"Annika," she said with a cluck of her tongue. "We're all just regular private citizens here, right?" A laugh, then: "Ah, one more thing. You should be very careful when you're out. They've tasked a satellite to search for you in large crowds, places where you might try to get lost. Digital reconstruction and recognition, heat-profile tracking, all that. If you're not on top of things they'll have CivPro there after you in a moment."
"All right," he said, heaving another sigh. "Thank you... Annika."
He hung up the phone and looked up into Bobbi's face. She was watching him intently with her eyes sharp with what he'd come to believe now was jealousy, daggers of bottle green. "What did that bitch want?" she asked roughly.
Walken grunted. "She called to tell me what the Bureau has on me," he said. "She has an informer."
He went on to name off the litany of charges. Bobbi's brows climbed with each one, until finally when he was finished she let out a low whistle. "They've got you set to be frozen till Jesus comes back, baby."
Which meant never, of course, he thought to himself, though he was pleased to hear some of her old concern in her voice. "I'm not surprised. This happens when you dick around with the Fed, isn't that what they say? The stereotypes aren't always wrong." He had betrayed the Bureau, or so it had been decided and Wolsey was now leading the Seattle branch's considerable resources to collect him.
"Yeah," said Bobbi, sounding somewhat stunned. "But to task a satellite to hunt you down, real-time? You know how much that costs?"
"Far more than I'm worth." He looked down at the disassembled origami of steel and plastics that was the C-J, laid out before him on the futon's silk blanket. "Maybe I shouldn't be staying here, Bobbi."
She seemed to move faster than he could blink. One moment she stood in the doorway; the next she was on him, her hand coming down to slap his face. Walken barely had time to snag her and he stared up at her with wide eyes, holding her arm by the wrist. "What the hell are you doing?" Bobbi was screaming at him, her eyes wide, her face livid. "Don't you dare start talking like that, Walken," she roared, trying to twist away from his grip and get to him, "That self-sacrificing hero bullshit — I don't have time for it! Don't you know you're in the safest spot you could be, you ignorant bastard? God damn it!"
"Jesus," he roared back, one hand on her wrist and the other hand grasping her shoulder, "Jesus, relax! They've got satellites, the CivPro heat and everyone on the Bureau right now looking after my ass! I was thinking we could move somewhere else, that's all! Somewhere that's deeper underground."
Walken tried to match her gaze, his eyes serious. His stern tone had instantly calmed to something approaching the hardness of concrete. His hand slipped from her shoulder, reached for her throat and seized it gently. He thought he knew how to calm her down.
She submitted almost instantly, her pupils wide with the mingling sensations of surprise and arousal. "Bullshit," Bobbi mumbled, though there was no real heat in the words now. "I'm not stupid, you know."
"No," Walken murmured. "You aren't. But you aren't listening to me, either and I understand that's because you don't know me in some places like you should." Walken leaned forward a little, his thumb stroking the flesh near her carotid, his fingers cradling the other side of her throat gently. "Now I want you to listen to me, all right?"
She blinked again, but nodded.
"Good," he murmured. "Very good. Now listen to me, sweetheart. I don't plan on going anywhere, understand? I'm not trying to wander off without you — without you, I'm dead. End of story. Dead, or in prison. You understand me? I need you. I'm not going anywhere."
Bobbi's face cleared somewhat. She nodded, though her pupils remained massive as she sat down on the edge of the bed. He kept his hand on her throat. "Do you understand?"
She nodded again.
"No," he said firmly. "Say it."
"...you aren't going anywhere," she murmured.
"And?"
"...and you need me." The slightest blush tinged her cheeks as she looked down at the gun. "Hey," she said, voice hushed and soft. "Your gun's all in pieces."
"I was trying to fix that when you jumped me," he said. "You gonna sit there and be good while I put it back together?"
Bobbi gave him a look, but she nodded. Somewhere, deep in her brain, old switches were flicking into place, shaking off rust. He hadn't realized at first what he had been doing, but now — much to his own surprise — he had slid into the role of leader between them, the dominant party. It made sense that they worked as they did, to say nothing of their being in bed together. The sex had turned into their dynamic in a matter of a week: she was submissive one moment, fiery the next. He looked at the curvy beauty and smiled. His girl, she'd said. He needed one. Maybe she was right.
They sat in silence while he finished his meditation, musing on this new turn, feeling the gun snap together as he sat there with his eyes closed. When the slide capped over the frame and he was finished, Walken put the gun aside.
"Come here, girl," he murmured, lying back on the futon with a smile. "Let me hold you for a while."
For the first time in those three days she giggled and slid atop him like the night slid over the city. Between them, at least for the moment, all was forgiven.
The dream came to him again, the Sound rising up to drown the city and wipe it clean from the land — only the sea was made of silver this time, mercury waves capped with a thin, luminous green haze. Where it drew back a new city rose, spires of black metal glittering, reaching skyward, trying to puncture the gray night. He could see that they were exaggerated versions of the bizarre towers down in the Waters, largest of all a bizarre, twisting, elongated double-helix spike —
Walken sat straight up as the dream-skin snapped, the acrid metal tang of the mercury tide hanging in his nostrils, sweat beading on his brow. Bobbi slept soundly next to him. He rose and walked naked through the halls of clear plastic into the kitchenette, hands balling and unfurling at his sides. There was a curious tension in him, something he couldn't name. The dream-world, horrible as it seemed to him now, was almost welcome to him in his sleep.
He opened the fridge and pulled out a carton of Sapporo before making his way into the computer room, where Bobbi's decrypt was chugging away. On the glowing panes of the holomonitors the progress was depicted in alphanumerics that sprawled like strings of gradient blue light across the navy blue panels. Three quarters of the alphanumerics were cycling, indicating encrypted code, while the rest had been locked down by Bobbi's programs.
There was the not-altar, the mobile terminal sitting there atop its surface. Walken really hadn't given it much of a thought before, so detached from the idea of brainriding was he. Was it so terrible to him now, the idea of the fusion? He had always been a creature of the meat, working with tools only in his hands. It was easy for him, working for the Fed gave him all the resources he'd needed without the edge of bionic augmentation, cybernetic interfaces, nerve jobs and grafted muscle. He had his intuition and that had been all he needed.
But now he lived like Bobbi did. And the voice had become strangely silent, not nearly as useful as it had been. He felt naked without it, cold without the comforting whisper of instinct. As he stood there, drinking beer from the carton in his hand and watching the strings of data constantly cycle, Walken thought about that world of edge — all edge, all necessary, every upgrade a step farther from the abyss of death and failure. Perhaps it might not be so terrible, he thought now. This merging with the machine.
Walken approached the console, setting his half-empty beer carton on the table next to it. He sat down before it, curious, as a child might sit before a grand piano. With long fingers he stroked its oblong form, found the corners, the ribbing there, felt the red rubberized texture of its casing. There was a covered slot in the back for ROM cylinders and datacells, a recessed power switch and, next to that eight different slots for peripherals and interface cords. It was waterproofed, he guessed, insulated from shock and the lik
e; a customized job, perfect for working in all weather. On the corner of its upper face slanted, stylized letters spelled out 'BRAIN FACTORY' in lieu of a corporate logo. He smiled at that. Bobbi was a creature of the personal touch.
Its keys were flat hexagons of pale yellow Lucite. There were no alphanumerics, like you would expect on a computer keyboard, because it wasn't a typical computer. Instead, the keys wore intriguing labels like 'NETWORK CONNECT' and 'NERVE MACRO' and 'AUTODUMP'. Sitting before this brilliant machine, this ferry for the mind into the vast digital sea, he felt a queer sense of obsolescence fall over him.
Reaching over the back of the terminal, Walken picked up a dusty electrode-based interface band. By Bobbi's standards, augmented as she was, it would have been an antiquated thing. Stone Age. For him, it was a thing of dawning wonder. He brushed the dust from the plastic tiara and examined the cord that ran from it, looking at the flat wafer of steel at the other end that served as its terminal. He plugged it into the back of the box, rolled his shoulders and settled the tiara's contacts on his brow and temples as he put it on.
He wasn't prepared for it. Where he had only intended to get the feel of things, to simply sit before the unpowered deck and imagine himself diving in, he had not thought to check that the machine wasn't already on. Instead he found the electrodes humming with power and through it the system reached for his mind with an iron hand and, without ceremony or preparation, pulled him into the abyss. Blackness swallowed him, pulled him through a sudden singularity, twisted him inside out. His body was obliterated by a single shearing plane of neural static. Walken felt his body divide, the electric torrent of a pain that denied definition running between each section like a glittering cable, felt the world beyond him as a sea of boiling ink — and then he was falling into the dark, faster and faster, screaming until his consciousness had become the very sound. He faded, a human echo and prepared to die.
But instead of death, something else happened. As he fell something sprang from him, seemed to reach beyond him. A narrow beam of quicksilver, coruscating and bright, lanced out from the sundered thing that was his mental complex and into the vast darkness. What happened there he could not say; there was only the silver swallowing his sensorium, a mercury void and then blissful nonexistence.
Walken woke up sweating on the bed, like he did with every terrible dream. His mind was fuzzy, clouded with sleep, but the faint odor of cooked meat brought him to the surface. Jesus, he thought, I'm so hungry.
He tried to move. It was a mistake. His body was suddenly made of wood and old string and it punished him for the pretense of attempting to get up. His brain seemed to catch fire and he fell back with a moan. The hunger roared insistently inside him for a moment further until he realized that the cooked-meat smell was coming from none other than himself.
What the hell had happened to him?
"Bobbi?" The word was only half-formed. He tried again. "Bobbi?" This time it came out, a loud and ragged croak and he heard the sound of her bare feet padding quickly on the concrete floor.
Her face was white as she threw aside the corner of the tarp-wall to get to him. It was worse than it had been when they had dug the Doll out of the trash pile, or when the ferals had tried to butcher them both. Her eyes bore dark circles and her pink hair was a limp mass tied into a fountain off the back of her head. She looked like a week of rough nights rolled into one as she hurried to his side.
"Tom?" Her green eyes shone with anxiety. "Baby? You all right?"
"Yeah," he croaked. A certain warmth had bloomed in him when he saw her face, the concern there, but the smell still hung around him. "What the hell happened to me? I smell like a fucking cheeseburger."
"Jesus!" She slapped his shoulder, her eyes tightening up. "What the fuck's the matter with you, man?"
Walken winced, both at the contact and the shrill note in her voice. "Ow," he muttered. "Easy, easy. I'm gonna break if you hit me too hard."
The tears that had almost come now vanished and she looked fiercely at him. "It'd serve you the fuck right," she hissed, "Doing stupid shit like that. What the Hell's the matter with you? Putting on 'trodes like that, virgin and all and with no buffer active, with a full-on decryption matrix running? You're lucky you didn't burn your fucking brains out!" She hit him again, though gently this time. "God damn it, Tom, I'm not worried about the Bureau or Stadil's backers killing you anymore — you're gonna do a fine job of it on your own!"
He gave her a wan smile. "Got nothing to worry about, then," he rasped and reached for her hand. He found it, felt a strange smoothness on her fingers. "You just keep me on a leash. You all right?"
Bobbi lifted her hand and looked down at her fingers, at the pink welts of burns that shone on their tips. "Got these pulling the electrodes off you," she said with a sigh. "Jesus, Tom, that was a really fucking stupid thing to do. I think the only thing that saved you was the lower bandwidth of the cable."
"I know, I know," he managed weakly. "I'm sorry."
She shook her head. "Yeah, yeah," she muttered. "I know. Of course... I can't be too mad at you, now that you're not dead or brain-damaged."
"Huh?" He tried to sit up very slowly and managed to prop himself up on an elbow without passing out. "What do you mean?"
Bobbi was quiet for a moment. She looked at him with those haunted, hooded eyes, so tired from little sleep. When she spoke again her voice was gentler. "Tom," she asked, her tone very deliberate, "When you put the 'trodes on, did something happen? Did you execute any programs, or do you do any brainriding in the past that I don't know of?"
"No," he said, blinking groggily at her, "I didn't. What's the matter? Did I fuck something up?" Horror welled up inside him. "Jesus, did I ruin the terminal?"
He tried to sit up again, eyes widening, but she put her hands on his shoulders to steady him. "No, baby, no — relax. Relax. It's just..." Bobbi took a deep breath and spoke the mystery that had been haunting her the days that he was out, beyond the question of his possible death. "When you went down, whatever happened to you? It wiped out the encryption. The cell's clear."
Walken pushed aside the question of why, sought what was behind it. "Is there data?"
"Yeah." She nodded, expression growing sober. "Only, you won't believe what's on it."
He swallowed, tasted the faint metallic dream-taste, knew new anxiety. "Show me."
"Genefex." As he spoke this word his voice was tossed, distorted by the stirring of a passing lifter low enough overhead to make the rebar shudder.
It was raining when Walken and Hunt met again under the blasted roof of First Ebenezer, this time on his invitation. He stood waiting for her under the enormous melted Jesus, sheltered from the rain that poured through the holes above, with his arms crossed and his expression victorious. They had talked for a solid hour that night, as the rain drenched the ruined church around them, Walken spelling out the mystery he had unwoven through his surprise trick of carelessness.
Hunt's horsey face had split into a wide smile as she heard it, arms crossed over her chest. "Very nice, Tom," she said and shook her head in disbelief. "I'd never have thought. That china-doll founder of theirs has always been at the forefront of ethics councils, community action, public safety..." She paused. "...though I suppose," she said then, "That this should've been indication enough that something fucked up was going down. And you're sure?"
When he had told her the whole of what he had learned that morning after he had returned from death, she had first been dubious. What they had found in the datacell, wrapped up in all that digital armor plating, had been nothing less than the equivalent of a micronuke's worth of damning information. Under all that encryption had been research reports, biocomputer schema and financial information, along with a parcel of details that had shocked them both: not just the true information behind the Dolls — their details, design sheets, the process behind their creation — but the true hand behind their purpose and the hand that had conceived them.
First w
as the revelation that the black houses in Wonderland that had crafted them — and nearly all other biocomputer products coming out of Wonderland — had been laboratories owned, sponsored and paid for by subsidiaries of Genefex itself. The paper trail, such as it was, unraveled a bewildering network of interlocking companies, subsidiaries and even government-sponsored research plantations spanning ten countries and three times as many corporations. They had been purposefully designed, engineered and built with technology that came from the corporation's master databases.
What was more, many of the documents were directives signed and directly authorized by Ghia Merducci herself. Others were letters to various personages across the world, many whom Walken recognized as major traffickers in Wonderland goods. Stadil had apparently been a member of this cadre of conspirators since he was an industrial magnate in the Balkans and had served as one of the primary facilitators of Genefex's black products business in the United States. It was through this vast network of connections and bribes that his activity had been concealed.
The story behind the Dolls was also revealed. Though Genefex had become famous through its introduction of rejuvenation and age-suspension through genetic surgery and synthetic telomerase, a fatal flaw had been discovered by the one person who had enjoyed its effects the longest. Merducci herself had discovered that in the past five years her own treatments had begun to flag. Her investigations determined that the process of life-extension through genetic means, however brilliant, had a definite horizon. Genefex was in trouble.
At the same time, however, the company's laboratory complex in Zurich had made another astounding discovery. Through research in dream-recording and chemical personality adjustment, Genefex scientists had unlocked the secret to encoding the human mind into a biocomputer matrix. The Dolls were launched as a means of finding new immortality, life extension through consciousness transfer into a new biological vessel. Endlessly young thanks to genetic alteration and their rebuilt metabolisms, the Dolls were an attempt not just to curry favor with the more extreme of the company's allies, but as test beds, each more advanced than the last, of this new technology. A whole complex was built in Wonderland, dedicated solely to the development of these new, terrifying vessels.
Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle) Page 21
