by Lee Bond
“What the fuck does that mean?” Garth didn’t like it. He hadn’t met a person yet not wearing a prote, and he hadn’t been in a single place yet that didn’t have at least one main system running the most rudimentary of netLINKs connecting the occupants to the outside world. There were signs everywhere that the building was in use; from occasional dribs and drabs of litter like coffee cups and candy bar wrappers to the awful Muzak playing in the elevator, there was definite presence inside.
“Fuck.” There was no time to waste; especially since he had no clue how long the Guillfoyle portion of the evening was going to take. Sighing unhappily at his lack of Intel, Garth climbed the ladder, snapped the duronium chains after a few tries, and exited onto the roof.
Crouching low enough so that the building’s fortifications would hide him easily, Garth crab-walked over to the side adjoining the secret relay node. His prote informed him the gap was a few inches short of ten feet from end to end. It was a distance he could easily cover with a running leap, but that wasn’t a good idea; there might not be any detectable active sensors, but then again, a two hundred pound man crashing onto the roof would make all kinds of noise. Who needed to waste sensors on something like that?
Besides, they’d spread a liberal layer of thistletrops –nasty razor sharp burrs that were caltrops on a bad day- nearly as far as the eye could see. A single thistletrop snagged on bare skin was damned near impossible to remove without the right gear; hundreds would kill, slowly and painfully. Anyone pole vaulting onto that roof would have a very short future.
“How very Spy vs. Spy.” Garth said drolly. Wasting precious time craning his head this way and that and using his proteus to take pictures, Garth at last determined that Guillfoyle’s agents hadn’t bothered to lace the entire rooftop with the ‘trops. The deadly little burrs stopped some thirty feet in. Rather than excite him, Garth was annoyed.
Under these circumstances, ultra-paranoid security agents would automatically go the extra mile by being overly positive that everything was under their absolute control. Unless they were, to a one, complete drooling idiots and immediate relatives of Ashok’s theoretical tribe of sisters, there was no way they could’ve missed the fact that a thirty-foot jump was no problem for three-quarters of the population. Unless …
“Fuck me sideways.” The building was being renovated, so any damage to, say, a section of ceiling in an empty office would go unremarked upon. Anyone strong enough to jump past the ‘trops would go right through the roof by virtue of being all muscle-y and shit. If he was in charge of security, rabid squirrels with laser beams for eyes would be directly beneath that weak spot in the ceiling. No way was he jumping that rooftop.
There was, technically speaking, an option ‘C’.
It sucked. It worked maybe one time in six, and even when guards didn’t come crashing into the room, there was every chance that you’d cut yourself stupid on the glass from the window you just jumped through or that you’d bean yourself unconscious on something you couldn’t have possibly anticipated being in the way.
The last time Garth had jumped through a window from an adjoining building, he’d done both. And then the guards, who hadn’t heard a goddamn thing, had wandered in for their nightly card game to find a semi-conscious, bleeding Mercenary Captain on their floor. That he’d taught them poker and walked away with a pile of cash is not important.
Taking aim at the window, Garth leaped.
Turuin’s Secret and an Old Friend’s Unwanted Interference
Turuin was tired. Excruciatingly so. But with good reason, a reason that made him smile.
At long last –longer than he’d ever dreamed possible, having passed by his own ‘best by’ date by three agonizingly painful months- dermal and subcellular implants threaded throughout his vat-grown body were finally succumbing to entropy. It was only through monumental effort of will and toxic doses of painkillers that he’d managed to keep control of his ‘favorite’ face for so long. That and the Starlight Woman’s promise that his suffering was important.
She’d burned, the Starlight Woman, burned like stars in the night sky.
If someone were to come across the slowly dying man, they would find themselves face to face with one of many of the government’s darkest, sickest secrets; Turuin was only human in the most ephemeral of meanings. Somewhere in the genetic soup that made him what he was, there was a strand or two of human DNA, but Turuin was not human enough.
He was a BioChimeric Unit, a gender-neutral entity capable of fine-tuning machinery seeded throughout his body so he could look, sound and act like anyone he wanted; man or woman, young or old, even, if need be, taller or shorter. He could mimic a person’s voice after but a single word, their mannerisms after an hour, their lives in a day. He was no one but who he was told to be, had no life of his own.
Turuin’s life -indeed the lives of every BCU- was fraught with danger, sorrow and misery. The entities were loyal to the Latelian paradigm, and would sooner die than rail against their lot in life. Even if they were able to form a complaint about their use, they wouldn’t; burned deep into their minds, into their very souls –if they possessed any spark at all- was an overruling loyalty that bypassed ordinary sentiment in almost every case.
Turuin groaned, fighting against the wracking pain cascading through his body. He had to hold on for a little while yet. Starlight Woman had said wait, abide, and be patient. He laughed bitterly. He would abide. He would abide until the end of time.
Loyalty to the cause, to ensure that Latelyspace stayed Latelian, had been his entire life. As much as a BCU could feel happiness, well, he’d felt that. Wearing a new skin every few months had been the utter fulfillment of his purpose in life, and he’d done his job gladly, bravely. The corruption and rot spreading throughout, not just Hospitalis, but through the entire system, was pervasive. Anti-Trinity agitators and politicians wanted everyone to believe that this was due to the Chairwoman’s increasingly warm relations with the machine mind, but Turuin didn’t see it that way. Turuin saw the corruption for what it was. Men and women of power wanting to keep that power, wanting to get theirs before the inevitable merging of the old and new stripped them of their chances, of their self-made titles, of their power.
He laughed again, delirious from the pain. Trinity was inevitable, he supposed. The Starlight Woman hadn’t said anything about the machine mind knocking down the rotten walls of his corrupt home, but there was nothing else. They all deserved what they got. That much Turuin had seen, months ago, when an explosion had slammed him into a wall, breaking something inside his head.
Since that time … ah, since that time … he’d been different. Doing his job had brought no happiness, no joy, no sense of fulfillment. He felt things he’d never felt, thought things almost too alien to be from his own mind. Regret. Regret. Regret.
He’d never felt it before, had to look up in an actual dictionary to understand the meaning of the word. He’d been forced to watch shows he’d rather have died than witness, on the off chance that he’d see the new expressions on his face mirrored on those of actors.
Regret. With it came discovery. He’d learned, after disappearing from sight with Lady Ha’s help, that virtually every man or woman he’d supplanted had been targeted, not for disloyalty, but because someone with enough money wanted them gone. Organizations he’d dismantled had stood in the way of someone else’s pet project. So on and so on.
Shame. Guilt. Two new words, two new dictionary entries, more shows. Push even a BCU too far, and it’ll want to die. His broken mind had suggested suicide as the only option, and he’d willingly –gratefully- seized the idea.
And then … the Starlight Woman had appeared, burning against his eyes like a brilliant blue sun. He remembered being able to see right through her and wondering if he was somehow dying without having taken action. But no, he hadn’t been dying.
He’d been visited by an angel.
Turuin stuffed a ragged fist into his mouth to keep t
he howl to a minimum. Teeth bit into the skin there, but he was mindless to that small pain. All he could think about was what the Starlight Woman had told him, had shown him.
A war, terrible and sublime in the same breath, devouring not just Latelyspace but Trinityspace as well, the whole of time and space. A great engine of destruction cycled in The Cordon’s depths, and Garth Nickels was directly involved.
Then the Starlight Woman, that blue burning angel, had told him what needed doing. He’d done it.
Turuin was immensely glad he had very little time left.
xxx
The window he’d been watching shattered into a thousand tiny, glittering pieces. Garth rolled through the aperture, slicing his hands open on the shards as he tried to slow down.
A man pointing a double-barreled shotgun large enough to swallow your head will make anyone cautious. “Please,” Turuin whispered hoarsely, breaking a silence that’d lasted for days, “please don’t make any sudden moves. I’m tired, and I’m afraid that I might … overreact if you do anything stupid. Some conditioning still remains.”
Garth moved slowly into a seated position, then carefully laced his fingers behind the back of his head. The voice sounded like Turuin; the ancient, withered man in front of him, holding a shotgun that should be mounted onto a battleship looked nothing like the flighty secret agent who’d helped him a short while ago. His hands smarted painfully from the cuts. “What kind of glass do you guys use for windows? Shit hurts.”
Turuin smiled weakly. “The old windows in Central are all diamond-based. A few hundred years ago, we switched from that type to a less dangerous one, but many buildings still use with the original style. I believe the modifications to this building do in fact include replacing the windows.”
“I think I have a few pieces stuck in my hands. Do you mind?” Garth couldn’t keep from openly staring at the withered old man. The voice was definitely Turuin’s, and as he stared, waiting for the gun-wielding octogenarian to make a decision, he began to see some familiar facial features underneath the sagging, grey skin and partially rheum-covered eyes. The similarity was gone quickly, dissipated beneath a tremor of agony that sent mortifying ripples through the skin.
“Fine.” Turuin waited patiently, watching as Garth unlaced his hands and began picking small chunks of very sharp glass out of the wounds. When his temporary prisoner was done, Turuin kicked a first-aid kit over to him.
Garth pawed through the kit looking for an antiseptic spray and nu-skin applicator. “So what the hell happened to you, Turuin?”
Turuin chuckled wetly, ending with a rasping wheeze that drew a look of worry from Garth. He motioned for Garth to mind his own business. “The whys and wherefores of my own demise are none of your concern, sa.”
“Fair enough.” Garth blasted one hand then the other with the antiseptic spray. “Care to tell me why you’re here? In the room I only just decided to invade on the fly? With a gun big enough to kill even me and a first-aid kit specifically tailored to my needs?”
“That,” Turuin said softly, “I am prepared to explain.”
“Good.” Garth replied, applying nu-skin to both his hands. He didn’t really need the stuff, as he’d heal quick enough, but the cuts hurt like the dickens and he had a suspicion he’d need to pay all kinds of attention to Turuin’s story.
“She burned like blue stars.” Turuin said fondly, sadly. “Like blue stars in the night.”
The hair on Garth’s neck stood bold upright. Lisa Laughlin. He’d not encountered her hand in the course of his life for many years. There’d been whispery feelings here and there across the Cordon, in places where she shouldn’t have been, couldn’t have been, but nothing concrete. Nothing except Tannhauser, and that first moment days before joining Special Services, when she’d told him on a recording that somehow, she was setting him on the right path.
He’d tried to forget her, tried to dismiss the final bit of that recording, when she’d disappeared, faded from view like a mirage. Years would pass before he’d catch whiff of her, and for days, weeks even, he’d suspect every tiny thing around him as being manipulated into place, nudging him, tweaking him along a direction that only she understood. Then he’d let go, resume his ‘normal’ life as a SpecSer captain. Only for her to appear, once again.
Lisa Laughlin. The last time he’d seen her had been at Tannhauser’s Gate. He’d seen her in the flesh, or at least, the diaphanous essence from which she was now made, and she’d forced him to let another man take his place in the final push. Seeing her had unlocked memories buried deep, deep within. Then she’d done something to him, somehow made him forget her appearance in his life, saying it was still too dangerous for him to know anything about who he was, what he was, that there was a chain of events that needed following if everything was to even have a chance of working out for the better.
He’d accepted the blank spots coming out of Tannhauser’s Gate as part of his life. After all, most of his life since waking up was filled with emptiness. At the best, he’d had half-formed recollections leading him along the way. Forgetting Lisa Laughlin had been easy enough, because remembering … remembering begged more questions. Questions that frightened him.
Turuin chuckled painfully. “You know her.”
“We worked together.” It was true enough, Garth supposed. “A long time ago.”
Thirty thousand years ago, in point of fact. He knew more about Lisa Laughlin than he did about himself, which was infuriating. Lisa Laughlin, aged 22, primary designation, Intelligence Officer and Systems Analyst. Specific tasks included dissemination, surveillance and acquisition of information. From who or what remained hidden from sight, but that’d been her job.
She –like him- possessed adaptive morphology built into her DNA. Unlike him, that reflexive response had transformed her, it seemed, into a being capable of seeing … everything.
And whatever she’d seen upon being pulled out of suspension had driven her to coordinate an escape on the very day that they were all supposed to’ve been spread across the Universe, financially punished for their failure to remember anything worthwhile about their own time. Had driven her to sacrifice thirteen of their slumbering friends.
What had she seen, Garth wondered, ignoring Turuin’s shuddering gasps of pain.
More to the point, why had she allowed the man who’d attacked him -nearly severing his head in the process- to escape? Garth couldn’t remember a goddamn thing about the guy except that he was as dangerous as he was, only far less scrupulous. Garth supposed this unnamed man was out there now, making someone’s life miserable.
There were too many secrets, too many hidden layers surrounding his life. Garth hated secrets. There was the one that explained why he’d climbed into a suspension chamber tens of thousands of years ago. There was the one that only Lisa knew, the one that’d forced her to allow the deaths of nearly everyone in the mining facility they’d been held in as well as the lives of the other thirteen. There were the ones that had her cropping up in places all across the Cordon. There was the one that’d brought her here, to Hospitalis, and into the life of this twitching, shuddering mess of a being once known as Turuin. There was the one that’d brought him here.
Had Lisa Laughlin implanted this location in his mind or had someone else done it? The only thing he knew for certain was that prior to Tannhauser, the woman hadn’t done anything to his mind or his memories. Those had been affected before going into suspension, and again from severe trauma and blood loss.
The suspicion that The Box held his memories was one of the only things that he trusted implicitly.
He was being pushed and pulled and he didn’t like it. Not one bit.
“You … you worked with Starlight Woman?” Turuin didn’t notice the awe creeping into his voice.
“For a time, yes.” They’d all been part of a unit. Even Kant Ingrams knew that much without having to look too deep. A unit designed to do what? To go where? Thirty thousand years into the future?
That seemed terrifically unlikely. Plunging into Pluto’s crust seemed like an accident. “But what were supposed to do … passed us by, I suppose.”
“Are … are you like her?”
Unbidden, a wicked smile flashing across Lisa’s lips blazed in Garth’s memories. She’d been young, so … young, and had signed on because of her talents. She’d maintained that youth through many years and many hard, horrible secrets. He shook his head. “No. Not even remotely.”
Turuin sighed. He supposed he’d known that from the moment he’d set eyes on Garth in the prote shop. Where Starlight Woman gleamed, Nickels absorbed. Light, sounds, everything that fell across Nickels’ path … he sucked it all in.
“So Lisa… ‘Starlight Woman’ … she told you I was coming.”
“Oh yes. She said you were coming and that I needed to help you.”
“And what, you just said ‘hey, this is not weird at all, this woman who is glowing blue and telling me what’s going to happen in the future, I might as well do as she asks without question?’”
“By the definition of sanity as applied to a BioChimeric Unit, sa, I am quite, quite insane.” Turuin tapped a withered finger against his soft, mushy skull. “I am broken, sa. Which is why she chose me in the first place.”
“Just because you’re insane doesn’t mean you’ve gotta trust a glowing woman, man.”
“Oh,” Turuin closed his eyes, “but I must. The things she showed me…”
Garth leaned forward intently, swallowing nervously when the shotgun swiveled automatically towards his head. “What did she show you?”
“Hardwired … hardwired nerves, sa. Please … sit back down. When a BCU unit is dying, it will protect itself against all dangers with absolute and utter ferocity. I doubt my savior would be pleased I shot your head off. The effort she has undertaken is, I gather, even more immense than I imagined.”
Garth raised his hands and backed away, warily eyeing the shotgun until it came to rest once more on Turuin’s lap. “What did she show you?”
