Cypulchre

by Joseph Travers MacKinnon

  “Good question; deserves a good answer, but I don’t have one,” responded Oni.

  The idea hit Paul so hard he had to hold the wall for a moment. “It’s…I am our Trojan horse.”

  “Huh?” Gibson asked.

  “I still don’t know if the CLOUD will open it right away. God knows we won’t have the time to test it out.”

  Oni and Gibson turned their gazes down, dejected.

  Gibson shakes his head. “There’s no room for second chances or second-guessing. If anybody can do this, it’s you,” he turned to Oni. “With our help, of course.”

  Oni slapped Paul on the knee. “Absolutely! Let’s introduce the Anomaly to oblivion! We’ll dial down your meta-rate and increase your reception speed, permitting you more time to deliver the package.”

  “Dial down my meta-rate?”

  “There are locks on your perception of time in the CLOUD. Your brain is, after all, faster than your body. Twenty-million-billion calculations per second.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Outland installed default rates on all of their memices, and ensured that BiAnima put reception speeds on all their PILOT devices, ensuring some correlation between real-time and NOOS-time.”

  Paul raised his eyebrows, bidding Oni to explain.

  “The default perception settings are standard issue so evaps won’t lose their minds…so they won’t become ghosts or gods.”

  “So one real second in the CLOUD would be?”

  “Ten minutes CLOUD time. Maybe more.”

  “Do you know if my…” Paul pointed to his head, “mental state will have any impact CLOUD-side?”

  “In the pre-trials—the ones I was there for, anyway—we had a few patients with Alzheimer’s, a few with bipolar disorders, and one or two subjects with extreme forms of schizophrenia.”

  “And?” asked Paul.

  “There were inconsistencies in their code. Erratic jumps in conveyance. But on the whole, nothing to worry about.”

  “Great!” declared Gibson. His face quickly found its sullen pre-set. He gloomily presented Oni and Paul with a floor plan for the penthouse. “W’chester will be well-guarded. If it doesn’t appear that he is, take extra precautions. They have mech-mercs in the lobby, so I can only imagine they’ll have one or a hundred guarding the old man.”

  Paul gasped, thinking on his trusty but wildly ineffective revolver. “I’m going to need a bigger gun.”

  Oni nodded, thoughtfully. “I’ll have to check…”

  “Check what?” Gibson pried.

  “Remember the Knight of the Holy Sepulchre?”

  “He was a little before my time,” replied Gibson.

  “The guy was some kind of crusader from the Middle East. Came to check on one of our patients, a friend of his. Ended up leaving his kit behind because he couldn’t take it on the state-jumper.”

  Paul and Gibson leaned forward for the punch-line.

  “It’s pretty ridiculous. I never tried it out. Barely touched it, actually.”

  “Dammit, woman! Spit it out,” said Gibson, some levity buoying his tonality.

  “We have a B.F.G.”

  “We do?” asked Gibson.

  “A what?”

  “Paul—you’ll have to download the instruction manual, but it’s…well, exactly what the name suggests.”

  “Sounds like exactly what I need.”

  Gibson pushed off the crate and started pacing between Oni and Paul. Ushering seriousness back into the discussion, he returned their attention to the nitty-gritty: “I’ll create a diversion; trip an alarm at another cypulchre—make the old man think he’s got us trapped. Going to need Ed’s help sorting things out.”

  “He got nicked in the PIT.”

  “When?”

  “I’m guessing sometime between when the PIT rats starting shooting and when they stopped,” Oni said sneeringly, digging the air in front of her with her hands, palms faced up. “You should probably give him some time.”

  “Alright, well, I don’t have much left to give. When he’s able, I’m going to need his help finding a secondary safe house in case this place gets marked for a drone strike. There’ll be feet on the ground, too; Outland’s going to send an army looking for you two after you get out.”

  “After we get out?” Paul had already dismissed the prospect of surviving. Hope had had a tendency to dull failure’s blade, and failure, blunt and heavy, had made pessimism his natural coping mechanism. “How will we manage that?”

  Gibson opened his tablet and brought up a 2D version of the Citadel’s blueprints. “W’chester has a Dragonfly on the roof.”

  “He’s not going to let us trash and dash on his custom shuttle…” declared Paul.

  “By this time tomorrow, W’chester won’t be making any decisions.”

  “What about the Citadel’s force field? How’re we going to get the Dragonfly through?”

  “You’ll have to swap Booker’s insert for Winchester’s,” Oni replied. “There’s no way in hell that Outland Security would risk vaporizing their master, even if they suspect he’s been taken hostage.”

  “Alright!” Paul yelled, his body signing his capitulation. He turned away from his accomplices to the dark encroaching on their deliberations. As if speaking to the shades, he summarized: “Knock off Winchester, save all the evaps, unbridle the Empty Thought, and get out. Am I missing anything?”

  “Oni and I still gotta figure out exactly how to smuggle you into the Citadel, but apart from that…”

  “And do we have a Plan B?” Paul said, sheepishly.

  “Sure,” said Oni. “Well, it’s more of a Plan B.F.G.”

  Paul turned back, and faced Oni with a look of comic disbelief. “How did I miss ‘psychopath’ on your application?”

  Scratching his chin, Gibson gestured to Paul, addressing Oni. “Better throw some reinforcement-armour on ‘em. Spine, shoulders, arms, and legs. These last few days look like they’ve taken their toll.”

  “Agreed,” Oni snapped back, scrutinizing Paul’s dimensions. “Nothing the EMP can damage—just enough exo-skeleton to give you a leg-up.”

  “All this,” Gibson said, glowering, “stays between us and off the comms. We can’t risk the Anomaly learning of our intentions before we act.”

  “Right.” Paul made sure his Monocle was offline.

  “That’s the plan,” concluded Oni.

  AND THAT’S THE PLAN Paul can’t stop thinking about.

  Driven mad by compulsion and exhaustion, he realizes he’s now thinking about thinking about the plan. “Enough!” he announces to an empty room.

  Up the cold metal steps to the rooftop, and out the door. Hunched over the railing is Oni, waiting. Not for Paul, necessarily. Just waiting.

  Chapter 28: LAST RITE

  “YOU TOO, huh?” Oni says to Paul without looking.

  Paul has trouble making her words out over the hiss of the wind whisking through the antennae, grouped like hair-plugs at one corner of the rooftop.

  “Pardon?”

  “Can’t sleep?”

  “Oh…No.”

  Paul joins her at the edge. He pauses, and traces his finger along the railing. Black-paint chips off under his nail, revealing clean, galvanized steel.

  Oni gestures to the Blue Zone’s rainbow skyline, banded by yellow street orbs and green electric-bridges. From here, it looks as if the Hyperloop bow-ties the lambent Citadel—gloomily reflecting surrounding lesser-buildings sprung by common minds—and knots around the northern T-Blocks.

  “It really bothers me, but I can’t help it…”

  “Help what?” Paul asks.

  “It’s an art gallery filled with empty frames. The ideas—the paintings themselves—are nothing but sludge dammed away in a shared bucket. And yet…” She bites her lip, and searches her mind. “It’s so beautiful. How could it be,” Oni shakes her head in disgust, “when I know firsthand that if it weren’t so goddamn hollow, it’d be rotten anyway?”

 
Paul grips the railing with both hands, and leans forward. “I can’t tell you how many people you’ve just described.” He peers over his shoulder with a grin, the wind now gusting up, combing his hair to the sides of his head.

  Oni visibly tries-on a reciprocal smile, but her sad eyes sap the affect. “Do you believe in redemption, Dr. Sheffield?”

  “I’d say we’ve both earned a first-name basis…”

  There’s clearly no room for Paul’s anxious levity or anal naming conventions, evidenced by Oni’s increasingly deflated form.

  “Oni…I don’t know. That sounds like a question best tailored to Father Ed.” He pulls a joint out his half-empty pack of Walruses and reflexively lights it.

  Oni snorts accidentally, after a vain attempt to muffle a sob.

  “Hey,” Paul says, quickly flicking the coal and sending the cannaberette waffling on a wind-confused arc. “What’s the matter?”

  She dries her rogue tears with the dorsal fabric of her glove, and reaches for Paul’s hand. Her cold little digits spark something previously dormant in Paul. He’s at once both sorry and happy to know Oni; double-hooked and weighted with a duty to her and with expectations to satisfy.

  “Oni, what’s wrong?”

  ONI DRAWS BACK the curtain, revealing Father Edmund Barros swaddled in blood-stained sheets, hooked to a dozen whining machines.

  “What happened?” Paul asks excitedly, bulldozing over to check Edmund’s monitors.

  “He didn’t tell anyone. I found him hunched over the little altar in his room, bleeding on his Saviour.”

  Paul nabs the med-tablet stowed to the side of Edmund’s pillow. “What!? When did he…?”

  “In the van, he said he’d torn his micromesh.” Oni turns on Edmund’s holographic doppelganger, and prods its stomach with a resentful point. “Failed to mention the ball of shrapnel sitting behind it. He knew…”

  “Is he going to…?” before Paul can finish, he reads his answer traced across Oni’s face in tears. “Jeeze…”

  “He’s currently in a coma. Bringing him out would be torture. The shrapnel was coated in depleted uranium; cut right through his lower intestine, and by the looks of it, got lodged against his spine a few hours ago. I’m not sure if he’ll be able to move.” She shuts Edmund’s medigraphic off. “He has a few days, max.”

  Paul coughs, and looks down at the bruised new skin on his forearm. A few days, max. “If we got him to the Citadel’s med-sci clinic…”

  “It’d compromise the mission. I’m not even sure about our chances without a gimp weighing us down…Wouldn’t change anything, anyway. Soon, his eyesight will go. If it hasn’t already, paralysis will creep up on him. Then basic motor function will go. Conjunctivitis if he lasts the week. Lesions will start popping up on his liver, lungs, kidneys…”

  Paul swats at the bad news, and interrupts: “No way around it?”

  “None.” Oni says, coldly, dabbing her eyes once again with her gloved hand. “He had this on him.” She holds out a folded piece of paper.

  “Writ-on-tree?” Paul says, eyeing the writing.

  “It’s his last will and testament. Mainly jokes, prayers, and superstitious scrawl, but he makes it abundantly clear in the later provisions that we not use artificial life support, and stressed dumping any digital continuance.” She turns the piece of paper in her hand and skim-reads half-way down the page. “‘Give back to Outland what is Outland’s and to God what is God’s.’” Oni holds her head, as if it’s become too heavy with pent-up tears for her neck to support it alone. “Should have moved north with his order. There’s nothing left here for good people.”

  “Hope, I suppose.”

  Oni nods, crumpling her face to dam back more tears.

  Paul squints, feeling a resurgence of awareness. “Sometime last night Ed came to talk to me. The dead seem to have made a habit of it.”

  “When?”

  “After you and Gibson tucked me in. He came to give me a blessing; some kind of voodoo…I was pretty out of it.”

  “You sure you’re just not revisiting a hallucination? It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s seen things this soon after an implantation.”

  “Hallucination or not, the memory is as vivid as any other.”

  Oni approaches the bed, grabs a cloth, and wipes the sweat off Edmund’s brow. “Assuming your memory can be trusted, what did he say?”

  Paul steps back, gliding his hands over his head. “That…he’d realized something long ago. Something to the tune of…”

  Oni clasps Edmund’s cheek sorrowfully. “Please, go on.”

  “‘Some people commodify life. Others, lifestyles. There are those who’ve never dared to live, and, as you know, Paul,’ he said to me, ‘oceans full of the daring dead. Some people sustain life, and there are a few remarkable ones that can save it. The special ones—the great ones—radically change it for the better.’”

  Oni gasps, and hides her eyes from Paul. “That couldn’t have been you hallucinating.”

  “Oh?” Paul looks at Oni, dubiously, uncertain now about the veracity of his testament.

  “It’s too pedantic and positive to be something your mind cooked up...But why you? Why didn’t he…?”

  “Tell you?” Finished racking his brain, Paul takes a deep breath. “Perhaps he didn’t think it necessary to inspire you to do what you’re already keen on doing.”

  The compliment carries up Oni’s shoulders. “And you?”

  “Besides the convenience of only having to cross the hall to see me?”

  Oni shrugs.

  “He died as a result of saving me. He was remarkable so that you and I could do something special.” Paul saunters over to Oni, and puts his hand on her shoulder. “I suppose he was making sure it wouldn’t be wasted.”

  Oni gently pushes Paul away, and—looking over Ed’s fragile form—turns off his ventilator, crying. “Hopefully he was right.”

  Chapter 29: THE ELEPHANTS IN THE ROOM

  THE OUTLAND MAT TRANSPORT SHIP, which Oni’d been tracking all morning, pulls off the Anaheim West Energy Freeway. It slows to give the private side-bridge enough time to charge. With the electric bands extended and a quick engine burst, the transport gracefully glides onto the service station’s external-elevator platform. The pilot puts it into idle, while the co-pilot links the station with their landing codes.

  Grumbling in place until cleared by the tower, the ship receives an impromptu scan by a swarm of Mosquito drones—likely at the request of Commander Cromwell with the Department of Continental Security. Still bloodless, the swarm disappears. The ship’s been cleared for landing.

  An android on the elevator secures the transport with a magnetic harness. The ship, an N-series Outland Spirit Train, ascends, creakily, to the rooftop of the glorified parking garage. With a visual ID from the android conducting it forward, it’s instantly registered as a priority vessel, prompting a second android out of its booth to direct it—away from the queue of colonial junkers and salvage skiffs—into a dock built specifically for Outland vessels.

  The second droid, a cool, gun-metal colour, is careful to avoid the aft jets feeding the mirages on the runway. With the help of dock-fixed mechanical arms, the droid tugs the transport into place. It waves batons in its personified alloy limbs, indicating to the pilots they’re on-mark. The pilots can’t make out the droid’s orange batons or much else on the ground, but that hardly matters; the entire process is pretty-much automated, the interplay between the droids and the pilots purely fanfare. Granted the mechanical precision of the parts involved and Outland paying triple the standard refuel and charging fees, it’ll be a quick turnaround.

  Out of the docking portal directly beneath the Spirit Train emerges a polarized Atlas Stand, which balances the hovering ship on a point, allowing it to turn off its engines without leaving the pilots to worry about making a full-touchdown. With a thump, it’s tethered and balanced.

  The service station’s electrical pumps don’t miss
a beat. They come slithering out of their coils, immediately locating the Spirit Train’s charge lines. Locking-on, they begin to deluge the ship’s tank with enough juice to get to the Citadel and back.

  The Spirit Train’s side-butterfly hatches scissor open, and the pilot and co-pilot, looking like elephant cosmonauts in their flight gear, climb out, and scale down the ladder built into the chassis.

  A third android, this time a fair-skinned replicant, sprints over, through chunky exhaust, to meet the pilots; regulars, evidently. They exchange obligatory salutations, and, together, amble across the tarmac into the central hub, teeming with Sentinels and off-world engineers.

  Another pair, dressed similarly in pilot G-suits—looking like Ganesha twins in mourning—slip out of the hub before the doors have a chance to fully close behind the Spirit’s original pilots. One of the elephantine G-suits is carrying a black case the size of a small coffin.

  They skirt past the droids supervising the fuel pumps, and make their way to the Spirit’s side butterfly doors. The taller of the two helps the other onto the ladder, and then passes the case up. Once the case and the first of the fliers are in, the second follows suit into the Spirit.

  A holographic sentry appears inside, at the mouth of the gangway. “Identification, please.”

  The taller flier throws down a holo-deck, which projects an image of a decorated Outland pilot with his helmet off, golden hair interlaced. The sentry scans the projection, and disappears.

  “Let’s hope the security sentry doesn’t have any second thoughts,” says the taller flier, voice garbled by its modulator.

  The fliers make their way down the gangway, deeper into the belly of the steel beast. On either side of the narrow passage are rows and rows of vacuum-sealed meat pods, safely divided and stowed like eggs in a carton. The shorter of the two fliers waves a wrist-scanner down each row as they pass in the direction of the stern. A beep on the wristband indicates a hit. The fliers glance at each other, and turn down the row indicated by the scan.

  The shorter pilot points to the handles at the foot of the targeted pod. Together they pry it open. With a pop, extramural air rushes in, blowing away the steam rising off the evap strapped inside. The man, entombed, is dead—evidenced by a noticeable lack of a face. Headed to the Citadel to return Outland the gear he’d borrowed.