Under the Flickering Light

by Russ Linton

  M@ti cranked her LUX app to full. She still hadn’t had enough time to figure out exactly how the hacker’s tablet worked. Their only light source in the tunnel, she kept the small screen pointed forward more for comfort than navigation. Knuckles limped along behind, clutching his side. She slowed enough to let him lean against her.

  His touch felt awkward again. Why he didn’t seem to feel the same discomfort, she wasn’t sure. His life spent in virtual proximity to his friends, he of all people should understand the weirdness. Flesh on flesh. Bone on bone. Cartilage wriggling. Snapping under your elbow.

  M@ti focused on forward movement. One step after another. She traced a yellow line on her map; this tunnel would take them under the East River. Eventually.

  “Harlock lives in Brooklyn Heights, right?”

  “That’s what I said.” Knuckles had slipped into the darkness and let his mind follow. His response was terse. “Why?”

  “Just want to make sure we get there.”

  That neighborhood had also been on the list of Loadi’s connections, but at a different address — she’d seen Harlock’s when she sifted through his remains at the concert. The connection had been one of the future dates too. Tomorrow, which didn’t make sense. Knuckles didn’t need to know that right now, she decided. One step at a time.

  They walked the rest of the night accompanied by the conversations of rats. Calf deep water marked the point where M@ti knew they’d reached the river. More luck, the tunnel hadn’t completely flooded. She held the light up while phantom creatures tugged at her boot laces. More than once, her or Knuckles jumped and shivered as slick forms brushed their legs. She didn’t want to know what they were. She just wanted out.

  “After the river, we’re out at the first platform,” she said, loudly, to reassure not only Knuckles but herself.

  “Cool,” Knuckles grunted.

  She could hear the weariness in his voice. Her own feet trudged along, sodden and squishing in her soles. They’d be there soon. She knew what Loadi had said about the fate of Knuckles’ band, but she hoped he’d lied. Meeting Harlock face to face and being able to rest, stop worrying, even for a few minutes would be a relief.

  Then they’d have to run again. She just didn’t know where.

  UNTIL THEY FINALLY reached the surface, M@ti had no idea how suffocating the rotting tunnels were. Cool air sent shivers along her skin, and she drank deeply and greedily of the city’s electric air. Hov exhaust and the drone drafts always gave off an anesthetized odor, but she’d been deprived for so long this time, she almost felt she could smell the dense wireless connections.

  They’d had to cross a flooded overpass, water lapping at the beams, to get to Harlock’s place. Flanked by shorter red brick buildings, the whitewashed facade was nondescript save the dingy stone porches which provided a weak attempt at classical grandeur. The apartment faced a canal which had once been an expressway, now flooded to divert the encroaching seas. Out in the harbor, a green lady stood, her torch held high so as not to be doused, her star-shaped base a shimmering reflection rising from the water.

  M@ti retrieved Harlock’s personal identifiers from her archives. She located the building’s passkey system and froze.

  Normally, sensors on the door would’ve picked up their specs or their Nexus gear, identified them, and opened the door. This would’ve then trickled into the sea of data siphoned from every tiny action of humanity and into the maw of the Collective.

  With the Fel-0-Sh!p’s odd device, that wasn’t a problem. If Harlock were truly dead though, she couldn’t spoof his credentials and make it seem as though he’d opened the door. His account would be flagged. Loadi would certainly notice.

  Knuckles watched the street nervously. “What’s wrong?”

  “I need a minute.”

  Using TrueSight, she forced her way into the system and began to dismantle the security. She felt the same rush as when she’d flexed those abilities in the Nexus and in Times Square. Hacking, not minor vandalism but real control, was growing on her. Maybe she should’ve followed the old man. Exile, why not revolutionary too?

  The doors slid opened.

  “You’re not the only one who can pick a lock,” she said.

  “Grats. Now figure out what room.”

  With Harlock’s identifiers loaded, she already knew. “Third floor. Number 305.”

  Hallways empty, no alarms, their break-in had gone smoothly so far, but they took the stairs instead of the monitored elevator. The lock on Harlock’s apartment door offered even less of a challenge. She could go anywhere, like Knuckles had said. Do anything.

  The euphoria faded as soon as the door creaked open.

  Trapped funk bred by small spaces and isolation wafted into the hall. Sounds of one-sided conversations and specheads shouting into their own realities penetrated the walls in a deep, submerged way. All more reasons she’d abandoned her formerly assigned apartment for the roof.

  Knuckles pushed past. “Harlock? You here?”

  M@ti pressed into the thickening funk and quietly closed the door. The apartment was like any other in the Preserve. Plain, undecorated walls encapsulated bland but ergonomic furniture printed to the resident’s precise measurements. A tiny kitchen consisting of a counter, oven unit, and fridge faced the windows near the drone port where deliveries were made. A Nexus rig filled the center of the room with a bed beside it. Both were empty.

  “Harlock?” Knuckles called, glancing about and disappearing into the bathroom.

  M@ti stepped further inside. White, clean sheets covered the bed. The Nexus rig hung lifeless. Newer than most, the harness and suit allowed for a full immersion experience. Of all the various tokens and rewards, there was no way to purchase or earn that sort of rig. Random lottery determined who received upgrades, although citizens assigned to new housing often found the latest gear waiting.

  She leaned in to examine the straps. No sign of wear. TrueSight showed her the connection hadn’t been synched to a user. Crossing the room, she opened the refrigerator. Empty.

  “He’s not here,” Knuckles said, stepping out of the bathroom. His worried gaze went to the rig and he crept closer to it. “Do we even have the right room?”

  This was his place. She was certain. M@ti returned to the door and began to examine the entry logs.

  “Harlock...Harlock...” She scrolled past one entry after another. Days. Weeks. Months. “All him.” The entries ended just hours ago with one more and she read it three times.

  She vaguely heard Knuckles flop onto the bed, followed by a grunt of pain. “I’m gonna crash until he gets back. So fucking tired.”

  M@ti made a noise, neither agreeing or arguing. Exhaustion had nearly overwhelmed her too, a weight made overpowering by the data entry she was reading for a fourth time.

  Manhattan Preserve Sanitation Protocol.

  Entry authority granted. Removal of biological waste. Re-habitation of dwelling, authorized.

  Agent assigned duty: Livingstone.

  Status: In Progress.

  M@ti stumbled backward and killed her display. She stared at the closed door, half expecting it to open and see the robot’s telescoping eye pan over her. Would it be concern? Evaluating her as a threat? This was no coincidence. Along with that psychotic Loadi, her former boss was tracking her.

  They had nowhere else to hide. Living in the rat infested sewer tunnels wasn’t an option. Sooner or later, the Collective would find them.

  She drifted blindly backwards and dug the device from her pocket. The back of her knees found the bed and she sat, gently, trying not to disturb Knuckles who was already snoring. She stared at the blank screen and absently untied her boots, sloshing out of the sticky soles and kicking them away. The tiny cursor on the screen blinked. No answers.

  Maybe they could be safe for a few hours. Time to think, rest. She stuffed a pillow between her and Knuckles and curled up around the tablet.

  Knuckles moaned quietly, his face buried in the mattres
s. Hidden lives continued to whisper through the walls, the floor, the ceiling. All these people, the entire Collective looking for her, hackers abducting her, sharing a bed with someone, and she felt as lonely as ever.

  M@ti tried to fight the fatigue as long as she could. She managed to pull up a tiny digital keypad on the device. The letters were arranged in QWERTY fashion like an archaic keyboard. There would be no sweeping gestures which she’d programmed her display to interpret into virtual action. She needed to RTFM. That or find a mentor.

  Avoiding others all her life had been made simple by the lure of the Nexus, a place she never wanted to be. Figuring out things on her own through trial and error and determination was more her style. Now though, she needed help.

  Surviving last night wouldn’t have been possible without Knuckles. When not almost getting him killed, his oddly transferable skills had saved them more than once. One less picked lock or pocket and they’d have been caught. One less swing of his sword...

  She turned her head enough to see Knuckles drooling into a pillow. Her eyes caught a rusted, flaking smear of blood on the sheets from her own shirt. This hapless spechead she’d helped turn into a murderer. Only an AI, sure, but she couldn’t shake the image of it crawling broken and twisted up Knuckles’ body, seeking vengeance for a life she didn’t want to believe it had.

  And all through the insanity Knuckles had been brave, supportive, any number of qualities she didn’t understand why she deserved. She’d been too hard on him. She needed to let up, if she hadn’t already lost him.

  M@ti rolled onto her stomach and stared at the device. Chin resting on one hand, she took a finger and tapped out a word at the cursor. Help.

  Commands scrolled down the screen.

  She stared in shock. Everything from file maintenance to administrative tasks were at her fingertips.

  Old man. Old device. She hoped the security was the same.

  19

  M@ti had a dream. She was trapped in a blank landscape. The cane tapped all around her. Dread, confusion, she couldn’t see anything except herself. Her retinal displays were offline, her eyes, blind, her only view was of her own back, soaked with blood dripping from an eye stalk wrapped around her neck.

  She jolted awake in Harlock’s empty bed.

  M@ti squinted into the shifting dark. Full of mid-morning light when she’d fallen asleep, the bland room danced with the glow of electronics. Reds blinked, greens stayed steady, and a golden pulse strobed from the headset of the Nexus rig.

  Knuckles. He’d jacked in.

  Her friend hung suspended by the straps and dotted with dermal feedback electrodes. Kinetic boots and gloves webbed his feet and hands with a latticework of plastic filled with continuous actuators capable of mimicking the feel of everything from spongy moss to gritty concrete. He was whispering to someone.

  Right before drifting off to sleep she’d considered cutting him some slack. The spechead was probably creeping across his nightingale floors and conspiring through paper walls thinking he could avoid detection. Meanwhile, they were being hunted by a real assassin.

  She didn’t bother trying to shout because the fancy headset would deaden any ambient noise. Swinging off the bed, she closed the distance in one step and punched him square in the gut.

  Air shot out of his mouth and he winced as his body folded around the blow. M@ti gritted her teeth. She’d been so pissed, she’d forgotten about his ribs.

  Her sympathy faded as Knuckles remained crouched, peering around his virtual world to see who’d punched him. She flipped the kill switch on the machine.

  “Good news is your ribs aren’t broken. If they were, I can’t imagine the pain you’d be in hanging there like that,” M@ti said, hitting the strap release without warning. Knuckles tumbled to the ground in a moaning heap. “Bad news? You just burned this place.”

  Knuckles squirmed on the floor beneath the rig. “Was that necessary?”

  She crouched. “What the fuck were you thinking? We’re going to have every warden and homicidal AI on us in minutes!”

  Knuckles’ pain gave way to guilt. “I had to ask around about Harlock and Harriet. Fivefold is the last place we saw them, right?”

  “Feudal Japan. Yes, that’s the last place we saw them.” Her elbow brushed his side as she helped him to his feet.

  “You don’t get it, I can operate there. I’ve got contacts. People.”

  “And magic swords which are fucking useless against armored AI war machines and hunters with admin rights! How do you not get it? We aren’t in a game. That rig,” she said, stabbing toward the Nexus machine, “was unregistered. Guess whose iris just got scanned? Who got placed in a dead guy’s house?”

  Knuckles’ face fell into shadow. He backed toward the bed and lowered himself in defeat. “They’re dead. I know it.”

  Selfishly, it relieved her to not have to be the one to crush his hopes. “How do you know?”

  “There’s news all over the Nexus. That glitch, that bonus content which turned out to be some sort of serial killer? It took out a lot of people. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Users are calling it the Revelation Virus. The Collective is trying to do damage control, stop the rumors, but people are talking. They’re saying cryptoanarchists did it, M@ti.”

  Knuckles paused, asking for her to confirm what he didn’t want to say. He looked not just tired but scared.

  M@ti took her time. She remembered when Loadi had gone amok. All those users in the midst of the cloned instances of the hunter, their ghostly avatars waking up to witness him go deep out of range. She didn’t yet understand how he could harm people outside the Nexus, but here they were, users freaking out, Harlock sent out with the trash.

  Her and Knuckles would be next. Sooner or later, Loadi would find them in the real world or in the Nexus, it didn’t matter.

  “Listen to me,” she said, kneeling. “I’m no terrorist, but we can’t ever go back. Maybe if we can get some distance, find a better place to hide, I can hack us some Nexus time. You can reach out to your people then for more information. Anything would help. We’ll just need to be more careful.”

  Knuckles wagged his head. “It won’t be the same. My gear. Heaven’s Breath. The Oni of Pain. It’s all gone.”

  “Your gear?” One second he seemed to understand, the next, he was lost again to his fake worlds. “That’s why you logged? To see if you still had your stuff?”

  Slowly, dark-rimmed eyes found hers. “They deleted it all, M@ti.”

  Good, she thought. None of it had been real, she wanted to scream. Shake him until he understood. Her jaw muscles ached. She shot to her feet and moved to the other side of the bed to escape his pitiful stare.

  Her foot struck something light and it skittered under the bed. She stooped to pick it up, happy to have any distraction. She felt around under the bed and dragged the boxed figurine into view.

  She’d kept the damn thing from Time’s Square. Like she was just going to stand it neatly on her desk beside the other. Her anger cooled as quickly as it had come.

  M@ti flung the box underneath the bed and pressed her face into the mattress.

  How much more real had her hideaway filled with junk been than his virtual treasures? They were all forgotten memories now. Garbage. A room full of garbage to be recycled, deleted.

  They’d both lost their lives. They could commiserate together. The thought of Knuckles’ arm draped around her, pulling her close, almost seemed inviting.

  On the mattress, the hacker’s device gave a muffled vibration. In seconds, M@ti was on her feet with Knuckles by the arm and TrueSight loaded, her eyes trained on the door.

  “Take it easy,” he complained. “I’m sorry.”

  “They’re here,” she hissed.

  She’d already planned an escape route the moment they first found the room. The back stairwell led into a courtyard and an alley. They could make it, but they’d have to be quick.

  M@ti unlocked the door and peered down both sides of th
e hall. Empty. She hustled Knuckles ahead of her, keeping an eye on the elevator. Floors began to light on the display and they broke into a run.

  They slipped around the corner and heard the elevator glide open. A familiar whine filled the hall and M@ti had an urge to look, but they couldn’t stop. Approaching the rear stairwell, she made quick work of the electronic lock, disabled just long enough to slip inside and ease the heavy door closed.

  Knuckles hobbled down the stairs after her. He was stiff from hanging in the rig. She felt she needed to prove to herself she was capable of sympathy, but right now, they needed to cover ground. They burst out of the stairwell into the early evening.

  Brick apartments flanked an open lot. A few specheads wandered, half-dressed. At least one walked by fully naked like a ghost among the living. The sight caused Knuckles to pause and she angrily waved him on.

  He’d seen that kind of crap before. He’d been in public with his specs off more than most. But maybe this was the first time he’d been a true outsider with no other world to retreat into but this one. Maybe he’d finally start to wake up. She needed him here. Present. By her side.

  They hurried through an iron gate and into a narrow street. This time, it was M@ti who faltered. Brownstones with cozy porches ran along the alley, steps protected by wrought iron railings. Trees grew in planters embedded in the sidewalk, their branches just high enough to scrape a child’s window on the upper floors.

  Realization struck her like her a blue screen of death. They weren’t running for their lives because of what she’d done. This wasn’t her fault. They were running for their lives because of what they had made her into.

  She sprinted between the pools of street lamps in a daze. The gap between her and Knuckles grew. She hoped he could keep up because she couldn’t slow down. She was chasing a memory always just ahead of her, right around the next corner. She’d find them. Then she’d show them what she’d really become.