Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle)

by Michael Shean

  But here, according to this terrifying woman, all humanity had done was forge its own end. From the previous century when the nuclear age first began, all the way up to the beginning of the European War in the fifties, they had thought that the world would end with nuclear obliteration. Then the Chinese perfected anti-radiation nanomachines and it was gene warfare and chemical warfare. Now, after all that, it would be all that technology and human callousness that killed the human race in a way it would neither expect nor feel.

  All she had said, all she had shared with him, he should be able to pass off as madness, the fancy of a very wealthy, but very crazy, woman. But he could not. There was the knowledge that she possessed, knowledge of his crisis of faith; how could she know such things if she had not been speaking the truth? How could she be able to do the things that she had done, create the blasphemies that she had perpetrated, if there was no truth to it? He wondered in that moment what kind of world it led to, this strangeness, that faithless world she described where human flesh was ruled by alien minds forever. Was apocalypse so near? Surely this had to be wrong.

  No. As much as he would wish to deny it, as much as he would desire for it to be otherwise, his instinct — no, that voice from another place, another being — confirmed it to be true. The world would be damned and he would be a part of that damnation if he gave up control forever. He thought of it, this world beneath the shadow of a dead star, spiraling away into the arms of distant, unknowable minds and he knew what he had to do.

  He closed his eyes, saw needle towers and chromium seas, smelled the sharp notes of methane and ozone in his nostrils. He saw the flash of the dark skies and their phantom clouds boiling with the endless crash of static electricity. He saw the future. And with the utmost calm — a calm he'd never felt before in his life — Thomas Walken made his choice.

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  In the end, all Bobbi had left of him was a bloody coat.

  It had been the one that he had worn when they had driven through the Old City, when they had searched for dead little girls in a concrete wasteland. He had driven them through a mass of insane feral killers to save them both. That was him, her knight in cheap black microfiber.

  Tom. On nights like this, she missed him like crazy.

  Bobbi had never thought of him as hers at the time. There was too much going on, too much insanity and Stadil’s stupid goddamned quest. And he had followed that road to the end, into the bowels of that abandoned hospital. The hospital that she had destroyed, and probably him with it, at his own request. But he had said that he had forgotten all about the Bureau, and that had meant that he intended to come back. Didn’t it?

  Thomas Cooley Walken, agent of the American Industrial Security Bureau. It had not been love, she didn’t think, but it had been something perhaps preceding it. Despite everything she had wanted, she had become fascinated with his vulnerability, his strangeness. Walken didn’t trust this world that she had accepted as a matter of fact. And now he was gone, and had taken the secret of that disbelief with him.

  All she had left of him was that black coat, pinned up in a shadow box on the far wall of her tiny bedroom by the door. It was the first thing she saw upon rising, the last thing she saw before going to bed. She stared at it now, stretched out like a skin. The stains had long since faded into the fabric, blood long since bonded with the synthetic fibers.

  She tore her eyes away to look at the holographic clock hanging over the doorway, its digits declaring seven-thirty p.m. “All right, Bobbi girl,” she murmured to herself, continuing her evening ritual. “Get your ass up and get to work.”

  And so she did, not being the kind to argue with the boss. Bobbi went into the little bathroom attached to her bedroom and splashed cold water on her face. When she thought of him in the dark like this she tried to imagine that she was him, or at least think like him. Wide-eyed and yet cynical, knowing the world was evil and yet being constantly surprised by it. She had never understood that, that seeming lack of an emotional callus.

  She liked him because he was like that. Complex. A puzzle. A girl like Bobbi was a sucker for puzzles, and the truth was she never thought that she could solve him. It was, she had realized, the core of attraction for her.

  Maybe that was why they worked; they were just different enough. Then she reminded herself that they had only ‘worked’ for a few weeks, that she had gotten crazy jealous over him for reasons she had yet to decipher and that they might very well have been just drunk on sex and adrenaline the whole goddamned time. She collected herself, pushed those memories into the back of her head, and prepared herself for the evening’s toil.

  Bobbi left the bedroom and walked out into her office, which was a shrine to another dead man. Two years ago, the office into which she now walked had belonged to a man named Anton Stadil. He and his fellows had burnt out their brains here, laid out under the flat blind eyes of deactivated wallscreens. She had inherited the Ballroom after Stadil’s death, but it was no longer the hedonistic palace that it had been two years before. Now it was called The Temple; the marble floor was now full of datanauts and other questionable creatures, drinking at tables or crammed into booths. She’d done it as a way to put her own life in order after Tom’s disappearance, being apparently unknown to the Bureau as his co-conspirator, but it was also a means to conduct her investigation.

  Setting up the club had taken quite some time. She was slow to build her enterprise from her inheritance for a few very important reasons. One was the Bureau, which apparently had no knowledge of her where Tom was concerned; that was fine by her, because she had enough things to worry about without the Fed sending her into a cryogenic penitentiary. The other problem – and, in her opinion, by far the biggest – was the Genefex corporation. Perhaps Bobbi might have gone on with her life right then and there had she believed that Stadil actually wanted Tom dead. But she didn’t. Old Anton had told her, sitting right where she did now, that he had wanted Tom to know the truth. To realize his instincts. The truth had been that Genefex, a vast and powerful genetics concern – the developers of clinical immortality – had discovered that their vaunted cure for aging had been weak tea. That they had been behind the black market technological juggernaut known as Wonderland, the dark side of Great Siam. This is what they had known without doubt. The data had all been there.

  But despite her dropping anonymous information to no less than six different news outlets, and even having taken the extreme step of leaking the evidence to the Bureau, nothing had happened to Genefex at all. The company had enjoyed double-digit gains and its oldest customers had escaped their projected Doomsdays. Great Siam was an even stronger state than before with the annexation of Burma and Malaysia a year ago. Everything that had been set to fall apart had spat in the face of prophecy. Something had gone seriously wrong.

  That damnable archive. Sent by Stadil to Annika Hunt, the controversial journalist – unable to be cracked by the Bureau, its contents had been unearthed when Tom had tried to access it himself via Bobbi’s own brain-riding terminal. Since Tom’s disappearance, it had occurred to her that the secret lay instead not in the archive itself,but in its source – most specifically, the way that Stadil had died. With Tom gone, she could only solve that mystery on her own, and it had seemed the next best likely avenue to pursue. But there was just no cracking that particular nut, no matter how hard she’d tried. Sources dried up or shrank away, and she couldn’t afford to deplete her reputation if she wanted to live any semblance of a normal life. So she had abandoned the search, or at the very least put it off until it appeared that there might actually be some traction. It had been a year since she had last touched the data.

  Bobbi sat down at S
tadil’s desk. She saw herself reflected in its pristine majority: her heart-shaped face with its mane of lavender hair styled in layers with a laser pencil. Startling green eyes that she would never change. Her curves, her hair, the crisp turn of her nose – these were all synthetic (or at the very least augmented) and not at all the way they had been when she was born. But her eyes, bottle-green and glittering with their motes of gold around the pupils, those she would never change. The flesh was the symbol of her vanity, she had always believed, and she could change it with fashion. But her eyes were her warning label. She wanted everyone to know what they were in for.

  Bobbi shook her head and brushed strands of hair from her face. “Come on, come on,” she called out to the open air. “Miss Bobbi, she is here!” She was calling to the computer, which she had named Paracelcus after an old alchemist she’d read about, turning lead into gold. The equivalent of what she did with data, really, most of her adult life. There was familiar comfort in bravado, the cowgirl’s shield. She found she often needed it these days.

  The massive telescreens that had hung on the walls had been replaced with holographic projectors, which conjured up legions of data all round her. Her standard worktop could wrap the whole room, obscuring the sight of Stadil’s kitsch collection with solid-light panels or three-dimensional displays. Bobbi had, at least to her knowledge, the best setup of anything not military or top-tier corporate elite. Stadil’s money and property had made sure of that. She had inherited Stadil’s assets the morning after Tom had vanished, as if they were reparations made for his disappearance. Windows of light winked into existence, depicting the very spare and industrially-influenced furnishings of The Temple’s bar floor; dubious people in dubious fashions sat at skeletal steel tables, drinking and doing business.

  Standing behind the bar, watching like some monstrous gargoyle, was a thoroughly massive black man, his prodigious musculature a product of vat-grown muscle tissue attached to an already powerful frame. He wore a tight white t-shirt to show it off, a Six Red Rebels band tee that rippled with his body’s topography. This was Marcus Scalli, the only person Bobbi really talked to anymore. Bobbi had known Scalli for years, and he was the closest thing to a friend she really had. She’d never been one for close-and-personals. He managed the bar for her as well as handling security, directing Sandy, the bartender and his bouncers. She was pretty happy with how things were going in that department. All the “specialty services” were her deal.

  Among the security monitors her mailbox window sprang into being, hovering there with a battery of business minutiae. Most of these were bills, promotional adverts, the usual fare that a business owner had to deal with. These she ignored out of hand; she’d written expert systems to process them and keep things running. Another was an alarm notice from one of the ghost-boxes she kept on the premises as part of the club’s “special services.”

  Among other pursuits, Bobbi ran a data deposit service at the Temple. She kept a battery bank of ghost-boxes in a back room; the small but spacious dedicated file-storage modules were kept isolated from the network and each other, ensuring that nobody could hack them without interfacing them directly. For a sizable hourly fee, customers could transfer sensitive data into one of Bobbi’s ghost-boxes and keep it safe for a period of time before they either removed it or had someone else pick it up. Transfer was only to physical storage media, and only with an assigned cipher key. They worked very well; even without Stadil’s fortune in her pocket, she could have supported the club and property on the revenue generated alone.

  It was a relatively easy service to maintain, but sometimes there would be issues. Sometimes the data stored was toxic, like a virus-prog with “leaky” code, and there’d be some lingering transfer on the unit in which it was stored. Bobbi would sometimes have to go down and clean out a ghost-box on her own – and, from the look of the alarm message pulsing red and irritable on her mailbox display, this would be one of those times.

  Bobbi got up and headed for the elevator. Hanging from the muzzle of an aluminum deer’s head mounted on the wall nearby was her hack kit, the old Army medic’s satchel she’d been using for years now. The red cross seemed to stare out at her; she hesitated for a moment, staring back at it before finally taking up the strap and stepping into the elevator. She had a lot of things to fix, she thought. She wondered if this kind of work would be the medicine she needed in the end.

  The floor of the Temple trembled with the throbbing beat of manic-pulse music, a beat that shook the doors as they opened into the back room. Bobbi’s nose wrinkled as she stepped out of the elevator and into the soup; it wasn’t her kind of track, that shuddering, rapid drone. Manic-pulse had taken the crown of popular music twenty years ago, fusing weirdly fluted, atonal synths to a skeleton of rapid bass rhythms. It was supposed to be representative of the future, or so The Nightmen had said when they first invented the stuff back in the late fifties – she didn’t know what kind of future they had envisioned save that it was strange as Hell. But then again, people liked all kinds of weird these days. There wasn’t really any room for normalcy.

  Bobbi stepped past the ghostly-lit cabinets of the coolers, pausing to pluck a Tsingtao from one as she went. No chill-tab on the beer; only glass bottles, primitivity as cachet. Bobbi twisted the lid free and took a swig of the chilled beer, felt it stream thin and tasty over her tongue, and stepped through the storeroom door to be assailed by the wall of sound.

  Bobbi had done much more than simply change the name of the club. The biggest difference was the distinct lack of lighting on the walls. When it belonged to the Slav, the club was lined with pornographic holograms and neon rails twisted into all manner of configurations. Now, however, the vaulted expanse was lined with dark green hexagonal tiles uplit by the soft glow of spot lamps. Simple. Bobbi was all about simple, especially since her clientele were anything but.

  Scalli loomed at the edge of the bar. “Evening,” he called over the withering beat, a sound that carried itself into her ear through her earbud. “Glad to see you’re up.”

  “Most people are,” Bobbi quipped as the cowgirl act slipped into place. “Everything decent out here?”

  “Same as usual,” Scalli said. “Everyone more interested in doing biz than causing trouble. Not for you, anyway.” His brows arched as he saw the bag hanging from her shoulder. “Unless there’s something going on I haven’t heard of?”

  She snorted. “Sorry, Scalli,” Bobbi said, “just one of the boxes needs prodding at. Sorry to disappoint ya.”

  “Disappointment I can handle,” Scalli drawled. She knew he didn’t like complications; it was one of the reasons he’d come to work for her, since with Tom’s passing virtually any complication she’d ever even thought of having seemed to have evaporated. Funny how money did that for you.

  Bobbi smiled at him faintly. “Yeah, well, I’m gonna go play nurse. See you in a bit.” She left him frowning after her, doing her usual circuit across the floor toward the secure booths where the ghost-boxes could be accessed. Hack artists and their retinues, such as they were, looked up to watch her pass. Some of them leered – that would be the new kids, those who didn’t know her on sight – but the vets and the usuals mostly gave her nods as she passed by. Familiar faces, most of them. Bobbi marked the few which weren’t on her way to the booths, resolving to look them up later off security footage. Never knew who new folk were, after all.

  Booth number seven was the one in question. Like its fellows, it was a small cubicle no larger than a narrow walk-in closet; the door was a flat pane of heavy alloy, magnetically sealed and extremely difficult to cut through. Normally she’d open the doors from her office, but she also had them rigged to open in proximity to her personal electromagnetic signature. As she approached, the door to the booth swung open.

  The walls of the booth were covered with the ribbed grid work of soundproof plastics, and dim blue lighting was projected from narrow bioluminescent strips bordering the ceiling. The ghost-box itse
lf, a cube of flat gray metal with faceted corners, sat on a clear plastic dais with a single chair parked in front of it. It had a small display mounted on the lower right half of its front face, which was currently reading “SYSTEM ALARM.” “Damn,” Bobbi murmured as she stepped inside and took her seat in front of the ailing machine, “what’s gotten into you?”

  There was a universal access port set into the face of the ‘box below its display. Bobbi set her beer down on the floor next to her, then reached into her bag and withdrew a thin, silvery cord which had two short plugs on either end. One went into the machine and one went into the back of a sleek, device which looked something like a brushed nickel collar with a padded interior and its front half removed. This she fitted against the back of her neck before connecting it with another cable to the interface port behind her ear. The collar was a portable neural firewall, a device which served as a terminal and a security barrier; some models would protect against viruses and the like, others helped resist intrusion. Bobbi’s was a heavily Lyricom unit which, already fitted to paramilitary specifications right out of the box, was the equivalent of tank armor against intrusions and attacks against the computer in her head.

  Which was good, because all that silicon in her skull couldn’t exactly be replaced very easily. She had gotten a new implant after Tom had disappeared; it was an Arashi Intuex-7, top of the line – bleeding edge even now with its custom-build modules and amped up hardware, especially its powerful holographic storage unit that allowed her to store short-term memories and expert data for a brief span. It had been extremely expensive, or would have been before she had taken Stadil’s money. Now it was an investment, hard-wired throughout her brain in ways her old Telefunken unit had never been. She didn’t want to risk major brain surgery again until the paradigm was sufficiently reinvented to make it necessary.