. Apollo’s celestial skycreatures moved like that, exhibited the same organic sense of life…
Then he realized what he was seeing.
It was the energy shape that had destroyed Shuttle 3107. The patterned light banking sharply towards Earth. It was the brief, frozen image that had murdered Celeste’s squadmates.
Standing abreast of him, Celeste lowered her weapon. “They look like sea creatures,” she whispered.
Once, when she was fourteen, she was involved in a lethal knife fight with a neighborhood boy. They had circled each other by a marshy lake of drainage pipes. When her opponent rushed her, Celeste buried her knife in his trachea. The boy staggered backwards, squawking like a duck on the blade, fell into the marsh. She pinned him, crying, until the water turned warm and he had stopped moving. And when it was over, she noticed that the water had life in it: bioluminescent jellies cautiously approaching the corpse, changing color from white to red.
